Sweep - Stakes

by Sara Bourgeois

  “Brighton? Please wake up.”

  “This seems to happen a lot,” I said.

  “It sure does,” Remy chuckled. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I thought you were…”

  “Do I look that bad?” I asked. “I look dead?”

  “You’re just very pale,” he said. “I called Annika. She’s getting Marius, and they’re coming here.”

  “More blood?” I asked.

  “More blood.”

  “But what if he’s the one who did this?”

  “I doubt it was. We’ll know because he won’t come to your aid, and then I’ll kill him.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Marius said.

  He’d moved so quickly and quietly that we hadn’t heard him approach. He had another vial of blood. I was happy that I wasn’t going to have to get it directly from the source.

  “I thought I couldn’t have more until I solved the case,” I said.

  “I have to make an exception when one of our own hurt you,” he said.

  “How did this happen?” Marius asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” Meri said as he ran back into the cemetery. “I didn’t notice it before because I was so worried, but the protection wards around Hangman’s House are all down.”

  “How could that be?” I asked. “Only you or I could do that.”

  “Maybe one of the vampires hypnotized you or something,” Annika offered as she walked through the tree line and joined us. “Or Brody did it. The house is his family house too.”

  “That…”

  I wanted to say it was impossible, but was it? While I had no idea why he would have done it, that didn’t mean he hadn’t.

  “You really think he’s capable of doing something like that?” I asked Annika.

  “In the past, I would have said no. Anymore, and I really don’t know. It’s the simplest explanation,” she said.

  “So what vampire did this to me?” I asked. “Was it the killer, or was it one of the villagers who was just angry about yesterday?”

  “Marius, do you have any idea?” Remy asked.

  His anger was barely contained. You could tell that he was furious someone had tried to hurt me, but I didn’t want him turning dark again.

  “I’m okay,” I said to Remy.

  I took his hand and gave it a squeeze. He relaxed a little and gave me a kiss on the temple.

  “That doesn’t make what happened okay,”

  “I don’t know who did it,” Marius said. “I can assure you that the council did not want anything like this to happen. If you’ll continue to work on the case, we’ll do our best to find who did this to Brighton.”

  “Oh, no,” Remy said. “This is over.”

  “It can’t be, Remy,” I said. “We still need the blood. I don’t have enough to completely cure me.”

  “I’ll go into that jail and get enough myself,” he said. “This ridiculousness is done.”

  “Remy,” Annika protested. “Please. We can’t just leave Kyle in jail and you can’t hurt him.”

  “Baby,” I said to Remy, “I appreciate how protective you’re being even though it’s not like you. Remember, I can hold my own. Kyle is innocent and we can’t just leave him in jail. You can’t steal his blood either. None of this is his fault.”

  “Why would your brother do that?” Remy glossed over what I’d said and changed the subject back to Brody, but I took it as acceptance. “Why would he take the protection spells and wards down?”

  “Somethings not right with him,” Annika said. “He’s been changing.”

  “Do you think he’s working with the vampire?” I mused more to the universe than to my companions. “Or, do you think he took it down because he was mad at me, and the vampire who did this just took advantage?”

  “We’ll figure that out,” Remy said. “Right now, what we’re going to do is put the protection spells and wards back up at Hangman’s House, and we’re going to include a new one to keep him out. He’s got his own home, and he can stay there until we’ve got this all sorted out.”

  “He’s my brother,” I protested.

  “Yes, and if he loves you, he’ll understand,” Remy said. “He might not like it, but he’ll understand.”

  Marius went back to the inn after that, and Annika, Remy, Meri, and I went back to my house. We spent the morning putting up new wards and spells. Well, Annika, Meri, and I spent the morning putting up new spells.

  Remy went down to the basement and boarded up the tunnel again. He didn’t want to take any chances that someone could sneak into the house. With the vampires lurking around, it wasn’t safe to have it open anyway.

  When it was done, we met back in the kitchen. “So are we going to find out if Julian did this or are we going to tell Marius to have the council take him?” Remy asked. “Your call.”

  “I want to go to his house and look around,” I said. “If we find anything that looks like he might be guilty of hurting anyone, we’ll tell Marius to turn it over to the council.”

  “We should just turn him over,” Annika said. “It couldn’t be anyone else.”

  “It could,” I said. “And that’s why we need to investigate first.”

  “All right then, that’s what we’ll do,” Remy said.

  “We’re going to need a powerful protection spell. Something much stronger than we used when we went into Kyle’s village. Meri, can you come up with something?”

  “You realize that vampires are the greatest predators on earth, right? That’s why they were able to see us before,” Meri replied.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Whatever. I can totally do it.”

  The ritual to protect us at Julian’s house was easier and faster than I thought given that I knew we needed the most powerful spell Meri could conjure. It turned out that it wasn’t the complexity of the spell but the intention behind it that made it more powerful. That, and Meri put a lot of himself into the magic too. I gave him extra salmon and a tuna steak to make up for it.

  Once we were protected, we took Remy’s car over to Julian’s block and parked down the street. The idea was that we were going to watch for him to go out and then go inside.

  “Don’t you think it would be better if we just went inside?” Annika asked.

  “I think we need to wait for him to go hunt for food.”

  “It’s daytime,” she said. “We should go in now.”

  “Annika, we already know that vampires aren’t actually nocturnal. If we go in there now, even if he is sleeping, he’s not vulnerable to sunlight.”

  “Oh, right,” she said with a sigh. “But you think he’ll go hunting at night?”

  “He’s less likely to be seen if he does, and if he’s really hunting animals, the forest will be quieter.”

  Sure enough, at sundown, we watched Julian slip out his back door and disappear into the field behind his house. For a brief second, he seemed to turn his attention in our direction, and I thought we were had. But I must have been being paranoid because the protection spell worked.

  No one moved at first.

  “We should do this,” Remy said. “Now or never. I imagine he won’t be gone long.”

  The problem with the protection spell was that it protected us from vampires and not annoying human sheriffs. Like the one who turned onto Julian’s street the second Remy popped the lock and we opened the front door.

  We were busted, and that time, Sheriff Black saw us doing the whole breaking and entering thing. It wasn’t like the last time where he’d just seen us outside and we could count on his embarrassment to keep him quiet.

  Nope, that time he was… gunning for us. Meri was able to get away, but the three of us ended up in handcuffs in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser. Even worse, Julian showed back up as he was putting me in the car and told Sheriff Black that he most certainly wanted to press charges.

  I would have thought he’d have been more afraid of Amelda than that, but people�
�� vampires included… did stupid things. Or he wasn’t worried about Amelda because he planned on fleeing Coventry the minute that Gunner pulled away from the front of his house.

  We were taken to the sheriff’s station where we were all photographed, fingerprinted, and thrown into the holding cell without our phones. “What about our phone call?” Annika asked indignantly as the cell door slammed shut on us.

  “You can have that when I’m done with the paperwork,” Gunner said. “Which will probably take a while considering there are three of you. Get comfortable.”

  “Figures,” I mumbled as he walked away.

  “What’s that, Ms. Longfield?” he called back over his shoulder.

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The good news was that the jail cell they used for holding was within earshot of the one that held Kyle. Once Gunner was gone, Kyle called out to us from a cell cattycorner to ours.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We were arrested breaking into someone’s house,” Annika answered.

  “Really?” Kyle asked. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “Then you don’t remember me very well,” Annika huffed.

  “I mean the part about you getting caught. The part about you trying to break into someone’s house sounds completely like you.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and I noticed she’d blushed a little.

  Kyle, the vampire, really had an effect on her. It wasn’t the time or the place for flirting, but at least she wasn’t sad about Brody. And she wasn’t distressed about being in jail either. When I looked at Remy, he looked completely serene as well. Neither one of them seemed too upset that we were sitting in the slammer.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Remy said when he noticed that I was on edge.

  He took my hand, and I took a deep calming breath. I didn’t like being trapped like that, but then it dawned on me that we were only trapped because we were consenting to it. We could have gotten out of there at any time, but we might have had to hurt Gunner to do it. Even just making him pass out again wasn’t an option because he’d already fingerprinted and photographed us. So we would just wait calmly. For what, I didn’t know, but Remy and Annika seemed at peace.

  The only person who might be coming for me was Brody, and that was a fat chance. I decided to use my time wisely, like Mr. Carter had said the one and only time I got detention in school. I knew my mother was going to lay into me for causing problems. Never mind that Brody got detention at least once a week. I was distraught because I tried so hard to be perfect just so that I could have some peace at home. “Ms. Longfield, you might as well use your time wisely,” he said with a soft, reassuring smile. Mr. Carter was my favorite teacher. He hadn’t given me the detention, and the look in his eyes told me that he’d have sent me home on time if he could. But that was neither here nor there while we sat in jail.

  “Kyle,” I said.

  “Hello, Brighton,” he answered back. “I wish we could have met again under better circumstances.”

  “I’m sure we’ll get another chance,” I said. “But in the meantime, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you in here? Why did Deputy Lundgren arrest you?”

  “Oh, that’s an easy one. He saw me leaning over the body. I tried to get away before he could catch me, but I knew he was a human and I couldn’t use my speed in front of him,” he said. “And before you ask, no I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I found her on the square. I was trying to help, but of course, it didn’t look that way.”

  “Why were you there?” I asked.

  “Because you called me and asked me to meet you there,” he said. “I haven’t told anyone that. I wanted to talk to you first. You didn’t really seem like the type to kill a woman and frame a vampire.”

  “I didn’t call you,” I said. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Now that you mention it, the voice was a little deeper. Still sounded like you, but I figured maybe you had a cold or it was an effect of the zombie virus?”

  I knew who it was. My conscious mind didn’t click right away, but somewhere deep down inside, my mind made the connection. “I need to ask you about something else.”

  “Yeah, go ahead. Ask me anything.”

  “I’m sorry about this, but we went to your house to investigate. I hope you aren’t too mad because we were trying to get you out of here,” I said. “But we only found one thing of interest.”

  “What’s that?” Kyle asked.

  “There was a book on your shelf that had a cutout inside. We found a key in there.”

  “A key?” he sounded surprised.

  “Yeah, an old key.”

  “That’s not what I kept in that book, Brighton,” he said, and it almost sounded like he was near tears. I couldn’t see Kyle, but there was a definite hitch in his voice. “It was a letter from my parents that proved that at least at one point, I knew where they were.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “The reason I’m still living in that place, which I have no doubt you’ve figure out is a prison colony by now, is because my parent left when I was a teenager. They ran away and no one has been able to find them. I’m still there because I volunteered to serve their sentence in exchange for the council not hunting them down and killing them,” he said.

  “And you should have turned the letter over to the council,” I said with a sigh.

  “Yeah, but I got that letter years ago. Over a decade has passed. I was still so young when I got it, and I was still so full of hope that they would come back and do the right thing. That maybe they would come back for me.”

  “How would anyone know the letter was there?” I asked.

  “Someone could have been watching me. Perhaps even another villager. They might have sold the information. It’s not like I’m super popular there. I think it makes the others uncomfortable because I’m innocent. Makes them feel convicted.”

  “You’re not going back there,” Remy said. “When we get you out of here, you’re not going back there.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” Kyle said. “But my parents’ sentence isn’t done. I’ve got no choice but to go back. Plus, I’ll probably have extra time added since I left to meet Brighton. It was worth it, though. I’d do it again.”

  “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be in there or here,” Remy said. “You sacrifice yourself for the people you care about without a second thought. You deserve better.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s without a second thought,” Kyle said with a chuckle. “I’ve cursed myself many times for taking on my parents’ burden. I had plans for when I was of age, you know. Plans to leave that place and find someone I’d lost.”

  Annika blushed furiously and tears welled up in her eyes. Kyle had planned to find her when he turned eighteen, but he’d taken on his parents’ prison sentence.

  “He’s right,” Annika said. “You’re not going back there. My grandmother is a powerful woman. She’ll help you if I ask. She’ll do it for me.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” Kyle said.

  “You’re not,” she said. “I’m doing it because it’s what I want. I want my grandmother to help you.”

  “Speak of the devil and she shall appear,” Amelda said with a smile as Gunner let her into the cell area.

  “Grandma!” Annika explained. “You’re here.”

  “Your grandmother tells me that she owns the house the three of you were entering and that she’d sent you there on official landlord business. While it would have been better if you’d alerted the tenant beforehand, there’s nothing illegal about it. So the three of you are free to go,” Gunner said.

  “What about Kyle?” Annika asked as Gunner approached the cell to release us.

  “He’s here on murder charges,” Gunner said through narrowed eyes. “I’m assuming your grandmother doesn’t have anything to say abou
t that.”

  He cast a look over his shoulder at Amelda. She shook her head no.

  “I do not,” Amelda confirmed.

  Before she let us drive away, Amelda told us to leave Julian alone. Remy protested that I had been attacked by a vampire and the only other one in Coventry at the time was in jail.

  “That’s not true,” Amelda said.

  “You don’t think it was Marius?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” she said with a sigh. “For whatever it’s worth, I trust their council. I also don’t believe it was Julian, so please leave him alone.”

  She wouldn’t tell us any more than that. No matter how many times Annika and Remy asked, Amelda was keeping her secrets about Julian. My guess was that he’d gone to her or she’d gone to him, and whatever he’d said to her during their discussion had been convincing.

  That left two possibilities. Either it was the funeral director who had murdered Landers and made it look like a vampire kill, or Kyle was guilty.

  There was so much that didn’t add up. Or it did, and I didn’t want to admit it. Two of those pieces began to click into place when we pulled up to Hangman’s House.

  It took me a moment to recognize the strange car in my driveway, but it was none other than the one that had picked Theodore up from the funeral home the other night while we waited to break in.

  “Guys, do you recognize that car?” I asked.

  “That’s the one from the funeral home the other night, right?” Remy asked. “The one that picked up Theodore. What’s it doing here?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  At about that exact moment, Brody came around from behind the house. He offered us a friendly wave and a smile I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “Be careful,” Remy said as he got out of the car.

  “Hey, guys,” Brody called to us. “My house key doesn’t seem to be working. Brighton, did you change the locks?”

  I hadn’t changed the locks, but they were magically warded against him. It was then that I noticed his smile wasn’t actually reaching his eyes, and that Brody was sort of baring his teeth at us. His mouth was barely open, but if you looked closely, you could tell. He was only just holding back rage.