by J. R. Rain
I motioned to her arms, both of which were wrapped up in a similar white cloth. “And you had other...things removed from your arms as well?”
She smiled serenely. “It’s horrible getting old, Mr. Spinoza.”
“I’ll remember that.”
I found myself scanning the room...in particular, the two exits. One seemed to head off into what appeared to be a library, and the other went down the hallway. I suspected there were a few offshoots from the hallway, an opening to the kitchen, no doubt, and the stairway leading up to the second floor.
“Who’s upstairs, Mrs. Perkins?” I asked.
Her slender form tensed a little; her fingers clawed the arm of the couch. “What do you mean, dear?”
“I mean, who’s that I hear walking around upstairs?”
“Oh, I have a guest.”
“Who?”
“Isn’t that a personal question, Mr. Spinoza?”
“Perhaps you could tell the police then.”
“Oh, I’m sure the police would have no interest in—”
“And you can also show them the wounds on your neck and arms—”
“Please, Mr. Spinoza, there’s no need for that.”
And that’s when a woman’s voice resonated from somewhere down the hallway. “I would suggest,” and the voice, growing louder as the speaker drew closer, “that you leave my mother alone.”
And as the last words were spoken, a very lovely, pale-faced woman stepped into the living room.
It was, of course, Evelyn Drake.
Chapter Twenty
She looked sick and weak.
My first impression was that I was looking at someone who should probably be in the hospital, or lying in bed.
Or in a grave.
She didn’t stand entirely straight, as if the weight of something was dragging her down. I also noticed she was supporting herself by resting a long-fingered hand on an elegant couch table sporting a vase with flowers. Dead flowers.
She looked like the perfect candidate to be gasping for air but, as far as I could tell, she wasn’t having any problems breathing. Did vampires even breathe?
I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t know much about the undead at all, and I was seriously beginning to regret my decision to come here at all.
After all, the woman in front of me was the same woman I had seen in the autopsy report. The same woman whose body had been covered in knife wounds.
Seventy-two of them, in fact.
Her feet were bare. She was wearing a dark robe. Silk, I think. Her hair was slightly mussed. She had been sleeping, roused, no doubt, by her mother. A little pit stop on her way to making tea.
Evelyn Drake was pretty in an undead, goth sort of way. Her cheek bones were prominent. Her lips full, her eyes round and seemingly all-seeing. Her blondish hair was matted in places and I figured even vampires get bedhead.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” I said.
“Now, that’s not a very nice thing to say to a woman,” she said.
She stepped into the room, feeling her way over the furniture, which supported her weight. She stumbled slightly over the spot where the carpet met the marble flooring.
The skin showing around her robe was so white that I found myself staring. Her thighs and arms and neck...like pure alabaster. Her lips were red, but not exorbitantly so. I had an image of those lips covered in blood as she fed.
She smiled as if she had read my thoughts.
“How long have you been living here?” I asked, unnerved. I had read somewhere that vampires could read minds. And so I did all I could to not think of the crossbow hidden under the blanket. In fact, I imagined I was holding a puppy. It’s just a puppy. A puppy, dammit.
She said, “Since my rather...premature burial.”
Although obviously weakened, her movements were oddly fluid. As if I were being approached by a ballerina. A very pale and hungry-looking ballerina.
“So, you’ve been living here secretly for, what, over a year and a half?”
“It’s no bother, really,” said Mrs. Perkins nervously. “It’s such a joy to have her back. We missed her so much. She stays in her room all day, sleeping. She’s such a hard working dear. And when we go to bed at night she leaves for work. Works all night, and sometimes she’s just coming home when we awaken. Always so tired and dirty.” The mother looked at her daughter with so much love in her eyes that my heart nearly broke. Evelyn was now about halfway across the room.
“Your daughter was killed, Mrs. Perkins,” I said. “An autopsy was performed on her. She was buried.”
“Ooh, we don’t talk about that,” said Mrs. Perkins, clearly living in denial. “Mistakes are made.”
“Mother and I have an agreement to keep my presence a secret,” said Evelyn, still approaching me. She looked weak, almost helpless, but there was something in her eye that scared the shit out of me. It was the look of a killer. A predator. A hungry predator. “In return, she gets to see her daughter.”
I looked at her mother’s wounded neck and arms. “And you get to feed.”
“Mother loves her baby girl,” said Evelyn.
My stomach turned. I tried to picture a daughter drinking blood from her own mother and it was too disturbing an image to hold for long.
“And what of your own children?” I asked Evelyn.
“My children have moved on, Mr. Spinoza,” she said, glancing at my card that was still on the coffee table. “They think mummy is dead and we’ll just leave it like that. My kids were always...in the way. And just a little too tempting.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Young blood...is particularly fresh.”
She looked at her mother who was watching this whole exchange with a frozen smile. Her cheek muscles twitched as she held the smile.
“You kill people,” I said.
She grinned. “I kill lots of people, Mr. Spinoza. It’s kind of what I do.”
“What are you?” I asked.
“What do you think I am?”
“A bitch. A user. And a parasite.”
The mother looked at me sharply. “I will not have such language—”
And that’s when Evelyn Drake lunged forward, leaping—
Chapter Twenty-one
I didn’t want to kill her.
Especially not in front of her own mother. It was all so fucked up.
But she didn’t give me much choice.
Her strength was alarming, especially when she had appeared so visibly weakened. Or perhaps that had all been an act to catch me off guard.
With her mother screaming behind her, Evelyn’s hand went straight for my throat and squeezed with such force that my neck would have snapped or been crushed within seconds.
The angle of her body was such that I didn’t have to even adjust the crossbow. As darkness rapidly approached the corners of my vision, I fired the weapon.
The first thing that I notice was a loosening of her grip. The next thing I noticed was the strangled sounds I heard...of course, those strangled sounds were my own feeble attempts to breathe.
The next thing I noticed was the woman on the ground, kicking and clawing her chest. It was a site I’ll never forget. Steam hissed from between her fingers. Her screaming mother dove on her, pulling at the silver shaft that protruded from her chest.
“My baby! My baby!” She worked the bolt with both hands as the vampire writhed and twisted and screamed.
Gasping, I found my feet, and just as the mother pulled free the bloody crossbow bolt, which dripped blood and meat, the woman on the floor lay still.
Mrs. Perkins threw herself on her daughter, wailing and begging her to come back to her.
And that’s when I turned my head and heaved until my stomach was empty.
Chapter Twenty-two
I was in my office drinking a latte from Starbucks. Starbucks has a new scone, called a petite vanilla bean. Being petite, I got three of them. They were damned good.
; Too good.
I had just finished the last of the scones when Detective Hammer and his thick cop mustache came in through my door and set a big bag of greasy donuts on my desk. He looked at my empty Starbucks package.
“Don’t tell me you had one of those scone things.”
“A petite vanilla bean. Three of them.”
“Oh, God. Any room left for a real breakfast?”
“You mean a real breakfast of donuts?”
“Is there anything else?”
“You are propagating the cop stereotype,” I said. “And there’s always room for donuts.”
He placed a cup holder on my desk filled with two steaming cups of coffee. Coffee had splashed out of the little holes in the plastic lids and had stained the rims. I knocked back the last of my Starbucks, tossed the empty cup in the trash, and started on the fresh coffee Hammer gave me. We both picked our donuts, sat back in our chairs, and took a few bites before Hammer got things started.
“You work some strange cases,” he said.
“Lately.”
“This might be the strangest.”
“Would be hard to top this one,” I said.
Hammer finished his first donut with a massive bite. He washed it down with coffee and then dug out a maple bar from the bag.
“We made some calls,” he said. “Talked to the right people. A very strange conference ensued between the prosecutors, myself and the warden at San Quentin, and ultimately the governor himself. And due to extraordinary circumstances, Edward Drake is now a free man. All charges have been dropped.”
“It’s hard to keep someone on death row,” I said, “when his victim has been alive and well for a year and a half.”
“She’s dead now. At least, we think she’s dead, whatever the fuck she is.” He looked at me. “What are you some kind of vampire hunter?”
“Slayer,” I said. “And, no.”
“Well, needless to say we got the DNA to confirm the boy’s status as her biological son. The kid will get his full inheritance. So you did do some good.”
I nodded, happy for the boy, but feeling so weird inside that it was hard to put a finger on how I felt about anything these days. I have now killed two vampires.
Hell, maybe I was a vampire slayer.
Jesus.
I voiced a question that had been gnawing at me. “Did her DNA come back with any, I dunno, abnormalities?”
“You mean, did she have some weird vampire DNA?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Nothing. Looks as normal as can be.”
We were silent some more. The silence was filled with the sounds of masticating donuts. I thought of the young man who hired me. “How much does David know of his mother?”
“Nothing. As far as he knows, his mother’s body had been recovered, a simple case of misplacement, and we acquired the DNA we needed. As far as the rest of the world knows, Evelyn Drake is dead, and has been dead, as she was supposed to have been two years ago.”
“And the father lives with the stigma of being a murderer.”
Hammer shrugged his meaty shoulders. “You can’t win them all, Spinoza. He was given a new identity. A new life. We couldn’t do anything else for him except to say thank you and sorry.”
“Thank you for trying to kill a bloodsucking killer?”
Hammer looked a little sick. “Right. Something like that.”
“Life is weird,” I said.
“No shit.” He reached in the bag, removed a peanut chocolate cake, and stood. “And now I’m going to go back to work and look for human murderers and psychopaths—and try like hell to forget this ever happened.”
“Join the club.”
“I’d rather not,” he said. “Hey, did you ever collect on your tacos?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m ever hopeful.”
The End
Spinoza returns in:
The Vampire in the Iron Mask
The Spinoza Series #3
(coming soon)
Spinoza’s adventures begin in:
The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo
The Spinoza Series #1
Kindle or Nook
Available now in ebookstores everywhere:
The Body Departed
A Ghost Story
by
J.R. Rain
(read on for a sample)
Chapter One
I stepped through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.
She was sleeping contentedly on her side. It was before dawn and the building was quiet. The curtains were open and the sky was black beyond. If there were any stars, they were lost to the L.A. smog. The curtains were covered with ponies, as was most of the room. A plastic pony light switch, a pony bed lamp, pony wallpaper and bedspread. Someday she would outgrow her obsession with ponies, although I secretly hoped not.
A girl and her pony. It’s a beautiful thing.
I stepped closer to my sleeping daughter, and as I did so she shifted slightly towards me. She mewed like a newborn kitten. Crimson light from her alarm clock splashed over her delicate features, highlighting a slightly upturned nose and impossibly big eyes. Sometimes when she slept her closed eyelids fluttered and danced. But not tonight. Tonight she was sleeping deeply, no doubt dreaming of sugar and spice and everything nice.
Or of Barbies and boys and everything in-between.
I wondered if she ever dreamed of me. I’m sure she did at times. Were those dreams good or bad? Did she ever wake up sad and missing her father?
Do you want her to wake up sad? I asked myself.
No, I thought. I wanted her to wake up rested, restored and full of peace.
I stepped away from the far wall and glided over to the small chair in the corner of her room. We had made the chair together one weekend, a father/daughter project for the Girl’s Scouts. To her credit, she did most of the work.
I sat in it now, lowering my weightless body into it, mimicking the act of sitting. Unsurprisingly, the chair didn’t creak.
As I sat, my daughter rolled over in her sleep, facing me. Her aura, usually blue and streaked with red flames, often reacted to my presence, as it did now. The red flames crackled and gravitated toward me like a pulsating static ball, sensing me like I sensed it.
As I continued to sit, the lapping red flames grew in intensity, snapping and licking the air like solar flares on the surface of the sun. My daughter’s aura always reacted this way to me. But only in sleep. Somehow her subconscious recognized, or perhaps it was her soul. Or both. And from this subconscious state, she would sometimes speak to me, as she did now.
“Hi, daddy.”
“Hi, baby,” I said.
“Mommy said you got hurt real bad.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Mommy said that a bad man hurt you and you got killed.”
“Mommy’s right, but I don’t want you thinking about that right now, okay?”
“Okay,” she said sleepily. “Am I dreaming, daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
We were quiet and she shifted subtly, lifting her face toward me, her eyes still closed in sleep. There was a sound from outside her window, a light tapping. I ignored it, but it came again and again, and then with more consistency. I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was raining. I looked back at my daughter and thought of the rain, remembering how it felt on my skin, on my face. Or, rather, I was trying to remember. Lately, such memories of the flesh were getting harder and harder to recall.
“It’s raining, daddy,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you live in the rain?”
“No.”
“Where do you live, daddy?”
“I live here, with you.”
“But you’re dead.”
I said nothing. I hated to be reminded of this, even by my daughter.
“Why don’t you go to heaven, daddy?”
I thought about that. I think about that a lot, actually. I said, “Daddy still has work to d
o.”
“What kind of work?”
“Good work.”
“I miss you,” she said. “I miss you so much. I think about you every day. I’m always crying. People at school say I’m a crybaby.”
“You’re not a crybaby,” I said. “You’re just sad.” My heart broke all over again. “It’s time to go back to sleep, angel.”
“Okay, daddy.”
“I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you, too, daddy.”
I drifted up from the small wooden chair and moved across the room the way I do—silently and easily—and at the far wall I looked back at her. Her aura had subsided, although some of it still flared here and there. For her to relax—to truly relax—I needed to leave her room entirely.
And so I did. Through the wall.
To hell with doors.
Kindle or Nook
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Dark Horse
Jim Knighthorse Series #1
by
J.R. Rain
(read on for a sample)
Chapter One
Charles Brown, the defense attorney, was a small man with a round head. He was wearing a brown and orange zigzagged power tie. I secretly wondered if he went by Charlie as a kid and had a dog named Snoopy and a crush on the little red-headed girl.
We were sitting in my office on a warm spring day. Charlie was here to give me a job if I wanted it, and I wanted it. I hadn’t worked in two weeks and was beginning to like it, which made me nervous.
“I think the kid’s innocent,” he was saying.
“Of course you do, Charlie. You’re a defense attorney. You would find cause to think Jack the Ripper was simply a misunderstood artist before his time.”