"And your role?"
I suppressed a grin. That had been very nice. He didn't trust me—understandable—and had slipped in the probing question very smoothly. Matei's hint about files told me how to answer.
"We had word that there might be a cult operating up here. Matei wanted me to bring up a pouch with the file, including some physical evidence."
"Evidence?"
I raised my hands, cast, brace, and all. "I don't know what was in the pouch. I just signed for the pouch. Matei was supposed to call ahead. I was supposed to deliver it to your department, then home again, home again jiggety jig. Only they ambushed me. Pouch lost in the fight."
"And the rest..." Ware sad.
"The rest—" I picked up the cup. "You know."
I took a drink and set down the cup then picked up the menu.
"Are you ready to eat? I'm ready to eat."
CHAPTER FIVE
The waitress came and took our orders. Ware ate light, ordering a single egg, over easy, and toast. I ordered heavier: western omelet, hash browns, extra toast, and lots of butter. My strength and healing are nice, but they come at the price of a metabolism that burns right through calories.
Hospital food had done me no favors.
When the waitress retreated to the kitchen, Ware sat looking at me, his face blank, the fingertips of his right hand drumming on the tabletop. He paused in his drumming to take a drink of his coffee.
"I've got one question," Ware said.
I turned up the palm of my left hand awkwardly in the brace in an invitation to continue.
"Is one word of that load of crap you just spun for me true?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Blood sacrificing cults networked across the nation? And they'd have to be networked for any evidence from Tennessee to be relevant in Indianapolis. That has 'Feds' written all over it, not some PI shop in Nashville. And this, 'Private investigators discover multiple cases of vampire worshiping cults' plot would be turned down by Troma Studios as being too implausible. I don't know how your boss sold my superiors on this line of shit, but I'm not buying it. I may have been born on a Monday, but it wasn't last Monday."
"I..."
He raised a finger. "No. Not one word. Not one more lie."
I shrugged. "What do you want me to say."
He looked at me unblinking. "How about the truth?"
I felt a hint of smile quirk at my lips. "I'm no Jack Nicholson, but are you sure you can handle the truth?"
"Try me. No. On second thought, let me tell you a little bit of what I know, and we'll see where it goes from there."
"Please," I said.
"First, there is the weapon you used to kill the first attacker on the street. Only you killed two with the same weapon, didn't you?"
I said nothing.
Ware shrugged. "Wooden stakes? Oh, sure, they have silver and steel points. Easier to keep sharp, right?" He waited.
Again, I said nothing.
"Fine, play it coy. At least silence isn't lying. Then, we recovered a gun which BATFE traced to a dealer in Nashville that sold it to one Dani Herzeg. Your gun, I believe?"
"Wouldn't be any point in denying I bought it," I said.
"No." Ware raised his cup to take another drink, frowned into it, then looked for the waitress. When he caught her eye he held the cup up.
"Be right with ya, hon."
Ware turned back to me. "Plus, your fingerprints were all over it. But the strangest thing of all was the ammunition. Somebody had melted something that looked like solder, only brighter, into the hollow points. Haven't run an analysis but I'd guess I'd say silver solder? Now why would you put silver solder in there? Never mind, why you'd put solder in there at all, why silver? My old man was a plumber and he used lead-free solders, including silver solder, for pipes, but you weren't avoiding lead because the bulk of the bullet was still copper jacketed lead."
He paused while the waitress filled his coffee cup. She waggled the pot in my direction but I waved her away.
"Simplest answer," Ware continues, "is that you are a complete fruitcake. But then there's this."
He pulled his phone from his pocket and, after a few taps and slides, turned it to face me.
A vampire face stared up out of the screen at me. That surprised me. It was supposed to be impossible to photograph vampires. It used to be thought that the silver emulsion, and the silver backing of older mirrors, refused to react to the soulless monsters, but they show no reflection in modern aluminum-backed mirrors and digital cameras don't register them either. Or so I thought.
I did not recognize the face, but it was lying on an asphalt roof. Probably the one I had staked on the roof. I didn't get a good look at that one before the other knocked me over the side.
The mouth hung open and the fangs, spaced the exact width of the wounds on my arm, were clearly visible.
"Shit," I said.
"You do speak." Ware smirked. "Some folk in the Gothic community have some very realistic fake fangs that fit almost seamlessly over their real teeth. These didn't pop out though, so the coroner thinks, thought, they were bonded into place."
He stared at me, his face cold. "Wooden stakes, okay, silvered steel tips but still wooden stakes. Silver bullets. Fangs. And a trail of corpses that starts at the morgue where—we've kept this out of the news—two particular bodies are missing. And at the hospital nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything. Nobody knew anything until a nurse walked into that room and found...that. Do you want to tell me what this adds up to?"
I said nothing.
"Great. Stay silent." He looked me up and down. "No crosses?"
I sighed. Matei was going to kill me. But...Ware had already figured it out. There wasn't much more to tell except to confirm that he was right. "Vampires aren't actually affected by holy symbols. That's a myth. Well, a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, no."
"It's a myth," Ware said. "Vampires are a myth."
"Lot's of things are myths," I said.
"Lots of...you mean there are more than vampires out there?"
"Let's just worry about the current problem right now," I hedged.
"So, what do I tell the captain?"
I sighed. "You tell him that we're tracking down a cult."
"He's not stupid. He can add up the evidence the same as I can."
"He won't believe it," I said.
"What do you mean, he won't believe it."
"If Matei has spoken to him, he won't believe it.
Ware sat back in his seat. He opened his mouth to speak, but the waitress arrived with our food.
"One egg and toast." She set one plate in front of Ware.
"Western omelet, hash browns, two orders of toast." She set the other in front of me. "Can I refill your coffee, hon?"
"Sure, why not?" I slid my cup closer to her.
She topped up my cup, then Ware's, then went to deal with another customer calling her.
"So that's the way of it?" Ware said when the waitress was gone.
"Look, part of what we do is try to keep the existence of vampires secret."
"What? Why?"
"Because when word starts to get out, things get...bad."
"Bad? How bad?"
"They would consider the attack on the hospital a modest start. Bathory wasn't a vampire, despite what some stories claim. She was an amateur compared to actual vampires. So whenever vampires start getting...obvious...my boss sends someone like me to make the vampire go away." I made a stabbing motion followed by a throat-cutting gesture.
"What do you mean, 'someone like you?' A PI?"
I thought for a moment. In for a penny, in for a pound. "Have you ever heard the term 'dhampyre'?"
"Pretend I haven't." Again, Ware's face showed me that I never wanted to play poker with this man.
"A dhampyre is child of a vampire. As in, born-of-their-body type child."
"How can a dead person have kids?"
I laughed. "It's not ea
sy. But some find it worth the effort to create...servants that need not fear the day. That's the 'abusive home' where Matei found me, with my mother the vampire. He took me in, surrounded me with people who taught me...taught me to be something other than a servant of a vampire." Ware did not need to know that I was still a servant of a vampire. Sort of. At least this vampire had learned to simulate a conscience. Sort of.
"What happened to that vampire, your mother?" Ware surprised me by showing genuine interest on his face.
"She got away that night, but I found her several years later. I killed the bitch."
"So where do we go from here?"
"We get me out of that damn nursing home for starters." I lifted my hands. "My wrist and hand are probably healed enough by now that I can handle crutches. The ankle will take a little longer and I'll need to be up to speed to be able to take these things out. In the meantime, we need to find where they're hiding when they're not..." I waved my hand to indicate the various attacks they had made.
"And maybe," I added, "we can find what happened to my rental. My luggage was in that car and it would be nice to have some actual clothes to wear."
"So," Ware said on the drive back to the short-term care facility. "Silver bullets?"
"Slows down their regeneration." I scratched at my wrist, just above the cast on my right hand. Everybody who'd ever worn a cast knew that itch. "Do enough damage with silver and you can slow them down enough to get a stake into them."
"So, stakes work then."
"A stake in the heart immobilizes them. Remove the stake and they start regenerating. To kill them, you either have to burn them to ash, completely remove the heart and I mean not one cell of heart tissue left behind, or cut off the head, stuff the mouth with garlic or communion wafers, and bury the pieces separately. Anything less and they can regenerate. They are somewhat more flammable than humans. We don't know why. And damage from fire doesn't regenerate. They need blood to heal it."
"Wait, communion wafers? You said they weren't affected by holy symbols."
Ware pulled onto the highway and I waited until he was merged in traffic before answering.
"Most holy symbols don't affect them. And before you ask it's not a matter of Christian or some other holy symbols. Crosses and crucifixes don't bother them either. This use of communion wafers is one of the few exceptions."
"Garlic then?"
"Garlic and communion wafers prevent their regeneration. Otherwise they neither harm vampires nor ward them off."
"Sun..." He swerved as someone cut across the lane right in front of him. "Damn, I wish I was driving a marked car."
"He wouldn't have cut you off if you were in a marked car," I said.
"No, probably not, although back when I was in uniform you'd be amazed..."
"I imagine."
"As I was saying, sunlight?"
"Sunlight will kill them. They sleep during the day but some old ones can hold off the need to sleep for a while."
"All right," Ware said. "We find them, fill them full of silver bullets, drive stakes through their hearts, and cut their heads off."
I looked across at him. His attention was firmly on the road.
"You seem to be taking this well."
"Twenty years on the force. I could retire at half pay any time now. You see a lot in twenty years. Not vampires, I'll admit, but every human oddity that comes down the pike. Next to all that, what's a few vampires?"
"There is that," I said.
He glanced at me, then back to the road. "So where do we start?" He seemed to be thinking for a few seconds. "There's not much of a Goth community here in Indianapolis but maybe..."
"No," I said.
"No?"
"Vampires aren't human. They have no need to socialize. They don't try to fit in. And if they did want to fit in, pale-skinned teenagers dressed in black is the last place they'd go. Vampires tend to have a reddish complexion and are puffy, almost bloated. They go where people are. They select an innocuous target, someone unlikely to be missed. And you have another missing person's case or someone who just drops off the map."
"Shit that's not...not good. Is there anything we can use? You say you've hunted these things before? How?"
"I'm dhampyre," I said. "Part of that means that if I get close I can sort of feel their presence. It doesn't give me much, just a feeling that a vampire is near. Normally Matei is able to give me instructions that get me close enough." I did not tell Ware that the sense worked both ways. Vampires could tell that I, or some dhampyre, was in the area too.
"And he can't do that now?"
"I wish."
We drove the rest of the way back in silence. I tried to think what the display at the hospital might mean. Vampires hunted in the shadows, staying hidden. But this? This was not like them at all. Could we be dealing with an actual cult and not vampires at all? I dismissed the idea as quickly. Human cultists could not have ripped bodies apart like that.
We reached the care facility and I got my door open while Ware got the wheelchair from the back. I flexed my left hand. It felt good without the brace. Holding onto the grab handle in the car for support, I was able to get out and stand balanced on my right foot.
"I'll call my boss," I said once I'd sat in the wheelchair, "and see if he has any leads for me."
"You said, a 'vampire would pick a likely target and we'd have another missing person's case.' We average maybe half a dozen cases a day here."
"And maybe one every couple of days is because of a vampire," I said. Also prostitutes, homeless, drug dealers, gangs. People who can vanish and not be missed. They don't kill every time they feed, but they kill enough."
"That wasn't a feeding back there, was it?" He pressed the annunciator button at the door to the care facility and the person inside buzzed him through the door.
"No, it was a message. What the message was, I don't know."
Ware wheeled me back to my room. He stopped at the doorway after pushing my wheelchair inside. "Maybe next time they could just send a text?"
"We can only hope," I said.
"Speaking of texts." He fished a card out of his pocket and held it out to me. "If you think of anything that can help, call or text. Otherwise, I'll be in touch."
I took the card and nodded.
The breakfast tray was gone despite my not having touched it. I never liked people going into my room when I was not there but there was nothing I could do about that here. Hospital. Short-term care facility. Neither gave you any privacy. The door had a lock, but the staff had keys. Normally, that made sense, but it irritated me.
I had left Ware at the door after assuring him that I could get back to my bed on my own. Even with my hand in a cast I could roll the wheelchair that far.
There was very little I could do until sunset when I could talk to Matei. Around noon Old Lady Perky came by with a lunch tray. Since no handsome middle-aged police officers came to take me to a crime scene and let me buy myself a real lunch I ate the simulation of food they provided.
Wait a minute, I thought. Had I just called Ware "handsome?"
He wasn't really. He wasn't bad for a man in his mid-forties but most people wouldn't have given him a second look.
Old Lady Perky came in to collect my lunch tray.
"You'd better get ready to go, sweetie," she said. "Your ride's almost here."
"My ride?" I stared at her. I had no idea what she was talking about.
"You've got an appointment in radiology at Community. The van will be here in about—" She glanced at the clock. "—ten minutes."
I sighed. "This is the first I'm hearing about it."
"Now, now, sweetie, I told you this morning."
"No," I said softly, "you didn't."
"Oh, I'm sure I did. Now you get ready to go and I'll be back in five minutes to wheel you out front for the van."
I found myself grinning as Old Lady Perky left without closing the door. Radiology. X-rays! Maybe I had healed enough for a w
alking cast. Or crutches. Even crutches. Anything that would get me on my feet enough to get out of this place.
CHAPTER SIX
I sat in the waiting area at radiology. While waiting I scanned through news reports on my phone. The recent rash of savage violent crimes bordered on the obscene. Trucks ramming into crowds. People going berserk with machetes. Slaughters like the one at the—I shuddered—hospital.
I wondered if the violence was being used as a distraction, widespread violence in which vampire activity would go unnoticed. One of Matei's main principles was to keep the secret. Would he...? Of course he would if he thought it would serve his ends. Fortunately, I didn't think it would.
"Ms. Herzeg?" A young man in scrubs stuck his head out the door.
I turned off my phone. "That's me."
"We're ready for you."
He didn't wait for me to even attempt to maneuver the wheelchair. He walked around behind me and took hold of the handles. I unlocked the wheels and he maneuvered me back into the X-ray room.
The hospital used a newer system. Instead of X-ray film, they used a CCD sensor to read the image straight into a computer.
A few minutes later an orderly wheeled me back upstairs to wait for the doctor to review the X rays.
"Well," Doctor Carter said after looking at my wrist X-rays. "This is much better than I expected."
"Can you change the cast to something that will let me grip?" I asked.
Carter looked at the display on his screen then smiled at me, "I think we can manage that. Now about that ankle."
I waited. Carter examined the next set of X-rays, those of my ankle.
"I'm not sure what to make of this," he said.
"Bad?" I asked.
"Hardly. This is..."
Before he could say any more, I Pushed. "Nothing exceptional here. The break wasn't as bad as advertised."
He shook his head and continued. "All things considered I was expecting a lot worse than I'm seeing here."
The trick with Push is not to use too much. It's very draining and it takes time to recover. In this case, I wanted no more than for him not to think about the rapidity of my healing. Just a bare nudge.
The Unmasking (Dhampyre the Hunter Book 1) Page 4