by P. N. Elrod
It was terrifying how fast he dropped, making a thud as his body hit the tile.
Katie stifled a scream, staring down in horror, not breathing.
He wasn’t breathing, either, but that didn’t bother me. I hadn’t killed him, being far too late for it. Goodness knows when that had originally happened or how.
I went to Katie and made her look at me. “He’s out for the count. Wood does that to his kind. You’re okay.”
She shook her head. “He’ll come back. I’ve seen it.”
“I bet you have, kid. Splash water on your face.”
While she pulled herself together I went through the guy’s pockets. My boyfriend and his partner do private detecting work, and I’d picked up some useful bad habits to add to a few of my own.
An ancient, long-expired driver’s license identified him as Ethan Duvert. No surprise.
I was shocked at the thick wad of money casually folded into one pocket. The bills were twenties with half an inch of crisp C-notes keeping them company. I’d bet it had come to him the easy way; he’d have floated invisibly into a bank vault and taken it, leaving some hapless accountant to try to explain the loss. I put the money in my purse for safekeeping. Honest. I’d find a way to give it back somehow.
Then—a policeman’s badge, a real one.
I nearly had a heart attack. If my boyfriend could be a private eye, then there was no reason why Duvert couldn’t be a cop, and I’d just clobbered him. Oh, God, I’d gotten everything wrong. …
“It’s something he uses,” said Katie, drying her face. “He made our chief of police give it to him to get out of tickets.”
It also gave him instant legitimacy with any cop between here and … “Sheldon, Ohio?” I read from the badge.
“My hometown. Used to be. Before he came.” Her face started to crumble and she hiccuped like a toy machine gun.
I knew the signs and stood, hands on my hips. “Hold it, sister,” I ordered in my harshest tone.
That derailed her. She gulped back a sob.
“Listen up, you can bawl like a baby later, but I need you to be a grown woman for the next three hours. Can you do that?”
She hiccuped again, but nodded. “Three hours?”
“The sun will be up by then.”
Katie looked like I’d smacked her with a wet fish. “How do you know ?”
“You first. Sheldon, Ohio—your family’s there?”
“Everyone is. It’s small, but we have a Carnegie library and there’s a private college on the other side of … oh, that doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me what does. Tell me about him .” I didn’t have to point at the body.
“He came to town last spring. He seemed to be everywhere. Everybody liked him. They’d just look at him and like him. First he was at the mayor’s house, then with the chief of police, then the minister, then my parents. My father’s a judge, and he and all the men who run the town know each other, and Ethan met them all.”
“And they liked him. No one thought that was strange?”
“If they did, he’d hear about it, then he’d meet them and change their minds.”
“I bet he did. How did you meet him?”
“I was at the movies with my friends, and that was when he noticed me. We’d seen him with our parents, and he was so handsome, all us girls had crushes on him, even the ones with boyfriends. He started coming by the house to see me and I was so excited that he’d picked me from so many others. At first Father and Mother thought he was too old for me, but he talked with them … and things changed. My parents started agreeing to ideas they’d never think of in a hundred years.”
“Like what?”
She swatted at her hair. “This.”
“You used to be blond like me.”
“I was already blond, but it was…” Her cheeks went red.
“A more natural color?” I said helpfully.
She nodded, relieved. “ He wanted it like yours. One day my mother took me to the town beauty shop and told them what to do.”
“You didn’t have a say?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know why I didn’t fuss. I wasn’t even surprised when Mother did that. She and I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world for me to get my hair bleached out like Jean Harlow.”
Maybe that was normal in Hollywood with a stage-obsessed mother looking to land her willing daughter a part in the movies, but not for a judge’s respectable wife and daughter in a small town in Ohio. “Anyone tease you at school about it?” Schoolgirls who dyed their hair were “fast” and instant outcasts. I should know.
“I stopped going. My parents didn’t mind, the principal and teachers didn’t mind— I didn’t mind.”
“Down deep you must have.”
“It wasn’t important. There was just Ethan. My whole life was for him … and it was wonderful. Absolutely perfect . I’d never been so happy. Every day I just loved him more and more and more. He had clothes sent to me—grown-up gowns from New York, real silk stockings, real gold jewelry. He—”
“I get it. Then he proposed?”
“It’s a blur now, like a dream. A wedding gown arrived, and I was fitted for a trousseau.”
“He had pictures taken.” I showed her the one I’d recovered.
“I look so happy, but it’s wrong. It has to be, the way I feel now.”
“You married him.”
“ He married me, ” she said sharply.
That anger was sweet to hear. Anger was good for her. She’d earned the right.
“My own father performed the wedding on my sixteenth birthday. But I was always going to marry George Coopley from across the street. We’ve been going steady since ninth grade. First I’d go to that private college and come back and be a teacher, and George was going to work in his dad’s bank, and it was like everyone forgot, even George. He was the one who gave me away to Ethan.”
I looked down at the still form of Ethan Duvert. Words clogged my throat, most not fit for Katie’s ears. I needed release, so I smacked him in the gut with the broomstick. I hoped he felt it.
Katie gasped at the violence. I didn’t apologize.
“He had it coming,” I said, debating whether to hit him a third time.
Her face twitched. It might have been a smile trying to break through her misery.
That was encouraging. “So you were married and living happily ever after in Sheldon, Ohio?”
“In the mayor’s house. It’s the biggest in town and the best. He moved his family to that horrible old drummers’ hotel by the tracks. Ethan said that was funny and everyone laughed.”
“Including the mayor?”
“More than anyone else. Did everybody go crazy?”
“No. They were hypnotized. You, too.”
“But—”
“Think about it. Ethan looks everyone square in the eye and next thing you know he’s running the whole town—except for drunks and the crazy people, and they didn’t matter. Right?”
“Were you there?”
“No. But I know what he is.” I started to say how, then thought better of it. If I told her about my boyfriend she’d lose confidence and assume I was another hypnotized victim. That kind of work gave my Jack a nasty headache, so he avoided using it. Duvert must have thought the pain worth it if the result allowed him to own a whole town and everyone in it. “So do you.”
She stared at Duvert, then at me, and whispered, “He’s a vampire.”
“More than that, he’s a dirty, low-down, manipulative, thieving bastard.”
“Thieving?”
“He stole your town, didn’t he? Not to mention your life.”
“More.” Her eyes glittered as fresh tears formed. She touched her throat. “He … fed from me.”
I couldn’t see the marks. They tended to fade fast and not leave scars. “Did he make you feed from him in turn?” It had to be asked.
She couldn’t speak, nodding instead.
“I bet it fe
lt good, though.” I knew that from my own experience with Jack. It was always intense for us, but even more so when he and I … well .
Katie blushed to her now-dark roots. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“Don’t let it bother you, honey, it’s what he arranged, like it or not. He got your body to do what it’s made for. It’s completely different when you do things with the right guy, one who doesn’t have to hypnotize a girl into loving him.”
Oh, boy, was it ever different.
But that part aside, my having Jack’s blood in me enabled me to see Duvert sieving through a closed window. Whenever Jack pulled his vanishing act I could follow his otherwise invisible movements while others could not. It was spooky, but he was my man, and some guys had worse habits. There was another advantage, too.
“Be glad he did it,” I said. “ That was Ethan’s big mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once his blood was in you it gave you immunity from his hypnosis. He couldn’t control you that way anymore. He must not have known.” Vampires don’t wake up dead knowing all the ropes about the condition. They’re only as good as their teacher—if he or she bothered to say anything. Jack was still learning.
“It was like waking up,” said Katie, “but I was alone. The only one awake in a town of sleepwalkers. No one else … I couldn’t talk to anybody, not even my mother. She’d have told him.”
“Don’t blame them. It’s his fault.”
“I do blame them. Why didn’t they wake up? ”
I reminded myself she was barely sixteen and feeling betrayed by those who were supposed to protect her. “Is that when you ran away?”
“First thing in the morning. I got a bus to Cleveland, then Toledo, then I ran out of money and had to do something. The only job I could get that paid right away and kept me moving was chorus-line work. I had tap classes when I was in school. I lied about my age, and Big Maggie and the others looked after me, but I couldn’t tell them anything or they’d think I’d lost my mind.”
“You’re awful darned lucky, kiddo.”
“Lucky?”
“That you fell in with Big Maggie and not white slavers.”
“What are those?”
“Never you mind. Who are those guys who came to the club? Did you see them?”
“The man in the suit is the mayor. I don’t know the others, but they’ll be from Sheldon. After I left, that picture of me, and a reward offer, appeared in all the newspapers. I changed my hair and wore lots of makeup and hats with veils, and it worked till now. Someone must have recognized me and sent word to Ethan.”
“This might be the first time he’s left Sheldon since his arrival.”
“So?”
“The town will wake up, given time. The hypnosis wears off unless he reinforces it, especially if it goes against what a person would normally do.”
“How do you know this?”
I had to bend the truth. She was in no shape for my life story. “I used to know a vampire. He was not like Ethan. He was a real man, good and decent. He helped me out of a jam and told me things. I wish he was here, because he’d kick this four-flushing dewdropper into the next state.”
Hefting the broom handle, I wondered if Duvert was due for another crack on the noggin. Vampires could recover fast from otherwise fatal injuries and not give a clue until it was too late to do anything. Even weakened and half conscious he could snap us in two a hell of a lot easier than I’d snapped the broom.
“Decision time, Katie. We can get on the train and head south or—”
“He’ll keep looking for me. What if he goes back to Sheldon and hurts my parents? What if he finds another girl and makes her do things she doesn’t want?”
“You’ve been thinking about this, huh?”
“Ever since I ran away. I want to go home. I want to be me again, not his puppet.”
“There’s always a Reno divorce,” I said, making a joke before raising a far more serious alternative. Katie beat me to it.
“Or I could be a widow,” she said in a low, steely voice. Her pale eyes were too hard for a sixteen-year-old’s face. “I thought about that. A lot.”
“Yes…”
“It’s better than killing myself. I thought of that, too, but he’d go turn someone else into a puppet, and I’d be dead.”
“There’s no advantage to it,” I agreed.
My tummy did another queasy flip. We were talking murder. Just thinking about the actual, physical act of killing someone, anyone, made me sick. I’d shot a man dead once, in the heat of a white-hot rage and to save others, but it bothered me. Every day it bothered me—I kept busy so as to not think about it.
But I knew people who weren’t bothered by killing. One of my gangster friends would help out gladly as a favor, but he was miles away down the tracks in Chicago. It would take time to get him here, but if need be I could keep Duvert out for the count.
I’m no movie heroine. I’m just Bobbi Smythe, a blond chicken who’s happy to let someone else do her dirty work. If you can’t bring yourself to go down in the sewer, call a rat.
“Katie, I’m gonna get us help. We’ll have to hole up. With him. It won’t be bad during the day but—”
For the second time that night someone crashed through a door to what I thought was a private place. Katie yelped and scrambled toward the window. I faced the threat.
Threats: badly dressed hometown guys. The banker looked punch-drunk, and I couldn’t tell if it was from his beating or months of forced hypnosis.
The four men stared at Duvert, silent.
Was now a good time to scream? It would bring the porter and stationmaster. But cops would get involved, because Duvert was a dead body, and here I was holding the murder weapon. They’d never believe anything about him being a vampire. They’d toss me in the tank, and I’d be a sitting duck for Duvert if he decided to invisibly float in to teach me a lesson.
I pulled the .38 from the purse still hanging from my arm. I didn’t want to kill them, but a shot in the foot would slow them down. “YOU! Listen to me!”
Their heads moved my way in unison, their eyes utterly empty. I’d half recognized it back in my dressing room. The people Jack hypnotized got that same look. On one person it was disturbing; four at once was intimidating as hell.
“Out of here. Now .”
Oh, my goodness. They were leaving . Shuffling out backward.
“Stop.”
They stopped.
“What are you doing?” Katie squeaked.
“I think I’m directing traffic, honey. Maybe all you need is a firm voice. Pick him up .” I pointed at Duvert’s body.
Each of them grabbed a limb, and then awkwardly they got through the door.
“Take him to the car,” I ordered. I didn’t know if they had a car, but they’d gotten to town somehow. It seemed a good bet.
They carried him across the station while Katie and I hung back. The porter lay on the floor, feebly moving. Oh, hell. I went to the ticket grill. The manager was likewise abused. I urged Katie to grab her little case, and then we slipped out to the street.
Duvert had a paneled truck. A smart choice: he could ride in back during the day, protected from the sun.
His minions had the back open to lift him in. Sure enough there was a trunk, looking uncannily like the one Jack used when he went on out-of-town trips.
I abruptly saw a problem about to happen. Duvert could not have contact with his earth or he’d recover quicker. I shot forward, Katie at my heels.
“Get in the front cab,” I told her, and poked at the mayor of Sheldon with the broomstick. “Stop! Put him inside, but not in the trunk.” I repeated that until it got through, then ordered them to climb in and shut the door. We had to get clear and fast. The two men in the train station would set the law on their four attackers when they woke up. Waterview cops would notice a truck with Ohio plates and check it.
Then I hoisted into the cab, pushed the stick and p
urse at Katie, and fumbled for the key. The last driver had thoughtfully or—being unable to think—thoughtlessly left it in the ignition.
I found the starter, then coordinated things until the motor rumbled alive. The gears were just bigger than I was used to; we jerked into first and rolled south on Route 23, heading for Cheboygan, about six miles away.
“What’ll we do if someone catches us?” Katie asked.
“They won’t.” I shifted again and floored it. The truck was almost new. Trust Duvert to help himself to the best. We shot down the road at fifty, then fifty-five. I liked Cheboygan; I liked saying the name and did so, repeating it like a chant. This was great, nothing but tall trees on the right, Lake Huron on the left, and clean night air.
“What about Cheboygan?” Katie demanded, her voice high over the roar of the motor.
“Bigger town, easier to hide in.”
It had been a few years since I’d played there. I wouldn’t remember much; all I’d have seen would have been the stage, the hotel, and cheap eateries, but every town had places where a truck could park unnoticed until sunrise. With Duvert safely dead for the day, I’d call my friend in Chicago. Heck, I could probably drive there; this wasn’t so hard.
Icy gray fog flooded the cab.
Duvert materialized between us.
He damned near broke my foot slamming his own on the brake pedal. He shoved me from the steering wheel. It was like being swatted by a giant, he was that strong. I cracked my head against the window and saw sparks.
Katie screamed and screamed, but none of it impressed Duvert. He quickly and efficiently brought us to a halt and cut the motor. She ran out of voice, falling silent except for trying to catch her breath. I couldn’t move. Too stunned.
Duvert’s good-looking face loomed into view. This close all I saw was his nose going in and out of focus. There’s a reason why I close my eyes when I kiss.
He reached around me and opened the door. I tried not to fall out, feebly grabbing at anything, slowing the drop to a woozy slither. I sat hard on damp pavement, rubbery legs every which way, my back to the truck’s muddy running board. Duvert dropped lightly next to me, bent, and looked me straight in the eye.
