by Jamie Davis
“Max, be a dear and take two steps to the right,” Jaz said. I want to make sure I have a clear shot in case your friend tries anything.”
Max did as he was told. He still stared at the woman standing next to him with a shocked expression plastered on his face.
“I assume you’re the new security consultant he hired when he fired us?” Jaz asked.
The defiant woman lifted her chin in defiance as she answered. “I am Sephrina, and I’m a high priestess of the islands. I’m not afraid of you.”
Jaz laughed. “You should be. I don’t take kindly to those who try to cheat old family friends, even ones who try and dump us when we need them the most.”
Dean saw Max wince at that last remark directed at him. Jaz could lay in on thick when she wanted to.
“Jaz,” Max spluttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would get Errington back up and running so quickly and then all this zombie nonsense started. Sephrina approached me and told me she could control zombies if any attacked. Then I started noticing things were going missing from my home. That’s why I called you. When I confronted her with my suspicions, we were attacked by my staff; all turned into zombies.”
“It was all part of her plan from the start, right Sephrina?” Jaz asked. The voodoo priestess didn’t answer. Jaz continued. “She was going to exert her control over the ‘attacking’ zombies just in time to ensure you’d stay on her side and keep on paying her for services she created the need for.”
“Something went wrong, though, and Sephrina couldn’t control them on her own. There’s something else controlling zombies in Elk City that’s more powerful than she is and it took over. That’s why you both had to run.”
“I would have wrested back control in time,” Sephrina challenged. “I just needed to adjust my spell some.”
“There’ll be no more spells today,” Jaz said. “You’re going to answer for your crimes here. Then, if and when you resolve your legal troubles in Elk City, you’re going to leave this town and stay away from it and my friends.” Jaz took out her cell phone and snapped a photo of the woman. “I have your picture on file now, and I’ll be forwarding it to all my satellite offices as well as to the local and federal authorities. If you try something like this again, we’ll know about it, and the next time, I can’t say I’ll be as forgiving.”
Sephrina started to say something but at the last minute clapped her mouth shut and nodded. Jaz seemed satisfied. She looked back at Dean.
“You can let go of her now. She’s out from under anyone’s control, for the time being, I think.”
Dean looked at the maid and took his hand away, ready to jump back if she lunged at him. The zombie woman blinked once or twice and then looked around in surprise.
“How did I get out here?” She spotted Max in the corner. “Mr. Herron, sir, what happened to me?”
“Maria, you’re going to be alright,” Max assured the woman. “I’m going to make sure to take good care of you. I promise.”
The situation with Max Herron resolved as they wandered back up to the house. There was the problem of the bodies involved. The rest of the household staff was dead. Jaz made a few calls and said her security clean up team would come in and take care of the bodies. It was a service they provided for their wealthiest clients, and Max was definitely an Errington client again. He’d written Jaz a huge retainer check as soon as he got back to the main house.
Jaz had handcuffed Sephrina and put her in the SUV. She would answer for the deaths here at the estate. The Errington teams on loan to Elk City were acting as deputies of local law enforcement during the current emergency situation. They could take the report and turn it in following their arrest of the voodoo priestess.
As they went out and got ready to turn Sephrina over to the security team that had just shown up, she stopped and looked at Dean.
“You are special, Dean Flynn. May I do a reading of you?” Sephrina asked.
Dean looked at Jaz who shrugged. It was up to him.
“Sure, I guess so.”
“Please remove the handcuffs.”
Jazz stepped up and took off the cuffs. Sephrina rubbed her wrists for a moment and then reached into a fold in her dress and took out a small deck of tarot cards. She shuffled the deck and then held the cards out in a fan shape to him.
“Take a card.”
Dean paused and then reached out, pulling a card from the deck fanned in front of him. Turning it over, Dean saw a round shape. There were symbols written at different positions spaced along the outside edge of the wheel.
“Show me the card.”
Dean turned the card and showed it to her. Sephrina sucked in a sharp breath muttering a single word in a quiet voice.
“Nephilim.”
“What?” He turned the card over in his hand and looked at the face of it again. He didn’t see anything that made any sense to him. “What did you see?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry,” Sephrina said, though something clearly shook her. “Sometimes the cards have nothing to say.” She held out the deck to him, and he replaced the card in it.
Sephrina hastily shuffled the deck again before putting it back where she’d gotten it. Placing her hands behind her back, she waited for Jaz to put the cuffs on her again. She didn’t look at Dean again or say anything else no matter how many times he asked her to explain herself.
Jaz stepped forward and re-cuffed the woman, but her eyes were on Dean. There was a puzzled expression on her face as she led the woman away to turn her over to the security team.
Dean pulled out his phone and tried to look up Tarot card descriptions on his phone. He tried to remember the word Sephrina had said but she had been so quiet he couldn’t quite remember it clearly. He did find the card he’d pulled from the deck. It was one known as the wheel of fortune card. It was supposed to signify change, destiny, life cycles or a turning point in life.
Well, given how fast his life shifted of late, he wasn’t surprised, though he didn’t put much stock in things like fortune tellers and tarot cards. He was a scientist at heart, after all. Dean shrugged and put his phone away while he followed Jaz back to the SUV.
Chapter 16
It was late by the time Jaz dropped him back off at his apartment. Dean was exhausted by the long day at work, followed by the side job with Jaz, and he looked forward to getting in bed and grabbing some much-needed sack time. Dean got in bed and closed his eyes, expecting a long, uneventful night ahead of him. It was not meant to be, though. Just as he was drifting off, the phone on the nightstand rang, startling him out of the early stages of sleep.
Dean reached for the phone and considered shutting it off and ignoring the call. He looked at the screen. The caller’s name read “Gibbie.” Dean sighed and tapped on the call to answer.
“Dean, thank God you picked up. You’ve got to help me. She’s gone berserk, and I don’t know what to do to stop her.”
Dean sat up and tried to clear his head as he processed the words from the frantic voice on the other end of the phone. Gibson Proctor, or Gibbie, was a local character in the Unusual community. He was a slightly overweight, middle-aged vampire who always seemed to find his way into trouble of one sort or another.
“Gibbie, you know better than to call me at home when something like this happens. Call nine-one-one. Barry and Lynn are on tonight. They’ll be able to help you.”
“I did call them. She’s got them cornered in a utility closet, and I think she bit Barry.”
That woke Dean up right away.
“Wait, tell me what happened. She bit Barry, you said?”
“Just get over to the Metroplex on Route 40. I’ll explain when you get here.”
Dean looked at his watch. It was close to midnight. The movie theater complex was known for their late-night screenings of current movies popular with the humans of Elk City. Members of the Unusual nocturnal community had taken to attending them as well, adopting the theater as a place to let their hair down and be
themselves.
Pulling on his clothes but taking the time to grab his fire department ID badge in case he needed to get past anyone to get inside, Dean rushed out and jumped in his pickup truck. Racing through the late-night deserted streets, he made good time and pulled into the Metroplex parking lot seven minutes later. The presence of numerous police lights amidst other emergency vehicles told Dean that the quick response team had shown up. That wasn’t good if Gibbie’s girlfriend was still out of control.
He parked at the edge of the cordoned-off area and walked up to a police officer standing near the entrance to the theater’s lobby. The officer held up a hand to stop him from entering. Dean decided to try and bluff his way past since he didn’t recognize the policeman.
“I’m with Station U and we have two paramedics in there,” Dean said showing his photo ID badge with the fire department logo on it. “What’s the situation?”
The officer shrugged as he looked scanned the badge with his eyes. “I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, I got here and was told to keep people outside. Some sort of disturbance with a violent patron from what I’ve heard.”
Dean nodded and started to walk past, reaching for one of the doors.
“Hey, why aren’t you in uniform?”
Dean gave the honest answer to the question. “I was called out of bed, and this was all I had that was clean. I was supposed to be off-duty and asleep until this came up.”
The officer snorted. “Yeah, sometimes you can’t catch a break. Go on inside.”
Dean smiled and pulled open the door, walking inside. He was going to have to think fast. He wouldn’t be able to fast-talk someone from the QRT. They would know he wasn’t there in any official capacity.
Once inside the lobby, Dean looked around, searching for options on where to go next. There was a crowd of police and what looked like theater managers on the opposite side of the lobby. He’d stay away from them. He just needed to find Gibbie.
A sound drew his attention away from the crowd near the snack bar.
“Psssst. Dean. Over here.”
Dean searched for the source of the voice and found Gibbie peering around a door marked “Staff Only.” He glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention to him and moved over to the door. Gibbie held it open long enough Dean to enter and pulled it shut behind them.
“Come on.” Gibbie led him up a set of stairs to a long hallway. There were metal utility shelves along one side of the hallway holding cardboard boxes of cups and lids and other supplies for the snack bar downstairs. The other side was lined with a series of numbered doors.
“Where are we?” Dean asked.
“This is the projectionist’s access hallway. Each of these rooms corresponds to the individual theaters below. The police haven’t looked up here yet.”
“That just means the police will be up here soon, Gibbie. They’re going to lock this place down.”
“I know. That’s why we have to hurry. Come on.”
The portly vampire gestured to Dean to follow as he took off down the long hallway at a jog. Dean had no choice but to follow him if he wanted to avoid getting kicked out of the building by the police before he had a chance to help out.
They came to a stop at the end of the hallway and entered the door marked with the number twelve. Inside Dean saw a projector. It was smaller than he expected but then he realized it was digital and didn’t need to be big enough to house a giant film reel like they used to use. Gibbie had opened a small metal door in the wall. The opening was tiny, barely two feet across.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s a utility access point,” Gibbie said. “I used to date the former projectionist. She was big time Emo and loved to bring me up here to fool around during the horror films showing at the time. She told me that through this access door, you could get anywhere in the building. There’s a similar opening in the utility room Evie is holed up in with Barry and Lynn. It’s the only other way in there besides the door.”
“Wait,” Dean stopped the vampire by holding up his hands in protest. “You want me to climb in there and find my way to where your girlfriend is holding my friends hostage?”
“Well, I can’t fit through that hole. That’s for sure.” Gibbie grabbed a double handful of his gut for emphasis.
“What am I supposed to do when I get there?”
“I don’t know. You’ll think of something. She’s not a bad person. For some reason, she just started freaking out in the theater and tried to bite a bunch of people. I don’t know why. It was like she was under another person’s control or something. I called nine-one-one and Barry and Lynn showed up. She grabbed them and pulled them into the closet. That’s the last time I’ve seen them.”
Dean’s radar was tweaked by something he heard Gibbie say. He said, “she was under another person’s control.” Dean looked around and realized that a crowded, dark theater would be a perfect place for an attack from Artur’s standpoint. It might be he could break the connection to the vampire lord like he did with Brynne if that was what was going on here. It could be something else entirely. Dean shook his head.
“I don’t know Gibbie. I might be able to help, but she could be having a normal medical or psychological emergency. There might be nothing I can do.”
“Dean, you have to try.”
Gibbie’s last words sounded desperate. Dean knew this was the only option for a quick fix without waiting for the police to try to negotiate their way inside. They’d run out of patience, though, and eventually, they’d just break in. Who knew who would get hurt in the process of neutralizing the threat in the utility room?
“Alright, I’ll do it,” Dean said.
Gibbie clapped with delight.
“You said her name is Evie?” Dean asked as he shrugged off his jacket. “What else can you tell me about her?”
“She is a relatively new vampire. She’s only been turned about twenty years or so. She is super gentle. She works at an all-night emergency veterinary hospital taking care of sick pets. I know she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, Dean. You have to help her.”
“I have to help my friends first. I’ll try and help Evie along the way if I can.”
Dean leaned down and looked through the narrow opening behind the access door. There was not a lot of room in there. He could see pipes and a narrow access ladder that would allow him to descend inside the wall to the ground floor where the utility room was located, he presumed.
“You’re sure this leads to the utility room?” Dean asked.
“Yeah. My old girlfriend told me these were the only two places to get into the crawl space.”
Dean took the pocket flashlight he always carried on him. Its LED lamp was surprisingly bright for the size. It would provide him plenty of light along the way. Getting down on his hands and knees, Dean placed the penlight in his mouth to hold it until he climbed through the opening. As he was climbing inside, he heard loud voices from the hallway outside the projection room. He hurried to get through the opening and barely pulled his feet through before Gibbie pushed the access door closed. Suddenly, there was no light but what shined from the penlight in his mouth.
Perched on the narrow ladder, Dean looked around to get his bearings before he started down. He could hear a police officer begin to question Gibbie from the opposite side of the utility access door. The voices soon faded, though, as he climbed down to the ground floor level. He stepped off the ladder and looked around. He could see the passage leading off in both directions and he tried to get his bearings. The utility room should be to the left, he decided, so he headed in that direction.
The utility access space was narrow and he had to turn sideways to go past the pipes and conduits running from the floor to the ceiling high above. Soon he reached a section where there was another small panel in the wall near his knees. Dean crouched so he could examine the access door from this side. There was a handle that he presumed would unlatch it. It looked like the door opene
d into the room on the other side so he’d be hard pressed to sneak through or even open it much to try and look around without being noticed.
Dean leaned forward and pressed an ear to the cool metal of the door panel. He could hear voices on the other side. One was Lynn’s.
“You need to let me check my friend out, Evie. You have to let him go so I can make sure you didn’t kill him. It’s not too late to do that.”
“I have to kill, to drink. It’s what the voice in my head is telling me to do,” said another woman’s voice.
“No, you don’t. Listen to me,” Lynn said. “The voice in your head isn’t real. It’s someone else trying to control you and get you to do things you don’t want to do.”
Dean was worried about Barry. He had obviously been injured by Evie, maybe seriously, judging by Lynn’s words. It was also apparent that Evie had exerted some sort of control over the voice she heard, unlike Brynne. It might have to do with being a vampire longer. Brynne might not have had the sort of self-control yet to manage it. That was good news for this situation.
Dean took his phone out of his pocket and sent a brief text message to Lynn.
I’m close by and want to come in. Make a distraction. Say “yes” if you understand.
It was a long shot but he had to try something. He just had to get close enough to touch Evie and break the hold Artur had on her. Dean still didn’t know how he could do what he did but it worked and that was all that mattered right now. He had to try and save Barry.
His ear was still pressed against the metal and he heard Lynn’s voice loud and clear.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Evie asked.
“Yes, I want to help you. That’s all.”
“You got some sort of message on your phone. What did it say? Show it to me.”
“Sure, here you go.”
Dean then heard some sort of scuffle begin on the other side. He decided to take advantage of the noise and pushed the access door open. He pushed his head through and saw Lynn and another woman struggling on the floor over control of the cell phone. Barry was slumped to the floor. His head was tilted to one side and Dean could see the bloody wound on the side of his neck. He seemed to be breathing but was unconscious.