Chapter 15
There were times when I felt Westham was too small for me. Too small for my bike. Too small for my life. I wanted to live in a place that was bigger, that I could get lost in, with so many faces that no one would know me anymore.
And then there were days like today, when it felt like it took forever to navigate the streets of the small town. I opened my bike full throttle where I could, but it felt like I was moving in slow motion. I could hear my own pulse thundering in my ears, felt it in my fingers where they curled around the throttle.
I could still hear the cackling laugh of Celia the werecat dancing around me in Joel’s pit. I tried to breathe, forced myself to take a deep breath, and another, and another. But my chest was tight, and my body did nothing with the oxygen.
I skidded to a halt outside my childhood home and took a long look. The oak tree at the side of the driveway had grown since I’d last seen it. Leaves were scattered on the grass, even though it had been cut recently. The low roof over the porch looked like it was leaning on the house, forcing it to squat down on itself.
I wondered if it was because of my panic that this place looked like it was suffocating, or if it had always been like that and as a child I just hadn’t noticed.
Claude’s car was in the driveway to the side of the house. It was unlocked. I opened the door expecting the worst, but there was nothing. No blood, no sign of struggle. No Aspen. I ran my hand under the steering wheel and in the foot well. I checked under the passenger seat. There was nothing there, no tracker I could find, and I didn’t have the time to keep looking. It didn’t matter. Wherever the tracker was, it said the vamps had to be here.
I ran up to the front door and tried the handle. The door was locked. I rattled it, yelling for Aspen. Great approach when you’re expecting master vampires. When there was no response, I ran around to the back and hopped the low gate.
The concrete in the backyard was cracked, with weeds growing out of it, and the grass was wheat beige even though it shouldn’t have been. I pressed my face against a window, cupping it with my hands so I could see into the kitchen.
Everything inside was undisturbed. The table in the corner looked ready for someone’s next meal, but a thin veil of dust lay over everything like a blanket. No one had been inside.
“Aspen!” I called out. I shivered, feeling cold despite my leathers.
I ran to my bike, but halfway there I slowed down as an idea came to me. I had bitten her. Her blood was in my system.
I stepped to the side and sat down on the grass under the oak tree. The leaves crackled under my weight. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and turned my focus inside.
I’d never done this before; I’d only heard about it from my parents. I focused on my heart, slowing it down. I evened out my breathing, inhaling slowly, taking twice as long on the exhale.
There had only been a few drops of blood on my lips. Barely anything at all. But I could feel her. She was alive.
I focused on the faint pulse that came from her. I felt her emotions, dim and distant, like I was looking through fog, but they were there. She was panicked and scared, and sore from being manhandled. But she was alive, and she wasn’t badly hurt.
I tried to find her. Her blood should have called out to me and told me where she was. But something was blocking me, and I lost the dim trail I’d picked up. Someone was hiding her.
My heart started its wild race all over again. I ran to my bike, back in full-on panic mode.
I made it to Aspen’s house in under five minutes, sure I’d broken every traffic rule in the book. I kicked out the bike stand and nearly dropped the bike to the ground before I balanced it and ran up the steps. The front door was ajar. I pushed it open carefully and stepped inside the house.
End tables were on their sides, and a potted plant lay on the floor with dirt strewn across the carpet. Broken pieces of glass that used to be coffee cups lay scattered toward the kitchen. When I stepped onto the tiles, the smell hit me before I saw anything.
Death had a smell. Rotten, a little sour, even though the body hadn’t begun decomposing yet. And fear often hung in the air around it. It took a while before that disappeared. It laced the air now, and I felt sick before I saw her.
Zelda lay face down on the kitchen tiles, vacantly staring at the pool of dark blood that had swelled around her head. The hair that had escaped from her neat bun was stained with it. Her right arm was stretched up, like she’d been reaching for something. The blinds on one window were open, which they normally never were during the day, making everything sharp and vivid.
From the looks of it, Zelda had run to open the blinds and had only made it to one window. If that had been the case, it meant the masters had been here. In the daylight. I knelt next to her and examined her without touching her. The blood came from a hole in her neck where her throat should have been. It was a mangled, bloody mess now. She’d been bitten and her throat ripped out to stop her. From the looks of things, they hadn’t taken her blood, or at least not a lot of it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said softly. Zelda had been hard and strict, but I’d known her for a long time and she’d been good to Aspen.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm my nerves. I had to keep my head about me. The way I was panicking was already dangerous.
I doubted they’d killed Aspen. They still needed me to take out Connor. If they’d already gotten to him, Aspen would have been here too, dead next to Zelda. And Claude’s car wouldn’t have been at the safe house. No, I believed Aspen was still alive. I needed to believe it. They were using her for motivation, because they knew that if she died, I would give up. I had to find her.
I stood up and systematically combed through the rest of the house, but nothing was out of place. The struggle had happened between the front door and the kitchen, and it had happened quickly, without wasting a lot of time.
When I stepped out into the sunlight again it felt foreign, like the whole world was suddenly a place I didn’t know. The sun was high in the sky. It was rolling on towards noon, and I still hadn’t eaten. I felt empty and hollow, but food couldn’t fill this kind of hole in my soul.
My phone rang in my pocket, and I pulled it out and pushed ‘talk’.
“You’d better get to the office,” Carl’s voice came loud and clear through the speaker.
“Just because I turned to you for help doesn’t mean we’re friends, Carl,” I sneered. I didn’t feel like playing his games. I already felt like I owed him one, and I didn’t like owing people.
“Thanks for the sentiment, but don’t flatter yourself,” he said. “This is actually important. I’m guessing you can make more out of this than I can, seeing that Ruben actually tells you things once in a while.”
I frowned but agreed. “I’ll be there in ten. I have nothing better to do with my time.” I’d meant that last bit sarcastically, but I realized as I hung up that it was true. I had nothing. No lead on Joel, a dead-end lead on Aspen, a dead caregiver and a missing driver.
Nope, I could still fit more on my plate.
The office was quiet, which was strange. Ruben ran a normal accounting firm during the day, which meant there should be cars outside. There weren’t. All the lights in the lobby were off, and everything had an eerie feel to it despite the sunlight filtering in through the windows. The day receptionist’s desk was unoccupied.
“Carl?” I called.
He appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked like he’d aged since I’d last seen him. His face was sagging, there were dark rings under his eyes and his blue irises were darker, like the ocean instead of like ice.
“What’s going on?” I asked, climbing the stairs to him. “Where is everybody?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, and for once he didn’t sound belittling or mocking or sarcastic. That in itself was more alarming than anything else. “Sonya paged me and I came here—”
“You still use a pager?” I
asked him.
He rolled his eyes. “Focus, Adele,” he snapped. “Sonya paged me, which isn’t that weird – she works funny hours for a vampire – but when I got here the whole place was quiet, like this. I wasn’t able to come in right away, so I didn’t know if this had happened before or after… So I phoned you, because you know more about this place than I do.”
“Aren’t you in Ruben’s back pocket?” I asked. I’d always had the idea that Carl was the favorite.
But he shook his head. “Honestly? I think he was just doing me a favor by taking me on. I have skills, sure. But what can I do? I’m just a human.”
“Very humbling words, Carl,” I said. “I always thought you were a bit of an ass—”
We’d stopped at the doors that led to Sonya’s office, and what I saw cut me short. The place was a mess. The desk was upside down, a file cabinet lay face down and papers were scattered all over the place. There was blood on the carpet. When I looked up, I saw that the light bulbs in all the lamps that hung from the ceiling were broken.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked.
“That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” Carl said, not sounding in the least offended that I’d been about to call him an asshole. In fact, he sounded worn. He looked like he was dead on his feet.
I walked through the office, looking around. Someone had been looking for something, from what I could gather, but everything was such a mess it would take days, and Sonya, to know what had gone missing. I pushed against the door to Ruben’s office.
“Don’t go in there,” Carl said.
I looked over my shoulder at him, and he was as white as a ghost. I frowned but pushed into the office anyway.
Something was leaning against the door, and I had to shove to get the door open wide enough for me to go in there. After I managed to slip through, the door closed again, and I was trapped in the office.
There was blood everywhere: on the walls, the carpet, the papers on Ruben’s desk. And the office was the same mess the other one had been. The furniture was all overturned, and the file cabinet drawers were all pulled out. When I turned to see what had stopped the door from opening, I gagged.
It was Ruben. And he was very dead.
His face was a bloody mess, like he’d been hit a couple of times. Big gashes across his body were oozing blood, and his clothes were a red-stained mess. His eyes were open, staring at his office. His throat was gone, worse than Zelda’s.
I closed my eyes and turned my head away. The blinds all around the office were closed. The light bulbs in here were broken too.
I pulled the door open, shoving against the dead body I didn’t want to touch so I could get out again. When I reached Sonya’s office I shivered. Carl was sitting on the edge of a tipped cabinet, looking small despite his bulk of muscle.
“Told you,” he said, but the joking tone in his voice was missing, and he looked about as haunted as I felt.
“Well,” was all I could say.
“Do you know what’s going on here?” he asked me after a moment of silence.
I walked over to the cabinet and sat down next to him. It was strange sharing personal space with someone. I was aware of the warmth that came from him and the smell of his cologne filtering through the sour smell of death and fear.
“He took on the wrong clients,” I said. “They’re vampires, after someone for a big deal. They came to him, and he took the job for the money. But it ended up costing a lot more than that.”
“I’m assuming you got the job?”
I nodded. I wished I’d never taken it. “You think it’s just another kill, and before you know it everyone around you is dying.” I stopped talking because a lump had suddenly risen in my throat. I didn’t want to cry in front of Carl.
“You know, I took this job because I wanted to prove myself to my father. He said I didn’t have it in me, that I was too soft, that I’d never be a real man.”
Underneath his charming, I-don’t-care façade and bulky muscles, he was just a boy. He looked vulnerable now, with the events of the morning peeling away his macho veneer.
“This doesn’t make me a man, though. You know? It just makes me a murderer.”
“They’re vampires, Carl,” I said, trying to sound like they didn’t matter. But somewhere along the line, I’d started to feel like they did matter. Connor mattered. And Mom mattered. I sighed. “I hate it too.”
“Why are you still doing it?” Carl asked.
I shrugged. “I guess when you give so much of yourself away to do it in the first place, you can’t stop. There won’t be anything left. This has started to define me, I think. Why do you still do it?”
Carl shrugged too. “I think it’s safe to see this as an opportunity to change jobs. The switch shouldn’t be too hard now. No two weeks’ notice, you know?”
His attempt at a joke fell to the floor in front of us. Neither of us thought it was funny.
“So, these vampires who killed him – are they after you too?” he asked.
“Yes, but not to kill me. They want me to take out the mark. They’re willing to kill to make sure that happens.”
“Why don’t they do it themselves?”
“Because he’s slippery, and they lost control of their own mess. Now they’re just making a mess for everyone else.”
Carl nodded slowly. “Hey, at least your life isn’t in danger,” he said.
“My sister’s is. And my IT guy. If they’re still alive, I have to finish the job to save them. If they’re already dead, well, then, the vamps have successfully killed me too.”
“I can help you find him,” Carl offered. “I’m sure when we put our heads together, we can do more than either of us alone could manage.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that easy. The mark – Connor – he’s not really the kind of vampire I want to kill. He’s…”
I took a deep breath, not finishing my sentence. Carl narrowed his eyes at me.
“I’m guessing there’s a lot more to this story. Let me see what I have so far. You don’t want to kill the mark because – and I’m just guessing – you have feelings for him.”
“I do not,” I said meekly, which was an answer in itself.
“Right. Sure. Your sister and the IT guy are being held hostage—”
“Maybe.”
“And you need to put an end to all of this. What am I missing?”
I sighed. What did I have to lose at this point, telling him? “My sister’s caregiver has been killed, my driver is missing, they have a pet cat-woman who’s out to torture me within an inch of my life, and I don’t know where to find Connor even if I don’t want to kill him, because I shot him.”
Carl raised his eyebrows.
“I missed,” I said.
“You?”
I snorted. “Hard to believe. I know.”
“These vampires… they’re the ones who killed Ruben?” He swallowed hard, like the words in his mouth made him sick.
I nodded.
“And they’re the ones who hired you.”
“To kill the mark, yeah. His girlfriend hired me to find him for her. At least, that’s what I thought. Now I don’t really know what to think. It’s complicated.”
“I can see that.”
I sighed, and Carl lapsed into silence next to me.
A banging suddenly started, and the cabinet underneath us rattled and shook. Carl and I both jumped up and backed away. The banging continued, and the muffled sounds of a woman’s voice traveled through the metal.
“Someone’s in there,” I said.
“I know,” Carl said, but neither of us made a move.
“We have to get her out,” I said.
Carl nodded, and finally we moved toward the cabinet. We tipped it onto its side with some effort, and the voice inside groaned. I fiddled with the door, trying to get it open, but a voice called from inside.
“No! Don’t open it! I’ll fry. It’s Sonya.
”
“The sunlight,” I said. “She’ll burn to a crisp if we open it.”
“What are we going to do?”
I thought for a moment. “The janitor’s closet,” I said. “It has no windows.”
“That’s downstairs,” Carl said, and I nodded. He sighed and braced himself at the one end of the cabinet.
I was at the other end, and we heaved and lifted it up with Sonya inside. She made small whimpering sounds as we moved her. Twice Carl slipped and dropped his end, and she screamed and cursed from inside.
“Sorry,” Carl muttered.
Finally, after a lot of sweating and heaving and swearing, we finally had the cabinet in the closet between the buckets and mops and ladders. I clicked on the single light bulb that hung from the ceiling, and Carl wrestled with the now-dented door to get it open.
When he yanked it free, Sonya tumbled out. Her brown hair was disheveled, and she had bruises on her face. Her hands were raw, with dried blood caked around her nails, and she glared at us.
“You couldn’t be a little more careful?” she asked.
“It was either that or fried Sonya,” I answered flatly. “What happened?”
Sonya took a shuddering breath. “They scheduled a meeting in the middle of the night. Ruben assumed it was to talk about everything. He asked me to unlock the office, said he’d be here literally last minute. But they didn’t want to talk. The moment they arrived, they started trashing the place. They knocked me down.”
“How many were there?” I asked.
“Just the same two as last time,” she said, and I nodded. Carl looked at me questioningly, but I would answer him later.
“Why didn’t you get out of here?” I asked.
“Ruben arrived and saw them bullying me. He got them away from me into the office. One of them followed – the master – but the other one stuffed me in this cabinet so I couldn’t go anywhere.”
“It’s metal,” I confirmed. She hadn’t been able to dematerialize.
“I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t hear too well through the metal, but I know Ruben closed the door. The next thing I knew, there was a lot of banging around me and then the cabinet fell over.”
I sat down on an upturned bucket. The closet was extremely small for the three of us and the cabinet, and I felt a wave of claustrophobia.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Sonya asked in a thin voice.
I nodded. There was no use denying it.
Sonya covered her face with her hands and cried. Her shoulders shook, and her body shrank in on itself, crushed by the weight of her misery. Carl put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but she didn’t pull away from him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I didn’t just mean for the fact that Ruben was dead. I was sorry for everything, for this happening at all, for her being involved in it, for the mess it had become.
“We have to go,” Carl said.
He wanted to talk; I could see it. If he was smart, he would run and never look back. He had too much to lose – he didn’t want to be involved in this. But I knew that Carl wasn’t particularly smart when it came to risking his own life. He wouldn’t run. He would stay to fight. That should have made me feel better, that there was someone who’d have my back. But it just made me feel sick to my stomach. If he died – and the chances were pretty good that he would – his blood would be on my hands too. It would be another body to add to my growing list of losses.
“We can’t open the door,” I said, turning to Sonya. She’d stopped sobbing, but her cheeks were wet and her eyes were bright. “You’ll have to get back inside that thing so we can leave. You’ll be able to get out again once we’re gone. And then you’ll have to wait it out in here until the sun goes down and you can go home.”
She didn’t look happy with me, but she didn’t argue, either. There wasn’t anything else to do about it.
She stood up and stepped back into the cabinet. Carl made sure she could push the door open from the inside before we left, so she wouldn’t be stuck in there again, and once she was inside her little metal coffin he opened the door and we stepped out of the closet.
“I don’t know what to do with this one,” Carl admitted. “We’re going to have to call the police because of Ruben’s death, and they’re going to go through all the paperwork. We have to get in there and get rid of our stuff before they can get at it.”
I suddenly felt like my body was made of lead. I felt heavy and sore, like I was the one who’d been beaten up. It felt like everything that normally kept me going had been drained out of me, and I was just a shell.
“Just call them, Carl. I’m going to go home.”
“But we can’t just leave—”
“It’s over, Carl,” I said. “Let them come. I can’t do this anymore.”
Then I left.
Vampire's Shade 1 (Vampire's Shade Collection) Page 15
