by J. R. Rain
She shook her head and I saw the smile reflected in the glass and I sort of lost it. Just sort of. I grabbed a shoulder and spun her around. When I spin someone, they spin. Big, small, in-between. And spin she did, nearly losing her balance.
“What are you doing, you freak?” she gasped, stumbling.
“This freak is trying to save your life.”
When she righted herself, her face was flushed with embarrassment and anger. No reason to be embarrassed. We were alone in the living room.
“I’m not embarrassed. I just don’t like being treated like a child.”
“You’re fourteen.”
“Exactly. I know what I’m doing.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve seen my vision. You’ve seen yourself being thrown out of a car and being...” I just couldn’t say it.
“Run over by a truck, Mom. Yeah, yeah, it’s all you’re thinking about this morning.”
“Who are those kids in the car?”
“I don’t know. I don’t recognize them.”
She was looking away from me. I still held her shoulder; she wasn’t going anywhere. “Are you lying to me?”
Now, she turned and looked at me and gave me a half smile laced with lots of snotty. Lots and lots of snotty. “No, of course not. Then again, you wouldn’t know if I were.”
“I have my ways, young lady.”
“Oh, you’re gonna snoop on me?”
“I’ll snoop if I have to.”
She took in a lot of air. My daughter was very much mortal and growing and blossoming and looking too cute for her own good. Her mind reading gave her false confidence. And I wished like crazy it would just go the hell away.
“Not false confidence, Mom. Real confidence. I know what people are thinking around me. I’ve gotten real good at it.”
“Mind reading won’t save you from that truck.”
She broke away from my grip, and crossed her arms under her chest and stuck out a hip. There was a chance she looked just like me. “That’s just the thing. I would never do that, Mom.”
“You would never do it sober.” And then it hit me. The look on her face just before the accident. The wild, jubilant, far-off look on her face. She wasn’t drunk. The others weren’t drunk. They were all on something.
“I don’t do drugs, Mom. It’s just a dream,” she said, and gave me a small grin and was about to leave, when I caught hold of her hand.
“Wait,” I said.
She sighed, already reading the question in my mind. “Yes, the fairies are real, Mom.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I talk to them. I hear them singing at night, and sometimes in the morning, and then, they are gone.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“Are they any less strange than vampires? Or werewolves? Or witches?”
“I... I don’t know.”
“They’re not, Mom. They’re real.”
“Have you seen them?”
She smiled and cocked her head. “Oh, yes.” And turned and left the living room.
Chapter Fifteen
“We found him there, up against the reeds, face down in the water.”
I was standing with Detective Hillary Oster on the southwest side of Lake Elsinore. A human-shape form lay under a stain-resistant white blanket. The stain-resistant part was probably a good thing, from what I was hearing.
“Called you as soon as we got the call,” said the detective. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. I had hit all kinds frustrating traffic coming out here from Orange County. I’d nearly summoned Talos and sprouted wings through the driver’s side and passenger windows, and flapped myself right out of the sea of brake lights. “Would have been more convenient if the body washed up earlier in the day.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” she said, but I detected emotion in her voice. She had grown to like the kids. And now, one of them was lying under a nearby blanket. That the shape only vaguely looked humanoid was troubling. At least, troubling to the sane, rational, loving person inside me. The bitch, on the other hand, was intrigued to no end. She said, “FBI is combing the area. So are my investigators. It’s a real clusterfuck. No one knows who’s in charge.”
“He’s missing his left leg,” I said.
“And most of his right arm. Half of his right side is gone, too.”
“Mind if I look,” I asked.
“You really want to?”
I was intrigued. Too intrigued. I called it professional curiosity. But I suspected it was something. A dark compulsion. I nodded.
Detective Oster stared at me, sweating in the heat of the late afternoon sun, wiped her brow, then nodded for me to follow her.
***
The body was as described... and then some.
With the detective holding up the blanket, I leaned down and studied the wounds, fighting like hell the excitement welling up within me. Was the excitement her excitement? Or mine?
I shook my head. It was hers. Always hers. It had better be. I refused to believe that the mangled corpse of a boy could excite me.
I’m losing it, I thought, as I studied the wound to his upper right arm. The flesh was loose, pale, supple, and cut clean through with what appeared to be many serrated edges.
“Teeth marks?” I asked.
Oster leaned down next to me, still holding the flap of the blanket. “Would be my guess.”
Damage to the boy’s hip was similar. The detective had already provided me a pair of latex gloves, and so I didn’t hesitate to reach down and lift away some of the tattered and sopping jeans. Most blood had washed away. Most blood had drained away, too. The hip socket had been torn free, and the expulsion of tendons and muscle might have been enough for most people to lose their lunch. Except I had the opposite reaction. My stomach growled. Worse, I’m pretty sure the detective heard it.
“I might, ah, vomit,” I said quickly.
“Not on the vic please.”
I nodded, made a show of swallowing, and said, “I’m good.”
The wound to his side—the very massive wound—was the most telling and the most perplexing. Although much of his side was missing, there was a very peculiar red ring around the perimeter of the wound. The serrated flesh was the same, indicative of teeth marks, but it was the red, dimpled flesh just outside the wound the held my fascination. I reached out and carefully ran my latexed finger over the indentations. Puncture marks, and just below these marks, the boy’s side had been completely bitten through.
“Had we been in the Everglades, this would have been a no-brainer,” said the detective.
“Alligator?” I said.
“Sure looks that way to me. Something took a bite of him. A few bites.”
I nodded. The thing I’d seen in Roy’s memory could have been an alligator. Long and cylindrical and missile-shaped. Yeah, maybe an alligator. Maybe.
I said, “What are the chances that, say, a rogue alligator is living in this lake?”
“A pet that got a little too big?”
“You hear about it all the time,” I said. “Some yahoo comes back with something that looks like a gecko lizard, only to discover that it’s eaten his cat. Rather than flushing it down the toilet, he drops it off here at the lake.”
Oster shook her head. As she did so, sweat spilled onto her roundish cop sunglasses and streaked down over the lens. She ignored it. A true professional. “It would have been spotted. Alligators surface, and sun themselves. They’re not exactly masters of camouflage.”
“And we’re sure it’s an animal attack?”
“The medical examiner might have a different theory, but those sure as shit look like bite marks to me.”
I nodded. They did to me, too. I continued examining the raw ring around the wound in his side. “Were his leg and arm found?”
She shook her head, and more of the sweat that had been building up at the bottom of her lens flung free. “Not yet.”
“Which boy is this?”
“Johnny.”
“He was the second to disappear?”
She nodded. “And no, we haven’t seen or heard from Luke.”
I stared down at the face that seemed peaceful and passive. Surely, he had been anything but peaceful and passive when whatever it was had come up on him. Had the boy been swimming in the lake, when something came up from underneath, Jaws-like? Or had he been fishing and caught something too big to haul in—something that had, in fact, pulled him into the lake? Except the boy had been missing for over a week now. I doubted he would be out swimming or fishing, not with the whole town looking for him and his friend.
“How long had he been in the water?”
“Hard to say, but my guess, not very long. Maybe since this morning. None of the critters had gotten to him.”
“Who found him?”
“A fisherman.”
“Statement?”
“He’s giving it to the feds now. From what I gathered, he’d found the body floating face down in the reeds.”
“Did he see anything else?”
“No.”
We were both silent, but I was picking up her thoughts. I was picking up the horror she felt. The fear she felt for her own kids. For the public at large. How she was going to break the news to Johnny’s mother that her son had been eaten alive. How she was going to convince her police chief to shut down the lake. How she was going to get through this without crying in front of me. But most predominant in her thoughts was finding Luke.
“How does a boy who’s been missing for a week, wind up in the lake, half-eaten?” I asked.
“Million-dollar question,” she said. “We’ve scoured the area. I have personally searched the entire perimeter of the lake a half-dozen times.”
“Maybe he was under the lake.”
“Trapped on something?”
“Maybe.”
She shook her head. “We hired divers. We used sonar. We covered likely spots, and checked out abnormalities in the lake. We didn’t find anything.”
“No lake monster, either?”
“Nothing. And certainly no twelve year-old boys.”
We both thought about that as a distant speedboat slapped the water and the sun beat down on a partially devoured boy.
Chapter Sixteen
I was waiting in my minivan for the sun to go down.
Lake Elsinore wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to live, or second or third. Not because of the heat or isolation, or even the high-crime rate. But because of the damn mountains.
Although having the sun dip behind the mountains hours before the actual sunset gave me some relief, it was a false relief. It was, quite frankly, confusing. My eyes told me it was dusk. But my internal clock told me not yet. And, of course, it wasn’t my internal clock, was it? It was my internal demon who knew all too well where the sun was in the sky.
In my book, when the sun disappeared behind anything, it was called sunset. Not in her book, though. Nope. Her rules dictated only when the sun disappeared beyond the horizon. Granted, it was a moving horizon. After all, when I was recently in New Orleans, I noted that my internal demon adjusted instantly to the geography. Apparently, there was no jet lag for the evil.
Now, with the shadows deepening around me, and the lake darkening in my rearview mirror, I waited in an apartment parking lot, on a slight hill. I waited to feel good, to feel strong, to feel more alive than I ever had before. At least, that’s how it always felt. With each sunset, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling this good, this strong, this free. That is, until the next sunset.
I waited for it now. Yearned for it. Hungered for it. I sat forward in my seat, gripped the steering wheel, closed my eyes and breathed and waited. It was as if I’d had all the sun I could handle, all the light I could manage, and another fucking second of it would drive me ape-shit.
C’mon, I thought. C’mon!
I released the steering wheel and shook my hands and breathed faster and faster, and hated the bitch inside me, hated her fear of the sun and light and anything happy and loving and real. I hated her control over me, her hold on me. Who the fuck was she to do this to me? Just who the fuck was she?
My head dropped, my chin pressed into my sternum, breathing, breathing, now wringing my hands, knowing that, to all the world, I might have looked like I was having a seizure. Which was why I stayed in the minivan. The windows were tinted, of course. After all, I often used the van for surveillance, too.
Her name had been Elizabeth—and maybe it still was. Then again, maybe she went by something new now. Like Zoran the Invincible. She had been the Librarian’s mother. And that’s about where her humanity had ended, as far as I knew. I hadn’t gotten the full scoop on her life on earth as a dark master. Or where, exactly, she’d been banished to—her and others like her. I also hadn’t gotten the full scoop on what went down and how it went down and how many good people had died in what must have been one hellacious battle of good versus evil.
She had fought her son, I knew that. And others like him. Alchemists, mostly. I myself was from a long line of alchemists. From the original alchemist, Hermes Trismegistus.
I wondered if my bloodline flowed through all my incarnations, or if it was isolated to just this current one. That is, my current and last incarnation on Earth.
My bloodline was highly valuable, I’d discovered. Which was why I had the pleasure of being targeted by Elizabeth, one of the strongest of the dark masters. My bloodline and her dark mastery were enough to turn the tide of power. That is, if I let her out, which I never did.
I say one of the strongest, because there was another, of course. The entity that currently resided in none other than Dracula himself, a prince of a man I’d encountered a few months ago—and a unique warrior who had saved my ass. Dracula, the original vampire. Dracula, who had given himself up as a vessel to the strongest of the dark masters. A dark master who just so happened to be the love of Elizabeth’s immortal life.
What tangled webs we weave...
The entity within Dracula had made it known that it wanted time with the entity within me. By time, I figured they meant some hot and sweaty dark master sex. After all, it had been centuries since they had been, ah, united. Centuries that Elizabeth had waited for me to be born. Why me, I didn’t know. Why not, say, my mother? I didn’t know that either. My mother’s bloodline would have been even closer to Hermes, less diluted. Then again, imagining my mother as a vampire nearly caused me to have a fit of semi-hysterical laughter in my minivan.
No, I thought. She waited for me for a reason. Perhaps it had something to do with my witchy heritage.
I nodded, knowing that was the key.
I continued breathing, sucking in lungfuls of worthless air, but not knowing what else to do. The sun was just minutes from disappearing from a distant horizon that I could not see—not with the damn mountain in the way.
Why did she hate the sun so much anyway? What was the deal with that? Kingsley operated in the sun, and he had a similar highly evolved dark master residing within him, too.
The answer came to me as an impulse, and it came to me from her, I knew. The thing within Kingsley was a different kind of dark master. A lower form, in fact. Okay, that made sense, although I would never tell Kingsley that. Then again, maybe he knew. The thing within him was hungrier, angrier, wilder. Hence, the beast he turned into each full moon.
I wrung my hands, breathed, rocked.
The sun, the sun, the sun...
I gripped my steering wheel. Too tightly. It creaked in my hands. Bent inward, threatening to snap. I didn’t care. I hated my skin, the sun, the light. I felt myself losing it, going crazy, completely fucking losing it...
And then it happened.
It was gone and the crawling sensation between my shoulders stopped and the air hissed out of my lips and I hung my head and found myself weeping... for joy.
Then, I sat back and found myself smiling, knowing I was surely
losing my mind, but I didn’t care. Not in this moment of pure relief.
The sun was gone, and I had never felt so alive.
Chapter Seventeen
There was a chance I might have been in the bad part of town.
The complex was tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. Anyone on this street meant to be on this street. No one came through here. And those who did were high or wasted or up to no good. Okay, that sounded sort of judge-y.
The apartment complex itself was sprawling, with many wings and buildings and covered parking lots and entrances. The apartment was gated, sort of. Heavy iron gates blocked the entrances, opened by, I presumed, a scanner card. But the rest of the complex was fenceless. Foot traffic could get in, but cars couldn’t. Seemed sort of half-assed. If you’re going to gate a place, then gate it.
And here, there was foot traffic aplenty. Teenagers lounged in groups of three or four. They did most of their lounging around an old Mustang fastback, which, when you looked at it sideways, seemed to be lounging as well. Grown men lounged in front of their apartments, or on their narrow, feeble-looking decks. Two kids on trikes lounged near the main entrance into the complex. An old woman watched me from a chair, a wooden cane in her hands. Come to think of it, she was lounging, too. Exactly half of all males within eyeshot, from the very youngest to the very oldest, were shirtless.
The apartment complex boasted a network of catwalks, wobbly-looking railings, and stone pebble stairs with chunks missing. This was, I was certain, an insurance company’s worst nightmare.
There was a general shift in attention and body language as I moved through the parking lot. The closest group of teens seemed too young to be trouble, but not too young to be crude. I heard “MILF” and “booty” and “dat ass” as I moved past them, and, for some reason, I was grinning all the way up the ramshackle stairway of doom.
Somehow, I made it up without plunging through a step, or careening off a broken rail. Up here it was a bit livelier. The smell of barbeque and beans and curry filled the air. Cigarette smoke, too. And weed. And meth. Kids riding on plastic toys, moms talking out front, laughter and TV. Someone shouted from the far side of the complex. Someone shouted back. Human beings are weird.