Blood Moon (6 page)

They walked into the hall of records with some apprehension. Darby and Rowan didn’t know much about the Keatons; all the information they had for the help desk was just an approximate date.
 
They had come up with this date based on Grandpa’s George’s date of birth and went back at least two generations, since George had used his Granddad Norm as a reference.
 
The year they approximated was 1860.
 
They didn’t figure, in such a small town, there would be too many Keatons so they crossed their fingers and asked the nice lady behind the desk.

“Hi. We were wondering if you could help us?” Darby asked.

“I can try. What or whom are you looking for?”

“Well, we found a reference to a family named Keaton that lived here in Oljone.
 
We don’t know how long they lived here, but we came up with an approximated date of a possible relative of theirs. We don’t have anything but a last name,” Darby explained.
 

“Hmmm. That’s not a lot to go on without a first name.
 
I could give you a couple of logbooks from that time period that may list a name.
 
The logbooks were used to do census reports for the area.
 
The community was small enough that they did it by hand back then.”

“Thank you.
 
If we find a name, can we then look up the family?” Rowan asked.

“Yes.”

The lady handed Darby two large books. She handed one to Rowan and they sat down at a library table, very long and very old.
 
For the next half hour they searched the volumes in front of them, trying to decipher different handwritings.
 
Rowan was the first to come to a Keaton and she jotted down the details: Mr. & Mrs. Nicolas Keaton, Married 1859.

“This looks promising, Darby. Right timeframe, 1859 for a Nicolas Keaton.”

“Great!”

They went back to the desk toting the large, dusty tomes and asked the lady if she could look up Nicolas Keaton who married in 1859.

“Give me a minute. I’ll be right back,” the lady said. She returned quickly and said, “You ladies are in luck.
 
I have what looks like a family tree from the Keaton family, probably from an old family bible. It even has a family crest on it.”
 

“Can we get a copy of this?” Darby asked.

“Sure, the copy machine is over there and it costs $0.20 per copy.”

“Thank you so much.”

With a copy in hand, they headed to the bookstore to pick up messages.
 
Rowan looked at the family tree as they drove the couple blocks to the bookstore and Darby ran in to grab the messages.
 
From what Rowan could decipher, the most logical culprit for the evil Keaton witch was a Suzanne Keaton born in 1862.
 
She was never married and had no children, according to the family tree.
 
There was also no reference anywhere to her death, however, every other member of the family was painstakingly accounted for. That seemed odd to Rowan.
 
It seemed the last of the line to live in Oljone might have been the two daughters of a Simon and Pauline Keaton named Rachel and Sally Keaton.
 
They had been born in 1974 and 1978.

Chapter 5

In the tiny little community of Loma Mar, a young woman named Brenda Olsen was out jogging after she had gotten home from a stressful day at work.
 
She had needed some wind down time after the day’s events in the office.
 
Towards the end of a project it always got to be crunch time and that was what was happening now.
 
Jogging always helped her get her mind off the details of work. In doing so, she had lost track of time.
 
It wasn’t dark yet, but in the wooded trail where she had been running it was getting a little darker than Brenda was comfortable with.
 
It was at this point that she cut her jog short and headed back to her car.
 

Still distracted by her thoughts about work, she came around a blind bend in the trail.
 
When the trail came back into view there was something in the middle of the path. It looked like a flashlight. As she got closer she realized that it was definitely a flashlight and it was on and slightly rolling back and forth as if its owner had just that instant dropped it.
 
Brenda slowed down to a walk, looking on either side of the trail to see if she could see the owner.
 
How odd
, she thought.
 
Brenda bent down to pick up the flashlight, when something came up behind her and everything went dark.

When Blake got off the plane he didn’t even bother going to a hotel to book a room; he went straight to 1414 Old Oak Hollow Road.
 
It was as he remembered from a couple of weeks prior when he had been there with Darby.
 
The house was in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Longmont, Colorado.
 
It looked abandoned from the road, and the front screen was permanently half open.
 
Blake felt almost as nervous as the first time he had been there, but for totally different reasons.
 
When he and Darby had been here they had come to see the werewolf to see if there was some way to undo the results of the werewolf blood that had been injected into Rowan, but he had been too horrified to go in with Darby.
 
He was afraid of what he would see, knowing that it was possibly what Rowan was going to turn out to be.
 
He had been so worried about this that he had allowed Darby to go into the house of the werewolf without him.
 
The guilt had been too much and after a bit, he had gone in after her, only to misjudge the situation, and jumpstart a ferocious fight with Dean.
 
In the midst of their tangle, Darby had been injured badly and at the time Blake had thought her to be dead.

Now he was here to befriend the werewolf and try to understand what Rowan had undergone in his absence during the last full moon. He figured he’d be doing a lot of groveling.
 
Devon had become great friends with this man, so Blake too wanted to be friends with him.
 
He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but it was a necessary evil in an effort to make things right with everyone.
 

After two weeks, Dean was wearing on him.
 
Dean had been merciless.
 
He had Blake pretty much repairing anything and everything that needed repairs over the last three centuries on the farm.
 
Blake had been controlling his temper with Dean, knowing the consequences, but it had been hard – really hard.
 
The house was now re-shingled, the fences repaired, and broken windows replaced. The barn roof re-shingled and the house and porch scraped of their crumbling paint and prepped for new paint.
 
His task for the next day was to repaint.
 
He was basically Dean’s new slave and Dean was enjoying it.

Tired from the last two weeks of hard labor, Blake drove up to the house with a trunk full of yellow paint. As usual, Dean greeted him at the front door, arms crossed, wearing the ever present stern face.

“It’s about time you got here.”

“The store doesn’t open until 9:00, Dean, and I stayed here working past closing time last night so I couldn’t have gotten it last night.
 
Unless you would like me to break into the store, mix my own paint, and paint 24/7, I couldn’t have gotten here any earlier.”

“There’s always an excuse with you isn’t there, vampire vermin?”

“Sorry, I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” Dean said.

The work was long and hard that day, but he had actually made good time; after all, the house was rather small.
 
That’s when Dean said, “Not bad! It’ll look even better after another coat, though.”
 
Of course it would
, Blake thought. Thankfully, the second coat went on a lot faster and Blake finished sometime around 9:30 pm. He was exhausted after the hot day in the sun.
 

As Blake cleaned the brushes and got rid of the empty paint cans, Dean walked up with a cold six-pack of beer.
 
That’s a first,
thought Blake.
 
Dean twisted off the cap and handed one to Blake and opened another for himself.
 

“Thanks, Dean!”

“Hmmm. Good job, by the way.”

“Thanks again.”

They sat on the porch steps in silence for a long while when Dean broke it by saying, “What makes you think she’ll forgive you for what you did?”

“I’m not sure she will, but I had to try, right? I had to start somewhere.”

“I suppose. Why’d you freak?” Dean asked.

“It’s hard to say.
 
I have an uncle who used to tell me this horrible story about a werewolf who had apparently mutilated a couple in a park. He went on and on about how it wasn’t for food; it had just seemed like a random bit of violence. That’s the only reference I’ve ever had of werewolves.”

“Hmmm.
 
So what made you change your mind and come back to repair the damage done?”
 

“Rowan, mostly.
 
I just couldn’t see her being like that no matter what she was.
 
I started reading and realized how similar our species were, and it got me thinking that vampires have always been judged by the rogue vampires and the made vampires who can’t control their lust for the kill.”

“Huh?”

“Well, vampires that are made by other vampires have a deeper craving for blood than born vampires.
 
Made vampires too, are sometimes uncontrollable.
 
The vampire that made them is supposed to be responsible for taming them, and teaching them to control their hunger. Often times that doesn’t happen and the made vampire will go off on killing sprees. These are usually the vampires that people hear about and end up judging us all by.”
 

“So what’s the difference between you and a made vampire?”

“Lots. A born vampire will rarely kill and usually only in self-defense.
 
And though we do feed on blood, we don’t need as much and we don’t need it as often. A made vampire must feed at least once a day. A born vampire feeds maybe two to four times a month and we block the human’s pain and memory of the experience.
 
My brother and I joke about our leaving bug bites.
 
That’s the image we leave in the human’s mind.
 
This allows us to live among them.
 
A made vampire can rarely live in a small community or town just because they would bring too much attention to themselves with their feeding habits.”

“Have you ever killed anyone? Or made any vampires?” Dean asked.

“I killed Terrence Paine and I must say I didn’t have a problem with that at all. Of course, you probably don’t care a whole lot that I killed the old guy either since it was he who killed your brother Benjamin, drained his blood, and injected it into Rowan. As for making a vampire? No.”

“Yeah, I have no problem with Paine being gone; in fact, I wish I could have helped. What a creepy old guy he was, huh?”

“You have no idea. Darby had planned for me to make him a vampire and then inject him with Benjamin’s blood.”

“Darby? No way! Why?”

“Well, that was Paine’s plan! He thought I had probably turned Rowan into a vampire so he injected her hoping the werewolf blood and the vampire blood would duke it out until both died, killing her, and ridding him of another problem.”

“But she wasn’t a vampire, so the blood just changed her to a werewolf instead.
 
Hmmm.
 
Does that make her my sister? Sister in-law? Sister-in-blood?”

“I don’t think it makes you anything but werewolves and now friends. Much to my disappointment, I think if you wanted to pursue a more…intimate…ummm…relationship with Rowan, I think you might have a good chance at success.”