by Kendra Ashe
“You could join us. Help us bring peace to our city,” he said.
“I'm not a killer,” I told him through clenched teeth. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Wren is your friend. He trusted you.”
“Humans and vampires can never truly be anything but predator and prey. You'd do well to remember that.”
As he was talking, I was inching closer to the door. If I made a run for it, I was sure they’d either tackle me to the ground or shoot me. I wouldn’t be nearly as difficult to subdue as a vampire and they’d managed to capture several of those.
To get to the door I was going to need a distraction. There was a vampire near where I was standing. If I could free the vampire without getting attacked, it just might create enough of a distraction to get to the door.
Moving quickly, I got to the vampire and yanked on the chain binding him.
He rolled off the table, loosening the binding just enough that he was able to break loose.
The move surprised Landry and his freaky apprentice.
As expected, the vampire lunged toward me but I lashed out with the scalpel.
While Landry was watching the vampire, I ran toward the door. With the cop and his sidekick closer, the vampire turned his attention to them while I slipped out of the room.
I slammed the metal door behind me and it latched.
They weren’t getting out of there until someone opened it and since the mortuary was closed, it wasn’t likely anyone would be around until morning.
I was relieved, but that only lasted until I realized that I was stuck without transportation. There was no telling where they’d stashed my car.
I also had to tell someone about their evil plan, but who. Landry was the bad guy and he was holding Wren hostage. Besides, my boss was kind of out of his mind at the moment.
I would have been tempted to leave them in there if it wasn’t for Wren. I couldn’t leave him to their evil plan. In any case, even if Landry was a nasty villain, it probably wasn’t right to leave him in there to be devoured by hungry vampires.
The only option I had was Mason. He’d know what to do.
Chapter Nineteen
By the time Mason arrived with a case of blood bags and his bandmates as backup, the woman was already gone and Landry was near dead.
Mason’s plan was to keep the vampires in their silver chains until they’d fed enough that they wouldn’t attack anything that moved.
Landry lasted only a few minutes before expiring.
“How are we going to explain a dead cop?” I asked Mason
“It’s not our problem.” He shrugged. “He brought this on himself.”
I wasn’t satisfied with his answer. “They may not be able to hold you in a prison but a murder charge for me would be really messed up. I was the one who locked them in here.”
“And the crazed vampire that attacked him did so because he’d been kept prisoner and not allowed to feed. That’s not your problem. Even if they would charge something like this, which they won’t, you were abducted. It was self-defense. All you were doing was trying to get away.”
He had a point, though I had my doubts they’d frame it like that.
It took a while but finally, Wren was sane enough to be released.
When I removed the chains, he gave me a weak smile. “Thanks,” he said in a low, raspy voice.
“How did you let this happen to you?” I asked.
“Landry called and asked me to meet him here on the pretense that he’d discovered who the Ripper was. As soon as I walked through the door, he shot me up with vervain.”
“What a jerk.”
We were all surprised when the dead detective stirred. Mason looked at me like I should know what was going on. I didn’t have a clue.
The detective’s body withered and jerked as if some unseen force was animating him. Finally, he sat up. Growling, he revealed long, white fangs.
Mason handed the good detective a blood bag, which I was sure he didn’t deserve.
“Well, Detective, it looks like you’ve joined the ranks of the undead,” Mason said.
The nightmarish site of watching the birth of a newborn vampire was chilling, but also fascinating.
“This doesn’t seem hardly fair,” I said. “He is responsible for turning crazed vampires loose in the city. How is he going to be held accountable for that?”
Mason gave me a dark smile. “Don’t worry, Love, he has sentenced himself to something much worse than death.”
“Yeah, but how did this happen?”
“I couldn’t say but since he knows that vampire blood heals, I think he might have been hurt recently and ingested some.”
I glanced over at Colin, who was still recovering on the metal table. “I’ll bet he was in on this. Landry probably turned on him.”
“Maybe.” Mason shrugged. “But after we dump the woman’s body in the river, I’m done with this craziness. If you know what’s best, you’d do the same.”
The now dead, crazy neighbor lady had been drained dry of blood. She might have deserved a good butt-kicking, but not death. I wasn’t the type to wish death on anyone. I sure wasn’t going to participate in disposing of a body.
“Instead of dumping her in the swamp somewhere, you should make sure someone finds her soon. It’s not right. She should have a proper burial.”
Mason smiled. “I’ll take your counsel into consideration, my lady.”
Damn! Why did he have to be so hot?
* * *
I watched as the priest threw a handful of earth over Marie’s coffin and finished the closing prayers. Although it was unusual to have the funeral after dark, we’d convinced the priest with a large donation to his church.
The funeral party consisted of Wren, the priest, and me. If Marie had had any family, they were long gone.
I hadn’t heard a peep out of our office ghost since we’d torn out the wall and discovered her skeleton. Like the gentleman he was, Wren volunteered to pay for her funeral and a small tomb in the Hope Grove Cemetery.
Solving a case over a hundred years cold hadn’t been easy, but with some digging, I think I finally knew what had happened to her.
According to some of the gossip columns of the time, Marie and Madam Jess had been fighting over some man about the time she’d gone missing.
There had been evidence of blunt force trauma on the skull. I figured Jess had blitz attacked Marie during a fit of rage to avoid the hangman’s noose; she’d hidden the body in the wall of her establishment.
Of course, there was no way to know for sure, but that was my best guess.
When the priest was done, I placed a single rose on top of Marie’s casket. “Rest in Peace, Marie.”
“Thanks for doing this,” I told Wren as we were walking away.
“It isn’t like I had a choice. I was sick of her tossing books at my head.”
“Women can be impatient,” I laughed.
“So have you decided whether you’re going to stay on at Dark Side and train as an investigator?”
“I think so.” I nodded. “But I don’t know about digging to find your mythical utopian valley.”
“I’ll always be searching for Shadow Valley, but we do a lot more than that, like chase down cheating husbands and wayward vampires.”
It was the wayward vampires that had me worried, especially one particular wayward vampire, but I figured as long as I consumed enough vervain, I would be safe.
I did owe Miss Avalon a big thank you for spiking my food. Her vervain gumbo would do more than just warm my stomach on chilly nights. It could very well keep my mind, heart, and body safe.
Without fully realizing it, I’d already made up my mind to leave any semblance of normal behind and step into the world of the unknown.
If only I’d known that vampires, ghosts, and werewolves were just the tip of the iceberg.
# # #
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Kendra Ashe
Kendra Ashe writes Urban Fantasy Romance Mysteries. Ms. Ashe studied Criminal Justice and Anthropology in college and has been writing stories since she was a teen. Kendra Ashe and her family now make their home in Utah. You can get Kendra Ashe news by following her on Facebook or Twitter.