by Lisa Jackson
He knew who she was? This wasn’t random? She fought harder.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he assured her. “Nowhere you can go.”
That’s where you’re wrong, cocksucker, she thought as her fingers brushed the cool nickel of the pistol. She grabbed the gun, yanked it out of the purse, heard the bag hit the ground with a soft thud. She drew her hand up, ready to blow this jerkwad to hell when she caught a glimpse, just a hint, of the guy’s face and she nearly dropped the gun.
Red eyes glared at her, fuckin’ red eyes from deep in the folds of some black hood.
A face black as night with ghoulish features and purplish lips was inches from hers. The face of evil, she thought wildly.
Oh, God! She nearly peed.
Hot breath washed over her.
Holy shit.
She struggled. Fought. Even though she was shaking from head to foot. Fumbling with the safety, she tried to think clearly. All she had to do was swing the gun around, over her shoulder, and fire.
But from the corner of her eye, she saw the thing, this fiend from hell, draw back those awful lips and expose a nasty array of sharp white teeth.
Sweet Jesus!
She had the safety off.
Immediately, she swung her arm upward.
Teeth slashed.
Blood spurted.
Pain screamed up her arm.
She squeezed the trigger.
Blam! The gun fired.
Blasted next to her ear.
The smell of cordite filled the air.
But her attacker held on, twisting back her arm so that she was helpless, her legs no longer able to kick. Her shoulder wrenched, throbbing in pain.
Oh, dear God, she’d missed hitting him. And the pain…excruciating. Blinding. Help me, Lord, help me fight him off!
She arched her back, still fighting, still hoping for a chance to get one good kick to his shins or his damned crotch. But he was heavy and strong. All sinew and muscle and determination.
Agony tore through her.
Her legs buckled.
In the darkness she saw the floor rushing up at her and now could only hope that somewhere, someone had heard the shot.
Bam! Her head cracked against the new hardwood.
She nearly passed out from the pain.
He fell atop her and shifted his hands. Before she could scream his fingers were on her throat pressing harder and harder as he straddled her. Alarmed by the red eyes glinting with malice, she fought back, her hands flailing at him, scraping at the leather on his body. If he was going to kill her, by God, she wasn’t going to make it easy.
But her lungs were burning, shrieking for air, and the hands on her throat were tightening so that her eyes felt as if they might pop right out of her head.
She kicked and writhed frantically.
Her lungs were bursting with the pressure.
Blackness seeped into the edges of her vision.
No! No! No!
She tried to scream and failed, couldn’t even drag in a breath.
Oh, God, oh…God…
Her legs stopped moving.
Her arms were leaden.
The burning in her lungs was pure agony.
Let me die, God, please. End this torture!
He leaned down and in the fog that was overcoming her she saw his fangs. White. Shining. Needle-sharp.
She knew what was to come.
A quick puncture. A quick sharp nip of pain as his hands relaxed and she dragged air into her windpipe in a wet hiss.
But it was too late.
She knew she was going to die.
CHAPTER 14
“If you want to keep them for the full day, they’re due back tomorrow at”—the clerk in the camouflage T and dusty jeans looked at the clock hanging over the door of the Rent-It-All store—“nine-thirty-six, but I’ll give y’all till ten.” Winking at Kristi, he offered her a gap-toothed smile that showed flecks of tobacco. She tried not to notice.
“Kind of you,” she said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. He was, after all, just a kid.
About eighteen years old, “Randy” as the name pinned to his shirt claimed, was gangly and fighting a case of raging acne, but still tried to flirt with her. Kristi smiled back. At least he’d helped her locate the right kind of bolt cutters she needed in this dusty warehouse full of equipment and would be do-it-yourselfers. “That’ll be thirty bucks.”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am. Them things ain’t cheap.”
Talk about highway robbery. Sure they were the expensive ones, but really, how much could they cost brand new? “Great,” she said with an undertone of sarcasm.
“So what did ya do?” Randy asked, adjusting his trucker’s hat and trying a little too hard to be friendly. “Forget your locker combination?”
Yeah, that’s me, just a dumb woman with a bad memory. “Something like that,” she said, then handed him two twenties, waited for her change, and declined his help in carrying out the long-handled tool. “Thanks, I got it,” she said, slipping the ten into her wallet and the strap of her purse over her shoulder.
“Now, if them there cutters don’t work fer ya, y’know, because y’all are a woman and they’re meant for a man, then you might want to rent a hacksaw or a sawzall.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “That’d do the trick.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, silently bristling. It wasn’t as if she were some tiny little frail stupid thing, for God’s sake, but she kept her sharp tongue in check as she hauled the bolt cutters outside. At eighteen, she’d hadn’t exactly been an Einstein either, and there was just no reason to get into it with the clerk.
She’d considered asking Jay to help her with her new project. She suspected he might own a pair of bolt cutters which could have saved her the thirty bucks, but she wanted to limit his involvement. First of all, he was misinterpreting her interest in him. He seemed to think she was angling to date him and that was not what she’d intended. So it was a good thing to keep him at a distance. He’d ask too many questions and what she was doing was bordering on illegal. As it was, he’d be in plenty of hot water if he was caught getting the information she wanted from the school and police records. If he even did that much for her. She wasn’t certain that he’d cross that line and so she hadn’t shared everything Lucretia had told her about vampires and cults. It was hard enough to get Jay on board without getting into the surreal, goth stuff.
Besides, she told herself as her running shoes crunched in the gravel of the Rent-It-All parking lot littered with battered pickups and a couple of monster trucks, some things were for her to do by herself. And breaking into the storage unit holding Tara Atwater’s personal things was one, despite what Randy, the eighteen-year-old expert, thought. She slid behind the wheel and started the car. Dust had settled over the windshield and the interior of the car was warm, the sun visible through high, thick clouds. Kristi found a pair of sunglasses in her glove box and slid them onto her nose. She backed out of her parking space, trying and failing to avoid potholes in the dirty gravel. She passed a jacked-up truck covered in mud, where a man lit a cigarette as he packed a chainsaw in the back.
“Idiot,” she muttered under her breath, then eased her Honda onto the side road and headed for the freeway that cut north from this section of low-slung, commercial buildings on the southeast part of town toward the All Saints campus.
Her plan was only partially formed, but she was rolling with it. Having Tara’s things tucked away in the basement of the house she was renting was a godsend. She’d turn everything over to the police for evidence, of course, but until they were interested, she figured whatever was in the storage unit was fair game. She’d already found out the type and make of the combination lock Irene Calloway had used to secure Tara’s things, then had spent two hours going to three different hardware stores before she’d found a lock that appeared the same.
Now she was ready.
A huge Suburb
an passed her covered in LSU stickers. A tiger fan, she thought with a faint smile. Kristi considered Louisiana State with its huge student body in Baton Rouge. Wouldn’t a larger campus make for a wider, less-noticeable hunting ground? Why girls at All Saints?
Because whoever is doing this is comfortable there. He’s either a student, a member of the faculty, or an alumni. LSU or another campus is unfamiliar. Whoever is doing this is intrinsically connected to the college, knows how to get around, has hiding places, blends in.
She felt a little frisson of fear slide down her spine. She was convinced that there was a monster stalking the ivy-clad brick buildings of All Saints, a psycho who had, so far, gotten away with his horrendous deeds.
“Not for long, bastard,” she said, and glanced down at the speedometer. She was flying, driving nearly twenty miles over the posted limit. She eased off the throttle and glanced in her rearview mirror, certain she would see flashing red and blue lights, but no highway trooper was following her. This time, she’d gotten lucky. Good. She couldn’t afford a ticket.
She took the exit closest to the campus and wound through the side streets, then parked in her usual spot near the staircase leading to her unit. Rather than head upstairs, she found the door leading to the basement laundry and storage facilities and unlocked it with one of the original keys she’d gotten from Irene Calloway. The stairs leading downward were dark and creaky, the walls made of ancient cement, the few windows small and grimy and shrouded with cobwebs, their thin threads littered with the drained, brittle carcasses of dead insects.
“Lovely,” she said as she turned a precarious corner. Three steps later she was in the bowels of the building. At least the basement was dry. There were stains on the walls indicating that water had at one time or another seeped through old cracks, and areas where an attempt had been made to patch the damage with little or no success.
On one wall two washers were already churning, and one of the dryers was spinning and heating, something inside its drum clanging with each rotation. Kristi didn’t dare try to break into the storage cage now, when someone might catch her. She didn’t want to explain herself. She planned to wait until the middle of the night and bring down a couple of boxes, though the thought of being here in the dark, with only a few sparse overhead lights, was nerve-wracking.
She left the basement, climbed up to her apartment and grabbed her laptop. She had a few hours before her shift started at the diner, so she planned to work at the local coffee spot where she could connect wirelessly to the Internet and listen to the buzz of conversation. She’d already figured out that Bayou Coffee, on the far side of the campus near Wagner House, was the most popular with the All Saints students. She slid her computer into her backpack, snapped her hair into a top knot, and pulled on a baseball cap, then took off.
From her door to the coffee shop’s took twenty minutes and, as luck would have it, two Asian students were leaving a small table near the window. Kristi snagged it, dropping her backpack onto one of the wooden seats, then stood in line to order a vanilla latte and a raspberry scone. As an espresso machine shrieked and steam rose over the groups of patrons, Kristi waited for her drink and surveyed the crowd. She recognized a few kids either from class or just running into them in the student union, library, or walking across campus.
Thankfully, no one turned gray before her eyes.
She was just picking up her order when the door opened and a tall, leggy girl with straight brown hair that fell halfway down her back walked inside. She looked familiar and Kristi placed her as someone in her classes who usually sat near Ariel O’Toole. The girl studied the tables as if searching for someone.
“Hey,” Kristi said as she passed the girl. God, what was her name. Zinnia? Zahara? Something with a Z…
“Oh, hi,” the girl looked like she was having trouble placing Kristi.
“Zena, right? You’re a friend of Ariel’s?”
“Oh…yeah?”
“I’m Kristi, you’re in a couple of my classes. Grotto’s vampyrism and Preston’s writing.”
“Huh…” Zena said without a hint of enthusiasm, and Kristi could tell that the girl still wasn’t connecting the dots, which may have been just as well.
“Have you seen Lucretia?”
“Stevens? Oh, uh, not since last week, I think. I’ve been kinda busy getting ready for the play.”
“You’re in the drama department,” Kristi guessed, and the girl visibly brightened.
“Yeah.”
“With Father Mathias?”
“Uh-huh. I’m not really into the morality play thing, but hey, it’s a start. He promised me if I did well, I would be considered for something deeper. I think they’re doing Tennessee Williams in the spring. A Streetcar Named Desire maybe, and I’d love to play Blanche DuBois.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Kristi said, though she had no interest in anything remotely to do with acting or being on stage. “So what’s with the morality plays?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a lift of one shoulder as she eyed the oversized menu of coffee drinks suspended over the baristas’ heads. “Just Father’s thing, I guess.” She stepped up to the counter and ordered a chai-tea latte and a muffin.
Kristi could tell Zena wasn’t interested in more conversation, so she walked back to her table and opened her computer. With one eye on the screen and the other on Zena, she picked at her scone.
Before Zena’s order was up, the door opened and Trudie arrived. Her round face was red and she seemed breathless as she spied Zena. She hurried up behind her and gave her own order. Within five minutes the two friends had scoped out the busy shop and were hovering near a booth being vacated by two young mothers and their babies. One infant was contentedly sucking on a pacifier while the other one was making noises that indicated he was winding up for an out-and-out wail. His mother was working feverishly to strap him into his stroller and get him outside. Her friend, with the calmer boy, wasn’t as frantic, but the minute the women had wheeled their tiny charges away from the table, Trudie and Zena nabbed it and sat down.
Kristi strained to hear part of their conversation, but only picked up a few words. She made out “Glanzer.” As in Father Mathias Glanzer. And “morality.” Probably the play. Zena was all about the play. And then she thought she heard the word “sisters.” But nothing more.
Kristi decided she was lousy at eavesdropping and was about to leave when Lucretia, wearing a long black coat and five-inch heeled boots, swept through the side door. Already a tall woman, she was now well over six feet. Kristi considered confronting her ex-roommate. After all Lucretia had asked for her help, then had been avoiding her. But Kristi decided she’d wait and see what happened. Maybe Lucretia was meeting someone here. Her lover, or boyfriend, or fiancé or whatever? Or maybe she was just grabbing a cup of coffee on the run. Whatever the reason, Lucretia, never particularly cheery to begin with, was looking perturbed and frustrated, her features bordering on haggard. As she stood in line, she ran a hand through her curly hair and stared up at the menu as if she’d never read it before. Or as if she were lost in thought, a million miles away.
Kristi lowered her head to her laptop. Still wearing her baseball cap, her face partially hidden by the computer screen, she thought she might avoid being detected.
No such luck.
Just then Lucretia glanced away from the menu, zeroing in on Kristi. “You!” Lucretia gave up her position in line to stalk across the tiled floor, nearly knocking over the cart holding a display of Christmas mugs and coffees that were marked down to half price. The cups with Santa and Frosty on them wobbled and Lucretia righted them in time. “Are you following me?” Lucretia demanded.
“What? No. I’ve been here for half an hour.”
“You’re sure?” Lucretia asked, glancing over at Trudie and Zena who, engrossed in their own conversation, hadn’t yet noticed her.
“Pretty sure,” Kristi said dryly, more than a little annoyed. “I have called though. Left you
two messages.”
“I know, I know. I—I’ve been busy. Look—” She placed her hands on the table in front of Kristi’s computer and leaned closer. “I made a mistake.” Her voice was a sharp, nearly inaudible whisper. “About those girls.”
“You mean Tara and—”
“Yes, yes!” she said emphatically. Her throat moved, as if she were swallowing hard. “I should never have told you about…about everything. I was wrong. Okay? I’m sure that all of the missing students will turn up eventually. When they want to. After all, they were all known runaways.”
“But you said that you knew them, they were your friends—”
“Not my friends,” she bit back. “I said I knew of them. And now I’m telling you I was wrong. So…just forget it. I made a mistake. You lived with a cop for a father. You know how they are. If there was really something criminal going on, the police would be all over it, so just drop it, okay? And…don’t call me anymore.”
“Are you all right?” Kristi asked.
Lucretia blinked. “Of course. Why?”
“You look pale.”
“Oh, God.” Lucretia gulped and stared at Kristi as if she’d seen a ghost. “So, what? Are you going to tell me I’m in danger? Like Ariel? She told me, y’know. Thinks you’re a flippin’ head case. What the hell is that all about?”
Inwardly, Kristi cringed. She knew she should have never confided in Ariel, figured it would come back to bite her. “Obviously, you and Ariel are close.”
“She knows you were my roommate, for Pete’s sake. I introduced you, remember? And then you act all weird. As if she’s in black and white.”
“Sometimes, I…” Oh, what was the use? How could she explain that there were times when people appeared colorless, as if they were drained of blood.
Drained of blood…
Kristi’s heart thudded uncomfortably as she made the connection to the vampire cult. But that wasn’t certain…no, the woman on the bus who had died hadn’t been in Grotto’s class. “It’s just a strange thing that I see.”