The Blood Born Tales (Book 1): Blood Collector

by T. C. Elofson

  Jack, look at the Greek vampire, for example. From 1883 to 1978, this creature terrorized Europe, claiming countless souls and drinking their blood for her own purposes. This is a proven fact.

  Jack wondered… Proven by whom? And how many cases like this one did this person have access to?

  Not taking his eyes off the screen of his phone, Jack read the name of the vampire. Aglaia. In Greek, the name translated to splendor or beauty. But some time afterward, she changed her name to Atrox, which, in Latin, meant terribly cruel or horrific.

  Jack touched the old marks on his neck. Whoever User319 was, he had just given Jack a true gift. But how could the stranger have known about that part of Jack’s life? Never in Jack’s wildest dreams could he ever have imagined he could find her again.

  Jack’s mind was swimming as his eyes frantically read over the information on his screen. He tried desperately to memorize every detail, afraid that somehow the information would disappear at any moment.

  It had been many years ago, in the hills of that small French town, when Jack had first encountered the vampire. And every moment since then, his thoughts had secretly been about her.

  Jack wondered for the millionth time who this User319 was as he put his phone down. He tried to calm himself, only to come around the front of the house to be greeted by a flood of camera lights and television crews. Hart Hammaned, the television anchor for a local station, shoved a small microphone into Jack’s face as if it was a sword he had just drawn. He acted like a valiant knight on horseback. The act wasn’t very believable.

  It was times like these that put Jack into his most venomous moods, usually during the early morning whenever he was confronted by the media. He hated the media and hated Hart Hammaned the most. Jack began to curse under his breath as he approached the reporters, cameras rolling in front of him.

  “Agent Mitchell, can you confirm that two more bodies have indeed turned up?”

  Jack’s dark sunglasses glanced in Hart’s direction as the two of them continued their hundred-yard stare at one another.

  “I have no comment,” Jack said, a splinter of ice in his tone and his fists clenched at his side.

  “Is the FBI here to help out in the investigation or because these killings are a lot bigger than you’re alluding to?”

  “No comment,” Jack stated once more coldly. He tried to keep his demeanor flat, but his nerves had begun to fizz with fury. He could kill this man, he thought. No one would really miss him and the news would still go on with some other fake asshole to take his place. These dicks were a dime a dozen.

  “My source tells me, Agent, that these killings have been going on long before they showed up in Seattle,” Hart began again. “Isn’t it true that bodies have been found in California and Oregon? The killer worked his or her way up the coast. Isn’t that right, Agent Mitchell?”

  Jack turned and walked away, refusing to divulge any information. He had known it was only a matter of time before that news got out to someone.

  “That’s really why the FBI is here, isn’t it, Agent?” Hart was yelling now and Jack wondered if he would hear from User319 about this too.

  Jack walked back into the house and was shaken by what the reporter had said. He had known for some time that the killer was working her way up the coast. Jack had been the one that formed the team between the FBI and Seattle PD, but he was not ready for the public or the Seattle PD to find out that information this quickly.

  Jack pulled a digital camera from his pocket and brought up the picture that he had taken of the letter. He stared at the screen and looked up, scowling. She made contact, he thought. He read the letter to himself and knew at that moment everything had changed. The game was now on different terms.

  Jack had been just a child when his grandfather had told him what would happen to a vampire that was exposed to the rays of the sunrise. A primal instinct now flooded warnings to his mind. Try as he might to not be like his eccentric grandfather, Jack knew these vampire tales were not so alien. At times, they even seemed to come from the depths of his origins. Something told him that his grandfather had been right all those years ago.

  His grandfather’s voice still rang in his head. Jack never wanted to relive those memories from his youth. He had thought he had broken free of that life for good. But now—twice in the last few days—he could hear the voice of his grandfather speaking to him. He had always known that there was evil in this world. Of course there was evil! Like the psychopathic murderers that inhabited every major city in this country… But there was also true evil hidden away under what we saw every day. Just like what his grandfather had always said.

  “It’s out there. Have no delusions about it, my boy.”

  Always the teacher. Always the vampire hunter, Jack thought.

  252

  Chapter 41

  11:30 a.m., November 25

  “‘Your citizens’,” Kenny uttered as I drove down the street. “That line sticks in my mind.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The note. She wrote, ‘I cannot say that he will not take any more lives of your citizens.’ That leads me to believe that she thinks of herself as an outsider—not one of us. Now does that mean that she’s not an American? Or she is a vampire? Not one of us. As in, not human, not a citizen?” Kenny fell silent as he scanned the note once more. “And Olisipo. That’s a place right? She could just be crazy. We should check the mental hospitals in the area.”

  “Yeah, she might be. But I’m not totally convinced of that yet,” I said.

  I thought hard, my eyes fixed on the road filled with mud puddles and the glaring headlights of oncoming traffic.

  “I swear to God I can’t come up with anything outside of the impossible. Everything I have known in my life is telling me that this is ridiculous, but I can’t shake the feeling that I have been watched and that evil is close. Monster evil. Like in the movies.”

  “I know,” Kenny sighed.

  “Hey, do you have internet on your phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do a search for Olisipo,” I said.

  He pulled out his cell phone, slid it open and exposed an elaborate key pad. The soft clicking of keys sounded as he searched the Internet.

  “Okay, I’m going to read from my Histopedia app. ‘Olisipo was a village in Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula,’” he read off of his phone. “Okay, so a long time ago, when the Romans ruled. So it says, ‘The Latin term Hispania was often used during antiquity and the High Middle Ages as a geographical name for the Iberian Peninsula.’ It’s more or less Spain.”

  There was a pause in his reading for a moment, then he continued. “Okay, the Romans invaded in 218 BCE. It was a training ground after that.”

  We bought drive-thru lunch—burgers and fries at a crappy place on 65 Street—and it had gotten very cool outside. Approaching headlights blurred my vision as I turned off and headed towards the water, back to my house. I was getting a migraine and I could already tell that no amount of painkillers would ease it. Not even the tall Coke I sucked on through a bent straw would help. I sometimes resorted to caffeine to ease my headaches. Caffeine is one of the world’s oldest painkillers and was used to alleviate headaches way before modern medicine. Most people are unaware of that fact since half the free world is addicted to caffeine. Anyway, it made little difference.

  Kenny and I had very difficult work ahead of us if we were to figure out what was going on, so the sensible thing for us to do was head back to the house, eat our lunch, and talk. But in truth, I did not feel like walking inside my empty house. With Merric gone, it was just depressing to me these days. The house felt far too cold and lonely for me lately. It was one of those times when I could think of nothing that soothed my mind.

  Sitting down in my study, Kenny and I ate quietly and afterwards I asked Kenny to review the cases for me starting at the beginning, with the first body that had shown up in Seattle. I felt an odd sensation of doom and yet
I felt lightness around my heart that spurred me into working on this. I don’t know, maybe the thrill of the unknown was juicing me.

  Even though there seemed to be no presence in my two-story wooden house but Kenny and myself, I still could not shake the strange feeling that I was being watched again. I did not share my thoughts with my friend though. I felt that I had already drifted too far away from clear thinking in the past few hours.

  Kenny sat at my long wooden computer desk and accessed the police files that we needed to review. Keys clicked in repeated succession as he entered his password into the VICAP website. Moments later he began to read files off to me.

  “Okay, the first victim was found in Lake City behind the public library. Twenty to thirty years of age. Not as strange a finding as most of the other bodies that have surfaced since then, but still no identification was found. Cause of death: blood loss from two holes in the neck.”

  Kenny paused and used the mouse to scroll down to another file.

  “Victim two: the girl out at Sand Point Naval Station,” he continued. “Victim was female, in her late teens. Cause of death: blood loss. Wear to her upper right condole and damage to her lower lumbar vertebra, contusions around the ankles, and hip displacement. Elongation of spine. She was hung upside down for a long period of time. Damage to the number 6 rib, musket ball found lodged in the rib, with no flesh damage. The musket ball had shown signs of age. It had been there some time. She also had damage to her ribcage, like it had been crushed at some point.”

  “Alright. Tell me about the Westlake Center case again then,” I said, still trying to take it all in.

  “So the third victim was male, in his mid-twenties. The cause of death is inconclusive at this time, however there is trauma to the back of the skull. The hyoid bone was cracked at the tip as if he were strangled. There is a split in the cartilage between the t3 and t4 vertebrae, as if he were stabbed or punctured with something. The M.E. has found traces of oxidized iron and rust embedded in the bone. Something very sharp and old left trace evidence behind—evidence in the process of being analyzed. The woman from the mall… well, it seems she was a witch.”

  “What?” I questioned.

  “Yeah, a Salem witch, apparently. The strontium isotope results verify Massachusetts,” Kenny told me. “Then, of course, there’s the two that were found at the Warwick Hotel on 5 Street. Mike Florida and Travis Macavity—the only ones so far that we have been able to identify.”

  Kenny stopped for a moment and scrolled down to another file. The lamp light was soft and seemed to cause shadows around the antique wood of the table in the study. I liked the look of the aged wood.

  Large trees by the window in front of Kenny swayed gently back and forth, blocking out the light of the sun that was trying so desperately to have a presence in the house.

  “The Pike Place victim is still pending. What we do know is that the person was set on fire, but there was blood loss and two holes were found in the neck. Our killer. Now it is up for debate if the old couple in Blue Ridge are victims seven and eight.”

  “That’s a lot of deaths in such a short time,” I said.

  I was deeply unsettled after I heard Kenny’s breakdown of the last few weeks of our lives. I then did something that was rather unnerving for Kenny. I drew my Smith & Wesson 40-caliber from my holster, released the clip and checked the gun. I held it in my lap for a moment in silence.

  “Dude, are you all right?” he asked.

  My eyes were shaking and questioning as I looked up at him and spoke. “I am almost certain that she’s watching me. Or that someone is watching me.”

  “We’ll get through this. She seems to want to help you, man.”

  “If we can even believe that note. She is a killer…” I said, trying not to let my fear show itself to Kenny. I hated that he might witness me seeming weak.

  But I knew Kenny truly wanted to help me and that was, in some ways, a comfort for me. The worst damage this woman could have done to us was to make us believe that she was a supernatural creature of the night. To put those thoughts in our heads would make us question everything. My biggest fear of all was not that there was a vampire roaming my city streets, but that Kenny and I might not be able to stop what was happening. Kenny looked at me and said something that changed things for me.

  “Tim,” he said softly. “Have you thought that maybe the reason all of our victims have come up with no matches in any of our databases is because they’re vampires?”

  “What?” I said in a disbelieving tone.

  “No, hear me out, man. No system anywhere has them on file because they were born well before any system existed. Think about it! Bone damage that cannot be explained, bronze metal that would have to be an antique now, used as a weapon? Bone growing over musket balls in bodies with no flesh wounds? As crazy as it sounds coming out of my mouth, vampire is the only label that fits our unidentified victims.”

  “And I thought I was the crazy one,” I sighed.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, Kenny and I were still busy going over the case and researching. What he said had stuck in my mind. It terrified me. Were vampires all around? Really? What good could a cop like me really do against something like that? I had spent my whole career bringing down criminals, the men and women who murdered and killed for a reason. Sometimes it was revenge. Sometimes it was to cover up their identity. But mostly it was for power, and it occurred to me that maybe Fabiana was killing for one of those same reasons. Power.

  I was enveloped by silence broken only by the sound of paper. Kenny was working at my desk as he printed out a search that he had done on vampire history. The printer growled to life and grabbed up sheet after sheet of paper. The paper disappeared into the mouth of the machine only to be spit out a moment later.

  “Listen to this,” he said as he began to read and handed me a print-out. I held a piece of paper in my hand, following along.

  “Vampire. From Histopedia, the free history media.

  “Vampires, it seems, were believed to be blood-sucking demons, for as long as man has been around. Okay, the term vampire came about in the 18 century, after a growth of vampire superstition in Western Europe and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It seems that many cultures had their own names for them. The Greeks called them vrykolakas and the Romanians called them strigoi. This all lead to mass panic and hysteria and, in some cases, even led to newly dead bodies even being staked, if you can believe that? The idea was that if you staked a newly deceased person, you would be saving them the trouble of rising from the dead later and ensuring that they would not become a vampire.

  “Next section: Identifying vampires. So there were many methods of identifying vampires. One required a virgin boy, who you would have to lead into a graveyard or church grounds, on a virgin horse, no less. The horse would supposedly grunt at the grave in question. Okay… generally, a black horse was required, but in some places, a white horse was better. Mainly this is total shit. Listen to this: ‘Holes appearing in the earth over a grave were taken as a sign of vampirism.’”

  Kenny fell silent for a moment before he continued reading.

  “Corpses believed to be blood suckers had healthier looks than expected for the time. Sometimes they were fatter and pale, and okay, ‘…showed no signs of age or death. When graves of suspected vampires were opened, fresh blood had been reported on the corpses’ faces.’”

  Looking through the pictures and files of vampire lore, I came across The Vampire by Philip Burne-Jones. I was shocked to see that the woman in the image looked just like the print-out I had of our suspect, Fabiana. The woman in the painting was supposed to be an actress named Mrs. Patrick Campbell but upon looking at the portrait of her, I thought she seemed unnervingly similar to Fabiana of Olisipo. She was beautiful and looked just like the seductive woman in my dream. But how could that be? I could still feel her touch on my face and her lips on mine. It was so real to me! But how could it be?

  The Vampire by
Philip Burne-Jones, 1897

  “Fabiana…” I uttered almost unbelievingly. “Can it really be her?”

  I pulled the print-out photo from my pocket, the still taken of Fabiana from behind the Westlake Center Mall. I unfolded it and placed it on the desk next to the 1897 painting by Philip Burne-Jones. It was her. There was no question in my mind.

  “No fucking way! I can’t really believe it,” Kenny said as he got out of my computer chair and began to pace the study, his hands pulling at his hair and rubbing over his face.

  “Are we really serious about this, Tim? I mean, we have gone down some real strange avenues of investigation over the years, but what we are talking about is unheard of! The captain and the FBI, for that matter, are going to want answers and we have none to give them. We can’t really go in and say, ‘Guess what! All those murders? Well, don’t worry too much—they’re just vampires killing vampires!’ They’ll lock us away forever!”

  And he was right. They would lock us away forever and I wouldn’t blame them in the least if they did. Then Kenny’s phone went off and I think I knew it was going to be his uncle again.

  “This is Johnson… Yeah? God, is he alright?! Okay, I’m on my way.”

  I stared at Kenny as he put his phone away.

  “Uh… Hank had an accident at my place. The old man fell down the stairs. Fuck! I told him to use the elevator! Tim, take me home please.”

  We raced back to his house as fast as my truck could get us there. Once more, my police siren was blaring and I pushed the engine of my Ford F150 as fast as it would go. We zipped and weaved in and out of traffic, the headlights of my truck flashing past slowed cars and trucks on I-5.

  A moment later, we were inside his house and Kenny was talking to the fire department as they were leaving. “Thank you. Thanks for everything, guys.”

  Then he walked into the living room and found his uncle. Hank was embarrassed and sitting on the couch with an ice pack on his knee.