He couldn’t argue with her reasoning, and he’d prefer not to have her out of his sight. He hated leaving her this morning, but it had been necessary for him to hunt. Throughout the day, he’d seen no sign of anyone else in the woods, yet they were out there. He would sense someone if they were close, but once he went inside, Mollie couldn’t sense someone approaching.
If he could find Jack or Doug, he’d have some help. He’d hoped to find some trace of them over the course of the day but discovered nothing. By now, they could be fifty miles or more apart and all of them in different directions. Plus, Doug and Jack probably didn’t have a human slowing them down. They would bring back help if they found it, but until then, he and Mollie were on their own.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said, and clasping her hand, he led her to the back of the battered house.
Over the years, the woods had crept in to reclaim their land and now crowded the back half of the house. He pulled pine branches out of the way and held them aside for Mollie to duck under before following her. Closer to the home, thick bramble bushes swarmed the bottom of the two steps leading toward the open doorway.
Settling his hands on Mollie’s waist, he lifted her over the thick thorns and set her inside the doorway. Unable to lift himself over the bushes, they tore at his jeans and sliced his skin as he battered them beneath his feet and pulled them out of his way. The steps sagged and creaked beneath his weight but held firm until he stepped into the doorway.
Mollie had already made her way to the center of the old kitchen when Mike’s shadow spilled over her feet. The layer of dirt and rotting leaves covering the floor was so thick she couldn’t see what lay beneath. Mollie’s nose wrinkled at the potent stench of mildew and rotting wood filling the air.
Spiders and other bugs didn’t bother to skitter out of the way as they explored; the insects had claimed this house as theirs, and they weren’t giving it up without a fight. It was a battle she was more than happy to let them win.
Two pots sat on the burners of the dust-covered, cast iron stove. When she peeked into the pots, she discovered one was filled with debris, but the other had a ladle leaning against the inside of it. Mollie turned away from the stove as Mike stalked across the kitchen to the doorway leading out. Her gaze fell on the table and the four, grime-covered plates sitting on it.
“Mollie,” Mike said, but she ignored him as she approached the table.
Two of the chairs were turned over and lay a few feet away from the table. The wind, animals, or any number of things could have caused the chairs to have fallen over the years. However, Mollie couldn’t shake the idea the prior residents of this home were sitting at the table when something caused them to flee.
The walls of this house held secrets, and she heard them whispering to her in every creak of the old wood, but she didn’t know what they were trying to reveal. Mollie rested her hand on a tarnished spoon as she tried to picture the family who once resided here.
“Mollie,” Mike said again. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
Reluctantly, Mollie stepped away from the table and followed him from the kitchen. Mike ducked through each of the doorways as they passed into the dining room and then beyond to the living room. They made their way swiftly through the rotting furniture that would have been considered new during World War II.
When they moved from the double-story house to the single-story section, they encountered a raccoon. The creature screeched its displeasure at them before darting into a hole. Mollie’s hand tightened on the strap of her rifle; she didn’t mind wild animals, but she’d read Cujo, and she was not about to take any chances. The raccoon was smaller than a Saint Bernard, but it could still do some damage with those claws. Plus, rabies was not on her bucket list of things to try.
“Do you think there are any bats in the lighthouse?” she asked Mike.
“It’s probably too cold for them up there.”
“Good.”
Mike stopped outside the closed door of the next room and gripped the handle. The rotten knob broke off in his hand. He tossed it aside and slid his fingers into the hole the missing knob created. The old, swollen wood groaned before a crack zigzagged down the middle of the door and it splintered apart.
Gripping the edges, Mike tore the pieces away with an ease that left her gawking. When he succeeded in clearing the wood, he froze before turning toward her.
“Mollie, stay there.”
His hand shot out to stop her from stepping forward, but she’d already seen what he was trying to keep from her. Resting her hand on his arm, she pushed it down as she gazed at the bodies within.
In the corner of the room, four corpses sat against the wall. Their eyes had rotted away, but their gray skin was strangely mummified as none of their bones showed through it. A knot formed in her stomach as something niggled at the back of her mind. There was something so wrong about this, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what.
The corpse wearing a necklace and a golden wedding band had its arms draped across the shoulders of two smaller bodies. While the other, larger corpse had its hand over the leg of one of the smaller bodies and resting on the thigh of the one with the necklace.
Mollie realized she was gazing at a family. She suspected they were the same family who fled their kitchen in the middle of a meal, but what had they attempted to run from?
She didn’t know the answer, but the more she inspected them, the more they seemed entirely out of place. They’d fled here and, what, died sitting together like that? Why hadn’t they left through one of the windows or continued on to the lighthouse to send out a distress signal?
She bit her lip as she shuddered. The furniture in this place was nearly a hundred years old, and all of it was rotting, yet these people appeared…
“Desiccated,” she whispered.
Mike gazed at the corpses while Mollie’s word reverberated in his mind. These people certainly hadn’t progressed through the stages of decay normally, but only a vampire could have drained them so completely of blood.
“There were four plates at the table,” Mollie said. “The chairs were turned over as if they were fleeing something, and they should be nothing but bones if they lived here in the thirties or forties, which is the time period everything in this home appears to be from.”
“These might not be the corpses of the family who originally lived here. If the Savages have brought other humans and vampires here, this could be an entirely different family, and they might not have died all that long ago.”
“Their clothing, or what little remains of it, looks pretty old to me.”
“Isn’t vintage a thing with humans now?”
“Maybe for some, but…” But none of the bodies had enough rotting clothing left on them to make much of a distinction about it. Maybe it was new vintage, but then wouldn’t there be more of it left? All that remained were tatters except for the set of shoes on the other bigger corpse, which she assumed was a man because of those shoes. “Something’s not right here.”
Mike wanted to tell her it was fine, they had enough to deal with without adding the mystery of the desiccated corpses to it, but she was right. Something was wrong here. He stepped into the room with the family and knelt beside them.
Leaning forward, he inspected the woman’s corpse. He guessed it was a woman only because of the oval-shaped, faded gold necklace she wore. Other than that, she barely looked different from the other, nearly naked, adult corpse.
Grasping the necklace, he pulled it toward him and examined the squiggly etching on the outside. Pushing the button on the side, he was surprised when the old lock clicked and the locket opened. Mike realized the engravings on the outside were ivy leaves only because of the inscription inside the locket: To Ivy. With love, Harry. 5/1/38.
“They’re not recent corpses,” Mike murmured as he looked at the woman’s wedding ring.
“How do you know that?” Mollie asked.
Mike read the inscription to her be
fore settling the necklace against the woman’s chest.
“Did vampires do this?” she demanded.
Mike leaned closer to inspect the woman’s neck but didn’t see anything there. He did find marks on the man’s neck and one of the children’s wrists. The other two corpses were bitten in a place hidden by their decomposition, and he wasn’t going to search for the marks.
“Yes,” he said.
Mollie glanced nervously behind her. She had the unsettling feeling of eyes staring at her from the shadows, but these weren’t the eyes of the living. No, these were the burning red eyes of the irate ghost family haunting this place. The hair on her arms stood on end as she cursed her overactive imagination, but once the image weaseled its way into her mind, it remained lodged there.
“You said, ‘Lately, there has been a growing movement to turn more vamps and humans Savage.’ I realize you’re immortal and your concept of time is probably different than mine, but I took lately to mean within the past few months, maybe a year. Hell, I’ll give you two years. However, these people have been lying here for about eighty years. If there were vampires here then…” Mollie’s voice trailed off as she looked helplessly toward the bodies. “They just killed them; they didn’t try to turn them into something else.”
Mike rested his hands on his knees before rising. “No, they didn’t try to turn them.”
“What is going on here?”
“I don’t know. The vampires could have come in and killed this family so they could take over this piece of land. Those vamps could have been here all this time and only recently decided to start turning others into Savages, or they could be doing something else here.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever read The Island of Doctor Moreau?”
“Many times. I’m not much of a reader, but H.G. Wells is one of the few authors I enjoy.”
Mollie couldn’t help but smile over this revelation; the man had taste. “What if this is something like that? What if these vamps are performing experiments on humans and vampires and have been for years? What if we weren’t in those cages to be turned into Savages or used for food, but for something far worse?”
“It’s possible, but I believe it is more likely they meant to turn us. These vamps may have been in the area for years, and these people paid the unfortunate price for that, but the Savages want blood and more vampires like them, not experiments.”
“Hmm,” Mollie grunted doubtfully.
“Come on; we should check out the lighthouse.”
Chapter Fifteen
Mollie’s knees were knocking together by the time she stepped off the last rickety stair and into the top of the lighthouse. She’d been convinced that with every step she took, the stairs would collapse and she would plummet to her death. A cold sweat coated her body, but entering the lighthouse didn’t make her feel any safer. Instead, she just had farther to fall if the rotten floor gave way.
A three-foot-wide path separated the outer half walls of the lighthouse from the inner half walls protecting the area where the flame once warned ships away from the land. The glass from the broken outer and inner windows once encircling the lighthouse tower and its beacon littered the floor along with debris from nearby trees. Chips of white paint remained on the outer and inner walls of the structure.
She winced when a pinecone crunched beneath her feet, and Mike glanced back at her. The sound wasn’t any louder than usual, but she felt as if she’d rung the dinner bell for every bloodthirsty vamp in the area.
Mollie crept carefully behind him to the front of the round structure and rested her hands on the wall. Beneath her palms, the wood was more mushy than solid; she pulled her hands away when dozens of pill bugs and centipedes spilled out to skitter across the wood. Shuddering, Mollie wiped her hands on her jeans, but it did nothing to erase the feel of the wood and bugs from her flesh.
Mollie took a deep breath and looked away from the rotting wood to the sea beyond. From here she could see that the cliffs dropped a good hundred feet to the white-capped ocean below. In some spots, massive boulders jutting up from the sea broke the waves and sent white plumes of spray into the air. To her left and right, more waves crashed against the rock walls of the cliffs until the forest swallowed her view of them.
Seagulls cawed as they banked through the air before diving toward the rocks where hundreds of them had settled. Dozens of gray seals sunned themselves on the rocks while others leapt into the water to catch fish or play.
The spectacular vista was so out of place with the events of the past few days that, for a second, Mollie almost forgot where they were and what happened. Something this beautiful could not coexist with the horror they endured. But coexist it did, and though it was beautiful, it offered them no hope for help or finding Aida.
However, if she did end up dying here, she was glad she got to see this first. When the sea breeze brushed against something wet on her cheeks, Mollie realized tears were sliding down her face. She wiped them hastily away before spinning and striding to the other side of the tower. Mike went the opposite way around the structure and met her there.
Whereas the other side was beauty and the promise of the known, this side was beauty and the promise of the unknown. For as far as she could see, trees spread out in all directions. In the center of the seemingly endless trees, a large barn and acres of cleared land were visible.
Behind the barn, the burned-out remains of a crumbled building lay scattered across the ground. She suspected it was once the farmhouse that went with the barn, and that whoever had lived there didn’t survive the fire.
Mike studied the terrain as he tried to formulate a plan for their next move. Beyond the barn, the woods stretched out for acres again, but he saw the hint of a brick chimney sticking up from the trees. His angle and the trees made it impossible to tell if another clearing surrounded the building, what the building was, or if there was more than one, but something was there.
It had to be where the Savages were staying, as the distance between it and the barn would explain the time it took for the Savages to reach them last night. He also didn’t see anywhere else the Savages could be staying, but that didn’t mean the forest wasn’t hiding more buildings.
Mike glanced at the sea behind him before looking toward the land again; they had no choice but to head back toward the barn.
“All I see is the barn,” Mollie muttered. “And I know Aida isn’t in the barn, or at least she wasn’t.”
Mike realized her human eyes hadn’t detected the chimney. “There’s another building beyond the barn. It’s a few miles away. I’m not sure if it’s another home or something else, but I see part of the chimney.”
“We’ll go there,” Mollie said. “That must be where Aida is.”
“Maybe.”
He didn’t want to get her hopes up about finding her sister. Thousands of acres of woods surrounded them, and he had no idea how far the forest stretched beyond what he could see. They could pass within half a mile of where her sister was, or closer, and never know it. Plus, he doubted any Savage kept a human alive this long without changing them. And if the Savages had changed Aida, Mollie’s sister might be beyond saving, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that.
“We should get down before someone spots us,” he said.
Clasping her elbow, he pulled her away from the rotted railing and led her down the rickety stairs to the ground floor. Mollie kept her head averted from the corpses as they made their way out of the room.
“We’ll search the rest of the house for anything we can use before we leave,” Mike said.
“We’re not staying here tonight?” The idea of spending the night in a house with corpses made her skin crawl, but they had shelter here, something they might not have if they went out there again.
“No. There are too many ways someone could get inside to defend them all. Someone could enter without us knowing.”
Mollie hid
her disappointment; he was right after all, but she was less than thrilled about having to return to the woods. She would have loved the chance to give her aching feet and legs a break. She was used to hiking, physically fit, and thankfully she’d swapped her clothes and dress shoes for sneakers after the funeral, but she was not used to this terrain, walking for so many hours, and going without water. Adrenaline continued to be her primary source of fuel, but exhaustion was starting to win out. However, she would keep going no matter what it took, and she would not complain about it.
Together, they made their way back through the rooms on the first floor before climbing to the second. Three doors led off the shadowed hall there, and they were all open to reveal the bedrooms beyond.
Mollie was halfway through searching the second bedroom when she realized the house didn’t have a bathroom in it. She paused for a moment as it hit her just how frozen in time this place was. Again, she had the feeling of being watched, but she refused to give in to the impulse to look behind her as she worked, because if she saw a ghost family, it might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In the last bedroom, an old trunk sat at the foot of the bed. Mollie blew the coating of dust off the cover, then coughed and waved her hand in front of her face when the particles floated into the air around her. Opening the trunk, she bit back a delighted cry when she spotted the quilt inside.
She pulled the thin blanket from the cedar chest and shook it out. Age had yellowed the white patches on it, but the blue and green diamond pattern was still evident. The reek of mildew clung to it, but the quilt was in good shape. Refolding it, Mollie tucked it beneath her arm and closed the trunk. It would be annoying to carry, but she didn’t care, she wasn’t giving up the blanket.
“Did you find anything?” Mike asked when he appeared in the doorway. He’d gone back downstairs to raid the kitchen.
Mollie held up her quilt. “I did. How about you?”
He pointed to a tarnished silver cup and small pot; he’d slid his belt through the handles to secure his find to his waist. He’d been careful to keep them apart, so they wouldn’t clink together when he moved. “For when we find water for you.”
Consumed: The Vampire Awakenings, Book 8 Page 9