Vampire Innocent (Book 9): An Introduction To Paranormal Diplomacy

by Cox, Matthew S.

  I can sympathize. Same thing happens to me whenever the radio plays Kid Rock.

  Whoa. I put a hand on Sophia’s shoulder, ready to drag her away from the ghost. “Careful.”

  “He’s not trying to scare us. I made him think of the jar.” Sophia squeezes my hand. Yeah, she’s frightened, but hiding it well. “It was evil and cruel of them to put your spirit in the jar. I let you out because trapping ghosts is wrong. You were in pain.”

  “I was…” Fletcher’s more human face returns for only seconds before the monstrous version returns, syrupy half-congealed blood glooping over his teeth. “They will pay!”

  “No.” Sophia shakes her head. “The people you are trying to hurt didn’t put you in the soul jar.”

  He surges toward her, stopping with his face inches from hers. “They didn’t release me either!”

  Sophia jumps back, color draining out of her cheeks. “True, but, they have no idea how awful it is to be trapped inside a soul jar. The mystics treated you like a ghost battery, not a person.”

  “They will suffer,” rasps Fletcher, flickering back and forth between his two appearances.

  “Being cruel because they didn’t know any better isn’t enough reason to kill them. The more evil you do now, the longer it will take for you to find rest,” says Sophia. “You really need to let go of Fletcher Maltby. You’ve been him for a super long time. Don’t you want to go back to the Cauldron?”

  He hisses, darting forward, thrusting his face up to hers. “Not until they pay for what they’ve done.”

  “Ugh. You’re not listening.” Sophia face-palms. “These mystics didn’t even know who you were until you started trying to hurt them. You’ve already killed people.” She shivers. “I think it’s my fault. You told me you wouldn’t hurt anyone and begged me to let you out. But you lied.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I whisper, squeezing her shoulder. “You were lied to. Anything he did after you let him out is on him.”

  Fletcher’s presence diminishes somewhat. The monstrous apparition fades into his human form, albeit still elongated and distorted. “Justice…”

  “No. Justice happened already. You killed people when you were alive. The police caught you, and you got hanged. You should have gone back to the Cauldron. Mystics like 300 years ago did something evil when they trapped your ghost. But those mystics are all dead now. And the universe has already punished them for what they did to you.”

  “Yeah. They’ve probably reincarnated three times in a row as door-to-door salesmen… or maybe over and over again as farm animals—or maybe Cleveland Browns fans.”

  Fletcher glances at me, confused.

  “Being a chicken in a factory farm cage is worse than a soul jar,” says Sophia.

  I hold a hand up to Fletcher. “Don’t get her started.”

  He leans back. “She’s vegan?”

  “No. But I don’t have to be a vegetarian to think it’s cruel to mistreat animals.” She sets her hands on her hips. “The mystics you’re hurting don’t deserve to die because they joined the same order the people who did hurt you once belonged to. And, really, you killed people. You did deserve some punishment, but no way a soul jar.”

  “You were a serial killer,” I say. “You killed people in life and you’ve murdered six mystics as a ghost. My kid sister can, and probably should, straight up destroy you, but she’s so damn sweet, she’s still trying to help you. Just… please go to the Cauldron so we can return home?”

  “Their entire order bears the stain,” rasps Fletcher.

  I elbow Sophia in the arm. “Hit him with the same stare you used on Mom when she said you could keep Klepto.”

  “You used to be trapped in a soul jar. Now, you’re trapped by your anger. There’s no reason for you to hate these mystics. As long as you exist here in the outer world, you’ll be consumed by anger and keep torturing yourself. The only person hurting you, is you.” Sophia whips out her big-eyed pleading stare. “The anger and hurt will never stop until you return to the Cauldron. I want to help you, but I can’t let you keep hurting people. It’ll make me cry, but if you won’t stop being a butthead, I have to do something mean.”

  Fletcher reaches out, tracing two fingers down Sophia’s cheek. “You would… shed tears over one such as me?”

  “I would.” She raises her hands, concentrating.

  A speck of whitish-blue light appears in the air not far behind Fletcher. In seconds, it grows to a spinning energy pinwheel, then further widens into a line of searing bright glow around a dark opening.

  “Seriously,” I say. “After what you did, anyone else in her position wouldn’t have even tried talking to you and gone straight to the whole exploding ectoplasm thing.”

  “It isn’t all his fault. The soul jar made his mind cave in, changing him into a manifestation of anger and vengeance, occluding his true personality.” Sophia glances sideways at me. “What’s ‘occluding’ mean?”

  “Hiding. I’m guessing you just quoted Asher?”

  “No. Mr. Bailey.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Callum… one of the mystics back home.” She grunts, widening the doorway. “There’s only one way for you to escape the pain that’s not gonna make me cry. Please go where you should’ve been able to go after they killed you.”

  Fletcher turns toward the portal. “No one has ever said they would weep over me. I—you are right. My thoughts are scattered, formless. Wrath and anguish taint my every breath. Blessed escape.”

  I indicate the portal like a game show hostess. “Right there. All expenses paid.”

  “You have my thanks, child. I would say I regret the deaths of those in this year, but I find my emotions out of reach. You are truly a unique soul.” He stares at her for a long moment, then faces the portal, which inhales him in a startlingly fast blur.

  “Whoa.” I blink. “Like a scrunchie sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.”

  “Mew,” says Klepto.

  Sophia emits a faint snarl, pushing her hands together. The portal shrinks in on itself and vanishes.

  “Ding,” I say.

  “Huh?” Sophia scrunches her nose up at me.

  “You just made level.”

  “Dork.”

  “Seriously, you beat the big bad and you’re only ten, so he’s gotta be worth at least reaching level two.”

  “Such. A. Dork.”

  “Says the girl who loves D&D.”

  Sophia sighs at the sky. “Can we go home now?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Why not?” She gasps.

  “It’s way too late to catch a flight. We can go to the airport so I can make someone honor the tickets we already have but didn’t use. Although, getting a refund or reissue of airline tickets might be too difficult even for vampiric mind control.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. I’m making a sarcastic joke.” I take her hand.

  Sophia starts to say something, then looks around. Two seconds later, she jumps into me, trembling.

  “What?”

  “We’re in a super creepy graveyard!”

  I chuckle, picking her up. “Just noticed?”

  “Ack! Go! Please!” wails Sophia, clinging to me. “I don’t wanna be here.”

  “Soph… you have two ways to deal with anything haunting this place. Destroy or send home. Why are you scared?”

  “Fear doesn’t make sense!” She squeezes me. “Please, can we go?”

  “Okay.” I scoop her up. “I want to go home, too.”

  We glide into the air.

  “Sare?” Sophia peers up at me, not even bothering to try keeping her windblown hair out of her face.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m gonna have a nightmare about that creepy face he made. Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  I chuckle. “We’re going to be in a hotel room sharing a bed anyway.”

  “Oh… right.” She flashes a cheesy smile. “Okay.”

  39

 
Void Gates for Dummies

  Only one person sees me drop out of the sky and land in front of the bookstore.

  He doesn’t remember. Part of me wonders if I should go back to the small town and erase myself from Addy and her family’s memory… but who’d believe an eight-year-old talking about vampires? They’d assume she made it up or played pretend. Grandma, I’m sure, knows better than to discuss such things openly. She obviously knows of brownies and dark dryads and those aren’t considered ‘real’ by society.

  Alas, the bookstore’s locked.

  “Grr.” I hold my hand out like a surgeon waiting for a tool. “Kitten.”

  “Huh?” asks Sophia.

  “I need the kitten.”

  Klepto leaps from her shoulder to my hand. “Mew?”

  “Mind getting the door?”

  “Mew.”

  She faces the bookstore and a faint click comes from the lock.

  “Thanks.” I set her back on Sophia’s shoulder.

  We head inside, cross the deserted store, and head down to the ritual room. The place is empty of people. My purse sits conspicuously on one of the tables next to Sophia’s helmet, a large envelope stuffed halfway into it. I grab the message, slice it open with a claw, and pull the letter out, reading it aloud so my sister can follow along.

  “Sarah and Sophia,

  “On behalf of the Aurora Aurea, I thank you for your great assistance in dealing with Fletcher Maltby. In the wake of the spirit’s assault on us, members of The Serene Lodge have renewed their attacks, attempting to take advantage of the situation. We have, however, sensed the spirit’s passing. It will take us time to gather our defenses against the Lodge and rebuild. For the time being, we have gone into hiding. Look under the blue book.

  “Warmest regards and thanks,

  “Asher Jones.”

  “They left!?” Sophia flails. “He said they’d send us back.”

  I sling my purse over one shoulder. “Blue book? Can they be any more vague? There are thousands of books in this place.”

  “Umm. Is that it?” She points at a huge tome as big as a man’s torso, eight inches thick, sitting flat on the table not far from where we stand.

  The massive book is bound in rich sapphire leather engraved in gold filigree. No other book in this room is even a third the size.

  “Certainly the most obvious ‘blue book’ in sight.” I grab the ridiculous thing and lift it. Pre-vampire me couldn’t have done so.

  Sophia swipes a few loose papers out from under it.

  I set the book down and peer over Sophia’s shoulder at a page of handwriting and lots of sketches. Looks like someone got drunk and tried to combine trigonometry with astrology. “He left you his math notebook full of doodles?”

  “No. I think this is a spell.” She reads over both pages, then re-reads them. “The note at the top says this will open the doorway back to my closet. I need to use the magic on a doorway. It’s going to connect the door to my closet for a minute.”

  “Oh wow. Can you seriously open a gateway back home?”

  “Umm. No idea. Might as well try. Worst thing I could do is fail.”

  “Worst thing you could do is cause a dimensional pinhole and suck the entire universe through a space-time inversion before spitting it back inside-out.”

  She blinks at me. “I’m telling Mom.”

  “What?”

  “You’re experimenting with drugs.”

  I laugh.

  “Give me a few minutes.” She walks out of the ritual room to the nearest storage closet, and sits cross-legged on the floor.

  Well, if it saves us having to spend another night here and deal with an airport, why not?

  She reads over the pages for a bit, then gets up to collect a couple candles, a hunk of chalk, and three bowls containing different colored powders. Like some kind of warped version of Mom cooking from a recipe she’s never seen before, Sophia draws symbols on the floor using chalk, glancing back and forth at the page in her hand. She makes a few corrections, then sets up the candles—lighting them with a snap of her fingers—and begins dribbling small amounts of the colored powders on the floor, creating more symbols.

  Okay, tween girls often mess around with occult stuff like Ouija boards and witchcraft, but it’s so creepy watching Sophia do it. She’s about as anti-goth as is possible to get. Blonde, blue-eyed, bright, smiling all the time, super sweet. My brain wants to picture her pulling tiny internal organs from bats or rodents out of jars while giggling and… just no.

  Finally, she stands, returns all the bowls to where she got them, and runs back to stand by the circle she made. Hands out, she focuses. All the powders begin glowing their respective colors, blue, yellow, and orange. The candle flames stretch to four inches tall. A blurry duplicate of the chalk writing appears, floating a half inch above the real one. Or is it the real one floating and the illusion is on the floor?

  Gah, my eyes. Looking at it is making me dizzy.

  A moment later, she lowers her arms. “Okay. The portal’s open.”

  “So what now?”

  She swallows—not a good sign—and grasps the doorknob. “We open the door.”

  Sophia twists the knob and pulls the closet door aside, revealing an infinite void like the one in her room before we landed in London. Good sign.

  “Hey, you did—”

  A squishy black tentacle whips out of the darkness, grabbing me around the head with a loud, wet, slap! Feels like I’ve been struck in the face by a slab of raw fish. The sucker-studded appendage gives me a few test squeezes as if it’s not sure what it grabbed. Great. I’m the piece of paper in a hat being drawn by an intra-dimensional giant squid.

  “Eep!” yelps Sophia.

  The slimy thing wrapped around my head yanks away, leaving me partially coated in ectoplasm. It’s probably snot, but I’m going to call it ectoplasm so I don’t throw up. An instant after the tentacle vanishes, the void barfs out a torrent of lukewarm slime, covering us both. The door slams closed on its own, loud as a gunshot.

  “Uhh, that’s definitely not right.” Sophia wipes her face. “There shouldn’t be any tentacles involved with teleportation. Sorry, I stink at this.”

  “Forget it… we’ll go home the normal way.” I scrape goop out of my eyes, slinging it to the floor.

  “I could try again.”

  “Nah. You need more practice before attempting intercontinental gateways. We should consider this a win because whatever grabbed me didn’t come out into the world. Try starting off a little smaller than England-to-Washington, like opening a door from home to school.”

  She blinks. “Ooh! Awesome idea. If I got it to work, I could sleep a whole extra half hour.”

  40

  The Long Way Home

  I sit on the end of the bed in our hotel room, wrapped armpit to knees in a towel.

  Did you know void tentacle slime is as sticky as road tar? I didn’t used to know. I do now. Okay, slight overstatement. It’s not quite as sticky as road tar. We both still have hair and eyebrows. Sophia’s attempt to use magic to de-slime our clothing had somewhat disastrous results. Fortunately, in her case, the winter coat absorbed ninety percent of the damage. It exploded. As did my entire outfit.

  Imagine how much it hurts to have duct tape stuck to skin and ripped off real fast. Now expand the sensation over your entire body. I did learn something new about being a vampire, at least. Those thin hairs on my arms? Yeah, they grow back pretty quick.

  Sophia succeeded in giving me an illusion of clothing, which made going to a nearby store less embarrassing than traipsing around in my underwear. I bought—no mind trickery, honest—us new outfits and a replacement coat for Sophia, along with a small carry-on bag and some extra underwear for both of us. I may be undead, but wearing the same ones every day is still ack.

  Fortunately, the remainder of the sticky residue washed out in the shower under hot water.

  Sophia’s taking a bath now.

  I’m do
ing something slightly less relaxing—calling the ’rents.

  “What is going on over there?” yells Mom by way of answering. “Your last texts aren’t making any sense.”

  Good. She’s shouting. Means she’s not too worried or upset.

  “It’s nothing too interesting. Had to use the card again for some clothes. Someone who didn’t know what they were doing hit a giant mud puddle and covered us in slime.”

  “Sorry!” yells Sophia from the bathroom.

  “I’m not sure what to say,” says Mom, her voice half sigh.

  “The exciting part’s over. We’ve really gotten into the spirit of things here. But we’re done. Gonna be on a plane tomorrow afternoon. I bumped into this really charming guy at the airport. We’re taking off at ten-to-four, pretty much right around sunset. Got a nonstop flight, about ten or eleven hours in the air, and we should land at Sea-Tac around nine. I can, uhh, figure out some way to fly home or you could pick us up if you want.”

  “All right. We’ll do that. Everyone’s eager to see you and I’m sure you wouldn’t mind the break from air travel.”

  “Sounds good. Okay, see you tomorrow.”

  “Night, hon,” adds Dad.

  “Oh, and please tell Sophia I don’t want her opening any more ancient soul traps without asking permission first.”

  “Sure thing, Mom.”

  We hang up, and I flop back on the bed. I might spend the whole night like this. Hotel towels are kinda comfortable.

  I wake up reclined on the bed exactly as I’d been before sunrise.

  I’m above the bedspread, head propped up on pillows to watch television, still wearing a towel. Sophia spent most of the night tucked in under all the blankets, snuggled against me, asleep. Two things have changed since I blacked out at sunrise.