Halfway to the Grave

by Jeaniene Frost

  “Ah, mistress, you’re an angel. Sure there’s not a drop left? I might have remembered one more person…”

  “Up yours,” I said rudely with another belch. “It’s empty. You should tell me the name anyways, after making me drink all that sewage.”

  Winston gave me a devious smile. “Come back with a full bottle and I will.”

  “Selfish apparition,” I mumbled, and staggered away. My bed couldn’t get in me soon enough. Or was it the other way around? Damned if I knew.

  I’d made it a few feet when I felt that distinct, pins-and-needles sensation again, only this time, it wasn’t in my throat.

  “Hey!”

  I looked down in time to see Winston’s grinning, transparent form fly out of my pants. He was chuckling even as I smacked at myself and hopped up and down furiously.

  “You drunken, filthy pig!” I spat. “Bastard!”

  “And a good eve’in to you, too, mistress!” he called out, his edges starting to blur and fade. “Come back soon!”

  “I hope the worms shit on your corpse!” was my reply. A ghost had just gotten to third base with me! Could I sink any lower?

  “What happened?”

  Bones came out from behind the bushes about fifty yards away. I started on him next.

  “You! You tricked me! I never want to see you or that bottle of liquid arsenic again!”

  And I chucked the empty moonshine jug at him. At least I tried to. It missed him by at least a dozen feet.

  Bones picked it up in astonishment. “You drank the whole bloody thing? You were only supposed to have a few sips!”

  “Did you say that? Did you?” He reached me right as I felt the ground tip. “Didn’t say anything. I’ve got those names, so that’s all that matters, but you men...you’re all alike. Alive, dead, undead - all perverts! I had a drunken pervert in my pants! Do you know how unsanitary that is?”

  Bones held me upright. “What?”

  “Winston poltergeisted my panties, that’s what!” I announced with a loud hiccup.

  “Why, you scurvy, lecherous spook!” Bones yelled in the direction of the cemetery. “If my pipes still worked, I’d go right back there and piss on your grave!”

  I thought I heard laughter. Or maybe it was just the wind.

  “Forget it.” I tugged on his jacket, leaning heavily. “Let’s go.”

  The moonlight shining down made his skin even creamier, and with his jaw still clenched, he looked both fierce and very beautiful.

  “You know what?” Suddenly, I began to giggle. “You’re pretty. You’re so pretty.”

  Bones glanced down at me. “Bloody hell. You’re absolutely pissed.”

  Another giggle. He was funny. “Not anymore.”

  “Right.” He picked me up. The leaves made small crunching sounds under his feet as he carried me. “If you weren’t half dead, what you just drank would kill you. Come on, pet. Let’s get you into bed.”

  I curled my hands in his shirt. “Only if you get in with me.”

  My lashes fluttered. Or I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Whatever.

  He snorted in amusement. “Who’s the drunken pervert now? You shouldn’t be so quick to malign men. Pot calling the kettle black, if you ask me.”

  “I love what you do to me,” I went on, not paying any attention to that. “You’re so incredible in bed. You must have been the best whore in London.”

  His chest shook with suppressed laughter. “Go on.”

  “You know when you do that thing with your…” I lowered my voice and continued on in a whisper. He listened intently, and his steps quickened. “…I love that.” I finished. Then I frowned. “But we can’t tonight. I have my period.”

  Bones chuckled. “I know, and you’ll love it even more that way.”

  “No, no.” My finger wagged at him. “Mustn’t. That would be naughty.”

  “Kitten-” we reached the truck, and he deposited me in the passenger seat-“we have a lot of work to do tomorrow, but the rest of the night is ours, and I promise you …before dawn, you’ll know the true meaning of naughty.”

  Deleted chapter showing the next day, previously published on Frost Fans forum.

  My head ached in a steady throb that was only made worse by the brightly lit room. Bones sat next to me. He wore a suit and tie. A briefcase was at his feet right next to his shiny, business- fashionable shoes. In his professional ensemble complete with thin, rimless glasses, he appeared the very picture of mundane respectability.

  Of course, that was total lie, and if what we were doing now wasn’t so gloomy, I wouldn’t have been able to even look at him after last night. Being mortified had only added to the effects of my hangover, I was sure.

  “So you see, Mrs. Phillips, why we would feel this was important enough to interrupt you at your place of employment,” Bones was saying. “We at the Internal Revenue Service take tax evasion very seriously.”

  “Of course you would,” the brunette sitting at her desk opposite to us agreed. She kept twisting the fake pearls around her neck. Madeline Phillips was a real estate agent in Hocking County. Her office was tidy, with several pictures of her and a smiling Amanda Phillips in the room.

  “Now, if I understand you correctly…” Bones consulted the paperwork in his hands, which had nothing to do with tax laws. “You filed last year that your daughter Amanda was living at home, still a dependent, and attending Hocking Community College. Is that your position for this current year as well?”

  A firm nod. “Yes.”

  My head banged louder. The pantyhose I wore felt like a lower-body straight jacket. I’d never worn any before, and I wasn’t going to make it a habit. They went well with the long wool skirt and matching jacket, however.

  Bones leaned forward. “Mrs. Phillips. You called the police last July to report that your daughter hadn’t come home. Then you never followed up with that. Are you telling me Amanda lives with you, even as of today?”

  Her fingers drummed on the desk. “Yes. Granted, she had me worried that night, but she apologized and hasn’t done it since. You’re too young to have a twenty year-old child, but let me tell you, they’re a handful. She’s always on the run.”

  Madeleine Phillips was wrong on both counts. Bones could be a great-great-great grandfather, if vampires reproduced, and Amanda hadn’t been on the run at all lately. She was dead. And if that weren’t bad enough, according to Winston, she’d been dead for over a month.

  I got up and closed the verticals without being asked. Our charade of being IRS agents in order to get a private meeting with Mrs. Phillips was over. It was time to go green and find out if this woman was the coldest bitch on the planet…or the most deceived.

  When I turned around, locking the door as a last precaution, Bones already had his brights on. He leaned over the desk at Madeline with his unnecessary glasses off.

  “Look deeper, that’s right…Now tell me, when did you really last see Amanda?”

  Her eyes were crystal blue and transfixed on his. “I-I don’t know…I don’t know!”

  “Kitten, you might want to turn your back.”

  “Why?” God, he wasn’t going to start beating the shit out of her, was he?

  “She’s been bitten, I can feel it,” he replied flatly. “I’ll have to drink from her to push her past it. Otherwise, she can’t answer me with the truth.”

  Oh. I cleared my throat, which was still a little numb after being invaded repeatedly by Winston. No, I didn’t care to see him feed, he was right about that. But it seemed cowardly in the extreme to turn around.

  “Go ahead. Do what you have to do.”

  Bones met my eyes briefly, then circled around the desk to where Madeline sat. Her hair was already up in a bun, so he didn’t have to bother with that. He undid a button on her shirt, pulling her collar open further, and bent to her neck.

  I only saw the back of his head and her face. Heard her slight intake of breath, saw her mouth open to make the sound, and then watched he
r eyelids slowly close. When they were all the way shut, he pulled back, rebuttoning her blouse and kneeling in front of her.

  “No marks,” I said, feeling very strange and remembering how there hadn’t been any on the other girl I’d stumbled on him feeding from weeks ago. “How, ah…how do you close the holes?”

  “You already know that.”

  My fingers clenched, which was ridiculous. Yeah, I’d had a good idea, but hearing it confirmed didn’t make me any happier. He’d cut his tongue on a fang and held it over the spot until it healed. Since we’d been sleeping together, my method of swallowing his blood had gone from licking it off his fingers to sucking it from his tongue after he did that while we kissed. Therefore, it was no surprise to discover he had more than one use for it, or where he’d gotten the idea from.

  “It’s not the same,” he said quietly, studying my face.

  “We have more important things going on, ask her about her daughter, for God’s sake.”

  My voice was harsher than I meant it to be, because I wasn’t really mad at him. I was sick over this whole thing. So many girls missing or dead, and we still didn’t know how many people were involved in it. Before we came here, we’d looked into the other names Winston had given me. Aside from Violet Perkins, whose human boyfriend had strangled her in a mescaline-induced rage, none of the others were even reported missing. They were dead, and no one, not even their families, knew anything about it.

  He stared at me for another second before returning his gaze to Madeline.

  “Now tell me, and nothing is hidden any longer, when did you last see Amanda? You don’t have to be afraid. No one will hurt you.”

  She’d started to shake. Tears flowed, and her face transformed into an expression of agony.

  “I don’t know where my little girl is! She went out after her birthday in July, months ago, and she never came home! She never came home!”

  Her voice rose. Bones held a finger to her lips.

  “Easy now, Madeline. Shhsh. I’m going to help you, so don’t fret. Who made you believe Amanda was home? When did it happen?”

  In a steadier tone, she relayed how the day after her daughter hadn’t come home, someone else had. Madeline couldn’t tell us what he looked like. She’d been hit with his eyes too fast, but she knew it was a man, for what little information that was worth. He’d instilled in her that Amanda was fine, she’d just seen her, and to go about her usual routine and do nothing further with the police. It had helped that her ex-husband was a loser neither of them had seen in years. Madeline’s parents were deceased, and she had no other children. To any of Amanda’s friends who called, Madeline had been programmed to say she’d moved. Just like the Spencers, though their daughter had told them that herself, and the jury was still out on whether Natalie was a victim or a villain.

  So Madeline continued to pay for an education which wasn’t utilized, kept Amanda’s insurance current on a vehicle that wasn’t there, and was oblivious to the fact that she’d never see her daughter again.

  “All right, Madeline,” Bones said when she was finished. “I want you to look at the clock. It’s three minutes to five. When its five o’clock, you won’t remember anything you’ve just said. Or anything I’ve asked you. We’re just two IRS agents who inquired about your returns, and now you’re no longer going to lie on your taxes. We didn’t talk about anything else, and nothing has changed with your daughter.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “She walks out of this room saying anything else, and what do you think will happen?” he asked me without looking away. “They know who she is. She’ll be lucky if they just kill her, but in all likelihood, they’ll have a waste not, want not attitude. You want to sentence her to that? I’d say she’s had enough cruelty done to her.”

  “But…but it’s…” There weren’t enough words to describe how wrong that felt, leaving her in her state of instilled illusions.

  “Not until they’re dead, Kitten. That’s the only way she’ll be safe.”

  There was no other point I could argue. He was right. It was still wrong, but in this case, wrong was the best we could do for her.

  Seconds ticked past. Bones moved away and was seated again when the clock struck five. Madeline blinked - and then her features settled back into polite wariness without a hint of their former pain.

  “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Phillips,” he said, rising. “We’ll be leaving now.”

  She stood as well, unaware that tears were still drying on her face. “I’ll have my accountant go over those figures more carefully next time.”

  He nodded. “We won’t need to return if you do, I’m sure.”

  I left without speaking. What could I say? Have a nice day?

  Bones placed a hand on my back as we left the building. His touch was light, barely discernable, yet it kept my legs straight as we walked. I wanted to cry. I wanted to kill someone. I didn’t want to ever know things like this could actually happen.

  “They kept her alive for two months,” was what I said as we got into the rental car.

  Bones didn’t start it. He just looked at me.

  “You’ve already done a great deal to help these girls. More than can be expected. There’s no shame in letting me take it the rest of the way. You won’t be abandoning them.”

  I considered dropping out for a selfish, weak second. Then I shook my head.

  “I’m in it until the end. However long that takes.”

  He put the key in the ignition and didn’t say anything else. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. After several minutes, something unrelated nagged at me.

  “Why did you tell Madeline to stop fudging numbers on her taxes? How did you know she was doing that?”

  “Come now, Kitten,” Bones said, with a knowing grunt. “Who doesn’t?”

  Alternate version of the first half of Chapter 24, where the “Renfield” was someone other than Lieutenant Isaac.

  They handcuffed me to the stretcher and drove me straight to the hospital in an ambulance. In no time the area was turned into a law enforcement and crime scene circus. None of it mattered to me, because I’d seen two things which filled me with inexpressible gratitude. One was my mother, IV bag attached, being hoisted into another waiting ambulance. The other had been Bones, running, unharmed, after Switch. His bullet wounds would heal and he would catch him. Everything inside me believed it. What was a little multiple murder count compared to that?

  A white-faced officer read me my rights and then burst into tears. Guess the sight of the living dead absorbing bullets like bubbles and still tearing throats out unnerved him. Not to mention the other vamps turning into shriveled mummies before their eyes. In my quick assessment, two had gotten away in addition to Switch, but I didn’t worry about them. We’d get them later. It shouldn’t be too hard, since Bones now knew who they were. Switch was our first priority, and he wouldn’t let him get away. After all, he had promised me vengeance, and I knew he’d deliver.

  The rescue workers treating me were also perplexed by my condition. I was covered with multiple slashes, stab wounds, bite marks, bruises, bashed ribs, scrapes and oh yeah, a bullet hole. Yet when the young attendant took my vital signs, he blanched in confusion.

  “Heart rate…normal. Blood pressure….normal. Pulse…normal. Jesus, that can’t be right.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” I murmured, enjoying the pain killers they’d injected into my IV. While the medication didn’t affect me as profoundly as it should have, still it took the edge off the sting.

  “Look at your arm. The bullet is extrapolating towards the point of entry. Holy shit, Tom, come see this!” Forgetting his professionalism, the tech pointed excitedly at my shoulder.

  Another face peered at the wound.

  “Not possible,” Tom stated flatly.

  A strangled laugh escaped me.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying my whole life, fellas.”

  “I can see the goddamn bullet crowning
! Give me some Steri-Pads…”

  Even in the midst of their awe, they still worked. Admirable quality. The bullet was pulled free from my flesh. When they unloaded me at the hospital under guard I could hear them still mumbling to themselves dazedly.

  “Did you see that? The tissue’s already coapted at the edges. The goddamn tissue’s coapted at the edges, Tom!”

  Daylight lightened the sky with mauve and amber streaks. Sunrise. In the brief moments before the Emergency Room’s automatic doors excluded it from my view I looked over at the horizon and smiled. We had lived through the night after all, all of us. It was the most beautiful sunrise I’d ever seen.

  * * *

  I now knew how a celebrity felt when they had something wrong with them which required hospitalization. There were multiple guards posted at my room, and doctors came in droves to gape and gasp over me. Aside from being handcuffed to the bed, it would have been flattering.

  The dawn brought weariness, with reinforcements. I slept through most of the poking, prodding, and futile attempts at stitches that were promptly removed when my skin closed over the sutures at accelerated healing rates. None of this concerned me. Bones would come for me. If not now then later. Let them gawk at me and scratch their heads now, while they had the chance.

  As it turned out, by noon I had my first visitor, and it wasn’t my undead lover.

  Detective Black entered the room with a nurse at his side. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Hello again, Catherine.”

  Both of his wrists were bandaged from where my knives had punched through them. Frankly, I was surprised to see him at all, let alone in a good mood.

  “Well, hiya,” I said, cursorily noticing the nurse fill a syringe with from a tiny bottle on her tray. “Didn’t know you could speak, Detective Black. You didn’t say a word yesterday. Sorry about your wrists, but I didn’t feel like getting shot. Happened anyway, though, as you can see. How’s my mother?”

  He came near my bed. The nurse gave him a look as she tapped the syringe in a professional manner to get any bubbles out.

  “No hard feelings, Catherine,” he said genially, holding up his thickly-bandaged wrists. His eyes were peat colored, and not nearly as friendly as his tone. “I’m getting promoted because of you. My career’s on the fast-track, but Mansfield already mentioned that. Damn, is that old man annoying or what? I couldn’t wait for him to retire, and thanks to you, he finally has.”