Sam and TJ glanced at each other and smiled, as if they were sharing a secret.
Matt had an intellectual knowledge of Sam’s mental abilities ever since her Transformation the previous year, and they’d shared some mental communication several times when they were making love, but this was the first time he’d seen just how strong her control was. It frightened him. A little sharing of deep emotions while making love was a far cry from seeing a man’s mind wiped as clean as a blank sheet before his eyes. He didn’t know whether to pat her on the back or lock her up as a dangerous weapon.
Sam, evidently sensing his discomfort, leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him from behind, kissing him softly on the back of his neck. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she whispered, “we use that power only in emergencies.”
He half-turned in his seat and pulled her face close to his. “Promise me you won’t ever do that to me,” he said, his eyes boring into hers.
“Of course not, dear,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Unless I have trouble getting you to take the trash out, then all bets are off,” she teased, happy to see the tension leave his eyes as he laughed with her.
She leaned back in the seat as TJ pulled out her cell phone. “Time to call Elijah and tell him where we are,” TJ said happily. The excited tone in her voice caused Shooter to glance at her in the rearview mirror, a frown on his face. He didn’t like the way her eyes lit up every time she talked to that son of a bitch.
* * *
I hung up the phone, relieved to hear that TJ and the others had made it safely across the border, but I was concerned when she told me about the man who’d been following them. Morpheus was proving far more resourceful at tracking them than I’d thought he would be. Staying a step or two ahead of him and his cohorts was going to be harder than I’d first thought. We might not have as much time to prepare for the attack as I’d hoped, so I guessed I’d better get started.
First, I put in a call to Professor Wingate at McGill University. I told him I was going to fax him some ideas I’d developed about how to make the treatments stronger, and we talked a bit about some of his latest experiments with new antiplasmid treatments he’d developed in the last couple of weeks, specifically a bacteriophage treatment that was being perfected in of all places Georgia, part of the old Soviet Union. I gave him the fax number at the cabin I’d rented and told him I’d have my computer set up later in the day. He promised to get in touch after he’d looked over my papers.
Now that my medical business was taken care of, it was time to get ready for Morpheus and his friends. I went to the registration desk and told them I was having four friends join me and reserved two rooms under my name, so Sam and the others wouldn’t have to show any identification when they checked in.
As I turned to leave the hotel, I noticed a man sitting in one of the large easy chairs in the lobby, ostensibly reading a newspaper, holding it up in front of his face. Jesus, I thought, this is like a bad movie. The man couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d worn a sign saying, I’M WATCHING YOU. This wasn’t good. I knew Morpheus had managed to track the group to Idaho, but how in the hell had he found me? I’d been careful about covering my tracks when I left Houston. I sighed, thinking the how didn’t matter so much as the fact that someone was very interested in my movements. The trick was to find out who . . . and why.
I altered my course so I could walk close by the man behind the newspaper. As I passed behind him, I cast out my mind to his to see if I could read him. If he was one of us, he’d have his mind blocked—a dead giveaway that he was from Morpheus.
Surprised to find his mind as open as a book, I noted mainly boredom at this assignment from his boss, Ed Slonaker. Damn, what was a Mountie doing watching me? Stunned that Ed would be having me followed, I almost stopped in my tracks. It was one thing to avoid Morpheus and his friends, it was something else altogether to try and outwit the Mounties in their own backyard.
I needed some breathing room, for I had a lot to do and very little time in which to do it. Later I would try and figure out what Slonaker’s interest in me was. I concentrated and pushed at the man’s mind, making him feel very sleepy and bored. Within minutes, he lowered his paper and leaned his head back against the back of the chair, snoring softly as he drifted off to sleep.
I grinned as I thought of Ed’s reaction when his watchdog reported he’d fallen asleep while keeping tabs on me. I had a feeling Ed could be a very strict boss when it came to things like that.
I wasted no time in finding a cab in front of the hotel and I headed for downtown Banff. I needed to get a car and some other supplies for my cabin, and I needed to do it fast.
The cars in Barney’s Used Car lot were amazingly inexpensive, until I remembered the Canadian dollar was only worth about seventy-five cents. I found a good, used Tahoe with four-wheel drive and paid Barney cash, working his mind just a little to cause him not to worry overmuch about paperwork. In less than twenty minutes I was driving off the lot and toward the shops in the tourist section of the city.
Handguns are strictly regulated in Canada, but they’re much more lenient with rifles and shotguns. Just about everyone in Canada hunts, or so it seemed from the number of sporting goods stores I encountered. I stopped at three different stores and managed to acquire four twelve-gauge shotguns and one large-caliber hunting rifle with a nine-power scope without arousing any suspicions at all. The clerk didn’t even raise his eyebrows when I bought a case of double-ought buckshot for the shotguns, probably thinking I was going to be poaching some elk in the national park.
I knew rifles and shotguns wouldn’t kill any of the vampyres Morpheus sent after us, but a load of 00-buckshot at close range in the head or chest will certainly get one’s attention. Put enough shots into a vampyre and it will definitely slow him down and it will take him some time to heal the wounds—time we might need.
My next stop was a hardware store. I bought a couple of long-bladed machetes, since I only had two katanas with me. After we’d incapacitated our enemies with the shotguns, we would need to finish the jobs with the swords to put them permanently out of commission. Along with the machetes, I got a roll of thin wire, a case of dynamite and detonators—to remove stumps from my land I said—a hacksaw, a small keg of nails, and ten small containers about the size of coffee cans. If we were going to war, as I suspected, then I wanted to be fully prepared.
I loaded my goods into the Tahoe and headed out of town toward my cabin. I traveled just over fifteen miles along the Trans-Canada 1 highway toward Calgary, and then I took a left onto a gravel road that led up the side of a mountain. Halfway up the road I had to switch the Tahoe into four-wheel drive to navigate through the deep snow that had accumulated.
After another five miles, during which I saw only one other cabin, I came to a narrow lane that was little more than two ruts running off the road into the forest. Half a mile later, I pulled into a small clearing and saw a log cabin nestled among tall pines, maples, and even some rather impressive oak trees. Only the pines still had foliage, the others were standing as bare as skeletons in the stark winter air.
Still, from more than fifty yards away, the cabin was invisible in the heavy growth of timber. There were several large trunks lying on the porch, delivered by UPS just as I’d asked. They contained most of the supplies I would need for my medical research.
It took me the better part of an hour to get the car unloaded and my trunks moved into the house. I was pleasantly surprised to find the cabin was equipped with a furnace and a large fireplace, as well as a very modern kitchen. It even had a microwave. There would be no roughing it for us, even out here in the boondocks, as they say in Texas.
Once I was unpacked, I glanced at my watch. TJ’s group should be arriving within the next hour or so, if they hadn’t run into heavy snow on the way. I quickly hooked up my fax machine to the phone in the cabin, which the real estate lady said was always left in service, and sent the faxes to Dr. Wingate as I’d promise
d. Then, I locked the door and got back into the Tahoe for the journey back to the hotel. If I were lucky, my watchdog would still be asleep and wouldn’t even know I’d been gone.
Thirty-three
Ed Slonaker was trying, but having a hard time keeping his voice down. He and John Ashby were having a late lunch at the Moose Head Bar and Grill in Banff, and even though there were few other customers at this time in the afternoon, he didn’t want their conversation overheard.
“You did what?” he asked angrily.
Ashby looked a little startled at his friend’s anger. “I told you, Ed. A guy from the New Orleans Council asked me if we’d had any suspicious characters arrive up here lately that might be one of us from the states, and I told him about this Pike guy you were worried about, that’s all.”
“Goddamn it, John, I knew you shouldn’t have gotten involved with those nutcases in Calgary. We’ve got a good thing going here, and you have to go and get us embroiled with”—he looked around to make sure no one was within earshot—“vampyre politics!”
Ed had advised John the previous year against joining the Vampyre Council in Calgary, the nearest one to their home in Banff, but Ashby felt they owed it to their race to stay in touch with others of their kind, even though he and Ed and Kim were the only vampyres in the region around Banff.
Ashby blushed and stared down at the elk burger growing cold on his plate. He took a drink of his coffee to give him time to think how he should respond. After all, Ed was his boss.
“Come on, Ed,” he said, trying to deflect Ed’s anger. “What’s the harm in me doing a little favor for one of us that needs our help? He even said the guy they’re looking for might be posing as a doctor, and I’m telling you, his description fits Pike to a T.”
Ed gritted his teeth to stop the sharp retort that came to mind and tried to soften his tone. “The harm is that if we get involved in disputes among others of our kind and they come up here and start some shit, when it hits the fan we’re the ones who are going to get covered with it,” he said, keeping his voice low. “We’ve lived up here for years now, taking care not to do anything to arouse any suspicions about how we live. What if a bunch of these hotshots from the states come up here and start killing and eating tourists right and left? What are we gonna do then, pal? Do you really want some serial killer task force from Mountie Headquarters in Vancouver down here looking over our shoulders?”
“But Ed, they told me this guy they’re looking for is working on a vaccine that will change vampyres back to normal,” Ashby argued, still not convinced he’d done anything wrong. “That will fuck things up for us much worse than us helping them to get rid of this guy.”
Ed sighed. “In the first place, I don’t believe such a vaccine is possible, Johnny, and in the second place, so what? Just how will that affect us up here?”
“Well, the council in Calgary is against such a treatment,” Ashby said. “They argue it will decimate our race and that if such a treatment is developed, the ones who take it and become Normals again will eventually talk about how many of us there are. If that happens, it won’t be safe for any of us anymore, ’cause the Normals will go on a witch hunt to flush us out.”
“Jesus, Johnny, that’s bullshit and you know it,” Ed said. “The Normals will never believe that another race such as us could have been living among them for all these years, feeding on them and killing them, without having been discovered.”
Ashby took a bite of his elk burger, made a face at the taste of the cold meat, and put the rest of the sandwich down. “I don’t know, Ed. I’ve heard stories from some of the older ones in Calgary about how it was back in Europe in the eighteen hundreds. People went around digging up graves and cutting off heads and sticking stakes in people’s chests and such. They say it was a nightmare, and it got so bad they couldn’t even feed safely ’cause every time someone disappeared the Normals started persecuting anyone who was a little different.”
Ed shook his head. They were getting off the subject. “That’s ancient history, John, and times are different now. But the point I’m trying to make is that no matter how we feel about this so-called vaccine, we don’t need a bunch of strangers coming up here and upsetting the situation where we live.” He didn’t add that both he and Kim had liked the man named Pike and that he didn’t want to have anything happen to him, no matter what he was into. And he especially didn’t want a bunch of crazy headhunters coming up to his home from the States and bringing unwanted attention to them with a goddamned vampyre war.
“Okay, okay,” Ashby said, holding up his hands. “You’ve made your point, but what can I do about it now?”
Ed took out some money and laid it on the table. “I guess the first thing we have to do is find out if Pike is the man they’re looking for. With any luck, he won’t be and our problem will be solved. After all, there’s probably a hundred men who fit the same description running around up here.”
“Uh, I’ve already started on that, Ed.”
Ed, halfway out of his seat, sat back down. “Oh? And just how have you done that?”
“I sent Billy Andrade over to the Banff Springs Hotel to keep an eye on Pike. I told him you wanted the guy watched and he’s supposed to let us know what he does.”
“Shit!” Ed said. “John, Billy is a Normal. What if Pike does turn out to be one of us and Billy sees something he shouldn’t?”
Ashby’s face paled and he winced at the thought. “I never thought of that.”
“You didn’t think, period!” Ed said, trying to control his temper. He just hoped Ashby hadn’t stuck his dick in it by sending a Normal, especially one as dumb as Billy Andrade, to tail Pike. If Pike were one of us, he thought, he’ll pick up on Billy in a second and then he’ll know we’re interested in him and he’ll be doubly on his guard. Damnit to hell, Johnny should have known better!
“What should I do?” Ashby said.
“Nothing, John, you’ve done enough. I’ll go on over to the hotel and tell Billy to go back to headquarters, that it was all a mistake. Hopefully, Pike will have stayed in the hotel and no harm will be done.”
“What about the people that called me?” Ashby asked. “They’re already on their way up here. I even got them some rooms over at the Springs.”
Ed rolled his eyes, this just got better and better. “That was real smart, Johnny, getting them rooms at the same place Pike is staying. I just hope they don’t run into each other in the lobby and start a war right there in front of everybody.”
“Aw, jeez, Ed,” Ashby said, alarmed, “you don’t think . . .”
“Never mind, Johnny, I’ll take care of them,” Ed said, pulling his coat off the rack next to the table and slipping it on. “When they get to the hotel, I’m gonna lay the law down to them that if they try and do any hunting up here in my hometown, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
* * *
Ed went to the hotel and found Billy dozing in a big easy chair, an open newspaper on his chest. He shook him awake and asked what he’d seen. Billy told him that as far as he knew Pike was in his room and hadn’t left all day.
Yeah, Ed thought, as if you’d know since you’ve been sawing logs here in the lobby all morning. Well, perhaps it was best Billy was such a doofus, at least he hadn’t alerted Pike that they were checking up on him. Ed thanked Billy for his work and sent him back to headquarters. After he left the hotel, Ed figured he’d done enough work for one day, and he headed home to see how Kim was doing.
When he entered the house, he found her sitting at the large picture window in the living room, staring out at the snowcapped mountain peaks in the distance, with tears running down her cheeks.
Shit, he thought, here we go again. Almost every time they fed lately, Kim was filled with remorse for days afterward. Sometimes, it got so bad she vowed to never do it again, but Ed had learned to wait for the Hunger to reappear and she would always forget her vow under the massive influence of her Hunger for human blood.
; He took his coat off and hung it on a peg next to the door. Taking a deep breath and steeling himself for what was to come, he moved over to sit next to her on the couch, putting his arm around her shoulders and pulling her close to him.
“Come on, darling,” he whispered against her hair, “you’ve got to quit tearing yourself up over this.”
“I can’t help it,” she mumbled. “I just can’t get that sweet couple out of my mind.”
He leaned back so he could look into her eyes. Jesus, he thought, sweet couple indeed. Transient drug users who’d certainly known what they were doing when it came to kinky sex were not exactly what he’d call a sweet couple.
“Dearest,” he said gently, “you have to realize, we are what we are. We have to feed to live just like everyone else does.”
“But not everyone else has to kill people to eat,” she argued.
He sighed. “That’s true, but everyone in our race does. It is part of the price we pay for our immortality, babe,” he said, stroking her hair as he talked. After a moment, he added, “But, what I don’t understand Kim, is if you hate what you are so much, then why did you convert me to be like you?” he asked, remembering how Kim had performed the Rite of Transformation on him just after they’d met.
She reached up and caressed his face. “Because I was lonely, dear, and I wanted someone to share my life with, and I just happened to fall in love with a Normal.”
“I know, sweetie, and I’ve never regretted what you did. I love you and whatever it takes for me to spend the rest of my life with you is worth it. Can’t you see that?”
“Yes,” she said, “and I feel that way, too. If only there were some way for us not to have to kill innocent people to stay alive.”
He hated seeing her like this. There were times, especially when there were no hardened criminals to feed upon and he had to take Normal people that had done no one any harm, that he felt much the same remorse as she did. But it never seemed to affect him as deeply as it did his wife.
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