Discovery of Death (4 page)

“
And is he—”

“
Yes, done. There were also three others. Two had been together, wandering the Forks, searching for late-night strollers. The third was in the Exchange, probably preying on the homeless.”

“
Cop out.”

“
Maybe, but I was only able to take him down. Don’t know if he infected anybody or killed them altogether. He had fresh blood around his mouth and the front of his shirt was soaked, so I suspect he had bitten at least one person. Maybe more.”

“
Seems each one we take down only brings forth others.”

He took his coffee back, raised the mug high as if in a toast. “Ah, but if we didn’t catch them, they’d be everywhere by now. The city would have been overrun a long time ago.” He brought the mug to his lips and took a long, hot sip. The cup was now empty. “Care for more?”

“
I’ll get my own,” she said with a smile, then went to the cupboard and got her own mug. As she prepped her cup, she said, “I’ll take tonight. Alone.”

“
I thought we’d be going together?”

“
That was the plan, but I’m worried about Rose. She’s taking Zach’s disappearance really hard.”

“
Ah, she’ll get over it.” He got to work making another cup of coffee for himself.

“
Maybe one day, but right now he’s all she thinks about.”

“
Puppy love. She’ll be fine.” He added a shot of sugar to his coffee. “Besides, how do you know he’s all she thinks about? Has she said anything?”

Shelly shook her head. “No, but she doesn’t need to. I can see it in her eyes. Half the time she’s a million miles away.”

“
Hm,” he said, and tapped the edge of his spoon on the mug’s rim. “Want me to talk to her?”

“
Maybe, but right now I think it’d be best to just give her some room and let her do whatever she wants to make herself happy. Safety in consideration, of course.”

“
Of course.”

“
It also means we should wait on telling her.”

“
About us?”

She nodded and brought her mug to her lips.

“
Agreed.” It had seemed Rose was at the perfect age to be told about her special heritage, was old enough to handle the truth.

The vampire community also seemed to have a code about age. They seemed to slaughter children and drain them of so much blood that turning wasn’t possible. Those about thirteen or fourteen and up seemed to be the ones they didn’t drain completely. Part of it, Marcus suspected, was teenagers were old enough to make sense of the power they’d inherit and, with guidance, be able to control it much more quickly. Kids and their impulses . . . how many would long for their families and make a spectacle of themselves, flying about the city, climbing up walls, moving at superspeed—it was too much of a risk for the vampires. Right now, their survival depended on their secrecy and operating in the shadows.

In a way, sadly, the slayers were part of the problem despite so
desperately trying to be the solution. With the frequency of vampire feedings or turnings, many people went missing as a result. Fortunately, the slayers had people in the hospitals, morgues, government, media, and emergency services. With the right cover story or direct handling of the body, much of what went on never reached the public ear.

Likewise, the undead had certain people in their employ to help provide blood for them, recently deceased corpses, and those with the ability to fudge the details of certain “discrepancies” when it came to the dead.

If it was needed, relatives of the deceased were bought off for their silence. However, the undead, like the slayers, had to be careful with who they dealt with.

If the vampires knew one thing all too well, it was that almost anyone could be a slayer. Not that slayers were common, but having been the protectors of the city since its inception, the slayers were able to have at least one of their team in every major industry, never mind freelancers on the side. Everyone from a mom in the playground all the way to a police officer could be deadly.

Marcus set his mug down. “Time to check inventory.”

Shelly nodded, finished her coffee, and the two headed down the stairs, past the family room and to the basement door. Shelly pulled a key from the coiled band around her wrist and stuck it in the lock of the knob. Once open, they went down the flight of stairs and hit the power switch at the bottom. The room lit up, revealing an arsenal of weaponry for their occupation.

Crossbows lined the wall across from them, and below those was a long rack loaded with silver stakes. Silver-bladed swords and machetes lined the wall adjacent, and beneath those, a bin of garlic-laced steam grenades.

There was a door against another wall, locked and chained. If anything, it was their trophy room, a place to store any vampires that didn’t disintegrate upon receiving a stake to the heart.

That was the problem with turning: it could be unpredictable and not everyone transformed the same.

In the middle of the room were bullet- and slash-proof his-and-her body armor, worker jumpsuits both light and dark, as well as a rack with hanging utility belts.

Good thing we invested wisely,
Marcus thought. Most of the stuff in the room was reasonably affordable. It was all the silver they had to buy that kept the cost up. Usually either him or Shelly would make trips to goldsmiths and jewelry stores and buy the purest silver items they could find. They’d take them back to the secret house and, at the tool station further back in the basement, use their own homemade smelting operation to create the weapons as required. Most of the stuff was reusable, as when a vampire disintegrated on impact, the silver stake would remain behind. However, there were the occasional run-ins that forced them to leave their weapons behind, or if a vampire was stabbed in the leg or arm, the creature would sometimes take off with the weapon. The kicker was, though ordinary wooden stakes would do, the vampire still had a chance to heal if the stake was removed quickly enough. A silver one, however, would poison the bloodstream and the bloodsucker would die regardless, whether right away or a couple hours later.

Shelly was already busy taking her pick of a sword and knife off the wall, while Marcus got her armor ready and began loading the pouches on the utility belt with garlic steam grenades, small knives, cell phone—just for their secret operations—and a few other things.

Though he knew Shelly could handle herself and had demonstrated such many times in the past, he still didn’t like the idea of her going out alone.

He prayed nothing would happen to her. Not tonight, not ever.

6

“
Z
ach, twilight is
upon us,” his mother said. She shook him gently on the shoulder.

Zach opened his eyes. He lay in his coffin, its plush lining a cradle to his body. Its heavy stone lid was no longer on top of it, and the wooden ones were open.

“
Are you rested?” she asked.

He merely nodded, then sat up. His mother stood upon the stone lid, which was on the floor.

His mother.

Though it was embarrassing to admit, she was beautiful, with perfect pale skin, bright red lips and silky-smooth black hair. Her black dress didn’t have a wrinkle on it. Oddly, too, referring to her as his mother seemed natural.

After meeting her this morning, she urged him to get some rest and saw to it he was comfortable in his coffin before mysteriously—and telekinetically—lifting its heavy lid, closing the wooden ones, the stone one sliding into place on top of the stone box. He had asked her why even put the lids on if it was just them inside the tomb.

“
For our protection,” she had said, “in case a stranger came along during the day. Not only would the daylight streaming in harm us, but in our weakened and exposed state, we might not be able to defend ourselves against them.”

Before she had closed the lid, however, she leaned in and gently kissed his mouth. At first, all he wanted to do was scream and get this woman off him, but just as quickly as the impulse came, so did it vanish and the brief peck she gave him was a welcome one. The love, adoration and care that oozed from her kiss was enough to let Zach know in his heart of hearts that everything was going to be okay. She closed the lid and he dreamed.

It began as a nightmare, one where this same woman, who moments ago carefully tucked him in, was tightly gripping his body, her face shoved deep into the crook of his neck. He could barely see what was going on with all her black hair in his eyes. It was all feeling: the entrapment, the strong sense of helplessness, the pain. He remembered two sharp prongs digging deep into his neck, then a moment later the gush of warm blood that leaked out along his shoulder and down his back. The sound of gulping—
her
gulping. The fiery pain in his neck built and built until green stars and black inky whirlpools filled his vision. His body went numb, every muscle locking, the spasms rich and agonizing. He wanted to scream, but he could scarcely open his lips without receiving a mouthful of hair.

The pain took him, spreading from his neck all through his back and shoulders and finally throughout his entire body. He shook, jerked and twisted. Then, finally, release. The pain stopped instantaneously and a rush of darkness swooped into his sight and enveloped him completely.

Moments later, he was back in the coffin, his mother shaking his shoulder.

“
I had . . .” he started.

“
You remembered,” she said.

“
It was real?”

“
It’s always real. Your first dream as one of us. Though you slumbered in your bed, you finished being reborn into our world. The first step is always the dream, the recollection of your change.”

He replayed the dream over in his mind’s eye, wincing. “I don’t remember, um, changing.”

“
The darkness,” she said. “That was when it happened. Though it seemed to you to last only an instant, in fact you were lying among us for several months.”

“
Several months!” Zach bolted out of the coffin and ran to the center of the crypt.

“
Calm down, my son.”

“
Stop calling me that!”

“
But I am your mother.” Her voice was innocent, as if she truly believed it.

I believe it, too,
he thought. More so, he
knew
it. Yet this lady in front of him was not the woman he identified as “mother.” That person was someone else. He just couldn’t remember a face or a name.

“
What’s with all the shouting?” came a gruff voice behind Zach.

He turned around to see a man sitting up in another coffin. The man appeared in his thirties, with black hair and brown eyes like the woman’s. He wore a fine suit, but one Zach instinctively knew was out of date, probably by a couple of decades.

“
Your son has awoke, my dear,” the woman said to the man.

“
Ha!” The man jumped out of the coffin, seemed to vanish into thin air for a moment, before reappearing right in front of Zach. “So it is you, my boy. When your mother said she was going to bring you to us, I told her that you might be difficult to find. I guess not. After all, you look just like her.”

“
What?” Zach said.

“
He suffers memory loss, dear, just like Wil had.”

The man furrowed his brow. “Oh, I see. Well, no matter” —he slapped a hand on Zach’s shoulder— “you’ll come around soon enough.”

Zach knew he should run and get away from these people as fast as he could, but his legs seemed locked and his feet glued to the floor.

“
Also seems your mother’s keeping you here, huh.”

“
I’m just doing what’s best. He can’t go running. He’s already been out of the tomb,” she said.

“
Is that so?”

“
But he came back, as if he knew this was where he belonged. If he leaves, it will have to be with one of us, or with Wil, maybe Cassie.”

“
Who’s coming with me where?” came another voice.

Zach turned to see the remaining closed coffins in the room were now open. One had a girl, the other a young man. Both seemed to be in their early twenties.

“
Wil, Cassandra, I’d like you to meet your brother Zach,” his mother said.

The girl was beside him in an instant and wrapped her arms around him. “Finally, finally, we’re together. Mom said you were the last to join us. Oh, I have so much to tell you.”

“
Hush up, Sis,” the young man said as he simply strolled over from his own coffin. “The guy just got here and, judging by the look on his face, doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on.”

“
Memory loss,” Zach’s mother sang softly then looked away.

“
Oh, just like me,” Wil said. “Cool. I remember what that was like. Scary, weird, yet seeming almost natural. Being here, I mean. That’s why you haven’t run yet, am I right?”

Looking at Wil was like looking in a mirror. Zach was merely just a younger version with smoother features.
Run?
“I can’t run.”