by Rain Oxford
After a moment, I pulled over, turned around and took the side road. It wasn’t a huge detour and I figured there was at least a chance it had something to do with the missing kids. I came upon a cop car with its lights flashing, parked in front of a house. I drove past, found a dark alleyway to park in, and then walked back.
It was a small, rundown home with a tarp over a section of the roof. I stood under a window with light shining through the curtains. The window was open slightly, which was not something that occurred regularly in the northeast.
“Are you sure she didn’t just have a sleepover for the night?” I heard a man ask. It only took me a second to place the voice of Officer Lewis.
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course she isn’t at a sleepover!” a woman screeched. “Do you think I would call the police if she was at a fucking sleepover?!”
“You need to calm down, ma’am.”
“My daughter is missing! Don’t fucking tell me to calm down!”
“We’ll find your kid. Until then, you need to stay calm and let us do our job. We will contact you if we have any questions for you.”
I wanted to smack him and I wasn’t even related to the missing kid. A moment later, the cop exited the house and got into his car. I had to make the decision on the spot whether to follow the cop or question the mother. Since it was possible the lazy excuse for a cop had a lead, I rushed to my car, turned on the engine, and waited for him to pass by. Once the cop car was a block away, I pulled out of the alley and followed at a safe distance. It wasn’t easy to tail him without getting caught because there weren’t many other cars on the road.
I broke my own rule of cell phone use in the car and called Cindy. “Hello?” she asked when she picked up.
“Hey, this is Aurora.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Another kid was just taken. Since it took the others at least a week to be taken by the creature, there’s a good chance this kid was chosen before Dr. Brian died.”
“Yes, but if he was the only one working to bring Marluk over, the creature would have returned to its world by now. It takes time to find new people to summon its master and it can’t be taking kids while it’s doing that. This means Dr. Brian was definitely working with someone else. Where are you now?”
“I’m following the cop who was just on the scene. He’s not headed back to the police station, so maybe he has a lead or maybe he got a report on another missing kid.”
“Okay, I’m going to look into the ritual that tells the demon’s pet who to take.”
“Alright. Keep me posted.”
“Will do.” She hung up and I texted Logan.
Another kid just went missing and I’m following Officer Lewis.
What’s the address of the missing kid?
I told him the address and he responded that he would question the mother.
Within ten minutes, Officer Lewis and I reached the edge of town. We drove for another ten minutes before the police car pulled into a driveway. I continued down the road until I found a spot where I could park off the road and then walked back to the old farmhouse. I was rather surprised I didn’t hear dogs barking; I thought all farmers had dogs.
First, I peered in through the window of the cop car, but I didn’t see anything odd and I didn’t want to risk the car light turning on by trying to open the door. I snuck around the main house and found the barn. Having never seen a barn in real life, I assumed that was where the horses were kept.
Inside, there was nothing but hay and stalls. By the time I left the barn, Officer Lewis was already gone. Deciding it was better to question the mother of the latest missing kid, I started heading back to my car, completely hidden in darkness, when the front door of the farmhouse opened and the porch light turned on.
“What were you doing in my barn?” the old man asked. He was in his seventies, thin, and tall with shaggy silver-white hair.
He must have held the record on human night vision. I sighed. “I’m working on a police investigation.”
“Are you with Officer Lewis? He already left.”
“No… I’m with a different cop,” I lied.
“Well… come in and have some coffee. It’s too cold for you to be working this late at night.”
The cop drove to this farmhouse for some reason, so there has to be a clue. Either that, or he had gotten a call on a completely unrelated matter and I was wasting my time. “Thank you.” I followed him in. The house was decorated with old fashioned furniture and trinkets and had a stale tobacco smell. “Do you live here alone? It’s such a big house.”
“I do. My wife died two years ago.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” I couldn’t smell his emotion over the stench of tobacco, which stung my nose when I tried. Furthermore, his face was so weathered from sun exposure that it was hard to read his expression.
“Don’t worry about it. I just wish we had been able to have kids before she died.” He ambled over to the kitchen and poured two mugs of coffee. “We got married right before the draft, and I didn’t want to leave her a single mother, so we waited. I survived and came home, only to find out she had joined the feminist movement and wanted a career.” He scoffed and shook his head. “What woman would choose work over raising her husband’s children? Anyway, she wanted to get her career started first, so we waited even longer. By the time we agreed to start a family, it was too late. We tried for twenty years, suffered four miscarriages and one stillborn. Every time, it killed our marriage a little more. By the time she died, she wouldn’t even look at me.”
He handed me a mug and I noticed a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. “Did Officer Lewis tell you anything about some missing children?” I asked, sitting on the foul-smelling, antique couch.
“Missing children?” He sat down in a cushioned rocking chair. I couldn’t tell if it was him or the chair that was creaking. “No.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, why was he here?”
“Because the neighbors heard me shooting at a coyote that has been skulking around.”
“In that case, I should be going. I’m sorry to bother you.” I set the coffee aside.
“Wait. What about the missing children?”
“It’s Officer Lewis’s case. A few kids ran away, that’s all.”
“Oh,” he said, looking disappointed. He probably just wanted company. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
That got my attention. “What? Why?”
“This town has always seemed to attract sinners. What those kids need is guidance, and they don’t get it at the lousy, corrupt churches they have in town.”
And there went my interest. “Alright, well, I’ve taken too much of your time.”
“I have a doctorate in theology,” he continued, ignoring my obvious disinterest. He pulled up his sleeve to show me his tattoo. “This is a protection symbol, which keeps me safe from unholy forces.”
“That’s pretty dramatic,” I said, standing to leave.
“It was necessary. I got it in ’82, when a demon came to town.”
“A demon?” I sat back down.
“I know it’s hard to believe, but they do exist. The demon tried to corrupt people in town, myself included. He eventually corrupted a pretty young waitress into giving him offspring.”
“She had his baby?”
“Not a baby, no. It was the ugliest little monster with fangs and glowing red eyes. Its mother said it was half human, but we all knew better.”
“What did you do?”
“We destroyed the demon and its spawn and chased the woman out of town.”
My stomach wanted to be sick, but my head was okay with demons being killed. I didn’t particularly care if paranormals or humans were killed when they had it coming. That didn’t mean I was happy with innocent people being killed because of ignorance and hate. Still, it happened, it sucked, and I never lost sleep over it. That posed the question; if demons did exist, were they deserving of death fo
r just existing?
The old man stood, hobbled over to the bookshelf, and pulled down one of several copies of the Bible. Then he removed a newspaper clipping that was sticking out of it. He walked back to his chair, sat, and held out the paper.
I took it and scanned the article. Basically, it was about a diner that burned down. “How does this point to a demon coming to town?” I asked.
“Look at the picture.”
I studied it for a minute. There were ten people gathered around the charred remains of a restaurant. At first, I couldn’t figure out what he meant. Then I focused on the people.
“Fuck.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said ‘yuck,’” I lied. One of the men was hugging a woman. The camera had only caught the side of her face, but I could just make out that she was smiling. The man was the really strange one, though; his eyes were black.
“The waitress’s name was Rose. The demon went by the name Dante.”
It could have been a trick of the light, but that was pretty realistic and more evidence of a demon than anything I had seen so far. I handed it back to him. “Do you know anyone in town who might want to summon another demon?”
He thought about it for a few minutes. “They hired a new librarian two months ago. I only met him once, but he’s one of those pagan freaks.”
I stood. “Thank you for your time,” I said. He didn’t try to stop me again. I texted Logan that I was heading to the diner. I wasn’t interested in wasting my time talking to a librarian. My phone rang before I could set it down, so I assumed it was Logan and didn’t check the number. “Hey, I’m---”
“Hi, Daddy,” a young girl interrupted. Static cut off the next thing that was said.
“Hello? You have the wrong number.”
“Don’t you have school?” another person asked. I froze. I may not have recognized my own voice from when I was a child, but I recognized my father’s.
“Hello?” I asked again, a hint of desperation in my tone. I knew something was wrong, but I was half certain I was imagining it.
Static cut in again. “… in the afternoon. You said we could go to the park today.”
“We will. I just have to finish my project, and that should only take another hour. Then we’ll have all the time in the world.”
My skin was crawling. I hung up the phone. This was definitely the creature messing with me. The radio crackled to life just like when I heard Lilly calling for help, except it wasn’t Lilly’s voice speaking this time.
“Really?”
“Definitely.”
“You work too much.”
“Shut up!” I yelled, shaking with anger. My instincts were pushing me to kill whatever was pissing me off. My fangs tingled with the need to bite and tear. My hands clenched into fists automatically. I got out of my car, went to the nearest tree, and punched it.
The absurdity of what I did helped to cool my fury, so I punched it again and again until I felt calm enough to return to my car. My knuckles were bloody and full of splinters, but it would heal just fine.
The radio was off, which should have been a relief. Instead, I was just irritated with myself; the creature now knew how to get to me. It was personal. I texted Logan again.
Forget my last message. I’m going to the library.
Even if it turned out to be a waste of time, I wasn’t going to sit around and be fucked with by some demonic pet.
* * *
I drove to the library, only to find it closed. As if that ever stopped me. The front door was glass, and I respected libraries, so I went around and found a backdoor. I broke the door, but it was going to be cheaper for them to replace than the front door.
The library, while nothing special, was clean and well laid-out. I broke into the office and looked through the employee files, which was a simple matter, since there were only three employees. Two of them had worked there for at least five years. The third one was a man named Michael Chambers, who was in his late thirties and had a master’s degree in mathematics. Why would someone with such opportunities be a librarian?
Even as I copied down the address, I knew it was probably a waste of time. Nevertheless, I drove to the address and knocked on the door on the middle unit of a triplex. The man who answered did not look like a librarian. He was thin, dressed in blue flannel pajamas, and had messy, medium brown hair. “Um… if you’re the pizza guy… you’re twenty minutes late… and you forgot the pizza.”
“You should call them back and tell them.”
“Oh,” he said, frowning. “Well, how can I help you?”
“Are you Michael Chambers?” He nodded. “You recently moved here and I was hoping you might have some information.”
“Like a survey?”
“No. There are some missing children. As a librarian, I figured you might have seen them.”
“Missing children? Please, come in.” I stepped inside. It was a small, clean place. The living room and kitchen were only divided by a breakfast bar. The only furniture was a brown leather couch with several boxes in front of it like a table.
“You’ve been here two months?”
“I hate packing, so I wanted to make sure I liked it here before I unpacked. Can I get you a coffee?”
“That would be nice.”
He went over to the kitchen. “So, who are the missing kids?”
“Kenneth Oak, Andrea Sherwood, Lilly Hartwell, Rome Phelps, Peter Bowen, and Jeana Franklin.”
“Shit. How do six people go missing and it’s not all over the news?”
“It’s a strange case. Do you recognize any of the names?”
“Lilly and Rome came to the library all the time for about a month after I started. About a month ago, they stopped coming so often and neither of them have shown up in a week. I figured they were working on a school project.”
“What kind of books did they read?”
“Rome loved fairytales. Lilly was… a little more eccentric. She liked horror.” He returned to the living room and handed me a mug of coffee.
I hesitated. His scent was strange; he was anxious and guilty. “Thank you. Did you ever see anyone paying too much attention to them?” I asked, looking him right in the eyes. He glanced down slightly.
“Um… no. I’ll be back in just a second.” He disappeared down the hallway into one of the rooms.
I raised the coffee to my mouth and sniffed it. There was definitely something that wasn’t coffee in it. It smelled herbal, not poisonous. Potion. Fucking wizards. I set the coffee down and turned to the hallway just as the wizard returned with a damn staff. It was crooked and had a jade tied on the end.
As he aimed the staff at me, I ran around the couch, into the kitchen, and ducked behind the counter. I heard an almost deafening explosion. Hoping it took him a second to “recharge” after such a massive outburst, I rushed him. I was in arm’s reach before he could move out of the way, but his staff was blocking his face, so I punched him in his left shoulder. He screamed with pain as his bones practically shattered like china. I tried to take the staff from his hand, but it electrocuted me.
It didn’t matter how fast I healed; it still hurt like a bitch and I sure as hell didn’t want to touch it again. He aimed it at me for a second time. After taking some damage, my self-preservation instincts overpowered my fight instincts. Vampires were not persistence fighters; we killed in as few strikes as possible. Although we were designed to take a hit, our speed meant we usually didn’t have to.
I picked up the couch to use as a shield. The wizard squeaked and shot a blast of light from the staff, which hit the couch. The couch caught fire. “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Put it out!” He waved the staff at the couch and it did nothing. “Crap! I can’t concentrate! Help! Throw it outside!”
I set the burning couch down and stepped back. “I’m not throwing your couch outside. You’re the one who set it on fire.”
“I can’t help it; you broke my shoulder and you were going to throw my couc
h at me!”
“You tried to set me on fire!”
“You’re a vampire!” The fire alarm went off. “Do something! My landlord is going to be pissed!”
“Do you have a fire extinguisher?”
“In the kitchen.”
I grabbed the fire extinguisher from beside the fridge. “Kill the alarm and I’ll put out the fire.” It only took a moment for me to douse the flames, and by then, he had fried the alarm with magic. Using the distraction to my advantage, I punched him in the broken shoulder again and simultaneously kicked the staff out of his hand. Before he could even reach for it, I snatched it off the floor and pointed it at his throat. It didn’t electrocute me again.
When he realized what happened, he squeaked. The scent of his fear filled the room. Obviously, he wasn’t one of the more arrogant wizards.
“Please don’t kill me,” he begged. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You tried to poison me and set me on fire.”
“Poison?”
“The coffee.”
“Oh, no, that was just a sleeping potion. I was going to escape while you were unconscious.”
“You know, I don’t even care. Where are the missing kids?”
He sputtered. “I don’t know! I didn’t even know there were missing kids!” He didn’t smell like he was lying.
“Then why did you attack me?”
“Didn’t you come here to kill me?”
“Why the hell would I kill you?”
“Because you’re a vampire… aren’t you?”
“Yeah. So?”
“The wizard council just collapsed and that voids the treaty they made with Stephen Yocum’s coven.”
“I couldn’t care less about treaties.”
“Then you’re not going to kill me?”
“I might, but not because I’m a vampire. If you didn’t take the children, what are you doing here? You don’t strike me as a librarian.”
“I’m not a librarian, I’m an author.”
“Really? Can people still make a living as an author?”