The Last Vampire Box Set

by R. A. Steffan

  My brow furrowed. “What’s the Weekly Oracle?” I asked, making a half-assed attempt to cover my full mouth with one hand as I spoke.

  “Underground newspaper,” he replied. “We’ll visit their office for a chat.”

  I swallowed and cleared my throat. “And how does an underground newspaper help with finding where my dad’s been taken?”

  “The thing about conspiracy theorists is that they often stumble onto valuable information without having the faintest clue what it really means,” he said.

  I hesitated. “I was one, you know. All my life, really.”

  He looked interested. “A conspiracy theorist?”

  “Yes. In fact, I guess I’ve recently become even more of one, although it’s faeries and demons now, rather than Illuminati and freemasons.”

  He huffed a breath that might have been a chuckle. “It hardly counts as a conspiracy theory when it’s true.”

  I gave him a sour look. “And it’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you,” I shot back. “I’ve been telling myself that all week.”

  “Indeed it isn’t,” he agreed.

  I spooned up the last of the soggy cornflakes and drained my glass of juice. “Right. So, are we coming back here afterward?”

  “As it stands now, we will,” he said. “It’s a good base of operations.”

  “But that could change if someone notices us while we’re out and about,” I hazarded. “Got it.”

  Rans nodded agreement. “Exactly. Shall we go?”

  I looked at my dirty dishes, not wanting to risk Tom and Glynda returning to find someone else’s milk dregs congealing in their sink if we ended up having to bug out. “Let me clean up first. No reason to be the worst house sitters ever.”

  He turned an amused eye on me. “When it comes to house sitters, you get what you pay for. And we’re not being paid.”

  “We also hypnotized the homeowners into needing house sitters in the first place,” I pointed out. “Come on—it’s only a juice glass and a cereal bowl. I’ll wash. You can dry.”

  * * *

  The offices of the Weekly Oracle were about what you’d expect for an underground conspiracy rag. Rans parked Glynda’s Ford Focus a few blocks away. We walked along the breezy Chicago streets, discarded plastic bags and other trash blowing around us in a dizzying aerial ballet.

  The building that housed the newspaper wasn’t derelict, precisely, but it was pretty obvious that the objects of our interest weren’t paying high-dollar rent on the place, either. Some of the windows on the ground level were boarded up, and efforts to paint over the ubiquitous graffiti tags on the walls appeared to be few and far between.

  There was a small sign hanging over the only door that didn’t have a “No Entry” sign plastered across it. An arrow indicated that the paper’s offices were in the basement.

  “Underground newspaper,” I quipped. “Right.”

  “Some clichés are clichés for a reason,” Rans said, opening the door and ushering me inside.

  I was more than a little skeptical of what these people were likely to be able to do for us, but I also knew painfully well that I was out of my depth. It wasn’t as though I had a ready-made list of suspects to question about my father’s whereabouts.

  The usual avenues—the normal things you were supposed to do when someone went missing—were no longer available to me. Calling the cops would be the same as standing under a flashing neon arrow saying, ‘Come and get me, faeries!’ I could try hiring a private investigator, but if I told them the truth about what was happening, they’d probably laugh in my face.

  So, conspiracy theorists it was.

  We trekked down a utilitarian stairwell that opened into a cavernous, mostly unfinished space. Some effort had been made to divide it into different areas using battered beige screens of the type designed for cubicle walls. The part that made up the front office area had a large receptionist desk acting as a symbolic barrier to keep walk-ins from wandering further back. From the depths of the basement space, the sounds of a printing press could be heard.

  At first, I thought no one was around, but then I saw movement in the back.

  “Just a second!” someone yelled, the words nearly drowned out by the noise of machinery.

  Rans wandered over and leaned his elbows on the reception desk, while I looked around with interest. It really was exactly what I would have pictured if someone had asked me to imagine such a place. Empty takeout boxes littered many of the available surfaces, fighting for space with computer monitors, keyboards, and PC towers that looked like they’d been picked up cheap from a university rummage sale. Cables twisted through the irregularly lit space like spaghetti.

  A red-haired guy in his early twenties made his way up to the front where we were waiting. He was clean-cut and well built. Frankly, I thought he would have looked more at home playing college football somewhere than rattling around in this place. Still, it was clear enough that he belonged here, based on the practiced way he avoided the bundles of computer cords snaking along the floor.

  “Sorry about that,” he said when he reached us. “What can I do for you?”

  “I spoke with Derrick yesterday about getting some EMF readings from local hotspots,” Rans said, and I perked up with interest.

  “Oh, sure,” the redhead replied. “You’re that guy. Hang on a sec, I’ll get him for you. In fact, why don’t you come on back and sit down. He’s just finishing up with replacing a busted piston on the inserter. Watch your step…”

  We followed the guy as he gestured us to come around the reception desk. He led us to a desk that was more or less free of empty Chinese food containers, probably because the antiquated cathode ray computer monitor that was sitting on it took up most of the available space. There were a couple of cheap office chairs next to it. I sat down, while Rans continued to stand.

  When the guy left to retrieve his friend, I leaned toward Rans and spoke out of the side of my mouth. “EMF readings? Like ghost-hunters use? Why?” I asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” he replied unhelpfully.

  I looked around the echoing basement full of outdated tech and rumbling machinery. “How on earth did you even find these guys?”

  “Paranormal and conspiracy forums online, of course,” Rans said, as if it were obvious. “Where else?”

  FIVE

  ANYTHING I MIGHT have said was cut off by the arrival of a blond guy with thick-rimmed glasses and a smudge of grease on his cheek. He was attractive in a geeky sort of way—probably about my age, with gray eyes and a slender frame. He tilted his chin in greeting as he approached, wiping his hands on a dirty rag before tossing it onto the corner of the desk.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “I wasn’t sure when to expect you back. Got those readings for you last night, though.” His eyes flickered to me, an awkward smile tilting the corners of his broad mouth for only an instant before his gaze darted away.

  Shy, I diagnosed. It was honestly a bit charming.

  “Wonderful,” Rans replied. “But where are my manners? JoAnne Reynolds, this is Derrick Nicolaev, better known in online circles as Hypnos. Derrick, JoAnne.”

  No doubt I should have been focusing on the fact that we were using the fake identities Guthrie had obtained for us, but my thoughts had crashed to a standstill.

  “Wait, what?” I asked, aware that my eyes were about to pop out of my head. “You’re Hypnos? Oh my god—I read all of your papers about government cover-ups of paranormal encounters on the Third Eye forum before it shut down!”

  Rans was giving me a look somewhere between curiosity and bewilderment, probably because I was enthusiastically fangirling a geeky guy I’d just met in the basement of a boarded-up office building. It wasn’t enough to stop me, though, as memories of those late night online forum discussions flooded me with nostalgia for a simpler time, before my life had turned into a bad SyFy Channel made-for-TV movie.

  “You might not remember it, but we chatted a
couple of times,” I blathered, my mouth flapping onward without stopping to check in with my brain first. “About the connection between political violence and instances of paranormal sightings?” I gestured to myself. “I’m TeamEdward4eva. That was my username, I mean.”

  Hypnos—or rather, Derrick—looked a bit dazed by my outpouring, but to his credit he paused, obviously thinking back to that time several years ago when Third Eye had been a huge deal in online circles. Meanwhile, Rans looked like he was trying very hard not to collapse into screaming fits of laughter, so I glared at him.

  “Oh, hang on.” Derrick pointed a finger at me. “You were the girl whose mother got shot, right? The… state senator, wasn’t it?”

  Close. I didn’t correct him, realizing now that it might not be a great idea for him to know exactly who he was talking to. Especially since Rans had just given him a fake name.

  “Yeah,” I said, glossing it over and moving on. “Wow. Small world, huh? So, you run a newspaper now?”

  Derrick looked around and gave a self-deprecating little shrug. “If you can call it that. We have a pretty decent online presence, but we keep the lights on with advertising revenue from the dead-tree version. Enough about me, though. You’re getting into the ghost-hunting business these days, huh?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Apparently so,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral since I actually had no freaking clue why we were here.

  “Cool,” he said. “Turns out you picked a good place for it. Let me get the others up here and we’ll show you what we’ve got.” He turned toward the back, where the press had just begun to power down, rumbling into silence. “Yo—Isaac! Óliver!”

  The redhead—Isaac, I was assuming—returned with another man following behind. The third member of the Weekly Oracle crew was a tough-looking Hispanic guy with shoulder-length black hair. My eyes fell to the empty left sleeve of his shirt, and I quickly dragged them back up, not wanting to stare. Something about his bearing made me think ex-military, and I wondered if he’d lost his arm in combat somewhere.

  “You’re the ones after the EMF data?” he asked, a faint Mexican or Central American accent coloring his voice.

  “Yep,” Rans agreed. “That’s us.”

  Óliver nodded and pulled the remaining chair around to the front of the desk. “D, did you get all that shit plotted on the map last night?”

  Derrick leaned on the edge of the desk. “Yeah, it’s in the file dated yesterday. The pattern looked pretty clear.”

  “Pattern?” I asked as Óliver pulled up the file. Everyone clustered around to look over his shoulder—me included.

  It was Isaac who had pity on me. “We have EMF meters set up at a bunch of area hotspots that sit on the ley lines crisscrossing northern Illinois and Indiana. Sometimes, if you plot the times and locations of the readings, patterns emerge. Derrick has some theories about energy waves related to sunspots affecting the strength of trapped ghosts.”

  I shot a look at Rans, still utterly in the dark as to our purpose here. He’d hidden his amusement from earlier behind an unreadable poker face, however, and there were no clues to be found in his expression.

  “Let me see it,” he said, his focus on the screen.

  Derrick pointed at the map that appeared. I recognized Chicago sitting on the bank of Lake Michigan, along with a portion of the two states around it. Several red dots of various sizes with timestamps hovering above them covered the visible area.

  “The size of the dot indicates the magnitude of the highest readings in the last seventy-two hours, with the timestamp showing when the peak occurred,” Derrick said, tracing a finger along an arc defined by the biggest dots.

  It meant nothing to me, but Rans nodded. “Right. So the biggest power surges are all following that single ley line, heading from west to east at a high rate of speed.”

  “Weird,” Isaac said. “Have there been any solar flares during that period?”

  “No,” Óliver grunted. “The last big one was six days ago.”

  “It doesn’t do a damn thing for my pet theory,” Derrick offered wryly, “but does it help you at all?”

  Rans straightened and flashed him a charming smile. “Possibly so. Whatever the case, I appreciate the assistance, lads.”

  Derrick shrugged. “The data needed to be collated anyway. You want a printout or a file transfer of this?”

  “No, no,” Rans said. “Not necessary. I just needed to see the pattern.”

  Óliver looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “You got a different theory about these readings? Because at this point, I’m open to just about anything.”

  Rans shook his head. “Not really. At least, not one I’m ready to air yet, but you know how it is. Every piece of data helps.” He turned his attention back to me. “Perhaps we should leave these gentlemen to their work now. Ready to head out?”

  I’m ready to get some freaking answers, I tried to project with my expression, but aloud, I only said, “Sure.” I smiled at Derrick. “It was really great to run into you in meatspace, Hypnos. Keep on fighting the good fight, okay?”

  I let my smile encompass the other two, as well. Derrick awkwardly shook my hand, while the others acknowledged me with brief nods. After a final brief farewell, Rans ushered me back up the stairwell and out the door leading onto the street.

  “Care to explain all that?” I asked once we were outside.

  “Certainly. First things first, though.” He eyed me up and down, a very strange look on his handsome face. “’TeamEdward4eva,’ Zorah? Really?”

  I stared at him blankly for a beat before the implications registered. Heat flooded my cheeks.

  “I was sixteen when I chose that username!” I protested. “It was a popular series—millions of people read it!”

  He had that look again—the one that said he was battling back laughter only with extreme difficulty. “I swear, if the word sparkle passes your lips…”

  “Real women crave the sparkle,” I muttered, casting a glare up at him. “That was my sig line.”

  A single bark of laughter escaped his control. “Bloody hell, luv.” He shook his head. “Ah, well. It could be worse. If you’d been Team Jacob, you and I might be having a serious problem right now.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I feel like I should point out that my being a teenage girl at the time excuses me for all of this. Whereas you’re seven hundred years old, and you’ve clearly got strong opinions regarding a girly young-adult vampire story.”

  “Boredom is a powerful motivator,” he said, before visibly wrestling his amusement back under control. “Now, though, we really do have other things to worry about.”

  I sobered, because yeah—that was putting it mildly. “So talk. Why do you care about ghost-hunting all of the sudden?”

  “Because they aren’t tracking ghosts. They’re tracking Fae travel along the ley lines. They just don’t realize it.”

  “Okay, explain that to me,” I said. “The magic and ghost stuff was never really my thing, ironic as that now seems. Ley lines are supposed to be… like, energy highways, right?”

  “In a way. Originally, humans became aware of them when several people noticed that large monuments and religious structures tended to be built along particular map lines, even though there was no coordination or purposeful planning to make it happen that way.”

  I frowned, mulling that over. “So… what? People built monuments in certain places because of invisible energy paths running through the area?”

  Rans shrugged. “Theoretically. Depending on who’s telling it, humans were either spontaneously drawn to the ley lines, or they were drawn to the concentrations of Fae nearby—since Fae use the lines for magical transportation across long distances.”

  My thoughts turned back to Albigard and his portals. “Oh. Is that how Tinkebell was able to whisk us from place to place?”

  But he shook his head. “No. Alby is a powerful magical practitioner in his own right. Many Fae can fold local spac
e to move short distances. The ley lines are for global travel.”

  I started to glimpse where he was going with this. “Meaning Fae were traveling along the line on that map we just saw, and this was happening around the time Dad disappeared. You think it’s connected?”

  “I had a theory,” Rans said. “One that Derrick’s data supports. The Fae tend not to travel back and forth from wherever they’re stationed on Earth very often. There’s no way to prove it conclusively, but the timing makes it likely they were transporting a high-level prisoner… or a high-level collaborator.”

  My throat went dry. “Transporting him where?” I rasped.

  “To the Fae world of Dhuinne. The ley line you saw on the map leads directly across the Atlantic Ocean to County Meath in Ireland. And the weak spot between the two realms—the gate used to move between the worlds—is inside a burial mound on the Hill of Tara.”

  My brain didn’t seem to want to work at the moment, but I forced myself to follow the logical steps he was laying out anyway. “Are you saying that my dad isn’t on Earth anymore?” Even speaking the words aloud made me feel cold, despite the summer heat reflecting off the concrete.

  His eyes cut to me, assessing my reaction. “I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

  Jesus. If he was right, what was I supposed to do now? I swallowed hard.

  “We should go visit the westernmost place where Derrick’s equipment picked up high readings,” I said, thinking it through as rationally as I could. “If they were traveling west to east, that should be the point they left from, shouldn’t it? Maybe we can find more clues there.”

  Rans was still watching me. “You really want to traipse up to a Fae-controlled site and start asking questions, Zorah? Because if I’m right, Caspian’s mates would be pleased as punch to whisk you away to join your father—and not for a touching family reunion.”

  The panicked feeling I’d been holding at bay for the last day or so was clamoring in my stomach, threatening to break loose and consume me. I was already a fugitive. Even with Rans protecting me for reasons I still couldn’t claim to understand, realistically, how long was I going to be able to avoid the Fae? I couldn’t just attach myself to Rans like a leech for the rest of my natural life, in hopes that he would continue to beat off my pursuers with a stick… or a sword.