“I wish it was now, Mom,” Jessie said, and roughly whisked away a useless tear that leaked unbidden from her eye. “I wish I had power right now.”
As she said the words, her fingers tingled as if she had suddenly stuck them in a light socket. Jessie yelped with the sudden pain, and the springs of the bed squeaked as she moved. She scrubbed her fingers against the coarse cover and the pain diminished. Her fingers didn’t hurt as much when she slid her hand toward the pillow, but the further her hand got from the top of the bed, the more they pained her. Jessie patted around the neatly tucked blanket, and when she dug underneath the nearly flat pillow and her hand closed around something that crackled, the tingle went away as if it had never been.
Jessie stared down at the paper-wrapped package she pulled out, dumbfounded.
“This is some big spooky shit, baby,” Mind-Mom said, and the accent wasn’t bleeding in now, her voice was all slow, Southern sugar. “Voodoo shit. You need to get outta here. Right now, hear me? Something’s wrong, leave now, I mean it!”
“I hear you,” Jessie whispered. “I’m gone right now.”
She stuffed the thin package in her pocket and got the hell gone, just like her dead mother told her to.
Chapter Six
Jessie cupped her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, savoring the warmth. The waitress at the small café she’d darted into had given her a funny look, but she’d waited courteously enough on the sweating, panting, black-clad girl.
Jessie had been running like the devil himself was chasing her, but the exercise hadn’t warmed her. She was still cold; cold way down inside, and the hot chocolate probably wasn’t going to help. But it wasn’t going to hurt, either, and there was something about the sugared drink that made her feel better.
For long minutes, she had ignored the package currently burning a hole in her pocket but now she pulled it out and stared at it. She carefully spread the brown paper apart. On top was a printout of a couple of emails. Jessie read it over and over again, disbelieving what she saw.
from:
Dan Jackson, domain administrator [email protected]
to:
Shannon
date:
Mon, May 12, 2012 at 4:07 PM
subject:
revised
The party time has changed. Be there at ten o’clock tonight. He has asked for you. Wear that sexy leather thing you had on the other night, ok?
Dan
from:
Shannon
to:
Dan Jackson, domain administrator [email protected]
date:
Mon, May 12, 2012 at 4:10 PM
subject:
Re: revised
I’ll be there. Can’t wait.
S
It couldn’t be true. Jessie began to shake. It was Shannon. Shannon was helping them. That’s why she had been acting so weird, and why she hadn’t wanted to help Jessie find Kira’s killer.
She was one of the killers.
Jessie put a trembling hand to her mouth and felt the tears run down her face. Shannon. Oh, god, Shannon. What had she gotten into? Was she high on meth when she did it? Had she helped kill her mother, or had she joined up with them later?
Maybe she was trying to get away from them and that was why she’d given Jessie the information about Dian Carman and Dan Jackson. Or was she trying to lure her into a trap? Maybe…
I can’t think about this right now, she thought. I can’t, or I’ll fall apart and then nothing will get done. I want them to pay, all of them to pay. Tomorrow. I’ll think about it tomorrow.
She pulled a wad of napkins out of the holder, wiped her eyes, and set the email to one side.
Why had Dan printed out the email? It didn’t do anything except link him to Shannon, and it incriminated neither of them. All it talked about was a party, and if someone didn’t know what was going on, they’d just think it was an email to his girlfriend.
Was it? Ewwwww. She hoped not.
The answer came to her with the swiftness of a lightning strike. It was for leverage. Shannon was trying to get away from them, and this was to pull her into line. All he had to do was say, ‘Hey, Shannon, if I get caught, you’re going down, too. Look, I’ve got an email from you right here where you said you were coming to a party.’
“On Monday,” Jessie said aloud, and felt the hot chocolate coming back up. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and it stayed down, but it was a close thing.
Andy’s body had been found on a Tuesday. Shannon had helped killed Andy Mossiman.
She spread apart the paper wrapping with shaking hands and pulled out two receipts. Both were from The Silver Unicorn. Jessie wrinkled her nose. The Silver Unicorn was a smoke shop down on the beach, the kind that sold drug paraphernalia. It was rumored to sell more than paraphernalia, too. A kid in her Biology class bragged to everyone who would listen that he bought his drugs from the hot chick that worked there, and that she was going to take him to some special party or something. Then he’d dropped out, and she’d been relieved because she never had to hear any more of his boring lies about all the girls he’d banged, was going to bang, or continued to bang.
God, he was probably dead. That poor, stupid, boastful boy was probably dead, just like Kira and Andy.
And Shannon had helped to kill him.
Underneath the receipts were a picture of a falling-down old house that looked familiar to Jessie and a piece of black fabric. She picked up the cloth and felt suddenly sick. It was stiff with some dried substance. Jessie didn’t have to bring it to her nose to tell what it was, but she did it anyway, just to be sure. It reeked of blood.
Jessie fought off the dizziness she felt. This was a trophy. This piece of fabric…someone had been wearing it when they were killed. It was cut from the body of some innocent victim during one of their blood rituals. Who had they cut it from? Andy? Kira? That poor, stupid boy from her Biology class?
Her Mom?
Jessie dropped it on the table and pressed a hand to her eyes. She didn’t know how she knew these things, only that she did. How did she find the package? She’d just understood somehow that she was going to find something to help her in Dan’s room, and she had. Something strange was happening, and she didn’t like it. What was happening here?
Should she give this stuff to Bennett? And if she did, how would she explain how she found it? He already thought she had something to do with these murders.
She waved the waitress away when she came to ask if Jessie was all right. Her mouth trembled as she stared into the woman’s eyes.
“I’m fine,” she said numbly. “Just fine.”
She smiled, and Jessie could suddenly see that she was beautiful. She could see how it was 40 years ago, when this woman was young and wild. She’d been a babe then, and everyone she met had basked in the light of her gentle eyes. She had a kind heart, and it showed on her face.
“You know, honey,” the woman said, “If I were you, I’d go home and talk to my mother. I’d bet that whatever it is, she can help you with it.”
“Yes,” said Jessie. “She could.”
She paid for her hot chocolate and left a generous tip on the table, not looking at the woman’s face again. She didn’t want any kindness right now.
She’d prefer a little righteous rage.
***
When Gisel opened the door to room 212, she could smell death.
Gisel knew what death smelled like; it had been a frequent visitor to the town where she grew up. Death wasn’t pretty or some easy fading away like they showed on the television. It was ugly and nasty and stank of piss and shit and blood and desperation.
She could smell all of those things when she opened the door, so she pulled it shut without looking inside and went to the front desk. The manager gave her a hard time, but Gisel had worked there for a long time and she knew how to handle him. She folded her arms over her chest and repeated again that
there was a problem in 212 and she could not go any further until someone went with her to check it out. He could, of course, let someone else finish her rooms if he preferred.
Since the manager was not as big a fool as he sometimes acted and they were short-handed already, he mumbled something nasty under his breath and came with her. He entered the room ahead of her and stopped as soon as he saw what was lying on the bed inside.
A woman in her fifties lay diagonally across the bed, facedown and fully clothed, her head twisted at an impossible angle on her slim neck. One arm was outstretched and a small pistol lay on the floor beside the bed. There was no wound visible upon her that they could see, and neither Gisel nor the manager made any effort to move closer and take a better look.
Her husband lay on the next bed, rigid. He was face-up, with an expression of terror so vivid upon his features that Gisel crossed herself.
“Madre de Dios!”
His throat had been torn out. It looked as if an animal had savagely ripped apart the tender flesh of his neck.
But there was no blood.
“You can say that again,” said the manager. “Fuck.”
***
Sergeant John Bennett was forty five years old, and he felt every minute of it as he slumped in the doorway of the hotel room. Too many nights without sleep and too much stress had caught up with him, and his face looked as gray and rumpled as the suit he wore. He looked as if he’d slept in his clothes; his collar was unbuttoned, his tie pulled sideways, and though it was only ten o’clock in the morning, he already had patches of sweat bleeding through his shirt.
God, he was tired. His eyes felt like they were full of sand. He blinked to clear them and leveled them at the hotel manager.
“Nobody reported hearing anything last night? No fights, no loud noises, nothing?”
“I already told you no,” the man said. “There’s nothing on the log, and all complaints are written down for the day manager to review. I got a call in to my night guy and he’ll be here to answer questions in just a few minutes. Whatever it was, it happened last night. I saw them right before I left work yesterday. They asked me if I knew where they could find good seafood. That was around six o’clock.”
Bennett rubbed his forehead right above the spot where his headache pounded fiercely. He sighed.
“All right,” he said. “We got all we need from you. it might be a couple of days before you can use this room again.”
“Yeah, right,” the manager said. “Like we’re going to need it. We sure aren’t gonna have a rush of customers after a double murder in one of our rooms. That kind of stuff gets around. Business is bad enough already, and now we got cops hanging around and crime scene tape everywhere.”
He shook his head and walked off, muttering to himself.
Bennett sighed again.
“Hey, John,” one of the technicians called. “We’re done with the photographs and we’re going to roll her. Want to come see?”
Bennett knew what they were going to find before he returned to where the woman’s body lay. Her throat was going to be torn out, just like her husband’s was. A lot of her blood was going to be missing. Just like he’d known that the gun on the floor hadn’t even been fired. Just like he knew that no one at the hotel had heard anything.
The violence in the rash of murders was escalating; each day, it seemed there was another, worse one. Something had to be done, and he didn’t know how. He felt helpless, and that was not an emotion that John Bennett was comfortable with. He was the police. He was in control, but not this time. They were dealing with a shadow man.
Or a demon.
***
The Silver Unicorn was five blocks from downtown, and there was only a light crowd there. Jessie had expected that. What customers they had were clustered around the counter at the other end of the store. The customers were all guys, and they were all leaning on the counter, flirting with the woman who worked there.
Jesse pretended to be interested in a display of pipes, but she was really staring at the woman’s reflection in the glass. The clerk gestured theatrically and often, her full black sleeves flowing around her as she did so. She laughed a lot and touched her customers frequently, her long red nails making a rasping noise on their clothing as she looked limpidly into their faces with the sloe eyes she had outlined boldly with kohl. She wore large hammered silver earrings and a matching necklace that lay flat against the bronze, smooth skin she displayed so much of with her low-cut blouse. Her skirt barely covered her butt, and she couldn’t have been wearing much in the way of underwear. It would have shown through the thin silk, and there were no lines marring the contours of her figure.
That’s what Mom always called a one-inch skirt, because when you wore one of them, you were one inch away from disaster at any given moment. Hate to see what would happen if she ever dropped anything around here. Probably be a riot.
She smiled faintly at the memory and then jerked at the sound of a voice. She’d been too intent on her musings to notice that the clerk had approached her end of the counter.
“Can I help you find something?”
“I’m looking for something you don’t have behind the counter,” she said carefully, but her voice still cracked. She met the woman’s amused gaze, who flung her hair over her shoulder and looked scornful.
“What would that be?” she asked coolly.
“Dan Jackson told me I could get it here.”
The superior attitude melted away as if it had never been.
“Sure,” she said, all smiles. “If Dan sent you, that’s okay. I’m closing up in about fifteen miutes. Wait outside for me. Oh, I’m Sylvia.”
“I’m in the red Toyota in the lot across the street,” Jessie said, deliberately not giving her own name.
One of the guys at the counter who had been staring hungrily at Sylvia looked at Jessie and waved. She caught the motion from the corner of her eye and her heart sank. It was David; she had a math class with him.
“Hey, Jessie.” He was all smiles. “I didn’t know you came in here.”
Something had changed in Sylvia’s face, but Jessie couldn’t tell what it was. Something roiled beneath the surface of her placid expression. Jessie tried not to look at her too long; she didn’t want to know what was underneath. She didn’t want to have any more of those visions or whatever they were. She could go the rest of her life without seeing one of those little black things wriggling around inside someone.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Jessie said. She waved at David and turned to leave. “Red Toyota.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Sylvia promised. “Just wait for me there.”
It was hot in the car, so Jessie started it and turned on the air conditioner. She didn’t see how you could survive Florida without air conditioning, and she didn’t know how the original settlers had done it. When their power was off for a week after a hurricane knocked down all the poles, she’d almost died from heatstroke. She’d even sweated during her shower – a cold one, since there was no electricity to heat the water – and she couldn’t sleep at night. AC was the best invention ever.
She glanced in the rearview every once in a while, checking on Sylvia. She was the only red car in the lot, so she couldn’t miss her, so there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t crank the radio, was there? She was singing along at the top of her lungs when wham! Something slammed into the car.
What the hell was that?
Boom! The noise was louder this time, and shattered glass flew everywhere from the gaping hole in her windshield. Jessie screamed and stared dumbly for a moment before she realized what had happened.
Someone was shooting at her. She ducked down and reached for the door handle, struggling to undo the seatbelt without lifting her head. Why hadn’t she taken the damn thing off while she was waiting? She cursed her mother and her car rules: When you get in the car, put on your seatbelt. Now it was a habit that just might get her killed. She was pretty sure her mother di
dn’t have this in mind when she’d ingrained the rules into her daughter.
At that moment, a third bullet slammed into the car. The seatbelt finally popped free and Jessie scrambled out the door and crouched on the ground. What was she going to do? Bullets could pass through cars easily, no matter that crap you saw on television about people hiding behind them. They were only good for cover. A bullet could easily come through the car and have enough force left to kill her.
She duck-walked around to the back of the car and heard a door slam, then squealing tires from someone driving fast down the street. She dared to lift her head and saw a battered blue Chevy tearing away at top speed, the driver’s face turned toward her. Her features were contorted and she was screaming out the window, but Jessie had no problem recognizing her. It was Sylvia, and she was still holding the gun.
Jessie stood up slowly and looked at the damage to her car. There was no way she could hide this one from Mrs. Davis. She was going to have to report it to the police, too. She wondered if her car insurance covered bullet holes.
She called Mrs. Davis and told her she’d been shopping for a friend’s birthday and when she came back to her car it had three bullet holes in it. In minutes, a police officer and her insurance agent were there. The cop seemed a little skeptical, but he took her explanation as stated, and the insurance agent arranged for a tow and gave Jessie a ride home. He left her at her front door with the promise of a check for repairs to the car the next day. Mrs. Davis fussed over her, and Jessie pretended everything was ok. She was in over her head, and she knew it.
Blood Worship (Chasing Vampires) Page 9
