by Marc Daniel
Michael had consciously been avoiding Helen ever since the massage, but they worked together, and Yellowstone wasn’t big enough for him to hide from her forever.
“What are you in a mood for?” asked Sheila. “A bowl of soup? Or maybe a salad?”
Michael looked at her with concern.
“I’m just kidding. Of course, we’re going to your favorite place. The one with the 40-ounce porterhouse.”
“We don’t have to. We can try something new if you’d like.”
“And spend the night waking up to the sound of your rumbling stomach? No thanks. We’ll go to the steakhouse,” she said teasingly.
Michael was happy to see Sheila relaxed. She hadn’t been cheery much since he’d told her about her sister.
“So what’s our next step, Michael? How are we going to figure out who’s behind all this? And more importantly, how are we going to make them pay for what they did to Stephanie and Lucy?”
The sudden change of conversation caught Michael by surprise. Those questions were constantly on his mind, but he’d purposefully avoided the subject this evening. He didn’t want to trigger painful memories for Sheila.
“Ezekiel thinks he’s getting close to figuring out who’s leading the Fida’I. As soon as we know who this person is, I plan on paying them a visit and asking a few questions about their client.”
“Do you still think Houston’s human traffickers are involved in any way?” she asked.
“No. I’ve been doing some thinking and the timeline is all wrong. The mountain lion that attacked us in St. Lucia and whose scent was at Stephanie’s was in Yellowstone the day before your article came out. He was the man who pushed the little girl into the hot spring.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I am. Whatever this whole thing is about, it has nothing to do with your articles. This is a Fida’I operation and if one is to believe Ez I’m the real target.”
“What about the bomb in my car?”
“I’m still not sure about the bomb. I suppose it could be the Chinese or the Mexicans, but I suspect it was probably the Fida’I’s first attempt on your life. The St. Lucia attack was to correct their initial mistake.”
“That’s an elaborate plan to just kill me. And why would they try to go after me with you by my side? They had to know you wouldn’t stand by and watch.”
“I suspect they wanted to kill you in front of me. They didn’t think I could have stopped them. And they were right. Not in the state I was in at the time. Without the elves…”
“So we sit and wait for Ez to give us a name and address?” Sheila asked. Michael felt grateful to Sheila for purposefully changing the discussion’s direction.
“No, we don’t. We need to go over the whereabouts of our likeliest suspects. Someone is trying to get to me by hurting the people I’m close to.”
“You’d never even met my sister, Michael.” Sheila’s voice was starting to quiver.
“Your sister may be the exception,” he replied gently, tightening his embrace around her waist. “They used her to send us to St. Lucia. As I told you before, I strongly suspect your sister has been impersonated and never even knew we were heading there. They kidnapped her to steal her phone and make sure she wouldn’t spill the beans.”
This time Sheila couldn’t hold back the tears that rolled in waves on her cold cheeks. They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and he hugged her tight against him, absorbing her sobs in his chest. He knew there was nothing he could say at the moment that would make her feel better.
He was facing the street holding tight to the woman he loved when he recognized someone walking on the sidewalk across the street. At first, he thought the woman just looked like her, but as she slowly got closer, he knew in the pit of his stomach that this was no lookalike; this was her. He noticed fugitive signs of surprise in the woman’s body language the moment her eyes fell on him. She hadn’t expected to see him here.
He was imagining things. This was impossible. It simply couldn’t be her. Vampires didn’t walk in broad daylight. She wasn’t one of Serafin and Maya’s freaks. She was an elder of the Eastern Covenant and simply couldn’t walk in broad daylight. This had to be a doppelganger. That was the only thing that made sense.
But then she waved at him from across the street and got into a BMW parked along the curb. Michael recognized the license plate immediately. It was the same car he’d spotted in Yellowstone. He’d been right in his assumption that the car belonged to a vampire. But never in a million years could he have imagined that she would be the vampire. She was back… This changed everything.
Chapter 57
A.D. 1679
Judging by the position of the moon in the cloudless sky, the night was already half over when Michael caught the first whiff of trouble. He had been one of five bears patrolling the Potawatomi village since the sun had set behind the sea of red oak, hemlock and maple trees boarding the small community. He paused, sniffing the air for confirmation. The scent was faint but unmistakable: bloodsuckers.
He let out a loud roar of alarm and sprinted towards the origin of the scent. In his peripheral vision he could see two other bears converging towards the northern edge of the village and more were coming out of their teepees. Non-shifters were pouring out as well, armed with spears and arrows. Michael hoped they wouldn’t need to use them, for such an encounter didn’t bode well for the human fighters.
He reached the battleground in less than a minute, but the fight was already raging. Two skinwalkers in their bear form were helping three men and a woman fend off two vampires that were circling the group at a dizzying pace. The two girls seeking refuge at the center of the Potawatomi’s improvised line of defense couldn’t be much older than ten or eleven. They reminded Michael of Wawetseka as a child, and he hoped the young woman wasn’t currently in harm’s way.
He knew the vampires would favor the youngest prey, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t content themselves with an older individual if they couldn’t get to the girls.
Moving at a speed impossible for a man to match, the bloodsuckers harassed the group protecting the girls with vicious attacks, retreating too fast for any of the Potawatomi to react. But the arrival of reinforcements was starting to change the physiognomy of the battle. The vamps were now facing seven skinwalkers in their bear form in addition to Michael’s werebear and a half dozen spear-wielding humans.
Michael saw one of the vampires rushing towards the man on his left, but he was too far away to intervene in time. The vampire effortlessly ripped the spear out of the man’s hands before throwing him across his shoulder. The whole operation hadn’t taken more than a second, but it still hadn’t been fast enough. As the bloodsucker retreated, one of the bears lunged and managed to trip him with his front paws. The vampire fell flat to the ground, releasing his victim in the fall.
Before he had a chance to get back on his feet, he was instantly pinned to the ground by a spear through the heart. Two other bears immediately started chewing at his neck and heart, but as the severed head rolled to the side, the bloodsucker’s body seemed to evaporate.
Michael couldn’t understand what he was seeing. These vampires didn’t behave like any he’d encountered in the past. Before he had a chance to ponder the conundrum further, a second vampire took advantage of the distraction caused by his fallen comrade and grabbed one of the children before running off with his screaming loot in tow.
The bears weren’t fast enough to catch up with the vampire and the spears thrown at him all missed their marks. The bloodsucker had already put a hundred feet between him and his pursuers when an arrow shattered his right knee, sending him tumbling to the ground. He was back on his feet an instant later, only to lose his other knee to a second arrow.
Michael was the first one to reach their injured enemy. Few things angered him more than someone trying to harm a defenseless child, a fact the vampire came to realize in the most painful of ways as Michael used his claws to re
ap the bloodsucker’s heart from his chest before chewing on his neck with the efficiency of a beaver chomping on a log. As he contemplated the lifeless body of the killer, he was relieved to observe that it hadn’t vanished in thin air like his companion’s.
Wawetseka was standing over the bloodsucker’s beheaded corpse, still holding her bow in her right hand, when Michael regained his human form.
“Nice shots,” he told her, nodding towards the arrows sticking out of the bloodsuckers’ knees.
“Good thing I didn’t follow your advice and hide away from the action,” she replied with a wink.
“I can’t argue with that,” admitted Michael, watching the rescued child sobbing in her mother’s arms.
“Where is the other vampire? I saw him die as I was running towards the battle.”
“That’s a great question, Wawetseka. I wish I had an answer.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to believe he might be,” replied Michael pensively.
“So why didn’t this one disappear after you killed him?”
“I’m not sure. I had never seen a vampire evaporate once he died, but now we potentially have three separate instances of just that.”
“What do you think it means, Michael?”
“I don’t know yet, but I have a theory. Now we just need to put it to the test.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We simply recruit a few vampires to partake in our study.”
Chapter 58
“Where’s Olivia?” asked Kewanee, sitting in the passenger seat of Helen’s truck.
On the back seat, Alexei and Elodie were buckling up their seatbelts.
“She wasn’t feeling well and asked for the day off,” replied Helen, starting the car, “but Elodie will replace her so we can still stick to the plan. “Kewanee and I will survey the trail heading west while the two of you will hike the north trail. It will take us a bit longer, so you’ll have to wait for us at the truck when you’re done.”
“I haven’t seen Olivia in days,” said Alexei.
“Neither have I,” replied Kewanee. “What has she been doing?”
Helen turned onto the main road as she replied, “She buried her sister two days ago, so she may be off for a little while.”
“What happened?” asked Kewanee.
“I think her sister was in a nut house or something. Maybe she killed herself,” said Alexei, his rolling Russian accent sounding particularly thick this morning.
“Let’s talk about something else.” Helen’s tone indicated that this was more than a suggestion.
“I guess Olivia will be spending even more time with Biörn now,” said Alexei.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Helen. She sounded slightly ticked off.
“Just the two of them spend a lot of time together, is all I meant.”
“They’re close friends. She’s like a daughter to him,” replied Helen, braking and eventually stopping twenty feet from a group of bison crossing the road.
“Yes. She’s like the daughter he never had…” added Alexei lightly.
Not everyone in the car found this last remark humorous.
Chapter 59
“Are you certain this was a skinwalker?” asked Michael, towering above his kitchen table.
“No I’m not sure, but Daka was convinced.”
“Then it was a skinwalker,” said Michael. The Shoshone boy knew what he was talking about when it came to skinwalkers.
“What does it mean?” asked Sheila from the corner of the room where she was preparing a fresh pot of coffee. “Was that bear part of the Fida’I commando?”
Michael walked to the window and stared in reflective contemplation at an elk munching on the leaves of a tree fifty feet away. “I simply don’t know. It seems unlikely, but at the same time what else could it be?”
“Why unlikely?”
“Because skinwalkers aren’t tough enough to interest Fida’I. No matter how big a skinwalker may be in his animal form, he’s still nearly as easy to kill as any other mortal being. A shot to the head will do the trick.”
“And the bear wasn’t very big either,” said Olivia. “Maybe three hundred pounds, give or take.”
“This makes no sense whatsoever.” Michael sounded frustrated. “A mountain lion, a werewolf, two tigers, now a grizzly. What next?”
Olivia gave Michael a look he wasn’t sure how to interpret. “Don’t forget the vampires,” she said eventually. He hadn’t forgotten about the bloodsuckers. How could he after seeing her across the street last night? She had waved at him, erasing any doubt he might have been mistaken about the identity of the woman. And since when was she a daywalker? Nothing added up.
Was she the one behind it all? Had she come to exercise her vengeance? Had she been the one who’d sent Silvia’s men after them in the forest? Was she responsible for Lucy’s death? Michael couldn’t wrap his head around it.
A knock on the door put a stop to his torture. He opened it to discover Ezekiel standing there.
“Come on in,” said Michael, stepping away to let the wizard through.
“I have some good news,” announced the wizard cheerfully.
“We sure could use some,” said Sheila, pouring some coffee for Olivia and offering some to Ezekiel.
“I’ve found the Fida’I leader.”
“Where is he?” asked Michael.
“Paris!”
“Paris, Texas?” asked Sheila skeptically.
“No, not Texas, nor Idaho, nor any of the fifteen other states that so creatively named one of their towns Paris. I mean the original Paris. The French capital.”
“What is he doing there?” asked Michael.
“Everyone has to live somewhere, my friend. And unlike you, some people enjoy the company of others and don’t bury themselves in the middle of nowhere.”
“Do you know what kind of praeternatural he is?” asked Michael.
“Not yet, but there’s a sure way to find out…” the old wizard replied with a knowing smile.
“When are we leaving?” asked Sheila.
“We?” Ez sounded more amused than surprised.
“Do you really believe I’d let you guys go to Paris without me?”
Chapter 60
“Don’t worry, Michael. I’ll take good care of her,” said Daka, getting into his car in front of Michael’s cabin. Olivia was waving goodbye to Sheila and Ez from the passenger seat. It wasn’t a cheery wave, however. The three of them were catching a flight to Paris later that day, but Olivia had declined their invitation to accompany them. Paris didn’t sound particularly appealing at the moment. Nothing did. She wanted her first time in Paris to be magical, not filled with sorrowful memories.
Of course, Michael had been worried about her safety during his absence and insisted she remained with Daka’s pack the whole time he’d be gone. She’d protested out of principle, but deep inside being with Daka was all she wanted. His support had been instrumental these past few days and only in his company did her heart feel a bit lighter.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“There’s something I need to check around Bozeman, but I thought we could go to the boiling river on the way back before heading to the reservation.”
“That sounds good,” replied Olivia, who liked to relax in this river where scalding water from hot springs mixed with icy cold water coming down the mountains to create a nice warm environment in which to spend an hour or two staring at the wonders of Yellowstone’s landscape. “What do you need in Bozeman?”
“We’re not going to Bozeman proper, but to a rest area on I-90. An eighteen-wheeler burned down with its driver inside yesterday and I need to go check it out,” he replied, exiting Michael’s driveway and heading north.
“Why? Isn’t that the cops’ or the fire department’s job?”
“They’ve done their job. Now I need to do mine.”
“Meanin
g?”
“This is the second vehicle fire around Bozeman in the past couple weeks. Bozeman is a small town. Cars and trucks don’t spontaneously catch on fire all that often. Especially if they’re parked at rest stops.”
“So you think this is murder?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I find it suspicious enough to go have a look. Arson is a vampire’s go to method to get rid of bodies. It’s hard to notice puncture marks on the skin or the total absence of blood if all that’s left of the victim is a pile of charred bones.”
“I see what you mean. So, you think vampires are behind this?”
“With everything else that’s been going on… Yes, the thought has crossed my mind. Maybe some of Silvia’s men are still in town. With a bit of luck, Lucy’s killer could be one of them.”
They reached the park’s North Entrance forty-five minutes later, unaware of the car that had been tailing them at a distance ever since they’d left Michael’s cabin.
*****
As the skinwalker’s car was getting ready to exit the small town of Gardiner located at the North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, the vampire decided to turn around. It would be too dangerous to keep following the vehicle onto the single road heading out of town. She’d be spotted in an instant.
Olivia had been back in Yellowstone almost twelve hours, but never had she been alone. The skinwalker had always accompanied her with the exception of a couple hours after he’d dropped her off at Biörn’s cabin. And meeting with the werebear at this point of the game wasn’t an option. The time would come, but not quite yet.
She suddenly felt weak, almost feverish. She touched her forehead with the back of her hand but found it to be ice cold. Just the way it should be. Her malaise slowly grew, however. Was she in need of blood? She’d drained the sleezy trucker a mere twenty-four hours earlier; she shouldn’t need blood again this soon. But something was definitely wrong with her. Could vampires get sick? She’d never heard of such a thing.