Chapter 18: Will

Chapter 18: Will

It was not going to be like searching for a needle in a haystack. From Alexis’s account, I already knew two key details about the vampires who had killed her parents. One: They spoke in thick British accents. Two: One of them had slash scars on his face.

I was a little apprehensive about how I would go about finding two particular vampires, but then it struck me. I was the alpha. All I had to do was issue a command to my pack, and they would do as I wished. So I did exactly that. I issued the order to the entire pack to keep an eye out for two particular vampires, describing them as best as I could.

Alexis felt like a changed person after the visit to the cemetery. While we did not meet all that much after that, I checked in on her every now and then at the warehouse. Not too much as to appear clingy and not too little as to make her think I was disaffected. Despite her opening up to me and getting some sort of closure by visiting the cemetery, I could still feel that she was in pain.

I know how I would have felt if Edward, the man responsible for my misery, had still been alive, and I would have been incapable of taking revenge. I was no stranger to revenge. Contrary to popular opinion, it did change things. At the very least, it doled out justice. At best, it evened the karmic scales of the universe.

I trusted my pack. In the brief time that I had spent as their alpha, I had trained them well. I could trust that they’d be able to hold their own if they got into a fight. Lately, it seemed that they had started accepting me as their leader. They were friendlier to me now. Sometimes, they’d invite me to their homes for tea or dinner. People were warmer towards me than when I had first assumed the role. The most probable explanation for that was that I’d kept a lid on my anger and my outbursts for long enough for people to overlook or forget it.

In the meantime, Alexis told me that she was keeping a tab on what Maurice was doing through the emulator phone. Mostly he was concerned with winning the next mayoral election. For the most part, he was lying low. I recalled the night when I had spied on him meeting Ralph in person. Alexis corroborated it and told me that she had seen him come out of Beckett Pharma’s building. Both of us concluded that the man, as deceptive as he was, played things close to the chest and did most of his dealings in real life rather than on the phone. That would explain his sparse cellular activity.

Eventually, it turned out to be Vincent who tracked down the two vampires. I hadn’t said this to anyone, but I knew deep in my heart that if there was someone in the pack who could accomplish this task, it was Vincent. That boy was the smartest kid I had ever met. Other than Maliha, who was smart but in an extremely twisted way. Vincent was more along the lines of wholesome.

“So I did a little spying, but don’t worry, I was careful enough not to get seen or caught,” Vincent said to me on the eve he made his discovery. We were in my home’s living room, sitting at the table, drinking beers.

“So, how did you find them?” I asked. “Was it difficult?”

“It was rather difficult now that you mention it. There are hundreds of vampires roaming around, and almost any two of them could match the description that you gave us. At night, they spread all over Fiddler’s Green, across the forest, and everywhere in between, ensuring their trucks make it out of the cove safely onto the highway. I figured it was going to be impossible to track all of them at night. But then, the best idea came to my mind,” Vincent said, barely able to hold himself back with excitement. His eyes were lit with fascination, and his face kept curling into a grin. “They all leave from the same place. The cove! That’s their only entrance and exit point.”

“That does make sense. They live there, after all,” I agreed. “Their ships go into the cove, and their trucks come out of it.”

“Exactly! So, if there was ever going to be a time to identify two vampires from a sea of hundreds of them, it was at the entrance. And I did that. I found them.”

“How?”

“Well, in the morning, when the vampires can’t come out into the sun, when they’re hiding deep within the darkness of the cove, I snuck around to the entrance and hid a long-range wireless mic there. Then I stayed put and waited for the night while listening to the mic’s audio. When the vampires started coming out, most of them were talking in your standard American accent, except for two chatty fellows who were talking in a cockney accent. I tagged them using binoculars and even confirmed that one of them had scars on his face. Here’s the best part, though: I know exactly where they are!”

“Good man, how do you know that?”

“Well, I followed them all night. They don’t just patrol the roads.”

“Go on, then. What is it that they do?”

Vincent grinned harder. “I guess they’re supposed to be on patrol shifts, but they take a detour in the forest and shack up in an abandoned building. I guess it was a forest ranger’s station. But that’s not even the interesting part. They’re apparently dealing some methamphetamine on the side. I peeked in through the window and saw them messing around with stolen high school laboratory equipment, making crystal meth.”

“Is that a drug?”

“They call it poor man’s cocaine. It’s quite dangerous and bad for your health. It rots your teeth. You can overdose on it and die,” Vince said. “I figure they’re dealing on the side.”

“And they gather there every night?”

“I’ve been following them for two nights and found them in there both times,” Vince said.

“One last thing,” I said. “When the vampires were leaving the cove, did any of them carry sniper rifles with them?”

“Not a single one of them had a rifle,” Vincent said. “Why?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, feeling a bit dumb for being played like that. But that would change tonight. More importantly, I had to break the news to Alexis.

***

It was not a look that I had ever seen on her face before. I was suddenly apprehensive, thinking that I had made a huge mistake bringing her to where the two vampires hung around. This could get ugly. Alexis did not move nor scowl or quiver. She simply stared as a predator does while stalking its prey.

“All this time, I have been tortured with the recurring image of these two assholes killing my parents, and this is what they’ve been doing? Dealing drugs?” Alexis whispered. Then she stared at me, saying, “I am glad you brought me here. I needed to see this. It’s going to make killing them all the more satisfying.”

“Wait, kill them?”

But Alexis was not listening to me. In the bleakness of the forest, she shifted into her wolf form and crashed through the window, landing atop the two vampires and pinning them to the ground. She yawed at them, howling at the top of her voice.

I jumped in after her and yelled, “Wait!”

Alexis glared at me while still pinning the vampires under her.

“Before we do anything rash, shouldn’t we find out why they killed your parents?” I asked, gently approaching Alexis.

“Oi, bruv, what’s all this about, then?” The vampire with the scars on his face spat. “You can’t come barging in here, threatening to kill us like that!”

Alexis roared at him, making him cower and whimper in a fetal position, but then promptly stepped back.

I took charge before things could get out of hand, fishing the rope out of my backpack and tying the vampires together with their backs to each other.

“We’re innocent vampires, mate. We ain’t got no quarrel with you,” the other one said.

“I know that’s a lie,” I said, ensuring that their bounds would hold. Then I stepped back, waiting for Alexis to shift back into her form so she could do the interrogation herself.

“Remember me?” she asked once she had shifted back.

“Sorry, love, you’re going to have to be more specific,” the scarred-faced vampire said, then burst into giggles.

Alexis took a crowbar lying in the room and slammed it against the vampire’s head.

“Now, if I were sober, I’d have felt that and would have gone ‘ow!’ But we make the best meth around here. Not even Heisenberg can come close,” he said, spitting out a broken tooth.

“You killed my parents,” Alexis said, seething with fury. “That night, in the car, you and your friend here came out of nowhere and killed both my mom and dad. How can you forget something like that?”

“Oh,” Scarface sighed. “That. Well, we ain’t forgotten that, have we, Campbell?”

The other vampire said, “Right you are, Elliot. We’ve not forgotten that night. We don’t forget any nights. We’re vampires, for fuck’s sake. Hell, Elliot and I even remember when we came to the States from good old Great Britain by ferry almost a century ago. Budding young vampires, we were, aye.”

“I’m not interested in your life story,” Alexis spat, holding the crowbar threateningly in her grip. “Why did you kill my parents?

“It was nothing personal. I swear!” Elliot pleaded. “We were under orders.”

“Whose orders!?” I yelled. It wasn’t fair that she had to do this alone. I grabbed Elliot by the collar and shook him fiercely.

“Fine!” Elliot yelled. “It was Ralph, our leader. He said he wanted the alpha and his mate gone, and we were the ones who got picked to do that.”

“But there’s more,” Campbell said. “Which we’ll only tell you if you free us.”

Alexis knelt on her knee and faced Campbell, her eyes red. “Neither you nor your friend are going to make it out of here alive. I will kill you both for what you did to my parents. If you tell me who was behind it, I’ll make sure you get a swift death. Otherwise, your torture will be stretched from now till the end of eternity. You’ll wish you were dead, but you’ll be worse off.”

“Don’t kill us, please,” Campbell burst out crying. “If I remember correctly, we did let you live that night. Won’t you show us some mercy in return?”

“Tell me who gave the order!” Alexis said, ramming the crowbar into Campbell’s midriff.

I could hear the sound of bones breaking as the crowbar made contact with Campbell’s body.

“It was the bloody wolves, all right? The two of you run around thinking that you’ve been wronged by the vampires. You don’t even know that there are wolves within your precious pack who have been working with the vampires for ages!” Campbell yelled, partly in agitation, partly in pain.

I grabbed him again and held his face up, asking, “What the fuck do you mean by that?”

“The order to have her parents killed came from the werewolves. Between us, we figured out the wolves wanted to plant someone new as the alpha, someone who’d be up for a little symbiotic relationship between the two races. We don’t know who gave the order,” Campbell said. “All we know is, after her dad bit the dust, your new alpha Maurice has been working with us from the first day. He gets a share out of every single shipment we sell.”

“Who ordered the hit?” I asked again.

“We don’t know!” Elliot yelled out. “We don’t know. But the same person who ordered the hit on her parents ordered your kidnapping too!”

If I wasn’t shocked already, this revelation was enough to suck the life out of me.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“We’ve been around for a long time. You don’t think we don’t remember Wilhelm Grimm? You haven’t changed a day since you disappeared,” Elliot said. “Someone’s been working against you for a long time from within your pack. Yep. We had a hand in making you disappear all that time ago. Do you think some eccentric occultist can get the drop on a werewolf just like that? No, sir. We helped him. We were there in the forest that night as a contingency. Someone has had it in for you from day one. And they’ve done a good job of maintaining their anonymity.”

Whatever drug-fueled story these two idiots were concocting was simply not possible. Who had been conspiring against me back then? Everyone from my pack was like family to me. But if there was even a sliver of truth to what these two were saying, then who was this mysterious person within my pack working against me? Why? What had I done to them?

“Enough chatter,” Alexis said. “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to barter for your life with these half-assed stories.”

“We can prove everything we just said. From your parents’ murder to his kidnapping,” Campbell said. “Please, just let us go.”

“One last thing,” I said, trying to regain my mental footing. “The other night when I was fighting with your leader, Ralph, were there really rifles aimed at me?”

Elliot started howling with laughter. Campbell joined him. “Rifles? You think we’re Blackwater or something? We ain’t got no rifles, mister. It was a scare tactic, and it worked. We were just pointing fucking lasers at you,” Elliot said.

I didn’t get a chance to confront them any further. Alexis had shifted into her wolf self again, and before I could stop her, she was tearing away at the two vampires. It was too gratuitous, making me look away.

All I could hear were the sounds of limbs coming off and the vampires screaming in pure agony in their final moments.

I didn’t dare turn around. I had been through this before. It was not a pretty sight when I escaped and murdered Edward and his men in the manor. I had no heart to see what carnage Alexis had wrought. Revenge was a messy business.

“I think I’m ready to go home,” Alexis said from behind me.

“Did it help?” I asked, not turning around.

“Avenging my parents? Yes. It helped,” Alexis said slowly.

“Then I think you should come home now,” I said. “Your real home.”

“I would like that very much,” she said.

I held her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed mine back.

“Thank you for this, Will,” Alexis said. “For all of it.”

***

Late at night, troubled by all the information the vampires had shared with me, I went to Fred’s little cottage. I was surprised to find him still awake at that hour, watching some war documentaries on an old TV set, smoking a pipe, and drinking his tea.

He poured me some tea, and we got to talking. I shared everything that I had learned that day. I wanted to know if he knew of any such conspiracies. After all, apart from me, he was the only member of the original pack that had survived so far.

“Pay no heed to all that talk,” Fred said at long last when I had finished speaking. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“You think so?”

“All I know is, I knew nothing of all this conspiracy before you mentioned it tonight. I think that a vampire, when cornered, will say just about anything to try and get out alive. You said so yourself; they deceived you with that whole sniper and laser bit. Who is to say they weren’t trying to deceive you again?” Fred said between taking puffs of his pipe. “We loved you, all of us. When you brought us to Fiddler’s Green, we came here without so much as a question. All of us were loyal to you. Don’t tell me you’d take the word of those bloodsuckers over that of your literal blood.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said, though still not satisfied. “Maybe I’m being paranoid.”

“Look not at the past but what the future holds,” Fred said. “Think of what you can do with the time you’re given. The opportunities that you have now that you didn’t have back then. Long after I’m gone, you’ll still be here, it seems. Live. For me, for all those who are gone and all the billions who came before you. Live. Don’t dwell on something that you can’t do anything about.”

I bid him farewell and went back to my home, pondering over everything that had happened today. It depressed me to think that someone had been working against me, that someone had a hand in my kidnapping, and that someone was—

I forgot what I was feeling gloomy about.

As I parted the curtains from my bedroom, I could see Alexis’s house. For the first time since I had been here, the lights inside her house were on.

And just like that, my sadness fleeted away, giving birth to hope.

Maybe there was some truth to what Freddie had said. It might be good to live a little.