Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1)

by Patterson, Joshua Grover-David

  A moment later, the vampire was down the stairs, standing directly in front of Smitty. The vampire smiled, Smitty lifted an arm to stake him, and the vampire pulled the stake away as easily as you pulled a toy away from a rowdy toddler.

  The two of them stood there, looking at each other. “You must be the vampire killer. I’ve heard of you.”

  Smitty blinked. He was weaponless and more than a little terrified. He didn’t know vampires could reason, let alone speak. He’d always thought of them as monsters. Beasts who knew no feeling but hunger.

  “You’re good. Very good. You’ve turned a lot of my kind to dust. Maybe more than anyone in history. I’m going to enjoy this.”

  Smitty claimed he remembered the vampire leaping for his throat, feeling himself fall, and that was it. I suspect he remembered more. Much more.

  We’re usually gentle. But I imagine that, given Smitty’s reputation and the particular vampire he encountered, things were very, very unpleasant for him. There were a couple hours between the moment Smitty met the vampire and the moment the sun fell behind the horizon; I figure the vampire used every minute available to him.

  I believe Smitty, however, when he says he passed out, that when he woke up it was dark, and that when his eyes opened, he was looking at an entirely different vampire.

  When Smitty woke up, the new vampire held her hand around the neck of one of Smitty’s friends. Smitty snapped his eyes closed and attempted to play dead but it was too late.

  “I saw you,” said the woman at the other end of the room. Her eyes were black and her teeth were pointed, but the words weren’t said unkindly. “For what it’s worth, you’re going to live. Which is more than I can say for your friends.”

  Smitty sat up. His head hurt, and he felt a wetness at his throat. He reached up to touch his neck and found a few sticky dribbles of blood. His neck had holes, larger than the pinpricks he found on vampire victims.

  At first, Smitty thought he was going to scream, but instead, a question popped from his mouth, almost without thought, “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “If you’re not dying already, then no,” said the vampire.

  The vampire walked over to Smitty, her eyes changing back to normal and her fangs retracting. She knelt next to him, and put a hand to his neck. Her fingers came back sticky. “Yes, you’re definitely going to live,” she said.

  “Why aren’t you going to kill me?” asked Smitty.

  “Apparently,” she replied, “I was wrong about you. You don’t understand us at all.” She looked at the door.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “Keep your mouth shut and your ears open.

  “The minute I leave here, I’m calling the police. I’m going to tell them there are a bunch of dead people here. I’m going to tell them that you’re involved. Your best bet is to run. Even if you prove you didn’t kill all your friends, everyone you know will never be able to look at you in the same way. Don’t think you’ll be able to prove we exist. I’ve already been to your house and cleaned out every scrap of evidence you might have used. I should have done it a long time ago.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Smitty.

  “You really don’t and that’s a shame. Now shut your mouth and listen. I am letting you go because it’s clear to me that you don’t understand we are on the same side. Vampires are not the enemy. You and I have the same job. To take away the pain. The only difference is you don’t have to do it under the cover of darkness.”

  The vampire looked at the door again. “I have to go. The vampire you encountered has been a problem for my kind for much longer than he should have been. If I let him escape, it may be another century before I can track him down.”

  Less than a moment later, she was out the door.

  Smitty lay on the ground for a minute, then rose to his feet. He felt shaky all over, drained both physically and mentally. But he trusted the vampire had told the truth. The authorities would be coming, and when they did, they’d find a house full of dead people, and Smitty, armed with silver bullets and stakes.

  He headed for the door with no particular plan in mind except running. But where to go? Home? Everyone in the group had been sworn to secrecy. No one knew what was going on that night. Not wives, not friends, not family members. Even as he was turning the knob to go outside, his plan was to drive away and pretend none of it ever happened. Your grandfather probably did something similar.

  The second Smitty opened the door, he realized he should have given some thought to a plan. Any plan at all.

  He stood there, looking out at the lawn, and beyond it, the street where a collection of cars sat parked. Each one of those cars belonged to someone in the house. They thought the job would be over minutes after it began, no one had taken the time to conceal their vehicles. Every car but one belonged to the vampire-hunters.

  The stray vehicle was a cop car, its owner standing on the lawn, looking at the house, and the open doorway. The open doorway Smitty was standing in.

  If he’d taken a few seconds to plan, Smitty could have walked out a back door, or jumped out a window, and crept around to his car. If he was very lucky, he might have driven away with no one the wiser. If he was even a little lucky, he might have passed off his odd wounds as some sort of shaving mishap, driven home, and avoided the majority of the trouble that was about to befall him.

  Instead, he ran.

  The cop gave chase but there was only one of him, and thirty-some years ago, calling for backup wasn’t as easy and quick as it is today. Smitty ran through a few backyards, hid in some shadows, and the police officer lost him in the dark. The minute the coast was clear, Smitty found a bus stop and took it to the local bus station. He caught the first trip out of town on the schedule.

  After that, he just kept running.

  He’d stuffed a few hundred dollars in his wallet. His original intent had been to get all of his friends good and drunk after they’d killed the vampire.

  The money let him run farther and faster than he might have been able to otherwise, and eat a little better. It took him more than a month to blow through all the money, and by then his strange disappearance was old, forgotten news everywhere but his hometown.

  Today, of course, his face would have been on every major news channel, tossed back into the public consciousness every hour or two for weeks or months. But back then, he made the front page of a few major papers, the inside pages in more of them. Almost none of the major news magazines picked up the story, and those that did ran it under a “strange happening in the heartland” style piece.

  Around here, of course, the story came out piecemeal. All the cars outside the vampire dwelling had a dead body inside the house to go with it. Except, of course, for Smitty’s. The cop who chased Smitty identified him from a lineup of pictures and Smitty was considered to be suspect in the murder of all his friends.

  Since he was never captured, there was never a trial. It didn’t matter. The court of public opinion found him guilty. Eventually, his wife divorced him and married someone else. They moved to another city. She probably wanted, and probably deserved, a fresh start.

  Smitty, meanwhile, ran until he couldn’t run any more. He eventually settled down in a larger city, where he could be homeless and more or less anonymous. He switched up shelters from time to time, found new and different ways to get a meal. Sometimes from a shelter, sometimes from a garbage can. He did odd jobs to make money but never thought about using his brain or his body to get a real job. Too risky. He was certain that, given enough time and interaction with anyone who wasn’t a full-time member of the street, he would be found and sent back home to face a jury for a crime he couldn’t offer a rational explanation for.

  He even refused to get a library card, choosing instead to sit and read a book each day, misfiling the one he was reading so no one could check it out before he was finished.

  Often, however, he would just sit and think. The vampire who had sentenced him to a l
ife on the run also had said they were on the same side.

  Like most revelations in life, it came to him when he least expected it.

  Smitty had holed up in a shelter for the night. It was the dead of winter and with the wind chill, the temperature was hovering deep into the negatives. Minus fifty degrees; something like that.

  He had gotten his cot, and tucked himself in for the night when he heard it. The first round of night coughing two beds over. For the first few minutes, Smitty thought his roommate had a bit of a cold. After that, the flu. But soon, Smitty heard a deep rasp in the man’s sharp hacks, and realized the guy probably had pneumonia.

  Smitty knew this would be a sleepless night for everyone, especially the sick man, and wondered what, if anything, he could do to help. At first. After four hours of constant noise, Smitty’s mental tune changed to someone needed to shoot that guy and put him out of his misery.

  That was when the pieces of the puzzle came together for him. Vampires weren’t feeding on the weak. They were ending their suffering.

  His brain parsed over all the vampires he had encountered, the people he had found, the vampires he had killed, and he realized in every instance, the vampires he murdered had sucked the last vestiges of life from people in horrible pain. People who almost certainly were ready to go, and likely were praying for death to end their suffering.

  Smitty barely made it to the bathroom before he started to retch. He realized he was a murderer. He carried that guilt until the day he died.

  CHAPTER 23

  I stared at Wash, trying to absorb everything I just heard, and having an epiphany of my own. “That’s why he came back home,” I said. “He thought he deserved a trial, even if it wasn’t for the right reasons.”

  Wash waved his hand back and forth. “Not exactly. Smitty spent years trying to determine what kind of punishment he deserved, or if he even deserved any punishment at all. He had, after all, lost a lot of friends to a vampire who was, by all accounts, bad. He lost more people than he ever killed, in other words.”

  “That’s an odd way to justify murder.”

  “People always will justify what they’re doing to themselves. No one really thinks he’s a villain. Everyone is the hero of their own story. It took Smitty years to fully understand that he had done a bad thing, even after puking his guts out.”

  Given the fact that my mom had dumped my dad for no reason I was able to see, and didn’t seem to feel even a teeny bit sorry about it all these months later, I could see his point.

  “So if he didn’t come back for that,” I said, “why come back at all?”

  Wash shrugged. “Smitty told me he spent a lot of time in libraries, reading everything even vaguely related to vampires. He told me once his favorite book on the subject was I Am Legend. It made sense to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No.”

  “Read it. There’s a correlation there.”

  I mentally rolled my eyes. Just what I needed, homework. “So, fine, then why did Smitty come back?”

  “I think the real reason he came back was he knew he wasn’t going to be around forever. Call it nostalgia, maybe. Or melancholy. He wanted to come home and see what had become of the old homestead, of his family and friends. He might have even looked in on your grandfather.”

  I felt a little water at the corner of my eye and wiped it away. “It wouldn’t have made much difference. Grandpa D wasn’t in good shape the last couple of years. Memory loss. Muscle problems. Even if Smitty visited him, I don’t know that my grandpa would’ve known who he was.”

  Wash looked at his hands and let me wipe my eyes again without comment before going on. “Eventually, Smitty ended up here. It was a bad night for a lot of reasons. Really bad weather and one really sick homeless fellow. I had planned to call an ambulance but I could tell it wasn’t going to matter, ultimately. I gave the guy the option. I could dial 911, or I could take his pain away. He opted for the latter. Smitty walked in just as it happened.”

  “That’s why you weren’t in the back room when I came to talk to Smitty.”

  “Correct. Getting caught is a bad thing. A lot of times, it means you need to move on. Find a new home, get a new identity, establish yourself again. It’s a lot of work, and it’s harder when you’re a vampire, government office hours being what they are.

  “But in this case, things worked out all right. Smitty knew what I was doing, although I wasn’t sure if he really approved or not. Accepted probably would be the best way to describe his feelings on the existence of vampires.

  “I called the police and told them I had a body to collect, and a couple of hours later, they did. It was just me and Smitty for the rest of the night. We sat and he told me his whole story, the same way I told you. He also told me he was in the early stages of cancer and that he wasn’t planning on trying to have it treated. He told me that, when the time came, he wanted me to help him end his life. He called it a sort of penance.

  “I suspect most of the reason he didn’t come to the shelter very often was I kept trying to take him to the hospital when he got sick. I figured if he got near a medical facility, he might try to extend his life a little, maybe get his cancer dealt with. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and when the end came, I honored his wishes.

  “Watching him waste away, though? That wasn’t easy at all. Not at all.”

  Wash stopped speaking and I realized the story was at an end. I glanced at the clock. I had plenty of time to make it to the bus stop.

  I rose from my seat, stretched, and picked up my bag. I glanced at the door, and shuffled my feet awkwardly. “So…”

  “Now you know Smitty’s story,” said Wash.

  “But what do I do with it?”

  “You do whatever you can with it. You walk out of here knowing your grandfather was a very lucky man. He met a very strong and dangerous fellow with sharp fangs and lived to tell about it. You also walk out of here knowing more about vampires than just about any living person in history, I’d wager. More than you should. You get to know your grandfather wasn’t crazy, which I bet is worth something to you.”

  I nodded. “And what happens next?”

  Wash walked to the front desk, indicating I should follow. He pointed to the front door. “Now, you leave, and you don’t think about this.”

  “What about all those dead homeless people?”

  “That’s for the proper authorities to deal with.”

  “The cops?”

  “Us.”

  I felt myself go a touch lightheaded as my heart rate picked up. “One of yours? One of you is doing this? Is it that one? The one Smitty met?”

  Wash shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s politician-ese for yes.”

  Wash frowned. “Okay. Fine. Yes. The man Smitty encountered has come back.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “In this case, it’s the same thing.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “John Smith.”

  I threw my backpack onto my shoulder and prepared to walk out the door. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

  Wash grinned. “Yeah, it sounds fake but that really is his name. At least, it’s been his name as long as I’ve known him.” The grin faded. “And he really is dangerous. Do yourself a favor and keep watching the news. If homeless people keep dying, you keep off the street at night. Actually, that’s good advice anyway. You never know who’s out there.”

  “Well,” I said, opening the door to head to the bus, “now I do.”

  I stepped outside. It was colder now and smelled of snow. Probably a dusting in our future, if not a couple of inches.

  Wash stepped out behind me and we walked in silence towards the bus stop.

  I glanced back at the shelter and saw a man in a too-thin coat walking in. “You have a customer,” I said.

&
nbsp; Wash glanced at the front door, then back to me. “The bus is coming,” he said. “Stay in its headlights and you should be all right. I need to go.” He looked into my eyes. “Stay safe, Lucy.”

  I blinked as the first snowflake of winter hit my eye, and he was gone.

  CHAPTER 24

  The bus made more than its usual number of stops as it let off the final shoppers of the night. By the time I got home and in the door it was almost one in the morning. I tread as softly as I could, not wanting to wake up my mom, or worse, Chuck. Much to my surprise, the light was still on in mom’s room as I walked past, though she didn’t stop me in the hallway with any kind of inquiry about why I was out so late.

  I didn’t really want to walk past her room again but I was completely awake and strangely hungry so I went downstairs and heated up a couple of pieces of leftover pizza and made myself a cup of herbal tea. Not wanting to have to come down a second time, I fixed myself a second cup, and carefully brought everything upstairs to my room.

  I sat up, eating and thinking, trying to tie together the threads Wash had handed me. How did my grandfather come to know Smitty? He had been an accountant at a local paper firm before he retired, not part of the medical world. How had he become a part of Smitty’s vampire hunting team?

  Had they needed a numbers guy?

  How long ago had the John Smith attack happened? If it had been anytime in the last thirty or forty years, chances were good that my grandfather had survived a vampire attack and kept the secret not only from his wife, but also from my mom. What did my mom know about the creepy old house with all the corpses in it?

  I had recognized a few of the faces in the photo. Were those guys still alive? Had they also escaped with my grandfather?

  I thought about going downstairs and trying to pull up the local newspaper website, maybe do a backdated search, but the archives of the local paper only went back two weeks unless you bought some sort of subscription. I suspected my mom wouldn’t have a problem footing a twenty-dollar charge if I claimed some kind of research project but didn’t think now was the time to ask.