I use the key I found to open the hatch and what’s in the safe isn’t what I expected. Cash. I grab the stash of banded bills and quickly thumb through them for a rough estimate. Four grand, all hundreds. I take the cash, of course, and feel around the interior, hoping to trigger some sort of trap door or something for another compartment to get to the good stuff, but no dice. I guess the cash was just for a quick getaway in case things took a turn for the worse. This home was just a throwaway spot then to lay low in between gigs. Aside from the things he obviously kept with him like his files and tech, there’s nothing of value, and he made sure of that. If I can find his lab, I’m sure my luck’ll change, even though I’m not sure by how much. Eugenie had already been making arrangements, so the information is out there, even though I put a bullet in his skull. How much do the others know? I can’t be for sure. He said he didn’t like working with vampires, but there are more than just them on this side of life. Those runes could have been used to keep unruly prospects at bay. It’s twisted, but there’s not much I can do now.
I just hope everything that matters is on his external hard drive and not in the hands of some crazy-ass shaman that wants to rule the world. That’ll only add to the crazy I’m dealing with. Darius is still in the wind, and his plans may not be far from that, and the same goes for whatever network managed to kill several dozen hunters and carry on like nothing happened.
Chapter 4: What’s Left
I make sure to clean up my mess from dealing with Eugenie and remove anything that could point the authorities to the truth they’re not quite ready to accept. Every now and then an interesting video will hit the web and take the net by storm for a week, but it’s all in jest. I’m sure the invisible forces that pull all the strings in the world do their part to keep the peace, but the moment the supernatural becomes more than just fairytales in the public eye is the moment everything falls apart at the seams. And while it’s interesting to ponder, I’m not sure how the baddies would react if the government came gunning for them. Especially since there’s no cure for the bigger threats more common in the Americans such as vampires and werewolves. Things would get political, quick, and we’re already struggling on that front dealing with regular people.
After I leave Eugenie’s safehouse, I make my way back to my car and hit the road. Riding on the wave of a shaky victory helps out some, but my thoughts towards what’s next eventually reel me back towards the lingering cloud of anxiety that my war path has done little to cut through, despite the progress I’ve made.
I pull up to my motel after securing Eugenie’s gear and find my way into my room. As usual, it’s just barely livable. No reason to splurge when all you do is travel, even if the money you’re using isn’t exactly your own. It’s the principle behind it. Yes, Joel taught us how to run scams, but only to take and use what’s within reason. You couldn’t pay the average joe enough to do what we do, so in my eyes, it’s even. A supernatural protection tax, if you will. It only hits the wealthy at random and covers everyone. At least that’s how I rationalize it. So does everyone else. I’m not mad at the bonus I got, either. Four grand goes a long way. It’ll definitely help cover the crap I’ll have to go through once Eugenie’s plan is made known.
Once I’m inside, I plug up Eugenie’s laptop and turn it on. Everything seems fine and dandy until I’m prompted to enter in a passcode. I close Eugenie’s computer and turn on my own, which boots flawlessly. I then plug in Eugenie’s external drive into one of the ports and wait for it to be picked up by my OS. The drive registers in a matter of seconds and I click onto it and gain access, unveiling a variety of folders labeled by an arrangement of acronyms and numbers. I drag my mouse over the first one and click. The folder flashes and a prompt pops up on my screen requiring a password.
“Deletion after three unsuccessful attempts?” I muse to myself after I read the text and gesture towards the screen. It’s crappy luck, but it’s to be expected. He couldn’t make it that easy. I play it safe and close out of the window. Eugenie’s doom’s day protocol isn’t worth risking perfectly good data. Knowing what I have to do next, I open one of the file transfer programs that Roc installed for me and try to make a copy to send off. I’m hit with another pop-up that warns me that files can’t be copied. I opt to send all of the content of the drive instead and leave it in Roc’s hands. He’ll know what to do.
With Eugenie out of the way, at least we have some breathing room.
While the files transfer, I look into more strange news happening in the states. Anything to keep my demons at bay after the rush of hunting wears off. My mind wanders when I’m alone these days, and I think back on brighter times, even if they weren’t so bright to begin with.
Even when I lost my parents, I still had Sailor.
The memories don’t make me happy. They only make me worse off; reminding me of what I lost and what’s left. A hollow heart, desperate to be whole again. It’s on these long nights that I miss her the most.
I try my best to push my emotions to the side. Is it a distraction? Hardly.
Maybe.
Depends on how you look at it. Either way, monsters are dying and lives are being saved in the process, so can it really be that bad? If I were to ask Roc that question, I already know how he’d answer. He’d wax philosophically about how you can’t help others until you can help yourself. Well, obviously, there’s an exception to the rule. If anything, it’s a mutual benefit.
In my search for strange happenings, nothing that I want to hunt seems to be popping up in the far corners of the web. Being that my main focus is vampires right now, I most likely won’t hear about their endeavors until the sun rises—when the rest of the world catches on. I’ve picked off a couple…one or two since I came across the book, but nothing on Darius. The community either has a shut lip policy on the guy or he moves in secret, which is unironically very vampire-like. Sticking to the shadows… I mean, he does have underlings, so he’s somewhere up on the chain. He also had enough pull to somehow find and interact with some fairly powerful witches, too. And then of course, there’s the grimoire and the cuff. He knew about that too, which is apparently a big deal in and of itself. The case had gone cold and I started tracking Eugenie about a week after Darius and I had our confrontation. It gave me the chance to recover a bit from our fight and allowed me to do some good elsewhere while I sleuthed around for leads. Now, I’m back at square one or rather, two, considering that I already have a major piece of the puzzle. The grimoire I stole from Darius and the other witches. It’s still hard to figure out what’s next, though.
In the silence of the night, my eyes shift over from my laptop screen to the book as it rests on top of a coffee table I moved beside my desk. There’s something about it that pulls on my attention. Actually, demands, may be the proper word, now that I think about it. It’s almost like that feeling when you’re home alone but something puts you on edge. Like, a bad vibe. A gut-reaction that sends you into panic mode on a primal level. At times, it’s like the grimoire radiates just enough negative energy to let you know that it’s powerful as hell, but the funny thing is, with all that power, the panic it instills isn’t so much as a fear, but a respect. A reverence.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff out in the field, but I’m not convinced the book is alive, however it did pass through the hands of at least one powerful witch. It wouldn’t be the first inanimate object to carry over trace amounts of energy of a unique variety. I wish I could find a name for it.
I grab the grimoire and place it on my desk, my attention returning to my laptop. I then tweak the parameters of my search to focus more on cases that may be vampiric in nature, but also for things that don’t fit the usual kind of strange I tend to go for. Outliers within an outlier. Darius has the cuff, and he’s been good to cover his tracks. Vampirekind as a whole, not so much. They do their best, but there’s always something. Has to be when people are involved. When they feed, they either go missing or find a body. There’s always a tr
ail. Even if it’s livestock or stolen blood from a blood bank, you just have to know where to look and have a little bit of luck. I don’t know where Darius is based here in the states, but I do know that the meet up was in Missouri, which is virtually near the center of the United States and seemed to be home to all the major players. Eugenie made me go all the way to the edge of northern Georgia before I found him, and he was running. The area I was probing for vamps was left wide open because I had no reason to imply that Darius was local. For all I know, he could originally be from Paris and on his way down to the US. He has to be around though…for me and the cuff.
Setting my search wide has just been a waste of time. Shrinking the area tightens the results. Less things slip through the cracks due to less information being mainlined. The system has flaws, and it takes some manual digging to confirm sources and potential cases, but I’m riding solo and I can’t be everywhere at once.
This is the next best thing.
It would be unwise to think he wasn’t searching for me just like how I’m looking for him. So, if he’s connected, he’d be at least within the scope of a few states. Most likely in the central band of states. The vamps down south, more specifically, in Louisiana had been dealt with heavily, so that’s out of the question...although it would make sense if Darius was trying to bring back to life the very same vamps that were hunted enough to make their empire crumble.
The Claumonte Brothers were the main bunch. The Three Kings of New Orleans is what they went by. Each of them was a royal pain in the ass and sinister. Almost as bad as demons.
Damn it.
I cringe as I narrow my search to include the surrounding states around Missouri and Louisiana. I admit, I’d been putting it off before. I’d rather not go back to Louisiana on vampire duty. Too many memories, but if that’s where Darius is, it can’t be helped.
I set the search parameters to newly desired properties and let it run while I reach for the grimoire in front of me, picking up where I left off before I was sidetracked.
When I first got it, I wasn’t able to make out a word of it… I’m still not, but there’s been some progress from when I first laid hands on it. I’ve been reading up on languages, forgotten ones, and ones created within communities in order to preserve secrets. None have led to any direct translations, but at least I’m narrowing the process down. Again, all of this would be one hundred times easier if Roc were involved, but that’s not an option.
I slowly flip through the pages of the grimoire, soaking up every character, even though I have no idea what any of it means. It’s impossible to make sense of any of it, but I’m compelled to keep going until I reach a breakthrough of some sort. The obvious choice, Latin, is nowhere to be found. Neither is Hebrew or any traces of the other more commonly known ancient languages. The web isn’t much of a help either.
I flip through same chapters as I’ve done before, but nothing seems to register. I glance at the clock on my laptop and realize that about an hour’s gone by without me knowing. Another wasted session with the book. It’s frustrating.
I close the tome and leave it resting in front of my laptop while the search continues to work its magic and the remainder of the files I stole transfer to Roc’s laptop.
While it’s doing its thing, I take a shower, dress my wounds, eat a protein bar, and hit the hay just short of four in the morning.
Chapter 5: Purpose
I wake up struggling to catch my breath but after a few moments, my pulse settles and I come back to reality. I sluggishly drag myself to the corner of my bed and rub my palm above my nose as I sink the weight of my head against it.
I had another nightmare about Sailor. They’re more common now.
I try to make out the time from my open laptop, but it’s too far away to make much sense of anything that the screen is displaying. I instead opt for my phone as a means to check the time. It’s a little past noon.
At least I got my hours in.
Along with the time and ignored messages from other hunters, there’s a voicemail from Roc. I cringe just about every time I get those now. Regardless, given the circumstances, not listening would be a bad call.
“Hey, Blaze. You’re probably beat right now, huh? That’s always the case with you it seems now-a-days.” Roc chuckles from the other side of the recording. I chuckle too with my head lowered, my thumb and pointer finger rubbing along my eyebrows. “…Yeah, I got your files. Heavy encryption, massive amounts of data. You did good on this one. I’ll see what I can find and send back everything once it’s decrypted. And don’t worry, I’ll break it down for you. Get back at me when you get the chance, and don’t forget to take a breather every now and then, okay? I know you can handle yourself, that’s not an issue. It’s just that the other side isn’t known for playing fair. You don’t want me to come busting in saving your tail, do you? I’ll never let you live it down. I do it enough as it is.” He laughs again. “Take care bud. Stay safe. Got another case I’m prepping for, and no, before you ask, it’s not with Sonya. If you need me, don’t forget to holler. We should do lunch or something next time we’re in the same state. Touch bases and whatnot. Adios.”
“Humph.” My smile widens. It’s faint, but I know it’s there. He’s a good friend, Rocco. I can’t thank him enough for sticking around. “What do you think naps and long car rides are for?” I mumble to myself.
I rise up from my bed and hover over my desk, browsing what my computer managed to find over the last eight hours from my search parameters. There’s a couple of bites, now all I have to do is do a little more digging to see which ones are actually cases in the making.
Adult body found in local ditch.
Lost teen found after reported missing for two years.
Sickle cell and you.
Local robbery, thwarted.
Bloodsuckers are on the rise! West Nile a threat year-round.
The list goes on for quite some time…dozens more if not reaching over the better side of one hundred. I click on the relevant ones; the ones that are better left to us than the cops, starting from the top, and browse through what the articles yield. For the most part, the nature of this part of the job is pretty hit or miss. Some of these are just clickbait and fear mongering articles, while others are normal stuff. There’s only a handful that stand out, and of that bunch, one gives me a definitive lead. Uptick in gang-related deaths. Violence steadily on the rise. The article’s origin is from findings in a town in Tennessee.
I open up another tab in my browser and begin to cross-reference the criminal climate in the area and pull up records of some of the most recent shootings. Names of the victims help, too and serve for an additional line of research. Sometimes, the victim is in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there are a few select incidents where there’s something more. A corroborator or someone who met an untimely end, for example.
After I get a good profile of the recent crimes, I do the same with recent strange happenings not tied directly to violence but has a correlation to what I’m looking for—vampires—and I’m not left empty handed.
With the three hours I spend checking forums and pinpointing areas of interest, I manage to find something that happened last week. A woman in her early twenties was found dead by gunshot wound to the head in the middle of a forest. It’s ruled as suicide, but there are notable track marks along the torso, arm, thigh, and neck. That was what was known to the public, but with more digging, it was claimed that previous signs of struggle were also found, primarily in the fashion of bruises around her ankles and legs. Turns out something like this happened a few years back and it was brushed under a rug. Different city, same state. A group of conspirators started to connect the dots but they didn’t know exactly what they were looking at. With all the back and forth comments on the forum, there was enough merit for reasonable doubt between posters. Some linked it to a serial killer who was never found, while others linked it to a coverup for the government leaking drugs to the homeless comm
unity to clean up the streets. There was even one poster who said it could be due to the lizard overlords who have their hands in the major affairs amongst world leaders. All of them were wrong, of course. What had happened is clear as day to me.
And if they lived through what I lived through, they’d be the same way.
Vampires. They were the cause of this. Now all I have to do is take them out…after I get what I want.
****
“Boy, we sure were lucky that we didn’t throw this one out, eh Agent R—”
“Rivers. You can just call me Rivers,” I say, correcting him. “The whole agent thing is just a waste of breath, and time is money.” I sigh, my hands firmly planted on my hip. With a little more digging and a couple of cold calls, I was able to find out where the body was stationed. I had also managed to set up an arrangement with one of the coroners. “But most importantly, time,” I continue, “is also the metric we use to measure how far behind we are on things like this. You said the body was found a week ago, correct? Are you sure about that?” I look to the coroner, that overzealous guy who can’t quite keep his mouth shut. I never knew people could get this star struck from dealing with the feds. I mean, I know they get things done, but, really? Usually people give me what I need to know and step right on out of the way. This guy seems to be hanging off of every word I say, like he thinks we’re going to be best buds or something. I suppose it could be worse. Maybe it’s the needlessly long car ride talking.
“Yes, well, no. Not really. We only made it known to the public after it had been processed.” He pauses and tilts his head up and to the side. “A…day or so after the fact,” he answers, but from the tone of his voice, I tell he isn’t confident in his response.
Blaze Monroe and the Tattered Heart: A Supernatural Thriller (The Hunter Who Lost His Way Book 3) Page 3