by Bill Blume
“They never really said, but they mentioned the motion detector in the hallway first.” Gidion had a bad feeling he knew where Dad was going with this. If the motion detector tripped before the door, then that meant the assassin had gotten inside without tripping the alarm, which begged the question of why she set off the sensors on the way out.
Dad pulled the car back around the building until he reached the garage door again. This time, he stopped and killed the headlights.
“Don’t like it.” He turned the car off and stared into the garage, which was now the only source of light. “She hasn’t sent you any more emails, I trust? No smiley faces?”
“Nope. The one on Grandpa’s door was the last.” The sudden silence from the assassin felt wrong, but Gidion couldn’t say why. The emails and the IM were all about taunting him, but during the fight at Grandpa’s, she didn’t toss out a single verbal jab.
“They didn’t say that the alarm reset, did they?” Dad asked.
Gidion shook his head. “Might not have. Grandpa wanted the alarm silent. He scared the bejeezus out of me the other night, because I didn’t realize I’d set it off either.”
Dad still hadn’t moved to get out of the car. “Let’s give this a few more minutes.”
“What are we waiting for?”
“To see if this is a trap.” He pointed past Gidion towards the back fence. “Keep your eyes open for any movement along the fence, signs we’re being watched. I’ll keep my eyes on the garage.”
Dad made them wait in silence for ten minutes, which wasn’t easy to do, given that both of them had been in a heavy sleep less than an hour ago.
“If they were going to make their move, I think they’d have done it.” Dad paused and leaned in front of Gidion for his own look along the fence. “If this is a trap, then either we’re not seeing them, which I doubt, or they’ve set up a booby trap in there.”
Dad took the lead, as planned. They went inside the funeral home through the garage. Gidion stayed just a few steps behind, enough to stay out of reach of the katana, if Dad needed to use it.
The plan was simple, with Dad keeping his eyes forward for anyone hiding inside and for any tripwires. Gidion’s job was to watch their back and make sure no one came in after them. Just having the option for a division of duties felt strange, no matter how much he was enjoying the idea of playing Robin to his dad’s Batman.
The smell of Grandpa’s tobacco pipe lingered in the garage. The tangy odor made it easy to forget Grandpa was dead and not waiting in his office. Gidion wished Grandpa was here. He wanted to say he was sorry for not backing down and laying low.
He glanced inside the two hearses, making sure no one was hiding in or under them. Everything looked as it should. Other than the cars, the garage didn’t offer any places to stay out of sight.
“Close the garage door.” Dad canted his head towards the control panel next to the door to go inside. “No point in letting them get in behind us that easily.”
Gidion wished the door leading into the hallway had a window on it, so they could see what was waiting on the other side. He pressed the buttons to lower the garage door, which creaked and groaned its way down. Even though he knew the point was to lock out the bad guys, Gidion felt like they were locking themselves in.
He pointed past Dad towards the unopened door. “There’s a light switch for the hallway just inside the door on the right. Control pad for the alarm is just above the switch.”
Once the garage door lowered to the ground, Dad gripped the door handle. He nodded to Gidion and then jerked it open. The hallway lights flashed to life as Dad hit the switch, but they only brightened the hallway a little. The sconces lining the walls used bulbs shaped like candle flames. They provided enough light to see that no one was waiting here.
Much brighter light came from the cremator room, just down on the right. Gidion thought about Dad’s idea, how the vampires might burn down the funeral home. Hell, maybe they’d rigged the cremator to blow up and kill them. He doubted it, though. The vampires had no guarantee they’d get him with the blast.
The alarm system beeped. Gidion punched in the code to disable the system and then rearmed it so that only the perimeter sensors were active. That would let them move through the funeral home, but if someone entered the building, they’d set off the alarm. Of course, that didn’t help them if someone was already hiding inside.
Grandpa’s office was the first door to the right. Dad tried the door, but it was locked. Gidion mimed that he could open the door. Grandpa had given him a master key when he started hunting. The message got across, but Dad shook his head, apparently not thinking it likely the vampires were in there. Dad ran his finger over the keyhole, and judging from the way he shook his head again, nothing suggested the lock had been picked. That didn’t mean the assassin hadn’t gotten Grandpa’s keys when she killed him.
Dad led them to the door of the cremator room. He adjusted his grip on his katana and then leaned to his left for a quick look through the open door. The curse he whispered made it clear something bad was in there, but his stance relaxed suggesting whatever it was in there wasn’t an immediate threat.
Gidion got a glance in the room once Dad stepped aside. The vampire was resting on the conveyer belt. One look eliminated any doubt whether he was a threat, because whoever put him there had decapitated him. The head was propped up to face the door, looking at them through a familiar pair of red-rimmed sunglasses.
• • •
They finished searching every room in the funeral home, including Grandpa’s office. Dad sent a text to Ms. Aldgate to let her know they were all right but that they were going to be a while longer.
Gidion focused on finishing what the assassin had started. With his cell phone opened up to the checklist he’d put together from watching Grandpa, Gidion prepped the cremator for the lost-and-found Justin Wetherington.
“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Dad went through the decapitated vampire’s pockets. This vampire didn’t have anything of value to offer them, though. Their assassin, if she was the one to blame for this special delivery, had already taken anything useful with her.
“I started taking notes anytime I watched Grandpa work the cremator,” Gidion said as he checked the temperature gauges. “Wanted to be sure I knew how to do this, if he wasn’t here to help.”
“Yeah, but are you sure your checklist is complete?” The way Dad talked, he sounded like Gidion was trying to defuse a bomb. “How do you know you’re getting this right?”
He remembered the night Grandpa caught him in here with Bonnie and GQ Drac’s bodies. That moment when Grandpa came over to the console to check the settings and realized they were all right had hurt him more than anything Gidion had said. Telling the old man he didn’t need him would have been kinder. Gidion wanted that moment back, just to say something to make the sting less for Grandpa and for himself.
“Don’t worry, Dad.” He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes while they were still hidden from his father. “I’m sure I’ve got it right.”
He turned and realized Dad hadn’t been looking at him anyway. Dad was studying the body left for them. The assassin had hogtied her driver and placed him here on his side. The rope had also wrapped around his throat before getting his head lopped off. Even though a vampire couldn’t die from suffocation, it did need air to function. They could choke to the point of passing out.
“You notice all the cuts.” Dad pointed to a cluster of them along the vampire’s arms and even down his throat, the part not cut off with his head. For this many wounds to be visible, she must have drained him past the point of his ability to heal. The pool of blood on the floor attested to that.
“She was interrogating him.” He’d used a similar technique on a vampire with the local coven to get information out of him, not that he managed to get a lot. “Had him here a while, too, but I don’t understand why. They were working together.”
“She left our h
orse farmer here to send you a message.” Dad shrugged. “Just not sure what the message is.”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Gidion pulled the sunglasses off of the vampire to study them. He considered keeping them as a souvenir, but when he saw Dad’s look of disgust, he put them back on the body.
Cleaning up their assassin’s mess kept them in the funeral home until 5:30. Gidion took time to check the security camera recordings on the computer in Grandpa’s office, but apparently Grandpa had never turned the cameras back on after they’d caught the original recording of the assassin in the cremator room last week. He considered deleting all of the recordings, including the one of the assassin, but the police already knew about the cameras. They might have already copied the files for themselves. Deleting them now would just look suspicious.
“Let’s get back to Lillian’s and get some sleep.” Dad groaned as he stretched his body, reaching up as if to crack his back. “Wish we could just go straight there, but we need to stop somewhere safe along the way and make sure no one put a tracking device on my car while we were in here.”
The entire ride home, Gidion kept thinking about what Dad had said, that the assassin was sending him a message. What the hell was she trying to tell him? Why not just email him the way she had been?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
After staying up late for cleanup duty at the funeral home, both Gidion and Dad slept until just after noon. Gidion never even heard Ms. Aldgate leave for school. They might not have awakened until dinner, but a call from Detective Bristow changed that. Richmond’s forensic techs had finished with Grandpa’s house.
Dad wanted to get a few things, including some of Grandpa’s weapons. Gidion just wanted his car.
They pulled onto Grandpa’s street a little after four, and a rush of relief made it easier for Gidion to breathe once he saw his car still there and with all its tires.
Dad parked right behind the Little Hearse. He took a deep breath as he looked at the front of Grandpa’s house. “You don’t have to go in with me if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll be fine.” He wanted to see if his assassin might have left something inside that the police overlooked. Odds didn’t favor that, but after her special delivery at the funeral home, nothing guaranteed she hadn’t left something for them here after the fact.
“Still nothing from her?” Dad asked as they approached the house.
“No more emails since that night.”
He’d considered sending her an email to see if he could prod her to make contact. In his more heated moments, he wanted to dare her to meet one-on-one. He’d started the email but never finished it. No matter how many times that he tried to think of a place that gave him an advantage, he remembered how she had handed him his ass. His right shoulder still hurt where it was cut, and the vampires made it clear they were willing to create a spectacle to stop him. Even a public place might not deter them.
Dad stopped at the front door. The crime scene tape, shaped like an “X,” only partially hid the fanged smiley face. This one was drawn in Grandpa’s blood. In the daylight, he could see the telltale signs of smeared fingerprints. The assassin had painted this one with her hand. Dad’s hand shook as he reached up and then pulled down the two strands of yellow and black tape. He pushed forward without any further hesitation. The door creaked open.
At first glance, the den looked as it always had. Age had warped the hardwood floors, but a dark red smear started a few feet from the door and ran along the floor to beyond the coffee table where Gidion had found Grandpa’s body. He also saw several bloody shoeprints, no doubt from the swordfight with the assassin.
The police hadn’t done anything to clean the house. When the detective gave them the green light to go inside, he suggested a cleaning service that specialized in this sort of thing. The thought of washing away Grandpa’s blood filled him with mixed emotions. Wiping away this blood also erased the last sign that Grandpa had lived here.
Gidion avoided looking down. He turned his attention to the walls. They were half-bare, with all of Grandpa’s firearms missing and only his swords, knives, and axes left behind. The police had taken the guns to test which one, if any of them, had been used to kill him.
For the first time since that night, Gidion realized that seemed strange, that a vampire would shoot Grandpa instead of feeding on him. The detective said they received a call from someone who heard a gunshot in the area around the time they estimated he’d died. No one had seen anything, though, including the officer who responded on that initial call.
Dad stopped by Grandpa’s bedroom door and the dried remains of a large, dark red puddle of blood. “See if Grandpa has any bolt cutters in his toolbox and bring them to me.” He went inside the bedroom before Gidion could ask why.
The toolbox lived in Grandpa’s utility room. The room looked skeletal, without any drywall to hide the wooden studs and the wiring to and from the circuit breaker and the washer and dryer. The whole house would give one of those TV house renovators a heart attack.
Grandpa kept his toolbox on an old metal assemble-it-yourself shelving unit. Gidion helped him put it together when he was seven. He still remembered Grandpa complaining about the lack of any written instructions, just pictures and diagrams for how everything went together.
He laughed as he remembered Grandpa’s exact words. “What kind of illiterate fucks are they making these things for? And don’t you go repeating to your dad what I just said.”
Grandpa kept a big set of bolt cutters on the top shelf. Each handle was almost two feet long.
“Got it,” Gidion said as he walked in on Dad in the bedroom. The room itself was a mess, and not in the Grandpa way. Every drawer had been upended and all their contents dumped on the bed. Dad was digging through the pile of clothes. “Did you do this?”
“No, and it’s a safe bet the police didn’t.” Dad looked under the bed. “Dammit.”
Gidion knelt to see what the problem was. A piece of floorboard just under the far side of the bed was removed.
“Get me a flashlight.”
Gidion pulled out his phone and crawled under the bed from the other side.
Dad scowled at him. “The display screen isn’t bright enough. I need—”
Gidion turned on the light on his phone, which blinded Dad for a second. “Behold. I bring fire to the caveman.”
“Your phone has a flashlight on it?”
“Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word. “It’s just the flash for the camera. Your phone does it, too.”
“You’ll have to show me how to do that later.” Dad pointed at the hole. “See if there’s a small box in there.”
Gidion had to shift around a few times to adjust his angle, but he was pretty sure the only thing in the hole was dirt and probably spiders and bugs. Thankfully, nothing bit him.
“Sorry, nada.”
Dad pulled out from beneath the bed to sit on the floor. He leaned against the wall by the window.
Gidion shifted back out from under the bed like a submissive dog in retreat. He was relieved when he managed to get free without banging the back of his head on the edge of the bed.
“What are we looking for?” Gidion asked.
“Not positive.” Dad looked at a black-and-white picture of Grandpa with Grandma on the bedside table. The picture was one of those posed, studio portrait jobs with the fake forest background. They must have been a little younger in that picture than Dad was now, and the resemblance between him and Grandma was uncanny. They shared the same nose and eyes, but Dad had inherited Grandpa’s ears, unfortunately. “Your Grandpa never let me see everything that was in that box, but the only time I saw him pull it out was when he told me a little about your Grandma. He’d been drinking enough to loosen up and talk about how they met. He showed me a picture of the two of them when they were in Paris before they married. Was a very touristy picture, the two of them in front of the Eiffel Tower.
“I always got the impression ther
e might be more in that box, maybe even something about other hunters, how your Grandpa became one in the first place.” Dad looked around the room. “I just really would have liked to have seen that picture of them again. The box was nothing fancy, just dull steel with a small Templar cross engraved on the top.”
Gidion thought back to the other night, when the assassin got in here. “She didn’t have it when she ran out.”
“Might have already handed it off to her driver.”
Gidion tried to think through that theory. Something didn’t feel right about it, the idea of her searching through this room while waiting to spring her trap.
“She didn’t search the rest of the house,” Gidion said.
Dad stirred from whatever thoughts had distracted him. “What do you mean?”
“Why did she only search this room?” Gidion stood and pulled open the door to the closet. “Going by what the detective said, she must have been in here for an hour, but she only searched this room. That means she either knew what she was looking for and found it, or I got here before she could finish searching the rest of the house. An hour seems like plenty of time to search the whole place. Why stop with this room?”
Dad stood and glanced out into the den. Gidion already knew that room wasn’t searched. The only sign of a mess came from his fight with the assassin.
“The most dangerous vampire is the one that gets away.” Although Dad said it, Gidion recognized the wisdom from Grandpa’s vampire hunter catechism. “We’ve been assuming this vampire came here for you. Maybe she came here for your grandpa.”
Grandpa never talked about any of the vampires that got away from him, but he warned Gidion about the dangers. Hell, his house was a testament to what it meant to be an aging vampire hunter. The front and back doors both had a steel bar that could drop into place like a door bolt on steroids. The old man had placed an arsenal in this place so he could reach a weapon within two steps in any direction. That preparation saved Gidion’s life the other night.