by Ward Parker
“The dragon lords used me as a hostage to exchange for Bill. Long story. The good news is that Ronnie is consolidating power and calling off the war with humans and vampires.”
“What a relief,” Matt said.
His arms were still around her. She realized she didn’t mind it so much. But she backed away before things got out of hand.
He frowned. “I wasn’t making moves on you. It just felt comfortable being close to you.”
“Yeah. It did.”
“Maybe we should do it more often,” he said with a wiggle of his eyebrows.
“I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“What kind of idea is wrong?”
“We’ve been friends for a long time,” she said. “I care about you a lot.”
He frowned again. “I don’t need to hear the ‘you’re like a brother to me’ speech.”
“No, not like a brother. That would be illegal in most states.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Matt, I find you sexy, as well as fun to be with. I wouldn’t mind taking the fun to another level. But I’m not ready for a relationship right now. I feel that I’m in a transitional stage of my life. It’s not the right time for me to fall in love.”
“There’s never a right or wrong time. It just happens,” he said.
“I guess I don’t want it to happen right now.”
“So, what exactly are you suggesting? A friends-with-benefits arrangement?”
“Possibly. We’re far from being innocent kids anymore.”
He folded his arms and took a step backwards. “I don’t know.”
She was confused. “I’ve felt the electricity between us.”
“Yes. But I also have, well, feelings for you. More than just fondness. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, but my feelings haven’t quite gotten that far yet. But they could. Just not right now.”
“That’s the problem,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be a problem.”
“It is for me. Because of my feelings, I’m more vulnerable than you. I can’t just hang out, have a little hanky-panky, and go about my business like it’s no big deal. I want to dive headfirst into a relationship. A love affair.”
Missy was quiet. She’d known he had feelings for her, which was why she’d never thought intimacy was possible. She didn’t want to hurt him if she couldn’t reciprocate the feelings. But she believed it would be possible to add the physical aspect without too much attachment.
“It’s not too much to ask for love,” Matt said. “I’ve never been married before, like you. I still have idealistic notions of how it could be. I believe I’m not too old to be a dad. You’re not too old to have a child.”
“I’m not at the stage of life yet when I’m ready to make marriage work again. The first one didn’t go so well.”
Her husband left her for a vampire and was staked not long after he was turned. Her idealistic views of marriage had been left far behind. And as far as children, she still had the occasional pang of missing being a mother. But face it, her life was so weird now—so deep into magick and monsters that being a soccer mom seemed impossible. And how could she raise a child when her life was in danger as often as the electric bill was due?
“You just want to use me for my body,” Matt said.
“I sure do!” She was happy to return to talk of shallow pleasure.
She smiled.
He struggled not to, but broke into a grin.
“It’s impossible to pout around you,” he said.
“Good. I hate pouters.”
“Well, your proposition is certainly worth considering. I need to decide if I want to risk getting hurt.”
“It doesn’t hurt if you do it right.”
“You know what I mean!”
“It is rather awkward talking about these things in the abstract,” she said.
“Yes. It’s a little easier if you get me drunk and ‘these things’ happen naturally.”
“Remind me to keep my fridge stocked with your favorite beer.”
“And I’ll be sure to limit my consumption, so I don’t get taken advantage of. Anyway, I need to run,” he said. “I’ve been assigned a follow-up story about Bill’s murder. The authorities are still puzzled why his dead body turned into dust.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and left.
Speaking of vampires, Missy had several voicemails and texts from Agnes on her phone, now that it was working again. And as she scrolled down, she was horrified to find messages from the van-rental agency.
She was overdue for returning the van. The van that lay upside down at the bottom of a canyon in another plane of existence.
Oh, my.
Missy’s absences to San Marcos and the In Between had created a backlog of patient visits. A sweet, elderly male troll, who lived in a small apartment building at the foot of the Intracoastal Waterway bridge, needed his annual physical. She told him he should watch his weight and exercise more. After becoming too old to snatch and eat people crossing the bridge, he had switched to a typical high-calorie, high-fat American diet. She hated to be a scold, but overweight trolls had a high incidence of heart disease.
Next, she visited two different werewolf patients at Seaweed Manor on the beach. They also needed to lose weight. She recommended they go on longer runs as a pack every night they shifted to wolves. The werewolves in this community were also notorious for partying. There was always the smell of weed drifting through the hallways. She reminded her patients to moderate their drinking. Werewolves didn’t make suitable candidates for liver transplants.
Finally, once nightfall had set in, she went next door to Squid Tower. She had three vampire patients who needed routine screenings. Blood draws were always a dangerous procedure with vampires, but she gritted her teeth, put on her warding amulet, and did her job.
She stopped by Agnes’ condo before going home.
“I’m relieved you’re okay,” Agnes said, hugging her. The old vampire was so petite her head only came up to Missy’s belly.
“Is the community in shock over Bill’s death?” Missy asked.
“I hate to say it, but there’s a sense of relief. He used to make everyone nervous with all his guns. And once he got into conspiracy theories, he was like a bomb about to go off. Oops, poor choice of words.”
“The creative writing class I teach is next week. It will be strange without him and his war fiction.”
“Speaking of war, if Ronnie honors what he promised you, our conflict with the dragons is, thankfully, over. But another one is building with the police.”
“Detective Affird?”
“Yes. He made it clear to me he knows we’re vampires,” Agnes said. “He’s gone from suspicion to certainty. And he’s coping with having seen the dragons that night you were kidnapped.”
“With luck, he’ll never see another dragon again, and there won’t be anything he can do about them.”
“Yes. But we need to deal with him. I’ve sent a notice to all residents to avoid feeding on humans, at least for several weeks. We need to lie low and not give him any provocation. I don’t believe he would simply attack our community and stake everyone. But if he had to come here on police business, he very well could leave some staked vampires behind.”
“Oh, my.”
“That is, unless we take a more proactive approach.”
“Like what? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
On Missy’s way home, she stopped at MegaMart, since it was open until midnight. She picked up cat food and human food, in that order of importance. As she passed through the home goods section, she spotted a man who looked familiar. He was examining a pair of dusting slippers. Until now, Missy hadn’t known she could dust her floors while shuffling around in her slippers.
The man looked exactly like Marvin.
But, of course, it couldn’t be him. Overweight, older men tend to look the s
ame, even if they’re vampires. She turned around and passed the aisle again to get a better look.
The man turned his back and was studying a shelf of garden gnomes.
She circled around the rows of shelves to pass the other end of the aisle. But then an employee rolled a cart of boxes, blocking her and her view. By the time she navigated to a better position, the man had disappeared.
He had really looked like Marvin, although she hadn’t seen his face straight on. She obviously was mistaken. Marvin was dead. She’d seen the pile of ashes he’d become.
Besides, Marvin lived at Squid Tower. The HOA bylaws would never allow a garden gnome to be displayed outdoors. The man had to be a human, not Marvin.
But why did he look so much like Marvin?
She was beginning to think like one of the crazy conspiracy theorists. This had to stop.
Still, she wandered through the entire MegaMart, from auto parts to underwear, looking for the man. He was nowhere to be found.
Could that have been Marvin’s ghost she saw? She had to think about that for a few minutes. Did vampires even become ghosts? Weren’t they already undead? And if it was his ghost, why would he be haunting the home goods section of MegaMart?
Her brain hurt, so she tried to think about trivial things as she finished her shopping. But ghost or not, the sighting continued to haunt her.
Finally, she broke down and called Agnes.
“Does Marvin’s neighbor, Mrs. Kinkuddy, still have that bag of ashes she said she collected from Marvin’s lounge chair?”
“I believe so,” Agnes said. “Detective Affird never came by to collect them. I believe he’s certain it was a case of a vampire being sun-torched. He was only pretending to believe otherwise.”
“I need to get those ashes.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Agnes used a spare set of keys to let Missy into Marvin’s condo. With no living heirs to leave it to, he apparently willed it to the Flat Earth Society. It hadn’t passed through probate yet.
Missy needed a favorite possession of Marvin’s to make the spell work. On his desk, next to the oversized monitor and pile of conspiracy-theory books, was a framed selfie of Marvin posing with his face near a footprint in the mud. Presumably, it was a Reptilian footprint, but it looked more like it was left by a tipsy bear. She grabbed the photo and began drawing a magic circle on the kitchen tile with a dry-erase marker.
“I’ll leave you alone so you can concentrate,” Agnes said with a dubious expression.
Modern science had difficulty identifying a person through their ashes in the absence of bone fragments. The incineration process destroys all traces of DNA. The only other method is reading X-ray emissions by using a particle accelerator.
Magick had better means. Missy considered magick a form of science that scientists refused, or were unable, to understand.
To explain her spell in simple terms, she harvested Marvin’s psychic energy, traces of which were left as a residue on things he touched, particularly a beloved object.
Her spell would “analyze”—to use a scientific word—his ashes to look for matching psychic energy. The heat of incineration can’t destroy this energy, unlike DNA.
She completed her circle, placed five tea candles in the points of a pentagram. A grill lighter lit the candles. Then, she began gathering her energies and those from the five elements, particularly water, since the ocean was just outside. Her own energies were still weak from overusing them in the In Between.
The spell was one that Don Mateo had devised, combining principles of alchemy, earth magick, and the magic of the original inhabitants of Florida. She read the incantation from a notecard, a curious jumble of Latin, Old English, and Timucuan.
The picture frame glowed along its edges as she activated and extracted Marvin’s psychic energy.
Next, she transferred that energy to the searching part of the spell. The plastic baggy of ashes grew warm in her hands. She expected it to become uncomfortably hot, with a spiritual heat, not the kind that would melt the plastic bag. But the bag remained simply warm.
The image of Marvin’s face she expected to see did not enter her mind. Instead, she saw only a black silhouette of a man.
The ashes must not belong to Marvin. Another man had been torched on Marvin’s balcony, not him. Who the man was, Missy couldn’t tell. Though the psychic energy was similar to Marvin’s.
He had been a very close friend. Or, more likely, he had been a family member. But as far as Missy knew, Marvin lived alone and didn’t have living relatives.
While the spell was still active, Missy lifted the baggy of ashes, rotating her arm around the room. She hoped to use the process in reverse, trying to match the unidentified psychic energy in the ashes with an object in the condo.
Not until the bag was closest to the second bedroom did something happen, a slight electric jolt to her fingers.
The ashes belonged to someone with a recent connection to that bedroom.
Leaving the magick circle broke the spell. But she carried the baggy into the bedroom. A vampire slept in here. The room, the bed in particular, gave her the creepy tingly feeling she had whenever she was in a vampire patient’s bedroom. Which she tried to do as little as possible.
She smelled a man’s old-fashioned hair tonic. The closet and dresser held men’s out-of-fashion clothing. No personal items were visible. It truly felt as if whoever slept in here had been a guest.
Then, she noticed the oddest thing. A deadbolt had been installed. On the outside of the door.
Was the occupant of this room Marvin’s prisoner?
Marvin had become even creepier in her eyes. And he apparently wasn’t dead. This vampire prisoner was most likely the one who had been sun-torched on the balcony.
But why? To allow Marvin to live a secret life of garden-gnome shopping at MegaMart?
She called Agnes.
“Did Marvin have anyone staying with him in his condo?”
“Not that I know of,” Agnes said. “Marvin was a very solitary fellow. No living human relatives. I don’t believe he kept in touch with his maker. Why do you ask?”
Missy explained her findings.
“Perhaps, he took in another conspiracy buff who needed a place to stay.”
It didn’t ring right to Missy.
“Thank you. I’ll be here a while longer, seeing if I can find out more.”
“Lock the door on your way out.”
Missy decided to try her spell again. She used the tube of hair tonic on the guest bedroom dresser to provide the psychic energy.
Repeating the spell, she held the baggy of ashes as it grew warmer, then hotter, like it was supposed to. This time, an image of a face appeared in her mind.
Marvin’s face.
What the heck?
So, these were, in fact, Marvin’s ashes? It had been Marvin who was sun-torched on his balcony, after all?
Okay.
But why was he imprisoned in his own guest bedroom?
She searched the master bedroom. She found an old address book that was surely Marvin’s, with yellowed pages and many addresses in a pre-modern format, such as only a name, street number, and no zip code or telephone number. Other listings had four-digit phone numbers. Marvin’s name was written on the inside front cover.
She repeated the spell. The book was rich with psychic energy. And it matched again with the ashes. It was more confirmation that Martin had been the victim, as everyone assumed.
So why was he sleeping in his guest bedroom? Was he really locked in here? Probably, whoever locked him in this room was the one who locked him on his balcony to be sun-torched.
More and more vampires suspected Bill was Marvin’s murderer. Missy was inclined to agree.
And she realized she had been mistaken when she thought she saw Marvin in the MegaMart.
17
Staking Time
Detective Fred Affird
had unfinished business.
The lunatic militia that called itself ERR was imploding. Their leader, the vampire Bill Meany, was dead. His murderer, Abe Washington, was under arrest. The rest of them had gone underground, which was just fine with Affird. The organization had been decapitated, the actual gunmen who had fired upon the police were dead, and the rest of the militia was not his problem. Let the FBI or ATF worry about them. Affird had bigger fish to fry.
For instance, what was he going to do about the dragons?
He had fabricated a story for the incident report stating the militants had accidentally torched themselves with gasoline bombs. The other officers at the scene, who saw the dragons, were keeping it to themselves for the time being, not wanting to be thought crazy. Affird, and all the superior officers, denied that dragons exist and asserted, therefore, that no one could have seen them.
There had been no reported sighting of dragons since then. Hopefully, there wouldn't be, and Affird could make himself forget they existed.
What remained unsettled was the vampire question. Affird was ready to wipe them out, once and for all.
No, not all of them. He’d promised his informant, Mrs. Kinkuddy, that he would keep her from being staked if she continued to give him information about Squid Tower.
He had suspected the community was filled with vampires for the longest time but couldn’t do anything about it. Not even with the information his informant had given him. Now, however, he was ready to act.
It was time to send the message they were not welcome in Jellyfish Beach. If they didn’t move away, they would be staked. He would set an example by staking their leaders.
There was also the problem with the werewolves living next door in Seaweed Manor. Most of the time, those residents were in human form, so they were less of an open sore for Affird than the vampires were. He had killed one of them before, but almost lost his badge for trying to kill an old lady werewolf who raised a stink with the department.
He wouldn’t mind ignoring that problem like the dragons.
The vampires were his focus. It’s why he made a late-night visit to Squid Tower to help him plan his attack.