Vampire Mafia: Santa Cruz

by Jackson Stein

In fact, she remembered there was a psychiatric syndrome in which the patient exhibited the deviant behavior of wanting to ingest blood. These patients usually had a background of severe schizophrenia, fetishism and heavy drug intoxication. Was this what Valentine meant? Or was she trying to give the man the benefit of the doubt? The last thing she wanted to believe was they were trusting their lives to a rogue agent whack job.

  They coasted down the off-ramp and into a highway rest stop. After screeching to a halt in the nearest parking space, Rachel exited the vehicle and Valentine and Stanic did the same. She folded her arms across her chest and gazed out at the ocean as she tried to make sense of the situation.

  The rest stop was desolate, nothing there except an expansive, well-manicured green lawn with about ten tangerine colored cement picnic tables scattered about. A public restroom was set off to the far side of the field. Rachel walked to a table with the other two a step behind her, and they all sat down.

  “Okay,” Rachel offered. “I did notice the police officer had what looked like sharper teeth than normal, almost canine-like incisors…but I’ve seen really bad teeth before. And I’ve heard some seriously sick people believe themselves to be vampires and have had their teeth filed to points.”  Rachel inhaled, but it felt more like a gasp as she thought back to the terrifying interaction she’d had with Officer Duprey earlier at the hospital, her abduction, and then her narrow escape.

  Chills ran up her spine as she recalled the officer’s eerie gaze and disfigured face. The image still disturbed her. She straightened, took a short breath and tried to shake off the vision. “But that only means we are dealing with sociopaths who have watched too many horror movies. It does not mean anything supernatural is happening here.”

  “All I’m saying is we must try to be as prepared as possible,” Valentine replied, challenging her argument with simple practicality.

  “If they were actually true vampires, then why did Luiggi and Giuseppi die back at the compound? I thought you had to drive a stake or something through a vampire’s heart to kill it?” Stanic interjected.

  Rachel shot him a skeptical look. Stanic couldn’t really be entertaining the possibility of real vampires, could he?

  “Good point, mate,” Valentine said. “That is because not everyone involved in the Stelino crime family is a vampire. We only suspect Vincenzo’s three sons. No one else at this time, but there could be others.”

  “Okay. I have had enough of this nonsense,” Rachel blurted as she launched to her feet, her frustration rising along with her blood pressure. “I’ll take my chances on the run or go to a police department in a different town, far away from here. John, I hope you’re not buying this supernatural bullshit. If you want come to with me, fine, you are more than welcome. We can leave town right now.”

  As she spoke, her body trembled. She glanced at John again, hoping for a positive response. The last thing she wanted to do was separate from Stanic right now. Despite their differences, the events of the last twelve hours had shown her just how much she didn’t want to be alone. She also didn’t want to be tied to an FBI lunatic either, and the thought made her frustration kick up another notch. “I need to use the lady’s room,” she announced to no one in particular. Then she turned to Stanic. “I suggest you think about what you want to do and be ready to let me know your decision when I get back.”

  She walked off toward the public facilities, cursing under her breath and shaking her head.

  The restrooms were situated inside a small building made up of four brick walls and a weathered, brown shingle roof. A pair of drinking faucets shone in the afternoon sunlight. Rachel didn’t need to use the bathroom, just some time to clear her head and think, maybe give Stanic some time to think as well. She drew in another slow deep breath that served to soothe her nerves.

  She walked to the water fountain, bent down and took a long drink. Standing in front of the structure, she scanned the area for other weary travelers, but the rest stop seemed deserted. Then, in her peripheral vision, she saw something move…sensed a presence close by…maybe inside the building. An animal? No…a sudden rustle of clothes confirmed her suspicions. She wasn’t alone.

  She took a step backward toward the grassy field that separated her from her two friends.

  A shadow rose up from behind, engulfing her inside its outline. She spun around and found herself face to face with a uniformed police officer, her sudden terror reflected squarely in his oversized mirrored sunglasses.

  Officer Duprey.

  The railroad-track scarring across his face seemed to stretch as his smile grew wide, exposing the same long incisors she had seen before.

  “Ah, there you are, Dr. Moore,” he said, pulling off his glasses. “I believe you’ve missed our last appointment. However, I think this time slot will do quite nicely.”

  Rachel’s throat constricted. She opened her mouth to scream but her airway seized. Duprey hunched over and moved toward her, arms opened wide, preventing passage to either side. She was standing directly in front of the restroom door and had no other choice but to backpedal into the dark room behind her. One shoe caught on the raised doorsill and she fell backward to the floor. Unable to look away from her predator, she pushed across the cold cement with her feet. Then her head made contact with the bricks on the back wall. She was trapped… cornered…and paralyzed by fear.

  He lunged forward like a wild animal and landed on top of her, holding both her arms behind her back with just one of his huge, vise grip-like, hands. His mouth opened, letting out a snake-like hiss, fangs dripping wet with saliva as he leaned in closer. He placed his mouth on her neck. She could feel his incisors piercing her skin with a sharp sting, entering her jugular vein. The pain shot down through her body as everything started going dark, then sudden dizziness…

  No…no…she couldn’t let him do this. She snapped her eyes open…sucked in a deep breath, then let out a bone-chilling scream.

   

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

   

   

  “That’s not going to work,” Valentine said, keeping his voice low. “She probably won’t even make it out of this town alive.”

  Stanic nodded, analyzing the seriousness behind Valentine’s pale blue eyes. He thought about the events that had occurred earlier in the day. Nothing seemed paranormal or mystical in any way, just the Mafia trying to push people around for their monetary gain, willing to stop at nothing to do so.

  “Maybe they’ve just found a pretty great way to coerce people into doing what they want, letting people think they have supernatural powers, causing them to feel terrified and helpless.” As Stanic spoke it became clear what he would do next.

  Leave town with Rachel.

  Just as he thought it, a shrill scream pierced the air.

  “Rachel!” Stanic shouted, bolting from his seat. Valentine did the same, both men sprinting toward the restroom. As he rounded on the restroom door, he saw a huge man mounted on top of Rachel. He charged in and slammed his body against her attacker like a linebacker, driving him backward across the room.

  Duprey flew into the brick wall, then rolled into a sitting position with his shoulders leaning against the stainless steel bathroom stall. A satisfied smile hung on his face as blood dripped from his lips.

  Valentine appeared in the doorway, gun drawn. He fired five bullets in rapid succession at the officer with a booming cra-crack-crack-cra-crack!

  The deafening sound echoed in Stanic’s ears as he rushed to Rachel’s side. Valentine was a half step behind him, and the two men lifted her to her feet. She was still breathing, but looked pale. Two fresh puncture wounds were on the left side of her throat, each dripping with a thin trail of blood.

  Stanic turned to the officer sprawled on the floor, frozen like an inanimate object, two bullet holes in his forehead, the front of his shiny forest-green uniform stained with three splatters of dark red liquid.

  “Stanic,” Rachel said.

  “Rach, are
you okay?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I think. Thanks for—” Rachel suddenly gasped for air, her eyes going wide, boring in on the downed officer behind him.

  Stanic turned. Officer Duprey’s eyes had snapped open and were locked onto Rachel. He leaned his body weight forward, maneuvered himself into an off-balance standing position.

  Valentine lifted his gun again and squeezed the trigger. Click. Empty. He tried again and again…click-click-click.

  Duprey rounded on the group, forcing them to back into the corner. His upper lip now pulled up high…his wild eyes crimson and seething with rage.

  Valentine tore his shirt open, pulled out a silver cross that hung around his neck and thrust it forward like a shield.

  Duprey cringed…then groaned as he cowered back, blocking his eyes as if the sacrament caused him actual physical pain.

  Stanic grabbed Rachel’s hand and practically dragged her toward the door where they dashed out into the sunlight. With Valentine right behind him, he cradled Rachel in the curve of his arm while they sprinted across the field to the SUV.

   

  ***

   

  “Tell us everything you know about the Stelinos. We need to know exactly what it all means.” Stanic demanded from the backseat as Valentine sped down the highway, weaving his way around the cars. He glanced at Rachel in the passenger seat. She seemed in a trance…or shock.

  “Okay,” Valentine replied, then paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “It takes three attacks to become…one of them. So everyone can relax a bit. But we will have got to be extra careful from here on out.”

  The agent remained silent for a moment before speaking again. “The brothers are highly intelligent and extremely mysterious men. Their father, Vincenzo, was somewhat of a figurehead who simply allowed his sons to run the day-to-day business. Vincenzo’s three sons live together in huge stone castle situated in the uncharted depths of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The castle sits at the bottom of a gorge, near the base of a huge cavern-like quarry. The only entrance or exit is from the summit of the mountain range just off Skyline Boulevard. A tiny one-lane road runs downward through the jagged rock cliffs and the castle seems to be located in a huge cave. In fact, the crevasse runs so deep that the sun never breaks though the canopy created by an enormous wall of rock and redwood trees towering above. Their castle is suspended in a constant state of nightfall, and this utter lack of sunlight leaves the terrain eternally cold and dark. I’ve only been there a handful of times, but it’s definitely creepy.”

  An uncomfortable chill ran through him as he proceeded to tell his friends more about the family. “Vincenzo’s sons are different…” He trailed off, troubled by the eerie images in his head. “Their style of clothing doesn’t make much sense at all. It looks more like something typical of old Eastern Europe than anything else, and they always wear completely black clothes. Even the way they walk appears rather odd. They seem to almost float across the floor like a shadow. All have aggressive personalities aimed to strike fear in the hearts in those they interact with…and they refer to themselves as Dark Lords.”

  Rachel’s jaw swung open as she looked at Valentine in speechless disbelief.

  “They each have specific roles within the family business,” Valentine explained. “Dominic Stelino’s specialty is handling the organization’s finances. He is in charge of payroll and accounting, as well as bribes and blackmail. But, more importantly, Dominic hides and launders the money. He would dream up the money-making ventures, and no matter how crazy it sounded, it would always turn a profit.

  His latest scheme was successfully extorting portions of the federal bail-out funds from various government officials. A few bribes and a couple of broken bones started the ball rolling. The people who wouldn’t comply ended up buried somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Stelino family made millions from just that one singular venture.” Once he began talking, Valentine couldn’t quit, he talked faster and faster, now gripping the encoded log book and the ancient parchment as he relayed all the information he could. All the information that might contribute to saving their lives.

  Stanic and Rachel listened quietly, taking in the startling new information the best they could.

  “Then there’s Nicoli Stelino. He is a charming showman who continues to gain more and more power every year. He’s kept a low profile, working as the special advisor to Mayor Tom Lane. With Lane in his back pocket, he gained access to a good deal of classified information. If a family project ran into any resistance from the city, Nicoli knew who was causing it, and he also knew which buttons to push to fix the problem. And to make matters even worse, Mayor Lane appointed one of the Stelino family’s cronies’ as chief of police. You’ve probably heard of Chief Rafferty. Well, Rafferty works for the Stelino family. He gave Nicoli direct access to several corrupt police officers as well as all of their police files.” His mouth dry, Valentine popped a small piece of mint candy in his mouth and continued.

  “And finally, Constantino. He is the one everyone fears the most. He would take care of the dirty work…the wet work. If the family had a problem, Constantino would make it go away. Together the three brothers are almost untouchable,” he finished, now feeling deflated “I’m not sure what this second book is or why Vincenzo had it with him,” Valentine wondered out loud, then he tossed it into the backseat to Stanic. “It looks pretty old, though. What do you make of it, professor?”

  Stanic studied the ancient parchment for a moment before speaking. “It’s roughly five to seven hundred years old and Romanian. I can hypothesize its place of origin from these indentures and page symbols.”

  Stanic held the book out through the opening between the front seats so the other two could see it, then pointed to the engraved pentagram symbols on the corners of each worn page and continued lecturing, as if Valentine and Rachel were students in one of his classes. “It definitely dates back to the Dark Ages…and these symbols are probably thirteenth or fourteenth century traditional Romanian.

  He suddenly jerked his head up from the book. “Wait…a…minute. No…I don’t believe it!”

   

  ***

   

  “It couldn’t be…but…it…” Stanic couldn’t think, much less get out the words.

  Valentine looked over his shoulder. “What couldn’t be?”

  “This…this looks like one of the original Grimoires, from the original set of ancient books of magic! There were only six of this particular set of texts in existence, and I’d heard none had survived. Then there were rumors that one had been secretly preserved but was later stolen. If this is truly one of them…”

  He shook his head. “No. I can’t believe it.” He took a long, trembling breath. “If this book really is one of the six, it contains powerful ceremonial rituals…in other words, this is real black magic,” he explained. “I suppose the rituals were mostly used as protection from demons back in the medieval times. It claims to grant certain transformative powers to those who successfully perform the ceremony. It says right here ‘Natum obscuri potestate inorbe novo,’ which roughly translates as, Birth of new dark power into our world.”

  Valentine kept his eye on Stanic in the rear-view mirror…sitting motionlessly, apparently still deep in thought about the meaning of the text.

  If these spells were really as powerful as claimed, then performing the rituals for themselves might be their best chance against the three monsters who called themselves the Dark Lords. “This text details the ancient process of becoming a vampire!” Stanic said, unable to keep his voice from rising with his excitement. “It’s a combination of performing the ancient ritual while drinking some sort of elixir.”

  Stanic kept reading, now in disbelief. “The active participants shall receive ‘Ingenio Maxime,’ or ‘the Special Abilities.’” He stopped, sighed deeply, and went on. “Unfortunately, there is only one way to complete the ritual. ‘Bibant sanguinema virginitate’ which translates
to drink the blood of a virgin. The ritual actually involves making a mixture of the blood from all who participate combined with the blood from a virgin. Apparently, each participant would be granted a unique ability or power as long as the ritual is performed correctly.”

  And again, more silence…

  “You can’t be serious,” Rachel finally said, throwing her hands into the air.

  He understood how she felt, and he was a bit of a skeptic, too. But if this was true and the Stelino brothers had used black magic to conjure some kind of super powers, there was only one thing they could do.

  First, complete the ceremonial ritual, and second, go to the brother’s castle while they still had the element of surprise and get the key code for the logbook. If they ran into the Dark Lords they would at least have a chance to fight them off.

  “Well…all of this doesn’t do us much good,” Stanic said. “We don’t have a chance in hell of obtaining the blood of a virgin.”

  Stanic and Valentine nodded in unison, then all went quiet.

  “I have virgin blood,” Rachel finally said.

  Stanic was caught off guard and leaned forward, closer to Rachel, both eyebrows raised as he looked at her. “I beg to differ,” Stanic said trying hard to hold back an inevitable smile.

  “Not mine, you jackass!” Rachel shot back, punching Stanic’s arm.

  “I have a young patient that gave me a blood sample recently. I know she’s a virgin because I personally examined her. The only problem is that the blood sample is back at my office.”

  “Brilliant then, love!” Valentine said “We’ve got to go get that blood.”

  “I agree,” Stanic said. “Let’s get the blood…and then go after the key code and put the Stelino family away for good.”

  “I don’t see much choice,” Rachel said on a sigh, finally conceding.

  “The sooner the better, then,” Valentine agreed. “We’ll get in and out of there before they know what hit ’em.”

   

  CHAPTER TWELVE

   

   

  Internal affairs special agent Daniel Gant parked on the curb in front of the small home near the coast in Capitola, walked to the front porch and up the steps with a long face and slumped shoulders. This was the one part of his job he really disliked, but it had to be done. He held grim news for the parents of a young girl who had not been heard from in several days.