Blood Red (40 page)

“Not with O’Neill’s dick, Danny Boy. And I’m better than good.”

“Gotta watch that ego, sunshine.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Soulis’s place?”

“Yep. But we’re just gonna watch for now.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Call it a hunch. Something about that girl in there and something about Soulis.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Something about their eyes . . .”

“Let’s go, Richie. I’m bored.”

“Yeah, now that you ain’t staring at that girl’s tits.”

“Man’s gotta have hobbies, Richie.”

“Man should learn subtlety, Danny Boy.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

Alan Tripp was feeling much better after a shower and a meal. So far no one had noticed that he was home. Well, no police cars at least. His closest neighbor, a man he still did not know by name after twelve years, waved when he saw him. Happily, that was after the shower and a set of real clothes.

The shower was wonderful. The meal he barely tasted. Part of him just wanted to get comfortable, but he couldn’t let that happen. So he cleaned the wound on his hand, scrubbing with soap and then rinsing with hydrogen peroxide seemed to take care of any possibility of comfort. The flesh around the wound was angry, red and swollen.

He wrapped it tightly and forgot about it almost as soon as he was done.

He’d planned on getting busy with his weapons, but instead he sat down at his home office and signed onto the Internet. There had to be a few sites about vampires out there.

There were over seven and a half million sites that listed vampires. He sighed and searched through the first fifty or so before his eyes started closing on him.

The sound of glass breaking was what woke him up. It wasn’t a small pane of glass being cracked by a rock; it was more like somebody had swatted at the sliding glass door with a hammer. He’d gone to sleep in front of the computer screen and had rested his weight on both arms. His hands were sound asleep and not at all happy about being awakened.

Groggy and dazed, he listened for any further sounds. At first there was only silence, but he heard the whispers. They were sibilant sounds, not that different from the leaves blowing down the street, but with a pattern hidden inside. Alan stood up and swayed, a bit of the room shifting rudely around him. He hadn’t counted on an infection to begin with, but now it seemed his hand had decided to share the wealth of bacteria with the rest of his body.

Or maybe he’d get lucky and it was just a cold.

Either way, he had to see what was going on; not checking went against everything he believed in. This was his home and he couldn’t sit idly by and do nothing if someone was breaking in. He walked as best he could to the doorway, and leaned against the wall for support.

He listened for the whispers and heard them again. Something about the sound sent shivers across his spine. He listened closer and finally understood what it was. He knew the voices. He couldn’t make out the words, true enough, but he knew the voices.

Meghan was whispering to Avery and he was whispering back.

Hearing them, knowing they were right outside the house and talking, took all of the strength from Alan’s limbs. He made himself slide along the wall until he could look toward the broken window he knew was close by.

What else was supposed to work on vampires? He thought fast and hard and finally decided to move into the living room. There, on the end table where she always kept it, was Meghan’s family Bible. The bookmark that held her place in the book was a crucifix on a leather strap. He pulled the book to him and carried it in his left, wounded hand, the bookmark in his right. He felt heat surging through the wound and clenched his teeth.

Avery stood in front of him, trying to coax his mother through the window and having no success.

“Come on, Mom, you can do it.”

She reached again then backed away, her expression showing her frustration. “I can’t. Something is stopping me.”

Alan watched her try again and fail. The sweet face he’d fallen in love with back in their senior year of high school— long before they dated, but it was love—grew ugly with anger and she snarled. He’d never seen her with that look on her face. He wasn’t sure her face had ever been designed for that sort of rage. She was like an almost perfect copy of the woman he married. He hated the thing outside his back door for that reason; hated it easily as much as he had ever loved his wife.

“Meghan.” His voice broke when he said her name and he felt the sting of tears threatening to escape. God, how he’d loved her; how she had completed him.

Avery turned to face him and so did his wife. “Alan? Can I come in?”

She had to ask. That much was true at least. They couldn’t come in unless they were invited; he wondered if all of the evil things in the world had that limitation.
Maybe
, he thought.
Otherwise how could there be anything left?

“Yeah, hon. Come on in.”

Her sweet, sweet smile was his reward as she gracefully stepped past the window that the two things had shattered.
Broke that fucker apart, Meghan
; he looked at the fragments of glass on the ground and was surprised to see that they cast reflections in the shards. The reflections showed a different Meghan, one who’d been dead for two days and an Avery who’d been dead most of a week.
Same as you did my heart and soul.

“Alan, we’ve missed you, baby.” Yes, oh that one hurt. That perfect smile on that perfect face as she came toward him with her arms opened, ready to hug him and to love him again.

He wished he could believe it for a moment. A thousand times he wished he could believe it as Meghan and Avery came closer.

Alan held out the crucifix, showed it to them and let them see what he carried. Avery flinched, but Meghan kept coming. Alan waved it around to make sure she saw it.

“Silly man,” she smiled and grabbed the cross in her hand, drawing the cord from between his numbed fingers. She held it up for him to see and then kissed it with her full lips. Her eyes lit up with amusement. “It’s just a pretty little trinket if you don’t believe in it.”

Avery bit him on his wrist, sharp teeth cutting through his flesh with the greatest of ease. The Bible fell to the ground as he tried to shake his son free.

Meghan dropped the necklace and reached for his face with her hands. Her strength was amazing. Avery had been powerful, but Meghan was so much bigger than a ten-year-old boy.

Alan kneed his son in the chest and, as Avery staggered back from him, spitting blood and profanities, he brought his left hand around to punch the monster with Meghan’s features as hard as he could in her face. His right hand came into play too, groping along the bookshelf that held most of the family’s mementos.

Meghan barely flinched from his fist, which flared into a lightning blast of pain as he tore the stitches from the infected wound. His right hand caught a picture frame that held their favorite wedding photo. He brought the edge of the frame around and slammed it into her right temple hard enough to bend the polished chrome corner and drive slivers of breaking glass into his fingertips.

She let out a small gasp of pain as the flesh on her temple dented inward, and then Meghan caught his hand in her grip and squeezed until his bones broke and the Kodachrome memory was sliced apart by glass and bathed in his blood.

Avery lunged forward and sank his teeth into Alan’s crotch, gnashing and savaging even as his tiny hands sank into Alan’s thigh with enough force to tear the denim covering his flesh.

Alan did not go gently into the darkness. His family made sure of it.

Boyd woke up to the sound of Danny whistling “It’s a Small World,” and started into consciousness as his partner tapped his shoulder. Before he could tell his friend to shut the fuck up, Danny was pointing.

Ben Kirby and the bombshell were approaching Soulis’s front door.

“You fucken kidding me?” He sat up, fully awake, and looked as the door opened without the two bothering to knock. Jason Soulis smiled familiarly at Maggie Preston. He gave a polite bow of his head to Ben. For only a second, he looked toward their car and, even from a distance, Boyd would swear the man looked right at him through the glass.

A moment later the three were inside and the door closed.

“Did he just wink at us?” Danny chuckled as he asked the words and then shook his head. “I think that prick just winked at us.”

Thirty seconds after that, the crows started landing all over the Crown Victoria. They dropped from nearby trees and from the darkness overhead and landed, making themselves comfortable. There were enough of the damned things settling down that Boyd could feel the car’s shock absorbers compensating.

“What do you think the chances are we’ll get shit on if we climb out?”

Danny laughed out loud. “I’m thinking we get out of this car and we’re gonna be pecked to death.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever see a crow go at roadkill, Richie? They can use them beaks to cut meat like a steak knife.”

“So screw it.” He started the car and activated the wipers. The birds on the windows hopped out of the way, cawing in protest. Boyd started driving.

“We’re just quitting?”

“No, we’re going to do something else instead.” Boyd lit his cigar, filling the car with thick white smoke. When he was done with that, he shifted into drive and they pulled away from the curb.

“You’re getting fickle, Richie.”

“I don’t want to get my eyes plucked out of my head, Danny. Do you?”

He pretended to think about it. “Not really on my list of things to do, you know what I mean?”

“You want coffee?”

“Duh.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” The birds started flying away. He was surprised they’d stayed on a moving vehicle for that long.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“We could go to bed.”

“With you? You’re a sick bastard, Danny.”

“So where are we going?”

“The morgue. I wanna check on a few things. Then I think we’ll check on our old pal, Brian Freemont.”

“Yay. I love field trips.”

“I was wondering how long it would be before you came to see me, Maggie.” Jason led them into his house. “I didn’t expect you to bring a friend.” The notion seemed to amuse him.

“He’s a very good friend to have, Jason. We were both wondering what the hell you did to me.”

“I made you better.” He led them into the dining room. “Sit, be comfortable. I’ll bring refreshments.”

They waited for a few minutes. Ben looked around the place with a nervous eye.

“Nice place.”

“I think Jason does all right for himself.” She’d been with a lot of men who managed to make money hand over fist. Jason was just the first to make her into something that wasn’t human. She rubbed her arms.

Jason came back in, carrying a tray with coffee and an array of small sandwiches. “I believe you would like answers.”

“Yes, please.”

He looked toward Ben, with that amused smile back in place. “Do you want them with Ben in the room?”

Ben made no comment and kept his face perfectly neutral.

“Yes. You can tell me in front of Ben.”

“You trust him that far?”

She nodded.

“Good. Excellent. That’s a rare thing, a trust like that.”

“What did you do to me?”

“I gave you power and the ability to defend yourself from almost anything.”

“Don’t play with me, Jason, please. Tell it to me straight.”

Jason shrugged. “I made you into a vampire.”

Ben looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You’re serious.”

“Of course. It’s a serious subject, Mr. Kirby.”

“A vampire?” Maggie sat very still as she tried to absorb that. “As in coffins, sunlight, and drinking blood?”

“You can forgo the coffin, actually. They’re hardly necessary.” Jason looked from one to the other and let that little smile play around his dark eyes. The worst part was that she wanted him. She wanted to politely ask Ben to stay here and then she wanted to take Jason up to his room and do everything they’d done before all over again. Damn, he was a sexy man.

She shook the thought away. “Okay, why did you make me a vampire and what does that mean, exactly, because I saw my reflection in the mirror not ten minutes ago.”

“There’s a lot to explain, so I’m going to hit the high notes and we’ll go from there.”

They both nodded.

“First, you do not need a coffin. That’s just one of those little things the fiction writers came up with. You also do not need the soil you were buried in. You were not buried. You are not dead. You are very much alive.” He smiled. “That makes you an exception.”

“How so?” Ben asked the question. Jason got an irritated look for a second. He recovered quickly.

“Most vampires are created when you feed and kill.” He shrugged. “They are a different breed. They die, they rise from the grave. They need to worry more about coffins and soil than you do.”

Ben opened his mouth again and Jason waved him silent before he could speak. “I’ll get to it, Ben. Please save the questions for later.”

Ben nodded apologetically and Jason went on.

“There are other ways to make a vampire. Maggie, I suspect you already know what acts we did together that caused this.” Ben closed his eyes. Other than that simple action, he remained perfectly calm.

“But why me, Jason?”

“Because you fit the needs I was looking for.”

“How so?”

“Well, for starters, you’re a very independent woman. You have no strong connections to the world around you, and you fascinate me.” He shrugged. “All three were important to my criteria.”