The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  A few of the large wolves growled at the two vampires, but most of them seemed to be completely demoralized by their own state. They whined and paced while Taffy took pictures.

  “What do you think this is?” Dahlia said conversationally, holding the big sack out. She supported it without effort, though she was a very small woman and the sack was very full and heavy.

  The yellow wolf eyes focused on the bag and the sensitive wolf noses sniffed the air. All the wolves rose to their feet. Just then, whatever was inside woke up, and gave a big questioning snuffle. Then there was a terrified oink as the creature smelled the wolves.

  The Ripper pack began to growl in anticipation.

  Taffy turned off the light, just in case someone walked by in the street below. “Ah, yes, you know that smell,” she said coaxingly. “You may be hairless, but you’re still wolves.”

  “This is your lucky night,” Dahlia said, turning over the sack and dumping a very fat sow onto the gym floor.

  In a squeal that sounded very like Kathy Aenidis’s voice, the pig tried to tell the Rippers that she was a valued friend of the pack, that she was beloved girlfriend to their packmember Bart. If she could have spoken, she would have reminded the wolves of all the spells she’d cast for them, all the potions she’d brewed — including one that had caused Todd Swiftfoot to become confused and weak and dead.

  But tonight the Rippers were wolves, and they’d been humiliated enough to make them on edge and impatient, and they were hungry.

  “I’ve brought you something,” Dahlia said. “Look! Bacon!”

  Charlaine Harris is the author of the lighthearted Aurora Teagarden books as well as the edgier Lily Bard series and the very popular Harper Connelly and Sookie Stack-house books. The latter are being read in twenty countries and are now a series on HBO called True Blood. Find out more at www.charlaineharris.com

  SIGNATURES OF THE DEAD

  FAITH HUNTER

  IT WAS NAP time, and it wasn’t often that I could get both children to sleep a full hour — the same full hour, that is. I stepped back and ran my hands over the healing and protection spells that enveloped my babies, Angelina and Evan Jr. The complex incantations were getting a bit frayed around the edges, and I drew on Mother Earth and the forest on the mountainside out back to restore them. Not much power, not enough to endanger the ecosystem that was still being restored there. Just a bit. Just enough.

  Few witches or sorcerers survive into puberty, and so I spend a lot of time making sure my babies are okay. I come from a long line of witches. Not the kind in pointy black hats with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show that once tried to capitalize on our reclusive species. Witches aren’t human, though we can breed true with humans, making little witches about 50 percent of the time. Unfortunately, witch babies have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty, from various cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds.

  The day each of my babies were conceived, I prayed and worked the same incantations Mama had used on her children, power-weavings, to make sure my babies were protected. Mama had better-than-average survival rate on her witches. For me, so far, so good. I said a little prayer over them and left the room.

  Back in the kitchen, Paul Braxton — Brax to his friends, Detective or Sir to the bad guys he chased — Jane Yellowrock, and Evan were still sitting at the table, the photographs scattered all around. Crime scene photos of the McCarley house. And the McCarleys. It wasn’t pretty. The photos didn’t belong in my warm, safe home. They didn’t belong anywhere.

  Evan and I were having trouble with them, with the blood and the butchery. Of course, nothing fazed Jane. And, after years of dealing with crime in New York City, little fazed Brax, though it had been half a decade since he’d seen anything so gruesome, not since he “retired” to the Appalachian mountains and went to work for the local sheriff.

  I met Evan’s gray eyes, seeing the steely anger there. My husband was easygoing, slow to anger, and full of peace, but the photos of the five McCarleys had triggered something in him, a slow-burning pitiless rage. He was feeling impotent, useless, and he wanted to smash things. The boxing bag in the garage would get a pummeling tonight, after the kids went to bed for the last time. I offered him a wan smile and went to the Aga stove; I poured fresh coffee for the men and tea for Jane and me. She had brought a new variety, a first flush Darjeeling, and it was wonderful with my homemade bread and peach butter.

  “Kids okay?” Brax asked, amusement in his tone.

  I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. “They’re fine. Still sleeping. Still . . . safe.” Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drunk dry. Partly eaten.

  “You finished thinking about it?” he asked. “Because I need an answer. If I’m going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they’re vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they’re sleeping in the daytime. And I’ll need protection. I can pay.”

  I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. “You know I won’t charge you for the protection spells, Brax.”

  “I don’t want Molly going into that house,” Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. “You know it’ll hurt you.”

  I’m an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I’m a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on, too, how many vamps were in the blood-family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.

  But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. “I’ll go,” I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. “If I don’t go, and another family is killed, I’ll be a lot worse,” I said to him. “And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car.”

  “You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Moll,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. “And we can get the money in other ways.” Not many people know that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we’d likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. “Moll. Think about this,” he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.

  “I’ll go.” I looked at Jane. “Will you go with me?” She nodded once, the beads in her black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, “When do you want us there?”

  THE MCCARLEY HOUSE was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a 1950s feel to it, and from the outside, it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself with its elvish, high-peaked roof, gree
n trim, and well-kept lawn looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.

  I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.

  Brax, dressed in a white plastic coat and shoe covers, was standing on the front porch, his hands in the coat pockets, his body at an angle, head down, not looking at anything. The set of his shoulders said he didn’t want to go back inside, but he would, over and over again, until he found the killers.

  Jane was standing by the car, patient, bike helmet in her hands, riding leathers unzipped, copper-skinned face turned to the sun for its meager warmth on this early fall day. Jane Yellowrock was full Cherokee, and was much more than she seemed. Like most witches, like Evan who was still in the witch-closet, Jane had secrets that she guarded closely. I was pretty sure I was the only one who knew any of them, and I didn’t flatter myself that I knew them all. Yet, even though she kept things hidden, I needed her special abilities and gifts to augment my own on this death-search.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, huffing in and out, my lips in an O. My body and my gift came alive, tingling in hands and feet as my oxygen level rose. I pulled the gift of power around me like a cloak, protection and sensing at my fingertips.

  When I was ready, I opened the door of the unmarked car and stepped out onto the drive, my eyes slightly slit. At times like this, when I’m about to read the dead, I experience everything so clearly, the sun on my shoulders, the breeze like a wisp of pressure on my face, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, grounding me, the smell of late-blooming flowers. The scent of old blood. But I don’t like to open my eyes. The physical world is too intense. Too distracting.

  Jane took my hand in her gloved one and placed it on her leather-covered wrist. My fingers wrapped around it for guidance and we walked to the house, the plastic shoe covers and plastic coat given to me by Brax making little shushing sounds as I walked. I ducked under the crime scene tape Jane held for me. Her cowboy boots and plastic shoe covers crunched and shushed on the gravel drive beside me. We climbed the concrete steps, four of them, to the small front porch. I heard Brax turn the key in the lock. The smell of old blood, feces, and pain whooshed out with the heated air trapped in the closed-up home.

  Immediately I could sense the dead humans. Five of them had lived in this house — two parents, three children — with a dog and a cat. All dead. My earth gift, so much a thing of life, recoiled, closed up within me, like a flower gathering its petals back into an unopened bloom. Eyes still closed, I stepped inside.

  The horror that was saturated into the walls, into the carpet, stung me, pricked me, like a swarm of bees, seeking my death. The air reeked when I sucked in a breath. Dizziness overtook me and I put out my other hand. Jane caught and steadied me, her leather gloves protecting me from skin-to-skin contact that would have pulled me back, away from the death in the house. After a moment, I nodded that I was okay and she released me, though I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see. A buzz of fear and horror filled my head.

  I stood in the center of a small room, the walls pressing in on me. Eyes still closed, I saw the death energies, pointed, and said, “They came in through this door. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them. Fast.”

  I felt the urgency of their movements, faster than any human. Pain gripped my belly and I pressed my arms into it, trying to assuage an ache of hunger deeper than I had ever known. “So hungry,” I murmured. The pain grew, swelling inside me. The imperative to eat. Drink. The craving for blood.

  I turned to my left before I was overcome. “Two females took the man. He was surprised, startled, trying to stand. They attacked his throat. Started drinking. He died there.”

  I turned more to my right, still pointing, and said, “A child died there. Older. Maybe ten. A boy.”

  I touched my throat. It wanted to close up, to constrict at the feel of teeth, long canines, biting into me. The boy’s fear and shock were so intense, they robbed me of any kind of action. When I spoke, the words were harsh, whispered. “One, a female, took the boy. The other four, all males, moved into the house.” The hunger grew, and with it the anger. And terror. Mind-numbing, thought-stealing terror. The boy’s death struggles increased. The smell of blood and death and fear choked. “Both died within minutes.”

  I pointed again and Jane led me. The carpet squished under my feet. I knew it was blood, even with my eyes closed. I gagged and Jane stopped, letting me breathe, as well as I could in this death-house, letting me find my balance, my sense of place on the earth. When I nodded again, she led me forward. I could tell I was in a kitchen by the cooking smells that underlay the blood. I pointed into a shadowy place. “A woman was brought down there. Two of them . . .” I flinched at what I saw. Pulled my hand from Jane’s and crossed my arms over me, hugging myself. Rocking back and forth.

  “They took her together. One drank while the other . . . the other . . . And then they switched places. They laughed. I can hear her crying. It took . . . a long . . . long time.” I blundered away, bumping into Jane. She led me out, helping me to get away. But it only got worse.

  I pointed in the direction I needed to go. My footsteps echoed on a wood floor. Then carpets. “Two little girls. Little . . . Oh, God in heaven. They . . .” I took a breath that shuddered painfully in my throat. Tears leaked down my cheeks, burning. “They raped them, too. Two males. And they drank them dry.” I opened my eyes, seeing twin beds, bare frames, the mattresses and sheets gone, surely taken by the crime scene crew. Blood had spattered up one wall in the shape of a small body. To the sides, the wall was smeared, like the figure of angel wings a child might make in the snow, but made of blood.

  Gorge rose in my throat. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. I turned away, my arms windmilling for the door. I tripped over something. Fell forward, into Brax. His face inches from mine. I was shaking, quivering like a seizure. Out of control. “Now! Get me out of here! Now!” I shouted. But it was only a whisper.

  Jane picked me up and hoisted me over her shoulder. Outside. Into the sun.

  I came to myself, came awake, lying in the yard, the warm smell of leather and Jane all around. I touched her jacket and opened my eyes. She was sitting on the ground beside me, one knee up, the other stretched out, one arm on bent knee, the other bracing her. She was wearing a short-sleeved tee in the cool air. She smiled her strange humorless smile, one side of her mouth curling.

  “You feeling better?” She was a woman of few words.

  “I think so. Thank you for carrying me out.”

  “You might want to wait on the thanks. I dropped you, putting you down. Not far, but you might have a bruise or two.”

  I chuckled, feeling stiffness in my ribs. “I forgive you. Where’s Brax? I need to tell him what I found.”

  Jane slanted her eyes to the side, and I swiveled my head to see the cop walking from his car. He wasn’t a big man, standing five feet nine inches, but he was solid, and fit. I liked Brax. He was a good cop, even if he did take me into some awful places to read the dead. To repay me, he did what he could to protect my family from the witch-haters in the area. There were always a few in any town, even in easygoing Spruce Pine. He dropped a knee on the ground beside me and grunted. It might have been the word “Well?”

  “Seven of them,” I said. “Four men, three women, all young rogues. One family, one bloodline. The sire is male. He’s maybe a decade old. Maybe to the point where he would have been sane, had he been in the care of a master-vamp. The others are younger. All crazy.”

  For the first years of their lives, vampires are little more than beasts. According to the gossip mags, a good sire kept his newbie rogues chained in the basement during the first decade or so of undead-life, until they gained some sanity. Most experts thought that young rogues were likely the source of werewolf legends an
d the folklore of vampires as bloody killers. Rogues were mindless, carnal, blood-drinking machines, whether they were brand-new vampires or very old ones who had succumbed to the vampire version of dementia.

  If a rogue had escaped his master and survived for a decade on his own, and had regained some of his mental functions, then he would be a very dangerous adversary. A vampire with the moral compass of a rogue, the cunning of a predator, and the reasoning abilities of a psychotic killer. I huddled under Jane’s jacket at the thought.

  “Are you up to walking around the house?” Brax asked. “I need an idea which way they went.” He looked at his watch. I looked at the sun. We were about four hours from sundown. Four hours before the blood-family would rise again and go looking for food and fun.

  I sat up and Jane stood, extended her hand. She pulled me up and I offered her jacket back. “Keep it,” she said, so I snuggled it around my shoulders, the scent of Jane rising around me like a warm animal. She followed as I circled the house, keeping between Brax and me, and I wondered what had come between the two while I was unconscious. Whatever it was, it crackled in the air, hostile, antagonistic. Jane didn’t like cops, and she tended to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how insulting, offensive, rude, or blunt it might be.

  I stopped suddenly, feeling the chill of death under my feet. I was on the side of the house, and I had just crossed over the rogues’trail. They had come and gone this way. I looked at the front door. It was undamaged, so that meant they had been invited in or that the door had been unlocked. I didn’t know if the old myth about vamps not being able to enter a house uninvited was true or not, but the door hadn’t been knocked down.

  I followed the path around the house and to the back of the grassy lot. There was a playset with a slide, swings, a teeter-totter and monkey bars. I walked to it and stood there, seeing what the dead had done. They had played here. After they killed the children and parents, they had come by here, in the gray predawn, and played on the swings. “Have your crime people dusted this?”