by Bill Blume
“It’s time to bring the police into this.”
Gidion answered with a laugh as empty as he felt. “Are you kidding? We need to get Dad’s car before the police find the bodies at the park.” He’d almost forgotten about the damn car. Lord, he just wanted to crawl into bed.
“You are in over your head. These people are armed with guns, something you don’t have.”
He’d considered going to Grandpa’s and arming himself with a shotguns, if the police left any in the house. Didn’t take long for him to rule out that option. Even though Grandpa had taught him how to shoot, he wasn’t good enough to win a gunfight against a half dozen vampires. The simple act of shooting that handgun in the park had reinforced how lousy his aim was. The only chance he and Blood had was to pick them off one at a time, do as much damage as possible to even the odds before any of them realized what was happening.
“What I have are two vampire bodies with their heads cut off in that park. If I’m lucky, then maybe the vampires cleaned up the mess for me. They don’t want to draw the attention of the police any more than I do.” It wasn’t until shortly after his meet with Blood that he realized he hadn’t seen the body of the first vampire he’d beheaded at the park. Given how dark it was and all the rain, there was a good chance he just overlooked the body trying to catch up to the vampires with Dad, but he hoped he was wrong. If they got the one body, then perhaps they got the second, too.
“I’d also need to explain to the police why I look like I got hit with a wall.” He pointed at the bruised side of his face.
“We could say that the bruising is from what happened at your grandfather’s house.”
“Won’t take Chesterfield County Police long to compare notes with Richmond and realize that’s bull.”
She looked out her kitchen window. When he started telling her what happened to Dad, he’d worried she might fall apart. She didn’t shed a tear. She focused. Hell, the reason she’d had all the lights off when he got here was so she could see outside and spot anyone approaching the house and make it more difficult for anyone out there to see her. That was also why she’d called him instead of Dad. She spotted his car.
No, Ms. Aldgate was determined to find an answer, one that wouldn’t involve him hunting and would get Dad back as soon as possible.
The entire time she was thinking through the problem, she slid the tip of her index finger along the rim of her mug. She stopped as soon as she found her next idea. “Is there a way to contact the phone company and have them track your dad’s phone?”
“Already tried it. They’ve turned off the phone, and the last coordinates placed it exactly where they planned to ambush me at the Willey Bridge.” He’d contacted the cell phone company on his way to meet with Blood. Mom was playing it smart. He suspected the next time she turned on the phone, she’d place herself somewhere just as unhelpful.
“There has to be something we can do, some way I can do more than just sit here.” She picked up her teapot and poured the last drops into her mug. Her hands shook, the only sign he’d seen that she was close to cracking.
“First, we need to get Dad’s car. Have you slept any?”
She avoided looking at him as she answered. “Yes, not sure how long. I’d been sitting in the dark waiting for you and your father. Didn’t intend to sleep. Your dog woke me when you started prowling around outside.”
“You plan to work today?” he asked.
He recognized the look she was giving him. She’d leveled Ralph Whaley, the dumbest jerk in his World History class, with that same dumbfounded stare when he’d desperately guessed that Rome was invaded by Japan. Idiot got booted out of the class before the first quarter ended.
“No,” she said, drawing out that word, “I am most definitely calling out sick. God gave us substitute teachers for reason.”
“Good, then I’ve got a research project for you.”
As badly as he needed to sleep, part of him considered staying up to search online for the recent housing sales, the idea he’d pitched to Blood to find Mom. He didn’t see how he was going to ever sleep and do that in time to find Dad without losing an entire night. If Mom was serious about turning Dad, then she’d probably started the process. That gave him two more nights, at best. After that, he’d be forced to put both of them down.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Gidion regretted his promise to give Andrea a ride to school, even if that was the best way to return her cell phone. The last of the rain clouds cleared as he reached her house.
The driveway was empty, meaning Andrea’s mom must have already left for work, so he parked the Little Hearse in her mom’s spot. Andrea ran out the front door as soon as he stopped. She wore a dark red velvet coat that came down just past her knees.
Even though she only kept the rear passenger door open for all of three seconds, she managed to toss her pale blue purse and worn leather backpack onto the back seat and shout “Morning!” before the door shut. By the time his fogged brain registered all that, she was diving into the passenger seat up front.
Her arrival sucked the hot air from his car and the incoming cold smacked him half awake. She was leaning in to plant a kiss on his cheek but then screamed.
“Great Glorianna, Gid! What happened to you?” She winced as she studied the bruised half of his face.
“You should see the other guy.”
Her scowl could have stripped varnish from furniture. “Considering what I suspect you did to him, I’ll pass. Does it hurt?”
He shrugged, but the gentle stroke of her fingers turned his cool reply of “Nah” into a sharp bark.
“Yes, clearly not hurting you a bit.” Her snark surrendered to her concern, though. “Seriously, what happened? If the right half of your face was bruised any more, you could cosplay as Harvey Dent without any makeup. And have you slept at all?”
He shook his head. “Been a long night. I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version on the way to school.”
“I’m half-tempted to drag your happy assets inside and plant you in my bed.” Her head bobbed back and forth as she considered that. “Which actually might be fun, come to think of it.”
“If I can manage not to get killed in the next twenty-four hours,” he said as he looked out the rear window to back his car out of the driveway, “I might take you up on that.”
He turned back around once he was on the road. He was about to put the car in drive, but Andrea’s silent stare stopped him.
“What?”
“Why the next twenty-four hours?” Snark time was so very done.
She listened to him sum up most of what he’d rehashed with Ms. Aldgate. He thanked her for the loan of her phone, which had worked, and he used the reminder to lift the cell from his cup holder and put it in her twitchy, tech-addicted fingers. The rest of the story came out easily enough: Dad abducted by vampires with guns and no clue where they’d taken him. He left out the part about his mom again. He wasn’t sure why that was so hard to admit to her. Hiding it from Ms. Aldgate had been one thing, but for some reason, he was ashamed of the lie his parents had forced onto him. He didn’t leave out the part about Blood, working with the very assassin who’d tried to kill him just a few nights ago. He’d expected the idea of him having some form of backup would comfort her.
“That’s a mistake.” Andrea had held her tongue for most of the drive, staring straight ahead with her jaw set. She crossed her arms and shook her head. She cut him off before he could reassure her. “No, save it. She’s the scorpion, and you’re the frog.”
“I’m sorry,” Gidion chuckled. “You’re calling me a frog?”
“You know? The fable about the scorpion and the frog?”
Before he turned into the school’s parking lot, he saw the look of disbelief on her face. He was about to merge into the line of cars of people dropping off other students when Andrea snapped at him.
“Don’t you dare pull up to that curb. You park this car right now and hear me out.”
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“Yes, your highness.”
He avoided her glare as he found a space in the student parking section not too far from the English building where she had her first class of the day.
“There’s this scorpion,” she said. “It wants to get across this pond, so it asks a frog to give it a ride. Swears it won’t sting the frog, explaining how doing that would only drown them both. The frog agrees to take him, but halfway across the pond, the scorpion stings him anyway. Just before the frog dies, it asks the scorpion why it did it, knowing they would both die. It tells him, ‘Because it’s my nature.’”
“Fine.” He held up his hands in a show of surrender. “I won’t be a frog.”
She touched his chin on the less bruised side of his face and pulled him close. “Promise me.” She kissed him, and her lips were warmer than he expected. More than the burst of cold air and her scream from earlier, that kiss woke him enough to wish she’d made good on her threat to drag him from the car and into her house.
Their eyes met as the kiss ended and they pulled apart. The way she looked at him caught him off guard. This girl had the same kind of steel to her eyes as Blood, but where the assassin’s gaze came from a vacancy of emotion, Andrea’s fears and desires filled a deep well. She was still that crazy, random girl who had invaded his circle of friends back in September, but somewhere along the way, a curtain she kept in place with everyone else had lifted just for him.
He nodded his promise, and she answered with a sad smile.
Her red velvet coat clung to her as she dashed from his car to the Science building. The crowd of students, all running around with less than five minutes before the school bell, obscured her long before she made it inside.
As much as he’d enjoyed that kiss, and could still feel the warmth of her lips on his, he couldn’t bring himself to smile. He’d lied to her, an omission hidden in his promise. The truth he’d withheld cut into his conscience as he drove back to Ms. Aldgate’s.
Andrea was so worried about him being the frog that it never occurred to her that the real danger was him being the scorpion.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Gidion was growing accustomed to waking up to life as bad as he left it. Ms. Aldgate might need a shaman to rid her guest bedroom of all the bad vibes he’d brought into it during the past week. He set his alarm for 4:00, not wanting to sleep past sunset. He’d worried for nothing, because he woke on his own. The time on his phone when he got out of bed and threw his clothes on was 2:13.
The local news websites didn’t mention any homicides in Chesterfield County. Gidion assumed Mom and her vampires had cleaned up after him. That also suggested the police hadn’t searched the park overnight. He’d assumed his gunshots lit up the 911 lines, but the thunderstorm might have negated that. Dad once told him that most firearm violations, meaning gunshots heard in the area without any other confirmation of someone being shot at, rarely resulted in anything. Most callers never had a clue where the shots had originated. That made the odds of finding a gunman, bullets, or a victim a crapshoot for any responding officers. A lot of the calls ended up just being fireworks, even when it wasn’t the Fourth of July or New Year’s.
Lord only knew what mess Gidion would have dealt with if Dad’s car had been found in the park along with the two vampires he’d killed. Given how things had gone during the night, he felt karma owed him the break.
He and Ms. Aldgate recovered Dad’s car before he drove Andrea to school. After that, she slept for two more hours and then threw herself into her assignment while he slept. She assembled a list of homes that sold in the Richmond area since he’d wiped out the local coven last fall. He’d given her some criteria to narrow her search. Most of all, he’d stressed the homes needed to be large and in nice areas. He didn’t point out why. The size was partly because of the number of vampires Mom had working for her. The house had to accommodate all of them. As for the nice areas, that was all about Mom. More than once, Dad told him she’d wanted to live in some elaborate mansion, and he suspected she spent the past decade assembling enough cash to buy a place like that.
Ms. Aldgate organized her list in order of distance from the ambush site at the Willey Bridge. Her fingers shook from too much caffeine and too little sleep, which also made her talk faster than usual. He let her run through three pages worth of addresses, but in his gut, he knew the instant he saw the first home that she’d found his mother. He just prayed his instincts weren’t delivering false hope.
She’d saved pictures and floor plans of the homes, and the house she’d located was just a mile west of the Willey Bridge. The backyard was right against the James River, perfect for disposing of dead bodies, if one had the knowledge of how to do it right. Cutting open the stomach would keep that sucker from ever reaching the surface.
He finished getting his gear together while Ms. Aldgate prepared some coffee and breakfast, which he took with him. He wanted a look at Mom’s house while it was still daylight. Grandpa had long warned him about attacking a vampire’s lair during the day. They woke super-pissed. Going after one during the day was risky enough, but a whole coven of them? He might as well walk in there and slit his wrists to save them the trouble.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t recon the exterior. One nice thing about vampires being flammable in daylight, they couldn’t look out their windows. That didn’t rule out human servants. The coven Gidion wiped out last year used half a dozen feeders, but Mom had passed on every opportunity, thus far, to use one.
Clear skies and lots of sunlight replaced last night’s rain. He made good time to the house on Burnett Drive. Getting to the address forced him to navigate a series of twisted, narrow roads that followed the southern shoreline of the river. Even the smaller homes here must have cost a fortune.
He started to doubt the house on Burnett Drive would be the right one. The homes he saw as he got closer were jammed together, almost close enough to jump from one roof to the next, but as soon as he turned onto Burnett, he knew he’d hit paydirt. The houses not only got bigger, but the property sizes followed suit. The first house he passed was surrounded by a tall, wrought iron fence that sent an unspoken message of, “Stay out, but feel free to admire and envy our fabulous estate.”
Not surprisingly, the address he’d come to see just emphasized the “Stay Out.” A white, brick wall stood tall enough to prevent anyone driving by from seeing the house on the other side, but it wasn’t so tall that he couldn’t climb over it. He pulled his car onto the limited curb, which on this narrow road left half of his car sticking out in the roadway. This secluded an area wasn’t likely to create a traffic issue, though. He crawled on top of his car. He had to stand to see anything.
From this angle, he realized the brick fence wasn’t safe to climb. Jagged bits of glass were embedded into the top of the brickwork to slash any trespasser’s hand to a bloody mess. Beyond the fence, tall evergreens covered the property and blocked most of the house from view. The two-story mansion was built from the same white brick as the fence, as if they’d constructed the outer wall from the house’s leftovers. The trees formed a small forest that grew especially dense along the right and left sides of the property. He’d already guessed that from the satellite imagery he’d seen online. He used the camera on his phone to snap a few pictures.
From here, he could see enough of the house to know it matched the picture and floor plan Ms. Aldgate had supplied. Five bedrooms with a garage big enough to house three cars. More importantly, the garage provided a means to enter the house without going outside. Perfect for a vampire delivered during the day who needed to avoid sunlight. Also provided privacy for moving a body from a car into the house for dinner. The place contained all the little touches to make it a vampire’s dream home.
A sign planted by the gate to the driveway warned to “Beware of Dog.” Gidion decided to test that since dogs and vampires didn’t mix. He climbed down from his car and popped open the trunk. He kept a bunch of sports-related equipme
nt in there, which provided camouflage for his hunting gear and for transporting vampire bodies to the funeral home to cremate them. He pulled out one of his rattier looking baseballs and strolled down to the corner of the property. He whistled as loudly as he could manage and then threw the baseball over the fence as far as it would go. Climbing back on top of his car, he looked over the fence to see where his baseball landed. His toss went pretty far, but no dogs had rushed to see what had violated the fence line.
He considered pounding on the iron gate with one of his baseball bats as a secondary test. The gate bore an elaborate design of a lion and a dragon reared back to battle one another. The decorative design prevented the casual passerby from seeing onto the property without getting right up to it. A camera mounted on a tall pole on the other side of the gate pointed down at the outside of the gate, favoring a view of where the driver side of a car would be.
Not knowing how wide the lens of the camera was, he decided to avoid the gate. Even if vampires couldn’t look out a window during the day, they could look at daytime video from a security camera. The camera might use a motion sensor to only record when something moved within its range. That meant someone could play back anything recorded later without having to search through hours of video. Not good for him.
Instead, he pulled two aluminum bats out of his car and pounded them against each other for almost half a minute. The racket got some dogs barking, but they weren’t on his Mom’s property. The dogs he heard were inside the fence of the house across the street. Their barking was just what he needed. He walked back to his trunk and put up his bats. He waited a little longer to see if the barking drew out any other dogs, but none answered from behind Mom’s fence.
Verdict? No dogs.
Climbing back into his car, he typed a text for Blood.
‘Think I found them. Meet me at the hardware store at Forest Hill Avenue and Chippenham Parkway. Bring your wallet.’