by Eve Paludan
Dracula looked at me. “What would be your reason for putting Samantha Moon in such a dangerous position?”
“I have a photocopy of the contract, but I need the original.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“Because I need to read between the lines,” I explained.
“Of course!” Dracula snapped his fingers.
He patted my head and the chill of his hand went through my thick hair to my scalp. “Good dog!”
I refrained from starting a bar brawl with Count Chocula only because I didn’t have enough bail money on me. Oh, and because he was Dracula.
“I heard that,” he said, reading my mind.
Of course he had. Was there no one here who couldn’t read my mind?
He looked at Sam. “Before I forget, I want to buy some chotchkes to take home to a couple of the boys who wanted to come, but I wouldn’t allow them to accompany me. I knew if they joined me on this trip, there would be drained ladies of the evening from here to the Boulder Dam.”
“Nice of you to leave your ‘boys’ at home,” Sam said wryly.
“I’m not a complete barbarian.” Dracula looked at me. “Got any idea where to get chotchkes?”
I smiled. “I know the perfect souvenir place.”
We took a cab to The World’s Largest Gift Shop.
Chapter 21
When we were back in the hotel suite, I tried to get back to what Sam needed to do. “The contract is going to be hot.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was examining the original, I burned my pinkies. In fact, my hands started on fire. That’s why I made a copy of it.”
“That tells me the author of that document,” said Dracula.
I shuddered. “So, the D—”
Sam said, “Don’t say his name, Kingsley. When will you learn that you’re capable of summoning other supernaturals?”
I shrugged apologetically.
“Werewolves have psychic voices that carry over long distances, so thank you for not summoning,” Sam said.
“Point taken.” I looked at Dracula. “What have we got so Sam won’t burn her hands on the contract?”
“Just a moment.” He went through his shopping bags of souvenirs and got out a pair of oven gloves with Las Vegas printed on them.
“Perfect,” I said, as he handed them to Sam.
She put them on her hands and nodded to Dracula. “They’ll do. Thanks.”
I got out my own bag of souvenirs and took out three big flashlights with Las Vegas stickers on them. I set them upright under a glass-topped end table to make a makeshift light table.
I looked at Sam. “We’re ready. Now, all we need is the contract and our three pairs of eyes.”
She was back with the contract before the door to our suite even closed.
Even Dracula was impressed. “How did you get it so fast?”
“I had no trouble sneaking into Jolie Hart’s suite. I sent a telepathic message to Fang to keep Jolie busy in the bedroom while I made off with the contract.”
“Do locks mean nothing to you, Sam?” I asked.
“Vampires love locks. They open for us as if we are keys.”
Dracula smiled with all of his teeth at that. I had a lot of teeth, too, but not as scary as his.
He must have read my mind because he turned to me. “And don’t you forget it. Especially in your dreams tonight.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “You can’t compel me.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Dracul,” said Sam, folding her arms. “Must you torment Kingsley so?”
“I only tease those I like. The rest of them are just food.”
“In that case, thank you for liking me instead of draining me,” I said, turning on the flashlights under the glass end table.
“I only like you after a fashion,” Dracula assured me. “I may tire of you someday. Then, we shall battle.”
“I hope not,” I said. “I would take no pleasure in assassinating the originator of a species.”
Dracula let loose with his teakettle whistling, donkey-braying laugh again. “As if.”
“Sir,” I said, “we need to get started on this.”
“Agreed,” Sam said. She used the oven gloves to put one parchment sheet at a time on my makeshift light table. When the light shone through the pages of the contract, we were indeed able to spot faint lines written between the main lines. The new ones were written in some sort of white ink.
“That white ink is made from human plasma,” Sam informed me.
“Yuck.”
The others didn’t seem to have the same qualms about it. As Dracula nodded at each page, indicating that he was finished with it, Sam removed the parchment on the table and replaced it with the next one.
No one spoke, or took notes, but I did photograph each page with my phone, making sure that I got the angle right to pick up the extra lines. We all read between the lines with a growing sense of dread. Even Dracula seemed disquieted. I could feel the heaviness of his sighs as we discovered more things that Jolie Hart had agreed to without knowing it.
When the last page was turned face down, Dracula sat down heavily on the couch and put his head in his hands. That scared me even worse than his teeth.
He muttered, “This is possibly the worst-case scenario imaginable.”
“I agree,” said Sam.
“I’m optimistic,” I said brightly, because things were coming together in my head.
They looked at me, startled.
“Care to explain your untoward glee?” Dracula asked.
“Of course. Okay, number one. Morrie is just a minion. He’s only an agent, a fraud, a pretender. Therefore, he has less power than he purports to have. Big D, he’s nothing but your garden-variety demonic vampire, and the only thing that gives him power above ground is our fear of him. He’s feeding on fear, gobbling it up like blood and using it to pump himself up. He’s weak up here without his dark puppet master. In order to accomplish the dark parts of the contract and take poor Jolie back across the River Styx, as it were, he’s going to need a lot of help. That concert venue would have to be filled with underling demon vampires for him to accomplish something as difficult as taking down Samantha, killing her, removing her entity, and putting it into Jolie. He can’t do all that without help. Morrie is but a cog in a wheel. But you two are the wheel.”
“Keep going,” Dracula said, the flames in his pupils intent on me.
I nodded. “Point number two: Information is power. In any investigation, court case, or battle, knowing your enemies and your allies opens up choices not just for defense, but for offense. I suggest we take offensive tactics as soon as Jolie and Sam are clear of danger. Or, at least, when she finishes the song on stage. Because the song is power.”
“Yes,” Sam said, “it is.”
“Something is missing,” Dracula said. “We know that Morrie made her a vampire and also failed to give her an entity. Is it because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”
That part was clear to me, now that I’d read the contract in its entirety. “Couldn’t. Not until two things happen. The song has to be sung before the entity can be planted, but he can’t plant it if Jolie Hart sings the song and goes home before he has a chance to implant it in her. Assuming I’ve read this right, if she can get home, she’s safe. They tried planting one entity in her and it died.”
Dracula’s mouth opened and closed in surprise. “How?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”
“But, Dracul, her memory was wiped when Morrie made her a vampire,” Sam said. “Going ‘home’ is a bit of an issue. She doesn’t know where she belongs.”
“Where is her home?” Dracula asked.
“Sir, where do you think she got that voice?” I asked. “A voice that can sing chords? The polyphonic voice is the rarest of the rare. She has a thousand vocal cords that render sound in a ventricular voice as well as a glottal voice.”
“How do you kno
w this stuff?” Sam asked.
“Because Google is my friend,” I replied. “I heard her singing chords in my back garden and I got on the Internet to find out how she was doing it. Only a few people can, but not at her level. I’m thinking she was a supernatural, even before she became a vampire.”
“Of course. She has a celestial voice,” Dracula said.
“Bingo!” I said.
“But who is she?” Sam asked.
“Sam, don’t you get it?” I said. “Jolie Hart is Fang’s guardian angel. Or was.”
Both Dracula and Sam gasped.
“Heaven is missing one of theirs,” I continued before the train of thought could get away from me. “From the hints in the between-the-lines wording of the contract, here’s what I think happened.” I paused and took a dramatic breath, then let it out. “Jolie Hart, guardian angel, was upset when Detective Rachel Hanner, or whatever her real name was, turned Fang into a vampire.” I paused, thinking.
“I just read Sam’s mind that Hanner is dead.” Dracula waved a hand at me. “Continue in this vein, canine.”
I rolled my eyes, but let that one go. “I think Jolie fell to Earth from Heaven because she either fell in love with Fang, or she thought she could save him from his blood club schemes.”
“I think it’s the second thing,” Sam said. “I know a little about fallen guardian angels. They have reasons greater than love. They have agendas.”
I nodded, wanting to tell her all about her own guardian angel, but I was apparently still unable to speak Ishmael’s name. “So, I think that Jolie fell to Earth to try to either be with Fang because she loves him, or to put a silver stake or bullet in him to stop him from his smarmy path as a purveyor of blood for money.”
“The blood club is not smarmy. It’s brilliant. Fang should franchise it. But I digress. If what you say is true,” Dracula said, “what happened to Jolie’s angelic sensibilities?”
“I think when she was hanging around Fang as a fallen angel, Morrie made her into a vampire,” I continued. “He did the memory wipe thing on her, convinced her that he gave her that marvelous voice, and compelled her to become a huge rock star. She doesn’t even know what she was.”
“History repeats itself,” Sam said grimly.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you someday.”
“To what end does Morrie do this?” Dracula asked.
I had an answer for that. “To steal a piece of Heaven and take Jolie to Hell as a gift for the king of Hell, to win his favor, make some brown-nose points, and rise up in power over other scurrilous demons.”
No one said anything for several moments.
“Morrie mocks Heaven with such umbrage,” Dracula said. “Even I don’t mess around with that.”
“How are we going to get her home when she has no clue about who she is or what she was?” Sam asked.
“Danny? Can you do it?” I asked.
The last fine particles of Danny’s spirit wiggled out of Sam’s purse and soared around the room in excitement.
“Looks like Danny’s ghost is on board,” I said.
“This is very dangerous,” Dracula said. “Sam could get killed. And the entity within her, too.”
“I agree,” I said. “Sam, you should stay in the hotel room until this is over.”
“No, you and Dracul cannot do this alone. It’s important that Jolie gets home safely.”
“And that Sam does, too,” Dracula said. “Sam has a greater destiny, far in the future,” he said mysteriously.
Sam teared up. “Fang is going to flip out when he learns that Jolie was his former guardian angel.”
“Sam,” I said. “At this time, no one should tell Fang who she is to him.”
Dracula said, “Agreed. He’ll stop our efforts to deliver her home—he’ll want to keep her here, and to keep her his.”
“How could a guardian angel fall like this?” I asked.
Sam went into the bathroom and sobbed.
I tapped on the door. “Sam, let me in.”
“No. I need to be alone. I’m going to call my kids.”
I honored that request. I didn’t point out that it was past their bedtime.
Chapter 22
That night, Sam locked me out of the bedroom. Disappointed and exhausted, I gave up begging through the door and sacked out on the pull-out couch, leaving the other master bedroom for Dracula. Fang was with Jolie tonight. Of course, he was.
I wondered where Morrie was. Probably making evil mischief everywhere he went. A lesser demon and a vampire, pretending to be king of the vampires. That had to be ticking off Dracula big time.
I felt anxious. Not just about what was going down with saving Sam and sending a fallen angel-turned-vampire back to Heaven before she had an entity planted in her. I had my own problems, too. I was less than twenty-four hours from turning into the werewolf again. Yet, here I was, still in Vegas. And I was too hot. Wait a minute, the air conditioning should have been moving the mat of hair on my barrel chest.
I opened my eyes in the darkness, only to see that the balcony sliding doors were open and the curtains were billowing. Apparently, we were leaking air conditioning into the desert night.
I leapt off the pull-out couch and ran onto the balcony, ready to fight whoever was coming to kill us. Instead, all I saw was a naked man sitting on a deck chair, calmly sipping blood from his flask.
“Big D, you almost scared the scat out of me.”
“Ha, amusing as always.” He patted the chair next to him. “Sit, sit!”
“Hang on.” I got a towel out of the bathroom and handed it to him.
He obliged me, putting it over his lap with a little eye roll at my sense of propriety. Only when he was covered did I sit in the chair next to him. We both stared out into the broiling night that glittered with all of the lights that Las Vegas offered.
Something slipped out before I realized I’d said it aloud. “Your shoulders are huge. I mean, I didn’t expect—”
“I work out. Just not how you think I do.” He smiled a secret smile and drank more out of the flask. He saw me looking at it. “Want some?”
“No, thanks. I don’t really need it like vampires do. If I drank some, it would be pure gluttony on my part.”
“It’s an unending supply. That’s how I can be so generous. Are you sure you don’t want a taste?”
I held up my hand in polite refusal. “I’m good.”
“Yes, you are.”
I gulped. It felt like approval coming from him. Or maybe it was a trick.
“It’s not a trick.”
“I don’t want to drink from your magic flask, but may I ask whose blood it is? I’m really curious.”
“It’s mine.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
I wouldn’t press him for more info. Changing the subject, I waved my arm across the shimmering lights of Las Vegas. “What do you think of Sin City?”
“I adore it.”
“You do? It’s tawdry, gaudy and freaking hot. I’m sweating bullets.”
“Werewolf, I love the heat of the desert as much as you enjoy the coolness of the forest. I can’t even tell you how hard it is to be a vampire sometimes. It’s a type of cold I can only escape by sitting in a sauna or taking a scalding shower. As soon as I get out, I’m cold again. I’m tired of it.”
“So, you like the heat?” I asked.
“I crave it. I think I’m going to buy a summer place here. I want to broil my testes on a vinyl car seat in high summer. They’ve been frozen for centuries.”
I tried very hard not to picture that. “To each his own.”
“I want a place that is warmer than my castle but cooler than Hades.”
I tilted my head at him. “You’re not what I expected, although my perceptions of you were formed by movies and books.”
“You see what I want you to see.”
“Oh,” I said, sta
ring at the blinking lights until tears filled my eyes. A wave of grief for Fang’s impending loss suddenly hit me.
“Such compassion. You’re already grieving for Fang’s heart,” Dracula said.
“Of course I am. He’s my… best friend.”
“Truthfully?”
“Yeah. This was his only real shot at happiness. With Jolie. With his fallen guardian angel, of all improbable creatures. But they’re both oblivious to her true identity.”
“Irony is a harsh mistress, Kingsley.”
“Thank you for calling me by my name.”
“You may call me by mine, too. I am Dracul.”
I tried to replicate the exact phonetics. “Dracul.”
“Good pronunciation.”
“Thanks.”
“Some say it means ‘devil’ in Romanian. But it really means ‘Dragon,’ in a more honorable context.” He paused. “Many years ago, my father, before things went so badly, was a member of The Order of the Dragon, whose intent was to protect Christianity in Eastern Europe. So were his sons.”
I leaned forward, interested.
He continued, “Part of the way that we protected Christianity was to protect the Grail.”
“The Grail?” I was shocked.
“Not that Grail. There are many. I am talking about this one. St. George tried to make the dragon tell where it was. But he would not speak, for it would have betrayed the Order. There was torture involved.”
“How awful. How old were you when that happened?”
“I was five when St. George killed my older brother and paraded his head on a pike for all to see his deed. He had killed what he thought was a huge dragon, but was in fact, a human child. He’d picked the wrong brother. That head on the pike should have been mine.”
“Barbaric.”
“Yes.” He lifted his flask and before my eyes, it changed to a gold cup.
I bowed my head reverently.
He handed it to me. I held the heavy cup with both hands and looked into the shimmering burgundy fluid.
“Whose blood is this?” I asked the question again, not because I didn’t believe—but because I was trying to understand. My hands were not trembling, but my voice was. “Whose?”