Chapter Sixteen

One Night in Klamath

We stay until visiting hours end.

We catch him up on all our lives. Dad harps on River to ditch the fishing job in Alaska and do whatever he can to be there for his kids. The phrase ‘don’t make the same mistakes I did’ gets thrown around.

The hardest part is hearing him constantly ask where Mom is. I can’t help but wonder if he somehow knows her soul is missing, though he’s about as magical as a brick.

We all go to the Monarch after leaving the hospital for dinner. This way, no one gets stuck having to do cooking or the dishes.

When we finally leave the Monarch, I feel like we’re on the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. There’s no one anywhere. The diner’s the only building in immediate sight with lights on inside. Feels as if this entire town has become collectively afraid of the dark.

And I think I know why.

Once we get back to the house, the brothers end up on the porch sipping beers and talking. The kids mostly take over the television… or at least try to. No cable, no internet, no satellite… so t hey’re stuck with whatever the antenna brings in. Ruby Grace parks herself half behind the couch, sitting on the floor so she can still read her tablet while it’s plugged in to charge.

Mary Lou and Rick sit on the couch together and look like they’re ready for bed, even though it’s barely nine.

My emotions have more or less settled now. Long, slow illnesses are horrible but at least they give us time to come to terms with the inevitable outcome. The suddenness of death determines who gets the most pain: the person dying, or everyone who cares for them.

If I sit here in the house, my mind is going to wander and dwell on all the bad emotions.

Might as well keep myself occupied with doing some good. With everyone else here reasonably distracted by conversation, television, reading, or sleep, I make my way to the kitchen. A couple cases of bottled water stand in the little nook beside the fridge. Might not be a bad idea for me to take one just in case things get crazy out there. No point taking a cold one out of the fridge, so I pop the plastic on the topmost case and pull a bottle free, then head out the back door.

I’m seconds away from letting my wings out when the screen door squeaks open.

“Where ya going?” asks Tammy.

“Out,” I say.

“Out where?”

I point into the sky.

“With a bottle of water?”

“Okay, fine. I might go vampire hunting.”

“I need more than that, ma.”

I glance back at the house to make sure no one’s come to listen in on us, then whisper back, “I think there’s a clutch of vampires in the area who are, umm… over-feeding. The whole town feels on edge. ”

“I got that feeling, too.” Tammy stuffs her hands in her pockets. “Want help?”

My initial instinct is to tell her to stay here and be safe. But I catch myself before saying that and actually think about the situation before responding.

“Sure… though right now, I’m only doing a scouting mission.” I look around at the woods, not quite liking the feeling I get from them. It’s not a sense of being watched, but it’s also not peaceful. “I think you might help more by staying here with Ant and playing defense. Got a feeling I’ve made us all targets last night.”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, like that’s never happened before.”

I let out a weak laugh.

“Okay.” She nods. “I’ll let Ant know and we’ll stand guard here. Call us if you need backup.”

“Thanks.” I give her a quick hug before unfurling my wings and leaping into the air, patting my pocket to make sure my phone is there. It is.

Let the hunt begin…

***

Flying to downtown Klamath is much faster than driving.

Especially since whoever made the roads around here, particularly the dirt ones, was severely allergic to straight lines. Guess it was cheaper and less back-breaking to let the shape of the land dictate the course of the road.

It only takes me ten minutes to zoom there. Since there’s practically no one outside, it’s easy to find a landing spot free from prying eyes. I swoop down in the alley between Meg’s Coffee and the building that used to be an ice cream shop when I was a kid. Now, it’s a Wendy’s.

Now, I’ve got some vampires to find .

With little to go on, I do the most obvious thing first and start wandering. Each time I spot a missing person poster that someone hung up on a telephone pole, tree, or building, I pause to touch it and try to get a psychic read. Only twice do I experience a sudden sensation. They’re brief, but the notion that those two people are dead is strong. I’m not sure whether I should be frustrated or relieved that the other ten posters didn’t make me feel anything at all.

I’m maybe an hour into this project when I spot the next unique face on a ‘have you seen me’ poster. It’s a boy of about eight. I hesitate, dreading the probability that when I touch this paper I’ll feel like someone killed him. After a moment or two, I summon the nerve to touch all five fingertips to the boy’s face.

Chicago.

Huh?

I’m thinking of Chicago. I tilt my head, trying to squeeze something more from the psychic ether. The boy’s in Chicago. I see a small house in the city. Older couple with him. No sense of fear, just sadness. Right as I start to think he’s possibly a victim of parental kidnapping and currently with non-custodial grandparents, a crunch breaks the tomblike silence of downtown Klamath.

The noise, quiet as it was, is enough to break my concentration on the poster.

Someone is walking up behind me… and they’ve stopped moving after stepping on a little rock or whatever scraped the sidewalk under their foot. It might be nothing. Sure, the entire town is hiding inside at night, but there’s always that one guy who ignores the warnings and goes out anyway. Simply being outside past eleven isn’t proof they’re anything dangerous.

I lower my hand from the poster. Need a way to translate psychic into reality. What better way than Detective Sherbet? He knows my weirdness. I pull my phone out and call him. Alas, it goes to voicemail. Not surprised. If he’s not on an active investigation, he’s usually asleep by this hour. He’s getting older. Won’t be too much longer before he retires. Hmm. Should I try to befriend his understudy and let the guy in on the crazy? It’s really damn helpful to have someone on the inside who I can talk to in plain truth.

Anyway, I leave him a voicemail with the details of the boy and that my psychic intuition tells me he’s in Chicago with two older people who are most likely grandparents or somehow related to him. That ought to be enough of a lead for the police to find him. All I can do is hope the sense of sadness I felt was the boy missing his actual parents who should have him because he was taken away… and not because they died to the vampires here.

Another scrape happens behind me. Rubber on pavement. The sound is so soft most people wouldn’t have noticed it. I note it but don’t react. My ears tell me the person following me is about fifteen paces back and not gaining ground. From the weight and timing of the steps, I’m sure it’s a man. Inner alarm is not going off. I’m not too worried. Meanwhile, I make a right turn at the next corner. Sure enough, my shadow makes the same turn.

Pretty obvious he’s following me now.

Whoever is behind me is also giving off a supernatural presence. I do the absolute dumbest thing possible for a woman walking alone at night, and turn down a small secluded alley. As soon as I move out of view of the street, my inner alarm gives off a mild warning prickle.

I walk about twenty steps into the alley before the guy gives up on trying to be subtle and rushes at me from behind.

At this, I whirl around to face him.

He’s about six feet tall, stocky, and smells like a wet dog. He’s cleared the distance between us in under a second, which doesn’t give me a whole lot of time; still, I get my hands up, grab him by the shoulders and pivot him over my left leg in a Judo style hip toss. Unfortunately, the maneuver costs me my grip on the plastic water bottle I’ve been carrying. It hits the alley and rolls away. Most of the force propelling him into the nearby wall is from his charge. I didn’t really throw him very hard.

He bounces off the bricks and whirls to face me.

… and I stop short, jaw open as soon as I recognize him.

“Mack?” I blurt.

A bestial snarl escapes past long, inward-curving fangs. His irises are a yellow-green hue, his face gray as death. In the half second or so I look at him, I’m convinced this might be Mack’s body, but Mack is not here.

He lunges at me, hissing and growling. We grab each other by the throat and spin in circles several times while I struggle to find the leverage to throw him again. Damn, he’s strong. I teeter backward. There’s nothing for me to brace against. He’s keeping me away from the wall.

There’s a small difference between him forcing me over onto the ground and me flinging myself backward—which is what I do. The motion lifts him off the ground and allows me to plant my foot in his gut. Rather than crash down on top of me like he’s trying to do, I send him flying up and over me to land on the pavement a short distance away as I skid on my back.

Whatever is going on with him is bad enough that he’s not mentally processing the fact he’s not easily overpowering me. In less than a second, he’s back on his feet and charging again. I flip over into a push-up position and shove hard. Vampire strength has me going straight up. Mack charges by under me and runs face-first into the wall.

My wings unfurl, keeping me aloft.

This is not Mack. This is his body. Something else is in control. I think that until he growls, “What the frick? ”

I almost laugh.

Mack’s one of those—well, he was one of those guys—who really hated cursing. In fact, he used to scold anyone who worked for him if they used bad language. Somehow… the vampire Mack is still retaining that part of his personality.

Oh damn. I really don’t want to do this but… it’s a mercy.

With Mack pushing himself off the wall and starting to circle under me, I dive bomb for the water bottle. He tackles me right as I grab it. We hit the ground together, him on top of me with his head right behind mine. Before he can sink his fangs into me, I twist myself around and ram my left elbow into the side of his head.

A dull thud and faint bone crunch accompany him flying off me into a logroll that comes to a halt with a loud whump against a dumpster. I don’t bother to waste time getting to my feet just yet; instead, I rip the cap off the water bottle as blue light floods the alley.

Dammit, I can’t hesitate. He’s a threat to innocent people around here. I could have been a mortal woman walking home.

When he comes charging back at me again, I throw myself to the side, somersaulting out of his way and let him run headlong into the other wall. He staggers back, whirling to face me with the most bewildered expression. It’s like watching a dog try to carry a long stick through a doorway and not understanding why it can’t get inside. He’s baffled that I’m fast enough to move away from him over and over again.

“I’m sorry, Mack.”

He growls and charges.

The poor guy’s motions are so direct and unsubtle, like he’s one of the expendable bad guys in a Stephen Segal movie who obligingly sets themselves up to be smashed. I close my eyes and swing. My sense of touch tells me I took his head off. The jolt in the handle of my sword when it hits the spinal cord is obvious .

Mack’s body plows into me and knocks me back a step or three… before it, too, disintegrates into ashes and bone dust. I hold my breath, both to avoid the horrible smell and to stop myself from inhaling Mack’s particles.

After a moment, I open my eyes. There’s nothing left of him but clothing and a vast smear of grey powder with some bone fragments. It looks as if someone dumped a crematory urn on the ground. I crouch over the remains and pick up one of the larger bone lumps. It’s about the size of a hen’s egg, but so eroded I can’t tell what bone it used to be. Maybe Max can use it to figure out what’s going on here.

“Hi, Sam,” says Mack.

The voice sounds simultaneously far away and right next to me.

I look in the direction it came from and make out a barely discernible human figure made of glowing light. ‘Glowing’ is perhaps too strong a word. ‘Faint luminosity’ works better. He’s hard to see it, even at night.

“Mack?” I ask.

“Yeah. It’s me… or what’s left of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not really in there, anyway. I’m being controlled by another. If you kill my flesh now, I can at least move on to the Creator. Better than watching my old self potentially harm innocent people. What you just destroyed wasn’t me. I was stuck inside, yes, but something else took over my body. Thank you for destroying that abomination.”

I stare at him, confused.

“Seems you’ve had an interesting life, Sammie.” Mack chuckles. “I don’t understand this crap, but I can tell that you’re something… else.”

“Yeah.” I sniffle. “It’s not fair. You were such a nice guy. You didn’t deserve this. ”

“Bad things happen and they don’t care who they happen to.” The blurry humanoid outline of light drifts closer to me. “I don’t have much time. The cosmic vacuum is pulling on me pretty hard... back to the Creator, I believe.”

“Do you want me to talk to Gwen?”

“Yes, but that’s not why I’m lingering here.” The amorphous shape extends a projection toward me in the rough shape of an arm, like he’s resting his hand on my shoulder. His touch is icy. “The creatures you’re hunting were made by the one who attacked your mother.”

I blink. “Wait. He’s still here?”

“Yes. When he failed to do what he was sent to do, he went rogue, so to speak.”

“Who was he following?” I ask for the sake of clarity.

“Elizabeth,” says Mack. “It was she who he stopped following.”

Okay, this is a bit too much. “How the hell do you know about her, Mack?”

The ghostly form shrugs. “It’s a ghost thing. Once you die, you learn all sorts of crap.” He chuckles.

“That’s the great cosmic irony,” I say. “You learn all the secrets of the universe at last, only to forget them as soon as you reincarnate.”

Mack’s ghostly laughter makes the hair on my arms stand up. “No reincarnation for me, lass. You know that. I might not be your typical vampire, but I was a vampire, of sorts.”

I decide to change the subject. “So, you’re saying this guy…”

“Elizabeth sent him after your mother decades ago. He tried to turn her into a vampire and somehow failed.”

“We’re not talking about the vampire I killed lat night, are we?”

“No, that was one of his creations. The main guy is still out there. ”

“Where’s my mom’s soul, Mack?”

“I’m not sure about that, but I think he knows. His name is Hans Bauer. He’s like the main vampire out here.” Mack’s form dims, as if he’s starting to fade away. “He’s not like his creations, though he’s slowly becoming more like them.”

I gesture at the dust on the ground. “What’s this? Vampires aren’t supposed to explode when they die.”

“What can I say? His creations are special. He has an amulet of some sort. Calls it the ‘Eye of Anubis’. He doesn’t know the power it holds. Thinks it’s just a cool fashion accessory.”

“Umm…”

The ghost drifts to the side, dimming more. “The amulet has power. It’s important. You must get it away from him.”

“Okay.”

“And please…” Mack reaches out to me. “Tell Gwen what really happened to me. Make sure she’s okay.”

I look him in the eye—or at least into the blurry smear of light that approximates the shape of a human head. “I will.”

And with that, the faint apparition disappears entirely.

Now I’m really angry. The same vampire who attacked my mother and vastly changed the course of my childhood is the one responsible for Mack’s death, too—and all the other deaths happening around here. I already wanted to stop him, but now I’m going to take pleasure in it.

Hmm... if Gwen usually opens the Monarch, she’d be asleep right now.

I decide to wait until morning. As on edge as everyone is around here, someone showing up unannounced at this hour isn’t going to go over well at all.

So… I keep walking around like live bait.

One down. Some unknown number to go.

Alas, I do not run into any other undead before 2:00 a.m. rolls around and I decide it’s time to call it a night.