“There is no use struggling, though I will be disappointed if you don’t.”
“You’re right. There is no use struggling.”
Her hand shot out and grabbed him by his ponytail. Ophelia could sense his surprise give way to horror as she sank her teeth into his neck and tore out a huge chunk of flesh. She drank his steaming blood in great gulps and then hurled his dying body to the floor.
“You fool!” she jeered. “You thought you were stalking a mere sorcerer’s apprentice. You will have to learn to recognize a master vampire when you see one if you ever hope to become one!”
Ophelia moved the mouse up to the program menu and selected Quit, disconnecting herself from the Internet.
“What an idiot,” she said to no one in particular, pushing herself back from the desk in her bedroom where her computer sat. Her opponent clearly had some experience at the Ravening, but not nearly enough to even think about taking on Ophelia. It would be a long time before her newly killed adversary amassed the power and skill required to become a vampire.
Ophelia got the tarot cards out of the box on her dresser where she kept them. She shuffled them on her way back to the desk and dealt the first one, faceup, as she sat down again. It was the Fool.
“Ah,” Ophelia said to herself.
Strange to turn over the Fool first, for the Fool was the first card in the tarot deck. She recognized herself in his figure. The Fool in his motley was slightly ridiculous in his dress. He carried all his meager possessions tied up on his back, set out for his journey through the world. The Fool could be a hopeful figure. The possibilities were wide open for the Fool, if he would only decide to unpack his things and make a go of it. But the nearby cliff indicated the possibility of disaster should he take a misstep. Ophelia was never sure whether to regard the small dog barking at the Fool’s heels as being there to warn him of danger or harry him into plunging to his death.
She reached for the next card, using the edge of her black-lacquered fingernail to separate it from the deck.
The High Priestess.
Two power cards in a row—extraordinary. There was energy in the room. Ophelia could feel it. It made her aura tingle. She lit a pair of black candles on the desk and turned out the lights before coming back to ponder her future.
The High Priestess was an enigmatic figure. She came shrouded in darkness but filled with secret, occult knowledge. She was one who could see behind the curtain, who could reveal what was hidden, illuminating the future.
Ophelia sat back in her chair and closed her eyes to meditate on the matter. She would have liked to believe that she was the High Priestess, but she knew it was only too obvious that she was the Fool. It came up again and again, no matter how she read the cards. So who was the High Priestess? It had to be someone who had recently come into her life, or was about to enter it. Otherwise, Ophelia couldn’t think of a single person who could help her unlock the possibilities for a future she had all but decided to forgo by swallowing the bottle of pills hidden under the doll her mother had given her.
Dr. Glass?
Ophelia started to smile, but the left side of her mouth went up higher than its opposite to form a smirk. She was too intelligent to put any faith in psychiatry. Besides, she had seen him staring at her tits. He sat there all the time she was on his couch, fantasizing about fucking her. Ophelia didn’t have to be psychic to know that.
Putting the question aside for the moment, she turned over the next card. The picture showed a half god, half goat at the foot of a black mountain, surrounded by chained people indulging in their earthly desires, slaves to their obsessions. The Devil card, powerful and dangerous. The card was for someone powerful and wanton, someone who could be impossible to resist, not because he was too charming but because he refused to take no for an answer.
The card was a warning.
Ophelia reached for the next card, but looked up when a light came on outside her window. She rose from her chair and moved to the window in a crouch, as if not wanting to be seen by anybody who might be looking up at her window in the dead of night.
A light had come on downstairs in the house across the street, illuminating the ferns and heavy antique furniture. Looking in through the open draperies, she saw an oversize Chinese vase beside the marble fireplace, over it some kind of landscape painting. It was odd to see the lights on like that, for the house was always dark at night. Even when the security patrol was checking on things, Ophelia could never remember them turning on more than a light in the hall. Tonight, the downstairs was ablaze, as if the house was wired so that a single switch turned on every light on the first floor.
She could see someone moving in the parlor, not enough of a body to see if it was a man or a woman, just a bit of motion masked by the furniture and by the angle of vision from Ophelia’s bedroom. She was thinking about going downstairs for a better view when a man walked to the bay window at the front of the parlor.
Ophelia crouched down lower, but it would have been almost impossible to see her there. The candles on her desk threw off only enough light to see a dull golden glow and shadows from across the street.
It was a man, and he stood holding his arms behind his back, looking down at the street.
Ophelia’s eyes grew wide.
It was the man from the cemetery.
He shifted his weight and looked up the hill, glowering, as if he saw something that displeased him greatly, though Ophelia was sure the displeasure on his face was the sort that came from somewhere within.
He looked up at her.
Ophelia threw herself down in the window seat, pressing her face into the silk pillows. She knew he couldn’t have seen her there, but she had an uncanny sense that he had anyway. She stayed hidden for half a minute before daring another look.
The man was no longer standing in the window.
Ophelia let out a long sigh of relief.
A masculine silhouette appeared in the door across the street. It opened and he came out, shutting the door behind him but not locking it, moving down the stairs with so much deliberation that Ophelia was sure he was going to come across the street and pound on her door, demanding to know why she had been watching him. But at the sidewalk he turned and began walking down the hill, toward the bay.
Ophelia grabbed her cloak off the bed and flew out of her room.
He was still in plain sight when she moved outside, keeping in the shadows. She went down to the street and, staying opposite him, followed at a distance of several blocks, certainly enough to be discreet.
In a Jaguar sedan parked up the street, a man sat with his face bathed in the blue light reflected from his iBook computer, which was hooked into the Internet via a wireless network card. He had about given up hope of luring Ophelia back into the game, but now that she had come out of the safety of her house onto the street, it would be even more fun.
Dr. Glass closed the notebook computer and put it on the passenger seat. He opened the door, closing it quietly, pushing the remote lock as he set off down the hill after Ophelia.
32
Investigation
OPHELIA WAS WORKING on the Web site when the doorbell rang. She looked up, scowled, then went back to work on the new photos she was placing on the Hauntings home page.
The doorbell rang again.
It wasn’t as if her father would answer the door, even if he had been home, instead of away on one of his ill-defined errands. He rarely left the house, but when he did, Ophelia had no idea where he went. Certainly not to the grocery store. Marketing had become her responsibility by default, not that either of them ever cooked. He didn’t have to leave to buy liquor; they delivered it once or twice a week in boxes brought to the back door. It would have been a relief of sorts to think he was seeing someone, but Ophelia knew that wasn’t where he went when he disappeared. It was a mystery. She was just glad he went somewhere.
Whoever was downstairs began to pound on the front door.
“If it’s anot
her Realtor I’ll rip his lungs out,” Ophelia said. She shoved herself away from her desk and went to the window. Parked on the hill in front of the house was a midnight blue four-door Ford Crown Victoria sedan with too many antennas and the sort of absurdly cheap-looking mini-hubcaps you see only on government vehicles.
Ophelia’s immediate thought was that something had happened to her father. He had given up driving, so at least he could not be arrested again for driving while intoxicated. (The BMW was parked in the garage, not drivable after his accident.) But his color had been exceptionally bad lately, and Ophelia was worried about his heart. She went down the stairs two at a time and opened the door as the policeman was about to knock again. There were two of them: a man and a woman, each unsmiling.
“Can I help you?”
“Miss Warring?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
The policewoman showed her badge. She was the one in charge.
“I’m Lieutenant Minelli. This is Sergeant Packer. Could we come in?”
Ophelia’s anxiety made her more agreeable than she would have been otherwise. She opened the door and stood out of the way. The two cops looked around the foyer at the piles of newspapers and mail and exchanged a look.
“Is it my father?”
Lieutenant Minelli and Sergeant Packer glanced at each other again.
“No, Miss Warring. Is your father home?”
She shook her head.
“We’d like to ask you about last night.”
“What about it?”
“Where were you?”
“I was home until after ten.”
“Alone?”
“I suppose my father was home, but I didn’t see him. I was playing a computer game.”
“And after ten?”
“I went for a walk.”
She didn’t tell them that she’d followed the man from across the street, the man she’d seen earlier at the cemetery, crying outside the Peregrine mausoleum. She’d lost track of him down by the wharf. Ophelia half suspected he had known she was following him, but it was only a hunch. After that, she’d gone on to the Cage Club, where there were a few people hanging out, but she didn’t want to mention that to the police. The club was sacred territory.
“Alone?”
She nodded.
“Would you mind taking a ride with us, Miss Warring?”
“To the police station? Am I under arrest?”
“What reason would we have to arrest you?” Sergeant Packer said, speaking for the first time.
“None whatsoever.”
“You’re not under arrest. There’s just something we’d like you to see.”
Ophelia hesitated. She was more curious than concerned, since she had not done anything illegal, at least not anything the two detectives were likely to care about.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Do you want to leave a note for your father?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Lieutenant Minelli looked at her with something close enough to concern for Ophelia to feel a spike of anger, but the moment broke as soon as the lieutenant turned and reached for the door.
Sergeant Packer opened the back door of the car for Ophelia and shut it after her before climbing behind the wheel and starting the motor.
“How long have you been a Goth?” Lieutenant Minelli was sitting sideways in the front seat, looking back at her.
“I don’t know.”
“I understand that you and your friends like to play at being vampires.”
“Shouldn’t you put your seat belt on?” Ophelia said. “It’s the law.”
“Do you believe in vampires?”
“What we choose to believe or disbelieve is irrelevant to what is real.”
“That’s what I would call an ambiguous answer.”
Ophelia shrugged. They were driving in the opposite direction of the Cage Club. A good thing. There was no telling what bits of this and that the police might find lying around if they decided to have a serious look at the Brood’s party place.
“Is it all pretend?”
Ophelia glared at the detective.
“What I mean is: Do you just play at drinking blood, or do you ever really—well, you know.”
“What is this about?”
“I think you know,” Sergeant Packer said without taking his eyes off the road.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ophelia said. She sat back, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Lieutenant Minelli watching her, but after a few minutes the policewoman turned around to the front of the car and left Ophelia alone, though she never did fasten her seat belt.
Ophelia guessed where they were heading when they were still nearly a mile away. The streets were familiar enough, and by the time Sergeant Packer turned the Crown Vic onto Magnolia Avenue, it was obvious they were heading for the cemetery. The car slowed to a crawl and Lieutenant Minelli turned around again and gave Ophelia a close, appraising stare. Ophelia could see Sergeant Packer’s eyes on her in the mirror.
“What are we doing here?” The officers did not answer. They drove into the old part of the cemetery on a road that ran along the base of a hill that had a memorial to World War I at its crest. A dozen or more police cars and other vehicles, including an ambulance, came into view only when they got to a little valley that fell away from the hill on its back side.
“You like to hang out in this cemetery.”
“It’s not a crime to visit my mother’s grave, Lieutenant Minelli,” Ophelia said, her eyes on the group of people gathered around a waist-high sarcophaguslike monument, one of the many ornate nineteenth-century oddities in the graveyard. The bone white marble seemed to have been defaced with black paint, but Ophelia realized in the next moment that it was in fact covered with dried blood. As they drove nearer, the inchoate pile perched on the bier turned out to be two bodies, limbs hanging at odd, uncomfortable-looking angles, slack in death.
Sergeant Packer stopped and shifted the Ford into park. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror, Lieutenant Minelli again turned sideways, as Ophelia stared at the macabre tableau. The fascination on her face transformed the moment she recognized the half-hidden, blood-matted faces on the corpses. It was Damien and Pendragon, the fledgling vampires from the Cage Club.
“There’s a third victim you can’t see from here. Rebecca Miller.” Lieutenant Minelli glanced down, evidently consulting her notebook. “Although her vampire name is Letitia. She’s behind the tomb thing where the other two are. At least her naked body is.” The lieutenant’s eyes met Ophelia’s again. “We haven’t found the rest of her head. We thought maybe you could help us out with that, Ophelia.”
33
The Truth
OPHELIA WAS LATE getting home, delayed first by her appointment with Dr. Glass, and later the side trip to the San Francisco Public Library.
She had to put her shoulder into the door to push the day’s mail out of the way. The foyer was getting out of hand. It was past the time to step in, even if it was to throw away the newspapers and junk mail. That much was plain from the way the police officers had reacted to the embarrassing chaos inside the house. But Ophelia had far more important things to think about.
The house across the street was dark. She checked this again as she locked the door behind her. Lights in the old Peregrine mansion were the first thing she looked for when the taxi turned up her street. But there was no one home.
Ophelia went upstairs without checking on her father. She turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes, leaving them where they fell in a pile on the white tile floor in her bathroom. Her sessions with Dr. Glass always made her feel dirty. It was not so much his questions about how often she masturbated and had she ever experimented with lesbian sex—Ophelia didn’t mind talking about these things—but rather the way he looked at her. Dr. Glass was the one who needed a therapist to pry into his dark, damp fantasies. She had
thought about throwing back in his face the fact that she knew he was prescribing Vicodin to Zeke, who was selling it at the Cage Club.
Dr. Glass had demanded that she tell him everything about the gruesome scene in the cemetery. Ophelia was a connoisseur of the macabre, but it gave her the creeps to see the delight he took in hearing about the way Damien’s intestines had been wound around his neck like a bloody scarf. He admitted the police had been there to question him about Ophelia. He claimed that he’d told them he sincerely doubted she had anything to do with the triple murder.
There were two things he said that ate at Ophelia. The first was whether she thought the homicides had anything to do with the Ravening, since Letitia, Damien, and Pendragon had all been involved in the role-playing game. The second irritant was the question of where the blood had gone. Each of the trio had bled to death, and though there was plenty of blood at the scene, there wasn’t enough.
The police had asked Ophelia the same two questions. Her answer to them, and to Dr. Glass, had been the same: no and no. But the truth was she knew—as everyone certainly did—that vampires had everything to do with the deaths and the missing blood.
And now she knew it for certain.
Ophelia stood looking up into the shower’s steaming water, letting it beat down, driving the tension out of her. The old house had a huge water heater, and there was enough hot water for Ophelia to stand there until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
She walked across the bedroom in the dark, drying herself with her towel, and looked out the window. He was still not home. It took a while to get her long hair dry. She brushed it out and left it to hang loose.
The bras and panties in her underwear drawer were all black silk. Instead of her usual long skirt, Ophelia found a black leather micromini to wear. She put on a black blouse that was cut in front in a way that nicely displayed her breasts, which were of a size and shape that tended to make men stare. She retrieved her ankh and crosses from the bathroom, pulling her long hair out over the chains as she put them on.
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