Gidion's Blood

by Bill Blume

  “Chili?”

  Ms. Aldgate had camped out on her couch with her large purple school bag sitting at her feet. A stack of papers were piled onto the coffee table. She held a red “Pen of Doom” in her hand as she graded quizzes. Gidion couldn’t say he was sorry to have missed that part of school today.

  “Yes,” she said, “making your father cook seemed kinder than charging rent.” She didn’t look up as she said that, but he could hear the smirk in her voice.

  “Good choice. Dad’s not a great cook with most things, but his chili—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Dad barked his protest as he went back into the kitchen. “I heard that!”

  “Hey, I was going to add that your chili is one thing you cook better than anyone else.”

  “One thing?” Dad sounded ready to pick his sword back up and go a round with Gidion.

  “I didn’t say it was the only thing.” Seeing Dad was busy checking on the pot of spicy good stuff on the stove, Gidion turned to Ms. Aldgate as she looked up at him. He mouthed to her, “It really is the only thing.”

  Even though she turned her attention back to the quiz in front of her, she said, “I trust Andrea was pleased to see you?” She had this very knowing tone, too.

  “You could say that.” Gidion couldn’t stop himself from smiling.

  “I hear she broke up with Seth Parson.”

  “She’s officially calling him ‘He Who Shall Not Be Named.’”

  She made a mean looking “X” on the sheet she was grading. “Is she doing all right?”

  Gidion cleared his throat. “Oh, she’s doing fine.” Oh so very, very fine, he thought to himself.

  “Good, then I suppose you two can finally start dating.”

  “Hey!” Even to him, the attempt at indignation sounded pretty weak.

  “Oh, please, if you two get any worse about mooning over each other in my class, I’ll be moving you both to opposite sides of the room.”

  Dad leaned into the den. “Trust me, just move them now. I’ve heard nothing but ‘Andrea this,’ and ‘Andrea that,’ out of his mouth ever since the start of the school year.”

  “Really, Dad? I couldn’t stand her when the school year started.” That was true, too. She annoyed the ever-loving hell out of him.

  They responded in unison with Dad going, “Bingo,” and Ms. Aldgate saying, “Exactly.”

  He realized he wasn’t going to win this one and headed into the kitchen. “Anyway, we have a small problem.”

  That got Dad’s attention. He stopped stirring the chili and leaned against the counter. Talk about a sign of how bad things were. Dad was actually taking him seriously.

  “I thanked Andrea for you,” he said, then added, “for calling the police.”

  “And that would be a problem because?”

  “She didn’t make the call.”

  Dad stared into space as he processed that detail in a way that reminded Gidion of a computer. “When the police showed up, were they going code three?”

  “Lights and sirens.” Gidion nodded. “Came straight for Grandpa’s house, too. Someone called and gave them all the right details to get the police there as fast as possible.”

  “Any idea who it might have been?”

  Gidion shook his head.

  “And you’re sure Andrea wasn’t lying?”

  “When I thanked her for calling 911, she was completely confused. Besides, why would she lie?”

  Dad took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We have a third player.”

  “Are you sure that’s a bad thing?” Ms. Aldgate asked. She’d gotten up and was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “That call saved Gidion’s life. That suggests this third party is on your side.”

  “I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that.” Dad didn’t look up from his thoughts as he said that. “If they’re really interested in helping us, then why haven’t they contacted us? Plenty of ways they could have done that, even without us being at our house.”

  “Back before Grandpa installed the security system at the funeral home, he said he was going to make some phone calls.” Gidion hadn’t given that any thought until now. “Calling a security company is one call. What if he called in some extra help?”

  “I don’t think he had contact with any other hunters. In all the years since I first started hunting, he never gave me an indication he knew any. I never ran into anyone either.”

  “Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.” The idea of extra hunters, especially now, was the kind of encouragement Gidion could use.

  Dad turned his back to them, taking the lid back off the chili to stir it. “I don’t think it was another hunter. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Because they called the police instead of going in after the vampire themselves?” Ms. Aldgate asked.

  “Exactly.” Dad didn’t look up from stirring the chili. “Might be another vampire, someone with a grudge against this assassin.”

  “Is it really so unlikely that it was just a neighbor?” Ms. Aldgate asked. “Maybe they saw Gidion and this vampire fighting through the window.”

  Dad looked back at Gidion. “Well?”

  “I doubt it.” He’d be lying if he didn’t admit that part of him didn’t want that to be true. The idea of more hunters offered some hope. Why should the vampires be the only ones with some kind of underground network?

  He didn’t realize they’d all gone silent until a phone vibrated. Gidion reached for his pocket to pull out his phone and check. “Not me.”

  “No, it’s me.” Dad pulled out his phone and made a visible effort to hide whatever message he’d just received from both Gidion and Ms. Aldgate. “It’s the person I’m meeting tonight.” He put the phone away without responding to the message.

  “And?” Gidion asked.

  “And you don’t need to worry about it. This is something I need to do alone, and it won’t take that long.”

  Ms. Aldgate had kept silent, but one look made it clear this was a silent protest. Maybe Gidion could draw her in to back him up on this.

  “Look, you finally agreed it was better to have a backup when it came to the funeral home,” Gidion said. “I don’t see what the difference is.”

  “That was because we knew we were probably dealing with a vampire.” Dad turned his back to them as he pulled some bowls from the cabinets. “This is an informant. I won’t be in any danger, and they might not show if I bring someone they don’t know.”

  Dad had called this person an informant more than once, but the way Dad said it left Gidion convinced it was code for “friendly vampire.” As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing. He didn’t care what Dad said.

  “You should go wash up, son.” Gidion recognized that was more code speak, this time for Gidion to get out of the room so Dad could have a moment with Ms. Aldgate.

  “Sure.” Maybe she’d talk some sense into him, not that Gidion had much faith in that happening.

  Gidion needed to test something before Dad left anyway, and the sooner he got a moment alone to test it, the better.

  • • •

  The one-on-one between Dad and Ms. Aldgate didn’t go well. The silence over dinner proved that. If he’d served her a bowl of nails instead of chili, she’d have chewed through it just as easily.

  Gidion waited to make his last argument until well after dinner. Dad was standing by the front door, getting ready to leave.

  “This is stupid. You let me go with you to the funeral home, and I’ve been dealing with vampires more than you this past year.”

  “You aren’t needed for this.” Dad glared at him over the edge of his sword, giving the blade one last check. Gidion had asked if he was going to take Shi no Yoru, but Dad insisted that Night of Death would always be Grandpa’s sword. “I’m just meeting someone for a conversation, not to hunt.”

  “You’ve checked that sword a lot of times for someone just going to have a conversation.” To Gidion’s surpr
ise, that observation came from Ms. Aldgate.

  “Lil, I need you to trust me on this. I won’t be long.” He slid the sword back into its wooden scabbard. “Three hours, at the most.”

  “I could just drive,” Gidion said, “and wait in the car.”

  “Enough, Gidion.” He didn’t shout, but Dad never needed to. As deep as his voice could go, just the barest hint of anger turned the simplest warning into the equivalent of a steel beam to the head. Ms. Aldgate must not have seen that side of Dad much, if at all, because she was watching both of them with this wide-eyed surprise.

  Gidion offered his best glare to Dad, for what that was worth.

  “Look, I’ll be back soon.” He placed a hand on Gidion’s shoulder. “I promise. Just trust me. There’s a good chance we can end all of this tonight.”

  He kissed Ms. Aldgate next. “I’d say don’t wait up,” he said, “but I suspect there’s no point.”

  “You would be right.” They kissed again, and despite how irritated he was with Dad, Gidion couldn’t hold back a grin. He’d never seen Dad kiss a woman. The past decade, he might as well have been a monk for all the lack of dating. If not for Gidion, the man would have been a hermit.

  Ms. Aldgate’s head nestled into Dad’s shoulder. “Please be careful,” she whispered.

  “Always am.” Dad pointed at Gidion with the butt of his sword’s hilt. “Hold down the fort.” The gesture revealed he was wearing the Gatchaman wristband Gidion gave him on his birthday. Gidion hoped it would bring him enough luck to keep him safe, but he kept the thought to himself.

  Dad pulled open the door and walked out.

  Gidion stood next to Ms. Aldgate in the doorway. They stayed there until Dad made a u-turn in his car and disappeared down the street. Gidion was the first to walk away from the door. He headed for the guest room, but Ms. Aldgate’s voice stopped him.

  “You do know my window in that room is painted shut, right?”

  Shit. “Not sure what you mean, Ms. Aldgate.”

  “You are twice as stubborn as your father, and I’ve listened to you argue yourself blue in the face in my class even when it was obvious you were wrong.”

  “Hey, the pyramids could absolutely have been built by aliens. You can’t prove they weren’t.”

  “You’re only proving my point.” Ms. Aldgate closed her front door and locked it. “That was the lamest attempt at a protest I have ever heard out of your mouth. It barely qualified as a token effort. The only reason I think your father didn’t realize it is because he has a bad habit of seeing what he wants to see.”

  Gidion didn’t have an argument for that. “Your point?”

  “My point is that the window in my guest room is painted shut, and if you break that window to sneak out, I will kick your ass from here to the East End.”

  “I wasn’t going to break your window.” Gidion sighed. She’d pretty much read him right the whole way except for that. “I was going to use the rain as an excuse to take Page out with an umbrella to use the bathroom.”

  She got a far-off look as she considered that. “That probably would have worked, too. So how are you planning to track your father? You must have something figured out.”

  “Yeah, I’m tracking Dad’s car.”

  “How did you—Oh, never mind.” She rolled her eyes and sat on the sofa. Her school work was still piled in neat stacks on the sofa cushions, coffee table and floor. “Your plan was stupid.”

  “Stupid! You just said it would have worked.”

  She pointed at him with the Red Pen of Doom as if to give him an F for his effort at subterfuge. “To get out of my house, yes, but you can’t really believe that barking machine would have kept quiet in your car and not given you away.”

  Page curled up on the floor in front of the television. She licked her lips, her big brown eyes going between the two humans in the room as if she realized she was the focus of their discussion.

  “Okay, yeah.” Gidion shrugged. “That was a bit of a risk, depending on where Dad goes.”

  “Well, fortunately for you, I agree that your father is being an idiot. Leave the dog, and get after him.”

  Gidion ran for the guest room and quickly changed. He layered up about the same as he had the night he’d run into GQ Drac outside of the Blue Goat. The only difference this time was that he put his black t-shirt with the red bat on over the turtleneck. He wasn’t going to risk burying his luck tonight.

  He geared up. Even though the police had the box cutter he’d dropped in Grandpa’s house, he still had Ms. Aldgate’s. He also brought the katana and wakizashi he’d taken from Grandpa’s earlier today.

  Last but not least, he grabbed his phone. He’d left it charging, and a quick check showed the battery was at a hundred percent.

  Ms. Aldgate stopped him just short of the front door. Lord, what now?

  “Not so fast.”

  She hugged him, the hilts of the swords trapped between them. The gesture caught him off guard. The emotions of the past few days, Grandpa’s death and all the secrets that had spilled into the open from him and Dad, choked him.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a mistake?” She reached into his hood and brushed a stray hair into place.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll be in the bathroom.”

  “Huh?”

  She disappeared around the corner into the hallway. “That’s how you’re getting out without me seeing you.”

  Gidion admired that. She could be pretty damn sneaky. This way, she wouldn’t be lying when Dad pitched a fit later. Nice.

  He covered the swords with his jacket before he ran out the door. The rain hit his face like ice pellets, sending a shiver through his body. He placed the swords on the floorboard of the backseat before diving into his car.

  He plugged in his phone to play some appropriate hunting music, going for some Imagine Dragons. As Dan Reynolds pounded out the lyrics to “Friction,” Gidion opened the web browser on his phone. The website for the GPS tracking account Andrea’s mom used had stayed logged in. This was the same GPS app her mom used the other night to figure out when she’d been in Church Hill with him. Andrea helped him set it up before he left her house. A map displayed and showed the location of Andrea’s phone. Before going into Ms. Aldgate’s house earlier, he’d hidden Andrea’s phone in the trunk of Dad’s car.

  According to the app, Dad was traveling eastbound on Midlothian Turnpike, not far from here.

  “Andrea, I owe you big time.”

  He’d tried to get his hands on Dad’s phone to load something like this, but anything he could afford lacked the level of stealth required. Besides, that meant finding a way to hack into his phone. Most any app he’d found that he could afford, would send a notification to Dad’s phone. He’d be busted. Besides, he had no guarantee Dad wouldn’t turn off the phone once he got wherever he was going.

  The request to plot Andrea’s phone would also send a notification to her phone, displaying on her phone’s screen as it had the other night in Church Hill, but with the phone hidden beneath the mat in the trunk of the car, Dad wouldn’t know it.

  Gidion was forced to do a bit of stop and go. Especially with the roads slick from the rain, he couldn’t check the GPS tracker and drive at the same time. He drove just short of each plot, pulled over into a nearby parking lot, and repeated the process. Gidion didn’t go very far before he realized Dad had already stopped.

  His car plotted along Woolridge Road, a little ways off the Midlothian Turnpike, not far from the Urban Farmhouse where Gidion studied with Andrea. Most of that area was residential, though. Surely he wasn’t meeting with someone in a house or townhome. If the person had one of those there, then why would Dad have waited until tonight to meet with them? That’s when it occurred to Gidion that he wasn’t technically tracking Dad’s car. He was tracking Andrea’s phone. What if Dad had found it and ditched it?

  Gidion stopped in the lot of a large fitness center to make the latest plot. He zoomed i
n on the map to check Dad’s exact location. If it plotted right, then Dad wasn’t meeting at someone’s house. Dad stopped at the entrance for the Midlothian Mines Park. Gidion had never actually gone there, just driven past it.

  He ran a quick Google search on the park, not that it helped him much. Changing the map view to display a satellite picture of the area showed a bunch of trees with several neighborhoods bordering it on opposite sides. There were two places to park, with one of the lots located across Woolridge next to Loch Lothian. That part he recognized from driving by it many times in the past. A wooden structure that reminded him of a stubby, short skeletal tower was positioned next to the loch. Dad plotted on the other side of Woolridge where most of the park was located. That assumed the plot was good and that Dad hadn’t tossed Andrea’s phone.

  Dad had left the house at about a quarter to ten. He and Dad both tended to time things so they arrived almost right as the event started. Going by that, Gidion figured the meet must be set for ten o’clock. The clock on his dashboard already showed it was a minute past that.

  So the next question was where they were meeting: in the park or did they just plan to rendezvous at the park and then go somewhere else? If they were meeting there, then they’d either stayed with their cars or gone into the park.

  Then he realized…if they met in the lot and planned to go somewhere else, Dad might leave his car and ride with the contact.

  Gidion zipped out of the lot onto Woolridge and floored it. If his dad left in another car, he didn’t have a way to track him.

  He slowed his car as he neared the park. Trees hid the parking area on the left where Andrea’s phone plotted. He also glanced at the parking area on the right. He didn’t see any cars, just a tall, wooden structure that the park website had called a headstock, a type of mining machine.

  Gidion kept going down Woolridge until he reached the shopping center with the Urban Farmhouse and the library. He turned around and went back towards the park. From this direction, thanks in part to the way the road curved, he saw his dad’s blue Toyota in the parking lot. Another car was parked on the other side of Dad’s.

  Gidion parked on the opposite side of the road in front of the wooden headstock. A sign warned against parking here after dark. The same held true for the lot across the road. That suggested Dad wasn’t going anywhere else. He ran the risk of the car getting towed if he left it there too long.