Juro gestured with his arm, releasing a wave of body stink. “This is the office Noyoko and I share. She doesn’t like to work here, however. She prefers the museum’s research room on the top floor. I don’t know why. It’s so hot up there.”
Officer Bob coughed and stepped on my foot. I breathed through my mouth.
“It’s a little close, you know?” I said. “Maybe she needs open spaces.”
Juro seemed to consider that. “Good thought. I’ll have to ask her.” He searched in a mountain of books that were piled in a tilting tower on a stool in a corner of the office. I wasn’t sure what was in those books, but I really didn’t want them to hit the ground. Sometimes paranormal things get annoyed when their sacred writings aren’t treated with respect.
Juro isolated one book, leaving the others in a leaning tower of tomes. He scrambled through the pages, running his fingers down each folio, speed-reading as he went. Officer Bob and I waited, Officer Bob standing still, his face serene, me tapping my foot and chewing my nails.
“Did you find…” I got no further when Juro held up his palm.
I hummed “Stop in the Name of Love,” and I could tell by the shade of his ears that this annoyed him to no end. I kept it up until Bob elbowed me.
I was so frustrated that I thought I was going to bleed out my eyeballs. Juro flipped to another chapter, and I thumped my head against the door in a steady rhythm. Another eon passed, which was probably only twenty minutes, when Juro said, “Found it!”
I nearly cried with relief.
“Here are the ingredients. An egg, a Japanese cherry blossom, a piece of volcanic ash, purified water, and a slab of petrified wood. Oh, and the Buddha statue.”
Officer Bob’s face was screwed into a question mark. “Why those things?”
I answered, realizing what they were from other ceremonies. “An egg for rebirth; a cherry blossom for air; ash for fire; water, well that’s obvious; and wood for earth. Buddha is the divine will that brings these things together and creates life.”
Juro nodded, blinking furiously.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Feeling a little funny, in fact. I’m parched. I need to get some water.”
“What’s on the other side of the door?” Bob asked, jerking his chin to the far wall.
“A hallway. We have inner corridors and rooms that allow us to move from exhibit to exhibit without walking through the museum proper.”
“Why don’t we do a sweep and see if we can find the fox while you get something to drink and take some acetaminophen or something,” I said. “You look a little blue around the gills.”
The back alleys of the museum were bare of any decoration, which seemed strange to me given the amount of arts and crafts in the place. Plain wooden doors led to offices on either side, and the overhead lighting was gruesome. There was no possible way anyone could look good in that light, but I assumed the museum staff were above that type of thing, concentrating on the cultures and evolution of the world. Or, something like that. They may have been frugal, given they worked off grants and disappearing state and federal funds. I clucked my tongue at that, experiencing a wave of fury at the stupidity of the people in Washington who thought it was okay to cut funding to the arts and sciences. Idiots.
The Buddha sent me a quiet ohm, and I bit back my anger. Focus, Jess. Focus.
I smelled the fox before I saw it. It gave off a musky scent that tickled my nose.
“There, up ahead!” Officer Bob pointed. “Whiskers!”
A flash of fox fur had us running down the hallway, to the left, and down another hallway, the white underside of the fox’s tails our beacon forward. That and the snicker, snicker the fox made as we chased it like the Three Stooges.
“Wait!” I said, drawing to a stop. “We’re chasing it, but that’s stupid because we have no way to catch it. Will a box hold a kitsune? A cage? Or could we chase it into a closet?”
Bob looked up at the ceiling as if the answer was written there.
“Okay,” I said. “We don’t chase the fox now. We gather our supplies for the exorcism and then figure out how to catch the damn thing. Meanwhile, we also look for clues to the bigger picture. I’m not convinced the fox is on its own.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Someone had to summon it.” Bob’s eyebrows scrunched together while he considered that statement.
“So, we have a bigger bad guy? The fox is an underling?” he asked, tapping his index finger to his lip.
“That’s my hunch.”
“In real life, the underlings get it in the back, and the big boss gets away.”
“Not this time, Bob.”
We made our way to Juro’s office to get back into the Asian artifacts room. Before we got there, Officer Bob held me back. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Juro isn’t telling us everything.”
“I really don’t like that guy,” Officer Bob said, putting his hand on his Taser.
I glanced at his hand. “Bob!”
“I have a sixth sense about people, Mrs. Friedman. You have to develop it when you become a police officer, and I’m telling you, something about that guy is fishy. Maybe he’s the big bad guy and he’s playing dumb.”
I studied him with new interest. “Tell me about this sixth sense of yours, Officer.”
“It’s nothing. No more than other cops have. I’m a good lie detector, is all, which is why I believe you, even though what you say is unbelievable.”
I continued to study him. “Verrrrrrry interesting, Officer Bob. Verrrrry interesting.”
We headed back out into the exhibit area, and I placed the Buddha on a display table. “I’ll be back,” I promised. The Buddha let out a deep cleansing breath and sent me a mental picture of a person doing a downward dog. Great, now I had a statue suggesting yoga postures. Maybe I did have anger management issues.
Chapter Four
Officer Bob’s statement about his sixth sense reminded me of my mother. She was an excellent lie detector, which strangled my youth something fierce. My mom was no bigger than I am, but she seemed huge to my eyes, and I admired her ability to chop an onion, bone a chicken, or shred a carrot without looking at her hands. She had a talent for knives.
Only two months after Liam’s turning by the skinny vampire and my introduction to the Diocese’s role in monster hunting, my world exploded again. My mom was hit by a runaway truck while driving over the Williamstown Bridge from Williamstown, West Virginia, to Marietta, Ohio, approaching Ohio State Route 7. The original bridge was built in 1903, but it had been updated in the early nineties and was the twenty-eighth longest bridge in North America, at least that’s what I’ve been told.
I still remember the knock at the door. It came in the middle of the night, and I refused to answer it because I knew, just knew, that something was terribly wrong. My father answered, heavy flashlight in his left hand.
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Friedman, my name is Trooper Finlay, from the Ohio State Troopers. I need to speak with you. I’m sorry, but there’s been an accident.”
Silence. I waited upstairs with my blanket to my mouth, not screaming out loud but screaming inside. I rocked back and forth. “No. No. No. No…”
My father opened the door, and the news was plain.
“Sir, your wife was driving a 1985 Chrysler LeBaron with the old-fashioned wood paneling, correct?”
My father hung his head and whispered, “Yes.”
The Trooper, whose job sucked at that moment, put his hand on my father’s shoulder, a genuine touch of grief to his voice. “I’m sorry sir, but your wife’s car was struck by a pickup truck and went overboard…”
I tuned out the rest out because none of it mattered. We didn’t go when they pulled out the wreckage, but we did briefly see my mother’s mangled body. She had bounced around inside the car, even though she always wore a seatbelt, and was ba
ttered, bruised, and bloody. Her body didn’t look anything like the loving mother I knew.
They never found the truck or the driver, and we buried her in a Jewish cemetery only a few blocks from our home. I could walk there whenever I wanted to talk to her, and sometimes I did, but as time passed, I realized she wasn’t there. She’d gone somewhere else, and I’d have to wait to see her again.
For months, I couldn’t speak without crying, so I became silent and grieved with my father, who diminished in size and personality like a balloon deflating.
“Dad, do you want dinner? I’ll make you something special. Anything you want.”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat something. Maybe an egg?”
He waved his hand at me but smiled a small smile. “You sound like your mother.”
“She would want you to eat.”
He tilted his head. “Okay, maybe an egg.”
I made him the egg, slid it in front of him, and handed him a fork. “Here, Dad, just the way you like them with a little cheese and fluffy.”
“With too much salt?”
I nodded. “Of course, with too much salt.”
He sighed and put the fork down. “Your mother wouldn’t want me to eat too much salt. She was always bugging me to be careful.”
“Right now, she would have wanted you to eat anything. Please, I’m not leaving until you get some protein in you.”
“Stop pestering.”
He finally ate the egg and a little bit of pineapple, but his meals were always small, and though he returned to work, there was something missing that never came back. A piece of his soul broke away the day she died and went with her.
I threw myself into my training, which is how I met Ovid, and I learned that he dished out advice and insults like a baseball pitching machine programmed to kill.
“Move your foot over to the right. You’ll get more balance.”
“If you only focus on your feet, how will you know what the monster is doing right in front of you?”
“Now you’ve lost your feet again.” He’d slap his hands together in frustration.
“What do you mean, you can’t concentrate on your hands and your feet? Don’t whine. Keep practicing! This has to be natural.”
“You’re out of breath already? Only one mile. Guess what, slow-poke, you get to do another. When a chupacabra is chasing you, he won’t slow down and say, ‘Take a minute.’” He poked me in the chest. “Run like your life depends on it. Because it does.”
Since I’d chosen a camping hatchet, he insisted I learn to throw it. “Camping hatchets don’t have the best shape or weight distribution for throwing, but it can be done if you focus on technique. Hatchets are really much better as a hand-to-hand tool or for functional things.”
“Like cutting off fingers?” I asked.
He gave me a pained look. “No, well, yes, but I meant for building fires, prying open doors, smashing crates, and breaking windows.”
“Oh.” I measured my steps from the target, turned, and threw again. I threw hundreds of times. I also trained with a real tomahawk, which was much easier to throw.
“You’ve got that down with your right hand,” he noted one day. “Aren’t you a switch hitter?”
“Yeeaaahhh,” I replied, looking at him sideways. I didn’t like where this was going.
“Time to learn with your left hand,” he replied with an evil grin. I dropped my head, resigned to my fate.
That’s how it went, day-after-day, until one practice, I got a “good.”
I stopped chucking the ‘hawk.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, ‘don’t get cocky,’ and get your head in the game.”
“I thought so.” I waited a beat. “When do I get to kill real monsters? When do I go after that son-of-a-bitch vampire that turned my friend?”
Ovid got right in my face. “You don’t get to go after Pascal. Ever. Got it? There are other monsters to fry.”
“He has a name?”
“Yes, Pascal.”
“Any relation to Blaise Pascal, the mathematician?”
“You remember your history. I’m impressed. Yes, not just related, but the very same one.”
“No! That’s impossible.”
“Yes, possible,” Ovid said, shaking his head. “Pascal was always in ill health in the mid-1600s and he sought healing through prayer, but illnesses of the body do not always respond to the wishes of the spirit. After he turned thirty-nine, he’d had enough of being sickly and resolved he would either find a way to heal or die before forty.”
“Who turned him?”
“When Blaise Pascal was younger, his father broke his hip, and two of the most prominent doctors of the day, Deslandes and de la Bouteillerie, attended him. The father survived and walked again, rare for the time, so Blaise sought help from both. It was Monsieur Doctor de la Bouteillerie who proved to be the man with the answer. In his study of medicine, he had looked for the secrets to life, to eternity, to avoiding frailty and death. That led him to vampires, which in turn, led Pascal to vampires. We don’t know who turned Pascal because, despite de la Buteillerie’s fascination, he himself never became the undead.”
I considered this as I slugged down a bottle of water and wiped away the sweat from my neck. I wanted to get this Pascal, and even though I wasn’t ready yet, I would be ready one day. I didn’t care if Ovid or the Catholic Church gave me permission. I was going to find this guy and stake him so he couldn’t move and drag him into the sun. I’d let him watch the sun rise knowing that any minute he’d burn, and I’d place him feet to the east, head to the west, so he could watch himself burn inch-by-inch.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
Chapter Five
After he’d been turned, Liam had rented a tiny apartment in the dark side of town, where they didn’t ask questions about why he wanted to sign the lease at midnight. The Diocese hadn’t let him out of their sight for a full month, teaching him the rules of behavior. If they’d had a leg bracelet to put on him, they would have. Instead, they had me. His behavior was my responsibility.
He’d been working a night shift at a local bar and had hidden his current situation from the owners, but it was tough. He became my liaison to Father Paul and Sister Mary, and our computer expert. He’d become proficient in hacking, which though illegal, was helpful and necessary. Each day, I said a prayer to thank the big G for helping us fight the big bad and slipped in a request for a hall pass on our pernicious ways.
“He’s really the Pascal?”
“That’s what Ovid said,” I responded, sitting way back on the blood-red suede sofa Liam bought as an ironic symbol of what he’d become. The apartment had one walk-in closet, and that’s where he slept.
“Why me?” Liam asked. “Why choose me of all people?”
“I don’t know, Liam. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that. It’s the millionth time, and once again, I say, it wasn’t your fault. It was that rat-bastard Pascal’s fault, and I mean to see him dead for it! He ruined my life!”
I was silent. It wasn’t that he wasn’t right. It was the growl and vehemence with which he said it. I wasn’t used to that tone, that ferocity, coming from Liam’s mouth. This was the gentle young man who asked me to walk him to his bus stop.
Except it wasn’t. Not anymore. The person in front of me was a vampire, and without guidance and friendship, he would lose his humanity and become a killing machine like the vampire that turned him. I highly doubted that little ten-year-old Blaise Pascal had turned to his mom and dad and said, “You know what I want be when I grow up? A skinny, blood-drinking raging creature of death.”
No, he did it to avoid pain and live longer without suffering, but whatever it was, the virus or chemical or magic, that turned people into vampires ate at them. As it had been explained to me, if Liam didn’t have constant contact with humanity to ground him, his goodness would leak away until there was no
thing.
Liam pulled a bag of donated blood from his fridge, tore the corner, and downed it. He drank at least three of these, every night. “I hate that I have to drink this, Jess, but if I don’t…” He trailed off.
“What?”
“If I don’t, I can’t think normally. I thirst for blood like a dying man in the desert thirsts for water. It’s all I can think about. I can smell it in the air, taste the particles on my tongue, and I’ll do anything to get it. Anything, Jess.”
“So, we’ll keep you well fed.”
He sat next to me on the couch, looking down at his shoes. “Jess. I’ve lost an essential part of who I am. I can’t promise I can control this thirst. What if I’m near you when I lose control? What if I hurt you? Kill you?”
“You won’t.” I swallowed hard as I said it. I knew I couldn’t promise that, but I wanted to.
He grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye. “Promise me you’ll kill me if I show any sign of losing control. Any sign at all. Don’t hesitate. Take my head with that ridiculous hatchet of yours. Carry a stake at all times.”
My tears ran hot down my cheeks. “I promise.”
“Okay.” He stood, tugged the corners of his jacket, held out his hand to me, and said, “Let’s go hunting. I don’t care what the Church says or Ovid says. I want to find Pascal, and I know where to start.”
I grabbed my bag, wiping my eyes. “Lead on, MacDuff.” I held the door for him and gestured him through.
He paused in the entrance. “You know the real line is ‘Lay on, MacDuff?’ right?”
I pulled up sharp, affronted, hand to my heart. “And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough.’ Please, who do you think I am? An amateur? I was a classics major, for God’s sake.”
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