by Mary Hughes
Finally, the chief continued, “CSU got onsite immediately. Lieutenant Roet is heading our investigations while Detective Strongwell is out of town. He’ll have to finish quickly, though, as the church ladies,” a grimace flashed across Dirkson’s face, “have scheduled the hall for mid-afternoon. All right, everyone. Alice in dispatch has forwarded Elias’s picture to your phones, along with all the information we have. Keep your eyes open. Dismissed.”
Closing his notebook, Ryker suppressed a sigh. While the Keydew alias was proving useful, netting him the information the Steel brothers denied him, he’d nearly blown his cover.
Still, he now had Elias’s last location. Roller-Blayd Hall. He rose to head directly there.
Without telling Kat?
The irritation returned in spades, aimed at himself. It was for her own safety, of course. Dealing with beings who could ambush a vampire? Not for humans.
Still, he was oddly reluctant to leave her out of this. He soothed his conscience by promising himself he’d tell her—once he checked everything out himself and was sure she’d be safe.
He moseyed out with the rest of the officers. After he caught Dirkson alone in his office for a little quality one-on-one memory time, he headed for Roller-Blayd Hall.
By now the sun was in the sky, but Ryker wasn’t worried. Certainly, the progression from red skin to raised body temperature to actually catching fire and finally being reduced to ash was not pleasant. But the older the vampire, the longer that took. As an ancient, he could endure even the midday sun for ten minutes or so before he developed the telltale burned skin. On a cloudy day or when the sun was low in the sky, he could be out for almost an hour without obvious symptoms. He’d survived outside nearly a full day in Sweden once by ducking inside for a moment or two’s recovery every half hour.
The outer doors were blocked by crime-scene barricade tape. He headed for the single unbarricaded door, guarded by a uniformed officer holding a tablet computer. Car patrol Officer Keck, a sharp and intelligent man.
“Name?” Keck said in a clipped tone.
Ryker grinned, all innocence. “Gosh, I only came to help—”
“Name?” Keen eyes flicked up from the tablet.
Ryker shifted gears. “Keydew, third shift foot patrol. I took Officer Titus’s place?”
“Yeah, you’ve been doing some nice work. Generating less paperwork for the rest of us, too. I still can’t let you in.” He flashed the tablet at Ryker to show it held a list of names. Keck tapped a finger on the Ks, where Keydew was glaringly missing.
As the door opened and Detective Roet emerged with a cart carrying a computer, Ryker peeked inside.
The front half of the cavernous space was crawling with police, several in coveralls and vinyl boots. Some also swarmed the two-story security platform midway. He whistled. “Is the whole force here?”
“Detectives and CSIs, plus a few senior patrol officers to lift and carry and hold measuring tapes. Elias is a huge deal. Besides, we only have until two, two-thirty.” Keck grimaced similar to Chief Dirkson when he’d mentioned the church ladies. It puzzled Ryker, but he kept Keydew’s young face bland.
“Are you sure I can’t help…?”
At Keck’s firm “no,” Ryker sighed. He could’ve compelled Keck to let him in, but the idea of having to hypnotize half the police force inside made him weary. Better to go get some rest and come back later.
“I guess I’ll go hit the hay, then.”
He meandered toward his sleeping place, a bolt-hole apartment immediately outside the Meiers Corners city limits. The safe house was one of hundreds he owned throughout the world, untraceable thanks to dozens of shell corporations nested like Russian stacking dolls.
Perhaps being forced to rest was a good thing. He’d be at it nonstop once he found Elias’s trail. He’d hit the hall after the police were gone. Certainly, he could charm a few church ladies.
Although, if Kat were with him, she could distract them, leaving him free to investigate.
His step invigorated. That was a good idea. No, a great idea. It was to his benefit he bring her along.
It had nothing to do with wanting to see her again.
…
At nine a.m., trussed up in a stiff dress shirt and slacks, unarmed and insecure, I mounted the wraparound porch of a painted lady on East Second and Main.
Otto’s Bed and Breakfast Smorgasbord.
I reached for the front door, gut churning. Inside was my mother. The mother I’d yearned for—until I figured out that she wasn’t coming, ever.
I wanted this meeting to go well. I wanted her to like me. Hashing the past wasn’t helping, and I tried to put it out of my mind, but foreboding churned my insides.
My heart stress-skipped a couple beats, scaring me motionless. Fighting vampires was easy compared to meeting the woman who bore you.
My heart kicked hard, paused, kicked again, and then the beats evened out. I shut my eyes and willed it to stay steady. It was harder than it should have been. I’d thought the Stiegs had chosen Otto’s B&BS as a neutral public place. Then I discovered the owner Otto was a Stieg, one of my brand-new relatives.
In fact, I had no idea how many relatives waited on the other side of this door. Meiers Corners was settled in the eighteen hundreds by German immigrants, and today most of the town was related in one way or another—kind of like sixteen million men were descended from Genghis Khan. I’d suggested to my sister Rey it was a virus, infecting everyone with Oktoberfest Disease via beer spritzers. She thought that was hilarious, but I’d been serious.
I opened my eyes on the door. Swallowed hard. Behind that thin barrier were all these new relations, all carrying unknown expectations and obligations that I was ill-equipped to meet.
If they’d needed me to protect them from bloodsuckers, I’d happily be their hero. I was good with short swords; mixing, not so much. Just open the door. I only stood there, arm out, hand clenching, jaw tight.
Maybe Rey was right about me and unresolved issues.
My heart hiccupped again. I should come back later. Nip back to my flat, grab a couple throwing stars and maybe my collapsible fighting stick. I’d be better prepared…in case vampires attacked. Yeah, that was it.
Backing away from the doorknob like it was Marley’s ghost, I edged onto the main sidewalk where I spun and trotted off, fast, to the north.
Intent on the corner, I was surprised by a noise like a leaky tire.
“Psst!”
I stopped. The noise came again, from my right.
“Psst. Kat!”
Alexis Steel hung in the darkened doorway of an old carriage-house garage. “Want me to sneak you past the welcoming committee?”
A whole committee to welcome me? My stomach roiled as I tiptoed toward her. “How many?”
She ticked up three fingers. “Well, there’s Otto and Ottowina and Gunter and…” She ticked up the rest of the hand, a second hand, and went to the first hand again, naming names.
When she started on the second hand for the third time, I gasped, “Okay, good. I got it. I was just…” I gestured west, away. “You know, just, um.”
She gave me a sympathetic grin. “Sure, you can just, um. But you’ll only have to come back. I promise to stay with you during the ordeal.”
“It’s not an ordeal, it’s family.” I swallowed my nausea. “But an ally would be nice.” Besides, if I didn’t do this today, Rey would sympathetically hound me until I did. “Okay, thanks.”
Alexis led me to a small doorway, through it, and into a passageway.
The panel slid shut behind us. It was pitch dark. I sucked in an involuntary breath.
Her voice came, reassuringly near. “Keep one hand on the wall. It’s pretty short.”
My reaching fingers met old wood worn smooth from generations of palms. A few dozen yards later, s
he stopped me.
“Stand here and hang on.”
“To what?” I said as she activated a mechanism going clack-whirr. I grabbed frantically at a stone ledge, and a moment later I was spun into a sunlit room.
I was clinging to the mantel of a faux fireplace. “That was cool.”
Alexis smiled at me. “This place was a speakeasy, but there are secret ways all over town. We can get to Hattie’s room through the back hallways.”
She led me upstairs, where she stopped beside a door in a broad, carpeted hall.
This is it.
A stone lodged in my throat. I swallowed hard.
“Okay,” Alexis said. “Everyone in this room has read the manual on vampires.”
“There’s a manual?” I said, momentarily distracted.
“Not for realzies. I meant you can speak freely. Remember, though, not everyone in town is in on the secret. Okay, here we go.”
My chest tightened. Will my mother be loving? Distant? Old and frail?
Alexis knocked on the door.
Anxiety sliced me, as painful as swords. What will she think about me? Will she approve…or not?
The door swung open. “You made the grab?” A thirty-ish woman poked her blond head out. A horde of childish voices bubbled out from behind her. The woman had the face and figure of a pretty milkmaid and sparkling blue eyes. Too young to be my mother.
Small hands grabbed mine. I was tugged stumbling into the room in the midst of a typhoon of voices. I was packed in chaos, worse than a dozen rampaging vampires. People of every size seemed to be everywhere.
My whole body seized while my lungs pumped like bellows.
“She’s here!”
“We have an aunt!”
“Hi, Aunt Kat!”
Hyperventilating to the point of seeing stars, I blinked down around my knees, where the voices were coming from.
“Can I call you Aunt Kat?” A miniature version of the milkmaid held my right hand and grinned up at me.
I blinked again, trying to clear the hallucination. It didn’t clear.
“Mommy says we should wait but you’re my first aunt except for Aunt ’Lexis but she’s only our aunt as long as she keeps putting up with Uncle Luke who’s Daddy’s brother. I’m Sarah Jane and I’m almost six.”
“Me too,” said the mirror image of Sarah Jane from my other side. “I’m Ellen Ripley and I’m almost six but not quite as almost six as Sarah Jane is.”
I blinked some more, unable to do anything else. My stomach was no longer churning, mostly because it was as stunned as I was.
The milkmaid appeared at my side. Beyond her, babies maybe three months old squalled, one in each of Luke Steel’s arms.
His mirror image deftly prepared two bottles of formula at the microwave station, testing the heat of each on the inside of his wrist.
“Um, hi.” I grabbed a deep breath to slow my heart, pushing it out as I grinned weakly at the small girls. If this was the immediate family, I’d never have survived the full welcoming committee.
The milkmaid gave me a bright smile. “You must be Kat. Believe me, I was as shocked to hear about you as you must be about us. We won’t expect you to trust us right away. Do you hug or shake hands? Come in, come in. Girls, get Aunt Kat a bottle of water—unless you’d like something stronger? Then you can each have an ice cream and watch television in the bedroom. I’m Liese,” she added as if it was the least important of all the words she’d said. Instead the name rang inside me like a bell, if bells were bundled nerves.
This was my biological sister.
She wasn’t at all what I expected. As the girls released my hands and ran to a room fridge beside the blond god making baby bottles, I swam upstream through her torrent of information to her question: whether I hugged or shook hands. In case I couldn’t get a word in, I stuck out my hand. She took it in a brisk single up-down and released.
Okay. I could do this. I took another cleansing breath.
“Slow down, princess.” The Luke-a-like had a deep, crooning voice. “She doesn’t need every detail all at once.” He set the bottles on the counter then gently lifted one of the babies from Luke’s arms. The men each took a bottle, both expertly finding hungry mouths. Twin sucks were followed by a pair of sighs, huge for such tiny babies.
Something deep inside me went ping.
One of the small girls pressed a cold bottle of water into my hand. Then they disappeared through another door.
The silence that followed was profound.
“Sorry about that,” Liese said. “It’s the engineering genes. Every item is equally important to me. This is my husband, Logan.”
She gestured at the second Luke Steel. The two men were identical except for two differences. Luke had a long braid and Logan’s mane was shoulder-length.
And in Logan’s shadow stood an older woman wreathed in uncertainty.
My mother.
New acid dumped into my stomach, mixed with frozen cutting shards. Panting through it, I tried to hide my discomfort—if scared out of your mind is slightly distressed—by adopting a chatty tone. “So, you’re an engineer, Liese?” Though I spoke to her, my eyes were glued to my mother.
“Computer programmer. Well, I was. Now I run a business. Steel Security,” she added, totally blowing my first idea that her business was handmade potholders on Etsy.
My gaze swung to her in astonishment. Who was this woman, who so blithely announced she was my sister and, oh yeah, she ran one of the top security companies in the fucking world?
She grinned. “Hey, Kat—how many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“Um, what?”
“Lightbulb joke ahead,” her husband murmured.
“C’mon, Kat.” Liese bounced on her toes. “How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?”
I shook my head. “Um, one?”
“None! It’s a hardware problem.” She beamed at me expectantly.
I could only stare. No doubt about it. My biological sister was crazy.
Which, in a way, was a relief. It meant my own insanity toting swords and slaying vampires was merely a trick of my genetics, rather than anything I could control.
Alexis intervened at that point, shutting the door with, “My husband and Logan are identical twins.”
Unnecessary, since they gave me identical suave smirks. “Nice to meet you, Logan.” I crossed mental fingers. Mostly nice, since it wasn’t their fault my stomach was eating itself.
Logan moved to stand beside his wife. She circled a casual arm around his waist.
Leaving only my mother in my line of sight.
I stared. She stared. My throat thickened.
Her eyes began to glisten.
I gulped air. Oh, hell, the waterworks were coming, and I had no idea what to do. Wrapping my arms around me, I braced for anything from a fake “I love you” to a big syrupy soliloquy.
Instead, she blurted, “Kat—I’m sorry.”
Chapter Six
I’m sorry.
Oh, God. Those two little words. They dropped into my brain and exploded. I only recognized the thick mental and emotional walls I’d erected after that “I’m sorry” hit me like catapulted boulders, and my walls shattered. Boom, blasting my skull, spots flashing in my vision. And once my shields were down…
It hit me. I was rejected by my own mother—because I deserved it.
I clutched my middle as pain sheared me in two. So much pain, I went dizzy a moment.
My lungs pumped hard for air I couldn’t get. My thoughts spun in shock. Years of agony swamped me in an instant, pain that had been there all along, pushed deep, hidden.
She was sorry.
My mother stood there, eyes brimming, this horrific, broken admission too naked to be anything but an honest apology
.
Anger deserted me. Hell, sanity deserted me. All my life, I’d shoved my issues so far and so deep that their bursting free drowned me in a torrent of the past.
Eyes swimming and nose expanding with the prick of tears, suddenly I was the wretched child I’d been in the orphanage, crying Mommy. My heart was so full of need that I actually took a step in her direction.
That tiny, involuntary step scared the crap out of me. I was vulnerable right now, horrendously so considering I had the backup of neither Rey nor my swords.
Alarm hotwired my brain, shorting out rational response. A deluge of acid and ice swirled in my chest, my head. I tried to handle it by making a joke. Kat—I’m sorry. “Glad to meet you, Sorry.” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Kat.”
She blinked, a fat tear squeezing from her glossy eyes. “I-I don’t understand.”
Her hesitation stabbed me deep. I’d rather fight a thousand vampires than upset her, but in my desperate, vulnerable state, I’d screwed up. I blurted, “No, it’s me, I’m the problem, I’m terrible at jokes—”
“She’s a Stieg all right.” That was Alexis. “Puns to take the place of emotions.”
I cringed, wishing the floor would open up and swallow me. Bizarrely, at that moment, all I could think of was the vampire king. If I’d let him kill me when we met, I wouldn’t have had to go through this today.
That drew me back from the brink. My sister and I had rehearsed this reunion moment. I grabbed a fortifying breath and went to take my mother’s hands.
“I’m Kat. I’m glad to have this opportunity to meet you, Hattie.” After giving her hands a quick squeeze, I dropped them.
She searched my eyes, her own gaze still glossy though not quite so panic-stricken. “You look like your father.”
Father triggered a punch of anger. “Do you even know who he is?” I winced the moment I said it. So, yeah, years of suppressed resentment can overcome good manners.
“I most certainly do,” she retorted with a bit of acid. I liked her better for it. “Race is on a mission right now, or he’d be here to meet you.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I shouldn’t have given you up,” she said simply, and my heart broke. “I tried to raise you, but I was alone and scared. Though I don’t expect you to understand or forgive me, I’m hoping eventually—”