Fire in Her Blood

by Rachel Graves

  Danny agreed too quickly for my taste. I didn’t think we’d gotten enough about the attack, but he seemed content with the birth certificate copies and the other employee records she’d photocopied for us. In another few minutes we were in the hall.

  “Hello again, beautiful.” The voice sounded smoother this time, the southern accent stronger, but the rich brown eyes hadn’t changed. I tightened my fingers on the doorknob. “Or do you prefer detective?” The young looking vampire had a smile on his face that suggested all sorts of things I’d like him to do to me, except I wasn’t every other woman he saw, and I didn’t want any of those things.

  “I’m about to open the door, it’s three-thirty in the afternoon, you might want to step back.” I spoke so Danny could hear me, hoping he would do the same.

  “I assure you I know exactly what time it is, detective.” He broke the word into too many syllables, dee-tect-tive, it was almost as annoying as his smiles. “I thought you should know, the thing you don’t do with your boyfriend? Chris did it often with a woman named Vianne. If you’re looking for him, I’d suggest starting with her.”

  “And who is she?” I asked the empty air. He was gone, leaving me annoyed and with no one to yell at.

  ****

  “It seems like God is going to force us to talk about our sex lives,” Danny announced with a sigh inside the car. I deliberately avoided the witch’s ball on the way out. Sure, I would have loved to feel magically calm, but I was too pissed off to admit it.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m going to have to ask you what that guy meant when he said the thing you don’t do with your boyfriend.”

  “Oh. That.” I focused back on the case and away from the revenge fantasies I had been playing in my head about the exasperating vampire. “He means biting. I mean, feeding or bleeding? Whatever the hell you call it, Jakob doesn’t do it to me.”

  “Smart man.” Danny waited a minute, letting the time between my revelation and his next words change the subject. “So some vampire named Vianne was feeding off Chris, and now he’s a vampire.”

  “Looks like it. Guess we should have asked Lynn more about the attack on Puck and less about Chris and Kelly.”

  “Na, we can get whatever we need about the attack from the victim. Tracking Chris down is going to be the problem.”

  “A nice sex free problem I hope.”

  “You and me both.”

  It was late enough in the afternoon that a fairly strong vampire would be awake but not dangerous. Puck had a number for Vianne, and our office had a reverse phone book that turned the number into the address of a house only a few blocks from Fairy Tails. Her home had elegant columns and ivy with whitewashed brick behind them. It was more colonial then its neighbors, but instead of looking out of place it looked classy, like the only girl in a dress at a picnic.

  ****

  “How was your lunch?” Danny asked.

  “Not bad, they were out of sandwich rolls, so I had to go with wheat but the cafeteria—”

  “I mean was it big enough for you to tell me who’s in there?”

  “Uh, yeah, hold on,” I said. Working magic hadn’t come naturally to me for a long time. Even now it took me a second to close my eyes and center myself, concentrating on the hints of feeling that always hovered on the edge of my conscious. A dead body was easy; it sounded like whispers in another room. Dead animals were more like a buzzing noise. Both of them gave me something to focus on; searching for death wasn’t as easy.

  I called the power into my body, pulling it into the center of my being as if it was my breath, and then I sent it out along the lines of those tiny hints of feeling. The darkness I saw with my eyes shut wavered, and when I opened them, the world was changed. In the new world I could tell Danny there were at least five vampires in the house, three of them were asleep. One of them was powerful, a hundred and fifty years old, maybe two hundred, the others were barely there, wisps of a being compared to her. I could’ve also told Danny about the neighbor next door who wasn’t going to live to see Halloween or the hamster someone had buried in their backyard two doors down, but I didn’t think he cared. There was whisper of power trying to reach back to me from inside the house. It felt familiar, but I didn’t trust it, so I let it all go. Having something tug back on that magic line scared me, but not enough that I was happy to stop. I always missed the magic when it left.

  The house had the same double locking doors Jakob did, two doors with a four foot space between them. The exterior door shut behind us blocking out all sunlight before we could ring the bell on the interior door. When the second door opened, the one behind us automatically locked, keeping whoever was in the house safe from stray sunbeams that could burn them. The maid on the other side of the door didn’t need protection. She was already tanned with the thick lines around her eyes and her mouth.

  “Yes?”

  “We need to speak to Vianne.” Danny flashed his badge, and the woman brought us into the foyer. She asked us to wait and hurried off. A minute later she opened the wide double doors for us.

  “Miss Vianne is happy to see you.” She gave us a quick bob then walked away. Her walk told me she was a little afraid. The parlor had rose print wallpaper, soft pink patterned claw foot furniture, and an antique oil hurricane lamp turned into a modern electric light giving a soft glow. All of it was unremarkable; I’d seen similar layouts in magazines. The woman was remarkable.

  She looked forty, or perhaps forty-five, but still good looking, the kind of a woman you call handsome. She had strong cheekbones and a square jaw. Her long dark hair was pulled into an elegant chignon, through the sweeps and swirls of the style more than a few gray hairs stood out against the brown. The diamonds in her ears caught the lamp light but couldn’t outshine the one on her neck or the jeweled bracelet on her wrist. I didn’t bother to compare any of them to the huge diamond ring on her right hand.

  “Ma’am,” Danny began.

  “Oh please don’t,” she cut him off smoothing the full skirt of her dress, “Ma’am is so incredibly old fashioned, and I try to be as modern as I can. Vianne is fine.” Her legs were tucked up under her on the couch leaving her half reclined, half sitting up. She had an air of refined exhausted.

  “Detectives Gallagher and Mors.” Danny pointed to me, and we both took seats. “We’d like to talk to you about Chris from Fairy Tails.”

  “I promise nothing I do there is illegal, detective.” Her voice was throaty and rough, like she’d been smoking for the last few decades.

  “I’m sure it isn’t”—he nodded—“but there was a supernatural assault by a vampire there the other night. We need to check with you and the other members of your household.”

  “Oh no, it’s dreadful, isn’t it? I assume you’ve already talked to Amadeus? He’s their vampire-whore,” she explained with a touch of bitterness.

  “You two don’t get along?” I spoke for the first time.

  “I find scruples on someone in his line of work laughable, and he has several. His coworkers don’t seem to be quite so ethical though.” She brushed it off with a wave of her hand.

  “You knew Chris then?” Danny asked.

  “A bit, he was incredibly young and sweet, the kind of boy who thinks he knows what he wants when really he doesn’t know what’s good for him. He shouldn’t have been in that place.” The longer her speech went on the harder her voice got, and then suddenly it was the same half asleep roughness. “What do I know, really? I don’t get there much.”

  “Any chance you got there last night?”

  “Oh no, last night I was very busy with…” Her voice trailed off.

  “With what?” I prompted. Her Southern languor and half-finished sentences made me nervous. I felt like our conversation was really some sort of game where we had to ask the exact right question to get the answer we wanted.

  “Other things, family things…”

  “You have a family?” Danny asked. Vampires were in
fertile, but they could still have a family. Jakob had adopted a son once, and lots of other vampires adopted children. Still, I didn’t think that was what she meant.

  “A girl does get lonely, you know,” she purred to Danny. “So I keep my boys. I collect beautiful ones, artists, dancers…”

  “Would any of them been at Fairy Tails last night?” I said, anxious to distract her from my married partner before she decided he was a collectable too.

  “Oh no, my boys know better.” She fixed me with a conspiratorial look. “Besides, boys don’t go out to eat when there’s good food at home.”

  Maybe it was something women said to each other, a saying that made people laugh, but I cringed inwardly at the thought. I didn’t like someone mixing the idea of boys, sex, and family so casually.

  “Could we talk to them? Ask them if they’ve seen anyone in the neighborhood that shouldn’t be here? After all, Fairy Tails is only a few blocks away. If a vampire did get out of hand, they might notice,” Danny asked, unaffected by her comment.

  “Oh, they’re all asleep, you see; they’re awfully young.” She sighed lightly. “I was in bed until a moment ago myself. I should really get back…”

  In a minute, I was sure she was going to invite Danny to join her, but my partner surprised me by standing up to leave. Apparently we wouldn’t be there to hear the invitation.

  “Of course.” Danny turned to go, but I suspected there was more on his mind. “Who’s playing the piano?” I hadn’t heard any music, but I wasn’t about to admit it in front of her.

  “Oh that’s Michael, he hasn’t, well I suppose it’d be easier for you to meet him.” She walked us up the stairs and down a hallway to open a door into a sunless room. There was a young man playing a complex classical piece with a passion bordering on madness. But then the only instrument I could play was the radio, so maybe it was normal.

  “Michael?” She barely raised her voice above the music, but he stopped immediately. “These people have some questions.” She moved so he could see us, and we could see him. The boy would never have a chance to grow into more of a man; he looked sixteen or younger. There was no hint of hair on his upper lip, and his features still had that feminine smoothness men lose by the time they get out of high school. I reached out to him with my power and felt that he was a minor vampire, compared to her he was barely in the room. If Jakob had been standing next to him I doubt I would have felt him at all.

  “When did you last eat?” she asked.

  “Um, six, eight hours ago? Wait, what day is it?”

  “Wednesday,” Danny said.

  “Oh, then two days ago. I’ve been working on this piece. I didn’t want to stop.”

  The elder vampire made a condemning noise. “You’ll have to feed from me.”

  “In front of them?” He seemed shocked and confused. She brought her wrist to her mouth and bit down. A second later he was on his knees on the floor in front of her sucking from her wrist for dear life. Presumably she’d offered him blood because she cared, but the scene spoke of domination and power. With her blood in his veins, he felt stronger to me, but not much.

  “Have you been doing things at Fairy Tails?” she asked, ruining Danny’s question. She was running her hand through his hair while he knelt in front of her as if he was a dog.

  “No.” He looked up at her from his knees and swallowed hard. “I have no interest there.” He answered her never looking at us.

  “You see, detectives, no one in my home can help you, now please leave my family to our rest.” She smiled sweetly, but her fangs were too obvious for me to trust it.

  We waited until we were in the car and well down the block to discuss it. We were driving into wonderful golden sunlight, but our time with the vampire had spooked me.

  “She was lying, right?” I asked Danny.

  “Pretty much the whole time,” he agreed. “The kid, Michael, I don’t think he was lying.”

  “No, he was too scared.”

  “Or too in love.”

  “That’s not love, it’s…well something else, something sick.” I remembered the young man kneeling in front of the older woman. “He looked at least thirty years younger than her.”

  “And the stiff’s how much older than you?” Danny asked with a grin.

  “Not old enough for me to kneel in front of him. How could that not bother you? I mean, really, ick.”

  “Oh I agree with you on the ick. She likes them young, and she calls them boys. Ick doesn’t begin to cover it.”

  “You think she turned Chris?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it. You noticed she didn’t offer to wake anyone up for us?”

  “She didn’t offer to wake anyone, and she didn’t offer us a chance to talk to the pianist, who I’m betting she knew was wide awake and playing.”

  “Her hearing is at least as good as mine, so yeah, she knew.” He pulled into the underground garage bringing the car back to the motor pool like always. From there it was only a quick elevator ride to our office. I was staring at the stack of hate mail when he spoke again. “You want to verify Chris’ birth certificate or stick with the arson?”

  We flipped a coin. He lost and took the top of the stack of hate mail off my desk. I worked with Chris’ paperwork for a bit, filling out the forms to pull a credit history in case he’d gotten a credit card or charged a plane ticket on one he already had. It was getting late though, and most people weren’t going to call me back. By the time the squad room started to clear out, I’d done everything I could to find Chris but didn’t have anything. The same way I didn’t have anything on the arson. It was damn depressing.

  Chapter Seven

  When I need to perk myself up, my first thought is chocolate. My second is usually Jakob. I had candy in my mouth and my hand was on the phone with him as soon as I walked in the door to my apartment.

  “Are you busy tonight?” I asked, trying to sound sweet.

  “Unfortunately, I’m spending my night listening to presentations from people who want me to invest in their dreams. Why is something going on?” Damn, he’d picked up on my tone of voice.

  “Oh no, nothing.” Just a bad day at work, not something I should really complain about. I scrounged around the inside of my head looking for another reason to have called him. “I was checking on your Monday schedule because next Monday is my birthday”

  “Your birthday is next Monday, and you never mentioned it?” he asked, shocked.

  “I don’t think birthdays are important, after all you always have another one coming up.” I looked up at the calendar. “Oh no wait it’s next Wednesday, sorry.”

  “How can you not know what day your birthday is?”

  “It’s not a big deal to me; it never was. I mean, I’d like to go out to dinner.” When things got rough for Mom and me, my birthday sometimes got forgotten. I’d learned not to expect much. “But we don’t have to.”

  “Wouldn’t we do something special?” he sounded confused, like I was acting crazy.

  “Dinner out is something special. It’s how I’ve celebrated my birthday for ages, Mom took me out for dinner and gave me some cash if there was any to spare. The waiter would put a candle in my dessert and sing to me. Standard Mors birthday celebration, happened every year.”

  “You’re serious? You’ve never gotten a present or had a party?”

  “No parties. If there was a present I don’t remember it. What am I breaking some sort of birthday law?”

  “No roller skating or laser tag or any of the other birthday parties E and Ronnie had?”

  “Dinner out with Mom when she was healthy enough for it, dinner out with Greg after she died.”

  “Not even a birthday cake?”

  “Hannah made me a cake a few times.” Hannah had been my babysitter; she was somewhere over sixty with snow white hair. She had taught me how to bake, and then later helped me pass my high school German classes. Thinking of th
e cake she had made, with cherries on top and thick whipped cream, made me miss her.

  “Your babysitter was the only one who celebrated your birthday?”

  “Uh-huh and what did you do for your kids? Not Ronnie, the other kids? Huge party there? What exactly is the medieval equivalent of roller skating?” I teased. He was silent on the other end of the phone. “That’s what I thought. Mom and I celebrated, but we kept it low key. Just because we didn’t do what your family did, don’t knock our traditions.”

  “I’m sorry; it’s surprising.”

  “Cancel enough meetings to go out to dinner with me, and I’ll forgive you.”

  “Done. You’re sure it’s next Wednesday?”

  “I’m sure. Now go listen to presentations. I love you.”

  I hung up the phone glad I hadn’t embarrassed myself about work. I hadn’t been a detective long, and while my frustrations stung, I didn’t want Jakob to see me as a failure. Of course, the easiest way not to feel like a failure was not to be a failure. I booted up my computer and logged on to the department’s training site. It was time to read up on arson investigation techniques.

  ****

  The next morning, I barely made it inside the glass doors when Danny spotted me.

  “Turn around, we’re on our way out.”

  “I don’t even get to sit down?” I’d been looking forward to reading through hate mail. I had some new ideas on how to organize it all.

  “Sorry,” Danny said, hitting the elevator buttons. “We’re headed to the motor pool.”

  “What’d we get?”

  “Another fire, and this one means it probably wasn’t anyone in the FBI files.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t mention Bradmoor High School.”

  We pulled up to the smoking remains of a high school gym a few minutes later. I drained my coffee and went over the details Danny had given me on the ride over. So far all we knew was that the fire had started in the middle of the night by persons unknown, and it burned out of control until before dawn, out of control but not far or wide, only the gym destroyed, and only half of it at that. No one was going to be climbing the rope or watching a basketball game, but they’d be able to change in the girl’s locker room without any trouble.