Breathless (Blue Fire Saga #1)

by Scott Prussing

CHAPTER 23. AN UNUSUAL SKULL

  “Who’s there?”

  The thick wooden door muffled Professor Clerval’s voice, but Leesa was glad he was in his office. She’d arrived early for her appointment, and with no yellow glow seeping from beneath the door, she’d been afraid he might not be here yet.

  “It’s Leesa Nyland, Professor,” she called loudly.

  A moment later, she heard the click of the old lock and the door swung open. The office was dark, lit only by two flickering candles atop the professor’s desk. No wonder she hadn’t seen any light under the door.

  “Come in, come in,” Dr. Clerval invited as he stepped back from the doorway. As soon as Leesa was inside, he pushed the door closed and turned the lock.

  Leesa wondered why he was keeping the door locked. “I’m sorry I’m early,” she said, standing in the center of the small office and letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. The air was thick with the fruity scent of his pipe tobacco, and she saw the pipe smoldering in the brass ashtray on the corner of his desk. A thin ribbon of smoke twisted up from the bowl in the candlelight, dissipating in the dimness above. “It was easier for the escort guy this way.”

  Even though Rave had destroyed the vampire four nights ago, she was still using the campus escort service if she had to go anywhere at night. Rave had impressed upon her that the burgeoning Destiratu could rouse other vampires at any time, and she should remain careful. Security was still high on campus, because the second girl had not yet been found, and no one but she and Rave knew the killer was dead.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Professor Clerval said. He moved to his desk and sat down. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad you’re early. I have something here I think you’ll find quite interesting. Pull your chair up close.”

  Leesa lifted the old cushioned chair she’d sat on the last time she was here and set it in front of the desk, next to the professor’s. Sitting down, she was astonished to see what looked to be a very real skull resting on a velvet cloth in the middle of the desk. The skull glowed a dull yellow in the candlelight, like a leftover Halloween decoration.

  “Is that thing real?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes. Very real. And very special. I call him Yorick.” He chuckled, looking embarrassed. “A poor joke, I know.”

  He carefully lifted the skull in both hands and turned it so it faced Leesa. “Take a look,” he said as he gently set it back down on the cloth.

  It took a few seconds before Leesa realized what she was looking at. The skull appeared normal in all respects except one, but that one was enough to pull a sharp gasp from her throat. Jutting down from the upper teeth were two sharp, curved fangs!

  “Oh my god!” she exclaimed, her eyes fixed on the pointed teeth. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Professor Clerval smiled. “Yes, it is. I believe this is a genuine vampire skull.”

  “How did you…Where did you…?”

  “A few years ago I found an old manuscript describing the beheading of a supposed vampire here in Connecticut back in the 1700s. As is customary, the body and head were buried separately, a good distance from each other.” Professor Clerval ran his hand over the top of the skull. “They did that to make sure the head and body could never join together and reanimate. Of course, most of the time, the person who was beheaded was just that—an ordinary person accused of being a vampire. But something about this account rang true to me. The author gave a surprisingly detailed description of where the head was buried, so I decided to see if I could locate the place. I was delighted to find what I thought was the exact spot. I went back at night and dug this up. I was astonished at what good condition it was in.” He carefully prodded one of the fangs with his fingertip. “I’ve checked very thoroughly. The fangs are real. This is not a hoax.”

  “Why haven’t you put this on display somewhere?” Leesa asked, her eyes wide. “This proves vampires really exist. Or at least that they once did.”

  Professor Clerval picked up his pipe and took a long puff. Leesa noticed he held the pipe well away from the skull.

  “I’m not certain that would be wise,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about the possible repercussions of doing just that. I’m not sure people need to know that vampires are real, especially with all the misinformation out there. Besides, it turns out vampire bone is even more sensitive to light than vampire skin. That’s the reason for the candles. Daylight would disintegrate the skull. Even normal room lighting damages it.” He smiled. “It’s a good thing grave robbing needs to be done at night, or this could have dissolved in my hands.”

  He pointed to a small, darkened area on the right side of the skull’s dome. “That came from sitting too close to my little table lamp here. So now I only study this by candlelight. I’m writing a paper about it.” He took another puff from his pipe. “Whether I ever publish the paper remains to be decided.”

  Leesa stared at the skull, fascinated. It looked so solid. She found it hard to believe it could disintegrate just from light. “Can I touch it?” she asked.

  The professor nodded. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  She gently placed her palm atop the skull. The smooth bone felt strangely cool. She couldn’t believe it—she was actually touching a vampire skull. “It’s amazing,” she said, rubbing the top of the skull. “Is this why you wanted to see me? To show me the skull?” Reluctantly, she pulled her hand away, and the professor wrapped the skull back inside the velvet cloth.

  “Actually, no,” he said, fastening a metal clip to the top to hold the cloth in place. “If you hadn’t been early, I wouldn’t have shown it to you at all. You’re only the second person to see this. The other is an old colleague of mine who studies vampires for a private foundation. But since it was out when you arrived, I decided to let you see it. With your family’s connection to the creatures, I’m certain I can trust you to keep my secret.”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” Leesa promised. She wondered what Rave knew about vampire bones, remembering what she had witnessed a few nights ago. She pictured the small pile of white and gray ash—the bones certainly disintegrated under the heat of his fire. “But if it wasn’t about the skull,” she asked, “why did you want to see me?”

  “It’s about your mother,” the professor said. “Just a moment.” He lifted the wrapped skull and carried it across the room, placing it gently inside an old-fashioned metal safe. He pushed the heavy door closed and spun the combination lock. When he sat back down, he switched on the desk lamp and blew out the candles.

  “I found something very interesting,” he said, picking up a thick leather-bound manuscript from the far corner of his desk. “In here.” He opened the book and thumbed through the pages. “This is one of the most comprehensive volumes about vampires I’ve ever found. It has a large chapter on grafhym.”

  Leesa watched him anxiously, wondering what he’d found that concerned her mom. They had already decided her mom might actually have encountered a one-fanged vampire—perhaps Professor Clerval had discovered something that proved it. But what she heard next was even better.

  “There may be a way to help your mother,” the professor said when he stopped flipping through the pages. “At least, if what’s written here is true.”

  Leesa leaned forward, scarcely believing her ears. A way to help her mom? Wow. “What does it say?”

  “It’s an account from a farmer in Mexico back in the late 1800s, about his wife. He writes that soon after suffering a strange puncture wound in her neck, which his wife said came from a man who bit her, she began behaving strangely.”

  Leesa thought of all her mom’s strange behaviors. “Strangely how?”

  “The biggest thing was that whenever she killed a chicken to cook for dinner, she drank its blood.”

  Leesa cringed at the image—thank god her mom had settled for tomato juice. “What does that have to do with my mom?”

  The professor looked up from the manuscript and smiled. “It’s the next part I think you’ll fin
d interesting.” He ran his finger across the page, finding the lines he wanted. “The farmer tried getting help from the local shaman and even from the church, but nothing helped. Then a few years later, he and his wife came across the man she said had bitten her. The farmer killed him with a machete, and then watched in horror as she threw herself upon the body and began drinking his blood. The farmer pulled her off as quickly as he could and took her home.” Professor Clerval looked up and met Leesa’s eyes. “She never drank blood again.”

  Leesa took a moment to digest what the professor had just said. “You mean…?”

  Professor Clerval smiled. “Yes. Apparently, the woman became her old self again. There’s a similar account from Eastern Europe in here as well. If these accounts are true—and the fact that they’re from two places so far apart makes it more likely they are—we may have found a way to cure your mother.”

  “Cure her?”

  “According to this, reverse all the effects of the original bite.”

  Leesa’s head was spinning. The professor was saying there was a chance she could have a normal mom, after all these years. She could scarcely imagine what that would be like. It was almost too much to believe or to comprehend. But drinking blood? She grimaced at the thought, but then remembered her mom’s appetite for tomato juice. Maybe blood wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for her.

  Reading her expression, the professor responded to her unspoken concern. “It’s an old book. I think we can probably get away with injecting the blood.”

  Leesa smiled. “Whew. I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up too much,” Professor Clerval said. “First, we’d have to find the grafhym that bit her. If we’re lucky and it’s still in Sleeping Giant Park, we’d still have to catch it somehow. And the blood could be dangerous. Like I said, it’s an old book—we don’t really know what effect the blood might have on your mother. But this book has proven correct on a number of other issues, so I have no reason to doubt it.” He lifted his pipe from the ashtray and took a puff. “So if by some miracle we did catch the grafhym, and if what the book says is true, the creature’s blood should make your mother’s symptoms disappear. There’s one catch, though—the blood must be fresh, which means you have to get your mother to Connecticut.”

  Leesa focused on the word “dangerous.” Why was everything in her life so dangerous all of a sudden? Did she have the right to ask her mom to try such a thing, when she couldn’t even figure out what to do about her own situation with Rave? Was she being selfish, by even thinking of trying something so risky just for the chance to have a normal mother? She pictured her mom’s habitually unhappy face. Perhaps her mom would welcome the chance. She had to at least ask.

  Her thoughts turned to Rave, who’d spent the last two days at Sleeping Giant searching for the grafhym. She hadn’t heard anything from him, but knew he was still looking. If he did locate it, she had little doubt he’d be able catch the grafhym when she told him about this. Indeed, that would probably be the easy part. Getting her mom to Connecticut might prove far more difficult.

  “I already have someone looking for the grafhym,” she said. “After our last talk, I wanted at least to find out if there really was a one-fanged vampire there.”

  Professor Clerval closed the book, surprised but pleased. “Really? Who? Some kind of detective or something?”

  Leesa smiled, picturing the silent way Rave moved and how quickly he covered ground. She imagined what he would be like in the forest. If the grafhym was there, Rave would find it. “Not exactly,” she said. “More like a hunter. A very skilled hunter.”

  Twenty miles to the south and east, on the outskirts of the coastal town of Old Saybrook, three other hunters waited in plain sight. Vampires—two male, one female—hanging out in a small park next to a mini-mart grocery store. The park was dimly lit by pale yellow illumination from the store’s parking lot lights, and the trio appeared natural and unthreatening, just some friends talking in a neighborhood park. They’d been there for about twenty minutes, sitting at a wooden picnic table and seemingly paying no attention to their surroundings. A few cars had come and gone from the lot while they watched, but none had carried what they were seeking—a lone woman. They were in no hurry. The night was dark and chill, exactly the way they liked it.

  They’d been sent out by the Council to find a feeder for the youngest of the three, a short, stocky male whose bald head was covered by the hood of his dark sweatshirt. His name was Paul, and he’d been a vampire for little more than a century. The growing hunger gnawing at him was becoming increasingly difficult to control. Having already lost two of their coven, the Council decided he needed a feeder to slake his thirst and prevent him from going rogue. They sent him out with two of his elders to keep him out of trouble. The female was Tess, a petite blonde who had been a vampire for almost five centuries, and whose power had earned her a seat on the Council. Now that Robert had vanished and was presumed destroyed, Tess was the most harmless looking member of the coven. In her jeans and bright blue coat, she looked like a young mother, which was why she’d been chosen for this hunt. The second male was Rafael, tall and white-haired, dressed in a long brown coat. Rafael looked like he could be Tess’s father, or even her grandfather. But he was younger than Tess, by more than a hundred years.

  Gail Bettancourt was tired. She’d been on her feet for most of the last ten hours, working the register. One hundred seventy pounds was a lot of weight for her poor feet. But finally, her shift was over. All she wanted to do now was go home, give her babies a hug and a kiss and put them to bed, then soak in a long, hot bath. Maybe have a glass of wine and some cheese while she soaked. She smiled as she pulled the elastic scrunchy from her black hair and let it fall loose over her shoulders. That picture was sounding better and better.

  She said goodnight to Henry, who would man the store alone until its midnight closing, and headed out the door toward her old Tercel, parked in the corner of the lot. The night was cold, so she grabbed the sides of her jacket together in front of her. No need to waste the energy to zip it closed—she’d be inside her car in a moment.

  As she bent to put the key into the lock, she sensed someone approaching. Her muscles tensed in alarm, but she relaxed when she saw the slight blonde drawing near.

  “May I ask you a question, please?” the woman asked.

  Gail straightened and turned toward the woman. “Sure. What do you need?”

  The woman smiled. “I was wondering…”

  Gail never heard the rest of the question. Somehow, impossibly, there was now a man standing beside her. Where had he come from? And how had he gotten there so quickly? Before she could even begin to formulate an answer, a pair of fangs sank into her throat and she collapsed into his arms.