“Right. Charles, then, and you can call me Tori. Now that we’re good friends, what do you want?”
Charles smiled at her, but his eyes remained intent. “Very direct. Good. I represent a small group that takes special interest in cases like yours.”
“So, what … like a lawyer?”
“No, we’re not lawyers. We’re a private company that does not frequently contact people who are not already aware of us. In this instance, we deemed it both necessary and prudent.”
“What type of company, exactly?”
“My employers value my discretion. I think you will come to value it as well.”
“I’m not interested in discretion. What I’m interested in is leaving. Since you’re the one who stopped me, and not the other way around, why don’t you cut to the chase and just tell me what you want?”
“We believe we can help you with the problems you are most certainly going to run into while you investigate this tragedy.”
“I see. So you’re a private detective, or a vigilante, or just some nutbag who thinks it’s a good idea to sell me his services on the day of my parents’ funeral. Thanks, Charles, that’s great. Not interested.”
“I am none of those things,” Charles said. His expression was amused, not at all perturbed by Tori’s anger or lack of tact.
Tori considered this for a moment, then shrugged, opening her car door. “Fine, you’re not. This is the part where I drive away. It was lovely meeting you. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“Stop, Tori.”
“No thanks.”
Charles put a hand on her door and held it open, looking down at her.
“If I tell you who we are, will you stop behaving like this and listen to what I have to say?”
“I don’t care who you are,” Tori said. She wondered if she were to use her strength to jerk the door shut, whether this man would let go or have his fingers crushed. She was about to try it, and he seemed to sense this. Charles took his hand from the door, smiled, and spoke in a low voice.
“I represent the Children of the Sun, Tori,” he said. “We kill vampires. Vampires like the ones that murdered your parents.”
He’s trying to get a reaction out of me, Tori thought and then, on the heels of that: Well, it worked.
She could feel her pulse racing. Her entire body seemed charged with electricity, rigid, unable to move. Tori sat in her car, hands welded to the steering wheel, trying to gain control of herself. Charles let her take her time.
Finally, when she was able to breathe again, she croaked out a few words.
“What did you say?”
“By your reaction, I’d say you heard me clearly, and understand very well that I speak in the utmost seriousness. I’ll not repeat myself, not out here in public, not even in the light of day.”
Tori was silent, trying to digest this piece of news which seemed to confirm the things that she had only begun to guess at. Vampires like the ones that murdered your parents, Charles had said. Yes, that seemed to be the case, and Tori had a good idea why. In December of the previous year, a vampire god had been killed, and Tori had played an active role in that murder. She had always feared retribution, but had never thought that her parents might be targets.
“How do you know?” she asked after a time.
“We know many things, Tori. We know about Abraham, for example. We know how he lived, and how he died. We know that at least one of his children remains unaccounted for.”
Tori felt a chill run through her. “If you know anything about me, you can guess that I’m not exactly a fan of people who kill vam—people in your profession.”
“If you knew more about yourself, and about what has happened to you, you might be fonder of us.”
“I didn’t have much opportunity to learn.”
“We may be able to fix that.”
“So you’re not here to kill me?” Tori asked.
Charles gave a small chuckle. “Good Lord, no. We don’t kill humans.”
“I’m not like other humans.”
“No? Perhaps not, but you are one of us nonetheless, and none of my people would raise a finger against you. We’re quite interested, however, in learning your story. Perhaps one day you will tell it to me.”
“Maybe.”
Charles smiled at her, but now his hawkish eyes glittered. “This is neither the time nor the place to enter into that particular discussion. I am only here as an emissary, Tori. The Children would like to help you, if you’ll let us.”
“So what’s next, then?”
“We should meet somewhere less public than this parking lot. Perhaps your parents’ former house, if it’s not too painful for you?”
“It’s possible. I need to think about this.”
“Take your time, but I must warn you that you are in danger.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Of that I have no doubt, Tori, but you’ve seen the brutality that these things are capable of. If they come at you in numbers, you may find them a match even for your talents.”
Tori considered this. “OK. Fine. How do I contact you?”
Charles handed her a card, and for one absurd moment Tori wondered if it actually read “Vampire Hunter.” She glanced down at it, then back up at Charles, whose amused expression told her he’d understood what she was thinking. The card contained nothing more than a phone number.
“Call that,” he said. “Whenever you are ready to talk, someone will be there to answer.”
Tori looked at him for a moment, frowning. “How much danger am I in?”
“I cannot say for sure. The things that did this are not stupid; I do not think the stupid ones would care about your transgressions. It is likely that they will wait for a time before carrying out any further action against you. How long that will be is anyone’s guess.”
“I’ll risk it.”
Tori could feel something building inside of her, a storm of such intensity that it frightened her, made her wonder what she might do if it was let loose. She needed to be away. Away from Charles, away from other people, away from the world. She would go back to her motel, lock herself in, and crawl into the bottle.
“I look forward to hearing from you, then,” Charles told her. “It was a pleasure meeting you, and I’m sorry it had to happen under such grievous circumstances.”
“You and me both. Goodbye, Charles.”
“Take care.”
In her rearview mirror, Tori could see Charles watching her go. He held his hand up once, just before she turned, and then he was lost from view. Tori drove on in silence, going over what he had said again and again in her mind, picturing how it must have happened, the way the vampires must have treated her parents. Inside her, the dark storm grew.
* * *
Angry. Violent. Drunk. Tori lay in the corner, naked except for a pair of panties, where she had fallen when she had lost her balance while tearing around the motel room. She had thrown a lamp into this corner earlier, and her landing had shattered the porcelain base. Picking the tiny shards from her skin, struggling to make her fingers obey her brain through the alcohol haze, had done little to improve her mood. Her arms and legs and body were now dotted with small drops of blood.
Her hands were soaked slick with the substance, making it hard to hold on to the heavy bottle as she raised it to her lips and drank. The liquid inside was select silver tequila, 100 proof, and the bottle held a liter and a half of it. Tori had made it about two thirds of the way through.
She swallowed, rubbed her mouth on her arm, lay back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes were far away, her mind trapped back in the home she had shared with her parents, imagining their last moments, events she had not been able to prevent.
Vampires had butchered them like cattle, for crimes they had not even known about, much less committed. Vampires had murdered her parents and left Tori alive to bear witness to the atrocity. Soon, she thought, they would come for her,
but not until she had been made to bear all of the pain and loss they had caused her.
Tori wanted to mutilate, desecrate, destroy. She wanted to find the creatures responsible for her parents’ deaths and pull their eyes from their sockets, tear their limbs off, gnaw the skin from their bodies. She wanted to bathe in their blood and listen to their screams of mercy before casting them, still writhing and very much alive, upon their pyre. Tori swigged from the bottle again. The world spun.
Anger whipsawed to grief as she thought of her parents again, recalling the expression of desperation on her father’s face. Tori let out a sound somewhere between a scream and a sob, felt hot tears stinging at her eyes, and drove her left hand hard into the mound of porcelain shards lying on the carpet. Tiny daggers drove into her flesh, piercing and slashing, and Tori barely felt them. She swigged from the bottle again.
Her hand was bleeding anew, pieces of the lamp sticking helter-skelter out from it in all directions. The blood pooled in the cracks between her fingers and dripped to the floor, staining the carpet. Tori upended the bottle over her hand, liquor cascaded down to hit her flesh, and her hand became a white-hot ball of fire. Here, at last, was something she could feel. Tori hissed through her teeth, grimacing, holding her hand out in front of her, willing herself to contemplate the pain.
She was going to find the things that had killed her parents and subject them to pain like this, only on so much larger a scale. The pain in her hand was only the smallest taste of the agony she was planning for them.
Tori continued to use the bottle, alternating between hand and mouth, and after a time the pain began to drift away. With it went Tori’s vision; she was blacking out, and was happy for it. She had consumed enough alcohol to kill a normal human being, all in the hope that she might be given this chance to sleep, this chance to forget – if only for a small while – that look in her father’s eyes. At last her wish was being granted.
The bottle fell from the numb fingers of her right hand, hit her leg and flopped to the carpet, the remainder of its contents sloshing out onto the floor. Tori’s head lolled back. She slumped against the wall and slept.
* * *
In the morning, things had improved. The storm of the night before had passed, though a cloud of rage and hatred still loomed over her. Physically, it was as if the previous night had never happened. This was the first time Tori had done major damage to any part of her body since Two had saved her. She was startled by how quickly the lacerations on her hand had healed.
I’m still mostly vampire, she thought, looking at herself in the mirror. Her arms, face, breasts, and belly were smeared with tequila and blood, but even the deepest gashes on her hand had faded completely. The alcohol itself had left only a very minor headache, which Tori knew would fade after a glass of water and a shower. She was fine.
The motel, on the other hand, was a mess. Shards of porcelain littered the carpet, accompanied by tacky spots of dried blood. There was a hole in the wall that she couldn’t remember making but knew hadn’t been there when she had arrived. Tori didn’t care. She would deal with the bill when it came.
She showered, rinsing away the evidence of the previous night’s masochism, thinking about the pain she had felt in her hand and the pain she would bring to her enemies.
“How can you trust him?” she asked the empty bathroom, filled with swirling steam and the sound of rushing water.
“You can’t, but it’s not like what he’s saying is really surprising,” her own voice answered back.
This was true. She could not trust this random stranger claiming to represent a group of vampire hunters, at least not without learning more about him and his organization, but she didn’t need trust to see that he was telling the truth. Throats torn out, wrists slashed; the murders had been about blood.
Some small part of Tori’s mind, perhaps the part not yet fully dominated by anger, thought that she should call Two again. There was no one else on earth who could understand Tori’s situation, no one who would be able to give better advice, and Tori allowed herself to consider the option for a few brief moments before shutting it out. No, Two was safe in New York. Better to not involve her. Impetuous, instinct-driven – Two would come flying out to Ohio within hours, no matter what Tori asked her to do.
I can handle this on my own, Tori thought with a touch of bitterness. Two had left her here in Ohio and, for better or worse, gone back to New York. There was no sense in involving her now.
Tori stepped out of the shower and dried herself off, brushed her teeth, performed the other tasks that went with her morning shower. She left the bathroom naked and dressed quickly. She fished the card Charles had given her from the pocket of her jeans, picked up the phone, dialed the numbers.
The first ring had barely begun when her call was answered. The voice at the other end of the line was not Charles, and the words were not a typical greeting.
“Please speak only to answer my questions. Our representative mentioned a potential meeting place to you yesterday. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, I … yes,” Tori said.
“Do you find it acceptable?”
“Yes.”
“Be there at noon today.”
“I will.”
“We look forward to working with you.”
There was a click, and the line went dead. Tori looked at the phone, shrugged, and hung up. Yeah, sure … I look forward to working with you, too.
Of course, she hadn’t made that decision yet. She would meet with Charles, yes, but that was no guarantee that she would accept his offer for help. She wanted more time and a lot more information before making any kind of decision.
It was already eleven thirty, and her parents’ house was miles away. Tori took her purse, shut off the light, and walked out the door. She left her belongings behind, expecting to return that evening. She would never see any of them again.
* * *
Charles was waiting in the driveway when Tori arrived, standing beside a muted grey Mercedes. Getting out, Tori glanced at her own car, a used economy import, and raised an eyebrow.
“Guess your business is pretty profitable?”
“It has its perks. Hello, Tori.”
“Hello, Charles.”
“I trust you’re feeling better than you were yesterday?”
“Maybe. Still far from good. I have a lot of questions.”
Tori unlocked the front door and held it open, but Charles gestured, indicating she should go first. Tori shrugged and went ahead.
“I will do my best to answer them,” Charles said, following her into the house.
“Good. Question one: now that you have me somewhere private, is this the part where you try to club me over the head or something?”
“Heavens, no.”
“OK.” Tori made her way to the kitchen with some trepidation, but found herself feeling strangely detached. The house had been cleaned once the police investigation was through, and it now seemed more like a place she had seen in a movie, or visited in a previous life.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she called, filling the coffee pot with water and watching her guest through the doorway that separated the living room from the kitchen.
Charles was looking at the pictures hung on the wall. “What are you having?”
“I’m making coffee. I think we’ll be here a while, don’t you?”
“I do indeed. Coffee would be very nice.”
“Fine,” Tori said. “Who killed my parents, Charles?”
Charles settled down on the living room couch and looked at her through the doorway, a small smile on his face.
“Still direct, I see. Very well. If I knew the exact names of the vampires in question, I would be happy to give them to you. I do not. To the best of my knowledge, there are none living in the vicinity of Lima. The ones that did this must have come from somewhere else. New York, most likely. That is where their council is located.”
“There’s a vampire
council?”
“I’m surprised you’re not aware of it, actually. Abraham sat at its head until his death.”
The electric coffee-maker began to bubble and hiss. Tori stepped back into the living room and sat down in a recliner. “How much do you know about my time with Abraham?”
“The only thing we know for sure is that you spent more than a decade at his mansion. Our sources have told us that you were a vampire, once, but I can see with my own eyes that you are not anymore. We were hoping you might be able to shed further light on what exactly happened to Abraham and to his children.”
Tori pursed her lips, considering this. Charles sat on the couch, legs crossed, hands folded neatly in his lap. He let her take her time, not anxious. His calm demeanor reminded her of Theroen.
“Not just now, Charles. I’m going to hold off on telling any stories for a bit.”
“That is fine.”
“Are you sure it’s a group of vampires that killed my parents, and not just one?”
“The forensics work that the police have done indicates that … forgive me, Tori, but this is somewhat graphic. Can I speak plainly?”
Tori made a motion with her hand. Go ahead.
“The work shows that your father was held by his shoulders for a substantial period of time, and that he experienced heavy bruising in that area. The police believe he was struggling so much because he was forced to watch the murder of your mother. This would indicate at least two assailants, likely more.”
Tori grimaced, her mouth suddenly bitter. She swallowed once, took a deep breath, and nodded. “OK.”
“I am sorry for your pain. The Children share my sympathy.”
“Thank you. Tell me about the Children of the Sun.”
“We are an order that dates back nearly six hundred years. Our origins are Incan, though obviously we’ve expanded our ranks.”
“Obviously, since you’re white-bread British.”
The corner of Charles’s lip raised momentarily in a slight smirk. He continued.
“We were initially an order of Incan warrior-priests, formed and trained to deal with the Ngembe plague.”
The II AM Trilogy Collection Page 34