Blood and Sand

by Elizabeth Hunter

  She didn’t remember?

  “I don’t know. Whoever you were supposed to be meeting. Dan thought it sounded like a guy. Weird name though.”

  “Kristy, I don’t…”

  “What? Are you okay?”

  Natalie cleared her throat. “I’m not sure.”

  All annoyance fled her friend’s voice. “Hey, what’s going on? Do you want me to come over?”

  “I, uh… I remember leaving work last night.”

  “You left late. You told Dan you were following up on a lead for the coyote story.”

  “Right.” Where had she been? Pushing down a swell of panic, Natalie walked to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, drinking it black. It burned her mouth, but she swallowed anyway, desperate for the jolt of caffeine. “I remember coming home. Mr. Sanchez was here. He made me a pan of enchiladas.” She opened the fridge. The metal pan was there, missing two enchiladas from her dinner last night.

  “You have the best neighbors. Loud and Louder never make me anything.” Kristy lived next to the most vocal married couple in history. Natalie would think her friend was exaggerating except she’d tried to watch a movie at Kristy’s one time and they’d actually given up after round three was louder than both rounds one and two.

  “Okay, enchiladas here,” she muttered to herself. “Think, Nat. Where did you go?”

  “Do you really not remember what you did last night? Because that’s not good.”

  “You’re telling me. It looks like I went out, but…”

  She looked around, taking in the evidence she could see. Dress thrown on the chair. Shoes kicked off. Purse thrown on the table with her phone not plugged into the charger for the night. If she didn’t know better, she’d say she’d gone out with friends to a club or a bar, drank too much, and came home to crash. But if she’d gone out drinking, Kristy would have been there.

  “Kristy…” She took another drink of the scalding coffee. “I don’t remember what I did last night. Like, no memory. At all.”

  “You didn’t meet anyone, did you?”

  She laughed a little. “No evidence of amorous encounters. Sorry.”

  “I can always hope.”

  As soon as she said it, her stomach dropped. Could there have been?

  Kristy said, “Oh shit.” The thought must have hit her at the same time.

  “Are you thinking—”

  “Natalie, you are one of the most level-headed people I know. This is not like you at all. You have never blacked out. Ever. Even in college. Someone might have drugged you. You need to go to the hospital right now. I’m coming to pick you up.”

  Her heart began to pound. “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Don’t shower. Don’t do anything else. Just throw on some loose clothes and meet me at the door. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “’Kay.” Natalie set down the coffee, willing herself not to puke. This wasn’t happening. This didn’t happen to her. It happened to the people she wrote about. “Kristy, drive fast.”

  “I’m right around the corner.”

  “And you are in fantastic health, Ms. Ellis.” The doctor seemed a little too cheerful for someone who was doing a drug screen on a panicked thirty-one-year-old woman. “All the tests came back negative. There are no drugs in your system. In fact, everything appears to be in good working order, though you are a little anemic, but that’s relatively common. Do you not eat a lot of red meat? There are other sources of iron or supplements if you—”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Kristy interrupted the doctor. “So you’re saying there are no drugs. At all? She just lost hours of her life for no reason at all?”

  Natalie tried to calm her friend. “Kristy—”

  “No! That’s ridiculous.” The doctor gave her friend a condescending look. “Look at him. He thinks you drank too much, can’t you tell?”

  “I probably did drink some. I told you I was going out. Maybe I tried something new and it just hit me harder than normal.” Natalie had been at the emergency room for hours at that point. She just wanted to go home and take a shower.

  “I know it seems very serious, but you would be surprised by how common sudden memory loss can be,” Dr. Sun said. “Often stress combined with a poor diet can trigger it.”

  Kristy frowned. “What about a stroke? Could she have had a stroke?”

  “Kristy!”

  Dr. Sun held up a hand. “We did screen for that. There would be evidence in her blood work.”

  “A tumor? Does she have a tumor?”

  “Oh my gosh.” She rubbed her face with both hands, wishing she was at home with her laptop.

  “Again, there is no evidence of that, though if your friend would like more extensive MRI work done, that is an option. However, since this has not happened before, and there may have been alcohol involved…”

  “Seriously, Kristy, just let it go. Dr. Sun—” She held out a hand and shook the doctor’s quickly. “Thank you. Unless there’s anything else, I’ll get dressed.”

  “No problem at all. Now,” He turned serious. “If this happens again, please see your regular physician. While a one-time occurrence is probably no more than your body telling you to take a break, repeated loss of memory—”

  “I got it.” She began to gather up her clothes. “It’s probably a massive malignant brain tumor. Or brain-eating aliens. One of the two.”

  Kristy rolled her eyes as Dr. Sun smiled. “Will you take this seriously, Nat?”

  “Yes, mom. Now, will you drive me home please?” She stood and grabbed her purse.

  Her purse…

  You brought the wrong purse, Ms. Ellis.

  She glanced down at it. The wrong purse. Who told her that? It was just her regular purse, packed with her wallet, a notebook, pens, too many pencils, and lip gloss… It wasn’t wrong.

  You stood out.

  The smooth male voice popped into her memory again. A male voice. But the doctor had said there was no harm done to her person. No evidence of sexual activity. No drugs.

  “It’s just my purse,” she whispered, tucking her phone in the side pocket. She had a sudden flash.

  Lights pulsing. A cold gin and tonic. Where was he? Why all the mystery? She grabbed her phone from her purse and fired off a tweet before she stuffed the phone back in her purse. Ugh, this music was impossibly loud…

  “Natalie?” Kristy was standing there, keys in hand. “You ready? The nurse said you could just check out at the desk in front.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand at Kristy, pulling the phone out of her pocket and opening Twitter. She quickly clicked on the tab for her own profile and checked her last tweet.

  Eleven hours ago. At #Boca and bartender isn’t light on the gin. Looks like this dress was a good choice after all.

  Boca. The club downtown. She’d been at Boca in her nice dress, drinking gin and tonics. “Kristy, what did I say I was doing last night? What did I tell Dan?”

  She frowned. “He said you were going out to follow up on a lead for the coyote story.”

  The coyote story. All her notes were at home, but she’d look through them. It sounded like she’d gone out the night before, hoping to meet someone about the piece she was working on. “Why would I have gone to a nightclub for that?”

  Kristy shrugged. “No idea. Would you have written it down?”

  She pulled her notebook out and flipped to the last page she had written on as they walked down the hospital corridor. There were a series of Spanish names and phone numbers. The address for the Mexican Federal Authorities in Ensenada. Another phone number for her police source out in El Centro. She remembered all of them.

  “There’s nothing new here. I’ll have to check at home.”

  “Well, if it’s important, you’ll have it written down.” Kristy patted her shoulder. “You always do.”

  Natalie tucked her notebook away and hoped like hell her friend was right.

  She sipped the coffee she’d reheated as she loo
ked through notebooks, scanned the scattered sticky notes attached to her desk, and looked on the back of computer printouts for any clue as to why she’d been at a fancy nightclub in downtown San Diego the night before.

  Since the mid-90s, reporters and others who followed crime in the Southwest had been aware of the startling frequency of young women being abducted near and around Ciudad Juarez. Authorities seemed reluctant to look into the matter too deeply. Some said it was a serial killer. Others said it was a result of sociological and cultural factors that led young working women to be targeted. Corruption. Drug cartels. Organized crime. NAFTA, for goodness sake. Everyone had a theory, but Natalie didn’t care. She’d seen evil. Looked it in the face at an early age. She just wanted it to stop. Hundreds of women had been killed and no one seemed to be able to do awn able tonything about it.

  And when isolated reports began trickling in about the bodies of young women being found in the desert on the California-Mexico border, Natalie couldn’t ignore it. Some of the reports speculated the women were victims of a coyote, a human smuggler, who was tricking the women into paying him, only to abandon them in the desert. Many of the bodies had been found in extremely remote locations and all were Mexican citizens. Others said whatever was hunting in Juarez had moved west, ready to wreak havoc on the women of Tijuana and Baja California.

  The reports from both sides of the border were troubling. The pictures were gruesome.

  When Natalie had sought permission to pursue the story from her editor, she’d been given the go-ahead, but only if it didn’t interfere with her regular assignments. So far, most of her work on the case had been gathering police reports from Mexico and the outlying desert towns in Imperial County, looking for any names that repeated, any patterns that hadn’t been noticed. Most of the work had been done at night, so most of her notes were here at home.

  She threw down her pencil in frustration and rubbed her eyes. She still had a strange feeling in her head. Not a headache, necessarily. Just a vague fuzziness that wouldn’t go away. Most people probably would put it down to exhaustion, but Natalie rarely tired, even when others were falling down. This just wasn’t like her…

  Leaning back in her desk chair, she heard her phone chirp, signaling a text message. She went to the kitchen to pick it up.

  “Dez?”

  Natalie frowned. She hadn’t spoken to Dez in ages. Not since her old friend had quit the university library and gone to work for that private foundation in Pasadena. They’d met when Natalie was doing research on a story for the college paper. Dez and her best friend had both been helpful—librarians really were the best researchers—but Dez had been the one she’d kept in touch with the most.

  How did it go last night? The message bubble glowed on the screen.

  “How did what go last night?” A burst of excitement flooded her and she flipped to her call history. There it was: a forty-minute conversation with Dez Kirby at seven o’clock in the evening. She’d initiated the call to Dez. Dez, who had given her a lead that must have led her to Boca in her best dress.

  Natalie hit the number to call her friend back just as she saw the sun slip over the horizon. She stepped out on the patio to enjoy the cool night air.

  “Hey!” Dez picked up. “I hope that helped. I wasn’t even sure whether he’d talk to you, but—”

  “Who? Who the hell did I talk to, Dez, because—I’m gonna be honest—today was really, really weird. Hi, by the way. There is a whole big chunk of last night that I do not remember at all, and I’m really confused.”

  “W…what?” Dez said as she moved around, and Natalie remembered her friend had a daughter now. It was probably bedtime or bathtime or storytime or something. “What are you talking about?”

  “Why did I call you yesterday?”

  Dez laughed a little. “Why did you say you called? Or why did you really call?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, you said you were calling to catch up since it had been months since we talked last. Matt says hi, by the way. He invited you up for a visit anytime you want.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet. And I’d love to see Carina. The pictures are just… She’s adorable, Dez. So amazing that you’re a mom nd hre a ow.”

  “Weird, right? Anyway, so we chatted for a bit, then you started asking me if I knew anything about the murders in Juarez, which I did.”

  She let out a breath. “That’s right. You helped Dr. Givens when he was working with Amnesty that summer.”

  “Yep. So I’m pretty familiar with the history, but I didn’t know about the stuff happening down by you. Did you say you don’t remember any of this?”

  “Nope. Nothing. The doctor seems to think it’s stress, but I’m not so sure.”

  There was a long pause on the line. “Well… stress will do weird stuff to you. I know it’s been really hard with work and being a new mom. Sometimes I feel like sleep is just a happy memory, so it could definitely be stress. I wouldn’t let it worry you, because that would just make it worse, right? You’re probably tired. Have you been sleeping normally? If I remember, you never really slept all that much, and if you’re following a story—”

  “Why are you rambling like a loon?” Natalie rolled her eyes. “Whatever it was, the doctor said it was probably nothing to worry about, though I think he thought I had way more gin than I actually did. But what were we talking about on the phone last night? You asked if I’d talked to someone. Who did you mean?”

  “Um… Well—” Dez’s voice broke up a bit.

  “Dez?”

  “Hey, can I call you back?”

  “Dez, I really need to find out what happened. I mean—”

  “I know. And I am going to call you right back, but I have a call coming through right now, and I really think I ought to take it.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I guess. But can you get back to me later tonight? I’m at home.”

  “I definitely will.”

  “Thanks, Dez. Appreciate it.”

  “You got it. Okay, gotta go.”

  “All right. Say hi to—” Dez had alrea

  dy hung up. “Matt.”

  Natalie looked at the phone. “That was weird.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Baojia would have preferred to meet with the Kirbys in person, but since that would have taken too long, he contented himself with a speakerphone while he practiced his forms. He stood in the center of his first-story studio, which had been customized to suit his particular needs. Weapons hung in neat rows along the eastern wall and a quiet fountain burbled in the corner. A long mirror hung along the north wall, ensuring precision as he practiced the ancient forms his human father had taught him.

  He practiced every night. It centered him physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At just over 150 years old, he was young for one of his kind. Vampires took care not to make too many children, and he was one of only four living vampires his sire had created. He had been turned for his skills and human strength, which were only amplified by his sire’s amnis. And the discipline that made him such an effective fighter in his mortal life allowed him to master his elemental strength at a young age. He was young, but he was also unusually powerful.

  Baojia sensed a change coming. Some shift in his immortal life beckoned him, though he had no idea what it could be. But it was there, teasing the corners of his mind and filling the vivid dreams he still had during his day rest. Practicing the wing chun forms he had learned as a child was his own form of meditation.

  Curreatantly, the patience he was so known for was being tried by the woman on the other end of the phone.

  “Well, what do you want me to tell her?” Dez asked. “She’s going to expect a call back.”

  “Then delay her until I can find out more, Mrs. Kirby.”

  “Please, call me Dez. I feel weird with you being so proper.”

  He paused, slightly uncomfortable at her informality. “Dez, I don’t know how much Matt has told you about Ivan, but—”

 
; “I haven’t told her anything about Ivan.” Matt broke in. “This is the first I’ve heard about all this.” Baojia could tell Matt Kirby was annoyed with his wife. He could also tell Dez didn’t really care.

  Dez said, “This is the first I’ve heard about Ivan, too! She did not mention that name to me. She asked me about the murders happening along the border because I worked on a documentation project down in Juarez when I was in college. Nat remembered I’d had some experience with that case, so she called to ask me—”

  “What murders on the border? Did you say Juarez?” Baojia stopped mid-extension. His arms hung perfectly still, but he felt his heart thump once. “Dez, what murders?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, Dez said, “I… I thought you would have known about it. I mean, it’s on the edge of Ernesto’s territory. That’s why I gave her your name. I really wasn’t trying to cause problems, but I thought if anyone would have information…”

  Baojia heard Matt talking to his wife as his mind raced. “Honey, Natalie’s a reporter,” the human said. “A really smart, persistent one, if I remember correctly. Why on earth did you think giving her an introduction to a vampire would be a good thing? She’s going to figure out something’s not what it seems, and the last thing Baojia or Ernesto need is someone really smart and really curious poking around!”

  “Don’t talk to me like that! You didn’t see what happened in Juarez. I did. And looking back with what I know now, I’m almost positive there is some sort of tie-in with a vampire. None of the human authorities could make sense of it. And there were hundreds of girls, Matt. Hundreds. And if what was happening in Juarez is moving into California—”

  “Desiree,” Baojia said. She stopped as soon as she heard his voice.

  Dez still sounded annoyed. “What?”

  “Thank you for making me aware of this.”

  That seemed to surprise her because she fell silent.

  Matt said, “I’m sorry your name was brought into this, Baojia. I know you keep a low profile, even in LA.”