Gidion's Blood

by Bill Blume

  The last image made it clear why the sender knew Bonnie wasn’t the person receiving these emails. The picture showed another red smiley face painted on the front of an all-too-familiar VW van, which was parked in what looked like a tow lot.

  “Just perfect.”

  At least he knew better than to use Bonnie or GQ’s emails, pretending to be them.

  As he went through the pictures, another email arrived from Hunter_of_Hunters.

  This time, the subject line changed to “Found you.”

  Unlike the other pictures, this one didn’t look familiar. The smiley face with fangs was painted on some kind of beige, vertical slats. A fence, maybe?

  There was something about the spray painted smiley face that looked different, too. He was just about to go back to one of the previous emails to compare when a small, white box popped up in the bottom, right corner of the screen. It was an instant message from Hunter_of_Hunters.

  ‘I see you, hunter.’

  Gidion slammed the laptop shut. He jumped out of his chair and turned off all the lights in his room.

  Even before he reached the window to peek outside, he realized he was panicking for no good reason. Page, still lounging on his bed, lifted her head and looked at him as if to ask what his problem was. The last time a vampire had gotten near his house, parked across the street, she’d barked like the Devil had arrived to steal his soul.

  He didn’t see any unusual cars outside. Gidion would know. He kept track of them. That was one of Grandpa’s earliest bits of advice: know your territory.

  Then he thought about the webcam on the laptop. Bonnie’s had one. He’d confirmed she’d used it to record her “snuff” videos. Could the person on the other end of that IM have hacked into the webcam and seen his face? He didn’t know if that was even possible, but the more he considered it, the less likely it seemed. Why would she tip her hand? Hell, why even let him know she could contact him? None of it made sense, but it confirmed one thing.

  His assassin was here, and she was getting impatient.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A dog barking woke Gidion the next morning.

  “Oh, dear lord, Page! Shut up!”

  The barking didn’t stop, and as he sat up, he saw Page curled up on the floor just outside his bedroom door.

  Then it hit him. The barking was his cell phone ringer for Grandpa.

  “Shit!” Did he oversleep again? He grabbed the phone and answered it before it could kick over to the voicemail. “Grandpa?”

  “Good, you’re awake.”

  “I’m so sorry.” He threw off the covers and scrambled around for his clothes. “I didn’t mean to oversleep. I can be there in twenty minutes. Promise.”

  “Calm down, boy.” Grandpa didn’t shout the command, but it had the same effect. “You haven’t overslept, but get your ass down here fast. We got a mess that needs to be cleaned up before anyone else shows up.”

  Grandpa hung up before Gidion could ask what was going on. Only then did he realize it was just barely daytime outside. He checked the time on his phone, and it was 7:15.

  “Good God. Seriously?”

  He stumbled his way through getting ready. After having that “panic wake-up,” the adrenaline rush was already fading to nil. Didn’t help that he was struggling through a melatonin hangover. The byproduct of Dad working overnights was all the various sleeping remedies stashed in the house, and he’d needed the help after the scare he’d gotten from his assassin last night. He’d placed a drop of lavender oil on his pillow and taken a half of a melatonin pill. Dad warned him against taking a whole pill. That stuff worked great, but the after-effects weren’t to be trifled with.

  He blasted his stereo on the drive to the funeral home to help counter the need for more sleep, not that it did much. Shouting the lyrics sounded like a good idea for all of two lines, at which point he decided even he didn’t want to be subjected to the horror of his singing voice. Falling asleep behind the wheel and crashing his car was preferable by comparison. Dad swore Mom sounded beautiful when she sang, but Caelan Keep had kept those musical genes.

  No one else had gotten to the funeral home by the time he pulled the Little Hearse into the lot around 7:45. None of the staff was scheduled to be there until 8:30 anyway. He sure hoped Grandpa had some coffee brewed.

  Gidion was surprised to find the garage door in the back sitting wide open. Grandpa was sitting on a stool next to one of the long, black hearses and sucking on his pipe. Far as Gidion could tell, nothing looked out of place.

  Given that he wasn’t making a body deposit from hunting, Gidion pulled into a space in the back of the lot. Before he could walk to the open garage, Grandpa met him halfway.

  “No, go back to your car.”

  “What?” Good God, what was going on? “You told me to—”

  “Just shut the garage door with the remote in your car.”

  “Fine.” Lord, he hoped they still only had two escorts scheduled. Gidion was not up for being here all day. He opened the driver side door and reached inside to hit the opener.

  The garage door shrieked as it usually did, working its way shut. He turned to see the beige horizontal slats roll down.

  “Oh, crap.”

  The unexplained vampire smiley face from last night appeared on the garage door. Now he understood why this one had looked different from the others. His assassin had painted the smiley face so that it was resting on its side instead of its normal position. She’d taken the picture at an angle, making it look like the paint had somehow smeared to the right instead of dripping down.

  “I’m going to have Andy drive the second escort.” Grandpa reached past him to reopen the door, which screeched as it rolled back up. “After the first one, you’re going to Pleasants Hardware and getting paint. Just a damn lucky thing it ain’t raining today. You got a change of clothes in your car?”

  Gidion nodded. He always kept a change of clothes in the Little Hearse for when he hunted, and even Grandpa’s ban on hunting hadn’t changed that habit. “How the hell did she find us?”

  “Got a pretty damn good hunch how, but that’ll have to keep for now. Just get ready for the first escort and make sure no one tries to close that door.”

  So much for laying low. Gidion didn’t see any point in hiding now that the assassin had tracked down Grandpa’s funeral home.

  She wouldn’t take long to figure out Gidion was her target. The few advantages he had left were almost played out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The lingering smell of paint fumes did nothing to improve Gidion’s mood. People had vandalized the funeral home before, so Grandpa knew the exact paint needed, E5CB60. Grandpa never called it by its name “Quilt Gold,” probably because that just sounded too girly.

  Gidion spent the entire day puzzling over how this “vampire hunter hunter” had tracked them to the funeral home, and by the time he stored the paint in the garage, he was pretty sure he’d figured it out.

  “All done?” Grandpa stuck his head out the door leading from the garage to the main hallway. By now, it was close to two o’clock. They were done for the day, with all the other employees and attendees long gone.

  “Yeah, suppose I should be glad she kept the smiley face on the door and didn’t decide to go after the bricks.” Gidion washed his hands in a sink using an industrial strength soap they kept here for the body removal services people who might get a little dirty delivering the messier corpses. Grandpa tossed him a towel to dry off. “Thanks. By the way, I think I’ve figured out how she found the funeral home.”

  “You think so?” Grandpa smirked with a “no shit” expression on his face. “My office. Got something you’ll wanna see.”

  He followed him in there and was surprised to see the computer turned on. Grandpa kept it on a table behind his desk. One of the assistant directors had donated it after upgrading to a laptop. The idea had been to let Grandpa use it to track the funeral home’s finances, but all it did was collect
dust, until now.

  The media player was open and showed an image of the cremator room with its bright white walls.

  “When did you get security cameras?”

  Grandpa laughed. “Day after you told me that bitch was coming for you. Want to see what she looks like?”

  Gidion had assumed Grandpa had called other vampire hunters. He should have known better. Still, he was impressed. Grandpa came across like some dumb, stubborn hick, but he could be pretty darn clever.

  “You knew she’d come looking.”

  Grandpa nodded as he played the video. “It’s what I’d have done if I’d been in her shoes.”

  That’s what Gidion had realized while painting the garage door. She knew he’d killed close to two dozen vampires in a short span of time. That kill rate meant he needed a way to dispose of the bodies without getting caught, and a crematorium made sense. There weren’t many in the Richmond area. Wouldn’t take long to visit all of them to find the right one.

  Grandpa often added some of the leftovers to the ashes given to their customers to help dispose of the evidence. More than one person had scattered the remains of Gidion’s kills with their loved one’s ashes. He wondered how many people had a handful of dead vampire resting on the mantel of their fireplace.

  Just as he was about to suggest they fast forward the video to the good part, a person stepped into the frame. The view was from the corner of the room near the door, so when she entered, all he saw was the top of her head and her back. Even that was obscured by the wide brim of a black hat. He could just make out her straight, black hair, which reached halfway down her back. She stepped up to the conveyor belt and leaned over as if to admire the rolling pins up close.

  “She smelled the vampire blood.” That’s what Gidion had figured.

  “Price of success, boy.” Grandpa shook his head. “Had the cleaning crew bleach the shit out of that room for days, but just wasn’t enough.”

  The video display included a date and time in the bottom left corner of the screen. “Wednesday night?”

  “Slipped in pretending to be here for one of the visitations.”

  Gidion wasn’t surprised. It’s what he would have done. She didn’t linger after getting her sniff of the place. She slipped out of the room, and the hat hid her face.

  “That’s not very helpful.” Gidion sat on the edge of Grandpa’s desk. He crossed his arms as he considered what they’d seen. “At least now we know she’s a vampire and not very tall.”

  He’d stressed over the possibility that the vampires had hired a human. Until now, he’d never fully appreciated the advantage that being able to walk in daylight gave him.

  “She’s a fucking chink.”

  Gidion didn’t restrain his groan as he rolled his eyes. There were times he wondered how he and his dad could really be related to Grandpa. The old man hadn’t met an ethnic slur he didn’t like.

  “How can you even tell?” Sure the camera was in color, but the quality wasn’t that great, and the black dress she wore covered her arms completely. The limited cleavage of her outfit didn’t help either. “And for the record, the more appropriate term would be Asian.”

  “Don’t give me that shit.” Grandpa’s complaint lacked its usual conviction. Navigating the folders on the computer for whatever he was looking for required too much of his attention. “Until you can tell the difference between someone from China and Korea, you can kiss my bony ass. Calling someone ‘Asian’ don’t mean shit. That’s like calling a white person European.”

  “I’m pretty sure Europe has more than white people.”

  “Just shut up and let me do this.” He muttered under his breath, “Liberal bullshit.”

  Grandpa played another video, but this was a picture of the main entrance. Gidion stood as he looked at the angle. The camera must have been mounted around chest-level just behind where the greeter stood.

  “How did you get a camera there without anyone noticing?”

  “You’re the enlightened expert on everything. Why don’t you go figure it out?”

  He did. While Grandpa grumped his way through the video, Gidion went to the entrance. He didn’t see a camera, not at first. Sitting on the tall, wooden table next to the hallway entrance, where they usually placed the guest registry, was a new electronic clock. To the right of the large, red numbers was the hint of a circle that could only be the lens of a camera.

  “Very sneaky, Grandpa,” he said as he walked back into the office.

  “Don’t you forget it.”

  He paused the video on a picture of the assassin walking into the funeral home. The wide brim of her black hat left little doubt it was her, that and the time displayed on the video. Grandpa kept the entrance to the funeral home well lit, so the picture turned out clear.

  “Didn’t bother signing the registry,” Grandpa said. “Already gave it to the family anyway.”

  Gidion noted what he could about her. She’d been turned very young, much younger than most of the vampires he’d encountered. That didn’t mean much, but she looked only a little older than he was. Her face was round and attractive with eyes a shade of brown that was colder than ice. They drew you in just long enough to know you should look away.

  Even if she hadn’t sniffed the cremator room, Gidion would have known she was a vampire just by her walk. Vampires moved with more grace than a normal person and with a predatory demeanor. Height, weight, and build didn’t even factor into it. A vampire needed to be a killer, and that’s not something easily hidden. They couldn’t survive otherwise, but something in the way this assassin took in her surroundings carried an added threat. Her own kind, the wiser ones, would fear her.

  “Don’t suppose you ordered the super-deluxe security cameras to cover the parking lot, too?”

  Grandpa shook his head. “Too wide an area.”

  “Would’ve been nice to know what she was driving.”

  He thought about one of Grandpa’s many vampire hunter wisdoms: once they’ve seen your face, they’ve already learned too much. This time, he was the one trying to out the hunter, but having her face didn’t feel like it helped much.

  “At least I can see her coming.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “Won’t do you a lick of good if she decides to take you out with a long-range rifle.”

  “Gee, thanks for that cheery thought.” Gidion tried to wrap his brain around this, get in her head. “She found this place on Wednesday.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Gidion pulled out his cell phone to open up Bonnie’s email account. “She didn’t start sending the emails to taunt me until Thursday. Why do that? She has an advantage now that she knows this place is where I dispose of the bodies. Giving away that she knows about it negates that advantage completely.”

  “You ever consider you might be giving this bitch too much credit? Might not be that smart.”

  “Given how much they’re paying her to kill me?” Gidion shook his head. “She’s got a plan. Just need to figure out how it works before she plays her hand.”

  “She’s just trying to piss you off into doing something sloppy.” Grandpa pointed his finger like he planned to stab Gidion with it. “Don’t do it.”

  “She doesn’t realize I know what she looks like. That’s an advantage I need to use before it’s too late. I can send her an email, talk her into meeting on neutral ground, a public place. She won’t realize I can recognize her. She’ll think she can ambush me, but I’ll be the one setting the ambush.”

  The tangy scent of tobacco filled the office as Grandpa pulled out his pipe and opened a pouch. “It’s a bullshit plan. She won’t fall into something that obvious. Besides, knowing what she looks like won’t do you a damn bit of good if she hides on a rooftop and takes you out like a sniper.”

  “Yeah, I believe you covered that with the whole long-range rifle thing,” Gidion said. “So what’s the play?”

  “Stay low, and keep your eyes open. Don’t jump at the ne
xt picture she sends you either. Minute you get sloppy, she’ll make her move.”

  Grandpa made it clear they needed to leave the funeral home before sunset, too. Just because she’d figured out where the vampire bodies were being disposed of didn’t mean she knew who was involved. If she watched the funeral home at night, she’d eventually piece together that the two of them were the ones to target. Even then, it was only a matter of time before she used what she’d learned to figure it out.

  Unless Gidion figured out how to find her first, they were as good as dead.

  Chapter Eighteen

  With Dad already at work, the house had an emptiness that emphasized the sound from each of Gidion’s movements. The smell of his dog about knocked him down more than her running to greet him with an inquisitive nose to his pants. She was especially curious about the beige spots of paint on his clothes.

  “Seriously, dog?” He pushed her aside with a pat on the head. “I don’t think there are enough paint fumes for you to get high, but let’s not test it.”

  After wading past the constantly moving furball of curiosity, he made his way into the kitchen. He grabbed a large bottle of orange juice from the fridge. Since Dad wasn’t here, he didn’t bother with a glass and drank straight from the bottle. Dad had left a note next to the mail on the kitchen table. Even though this was supposed to be his night off, he’d agreed to go in for overtime and work until four in the morning.

  “Wasn’t like I was planning to hunt tonight anyway.”