by J. R. Rain
“You didn’t pick up your work phone.”
“You know I never pick up after hours.”
“You used to,” I said.
“Well, honey, that was before I became so goddamn busy. Can I call you later?”
“Even better, why don’t you come home.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
He clicked off and I was left staring down at my cell phone. If it was possible, he seemed to have been breathing even harder by the end of the conversation.
* * *
It was past midnight, and I had worked my way through more than half of the twelve files when Danny finally came home. He stopped by the study and gave me a little wave. He looked tired. His dark hair was slightly disheveled. His tie was off. The muted light revealed the deepening lines around his mouth and eyes. His eyes, once clear blue and gorgeous, were hooded and solemn. His full lips were made for kissing, but not me, not anymore. He was a handsome man, and not a very happy one.
“Sorry about not picking up the kids,” he said. He didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t sound like he gave a shit at all. “I should have called your sister.”
“That’s okay. I’ll make it up to her,” I said. There was lipstick on his earlobe. He probably didn’t think to check his earlobe.
He said, “I’m taking a shower, then hitting the hay. Another big day tomorrow.”
“I bet.”
He stood there a moment longer, leaning against the door frame. He seemed to want to say something. Maybe he wanted to tell me about the lipstick.
Then he slid away, but before he was gone, I caught a hint of something in his eyes. Guilt. Pain. Confusion. It was all there. I didn’t think I needed any heightened sixth sense to know that my husband of fourteen and a half years had fallen out of love with me. We all change, I suppose. Some of us more than others.
After he was done showering, I listened to the box springs creak as he eased into bed and I set down my pen and silently cried into my hands.
15.
I was running along Harbor Blvd at 3:00 a.m. I had finished reading through the files and needed some time to think. Luckily, I had all night to do so. Being a vampire is for me a nightly battle in dealing with loneliness.
I was dressed in full jogging gear, sweats and sweatshirt. No reflective shoes. I had been pulled over once too often by cops who had advised against a woman running so late at night. I wondered if they would give the same advice to a vampire. Anyway, I kept to the shadows, avoiding the cops and everyone else.
I kept up a healthy pace. In fact, my healthy pace was nearly a flat-out sprint. An un-godly pace that I could keep up for hours on end, and sometimes I did. Sure, my muscles hurt afterward, forcing me to soak in my hot tub. But I love the speed.
Harbor Blvd sped past me. I breathed easily. The air was suffused with mist and dew. My arms pumped rhythmically at my side, adding balance to my churning legs. Harbor was empty of all traffic and life. I made a right down Chapman, headed past the high school and junior college. Streets swept past me, I dodged smoothly around lamp poles, bus benches, and metal box thingies that had something to do with traffic lights. I think. Anyway, there seemed to be a lot of those metal box thingies.
I didn’t need water and I didn’t need to pause for air. It was an unusual sense of freedom. To run without exhaustion. The city was quiet and silent. The wind passed rapidly over my ears.
I was a physical anomaly. Enhanced beyond all reason. My husband once called me a super hero after seeing an example of my strength and marveling at it.
There was a half moon hanging in the sky. I thought of Kingsley and his obsession with moons. It stood to reason that a werewolf would be obsessed with moons. I ran smoothly past an open-all-night donut shop. The young Asian donut maker looked up, startled, but just missed me. The smell of donuts was inviting, albeit nauseating.
A werewolf?
I shook my head and chuckled at the absurdity of it. But there it was, staring me in the face. Or, rather, he had stared me in the face. So what was happening around here? Since when was Orange County a haven for the undead? I wondered what else was out there. Surely if there were werewolves and vampires there might be other creatures that went bump in the night, right? Maybe a ghoul or two? Goblins perhaps? Maybe my trainer Jacky was really an old, cantankerous leprechaun.
I smiled.
Thinking of Kingsley warmed my heart. This concerned me. I was a married woman. A married woman should not feel such warmth toward another man, even if the other man was a werewolf.
That is, not if she wanted to stay married. And I really, really wanted to stay married.
Perhaps I felt connected to Kingsley, bonded by our supernatural circumstances. We had much in common. Two outcasts. Two creatures ruled by the night, in one way or another.
A car was coming. I ducked down a side street and moved along a row of old homes. Heavy branches arched overhead. With my enhanced night vision, I deftly avoided irregularities in the sidewalk―cracks and upheavals―places where tree roots had pushed up against the concrete. To my eye, the night was composed of billions and billions of dancing silver particles. These silver particles illuminated the darkness into a sort of surreal molten glow, touching everything.
I turned down another street, then another. Wind howled over my ears. I entered a tougher part of town, running along a residential street called Bear. Bear opens up to a bigger street called Lemon. I didn’t give a crap how tough Bear Street was.
Yet another side benefit: unlimited courage.
My warning bells sounded, starting first as a low buzz in my ears. The buzzing is always followed by an increase in heart rhythm, a physical pounding in my chest. I knew the feeling well enough to trust it by now, and I immediately began looking for trouble. And as I rounded another corner, there it was.
Three men stepped out of the shadows in front of me. I slowed, then finally stopped. As I did so, four more men stepped out from behind a low-rider truck parked on the street. Next to the house was an empty, dark school yard. As if reading their collective minds, I had a fleeting prognostication of my immediate future: an image of the seven men dragging me into the school yard. Then having their way with me. Then leaving me for dead.
A good thing the future isn’t written in stone.
I smiled at them. “Hello, boys.”
16.
Four of the seven were Latinos, with the remaining three being Caucasian, Asian and African-American. A veritable melting pot of gang violence. I studied each face. Most were damp with sweat. Eyes wide with anticipation and sexual energy. Details stood out to me like phosphorescent black and white photos, touched by ghostly silver light. One was terrified, jerking his head this way and that, like a chicken on crack. All of them around same age―perhaps thirty―save for one who was as old as fifty. A few had bed-head, as if they had been recently roused from a drunken stupor.
I could smell alcohol on their breaths and sweat on their skin. The sweat was pungent and laced with everything from fear and excitement, to hostility and sexual frustration. None of it smelled good. If mean had a scent, this would be it.
A smallish Latino stepped forward. A switchblade sprang open at his side, locked into place. For my benefit, he let the faint light of the moon gleam off its polished surface. He was perhaps thirty-five and wore long denim shorts and a plaid shirt. He was surprisingly handsome for a rapist.
“If you scream, I’m going to hurt you.” His accent was thick.
“Gee, what a romantic thing to say,” I said.
“Shut up, bitch.”
I kept my eyes on him. I didn’t need to look at the others. I could feel them, sense them, smell them. I said, “Now what would your mothers all think of you now? Ganging up on a single woman in the middle of the night. Tsk, tsk. Really, I think you should all be ashamed.”
The little Latino looked at me blankly, then said simply: “Get her.”
Movement from behind. I turned and punched, extending my ar
m straight from my body. Jacky would have been proud. My fist caught the guy in the throat. He dropped to the ground, flopping and gagging and holding his neck. Probably hurt like hell. I didn’t care.
I surveyed the others, who had all stopped in their tracks. “So what was the plan, boys? You were all going to get a fuck in? The very definition of sloppy seconds―hell, sloppy thirds and fourths and fifths. Then what? Slit my throat? Leave me for dead? Let some school janitor find me stuffed in a dumpster? You would deny my children their mother for one night of cheap thrills?”
No one said anything. They looked toward their leader, the slick Latino with the switch. Most likely not all of them spoke English.
“I’ll give you once chance to run,” I said. “Before I kill all of you.”
They didn’t run. Some continued looking at their leader. Most were looking at the man rolling on the ground, holding his throat. Switchblade was watching me with a mixture of curiosity, lust and hatred.
Then he pounced, slashing the blade up. Had he hit home, I would have been cleaved from groin to throat.
He didn’t hit home.
I turned my body and the blade missed. I caught his over-extended arm at the elbow and twisted. The elbow burst at the joint. He dropped the knife. I picked him up by the throat. Screaming and gagging, he swung wildly at me with his good arm, connecting a glancing blow off the side of my head. I simply squeezed harder and his flailing stopped.
His face was turning purple; I liked that.
I raised him high and swung him around so that the others could see. They gaped unbelievingly.
“You may run now,” I said.
And they did. Scattering like chickens before the hawk. They disappeared into the night, around hedges and into dark doorways. Two of them just continued running down the middle of the street. All of them were gone, save for one, the fifty-year-old. He was pointing a gun at my head.
“Put my nephew down,” he said.
“It’s always nice to see gang raping and murdering kept in the family,” I said.
I put his nephew down. Sort of. I hurled the kid with all my strength into his uncle. The gun went off, a massive explosion that rattled my senses and stung the hell out of my hyper-sensitive ears.
When the smoke cleared so to speak, the old man was looking down with bewildered horror.
Switchblade was lying sprawled on the concrete sidewalk, blood pumping from a wound in his chest. Spreading fast over the concrete. A black oil slick in the night.
Blood.
Something awakened within me. Something not very nice.
The older man looked from me to Switchblade, then at the gun in his hand. A look of horror crossed his features and tears sprang from his eyes. Then he fled into the shadows with the others, looking back once over his shoulder before disappearing over someone’s backyard fence.
I was left alone with Switchblade. His right hand was trying to cover the wound; instead, it just flopped pathetically.
“Well,” I said to him, kneeling down, “nice set of friends you have.”
And as I squatted next to him, the flopping stopped and he looked at me with dead eyes. I checked for a pulse. There was none.
Aroused by the gunshot, house lights began turning on one by one. I looked down at the body again.
So much blood....
17.
We were alone in an alley behind some apartments.
The early morning sky was still black, save for the faint light from the half moon. I was nestled between a Dumpster and three black bags of trash filled with things foul. A small wind meandered down the alley. The plastic bags rustled. My hair lifted and fell―and so did the hair on the dead guy.
After my runs, I usually feed on cow blood. The cow blood is mixed with all sorts of impurities and foul crap. I often gag. Sort of my own private Fear Factor with no fifty grand reward at the end of the hour.
Before me lay Switchblade, the punk who had no doubt organized the gang bang. I had ferreted him away before anyone could investigate the shooting and now he lay at my feet, dead and broken.
I looked down at his chest, where blood had stained his flannel shirt nearly black.
Blood....
I ripped open his flannel shirt, buttons pinging everywhere. His chest was awash in a sea of caked red. The hole in his chest was a dark moon in a vermilion sky.
His blood would contain alcohol, as he had been drinking. I didn’t care. The blood would be pure enough. Straight from the source. The ideal way to feed. Then again, ideal was relative. Ideally I would be feasting on turkey lasagna.
I dipped my head down, placed my lips over the massive wound in his chest, and drank....
* * *
I returned the body to the same house, left it where it had fallen. I drifted back into the darkness of the school grounds, where I knew in my heart they were going to drag me off to be raped.
It was still early morning, still dark. No one was out on the streets. Curious neighbors had gone back to sleep; there were no police investigating the sound of a gunshot. Apparently gunshots here were a common enough occurrence to not arouse that much suspicion.
The attackers themselves were long gone. They were scared shitless, no doubt. One of their own had been shot by one of their own. Each would awaken this morning with a very bad hang over, and pray to God this had all been a very bad dream.
Instead of their prayers being answered, they were going to awaken to find the body. What happened next, I didn’t really know or care. I doubted a group of men would even attempt to identify me, lest they reveal the nature of their true intentions the night before.
At any rate, using a half empty can of beer from the nearby dumpster, I had cleaned the wound of my lip imprints. Let the medical examiner try to figure out why someone had sloshed beer all over the gunshot wound.
As I stood there in the darkness, with a curious phantasmagoric mist nipping at my ankles, I remembered the taste of his blood again.
God, he had tasted so good. So damn good―and pure. The difference between good chocolate and bad chocolate. The difference between good wine and bad wine. Good blood and bad blood.
All the difference in the world.
I left the school grounds and the neighborhood as a slow wave of purple blossomed along the eastern horizon. I hated the slow wave of purple that blossomed along the eastern horizon. The sun was coming, and I needed to get home ASAP.
Already I could feel my strength ebbing.
Since my belly was full of Switchblade’s blood, I did not want to cramp up and so I kept my jog slow and steady. On the way home, as the guilt set in over what I had just done, I held fast to one thought in particular as if it were a buoy in a storm:
I did not kill him; he was already dead....
I did not kill him; he was already dead....
18.
The kids were playing in their room and Danny was working late. Tonight was Open House at the elementary school, and he had promised to make it home on time.
The words “we’ll see” had crossed my mind.
I had spent the past two hours helping Anthony with his math homework. Math didn’t come easily to him and he fought me the entire time. Vampire or not, I was drained.
All in all, I just couldn’t believe the amount of work his third grade teacher assigned each week, and it was all I could do to keep up. Didn’t schools realize mothers want to spend quality time with their children in the evenings?
So now I was in my office, still grumbling. It was early evening and raining hard. Occasionally the rain, slammed by a gust of wind, splattered against my office window. The first rain in months. The weatherman had been beside himself.
I liked the rain. It touched everything and everyone. Nothing was spared. It made even a freak like me feel connected to the world.
So with the rain pattering against the window and the children playing somewhat contentedly in their room, I eventually worked my way through all of Kingsley’s files. Only
one looked promising, and it set the alarms off in my head. I’ve learned to listen to these alarms.
The case was no different than many of Kingsley’s other cases. His client, one Hewlett Jackson, was accused of murdering his lover’s husband. But thanks to Kingsley’s adroit handling of the case, Jackson was freed on a technicality. Turns out the search warrant had expired and thus all evidence gathered had been deemed inadmissible in court. And when the verdict was read, the victim’s brother had to be physically restrained. According to the file, the victim’s brother had not lunged at the alleged killer; no, he had lunged at Kingsley.
There was something to that.
And that’s all I had. A distraught man who felt his murdered brother had not been given proper justice. Not much, but it was a start.
I sat back in my chair and stared at the file. The rain was coming down harder, rattling the window. I listened to it, allowed it to fill some of the emptiness in my heart, and found some peace. I checked my watch. Open House was in an hour and still no sign of Danny.
I pushed him out of my thoughts and logged onto the internet; in particular, one of my many investigation data bases. There had been no mention of the brother’s name in the file, but with a few deft keystrokes I had all the information I needed.
The murder had made the local paper. The article mentioned the surviving family members. Parents were dead, but there had been two surviving siblings. Rick Horton and Janet Maurice. Just as I wrote the two names down, the house phone rang. My heart sank.
I picked it up.
“Hi, dollface.”
“Tell me you’re on your way home,” I said.
There was a pause. He sucked in some air. “Tell the kids I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “You tell them.”
“Don’t.”