She felt so alone.
“You going to be okay?”
“Don’t worry about me. I was going to ask you the same thing?” Madison stared into her friend’s eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw. He had seen her in action, fighting vampires as a vampire. Would he think differently of her now? She worried her friendship had died. She couldn’t bear to think he would reject her now. She couldn’t blame him if he did.
“Call me tomorrow. We’ll grab a coffee.”
She looked at her untouched coffee in the cup holder between the driver and passenger seat. “I’d like that.”
# # #
On the drive from Neal’s over to her father’s house, Madison cried. The tears were hot on her cold skin. She thought they might ice over, but didn’t have the energy to brush them away.
She pressed the speed dial on her phone.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m back in town,” she said. “I am sorry for putting your through so much.”
The Butcher laughed. “I left a little something on the side of your front step. The cold will have kept it good. It isn’t much. I was worried about you. I couldn’t find a way to help you while you were. . .away.”
“I should never have asked.”
“But you managed?”
The homeless had offered her their veins. She had fed on their desire to help. It was selfless of them. She would never disregard the humanity shown. It didn’t take away the guilt that grew inside her. This curse was evil. Judas had brought it on the Apostles. She knew this much, and it made her stomach churn. Somehow she would do everything she could to fix it, to make things right with God. She only prayed she didn’t sacrifice her soul in achieving freedom from the damned. “I managed,” she said.
Ending the call, she pulled into the driveway.
Set beside the steps, as Butcher promised, were two Styrofoam cups of animal blood. She drank the first down in a few swallows. It was like sewer water compared to the sweet and irony taste of human blood, but she savored every drop. She felt the healing instantly. It radiated warm waves of peace throughout her body. She wondered if the wound on her arm would heal on its own, or if she would still need stitches as she pushed open the front door.
Inside the house it was dark.
She wondered if her father was working. He had to be worried sick. She switched on the light on the lamp beside the front door and dropped the second cup of blood.
It hit the hardwoods and opened. The lid fell away, and blood sprayed back up and onto her pants and shoes.
The coffee table was smashed and the couch cushions shredded.
“Dad?”
She stood still, listening. The house made enough noises in the winter to make one think the place was haunted. She knew the sounds well, from the rattle in the pipes, to the snap hiss of the furnace lighting up. “Dad?”
Something went thud.
It came from the basement.
Madison walked from the living room into the kitchen. The door to the basement was closed. She hesitated reaching for the doorknob, but just for a moment, a fraction of a second. Pulling the door open, she descended the stairs.
A naked bulb dangled over her father’s head. His hands were behind his back, his legs fastened with torn sheets to the chair. He had been gagged. Dry blood covered his face. She saw the gash on his forehead above his eyebrow.
His eyes were open wide, and he shook his head from side to side.
It was a trap.
But she already knew that.
Chapter 29
Adam was tied to a chair in the basement with a vampire.
Two vampires, Madison thought.
“I will make this simple. We want the dagger. In exchange, you can have your father back.”
The vampire stepped out of the darkness and into the glow from the bright light bulb. The brilliance from the bulb almost blinded her to the dark.
“Who are you?” It sounded stupid when she said it out loud. She wanted a name. “I am Madison Young. Peter is my bloodline.”
The vampire laughed. When he spoke, any trace of pleasure was gone from his tone of voice. He ground his teeth as if each word uttered pained him to have to say. “You introduce yourself like you are royalty. You’re not. You’re a hundredth generation of nothingness. A fool is what you are. A kid with a dagger who has no comprehension about the world, our world, my world. I wasn’t sure if you would be back. It was a precaution Julius and I decided to incorporate. I see you fled Pennsylvania. A wise choice. Very wise. Only thing that was waiting for you there was certain death.”
“Who are you?”
He shook his head. “You know what? For you, I will play along. My name is Quincy. I come from the bloodline of James, son of Alphaeus. I wear around my neck the topaz pendant.”
Her father strained uselessly against his restraints. She hated seeing him so helpless. He had no idea what was going on. She smelled his fear. His heart hammered away behind his ribcage.
She’d known some families were joined together, combining two bloodlines. She should not have been surprised by Quincy’s appearance, and would not underestimate his strength or his potential for evil.
“I like topaz better than jasper. Blue is a much prettier color.” Madison hoped that her voice was steady, even. She didn’t want the monster to know how afraid she was. She didn’t think he could smell her fear the way she’d been able to with Neal.
Her words stopped him, though. The impact she’d wanted to make had been delivered.
She wanted to tell her father everything would be okay. This time it was her job to protect him.
Quincy smirked, his head tilted to one side. “I see. And how many did you kill?”
“Including Julius? All of them.”
Adam shook his head, dropped his chin to his chest. His scream was muffled. The confusion he felt was painfully obvious. Madison needed to get him out of the chair, out of the basement, and out of the house. It wasn’t going to happen, not until she killed Quincy.
She would kill Quincy.
The animal blood was enough to restore some of her strength, a bit of her energy, but even without it she felt fired up. Anger did that.
There would not be time to devise a plan. She needed to act first, and figure out what should be done after the fact. It made no sense, but she knew the longer she stood still, the more her nerve would fade, the more her emotions would play into things. Quincy knew this as well.
It was why he had Adam tied to a chair. His plan was transparent, and not at all different from when Julius held Neal hostage.
And where is Julius now, she almost said out loud. Gloating would make things worse. The danger her father was in was real.
It was time to do something, to take action.
Only Quincy must have been thinking the same thing.
His fingernails were like talons. He didn’t taunt her with them. Instead he jabbed them into Adam’s neck.
Blood poured out of the gaping holes.
Madison charged Quincy.
He stepped aside and threw a punch at the back of her head. She fell forward. Her forehead slammed into the small worktable her father used. Standing up and turning around, she pulled her dagger from the hole inside her coat, ready to stab the vampire in the heart.
Quincy wasn’t there.
The lightbulb swayed back and forth. Shadows moved on the basement walls.
Her father was bleeding to death. He still fought against the ties that bound him, wasting his energy.
Madison couldn’t tend to his wounds until Quincy was eliminated.
Her father needed help.
She slashed the dagger across the zip ties that cuffed his hands together.
Adam fell out of the chair, pulling off his shirt. He pressed the shirt to his neck. He tried to talk, urging her to get out of the house, to run.
Madison stood protectively over her father, her eyes trying to scan the moving darkness.
Quincy lau
ghed.
His voice echoed, as if bouncing off cinderblock walls.
Madison reached a hand up to stop the light from swinging, and instead pulled the string shutting it off. The darkness was more of a friend.
Except the light left her blinded.
She saw only dancing spots of white. Her eyes needed time to adjust.
There was a growl, and before she could turn to face it, arms wrapped around her waist and lifted her body into the air before driving her onto the floor. She heard something inside her snap and crunch. She grunted, and let out a gasping moan.
Quincy pressed his weight over her, his hands fought for the dagger in her right hand. Pinned, she could not fend him off.
She screamed as something sank into her wrists.
His fangs were sharp, and shredded the skin below her hand.
Quincy sat up, the dagger in his hands. He held it high, fingers laced together around the handle, the tip of the blade poised over her chest.
She heard a click before a spinning whine screamed overhead.
The dagger fell from Quincy’s hands. The blade fell sideways onto Madison’s chest.
Quincy pressed his palms to his throat. His head fell forward, and toppled off his shoulders.
The head plopped onto Madison and rolled off. It lay beside her, eyes open, staring lifelessly at her.
Adam switched off his hand-held circular saw and set it on his workbench before falling to his knees.
Madison held him.
The blood was spilling from his neck. She reached for his shirt and pressed it tight over the wound.
“I can’t, I. . .I love you,” he said. “I. . .love you.”
“Dad, no. Dad, I’m getting you to a hospital. Dad. You can’t leave. Dad. Daddy?”
He sucked in two quick breaths.
She tried to get her phone out of her pocket, but didn’t want to move him. “Dad, you’re staying here. You can’t leave me. Dad? Daddy?”
He never exhaled.
His eyes stayed open.
He stopped breathing.
“Dad! Daddy!”
The stair at the top of the basement groaned under someone or something’s weight.
Madison, as gently as she could, lowered her father’s head onto cold cement. The dagger was on the floor next to Quincy’s corpse. The blood that spilled from him looked maroon. Not like lava.
“Madison? It’s okay. It’s alright. It’s me.”
She didn’t recognize the voice.
She crawled to the dagger, and held it ready to fight.
A man came slowly down the steps. “I am sorry I could not get here sooner. I would have helped you again.”
Again?
She stayed quiet, hoping the darkness that surrounded her made her invisible. She wanted to be invisible.
“I was with you in Pittsburgh.”
Neal was with her in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t Neal on the last basement step.
She watched him reach out his arm. He pulled the string, and the light came on. The bulb danced back and forth.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“Yes. You do. I am the ghost,” he said. “My name is Ben. Ben Milton.”
“You don’t look like a ghost.” He looked like some kind of mobster, was maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. Under a black fedora with a white band she notice big brown eyes, straight white teeth, and a five o’clock shadow. He was dressed in a black trench coat with a black suit and thin black tie. The white shirt look crisp, like it had recently been starched and pressed.
He removed his hat and held it between his hands revealing was short, well-oiled, and slicked back dark hair. “It’s kind of a long story what happened to me.”
Madison debated just killing him. “I’m not in the mood for stories.”
She thought about just killing herself.
“Now’s not the time to tell it,” he said.
“I want you to leave.”
“I know you are looking for answers.” He held up his hands, as if the gesture would placate the situation.
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know your dad is somewhere wonderful right now,” Milton said.
He didn’t know that. No one could. Madison got to her feet. She breathed deep, loud breaths. Her chest heaved in and out. “Get out of my house.”
“I have someone that wants to meet you. I need you to come with me.”
She wasn’t going anywhere with anyone. “I will not ask you to leave again,” she said.
“You have nowhere else to go right now. The police will be here. You can’t stay. There is nothing for you here. Not anymore. You are alone. Confused. You don’t have to be. My friend can help.” Milton stood still, both hands raised.
What he didn’t realize was a defenseless pose wasn’t going to stop her from killing him.
“I have been watching you since the attack, after the story was in the papers and on the news.”
She took a step toward him.
Her muscles felt raw. Her body ached.
She raised the dagger.
“Madison, I want you to think about what I am telling you. We need your help.”
“I warned you.” Before she could swing the dagger, her vision blurred.
She dropped the dagger and fell backward, her head landed on her father’s leg. She strained to look over at him, and felt at peace to see him looking back at her before her eyes fluttered and blackness swallowed her completely.
“Great,” he said. He spun the hat in his hands, then placed it on his head, and traced his fingers over the bent brim.
Epilogue
“This is not how I wanted things to go.” Remy Shadowbrook stood next Madison Young. His black hair was pulled away from his face and braided in a rope-like ponytail that went mid-back. He placed his fingertips on her arms, just below the leather straps that restrained her to the bed.
The I.V. was set on a steady drip. The blood flowed from the pouch through the tube, and into the young vampire’s arm.
Ben Milton shrugged off his trench coat and draped it over a chair. “What else could I do?”
“She is so pale, pasty,” Shadowbrook said, as if to himself. He turned away from the young vampire and walked down rocky stairs into a science laboratory. “You could have left her at the house.”
Milton removed his fedora and set it down on the chair beside his coat, and then followed behind Shadowbrook to where he stood stooped over one of the worktables. Labeled test tubes stood in stacked trays. Beakers with green fluid bubbled on Bunsen burners with tubes that snaked through an array of other colored fluids. There were notebooks, textbooks and behind it all, two blackboards filled with chalky formula. None of it made any sense to Milton. “Once people realize her father’s missing, the cops are going to find the bodies in the basement. I’ve told you already. I grabbed her, and got out of there. It wasn’t easy, either. She’s petite and everything, but carrying dead
weight. . . let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.”
“I didn’t want you to interfere.” Shadowbrook picked out one of the tubes, and held it up close to his eyes. He stared at the small amount of fluid inside as he swirled it around and around.
“I didn’t. She handled the vampire in the basement, I stayed upstairs. I told you, it was her father. He helped her.” Milton did not like the catacombs, they reminded him too much of being buried. He always felt claustrophobic down here.
“I meant In Pittsburgh.”
“She was out numbered.” Milton through hands up in the air.
“I wanted to see how she handled herself.”
Milton shook his head. “She impressed me. And saved all of those kids. They’ve been showing the families reuniting on just about every news channel.”
“It’s the kind of person we need on our side,” Shadowbrook said.
“A hero.”
“Our hero.”
Milton pursed his lips. “If she decides to joi
n us.”
“She will.”
“I don’t know how you can say that with so much confidence, Remy,” Milton said. “I mean, the Shadowbrook name means something to you. Your cause. Your purpose. She might not be so willing.”
“You are with me.”
“What else have I got to do?”
Shadowbrook didn’t laugh. “Is that the only reason you agreed to help, because you are bored?”
“I am eternally grateful to be part of your team, master,” Milton said.
“I am not in the mood for joking around. We don’t have much time. He already has the plans in place. I am afraid if we don’t act soon, it will be too late.”
“I’m sorry. I just am trying to lighten the mood.” Milton nodded. It was a nearly impossible task. The rock walls always felt wet, the rooms damp. There was no getting away from the earthy smell. It clung to his clothing, to his skin.
“There are grave days ahead, Milton.” Shadowbrook narrowed his eyes. “Grave days. We do not need to lighten the mood. It isn’t just us that is in danger. All of humanity will suffer if we fail. There will be no stopping the evil. There will be no souls left to save!”
“So what do we do now?” Milton said.
“We wait until she wakes up, and then we talk to her. . .and we pray she agrees to help us.”
# # #
USAT George Washington–August, 1945
Gunther Himmler kept a handkerchief over his mouth while he pressed a palm against the wall for support. He had never been on a boat before. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean had sounded like an adventure. The trip had quickly become a nightmare. At the dock in Amsterdam the size of the army vessel had been overwhelming as well as misleading. The ship appeared capable of gliding across the ocean unhindered. Once out to sea and land no longer in sight, Himmler realized the foolishness of his thoughts. The George Washington was little more than a toothpick barely afloat in the vastness of water that surrounded them.
“Are you alright?” It was one of the other scientists from Germany being transplanted into the United States.
Young Blood: The Nightbreed Saga: Book 1 Page 21