Baited Blood (5 page)

“No, not personally, but I’ve met vampires over the years who have.” Samuel smiled. “I’ve been told she’s quite a handful: very headstrong and determined. She fits the description Keleta gave us.”

In spite of Samuel’s attempt to soothe her worries, a chill ran through Madison’s veins like a slippery eel. “But why would Annabelle come back and bother the Dedhams after so many years?”

“We won’t know that until we find her and talk to her. Personally, I’m more interested in why she tried to kill one of her own charges, then dumped him here in our back yard.”

“It was the Dedhams’ back yard,” Madison corrected.

Samuel grinned. He liked the sharp banter he received from Madison. She was quick and gutsy. “You know what I mean. The council doesn’t like the unexpected. If someone else had seen Keleta instead of you, there’s no telling what kind of uproar it might have caused.”

A thought crossed Madison’s mind. One of the things she enjoyed about working with Samuel was that he was always willing to answer her questions about vampires and their culture.

“Samuel, is it okay for a vampire to kill a vampire that they’ve turned? That seems an awful lot like a master-slave relationship, especially with the branding.”

By the way Samuel leaned his head against the back of the sofa, Madison knew he was weighing his words. He’d always tell her the truth, but he didn’t always tell her all the gruesome details. She wasn’t sure if she liked the editing or not, but she trusted him enough to accept it.

“Yes,” he finally answered in a blunt, short tone. “A maker does have dominion over the vampires he or she turns, but only to a point. It’s rather complicated, but basically a vampire should mentor the newly turned vampire until he is able to fend for himself. Some go off on their own as soon as they are able. Others develop a special bond with their maker and choose to stay with them for many years, sometimes forever. We’re usually very strict about the mentoring here in California, but if someone doesn’t live up to their responsibilities, the baby vampire is sent to Ricky and Byron. They are quite good at working with the orphans. But in general, we consider vampires killing other vampires to be murder, just as humans killing humans is murder.”

“But you’ll exterminate Keleta if he doesn’t make the grade. That’s murder.”

“Extermination of certain vampires,” Samuel explained, leaning forward to give the topic the serious attention it required, “is sometimes necessary to protect the community. It weeds out bad apples or potential problems. And it is not done lightly. Keleta will be given a fair chance.”

Madison still wasn’t satisfied. “But it’s playing God.”

Samuel stood up and came to stand in front of Madison. He placed a hand under her chin and raised her face up to look at him. “Let me remind you, Madison, that vampires are already dead. We’re just trying to manage those that God has already forsaken.”

The two of them, vampire and living, remained in that position while Madison digested the words. She could feel the beat of her heart echoing in Samuel’s fingertips.

“Is that why you chose a name that means ‘the cross’?”

“As I told you, I just liked the name.” Samuel gave her a gentle smile and removed his hand.

“Is it like this with vampires all over the world?” Madison asked. “You know, the managing, judging, and extermination thing?”

“I’m afraid not. There are some communities like ours that take it very seriously, but most do not. A new vampire either sinks or swims. Older vampires are allowed to do whatever they please. Our council is modeled after a very successful one in Switzerland.”

“Leave it to the Swiss.” Madison turned back to her work, breaking the intensity that had filled the room like heavy humidity.

Samuel continued to watch her long after she had resumed her work. “Are you quite comfortable with the computer and various programs?”

She glanced at him while her fingers worked the keyboard. “Pretty much, especially if I have a manual to check. I took a
couple
classes before I came down to LA, and I like working with computers. I’ve been teaching myself more stuff as I go.”

“Good. I might add another duty to your job description.”

Madison swiveled a quarter turn in her chair. “Director of Vampire IT?”

“Sort of.” Samuel leaned against the desk. “There’s a special vampire database I want you to learn. Currently, it’s run by a vampire named Joni Langevoort up north. I may send you to her for training. I think it would be very advantageous for us to have you familiar with it.”

Madison nodded her consent. “Always like to learn new things. Just let me know when.”

“I think it will be soon.” Samuel pushed off from the desk. “But for now I need to get ready for my date with Kai. We’re going to the Disney Concert Hall tonight.”

As he started for the door, Madison swiveled back around in her chair toward him. “One more question, Samuel.”

He stopped in the doorway and waited.

“Don’t your lady friends ever mind that you never take them to dinner? You know, like someplace elegant and fancy?”

A deep, rich laugh escaped his lips. “If they do, they manage to get over it. They know enough to eat before we go out.” He winked at Madison and flashed his fangs. “I dine when we get home.”

FIVE

S
ame scream, different day. Another mug shattered on the patio floor.

Madison couldn’t believe her eyes. She closed them tight, held them shut, counted to ten, then opened them. But it was still there. Hopping over the spilled coffee and broken pieces of mug, she ran into the house and up the stairs.

This time, she went straight for the X-Acto knife, slicing a different finger. If this kept up, she was going to be slitting her wrists. As before, Madison woke Dodie first, then Doug. Although the two vampires had only been asleep for a few hours, they flew down the stairs and out to the patio.

The body was exactly where Madison had last seen it—in the middle of the pool, facedown, arms stretched out, naked. It hadn’t made a desperate crawl to the side.

Doug jumped into the pool and pushed the body toward the steps at the shallow end, where Dodie and Madison waited to help. As with Keleta, a stake had been driven through the man’s chest. They got him out of the water and turned him on his side to examine the stake.

Dodie’s eyes moved from the stake to the man’s face, then traveled up, seeking Doug’s eyes. She shook her head very slowly. Madison first gave one Dedham, then the other, an anxious look, knowing instinctively what Dodie’s look meant even before Doug released his hold on the dead vampire.

“Are you sure?” Madison asked.

“Look at his face, Madison.” Doug pointed to the eyes of the man, who was now on his back.

Madison took a step closer and gasped in disgust. The man had a rugged face with a lantern jaw, a short beard, and longish, light hair, now plastered to his head like seaweed. His eye sockets were hollow, dark, empty orbs, shiny with residual pool water.

“Yuck.” Madison backed away, a hand over her mouth to squelch a gag. “Why would someone do that? They’d already killed him. Is it some sort of sick message?”

“No, dear,” said Dodie, standing up and going to Madison. She put an arm around the girl in comfort. “No one took his eyes. That’s what happens when a vampire dies. The eyes sink into the skull almost immediately after death.”

Madison stole a glance at the eyeless body again, summoning the courage to look longer. This was the true meaning of
lights out.
“Does he have the brand?”

Doug turned the body on its side and checked. He nodded toward the women and gently lowered the body back in place. “Yes, it’s there. There’s also this very nasty and old scar on his side. Looks like a sword or very large knife injury. Might help in identifying him.”

“Now what?” asked Madison.

It was nearly ten in the morning. Madison had slept in, then gone downstairs for breakfast and coffee. She didn’t have a class until two. Pauline had told them yesterday she would be in after running errands. She’d been spared once more from finding a body in the pool.

“Let’s move the body into the house and out of sight,” Doug suggested.

The man was larger than Keleta, and the vampires were slowly being sapped of their strength by both the sun and the lack of sleep. With Doug clutching the torso and Dodie and Madison on each leg, they carried the body into the house and deposited him on the kitchen floor just as Pauline came through the door leading to the driveway. She was carrying a couple of plastic grocery bags in one hand and dry cleaning in the other.

“Oh no, not in my kitchen,” were Pauline’s first words upon seeing the dead vampire on the gleaming kitchen floor.

Doug went to Pauline and took the grocery bags from her, placing them on the counter. “It’s just until the knacker gets here. Dodie’s calling him now.”

Pauline, a short, thick African-American woman with long salt-and-pepper braids, dropped her large purse on the seat of a kitchen chair and draped the dry cleaning over the back of it. She stepped closer. “Anyone we know?”

Doug shook his head. “We don’t recognize him. But he has the same brand as the last one.”

“Lord, help us.” Pauline shook her head and walked to the counter where Doug had deposited the groceries. Nearby, Dodie was talking to someone on the kitchen phone. Pauline looked over at Dodie. “Mrs. D, you tell that lazy-ass knacker man to pick this body up PDQ. You hear me?” She looked back down at the dead undead. “Gives me the willies, no matter how many times I’ve seen it before.”

Dodie hung up the phone. “Not to worry, Pauline. Jesús said he’d be here before noon. He was coming here anyway with a delivery.”

“What’s a knacker?” Madison asked. “Some sort of vampire undertaker?”

Pauline and Dodie both glanced at Doug, the two women letting him know he could field the delicate question.

“It’s an old English term,” Doug explained. “A knacker picked up old animals, particularly farm animals, who were dead or too worn out to work, then rendered them or sold them to factories who processed them.”

“Ewww.” Madison looked down at the body. “Guess vampires aren’t very sentimental about their dead.”

Pauline started putting away the groceries. “Don’t let Jesús hear you calling him a knacker. He’ll box your ears. He prefers
handyman
.” Pauline looked over at Madison. “Jesús is also the one who delivers the animal blood for the vampires who drink it. That’s what he’ll be delivering when he drops by.”

Like a broken record, Madison’s brain was still stuck on the knacker part and on Samuel’s comment about God forsaking the undead. “So Jesus comes and takes away the dead vampires. Would that be considered ironic or fitting?”

“And don’t you go letting Jesús hear you calling him Jesus, neither,” Pauline shot over her shoulder. “He’ll box your ears twice for that. It’s always
Jesús
.”

Doug chuckled. “Listen to Pauline, Madison, and save yourself some grief.”

Dodie knelt down to look at the body again. “Well, if Jesús doesn’t get here soon, there may be no reason for him to show.”

The others directed their attention down at the body. There, before their eyes, it was already starting to shrivel like a balloon with a slow leak.

Doug knelt down next to Dodie. “He must have been a fairly old vampire.”

“How can you tell?” Madison asked, not sure she wanted to get a closer look. “Do you count his rings like on a tree stump?”

Dodie shot Madison a frown for her flippancy. “No, but just as older vampires heal quicker, their bodies also decompose quicker upon death.” She looked back down, her voice softer. “It’s as if the earth is calling them home from too long a trip.”

Doug left the room and returned with a sketchpad and pencil from his art supplies. Doug had a small office off the den where he also dabbled in painting and drawing. He moved a chair to a good vantage point near the feet of the dead vampire and began sketching the quickly shriveling face.

“Great idea, Doug.” Dodie stood just behind her husband and watched his sketch develop.

“Can’t you just take a photo?” asked Madison.

“You see any photos of vampires around here?” Pauline gave Madison a pointed look with the question. “There’s a reason for that.”

“While we can be photographed, we generally don’t come out very well in photography,” explained Dodie. “Sometimes not at all. It’s another one of those odd mysteries. The sketch will allow us to capture details.”

Madison shook her head, wishing the vampires had come with a printed manual. Learning on the job was exhausting. “Okay, so from the way he’s disappearing, can you tell how old a vampire he is?”

Dodie cocked her head to one side and considered the vampire on the ground. “He’s definitely not as old as Samuel.”

“That’s for sure,” added Doug. “I once saw a two-thousand-year-old vampire die. He was dust in a matter of minutes. I’d say this one is a few hundred years old.”

Madison looked down at the body. The face was quickly resembling a dried apple doll. The torso and limbs were drying, the skin beginning to cling to the skeleton like plastic wrap covering leftovers. But still Madison was stumped. “Then why wasn’t he decomposing in the pool? He looked normal when you pulled him out.”

Doug continued perfecting his sketch. “Because water preserves our bodies. They don’t even have to be submerged, just wet.”

The information caused a chain reaction in Madison’s brain. “That means whoever did this wanted to make sure the body was found, no matter how long it took.”

“Most definitely,” Doug said, not looking up from his drawing. “It was probably dumped right after we went to bed this morning, and it would have kept until we got up this evening.”

“But what if it had been found by someone who didn’t know about you?” Madison shuddered at the thought of an outsider calling the police to report a pool death. “If it is this Annabelle, she’s determined to cause you trouble, isn’t she?”

Dodie’s jaw tightened. “Sure looks that way to me.”

A knock at the back door made them all jump. Instinctively, Madison moved to block the body from the view of anyone coming through the door.

Pauline looked out through the sheer curtain at the door’s window. “It’s the knacker,” announced the housekeeper, unlatching and opening the back door.

Everyone sighed in relief. The Dedhams seldom had random visitors, but until the body was gone, they would all be on edge.

A short, stout middle-aged man with bandy legs and light brown skin was let into the kitchen by Pauline. He was dressed in old jeans, a dirty knit work shirt, and heavy work boots. As he entered the house, he removed a beat-up ball cap to display thinning black hair peppered with gray and a broad face lined by the sun. He reminded Madison of a hobbit who’d become a day laborer.

“Jesús,” Pauline said to the man, “this here’s Madison. She lives with the Dedhams.”

Jesús gave her a crooked smile of small, uneven teeth. “Ah, I hear much about the fair Madison already.”

Madison wasn’t sure if being known was a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, it made her uncomfortable. “You have?”

The small man nodded. “You did much to help Mr. Samuel and the others a few months ago. We’re all very grateful.” His voice had an upbeat, friendly tone to it.

When Madison looked puzzled, Jesús offered, “If the
vampiro
fall, we all fall. All our businesses.”

“He’s right about that,” Pauline added with a jerk of her head.

Madison had learned that there was a very tight community of the living who served the vampires in various ways—as housekeepers, hairdressers, lawyers, drivers, and even some who provided fresh blood. Whatever services the vampires needed to continue their way of life but could not provide for themselves was outsourced to those amongst the living who vowed silence in return for extra-large paychecks. When Madison had agreed to work for the council, she had joined their ranks.

In an awkward gesture, Madison held out her right hand to Jesús, who took it between both of his work-worn hands and pumped it firmly. Done with the formalities, Jesús smiled at the Dedhams and walked over to study the body.

After crossing himself, Jesús pronounced, “Easy job.” He turned back to the door. “Be right back.”

When Jesús returned, he was carrying a large cooler. He placed it on the counter. “Here’s your order.”

Pulling a kitchen-size plastic garbage bag from his back pocket, Jesús squatted down next to the decomposing body and went to work. After slipping on work gloves, he ran his hands up and down the limbs, testing their brittleness. Starting with the long legs, he began dismembering the corpse by snapping the body apart at the joints as if breaking kindling.

When Doug and Dodie went into the other room, Madison looked at Pauline with raised eyebrows.

“Would you want to watch,” the housekeeper replied, “knowing that’s what’s gonna happen to you one day?”

Madison shivered. “It is really creepy.”

While Jesús worked at breaking up the dead vampire, Pauline unpacked the various containers of animal blood from the cooler. She handed several to Madison. “Here, put these in the freezer.” Pauline read the label on one container and set it aside. “I’ll keep this one out for their supper tonight. It’s wild boar’s blood—a particular favorite of Mr. D’s. Might make them feel better.” Pauline handed Madison the boar’s blood, instructing her to place it in the refrigerator. The last several containers went into the freezer along with the first bunch.

When Jesús was done, the body of the once large and bulky vampire had been reduced to the size of two days’ worth of kitchen garbage. “At the rate he was going,” the knacker noted, “this bag will be filled with nothing but dust by early tomorrow.”

Madison couldn’t stop her morbid curiosity. “What will you do with him … with the dust?”

“Depends on whose it is,” the odd little man explained. “If friends of the deceased request it, I return it once it’s fully decomposed. Otherwise, I scatter it in my garden, in the woods, or sometimes in the ocean. I return it to nature, where it belongs.”

When Jesús was done and gone, the Dedhams returned to the kitchen hand in hand. “If you don’t need us,” Doug told Madison and Pauline, “we’re going back to bed.” He looked pointedly at Madison. “And you, young lady, should be heading to school. You’re not late already, are you?”

Madison glanced at the clock on the wall. If she skipped her shower, she’d make it. “No, I’m good.”