A Drop of Red

by Chris Marie Green

  “Even your recommendation can’t bring me over to the wine side.” Dawn took off her jacket, tossed it on a chaise longue, then leaned on the tiled kitchen counter. “I’ll just grab some bubbly water in a second, if it’s all the same.”

  Eva smiled at Dawn and turned the faucet back on. “Frank, I suppose I don’t have to ask if you want anything.”

  Whether it had been some kind of reminder that she supplied him with blood or if it had just been a comment, Dawn wasn’t sure. At any rate, her dad kicked around some more and glanced at the window.

  Sigh.

  Well, this was so much more fun than Dawn had anticipated.

  She reached for a plate of cheese and plucked off a chunk of what she hoped was smoked Gouda. Popping it into her mouth, she gave it a taste-drive.

  “Good stuff,” she said, then swallowed.

  Frank took a step. “What have you been up to, Eva?”

  Her mom turned off the water, putting some cut carrots on a paper towel to dry. “I took an organized walking tour today that Kiko recommended. Up in Hampstead.”

  “Really?” Dawn asked. Until now, Eva hadn’t taken the initiative. “That’s great. I heard Hampstead is swank.”

  Her mom laughed softly. “It was funny, seeing the village from the point of view of ‘Mia Scott,’ regular citizen, the ‘new me.’ A lifetime ago, a Realtor almost talked me into buying property there, even though I’d never seen it before.”

  Her smile waned and she went back to the vegetables.

  Remorse scratched at Dawn, and as silly as it was, she wished that Eva could’ve stayed perfect, rich, and forever twenty-three. She’d seemed much happier then, even though Dawn had literally wanted to kill her.

  A sound, like rapping on the window, made Dawn turn around. Instinctively, she flicked her wrist upward and aimed her holy water bracelet at the glass.

  No need.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Frank said, going to the window.

  Even though there was nothing to see, Dawn lowered her wrist. Breisi had no doubt woken up.

  Eva tore celery from its stalk and transferred each piece to the cutting board for trimming. “I can set a place for Breisi, too, Frank.”

  It wasn’t sarcasm, just a resigned half joke, and Dawn went over to the window, hoping Frank wasn’t thinking of opening it and letting his girlfriend in. The freak-in-love expression on his face told her it was a distinct possibility.

  Breisi knocked again, not with any kind of spiritual fist, but as if she were exerting pressure against the glass with her entire essence.

  Frank grew serious. “I think she wants to talk to us, but the glass is too thick.”

  He waited, yet there was no more knocking.

  “I think she left,” he said.

  Dawn went to the door. “Tell me she’s not coming up here.”

  All the while, Eva chopped at the celery.

  Just as Dawn was about to turn the knob—she had to get to the bottom of the stairs to tell Breisi that Frank hadn’t wanted to come here in the first place and this situation was all Dawn’s fault—a more emphatic pounding rattled the door.

  It sounded like an actual fist.

  “Frank?” Dawn said.

  “I’m here,” he said, at her back.

  Eva’s chopping suspended.

  Just as Dawn heard a raised voice beyond the wood, her dad sniffed the air, trying to catch an identifying scent through the herbs from the meal.

  More urgent knocking.

  Her phone rang.

  She checked the ID screen and her blood pressure fell to a series of relieved bumps.

  “Unbelievable,” she said, opening the door to reveal the last people she’d been expecting to show up for dinner.

  Kiko and Natalia.

  He had his phone to his ear, and both of them weren’t wearing coats. Both of them were also breathing hard, as if they’d just burst out of the Limpet house and run on over.

  “Dawn,” Natalia said, “I had a vision, but Kiko—”

  Shoving his phone into a cargo-pants pocket, he stepped in front of the new girl, cutting her off, his blue eyes feverish.

  “I had a vision about some cemetery,” he said, “and we’ve got to chase it down now!”

  “You saw something?” Dawn asked, overjoyed that Kick-Ass Kiko was back.

  “Yes!”

  She beat her emotions into smoothness. A vision. A lead . . .

  “What did you see? Where? And why aren’t you online researching which cemetery it is while you called me on the cell phone instead of freakin’ running over here like morons?”

  “I was excited!” Kiko said, raising his fists in the air.

  Natalia looked embarrassed. “He ran out the door to tell you, and I . . .” She frowned. “I really don’t know why I ran, too.”

  Kiko pointed his index fingers, assuming the internationally known “I’m number one” sign. “You ran over here with me because you’ve already won over the boss and now you’re working on Dawn, brownnoser.”

  His eyes seemed bright as he addressed Dawn now. “After Natalia finally drug her caboose out of bed, we had . . . I suppose you could say we had a lively discussion about vamps and visions, blahblahblah. We were both touching dirt from Billiter in a sample dish—”

  “He wanted it for a psychometric reading and I wanted it to see if listening to it might help at all,” Natalia interrupted.

  “—when BLAMO! It just happened. I saw a cemetery with black gates in front of a pinkish metal gatehouse. Then a grave that looked like a boxed garden with a burning glass lantern.”

  Natalia kept her cool, even though it looked like the poppy she’d been wearing ever since Dawn had met her had been shoved into her curls. “I believe my own vision is from the same cemetery with the pink building. But I saw a different grave. Near a sign that read ‘five,’ and marked by a Celtic cross.”

  Dawn’s heart rate picked up. “You guys really had competing visions.”

  They nodded.

  Find this cemetery, go go go—

  Dawn dashed to the chaise longue to grab her jacket, hoping like hell that Kiko wasn’t doing something pathetic like making up a similar vision to Natalia’s just to compensate.

  But he wouldn’t do that. Kiko had been too good a psychic. And he still could be, if this lead paid off.

  “Eva, I’m really sorry about this,” she said on the way back to the door. “Rain check for later?”

  Her mother nodded, taking the vegetable plate over to the dinner table, like she was going to eat alone.

  Hating the sight, Dawn went to give her mom a hug. She sort of accomplished an awkward version of one, then followed Frank into the hall as he waved to Eva.

  As Dawn closed the door, she caught a glimpse of her mother striking a match and lighting a candle, illuminating the emptiness of the table she’d set for company.

  Illuminating the vacancy in her gaze, too.

  NINE

  THE HiGHGATE DiLEMMA

  MORNING peeked its way through a threat of rain while Dawn, Kiko, and Natalia stood in front of the black iron gates of eastern Highgate Cemetery—the location of the psychics’ visions.

  While they waited for this section to open, Dawn knew what was behind her without even glancing: a former chapel with arched windows like staring eyes that never looked away from the mist-slicked lane that divided the east and west graveyards. The building, which reminded her of a place where some governess might run around with a flickering candle while chasing down a ghost, served as the entrance to the western section, but it was closed, only open to those who had arranged a tour.

  The Web site had posted an opening time for the east side of 11:00 AM on Saturdays. But Kiko, who was on fire to get going, had suggested that they sneak in last night. Needless to say, Dawn had talked him down, refusing to stir any shit.

  “The biggest urgency is your ego,” she’d told him. “And Highgate’s dealt with too much vandalism in the past to be low
profile, so we’re going to wait until everything’s kosher.”

  Yet she’d known how to use their resources, and after the team had cyberidentified eastern Highgate as the location of the visions, they’d sent a few Friends there. As expected, the spirits had pin-pointed the graves in question while the team itself had gone with this promising lead, rescheduling all Kate-contact appointments and, instead, putting their efforts into finding out everything they could about the cemetery.

  However, for the Friends, Highgate had been too dark to make out fine details, like names or dates, on the stones. So this necessitated a team visit come morning, when they would be able to see the graves up close and personal while Kiko attempted touch readings and Natalia listened for voices.

  For the rest of the night, they’d researched, pushing back a second visit to the Billiter burial ground for Natalia to catch more possible chatter. They didn’t even get to go to the coroner’s so she could listen there, because an appointment had never come through.

  They did have enough time to take Natalia to the right-sided-heart boy in the lab fridge/freezer though. But just as Costin had surmised, she wasn’t able to hear anything from him, probably because she’d looked like all she wanted to do was run from a corpse with stitches and ice dusting its skin.

  Around then, sunrise had broken, and Costin and Frank had retreated to their dark beds, leaving the humans to nap and then strike out for Highgate.

  Now, Dawn blew out a smoke-warmed breath, holding back a shudder at the oppressive creepiness weaving through the trees and bushes beyond the eastern gates. Kiko, Natalia, and even the Friends who were with them had noted it, too. The new girl had even said something about an “uncomfortable hollowness” the second they’d emerged from the tube stop down the hill.

  Kiko checked his watch for the umpteenth time, the brim of his black baseball cap pulled low as mist spangled it.

  “Five ’til eleven,” he said, glaring at the closed gates. Breisi and a couple Friends were inside right now, just to check things out, and he kept anticipating their return.

  Natalia was pacing, one hand stuffed in her red coat pocket, the other holding a closed plaid umbrella. There were bags under her eyes.

  As she passed, Dawn could tell she was still tuned in to whatever they were feeling around here.

  The other girl turned around and paced toward Dawn again, then stopped in front of her. “I can’t help dwelling on what we read. About the Highgate Vampire?”

  “Don’t dwell.” Dawn rubbed her bare, mist-clammy hands together, then shoved them into one of many pockets in her long black rain jacket. Normally, she would remind Natalia that they shouldn’t talk loudly about vampires in the open, but since this particular one was a big part of the Highgate Cemetery’s mystique, it wouldn’t be out of line for some random tourists—like they were pretending to be—to mention it here.

  “What if the stories are true?” Natalia added.

  Her other concerns went unsaid. What if the Underground vampires tied in with this legend of the one at Highgate? The fact that both psychics had gotten readings from this cemetery had to be significant to their hunt.

  “From our pamphlets,” Dawn said, playing the part of a tourist to the hilt, “we know that most activity was in the nineteen sixties and seventies. A lot of people”—such as Costin, who’d studied the Highgate Vampire in the past—“think this story’s just a case of legend tripping. So don’t worry.”

  Natalia didn’t seem so sure, even though Costin had explained “legend tripping” last night. It was a sociological thing where thrill seekers gathered at notoriously scary spots to drink, drug it up, screw, and prove their courage to the opposite sex. Based on his experiences, he believed the Highgate Vampire was a good example of how humans tended to use the paranormal to entertain themselves, not to look deeper at what might lie beneath their very streets.

  “And what about the rumors of black magic?” Natalia asked.

  “Okay, those are real.” Their documents said that there’d been mutilated animals on the premises and evidence of vandalism indicative of rituals. “But that would probably be from human activity.”

  “It’s only . . .” The second psychic glanced at the daunting gates, then shivered. “This cemetery is not as peaceful as most are for me.”

  Dawn followed Natalia’s gaze. Somewhere back in her overactive imagination, she expected to find a tall, dark, looming figure—one that might look perfectly at home among the houses of the dead.

  She leaned toward Natalia so she could whisper, “What else has you on edge? Are you hearing voices?”

  “Distant murmuring.” She lowered her tone. “Most who are buried here are resting nicely. Most.”

  Dawn shrugged into her jacket, telling herself it was because she was cold.

  Kiko strode up to the gate, where he could get a better view of an elderly man who was moving around inside the pink-tinted gatehouse. The psychic tapped his toe and stared at him, as if that would do anything but tick him off and make him lollygag some more.

  “Dawn?” Natalia asked, her voice still low. “I have been wondering. . . . There seem to be different types of vampires in our . . . travel literature. Good ones and bad. I thought they were all bad, except in movies and romance books.”

  Yeah, Dawn had thought so, too.

  So how did a person explain the difference? Especially when that person didn’t really even understand the distinction herself, what with having a fanged father who was way better than he’d ever been when she’d known him as a human, and a sort-of boy-friend who was a vamp bent on saving the world.

  And especially not when she’d felt so good being one of the bad guys for a short while, too.

  Dawn wished the gates would just open. But . . . no luck.

  “My best explanation,” she said, knowing she’d have to answer sometime, “would be that maybe it’s in how a creature reacts to what’s taken them over. Like ‘the Force,’ you know? It could be that some vamps use it for the dark side and others use it to redeem what needs redeeming.” Sounded pretty persuasive.

  “But,” Natalia responded, “it’s said that vampires have no souls. How can the loss of one result in any good?”

  Besides Costin and Frank, Dawn thought of how Eva had risked everything back in L.A., defying the Master so that she might save her daughter.

  Dawn tamped down a swell of emotion. No need for it now.

  “I read”—no, she knew—“that vampires are left with a conscience. A personality, really. They still have memories and longings, and I guess each creature deals differently. Some leave the past behind and dive into a whole new party existence, like they’ve gotten a chance to do everything they couldn’t do before, and there’s nothing to stop them now. Some just wish they could go back to what they used to have.”

  Natalia took that in, looking like she half believed the explanations and half didn’t. It reminded Dawn of something the girl had asked the night before last as she’d fallen asleep.

  “All these years and Costin has never written a book or gone on the telly to reveal the truth about vampires. Why?”

  The answer had been easy.

  “Because even though the world likes their scary stories, they’d never believe it,” Dawn had said. “Most of us really don’t want to acknowledge that there might be anything so close by as bad as what we’ve imagined, so we need our fantasies to keep it underground.”

  If they’d only stayed there.

  She also hadn’t added that Costin wasn’t crazy about the notion of having the public—and hence unsympathetic authorities—in his business, either. He’d be persecuted like any vampire, no matter whose side he was on.

  By the gates, Dawn heard Kiko say a “Yessss,” under his breath as the elderly man came out of the small house. Number One Psychic shifted from one foot to the other, then calmed down when the gatekeeper gave him a curious look as he opened the gate and retreated back to his pinkish dwelling.

  �
�Breisi?” Dawn asked. But it was really more of a command for the nearby Friends to return to them so they could get a move on.

  After a few seconds, a burst of jasmine whooshed by.

  “All clear,” Breisi said in her spirit voice as her pals hung back.

  Natalia exhaled and glanced around as they all went to the little window in the gatehouse and paid a few pounds each for the entrance fee. The man gave them an I’m-watching-you look before they sauntered away.

  Kiko had a bounce to his own walk as they scanned the ornate headstones and mausoleums flanked by rhododendron bushes, tulip and oak trees. There were also simple markers, wooden crosses where flowers like lilies and yellow roses kept vigil.

  Then there were the marble angels that sadly looked down upon them as the rain started to fall. One of them had a broken finger, and it seemed to point right at Dawn.

  She pulled up her hood while Natalia opened her umbrella.

  “Feel that?” Kiko asked, turning around like a compass needle searching for a place to point. “My grave’s close. Breisi, do you wanna take us there first?”

  But their Friend had already flown in a straight line up the black-top, where crowded, cracked gravestones tottered on slight hills. Ivy crept up the markers’ sides, just like the vines were clawing out of the ground to keep the stones there.

  Raindrops popped on Dawn’s hood. Otherwise, there was nothing. No activity.

  Just a sense of waiting . . .

  She shivered as she felt a tingle at the back of her neck, like long nails only an inch away from touching her.

  Turning around, she only saw the graves, trees, and the pink house in front of the gates, then the old chapel.

  “Breisi?” Kiko said as Dawn faced them again, her hand touching the silver throwing blades in one of her pockets.

  Their Friend’s voice wound through the rain. “We’re all feeling a pull to Natalia’s grave. Let’s go there first.”

  As the new girl followed Breisi’s voice, Kiko looked like he was going to order their Friends to see to his vision.

  But then he clenched his jaw, too proud to force them.