“The ones inside won’t hurt you, and they won’t let harm come to you. Just stay calm and hold steady. Grandmother came to help.”
“Pay no attention!” Dian Carman screamed. “It’s only a trick!” He stalked closer, menace practically oozing from him. “I will kill her, you will see. She is nothing next to me!”
“Do it now!” her mother cried. “Now, Jessie!”
Jessie pulled the vial that Father Raymond had given her out of her pocket, uncorked it, and threw it into the demon’s face.
Dian Carman shrieked, the sound wailing through the night. His hands flew to his face and Jessie could see the skin bubbling into blisters. He reeled in circles, one eye blinded, his flesh melted as the holy water boiled its way through.
“Dob! Dother!” he howled. “Help me, brothers!” When no one answered, he screamed to his followers, his hands grasping a young woman as she ran by in panic. She shrank back from him in fear and revulsion. He shook the girl, so hard that her head flopped on her neck. “Kill her!” he screamed. “Kill her!”
But the girl pulled free and fled, just as the others did. They trampled one another in their fury to be gone. They kicked and punched to be the first to get out of the room. Jessie saw Dan Jackson crouched in a corner with his hands over his ears, sobbing.
And Jessie felt the power rise in her until it was nearly unbearable, until she felt she would explode from the force of it. She pointed both hands at the demon. A sound rose from her throat, a guttural sound of pain and fury, the howling of wrathful voices that rose into cacophony. The demon bent in on himself, trying to get away from the noise that surrounded him.
Jessie could feel a buzzing begin way down in her feet, and it sang its way joyously through her, growing stronger and stronger as it surged ever upwards. She jerked with the force of it, with the power. When it reached her hands, she felt a whispering rush as a green, swirling tide of light flowed from her and hit Dian Carman with the force of a hurricane. He screamed and writhed in its might.
It seemed to Jessie as if the green light that flowered from her fingertips was composed of hundreds upon thousands of voices, and that the voices were whispering their own names, over and over again, and that they had joined their energy to kill him.
It seemed to last forever, that green light/sound/cry. It went on and on, and when it finally stopped pulsing from Jessie, Dian Carman lay unmoving on the floor. While she watched, his flesh and bones melted into a disgusting soup of viscous fluid.
Jessie felt empty now that the voices were gone; she felt hollow inside, and suddenly, achingly lonely. She would hear those voices in her dreams and she would always wake with a smile on her face, gladdened by them. She had known them all for those few moments, she had been them all in some strange way, and she was always glad when they came to visit her sleep.
Jessie pulled the gun from her pocket and pointed it at a small group of followers cowering on the floor.
“Tie him up,” she said, and indicated Dan Jackson. “I’ll kill all of you if I have to, so don’t think about running.”
She needn’t have worried; they scurried to do her bidding. The weeping Dan Jackson was bound tightly, and Jessie made them drag him out into the hallway.
“Stay here,” she ordered. She locked them in the room, hoping they were still sufficiently frightened of her to stay put because she wasn’t even sure she was strong enough to take care of Dan, who was tied like a steer for branding. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and called Bennett, giving him concise directions to the house in a calm voice and telling him how many were still here. She hung up on his sharp questions, cutting him off in mid-sentence.
Then she toed the blubbering Dan in the ribs to get his attention.
“I have to know some things,” she said. “It’s all over, so it doesn’t matter if I know. Why did you leave that stuff under your pillow? You had to know somebody would find it eventually.”
“That wasn’t me, it was Shannon,” he said sullenly. “Do I look that dumb to you? She couldn’t take it when we started killing people she knew. It was all right as long as it was strangers, but when we started killing her friends…He was smart, you know. He found all the people to cook up the meth, and he brought us to this house. We got a whole chain of distributors going. Some of us started taking too much of the product and went a little crazy, but overall it was working out pretty good. I had a lot to do with that. I’m just as smart as him,” he boasted. “He was a vampire hanging out inside a group of people who pretended to be vampires, so he looked normal. So smart…”
Jessie kicked him again. “Get over all the admiration for yourself and your freak boss and tell me about Shannon.” When he acted reluctant, she brandished the gun and he began to talk. The words poured from him, as if he had been dying to tell someone all along.
”We met at a party and I started feeding her drugs right away, then I introduced her to him. He hypnotized her somehow and she would have done anything for him, at first. He would call to her and she would come, no matter the time or where she was or what she had to do. She did anything he asked. She distributed meth and she started taking a lot of it.”
Dan grinned, and Jessie wanted to punch him.
“She might have acted all right around you, but she was one of the worst for a while. She loved the money, but it wasn’t only that. She had the bloodlust, too. After we killed Kira, all that started wearing off. She started pulling away. She tried to talk us out of killing Andy, but our master needed him. She talked to me about you and she begged me not to tell him, but of course I did. I tried to scare you off without hurting you. I made a phone call and I came to your house, but you wouldn’t stop. I had to tell him then. If you had backed off, she would probably still be alive.”
Jessie flinched at his words, and he laughed.
“She freaked after he came to see you. He made me stop going to work and move out of my grandma’s house because he knew she’d crack and tell you eventually, and she did. He gave your name to the other people in the group and told them you were our enemy. Some of them weren’t so stable anymore. Like Sylvia, who shot at you. Shannon wanted you to find everything out, so she left you that clue. I almost got you that afternoon, you know. Dian told me you were there and you’d only been gone a couple of minutes when I arrived.”
Jessie’s skin crawled when she remembered how she’d run down the street like a madwoman when her mother had warned her to get out. Everything would have turned out so differently if she hadn’t left when she did.
“She wanted to get caught and she knew that she would if you got the right information. She couldn’t handle it. She said that we’d become evil, and she wanted it to stop. I knew it was evil. I knew it, and didn’t care. It wanted it to be more depraved and immoral than it was. I liked it, and the only thing I regret is that I didn’t get to put my old granny on the altar in there.”
“Why’d you do it, Dan? Why did you kill them all?”
“It started out for the ceremony; we had to have them for him. We’d have them on Fridays, but sometimes I couldn’t find anyone to kill. I picked up some woman one night while she was waiting for the bus, but we couldn’t count on that happening all the time. The next time, we picked up a bum and we got lucky with a couple of runaways. But we didn’t want to come down with some disease, so we had to have clean kills. He liked them best when they were young.”
Some woman who was waiting for the bus… Jessie felt sick. She felt shaky, and her eyes burned the way they did when she was going to throw up. She slid down until she was sitting on the floor. Dan just kept yakking away.
“I met people online and got them to trust me. As soon as we hooked up in person, I’d start feeding them drugs and getting them dependent on me. Then I’d ask them to a ‘party’. It took a long time to work up a sacrifice, took a long time to get them to trust me. What’s the world coming to, I ask you?” Dan gave a high-pitched cackle. He lifted up his head to glare at Jessie, the
naked hate in his eyes a shock to her, even knowing what he was.
“I’d cut you up and drink your blood if I could. If I ever get loose, you better run and run, little girl.”
“You’re never getting loose,” she said. “Tell me about the ceremony.
“We’d get high first, and get them high, too, so it seemed like a bad dream to them. We put it in their soda or their liquor, because you can’t taste it that way. There’s just nothing like killing somebody when you’re high…” he said dreamily. “All that blood and gore; I loved it. We’d kill them and drain their blood into the tub. There were gallons and gallons of it, seemed like, and he’d drink his fill. Then we’d have a party and make cocktails from the blood that he left. Sometimes people couldn’t wait, and they’d be up there licking blood and stuff off the wood. I think he probably drank from them when he couldn’t get a victim, though he always said he wouldn’t. he said we weren’t sheep, and he couldn’t drink the blood of his brothers and sisters. But I saw how he acted when he was hungry, and we were all his sheep when he needed blood. I think he’s been at me, too, because I got to where I couldn’t wait, either.”
“You’re looking kinda green, Jessie,” he said slyly. “Want me to tell you about your friends? How Andy begged and begged and I cut his throat anyway? How that Kira girl screamed for her mother the whole time and it got us so hot we slashed her to pieces, just kept slashing and slashing until there was hardly anything left of her but a warm puddle of glorious blood…”
Jessie’s hand trembled on the gun. She balanced her arm on her knee and pointed it at him and put some pressure on the trigger. How could this piece of dirt live and Kira and her mother die? He should die, too, not grow fat in some prison.
“Don’t do it, Jessie,” Mind-Mom said loudly. “The best retaliation is to let this one live, can’t you see that?
“What was that?” Dan asked, trying to twist around. “Who’s here?”
“Your doom.” Jessie’s hands still shook, and she eased the pressure off the trigger “The one person who could make me not kill you. You’re terrified of jail, aren’t you? You feel like you’ve been in jail your whole life, living with that crazy old bat who has the nerve to call herself your grandmother. But that is what is going to happen, Dan. You’re going to be in jail forever and ever and ever.”
“Shut up, bitch,” he shrieked. “I’ll get loose and I’ll get you. I’ll find his brothers or they’ll find me. There are more of them, you know. They’re not dead, and they’ll come and they’ll eat you alive! I’ll help them drink your blood and smash your bones!”
“No, you won’t,” Mind-Mom whispered, her voice full of sorrow. Jessie could see her between them, one slender arm reaching toward him but never touching. It seemed as if Dan could see her too, because he howled and tried to crawl away from the lady with tears on her face.
“Oh, you won’t Dan, you won’t, you’ll just lie in that narrow bed and dream at night about what a good life you could have had if things were different. It would have been, you know. You could have had a wonderful life, but now you will live in a waking nightmare. Your mother really loved you, but she won’t come to you now, Dan. She won’t help you because she knows you are evil, evil now, and her soul hurts for you. You killed me, Dan. I was just waiting to go home and be with my baby. You were still human that night, but you’re not anymore, because you’ve given your spirit to evil. You knew I had a daughter. I told you so while we were sitting there together. You knew if you went through with it that you were leaving Jessie all alone, and you knew what that could do to a person because it had been done to you. You could have stopped it that night. Even after the things you had done, you weren’t evil, and you could have changed it all. You could have become the person you were meant to be. You knew that you shouldn’t do it, but you did it anyway, and now you don’t even remember how many you killed. You could have stopped it all, and your mother knows that. And so do you.”
“Not true, not true!” he screamed. “Shut up, make her stop!” he screamed and screamed and screamed, until he couldn’t see the woman anymore. But he could still hear her whispering, over and over.
“Poor boy, poor boy.”
He kept on screaming until Bennett arrived with police and ambulances, and the EMT gave him a shot to sedate him. Jessie crouched, crying, by the wall where she had leaned an eternity ago. She didn’t move when Bennett took the gun away from her. She could still see Dan’s throat moving spasmodically as they loaded him into the ambulance, and she could tell that he was still hearing the words her mother had spoken, and that in his mind, he was still screaming.
***
“I’m going away for a little while, baby,” Mom said. “I’m going away, but I’ll be back if you need me.”
“I can dream you whenever I want to,” Jessie said to her. “Isn’t that what you are, a dream?”
“I’m whatever you want me to be,” Mom said, and stroked a strand of hair away from her forehead. “You can dream whatever you want.”
“That’s the same kind of bullshit answer you gave me in real life,” Jessie complained. “What in the hell does that mean, exactly?”
“I don’t care if you are old enough to go to college, you watch your mouth or I’ll kick your butt,” Mom said, that eyebrow rising right up into her hairline the way it always did when she was pissed.
“If this is my dream, I ought to be able to say whatever I want,” Jessie said stubbornly. “I want you to stay.”
“Business to take care of,” Mom said breezily.
“What kind of business?”
“I’m so sorry you had to grow up so fast. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that all this happened.”
“You can’t fix everything, Mom.” Jessie watched a little smile play across her wide, mobile mouth.
“Maybe I can,” she said. “Maybe I’m the Magic Mom.”
“I haven’t believed that since I was eight years old,” Jessie said wryly, but she was lying. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she thought that her mother could do anything.
Even come back from the dead.
“Maybe you believe in a lot of things that you say you don’t,” Mom said, just as if Jessie had voiced the thought out loud. “Grandma Belle says she’s proud of you. It’s not over, baby. There are more of them, so you be careful. I’ll be watching.” Trailing her lips across Jessie’s forehead, she turned and was gone.
***
The ringing phone woke Jessie from a sound sleep. Bennett had brought her to the hospital and they’d sedated her to keep her overnight, since she was babbling about discovering her mother’s killer and ghosts and vampires. And because she couldn’t stop crying, of course. Whatever was in the shot they gave her worked, because ten minutes later she was laid out on the bed with a big old smile on her face.
Bennett made Mrs. Davis go home and go to bed, and he had stayed in her place. She’d woken a couple of times that night and found the cop who tried to pretend he was tough sitting in the chair with his head on her bed, snoring.
“’Lo,” she mumbled into the receiver. She could barely focus her eyes.
“Jess,” Bennett said gruffly. “I just got off the phone with someone who says she’s your Aunt Lucinda. Says she’s in Paris and she just got a message she should call her sister. She finally got hold of your old landlady, who gave her my number. She says to tell you that she’ll be there day after tomorrow.”
Jessie smiled groggily.
“You know anything about this? Did you finally get hold of someone who knew how to find her?”
“No,” she said, laughing.
It was no use pretending anymore that it was a dream. It had all been real; the demon vampire, her mother, the strange power she had felt…
”But I bet I know who did.”
Epilogue
He was beautiful.
The most gorgeous man she had ever seen, even more gorgeous than Dian had been. She was on her knees in front of hi
m, and she stared worshipfully up at him. He held out a hand and helped her to her feet, holding her arm solicitously and smiling sweetly.
“Tell me everything you know about this girl, the one who killed my brother.” She couldn’t take her eyes away from his red, red lips. “I will reward you handsomely, of course.”
“Yes, Dob,” she said. “Whatever you want.”
If you liked this book, watch for Blood on the Moon, Book 2 in the Chasing Vampires Trilogy, Coming Soon!
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