Out for Blood

by J. L. O'Rourke

  “Romance,” Mum declared. “Why else would a young woman be walking along the beach in the moonlight?”

  “If there was somebody with her, how come she drowned? Wouldn’t they have saved her? Or at least called for help? And why were there no footprints on the sand?” I asked.

  “Those are probably all questions the police are asking,” Grant said. “Maybe we’ll hear some answers tomorrow at the funeral.”

  As I wasn’t going to give them my opinion as to why there were no footprints near her body, I said goodnight and left them pondering the questions I had asked. I was genuinely tired and was nearly asleep when I heard the determined tap on my window. What did Severn want that couldn’t wait? Shelving a few ungracious and unloving thoughts, I rolled out of bed and opened the window without really looking at who was on the other side so I was shocked when it was Aiden who climbed in.

  “What do you want?” I demanded.

  “I want to talk to you. I want to know what your problem is with me? For the last few days, since I sorted out the Mad Sally issue, you seem to have decided I am some kind of crazed killer. Why? What have I done to you?”

  “To me, nothing I can prove but you’re not denying killing Sally, are you?”

  “That was business. The Reverend told me to clean up, so I did.”

  “Exactly! Couldn’t you just have paid her off, like the Rev said you were going to do?”

  “Oh, don’t be so naive. If we had paid her money she would have taken it, waited a while then kidnapped the kid again, or kept asking for more money. The way I cleaned up, your friends the McCormacks can get back to their lives with no possibility of her ruining it. Clean. Tidy. But that doesn’t make me dangerous, just sensible, and it doesn’t make me responsible for every person in the city who dies while we are here helping you out of your amateur theatre mess.”

  “Wow! Tell me how you really feel. If you didn’t want to help me, why did you come.”

  “Oh get a grip, I didn’t say I didn’t want to come, I’m just pointing out that I am not to blame for everything bad that happens while we are here. So can you lay off badmouthing me to the Rev?”

  “Only if you stop following me around. It’s creepy.”

  “Following you? When? I haven’t followed you. Why would I waste good hunting time doing that?”

  “Then who has? The Rev?”

  Aiden’s sat on the end of my bed. He was still tense but his anger had diffused into concern.

  “What do you mean someone has been following you? When and where?”

  “All sorts of places.” I described the times I had thought I had seen a figure and why I assumed it had been Aiden because of its speed. When I added that Severn had seen it too, Aiden reacted, moving from the bed to the window in one fluid stride. Without an explanation he climbed through the window and ran off into the darkness. I watched him disappear, closed the window and returned to bed but, although I was desperate for it, sleep was a long time coming.

  Chapter 11

  Julia’s funeral was beautiful but sad. Our stage manager spoke about Julia’s work backstage and one of the younger chorus members sang her favourite song. Grant made a short speech as president of the company, even though he didn’t know her very well. I looked for Beth, who had been the other ASM on our last show, and we hugged as if Julia had been our best friend.

  Afterwards, we joined the crowd in a nearby hall, nibbling savouries and sharing memories. I wandered around, listening to conversations, hoping to hear something more about how she died, but either nobody knew anything or they weren’t saying. The only information I gleaned was that everybody was surprised she had been at the beach as her fear of water was well known. It wasn’t until I had given up on hearing anything useful that I hit the jackpot. I was reaching for another sausage roll when I heard the stage manager’s voice.

  “I don’t think she had a current boyfriend,” I heard her say in reply to a question from the woman next to her who I recognised from our wardrobe department. “Not since the show. She was pretty cut up about that and it was pretty unfair what he did to her.”

  “What happened?” the wardrobe lady asked. “Did someone let her down?”

  “In a big way. That gorgeous hunk of flyman who came in with the travelling crew, Seth Borman. He flirted with her backstage every night and in the second week she was all excited because he had taken her out after the show. According to her it was all on, then he packed up and left with the rest of the crew and she never heard from him again. Not a word. As far as I know she hadn’t dated anybody since then.”

  Seth! She was one of Seth’s conquests. Did the Reverend know that?

  “Didn’t he even say goodbye?” the wardrobe lady asked. “The rotten ... oh I shouldn’t swear at a funeral ... but what a mean thing to do.”

  At least none of the stage crew, except the vampires and me, knew what had really happened to Seth. The stage manager obviously thought he had just been sleazy and done a bunk, which meant the vampires must have done a good job of cleaning the stage after I left.

  Seth and Julia. I hadn’t picked that but I wasn’t on Julia’s side of the stage during the show and Seth was mostly up in the fly tower, so he must have made his move when he passed her to go up and down the tower’s ladder. I wouldn’t have thought Julia was Seth’s type, but I guess she was – I mean she walked, breathed and had a body full of blood, so that probably covered all the essentials. Every time I had seen him, he was surrounded by his acolytes, Meredith and Olivia. I wondered if they knew about Julia and what they had thought about her.

  “It looks as if they have written it off as suicide,” Grant said on the drive home.

  “Suicide?” Mum gasped in horror. “I thought they had decided she drowned. Some kind of accident.”

  “She drowned all right, there’s no doubt about that, but I was talking to her father and he said Julia had been depressed lately over some guy who loved her and left her. They haven’t figured out how she got to the beach but from what her father said, the parents just want to be left to grieve. They want the police to let it go.”

  “That’s sad,” Mum said. I stayed quiet, thinking of Seth. I hoped it wasn’t suicide – I didn’t want to think our actions to save ourselves had caused her death.

  Mum broke the silence by declaring that funerals were too sad and she needed cheering up. Grant knew the solution without asking and changed the car’s direction to drop us off at the nearest mall. With a rueful smile, he handed Mum his credit card and told her to call when we needed a ride home. Mum had Grant well trained.

  Clothes shops – the mall had lots of clothes shops and Mum worked her way through all of them, swiping the strip off Grant’s credit card and loading me up with an assortment of labelled bags. We shopped our way along the ground floor and when we reached our favourite coffee shop in this particular mall, I begged Mum to take a break. I fell into a chair, dumped the pile of parcels on the floor around me and let Mum fetch a large, soy cappuccino with cinnamon for herself and a mochaccino with whipped cream for me.

  “I had another letter from your father today,” Mum said between delicate sips of her coffee. “He has calmed down a bit since you promised to go over there as soon as you could, but he is still blaming me and claiming I have brainwashed you.”

  “Oh, really? He needs to get over himself. Tell you what, I will email him and say I will definitely come over at Easter if he pays for the tickets. I will tell him I am enrolling at MAINZ and send him the Easter holiday dates so he understands I will only be there for a few days. Hopefully that will be enough and he will stop hassling us.”

  “You’re really not interested in meeting the baby, are you?”

  “Nope, not at all, until it’s old enough to walk and talk. Horrid big sister, aren’t I?”

  “Well, as I keep telling him, you’re not a kid anymore and you are more than capable of making your own decisions. I’m sure in his head you are still at primary school.” She pause
d and we sipped our coffees in perfect unison like synchronised swimmers. “Tomorrow, if you like, we could find out what you need to do to enrol in your course. The show isn’t until the evening so we have all day to organise the paperwork. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds perfect,” I said, smiling over my cup.

  “What does Severn think of your plan? Have you told him yet?”

  “Yes, I told him and Anita at the same time. Sev’s all for it. I think the Reverend knows the guys who run the course so I reckon he will give me a good reference if I need one.”

  “I’m sure he will,” Mum agreed before she dropped into the sweet tone that instantly warns me to listen very carefully to all the hidden levels of what she will say next. “If you join their crew and tour with them after you finish your course, you are going to be away for a very long time, aren’t you? It’s going to be a major change to your lifestyle.”

  She was doing that I-know-they-are-vampires thing again. I needed to choose my words just as selectively.

  “Wherever I go with them, I will still only be a plane-ride away. I’m not sure yet if I will travel with them for a while to gain more theatre experience or whether I will join them permanently. I realise that joining permanently will be a huge move, so I won’t be making that decision lightly. It’s not like there is any rush.”

  I thought I had worded that well and fended off Mum’s usual snide retaliatory remark, as she finished her coffee and suggested we set off again on her shop-till-she-dropped mission, but as we passed a pharmacy she threw in the curve-ball I thought I had avoided.

  “If you were turned into a vampire young enough, you’d never need plastic surgery to stay beautiful.”

  “Only if you were beautiful before you changed,” I replied. “Ugly would stay ugly.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Did I say my mother was some kind of a witch?

  Mum ran out of steam half way around the mall’s top floor, plonked herself down on a convenient bench seat and sent Grant a text to pick us up. We made our way to the pick-up point and perched on a planter box to wait, enjoying the warmth of the sun on our faces.

  “You might miss this, though,” she said without warning. “How is Severn? He didn’t cope too well in the sun at the matinee. Still, he did better than I would have expected. Would a high factor sunscreen help? Or one of those Australian bush hats with the wide brim?”

  I was saved from having to answer by the toot of a car horn - Grant, in the role of knight on a white horse, riding to my rescue. I hustled Mum and her parcels to the loading zone where we collapsed gratefully into the car to let Grant chauffeur us home. He had an old musical playing through the cd player which made Mum automatically burst into song. Grant picked up the men’s lines and I even offered a few chorus notes – anything to avoid more of Mum’s disturbing conversations.

  Chapter 12

  “I don’t know how to deal with her,” I moaned to Severn later as we sat on the Edmonds Gardens grass, gazing up at the night sky.

  “Maybe we should come clean and just tell her. Maybe I should take off my shirt and show her my wings.”

  “Maybe you should. I think she’s testing me, testing us, to see how long we will keep up pretending you guys are human.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Tomorrow. Mum suggested we do my MAINZ enrolment tomorrow. Why don’t you come over. I’ll bet you a pizza that she brings up the subject. I reckon we call her bluff and tell her the truth.”

  “I wish Aiden would tell me the truth. I know he’s lying about something. Him and the Rev. They’ve gone out again tonight, together. They’re not hunting, it’s too early for that, but they were huddled up together before they left, writing notes to each other so I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. When they left, they both looked really serious, so something is up, but they’re not letting me in on whatever it is.”

  “Aiden came and saw me last night,” I said. “He wasn’t happy. He accused me of badmouthing him to the Rev, which I have to admit was true, but when I told him to stop following me, he denied it and, you know what, I believed him.”

  “You’ve had someone following you? When?”

  “Several times. Like when I was going from my place to your motel, or home again. Like I told Aiden, I never saw who it was but they moved so fast, I assumed it was Aiden. You guys are the only ones I know who can be that stealthy.”

  Severn didn’t answer. He sat straighter, pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them protectively and rocked his body backwards and forwards. Finally he looked at me over the rim of his glasses and spoke.

  “Moving fast. You see a flash that’s so quick you can’t tell if it was coloured clothing or a black shadow, but you’re sure it’s too big to be a cat or a bird. Yeah, I’ve seen it too. But Aiden wasn’t who I thought it was. For a brief second, yesterday, I thought I recognised the shape, but I can’t be right. I can’t be. Honestly, I wish it had been Aiden. Him, I could deal with.”

  “So who is it?” I asked.

  “Someone it can’t possibly be. Look, sorry, I know tonight was supposed to be about us, but I need to find the others. I need to find out if they are thinking the same thing I am, or if they already know and are covering it up, because, if that’s the case, I am going to lose my rag and things could get violent. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

  “No you won’t! Whoever, whatever, this is, it’s been following me for days and it’s been creeping me out. I want to know the answer, and there is no way I am going to sit quietly at home like a good little girl while you yomp off on a secret mission. Wherever you’re going, I’m going too. Anyway, someone has to stop you and Aiden from killing each other because the Rev won’t – he’ll just wait until you’ve both gasped your last breath, then clean up the evidence. So where will they be? Where do we look first?”

  Severn looked from me to himself, fingering the blue denim of his jeans.

  “First we get out of these clothes.”

  “Um,” I misinterpreted the intent of his words and he laughed at my mistake.

  “Not here. I meant, these clothes are too bright. We need our blacks. Your place first, then the motel. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  My place was in darkness as Mum and Grant were visiting friends, so I didn’t have to make any fake excuses about why I was changing into my stage blacks and going out again. I was glad Mum wasn’t there to make any suggestions about black being an obvious colour to wear when you’re out with a vampire, which she wouldn’t have been able to resist doing. We managed to resist each other though – I grabbed my clothes and locked myself in the bathroom to change so Severn couldn’t help me – because then we would have got side-tracked and never left the house. I finished off the outfit by tying my hair back in a ponytail and pulling on a black beanie – no point dressing in black to merge with the night when your yellow hair stands out like a beacon. I clipped my maglight and my pocket knife to my belt, just in case, and I was ready for whatever we were heading into.

  Severn was on edge as we walked to his motel - his eyes flickering left and right in hunting mode – but nothing followed us. Or, at least, if it did, we didn’t see it. Instead, we reached the motel without incident and I stayed in the lounge while Severn changed his clothes. Temptation averted for the second time. But we didn’t leave straight away. Severn took advantage of the empty rooms to search Aiden and the Rev’s belongings, looking for the notes they had been writing to each other earlier. He had no luck but I found their remains in the kitchen – a pile of ashes in the bottom of a pot they had used in lieu of a fireplace to burn them. Sev’s response when I showed him was an angry animal grunt of frustration.

  “Where do we start to look for them?” I asked as we left the motel.

  “You know? I’m not sure, but our best bet might be the centre of town. Let’s start with the nightclub area.”

  “I wish they had left the car here, it’s a long walk.
”

  “Not when we jog.” Severn laughed at my horrified gasp. “Only as far as the bus stop. Come on.” He grabbed my hand so I could keep up, which I struggled to do, even though he wasn’t using his vampire speed. When we reached the bus stop, I leant against the street light, gasping for breath, my heart racing, while Severn looked perfectly calm. It wasn’t fair!

  We rode the bus all the way to the central bus exchange then walked down Lichfield Street, blending easily with the partying groups heading towards the nightclubs on the Strip. Seven said that was their favourite hunting ground so it was a logical place to start looking for the Rev and Aiden. Again, by his rapid head movements, I could tell Severn had his hunting senses on full alert, listening to every sound as we walked, hugging the dark side of the street under the shop verandas.

  Getting inside the nightclubs proved impossible. Usually, when the boys hunted, Severn dressed up in a flash Italian business suit so he looked old enough to get inside, but in our blacks and with me by his side, there was no way we were going to meet the dress code, let alone pass me off as old enough to get in, even if they believed Severn’s fake driver’s licence. I had to resort to asking the bouncers guarding the nightclubs’ doors if the other two had been there. If it was only Aiden we were looking for, it would have been impossible. One average-sized male with brown, wavy hair looks pretty much like thousands of others, but the Reverend was distinctive. At the third place I asked about two men, one of them about my lack of height, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, we struck the jackpot.

  Well, almost. They had been there, but they had already left.

  “Which way did they go?” I asked and we set off in the direction the bouncer pointed.

  We got the same reaction at the next nightclub along the Strip, although this time they had left with two women. Severn looked concerned when he heard the bouncer’s description of them.

  “That’s what I was worried about,” he said, without explaining what he meant. I wasn’t letting him away with that, so I dragged him into the nearest café, bought us both a coffee and pushed him towards a corner table where we could talk.