by J. R. Rain
Instead, her cell rang before we were barely out of the parking lot. She hadn’t carried it the night before, as if she didn’t want to be reached. A conveniently timed woman of mystery.
“Oh, crap, it’s my dad,” she said, checking the incoming number.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“He’ll ask me what I am doing. After you dropped me off last night, he was all in my face. I guess he saw your car. Or saw that you were a boy.”
Boy. I had to grin. I guess I looked that way, especially to an older human.
“He probably saw that little kiss you gave me,” I said. “I hope you told him my intentions were purely honorable.”
“Well, I don’t know your intentions.” The phone quit purring after the fifth ring.
“Sure, you do. You want me to kill your dad.”
She swatted me. “No, I want you to make him stop killing girls.”
I’d slowed a little to look at her, but before I could punch the accelerator, a Volvo wagon swerved in front of us, tires squealing. It blocked my lane, sliding sideways, and I recognized it from Parker’s driveway.
So much for the “safety-minded” thing.
I could have sped up and driven around, but that would have been dangerous. Even though the night school was on a side street, it was still pretty urban. And despite my preternatural powers of the night, when I was behind the wheel I was just another dude driving a car.
I braked as the Volvo door opened and under the sodium-vapor lights, I got my first look at the alleged cult leader named Erasmus Cole.
He had a commanding presence, a few inches over six feet, with dark, curly hair and a swarthy complexion. As he stormed toward my Mustang, he moved with athletic power and grace, a man with purpose. As I sized him up, I realized he wouldn’t be as simple to handle as a meth-head wanting free money.
I assumed he’d come to my side, so I opened my door to meet him halfway. I’d gone toe-to-toe with a few girls’ dads in my past—after all, I’d been a teen boy an awfully long time—and usually they just wanted to show their daughters they were standing up for them and watching their backs. In other words, all sizzle and no steak.
A couple of them had been psychos, though, and saw family members as property, and from such sick thinking sprang abuse, incest, and emotional distress.
I wasn’t ready to fill out my scorecard on Erasmus Cole just yet, though I’d researched his cult a little in the wee hours of the previous morning. And, of course, his smiling visage had been featured on the cult’s website, the gentle man who offered a peaceful and blissful alternative to the hectic, soul-destroying ways of modern life.
He wasn’t smiling now, though, and I was out of the car when I realized he was heading toward the passenger side.
He yanked open the door and pulled Parker out with a gruff and non-negotiable “Come on!”
He wasn’t overly violent, but I could see the potential simmering there. The man clearly had a volcano buried inside that beatific mountain of a head.
Parker let out a moan of “Daaaad” that was more embarrassment than fear.
I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I didn’t want to tip my hand early, before I knew more about the situation. While I trusted Parker, I also knew people tended to be too close to their own drama to be able to examine it with anything approaching rationality.
Erasmus glared at me and I saw something in his eyes that wasn’t present in his Internet avatar—a strange glint of the pupil, a spark of reddish orange.
Parker was also glaring at me, with an imploring look, clearly expecting me to spring to the rescue.
A car horn blared behind me and I turned to see Frank the night-school bully hanging his head out the window. “Hey, Nancy, get that pile of junk out of the road before I bulldoze it.”
So there was no way I could launch into butt-kicking Vampire Poster Boy without the whole world catching on.
“You stay away from my daughter,” Erasmus said, his voice deep and gruff, like a bag of broken glass dropped down a well.
Well, Plan A of me pretending to be her boyfriend and getting an invite to the cult compound was shot. Time for Plan B.
“Sir, you misunderstand,” I said. “I was merely sharing with Parker about the path of personal growth through metaphysical self-empowerment.”
It was some phony-baloney New Age gobbledygook I’d lifted straight from his website. One way to get people on your side is to let them think they are geniuses.
Or gurus, in this case.
Some of the tension dropped from his shoulders. “Acceptance through surrender,” he said, another of his catchphrases.
Frank locked down on the horn again, and traffic was piling up.
“I didn’t mean to offend you, Mr. Cole,” I said. “Or should I say, ‘The Answer’?”
He hadn’t released Parker’s wrist yet, but he didn’t seem to be hurting her any. “You should move your vehicle,” he said.
Turning to Parker, he added, “Get in the car. We’re going home.”
So Plan B wasn’t working, either.
Plan C was to fly through the air and knock Erasmus Cole silly, rip him into a thousand red bits as the whole night school watched, and then howl at the moon in triumph.
But then I’d have to drop out, and I was determined to pull up my history grade.
“It’s okay, Parker,” I said to reassure her that I’d be watching. “I’ll call you later.”
Erasmus glared at me one more time and got behind the wheel of his Volvo, Parker climbing into the passenger seat with a disappointed expression.
As the Volvo backed up and pulled away, more car horns blared. There were at least a dozen behind Frank’s car, and Frank was now slapping sheet metal with his open palm.
“Move it, Pencil Neck,” he bellowed. There were a couple of his goonies riding with him, and I heard them laugh. Apparently my little display of flinging the pencil with enough force to kill had failed to make the proper impression.
Again, I couldn’t launch into a wild display of carnage, as hungry as I was, but it was mighty tempting. Instead, I flipped him the bird and got into the Mustang and drove home without stopping for coffee, which I couldn’t drink anyway.
Chapter Six
I lived in a subterranean apartment in Bell Town. It was sort of a bohemian district, lots of artists and neo-hippies and musicians, and I liked it because of the night life.
Nobody thought my schedule was weird, and I never bumped into anyone who said, “How come you only come out at night?”
People think vampires live in musty cellars without windows, with rats crawling all over the place. I prefer dark décor, but I do have an aesthetic sense. I’d collected a few sculptures over the years, and a couple of Magrittes and a Dali. I can’t say where I got them, and of course my infrequent visitors assume they are reproductions.
And, like any self-respecting modern vampire, I had wireless access and an awesome computer. Unlike sunlight, the glare of a computer screen was not painful at all. I could even look at virtual pictures of the sun without turning into a smoking ball of ash.
After turning on some Thirty Seconds To Mars, keeping the volume low so as not to disturb the neighbors, I finished my homework. While history was easy for me, geometry was always a pain in the butt. No matter how many classes I took, I could never tell a hypotenuse from an isosceles.
Once I packed everything, I went back to the Internet to learn more about Erasmus Cole, aka The Answer. Apparently he was still underground enough that his cult-leader thing hadn’t affected his demand in the square world of physicists. His official bio didn’t say anything about blood sacrifice, his career, or his family. It was all suntans and smiles.
Heck, before I turned him into my enemy, maybe I could get him to help me with my homework.
According to his site, The Answer operated a resort called Cloudland in Mount Shasta, just over the Oregon line in California. The 300-acre property was billed as a r
etreat center, but if you read between the lines, you could see the customer base wasn’t your typical family with 2.3 kids.
Cloudland catered to those “seeking spiritual enlightenment through therapeutic treatment and holistic integration of the feminine divine.”
Now, the first question I’d ask if I were a woman is, “What’s a dude doing heading up a center marketed toward women?”
The first answer would be “money” and the second answer would be “sex,” but if you put them together, you probably got the real answer: “power.”
The fact that Erasmus billed himself as The Answer suggested he was on a power trip that would rival those of any modern-day politician, evangelist, military leader, or celebrity.
No wonder, as Parker had stated, men weren’t drawn to his little self-improvement center in the woods, although one had to consider that the odds were probably good if you were looking to hook up.
Unless, of course, access was one of those little avenues The Answer used to pile up the cash. Plenty of rich guys would pay a lot of money to get a chance at a vulnerable population of nubile young women.
The website didn’t show much, just a couple of pages of The Answer’s gibberish, a contrived concoction of all the best add-water-and-stir New Age religions. The articles were accompanied by a few photographs that showed flowering trees, a pond in a meadow, and a few women in muted cotton shifts frolicking in a flower garden with the snow-covered Mount Shasta towering majestically in the background.
All in all, it was presented as a pleasant way to spend a week and meditate in between lunches of little sandwiches made of cucumbers and watercress.
The prices weren’t listed, but when I went through the registration process, I found that a week’s stay cost $3,995, plus additional menus where one could sign up for day spas, intensive training sessions, and group therapy, all for “only hundreds more.”
If The Answer hadn’t started killing people, he probably could have done like all the other cult leaders of our times and make a mountain of money and retire in luxury on some deserted isle where followers never bothered him.
No, he was one of those weird ones—a sincere guy who apparently believed in his own brand of Armageddon.
In Plan A, I would have walked through the front gate holding Parker’s hand, blinking all wide-eyed and innocent, saying “Aw, shucks” a lot while I asked her dad what his favorite sports teams were.
Plan B and C were already out, and now I was at Plan D. I was a little concerned that I’d been working this case for less than 24 hours and I’d already used up a good chunk of the plan alphabet.
I registered for the following week, since night school was about to have its fall break.
I signed up as “Summer Rain,” which had actually been the real name of a real person at one point. I know, because I had the credit card to prove it. I suspected Summer was long dead, though, and probably wouldn’t mind a big hit to her credit rating in a few months.
Now all I had to do was make sure Parker stayed well out of the way while I took care of business.
Well, that and not flunk geometry.
Chapter Seven
Friday night. A week later.
Parker had cooled it a little with me, whispering that her dad had laid down the law and that I looked like “bad news.” Score points for Pops, because I was.
The following night, I would leave for the retreat in Shasta and see for myself what was going on. That I had registered under a female name didn’t stop me. Summer Rain, in this case, was going to turn out to be a dude.
Daddy and his creepy cult of women were just going to have to deal with it. But first I needed to recharge the old batteries.
I keep chilled blood in my refrigerator, behind some empty cartons of milk and an old watermelon that I really ought to toss.
Not the world’s greatest hiding place, granted, but I wasn’t too worried about that, and it’s not like I could hide it in the back of the toilet like a drunk hiding whiskey. I lived alone, as I had for many, many years. I had few guests, and fewer still randomly opened my refrigerator for anything. Still, on the off-chance that someone did, I would prefer not to explain the packets of blood that I kept in the fridge.
I had just fetched such a packet, which was provided to me at great cost from a contact who worked in a hospital. Do you ever wonder why phlebotomists take three and sometimes four vials of your blood? Don’t you think all that blood might be overkill? Well, it is. Some of the blood gets sold to folk like me.
The undead like me.
Many phlebotomists are the true drug kingpins of this world. Peddling the drug of blood.
The packets are handy, designed for impulse consumers. With a quick swipe, one end was open and I was guzzling it hard when there came a knock on my door.
One thing you don’t do is cross between a grizzly cub and its mother. The other thing you don’t do is disturb a vampire when he’s feeding. The image I had was tossing the cold, crappy blood and replacing it with some fresh, warm blood. The same blood currently pumping through the veins of whoever was standing outside my door.
In fact, it took all my inner strength, honed from years of self control, to not throw open the door, pin down whoever was standing there, and sink my teeth deep into their soft neck.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
Just drink. Drink.
I did, guzzling, feeling the warmth spread through my body, despite initially going down cold. Warmth and strength.
The knocking came again.
And I nearly tore myself away from the bag, thinking of that hotter, fuller bag standing mere feet away.
Nearly.
But I kept guzzling, and soon I was squeezing out the last few drops like a miser squeezing out the last of his cheap toothpaste. The bags of blood are perfectly measured out to give me all the fuel I need. Or crave, as I thought of it. I never drank too much, but Lord help you if I didn’t drink enough. If I didn’t drink enough, and I was still hungry, anything was fair game, including kittens and puppies and kindergarteners.
I never said I was a saint.
Just a guy with an unhealthy appetite.
With the last of the bag consumed, I tossed it in my trash compactor with the other empty bags of blood and headed to the door.
And when I peeked through the peephole, I could not have been more surprised to see Parker standing there.
Looking cute and impatient.
Chapter Eight
I unlocked the door and opened it. Parker stood there with a big smile on her face. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was embarrassed that she came to my apartment, or if it was because she was generally glad to see me.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Standing. Do you never answer your door?”
“No. I mean, how did you find me?
“You’re not the only one with secrets. Are your parents here?”
“Uh. Mom’s out visiting her sister.” I wasn’t sure I had a mom, or whether she was alive or dead. If you’re not a saint, you get to lie once in a while. “Come on in.”
Parker entered my house carrying a bright yellow purse. She walked over to my Victorian couch that cost more than all the furniture in the place combined and dropped her purse beside it.
“Please have a seat,” I said, sitting at my kitchen table that was virtually in the living room itself being that my apartment was as small as a New York loft.
“Did you sneak out?” I asked, not sure if she would tell me the truth. I trusted her, but I was beginning to catch on that she was no saint, either.
“Yeah, I did. My dad actually left on a big all-night road trip.”
“Road trip?”
“It’s one of his little habits. For all I know, he’s dropping off dead bodies.”
Parker was staring at my mouth. She had a puzzled look with a hint of dread behind her eyes. She put a finger against her lips and did a wiping motion.
Crud, some blood
had dropped on my cheek.
“What were you eating, strawberries?”
Strawberries aren’t dark enough. I had to think quick. “Actually,” I answered, “I was eating beets. Lots of iron.”
“That’s disgusting. You were eating beets. Beets have got to be the grossest vegetable. They look like they are dipped in blood.”
I smirked. She had no idea how appetizing that sounded. Blood was my catsup. Blood on just about anything sounded divine. “I’m a vegan at heart. And iron is good for the blood system. Everyone should eat more beets. Life would be better.”
“Still, beets are gross! They taste like ass.”
Usually, when someone said that, my first reaction was to ask how they knew what ass tasted like. But I kind of liked her, so I let it pass. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you find out where I lived?”
Parker began to stammer. “Well,” she said, “You’d be amazed how a short skirt and a pair of black nylons can persuade a horny nineteen-year-old administrative assistant in our school office.”
“He just gave it to you?”
“Yeah. I hope you’re not angry.”
“No, I’m not angry.” After all, how could I be angry at the poor nineteen-year-old that Parker just threw under the bus when I knew for a fact he was completely innocent. How did I know this? The administrative office doesn’t have my real address. Parker was up to something. Fair is fair, if she was going to stalk me and come over then she was going to answer some hardball questions. “I have another question for you.”
“Go ahead.” Parker appeared confident.
“How do you know for sure your father has killed anyone?”
Parker took my question in and nodded. She took her time to answer the question. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make something up or if she was just preparing to tell me something insanely intense. “Well,” she said. “I don’t know for sure. I just know he’s the one in charge and about once every two months a girl very close to him disappears without a trace.”
“Without a trace? Don’t these girls have families?”
