No job, no school… I guess all that’s left is playing with my niece. I can think of worse ways to spend the day.
I grin at her. “You bet, Squirt.”
Of course, that only serves to get her more excited and she barrels out of my room. I hear Purl’s hiss as she careens past my cat in the hallway. My cat slinks into my room a moment later with her tail puffed up.
Purl never liked kids. She looks up at me like she blames me for Amelia being hyper on a Sunday morning.
I comb a hand through my tangled hair and laugh loudly. “Sorry, kitty cat.”
I roll out of bed and change sweaters, grimacing at the progression of my sickness. It’s now past the center line of my shoulder, touching my right collar, and tendrils are now extending further down to my lowest rib on my left side. On my back, it has spread even further there, covering up most of my back.
The attack last night was bad, but I didn’t realize that it would be this bad. This is by far the biggest change in my scar in five months.
I swallow self-consciously and unroll the clean sweater over my torso. I pull up some yoga shorts and I wonder how long it’s going to be until the shorts no longer cover up my scar. Not long.
“Auntie Edie! You comin’ for brekkist?” Amelia shouts up the stairs, giggling unabashedly.
I tear myself away from the mirror and take one breath to steady myself.
“Of course!” I call back.
When I sit down at the kitchen island, Graeme thunks a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of me. He frowns at me for a second then turns away. I sigh and dig into my meal. He’s still mad at me from the night before. Yes, he was waiting up for me, no, he wasn’t happy that I was out late again, and yes, we even had an argument about my staying out late. I understand that he’s being protective, but there is a day coming up soon when I won’t come home at all.
I don’t want him to wait up for me.
“Auntie Edie, lookee me!” Amelia sticks her fork in her eggs and when the weight of the handle causes it to fall and launch some eggs, she laughs loudly, clearly pleased with herself.
I can’t cover up my own giggle. Maybe being fired from the Sacred Grounds was one of the best things to happen to me in the last five months. Otherwise I’d have been at work and I would have missed this moment. I make a mental note to cherish these times more.
“Amelia Anne!” Graeme barks, glaring at his daughter. “You know how to eat properly.”
Yep, Graeme is definitely in a bad mood.
Amelia glowers and feeds herself. Her feet swing wildly, a sign of her pent-up energy.
“After breakfast, we’ll play princesses and dragons,” I tell her. Usually I’m the princess and she’s the dragon, which is fitting concerning her personality.
“Okay!” she says. She finishes up her meal and bounds off to the backyard. Luckily, it’s May in Austin, which means that we don’t have the hundred-degree weather yet.
“I assume you’re going to do some more ‘hunting’ tonight?” Graeme grouses sarcastically when Amelia is out of earshot.
I feel the heat in my cheeks at the accusation in his tone. “Yes,” I say through gritted teeth.
He stops everything and gives an exasperated sigh. “Edie…”
“I’m going down to San Antonio at nightfall to follow up on a lead.”
He’s still for a long stretch of silence, then says, “And what will it be tomorrow? You’re going to go check New York City to see if the Tooth Fairy has a cure for you?”
“That’s not it, Grae—”
“I can’t keep doing this, Edie,” he says seriously. “Staying up late, wondering where the hell you are. You worry me. You worry Amelia. You know if you’re not home by the time she goes to bed, she refuses to go to sleep without that damn teddy bear you gave her?”
Well, now I feel like shit. “I…have to do this, Graeme.”
“No, you don’t,” he says. “You could go to the doctor, get this checked out. You could talk to someone. A priest. I don’t know. Something other than chasing shadows.”
My guilt is being replaced by anger. “You’ve always known that my family fights the darkness. Shadows are a part of the darkness.”
“Had I known…” Graeme shakes his head as he looks out the window at his daughter on the swing set. He doesn’t finish his thought, for which I’m thankful. I don’t want him going there. I don’t want him expressing regret about his choice in marrying my sister. It wasn’t her fault that she was the Harker. It wasn’t her fault that she’s now dead.
I want to tell him I’m sorry for all the worry and pain that I’m putting his family through. I wanted to. Now, though, I desperately need a cigarette.
I put my fork down next to my half-finished eggs and get up. “Thanks for breakfast,” I say flatly.
I head out to the backyard and light up, inhaling deeply. The shake in my hands is gone now. The power of nicotine-induced calm.
I really do feel guilty. I hate making my family worry. I hate that my niece can’t sleep when I’m out at night, I hate that my brother-in-law worries about me in his own way. However, I see no way around it.
“Auntie Edie.” My niece stands in front of me, a worried expression on her face. “Big girls don’t cry,” she says.
Am I crying? I laugh at myself and stub the cigarette out underneath my boot.
“You’re totally right, Squirt,” I say. “Sorry about that.” I wrap her up in a bear hug. “But big girls do this to little girls!” I then furiously tickle her all over, her loud squeals of unbridled happiness reverberating in my ears.
I am going to make the most of the time I have left, which is different than Graeme’s definition of it. I’m going to find the fucker who killed Meghan and I’m going to make him wish he’d never been born, let alone turned into a vampire.
I hope that I’m not hurting the ones I love in the process. And in thinking that, I wonder what Jude will do when I die.
Carl comes over shortly before sunset wearing yet another Sublime shirt.
“You’re dressed ready to go into an unknown situation,” I note, letting him inside.
“It’s my lucky shirt,” he tells me, plucking at the fabric distractedly.
“You’re also early.”
“Couldn’t risk you getting a bit too antsy about going down there,” Carl says.
I shrug. “Jude has the address anyways, so I’d still have to wait for him.”
Carl checks the height of the sun in the sky. “We have a bit of time before we have to go.”
I’m honestly a little disappointed that the day is almost over. I’ve spent nearly all of it with Amelia, forgetting everything that I have to deal with tonight. It’s been a wonderful day, and I can’t remember the last time I had one like it, even before Meghan’s death.
“I’m so glad that you and Jude reminisced about my more embarrassing moments.” I may never forgive him for that.
Carl shrugs. “Hey, he didn’t want to talk about anything else.”
My traitorous heart quickens its pace at his words. Did Jude really only want to talk about me?
“Glad you two got along.”
“Not as well as he wants to get along with you.”
Dammit, Carl.
Graeme gives my cousin an icy reception when we go into the kitchen. “Carl,” he says gruffly.
“Gray-Gray,” Carl says, using a nickname that he gave him a long time ago. I know that my brother-in-law hates the nickname, so it at least brings a much-needed smile to my face.
I scarf down my Hamburger Helper dinner without addressing Graeme. I tell Amelia not to worry about me, that my friends will watch after me tonight, which she seems to take in stride.
Before I leave the kitchen table, she gives me a hug. “Love you, Auntie Edie.”
I have to swallow back the lump that forms in my throat. She’s the real reason why I’m fighting. There may be no hope for me, but there’s hope for her.
Carl and I
raid the weapons room so that we’re ready for whatever may happen tonight. I have no idea what to expect.
A machete, a few stakes, plus Glimmer, and I should be prepared. There’re other weapons in my trunk, like the grenades and a few guns, but if I have to resort to them, then we’re truly fucked.
“You should really wear that thing,” Carl says, nodding over to the leather outfit that Meghan used to wear. It’s such a contrast to my black hoodie and jeans that I feel like a lesser vampire hunter next to it.
Meghan was the real Harker. I’m only playing the part. An understudy.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I stuff some stakes into my front pocket. “Because it belongs to someone else.”
Carl catches my drift and we finish arming ourselves and then head out to sit on the front porch, waiting for the vampire to arrive.
As the last tendrils of light leach from the skyline, throwing the world into an uneasy twilight, I’m feeling pensive. Hopefully, we’re not heading into a trap. Hopefully, we’ll find some answers.
Here goes, I think to myself, counting down the seconds until Jude shows up.
I get to five.
“Let’s go,” Jude says somewhere to the left of us. Carl jumps, but I’ve been expecting it. He’s standing by my Lancer in the driveway, next to the driver’s side door. He looks primed, ready to go. I can tell that he won’t take “no” for an answer when it comes to driving. He grins at me.
“We have a long night ahead of us.”
16
Jude
When we get to the address of Maria’s associate, we discover that it’s a dry cleaners.
Tender Loving Cleaners.
Makes sense, I guess.
"We're here,” I say blandly.
Edie sucks in a breath beside me in the passenger’s seat, obviously a little apprehensive about me driving her car. She’s been silent for most of the drive down.
“A drycleaners?” she intones, unbuckling her seat belt. “Really?”
Carl's expression matches hers as we both get out of the car. "I would have thought of something…different? I feel like I should have brought some of my mom's dry-clean-only things here."
“Or you can finally wash your Sublime shirts,” Edie mumbles.
"It's a front," I say. At least I hope it is, or else I got the wrong address.
"Thank you Captain Obvious," Edie says. In the darkness, she gives me a rare smile.
I mask my delight by giving her a mock-hurt look. No use in her knowing that her smile has made tonight special already. "Well, what did you expect? Area 51?"
She shrugs. "Something a bit more menacing."
It's in a strip mall between a frozen yogurt shop that's still open at nine o'clock and a preteen clothing store with dark windows. We're in suburbia right now, just down the road from some houses. In the dark, I can see that the lights are still on in the dry cleaners, but I can't see what's in there, other than a neon OPEN sign.
"Ready?" I ask.
"I guess," she says. "I have a bad feeling about this."
So do I. I don’t think we’re going to find trouble, but I get the feeling that we’re going to find answers in here that we may not like.
I lock the car and toss the keys to Edie. She catches them in her right hand and her full lips upturn into a smile again. Two in one night. She must be excited. She doesn’t realize how beautiful she is when she smiles like that.
"Let's go," she says, bounding up to the business.
The door chimes when Edie opens it, Carl following behind her. I take one last look outside for an ambush before going inside to the florescent lighting, which I actually may hate worse than sunlight.
Behind a large counter, an old woman of Asian descent sits expectantly, the automated clothing rack behind her leading into a dim warehouse.
It’s a real dry cleaners, and Maria isn’t in sight. In fact, I don’t even sense her around.
The old lady, though, stiffens as we enter, posturing a bit. Surrounded by wrinkles, her keen eyes flick from Edie and Carl and then finally on me. She knows what I am. And she doesn’t like it.
"We're closed," she says in a thickly accented voice. "You here to pick up?"
"Uhhh, no?" Carl looks to Edie in panic for a sign of what to do next. He doesn’t realize that she’s putting on a show for them, and he failed the test. Edie is stoic next to him, as her eyes narrow at the old woman.
"We’re meeting someone here," Edie says in a tight voice.
"Who?" the old woman demands.
"A friend."
The old woman isn’t a vampire, but that's not saying much. Vampires can have human servants, so for all I know, her hands behind the counter are signaling an alarm for her master to descend upon us. If Maria’s “associate” is a powerful vampire, then this woman is dangerous as well.
As if sensing my thoughts, the woman puts both of her hands into plain sight and leans on the desk. "A friend? Dunno him."
Him? My eyes widen imperceptibly, yet even still, the old woman notices. She gets a sly grin on her face.
“Ahhh,” she says with an enigmatic chuckle. “So you’ve met Maria, I take it.”
"She invited us here," I say. "Yesterday."
“Maria didn’t invite you,” the woman says and leaves it at that. She frowns at Edie through her wrinkles and at first, I think she's scrutinizing her. "You're her?"
Edie stiffens.
"She’s the Har—" Carl starts, and Edie elbows him in the ribs.
The woman gets up from behind the desk and shushes him with unexpected speed for an eighty year old.
"Don't say that name here," she hisses. "Walls have ears wherever you are.”
“At a dry cleaners?” I ask sarcastically.
The woman ignores me and gives Edie another onceover. "You don't look like much, honey."
"I'm enough," Edie tells her thinly.
The old woman blinks and bursts out laughing. "English is my second language," she says, "and your bad comebacks are still a little over the top, sweetie."
She turns away and heads back around the desk, bustling around where we can't see what she's doing.
"He's downstairs," the woman says.
"Who’s downstairs?" I ask.
“My grandson.” she says. "He'll be excited to see you."
The clothing rack hums to life and begins to rotate, feeding the clothes to the front. Thirty or so hangers laden with clothes whizz by before she stops on a plain, gray suit and pulls up the plastic bag. From a pocket on the inside of the blazer, she produces a key.
"Never have the key on you if you're working in the store," she says to Edie. She sneers at me. "You never know what riff raff can come in here. Is he trustworthy?"
Edie’s eyes flick over me, curiosity playing over them. “I thought Maria was a vampire too.”
“Maria is a servant. She’d never betray us. Even still, I don’t like her.” She waves her hand. “That’s Zhi’s thing.”
“Maria came to me to give you an address,” I say.
“Then Maria is more foolish than I thought,” the woman says. “Giving our location to a vampire.”
"Yes," Edie answers softly but firmly, cutting through the tension between the two of us. "He's trustworthy."
I look at her in both surprise and relief. Edie trusts me. The thought makes me happier than it should.
The woman gestures us forward as she passes by us on her way to the front door. She flips off the neon sign and locks the door, looking around in suspicion before turning back. "Come along," she says, waving for us to join her, heading towards the back of the shop. “There’s much to discuss.”
17
Edie
Red flags go up in my mind. It's one thing to meet someone in a glass storefront. It's entirely another to follow them into the dark warehouse behind it. I know nothing about this woman, and she wants us to follow her?
"I don't trust you."
She cocks h
er head, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. "Honey, if I wanted to kill you, I would have done that already. You may think you're special, but you haven't been around anywhere near as long as I have."
"We're being cautious," Carl says.
"If you wanna be cautious, honey," the woman says, "don't hang out with his kind." She points to Jude. "Even the supposed good ones always turn on you. Always. Maria is a ticking time bomb."
"You know what—" Jude growls.
"I can see why you're here," she interrupts him in a huff. "And I don't like it. You're lucky I don't leave you up here, but I suspect I won't get her downstairs without taking you down there too."
Jude immediately slams his mouth shut with an audible snap.
"Now," the woman says, "Come on down before I get tired of you."
I look back to Carl and Jude, and my cousin gestures for me to go ahead first. "Coward," I mouth to him. He shrugs. I roll my eyes and follow her.
We follow her behind the desk to the facility behind the office. It doesn't seem like the cleanest of places. The flickering fluorescent lights make it look like some sort of nightmare where a madman is running after you with a knife and you can't find the way out.
"I'm Li," the woman tells us without turning around. "I'm Zhi's grandmother, taught him everything he knows, although if you ask him, he says he's better than me."
Finally I have a name for who we are meeting, although I don't have any information on him other than that.
“Is he?” I ask. “Better than you?”
Li gives a short laugh. "Better? Oh yes, honey. I used to fight jianshis back home over forty years ago. I miss that. At least those vampires had the good sense to follow culture conventions. So predictable, unlike the vampires here."
I know from my research that a jianshi is a kind of vampire in Chinese culture, which means that she is a vampire hunter herself. No wonder she doesn't like Jude.
"I'm Carl and the hot vampire is Jude. And this is Edie," my cousin says, pointing between us. "Most people only know her by her last name."
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 31