by Chanel Smith
“Don Echeveria had been scared at first, but as time went on, he told us that we might as well let him go because he had instructed his wife never to pay the ransom if he was ever kidnapped. We didn’t believe him, of course, but the ransom didn’t come for several weeks and he reiterated over and over his claim that it would never come. After a couple of months, there was still no ransom paid and Juanito and I were beginning to get tired of listening to the old man tell us to let him go. We should have let him go, but we didn’t.”
Jorge Luis paused, looked down at his feet, wiped his eyes and then began again. “We held him until midnight of November 25. It meant nothing at the time, it’s just when we started to do the shameful things that we did.”
He paused and wiped his eyes again. His body shook as the memory overtook him and he fought back the sobbing that threatened to prevent him from continuing. He finally regained control and finished his story.
“We tortured that poor old man every night for seven nights. It was at midnight, what is now celebrated as Medellin’s Alborrada, that his body could no longer take the torture and he died right there in front of us. He was the first man that either of us had ever killed.”
Jorge Luis’ sobbing made it impossible for him to continue. Jairo, knowing far better than anyone present, what demons his cousin was struggling with stepped forward, wrapped his arms around him and held him in the dim light of the gardens of El Castillo.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ellen nudged me and gave me her classic look when we arrived at El Castillo two days later. The nudge and the look were a reminder that she was still my one and only as Jovani stepped clear of the front door of the castle and my eyes lit up. In spite of Ellen’s reminder, I was eager for a Colombian-style greeting from the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“Don Monty, Doña Elena,” she called out to us, smiling as she was coming toward us with her curvy hips rocking back and forth and her high heels clicking on the stone beneath her feet. “I hope that you’ve enjoyed the last two days of relaxation here in the City of Eternal Spring.”
Ariel had joined us just in time to facilitate our communication with the museum’s curator.
“We have, indeed,” Ellen smiled as she leaned in for the hug and kiss.
I caught Ellen rolling her eyes as I received my greeting and looked at her over Jovani’s shapely shoulder. “You have a beautiful city,” I added.
“Please come with me,” she said as she started out in front of us to lead us toward the front door. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t help glancing down at the slender legs and nicely rounded features of her figure.
Ellen caught me looking, glared at me and hissed through gritted teeth. “Mon!”
I shrugged as I drew my eyes upward to the back of Jovani’s head and tried to keep them from wandering downward again.
Ariel turned away, stifling a laugh.
Jovani led us to her office inside the castle, the sound of her heels echoed through the hallways as we went. “Ariel filled me in on what happened last night,” she said, dropping back to walk along with us instead of in front. That move might have saved us from a fight later on, though I was already sure that I was going to get an earful to go with my eyeful.
“It’s not often that there are witnesses around to attest to the completion of our task,” I replied.
“It intrigues me to know the identity of those who kidnapped Don Diego, but Ariel refuses to budge on that particular detail. Since Jhon Jairo was one of those who helped out in the case, it gives me a chill to think of who might have been involved.”
We’d agreed among us, before parting, to keep the names confidential. The truth about Don Diego’s kidnapping needed to be brought out into the open, but there was nothing to be gained by pinning it on the Ochoa brothers. By doing so, we would simply be opening a wound that had long since healed over.
“Who is not as important as the fact that you will no longer have an issue here at the museum,” Ellen replied.
We turned into the doorway of Jovani’s office and she directed us toward the seats in front of her desk and then took a seat. “I have someone bringing coffee. Would you like anything to go with it?”
“No, thank you,” Ellen replied for the both of us.
“Let me put together the paperwork that you’ll need in order to get the balance of the fee for your contract,” she smiled as she filled in a few items on the form, scribbled a signature and presented the papers to us. “You will be able to make this transaction at the Banco de Bogota near your hotel. Ariel will assist you in that as well.”
“Thank you,” Ellen smiled, accepting the paper from her.
At almost the same moment, a woman brought a tray with four small cups of coffee on it and set a cup in front of each of us. I’d gotten used to coffee with milk and natural cane sugar in it. I had already been making plans as to how I was going to be able to have that new taste back in the States.
“We contracted the hotel for a few more days as a courtesy and your flight will be on Thursday,” she informed us, passing a folder with plane tickets to Ellen as well. “You are welcome to stay and enjoy Medellin for a little while longer or exchange those tickets for an earlier flight. It’s really up to you.”
It was my turn to say thank you, or at least it felt like it was when she looked at me with her Bambi eyes and smiled while Ariel translated what she had just said.
The next moment, someone was stirring outside the door to the office and Jovani looked up to see who it was. There was a brief exchange and Jovani’s expression changed to a quizzical one before she accepted an envelope and the person who brought it disappeared. Holding the expression, Jovani sunk back into her chair, opened the envelope and turned as white as a sheet.
“Are you okay?” Ellen asked, quickly sensing that something was wrong.
Though Jovani’s eyes were already overly large, they had nearly doubled in size as she looked at the paper that she had drawn out of the envelope.
Jovani said something to Ariel and then turned to Ellen and me.
“She said that you will want to hear this,” Ariel prefaced.
“El Castillo has just received a donation of 10,000,000,000 pesos from a person who wishes to remain anonymous.”
I quickly did the math in my head and came up with the sum in U.S. dollars, given the current exchange rate and shared it aloud with Ellen. “That’s a little bit over $3,000,000.”
Ellen’s eyes widened to match those of Jovani. It was a great bit of acting. Ellen had to have known who had sent that donation, but she appeared to be just as startled as Jovani. I could never have pulled off that look, so I clapped my hand down on the desk and said, “That’s great!”
“There’s more,” Jovani announced and Ariel translated. “The note attached says, ‘Please enjoy the first of many Alborradas to come.’”
After spending a few more days in the City of Eternal Spring, Ellen and I were refreshed from the odd hours that we’d had to keep and from the stress that our case had caused us. The donation and promise of many more to come from Don Jorge Luis Ochoa had gone a long way toward filling in the missing pieces of my struggle with finding balance in things.
A life that was taken could never be replaced by any amount of money. Destruction to the lives of other people could not be bought off by contributing to the building up of the lives of others. The end does not justify the mean in any set of circumstances. I would never part from those beliefs. However, Jairo, Jorge Luis and the spirit of Juan David had begun to have a profound effect on me by the time the flight Ellen and I were on lifted off of the runway and started out across the rich, green ridges of the Colombian Andes.
Though not all men took advantage of it, all men had the opportunity to change; even one of the bloodiest killers in the history of Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror. In ways both small and large, even the worst of men were able to set things right again.
Before Medellin, castles had always reminde
d me of kings, queens, princes and princesses, but at El Castillo, I learned of a new sort of nobility; a nobility that brought things back into balance.
“So?” Ellen said. “You ready to get back home?”
“Sure,” I replied. “But we’ve got to stop off and feed a craving first.”
The end.
Monty and Ellen return in:
Ghost Town
The Ghost Files #9
Coming Soon!
Also Available:
The Vampire With the Golden Gun
The Huntress Series Book #1
by Chanel Smith
(read on for a sample)
Prologue
The breeze was cool and moist and it felt fresh on Veronica’s face, bringing with it the faint smell of orange blossoms and Californian buckwheat; both of which she loved. It was somehow the perfect requiem to the purpose of her visit to the cemetery yard in Whittier that night and as she sat perched atop the steeple of the mission-style building staking out the grounds below her, she felt a wave of purposefulness sweep over her.
There was no way of her knowing how long she would be waiting out there in the night air and the darkness, so she had been sure to feed early and feed well on the fresh supply of hemoglobin that she had picked up from a local supplier a few days before. He was a good, reliable source. A conscientious old Chinese vampire in San Francisco’s Chinatown, he ran a few of the last remaining underground blood dens in the western hemisphere. Once a week, Veronica took a quick trip north to collect her supplies and indulge in a little of the secretive ‘Chinese Tong’ atmosphere that existed in Mr. Tan’s many opium rooms.
Veronica loved the dark underbelly of San Francisco’s trendy sub-culture; the drug scene, the music scene, the gothic supernatural scene that didn’t seem to exist anywhere else in that magnitude besides New Orleans. She felt at home there entwined with strangers dressed in black vinyl on the low leather settees in the darkened basements. While some made love, others got high, and while some fed, many were fed upon. It was symbiotic and undemanding and it drew her in constantly. But her time with Mr. Tan was done for the week and here she was staking out a cemetery, waiting to attend to her latest mission.
A few weeks prior, an elder vampire by the name of Fariha de Sanabria had been sent to the ‘Final Death’ by an unknown killer. The rumors on the street had it that a human had done it. The more she pried, the more Veronica picked up tidbits about the whole affair. It was becoming common knowledge among the L.A. vamps that there was a renegade killer operating in the area. A man who tracked down vampires, broke into their places of abode and gunned them down with a crossbow. A crossbow with silver tipped arrows. Apparently he was damned good, too. He had caught Fariha in the open and impaled her to a tree with an arrow through the heart. Right in the middle of a park over in Yorba Linda to boot.
Fariha’s demise hadn’t bothered Veronica in the least; in fact, she had been more than just a little relieved. The three hundred year old Moor had been as skilled a fighter and killer as they came, and Veronica had not been looking forward to the day when she would have encountered her. And she would have eventually done so, because Fariha was a coven maker and that type of shit did not go down well with modern day vampires.
She ‘stole’ people from their human lives, feeding on them until they were too close to death to deny her. So, of course when she asked them if they wanted to live or die, they chose to live. To live the life she would give them. She had made a record six progeny in the last year and, in the opinion of most of the elder vampires, she was doing a piss-poor job of educating them and keeping them in line. They now saw her and her growing coven of hooligan fledglings as a threat. Why else was she procreating? So the human hunter had dealt with Fariha, and now Veronica had assigned herself to deal with Fariha’s children.
It wasn’t long after midnight that the six dark figures emerged from the crypt below a broken down, neglected mausoleum that seemed to hide in the shade of two weeping oak trees. Veronica caught the scent of death on them and cocked her head to one side as she took a head count. They were finely dressed in what she could only envision was authentic vintage clothing from Fariha’s wardrobe. The leather of their jackets, corsets and pants was aged, yet supple and luxurious; the brocade silks of the skirts and vests shone with gem-like colors and fine needlework. Veronica counted six baby vampires.
They were weak, vicious, starving. It was hunting time and they were working themselves into a mad frenzy. They had gained a bit of a reputation of having no moral standard and no self-control. Since the death of their maker, the pain of her loss seemed to have driven them into further depravity because of late, children, passersby, joggers, commuters, baby sitters… no one had been safe. They killed without discrimination, not even bothering to seek out the feeding houses and blood banks in the area.
Veronica would be sure to wipe them out.
One of the males paused on their way toward the cemetery gates and sniffed at the air as if he had caught the scent of something strange. It took him and the others a few minutes to come to the conclusion that their senses were correct, but that was all the time it took for the Huntress to make it all too late for them. Veronica floated swiftly down from the high steeple and landed soundlessly on the ground behind them. She quickly arranged herself into a position from which she would be able to move among them in a perfect arc. She unsheathed her silver-bladed Katana and the mahogany silver tipped stake and, in the blink of a human eye, she had powered through the group, removing every head clean from its shoulders and driving the wooden spikes straight through every heart.
She twirled one more time and as the tails of her long black coat came to settle around her calves, Veronica looked up and watched the six headless figures burst into flames simultaneously among the headstones of the Rose Hills Memorial Park. She smiled as she walked out of the gates, sheathing her weapons at her side.
***
San Juan Capistrano. The city is the site of the Catholic mission for which it is named, Mission San Juan Capistrano and after Giovanni da Capistrano, a Franciscan saint from the Italian region of Abruzzo. Within its limits can be found one of California's oldest residential neighborhoods, Los Rios. It is the home of the oldest in-use building in California, the Serra Chapel in the Mission. Despite all its rich history, the area is probably best known at present for being the home of both the first vineyard and the first winery in California.
It was also the locale of Johnston McCulley's first Zorro novella, The Curse of Capistrano, published in 1919, which was later renamed The Mark of Zorro after the success of the film of the same name.
It was in a forgotten grotto below the old mission that Veronica Melbourne now sheltered. She had solemnly accepted some help from one of Mr. Tan’s many trusted colleagues to find the place after several disconcerting discoveries of her previous nests. There was nothing more frightening for a vampire of any disposition, than the thought of being discovered and brought out into the light of day as they slept helplessly.
As she sat on the edge of her twin-sized cot and looked around the dark, damp room, she sighed heavily.
I live like a fucking rat! she thought. I really need a paying job, and fast. Maybe if I had a steady stream of income, I could afford a nice, light-tight apartment near the Haight-Ashbury in San Fran. That would be awesome!
Veronica sighed again. She knew many vampires in the California supernatural community, but she didn’t know of even one who lived like she now did. She vaguely remembered being told by an elder vamp about how they acquired property and wealth and managed to live fairly well-to-do lives without having to work a day in their ‘second life.’
She shook her head.
Stealing from the dead has got to be just about as much bad luck as speaking ill of them.
She decided that she preferred the holes in the ground under churches that she had been reduced to than glamoring some dead person’s attorney into adding her to their will or, even
worse, some bank teller into keying thousands or even millions into her checking account, knowing full well the poor employee would be subjected to federal investigation and subsequent incarceration for it.
No way, Jose!
But then again, she had always been a prideful girl.
Chapter One
A few days later, Veronica sat in a street side café in the shopping district on Old Town Calabasas, sipping a room-temperature drink and doing her favorite thing; celebrity watching. The waitress attempted to approach her table for what must have been the third time since she had sat down and Veronica noticed when Ryu, her usual waiter, held onto the girl’s elbow to stop her and shook his head discreetly. A few moments later, he went over to her table carrying a small box.
“This came in for you today by courier, Miss Melbourne,” he said, smiling confidently.
Damn, he was so fucking hot. There’s just no way he doesn’t know that!
She took her time looking the man up and down, feasting on him with her eyes, even as her fangs began to tingle and the crimson saliva filled her mouth.
She swallowed hard and barely managed to reply, “Thank you, Ryu.”
Veronica took the box and put it down on the table beside her. As curious as she was about its contents, she returned her gaze to the Asian-American man that was consuming her attention. His arms were long and muscular and completely covered in full sleeves of colorful yakuza style tattoos. She looked closer and noticed that there were traces of black line and colored images peeking out from just above the stiff collar of his white starched work shirt as well.
I wonder if he’s wearing one of those full suit tattoos I’ve heard so much about?
It was difficult to find even the most enthusiastic human canvas who would commit to that these days. Outside of the pain, there was the sheer expense of it to consider too. His right arm showed the brazen defiance of the oriental phoenix as it twisted up his arm, surrounded by flames and petals that were falling from the blooming branches of sakura trees. The left depicted the curving undulating body of the dragon engulfed in billowing clouds and images of Taoist gods and goddesses herding and feeding flowing streams of colorful koi fish.