“You tell me,” he said. “You were supposed to wait for me. I come home and you’re nowhere to be found. I looked for you everywhere. All night. All night.”
“Yeah, but-”
Veronica rose out of the bed halfway. She yawned and could taste the dried blood in her mouth. Looking around the room, she realized that her own bedroom resembled a jail cell. It had a small bed, tiny table and a chair with a window.
Mark wheeled over to her, pointing at her bloodied clothes on the floor.
“All night, I looked. Then I finally come back and you’re sound asleep in bed. Your shirt, your pants covered in blood. So? Tell me what happened.”
“I am starting to think that vampires cannot see their own reflections because they can’t face what they’ve done.”
“What does that mean? What did you do?”
“I-” Veronica stammered. “I remember going out.”
“And?”
“And I remember I had this huge headache.”
“And?”
“And now it’s gone.”
Mark took out his iPhone and swiped through a couple of pages. He held up the phone to Veronica.
“See that?”
She took the phone from his hand and shrugged her shoulders. “Gruesome murders in downtown Oakland. So?”
“So, the guy’s throat was ripped out.”
“Oh,” Veronica licked her lips, tasting the iron of blood that was not her own. Memories flashed in her head. An elderly woman. A black man, early twenties. Just like in the news report.
“I killed him,” she admitted.
“Jesus,” Mark twirled around in his wheelchair. He slid to the window but stopped himself short, rubbing his temples as if to settle the thoughts in his mind. “I used to like looking out the window to think. Now, I can’t.”
“You look more like a man looking for the quickest path to escape.”
“You were supposed to stay inside,” Mark said, now glancing at the front door and the telephone in the kitchen as if waiting for someone to call or show up. “Your impulses are the same. The same as Terri’s. If I tie you up, you’ll break loose. We don’t have many options here.”
“I felt claustrophobic,” Veronica said but realizing she had felt a stronger pull. “I had this urge inside me. I couldn’t fight it. Like giving yourself over to the waves of the ocean or the light of the moon.”
“How many did you kill?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who killed the old lady?”
Veronica scrolled through the report. It gave further details on an elderly Asian woman who had been found with her throat ripped out just like the man.
“No way.”
“You sure?”
“I remember the guy,” she said. “I didn’t kill anyone else.”
“Can you hear yourself?”
Veronica sighed hard.
“Terri said the same thing,” Mark could no longer look Veronica in the face. He spun around, heading to the refrigerator. He took out a can of root beer, popped the cap and chugged it down.
“That doesn’t help,” Veronica got up out of bed. She looked over at her bloodied clothes.
“I don’t think I can help you,” Mark crushed the soda can and threw it in the garbage. He looked forlorn, his body language fitting a parody of depression. Only Veronica knew his sadness was all too real.
“I don’t need you to do anything,” Veronica moved toward her boyfriend. She knelt over and gave him a hug. “I just need you to be here with me. We’ll find a way. Can you do that?”
Mark ran his hands through Veronica’s hair then across her back. “But I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been a praying man. But I prayed over you last night. I knew it won’t be answered. I just don’t know what else to do.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to do,” Veronica whispered, feeling a distance growing between her and Mark that scared her. “Maybe there’s no point in fighting it like Terri did. Maybe the whole trick is to just survive with it.”
“There has to be a way,” Mark said. “Has to be a cure.”
CHAPTER TEN
Mark poured cat food for Nigel and Isla and they ravaged the dry morsels as soon as it their bowl.
Petting the cats on the head, he wheeled over to Terri’s room where Veronica stared at the scribblings on the wall.
Her scrawlings were mostly words and sentences that really didn’t seem to connect with one another. The writings of a mind in an altered state. “Catch 22”, “Nosferatu”, and other words that Veronica couldn’t quite make out. But one word had been repeated over and over again.
Sabine
“Who’s this?” Veronica pointed at the name.
“Terri mentioned that name,” Mark stilted his head upward as if trying to jar a great memory. “Yeah, she did. Said she was a witch. A witch that could help with her vampire issues. Said that she could stop it with a spell.”
“Sounds desperate. And crazy.”
“No more than being a vampire already is, right?” Mark said. “I’m like you. I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”
Veronica stepped toward a stack of paintings Terri had leaned against the wall. She sifted through them, feeling a tinge of self-pity as to why her own life had become a blood-tinted painting. But then she found a painting that had stood out from the others with its fine detail, obviously something that Terri had spent more time on than the others.
“She was so talented,” Veronica held up the painting of beach at nightfall. The painting showed the moonlight hitting the waters with a few geese gliding lazily across. But in the foreground was a tent on the beach. The tent had a sign of a pentagram in its material.
“It’s the old Neptune beach,” Mark wheeled over and took the painting out of Veronica’s hand. “Yeah. It’s all abandoned now. Out near the Naval Air Station.”
“Is it open to the public?”
“Some parts. Most of it is condemned.”
“Think maybe Sabine is around there someplace? If she’s a witch, she’d have gone underground. I’d say this looks like the place I’d want to go if I were a witch. Hiding out in a tent, reading people’s fortunes. Casting out demons and vampires.”
“I don’t know if it’s a place I’d want to go at night.”
“Since when are you chicken shit?”
Mark scratched his head, pretending to be thinking the question over.
“Since, well, someone became a vampire. That’s just me laying out the facts like any good scientist.”
“You’re safe with me.”
Mark looked up and smiled at Veronica. She saw a little of the old Mark there, vulnerable but eager to prove himself.
“Let’s go.”
The car ride over to Neptune Beach would be as quiet as the beach itself. The road began to decline, like a twisting waterfall as they passed through rows of abandoned homes.
“I had a dream about her last night.”
“Who?”
“Terri,” he said looking out the window as Veronica came to a stop. “She came to my window. Scratched at it like that scene in Salem’s Lot. She said, ‘Open up, Mark. It’s me. Open up.’”
They could see the moon glint from a broken entrance sign ahead. Exiting the vehicle, Veronica and Mark eyed the tattered buildings as if they were waiting for a zombie to pop out any second. Mark kept craning his neck to his right, thinking he heard something.
“What?” Veronica asked.
“Nothing. Just keep going.”
They turned a corner with more abandoned buildings on the side, trudging their way through tall weeds and cattails. At the end of the block stood a sign that read NO TRESPASSING.
The fence behind the sign had already been broken.
“Maybe I should do this alone?”
“Maybe because I'm in a wheelchair?”
“I didn't mean it like that.”
“If I can survive Iraq,” Mark said. “I can survive a condemned neighborhood in my own city.
”
Mark wheeled past her, angling his chair to rip out the remaining board so he could get through.
“Besides,” Mark said. “The only people we're going to find here are crack addicts and rats. Fun part will be trying to differentiate between the two.”
Veronica noticed that Mark looked different. He didn’t look depressed anymore. The wheels on his chair rolled faster than usual. He looked alive.
A soldier on a mission.
Mark led the way as they broke past the barrier and onto a trailer of criss-crossed wooden shingles. Sunken tents with poles sticking out looking like corpses from a past long laid to rest. Sagging huts to their right had faded posters of an era long gone. The Bearded Lady. The World’s Strongest Man. The World’s Biggest Horse.
“This side of town has more secrets than people,” Mark said, locking eyes with Veronica before wheeling further down.
Veronica felt the neglect of the former amusement park clinging like film to her skin. She wanted to run back home. To her past life where she could run direct into the sunlight and danced in the water on the beach. She wanted to feel the darkness of being a vampire wash away from her body with each wave.
Instead, she began to feel the thirst again. Like a child clinging to her leg, getting heavier and heavier.
Then she saw the name.
Sabine.
In bold faced print on a poster that looked untouched by the decades gone by. A red headed woman dressed as a gypsy or witch had been drawn in the center. At the top read “GET YOUR FORTUNE READ.”
The door stood ajar and Veronica pushed it open.
“I don’t think ladies should go first here,” Mark wheeled himself past Veronica, slowly entering the hut.
One window had been covered by a sheet. Moonlit rays from another broken window hit the dust particles inside. Mark coughed. Veronica held her breath as the stench of decades old urine and feces hit her nose.
No furniture remained aside from the circular table and crystal ball in the center.
“Holy shit,” Veronica stepped to the ball. Wiping away the dust with the cloth of her forearm, it looked as good as new. “Bet this thing duped a lot of folks.”
“There’s a back room,” Mark said, pointing to a door knocked off its hinges.
Veronica stepped to the door, pushing it open but seeing an assortment of junk on the floor. Large pieces of indistinguishable metal and wood. Too cumbersome for Mark to navigate through.
“Wait here, k?”
“Sure, nothing else to do,” Mark spun around, seeing a silhouette came to an abrupt stop outside the front door.
Veronica walked further into the room and saw that the room had been lit by a candle sitting on another circular table. A deck of cards clearly visible in the center.
“Someone’s here,” she whispered.
Taking a close look at the table, she saw that one of the cards had been flipped over.
The tarot card of death.
Her heart racing, she stepped out of the room.
“Mark?”
Stepping out of the hut entirely, she looked left and right.
Not a trace of her boyfriend.
Guinness hung up his cell phone as he and Darien scanned the walls inside Terri’s apartment. Darien took out a cigarette and a Zippo to light it. He felt insulted that the pastor had called her in to help out, but he couldn’t help but feel attracted to her. He couldn’t help but notice how the moonlight through the window shaded her breasts like round curves on a highway.
“What do you think?” Darien asked.
“She was all about marking the moments,” Guinness turning his attention back to the wall, rubbing a face that now showed the effects of twenty years of cold wind and worry. “Wrote down everything that was happening to her. You figure she would just use a notepad like everyone else.”
“Trade secrets written in blood,” Darien said, squinting her eyes in the darkness as she traced the outlines of Terri’s words. “Sabine. Find a cure. Find a cure. Obviously, a tormented woman.”
“Hanging around scumbags will do that to you.”
“So, the other girl lives next door?”
“Yeah.”
Without another word, Darien walked out of the room and headed out of the apartment with Guinness following her like a puppy.
“This the one?” Darien pointed at the large window of the apartment adjacent to the one they just left.
“Yeah,” Guinness closed Terri’s door then re-taped the yellow “Police : Do No Cross’ tape across it.
Darien took out an electronic lock pick and inserted it into Veronica’s keyhole. With a snap of the wrist and a twist, she had the door open in less than five seconds.
Following her in, Guinness flicked his flashlight on before Darien turned on a small lamp on the counter.
“I'll be honest,” Guinness said. “I don't know why he called you for this one.”
Darien looked thoughtful for a moment, her eyes betraying an expression of contempt before she decided to say nothing.
She turned her attention back to the apartment. She scanned the walls. The shelves. She took a long drag on her cigarette the then let out the smoke like a train letting off steam.
“I mean, we don’t know for sure, right?” Guinness turned and looked out the door. “We don’t know how much time we have.”
Darien entered the bedroom and saw small droplets of blood on the floor. Reaching down, she scraped off a tiny amount and brought the flakes of dried blood to her lips.
“What is it?”
“I can tell blood type,” Darien said, standing up with the satisfied air of someone who just solved a great mystery. “This is not hers.”
“So what? Doesn't prove a thing.”
Darien shook her head. “I kill first and ask questions later.”
“Yeah, well, if I did that I'd lose my job. Or worse.”
“That's why I do what I do and you do what you do.”
“And how would you even know that she’s a vampire?”
“That’s why he called me. You only know when they’re coming at you with their fangs bared. By then, it’s too damn late. I can tell just by looking in their eyes.”
“I’ve been a cop for over seventeen years. And you can’t tell shit by looking into a person’s eyes. I know it sounds like a cool thing to say. But people can hide shit.”
“These aren’t people.”
Darien began opening drawers, leafing through papers, assorted pieces of jewelry and long broken electronics.
“Cops like to get people flustered,” Darien spoke like a schoolteacher scolding her class. “Make them nervous into thinking they know more than they really do. But vampires. That won’t work with them.”
“What works?”
“My intuition. I see it in their eyes. That lust and feeling that they will kill you with no regret. And it isn’t like the movies. They think about their kills as they sleep. Over and over again like a broken record.”
Darien slid the cabinet across the floor, wanting to look behind it.
Nothing.
“What is it that we're looking for?”
“Any connection,” Darien said. “No detail is too mundane. Don't they teach you that in detective school?”
Guinness didn’t respond, he walked back toward the door and looked out before returning to the bedroom.
“We got to hurry it up.”
“Hold your horses.”
“What if she comes back. And she’s, you know?”
“A vampire?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll deal-”
“What's it like?”
“What's what like?”
“To kill one of them. I mean, I’ve killed most everything else. Even shot someone in the line of duty about two years ago. We used to hunt elk. Deer. Wolves. Saw my dad kill a damn grizzly bear when I was a kid. How does killing one of them compare to-”
“I wouldn't know,” Darien said, pickin
g up Veronica’s picture on the mantel piece. “I'm not in it for the killing. This is about something else.”
“She's pretty,” Guinness said, taking the frame out of Darien’s hand. “Just like the last one.”
“She won't be pretty when she's dead,” Darien said, her dark eyes as still as bullet holes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The only sounds Veronica heard was the faraway sound of a coyote howling. Her eyes drifted up and down the abandoned strip for Mark. She yelled out his name until her voice became hoarse. Texted and called him several times.
“This isn’t funny. Where are you?”
The broken-down buildings looked natural but seemed unreal. The dead trees, the broken signs, the weather-beaten shells of storefronts. They all seemed fake like an artist’s rendition of what an apocalypse would look like.
Exhausted after nearly an hour of running and searching, she noticed that the smell of the ghost town began to worsen. An odor that suggested only one thing.
Death.
A stench that dried and crusted on the body, like a hyper realized version of a convalescent home. Only this smell had something else, an emotion of despair. A mixture of predator and prey, the entire place smelled like murder.
Voices could be heard up ahead. A scared voice. Male. Then an angry voice. Female. Veronica couldn’t quite make out the words. A few moments of quiet and Veronica had that uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
Frightened and confused, Veronica finally trudged back to her car feeling as if she had blood on her hands. She should have insisted that Mark to stay put. But he would not have listened. He never listened. That’s why she loved him.
She came back to find her car enveloped in a reddish vaporous cloud. The car door on the passenger seat had been left ajar. Looking inside, she saw his wheelchair folded up into the seat.
“Mark?” Veronica called out.
She shut the door and entered the vehicle on the passenger side. Still looking around for any sign of Mark, her heart pounded with dread as she started the engine.
“You've been looking for me,” the voice in the back seat whispered.
Spinning around, Veronica saw the ugliest woman she had ever laid eyes on, making her mouth drop in shock. Wrinkles and crevices deeply marked the witch’s face as her milky eyes stared back at Veronica, unblinking. Her hair had all the colors of a rotten apple and her skin had the look of an old rag. She wore a faded blue dress with a torn strip across the shoulder.
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