Moon Shadow (Vampire for Hire Book 11) (8 page)

Chapter Fourteen

The dance party ended when Tammy appeared in the doorway, shook her head contemptuously, and pronounced that we were all lame.

I caught up to her in the living room. My niece followed us in, and I asked for some privacy. Mary Lou swept her up and hauled her deeper into the big house.

“Strong words for someone who used to call themselves Lady Tam Tam.”

Tammy took to studying my sister’s china hutch, which displayed anything but china... my sister, besides being a closet rapper, had been into all things medieval growing up. Dungeons & Dragons, fairies, sword and sorcery novels, Renaissance fairs. Yeah, go figure. I’d been told repeatedly that I’d been a witch in a handful of past lives. Maybe my sister had been Maid Marian or, maybe, a princess with an aversion to peas.

“You’re funny,” said Tammy, without looking around. She was eying a Knights of the Round Table display that, admittedly, looked pretty dang cool.

I said nothing, not because I didn’t have plenty to say about my wannabe rapper, medieval-loving sister. But because the dream had come again, and I saw my daughter jackknifing in the center of the road as the truck’s tires thumped-thumped over her exposed stomach. Crushing the life from her and bursting blood from every orifice.

“
Eeww
, Mom.”

Yeah, I doubted that last vision—or memory—had stayed hidden. Too powerful, too painful, too fucking terrible.

“Such language, Mother.” She had moved on to examining a fairy sitting on a crystal ball. The fairy had blue wings. I wondered if fairies were real, too.

“Of course they’re real, Mom.”

“Oh? And how would you know?”

She giggled and moved on to a red-winged dragon perched on a pewter rock. The dragon was eying the fairy. I came over and stood next to Tammy. We were both eyeballing twin swords sheathed in a wooden mantel of some sort.

“You kind of sounded like you knew what you were talking about,” I said.

“I’m just joking, Mom. Of course they’re not real.”

But I wasn’t so sure. I knew when my daughter was lying. I sure as hell didn’t need to be a mind reader for that. She had backtracked, but not very convincingly. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“You want to talk about the dream.” She moved on to a display of tiny pewter figurines that could have been lifted from a
Lord of the Rings
board game.

“It’s not a dream, young lady.”

Tammy shrugged and touched the glass with her fingertips. She was going to be small like me. I barely scratched five foot, three inches. She had barely tipped the tape at five feet. She was thinner than I’d been at that age. She could thank Danny for that. I’d always had a little, um, padding. Even in my vampirism, some of the padding had stayed, although I was leaner and harder than I’d ever been.

“Okay, so, a vision. Whatever.”

“Not a vision. And not whatever. It was a premonition. A prophecy. A future happening.”

She shook her head and I saw the smile reflected in the glass and I sort of lost it. Just sort of. I grabbed a shoulder and spun her around. When I spin someone, they spin. Big, small, in-between. And spin she did, nearly losing her balance.

“What are you doing, you freak?” she gasped, stumbling.

“This freak is trying to save your life.”

When she righted herself, her face was flushed with embarrassment and anger. No reason to be embarrassed. We were alone in the living room.

“I’m not embarrassed. I just don’t like being treated like a child.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“Exactly. I know what I’m doing.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve seen my vision. You’ve seen yourself being thrown out of a car and being...” I just couldn’t say it.

“Run over by a truck, Mom. Yeah, yeah, it’s all you’re thinking about this morning.”

“Who are those kids in the car?”

“I don’t know. I don’t recognize them.”

She was looking away from me. I still held her shoulder; she wasn’t going anywhere. “Are you lying to me?”

Now, she turned and looked at me and gave me a half smile laced with lots of snotty. Lots and lots of snotty. “No, of course not. Then again, you wouldn’t know if I were.”

“I have my ways, young lady.”

“Oh, you’re gonna snoop on me?”

“I’ll snoop if I have to.”

She took in a lot of air. My daughter was very much mortal and growing and blossoming and looking too cute for her own good. Her mind reading gave her false confidence. And I wished like crazy it would just go the hell away.

“Not false confidence, Mom. Real confidence. I know what people are thinking around me. I’ve gotten real good at it.”

“Mind reading won’t save you from that truck.”

She broke away from my grip, and crossed her arms under her chest and stuck out a hip. There was a chance she looked just like me. “That’s just the thing. I would never do that, Mom.”

“You would never do it
sober
.” And then it hit me. The look on her face just before the accident. The wild, jubilant, far-off look on her face. She wasn’t drunk. The others weren’t drunk. They were all on something.

“I don’t do drugs, Mom. It’s just a dream,” she said, and gave me a small grin and was about to leave, when I caught hold of her hand.

“Wait,” I said.

She sighed, already reading the question in my mind. “Yes, the fairies are real, Mom.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I talk to them. I hear them singing at night, and sometimes in the morning, and then, they are gone.”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“Are they any less strange than vampires? Or werewolves? Or witches?”

“I... I don’t know.”

“They’re not, Mom. They’re real.”

“Have you seen them?”

She smiled and cocked her head. “Oh, yes.” And turned and left the living room.

Chapter Fifteen

“We found him there, up against the reeds, face down in the water.”

I was standing with Detective Hillary Oster on the southwest side of Lake Elsinore. A human-shape form lay under a stain-resistant white blanket. The stain-resistant part was probably a good thing, from what I was hearing.

“Called you as soon as we got the call,” said the detective. “Took you long enough.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. I had hit all kinds frustrating traffic coming out here from Orange County. I’d nearly summoned Talos and sprouted wings through the driver’s side and passenger windows, and flapped myself right out of the sea of brake lights. “Would have been more convenient if the body washed up earlier in the day.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” she said, but I detected emotion in her voice. She had grown to like the kids. And now, one of them was lying under a nearby blanket. That the shape only vaguely looked humanoid was troubling. At least, troubling to the sane, rational, loving person inside me. The bitch, on the other hand, was intrigued to no end. She said, “FBI is combing the area. So are my investigators. It’s a real clusterfuck. No one knows who’s in charge.”

“He’s missing his left leg,” I said.

“And most of his right arm. Half of his right side is gone, too.”

“Mind if I look,” I asked.

“You really want to?”

I was intrigued. Too intrigued. I called it professional curiosity. But I suspected it was something. A dark compulsion. I nodded.

Detective Oster stared at me, sweating in the heat of the late afternoon sun, wiped her brow, then nodded for me to follow her.

***

The body was as described... and then some.

With the detective holding up the blanket, I leaned down and studied the wounds, fighting like hell the excitement welling up within me. Was the excitement her excitement? Or mine?

I shook my head. It was hers. Always hers. It had better be. I refused to believe that the mangled corpse of a boy could excite me.

I’m losing it
, I thought, as I studied the wound to his upper right arm. The flesh was loose, pale, supple, and cut clean through with what appeared to be many serrated edges.

“Teeth marks?” I asked.

Oster leaned down next to me, still holding the flap of the blanket. “Would be my guess.”

Damage to the boy’s hip was similar. The detective had already provided me a pair of latex gloves, and so I didn’t hesitate to reach down and lift away some of the tattered and sopping jeans. Most blood had washed away. Most blood had drained away, too. The hip socket had been torn free, and the expulsion of tendons and muscle might have been enough for most people to lose their lunch. Except I had the opposite reaction. My stomach growled. Worse, I’m pretty sure the detective heard it.

“I might, ah, vomit,” I said quickly.

“Not on the vic please.”

I nodded, made a show of swallowing, and said, “I’m good.”

The wound to his side—the very massive wound—was the most telling and the most perplexing. Although much of his side was missing, there was a very peculiar red ring around the perimeter of the wound. The serrated flesh was the same, indicative of teeth marks, but it was the red, dimpled flesh just outside the wound the held my fascination. I reached out and carefully ran my latexed finger over the indentations. Puncture marks, and just below these marks, the boy’s side had been completely bitten through.

“Had we been in the Everglades, this would have been a no-brainer,” said the detective.

“Alligator?” I said.

“Sure looks that way to me. Something took a bite of him. A few bites.”

I nodded. The thing I’d seen in Roy’s memory
could
have been an alligator. Long and cylindrical and missile-shaped. Yeah, maybe an alligator. Maybe.

I said, “What are the chances that, say, a rogue alligator is living in this lake?”

“A pet that got a little too big?”

“You hear about it all the time,” I said. “Some yahoo comes back with something that looks like a gecko lizard, only to discover that it’s eaten his cat. Rather than flushing it down the toilet, he drops it off here at the lake.”

Oster shook her head. As she did so, sweat spilled onto her roundish cop sunglasses and streaked down over the lens. She ignored it. A true professional. “It would have been spotted. Alligators surface, and sun themselves. They’re not exactly masters of camouflage.”

“And we’re sure it’s an animal attack?”

“The medical examiner might have a different theory, but those sure as shit look like bite marks to me.”

I nodded. They did to me, too. I continued examining the raw ring around the wound in his side. “Were his leg and arm found?”

She shook her head, and more of the sweat that had been building up at the bottom of her lens flung free. “Not yet.”

“Which boy is this?”

“Johnny.”

“He was the second to disappear?”

She nodded. “And no, we haven’t seen or heard from Luke.”

I stared down at the face that seemed peaceful and passive. Surely, he had been anything but peaceful and passive when whatever it was had come up on him. Had the boy been swimming in the lake, when something came up from underneath,
Jaws
-like? Or had he been fishing and caught something too big to haul in—something that had, in fact, pulled him into the lake? Except the boy had been missing for over a week now. I doubted he would be out swimming or fishing, not with the whole town looking for him and his friend.

“How long had he been in the water?”

“Hard to say, but my guess, not very long. Maybe since this morning. None of the critters had gotten to him.”

“Who found him?”

“A fisherman.”

“Statement?”

“He’s giving it to the feds now. From what I gathered, he’d found the body floating face down in the reeds.”

“Did he see anything else?”

“No.”

We were both silent, but I was picking up her thoughts. I was picking up the horror she felt. The fear she felt for her own kids. For the public at large. How she was going to break the news to Johnny’s mother that her son had been eaten alive. How she was going to convince her police chief to shut down the lake. How she was going to get through this without crying in front of me. But most predominant in her thoughts was finding Luke.

“How does a boy who’s been missing for a week, wind up in the lake, half-eaten?” I asked.

“Million-dollar question,” she said. “We’ve scoured the area. I have personally searched the entire perimeter of the lake a half-dozen times.”

“Maybe he was
under
the lake.”

“Trapped on something?”

“Maybe.”

She shook her head. “We hired divers. We used sonar. We covered likely spots, and checked out abnormalities in the lake. We didn’t find anything.”

“No lake monster, either?”

“Nothing. And certainly no twelve year-old boys.”

We both thought about that as a distant speedboat slapped the water and the sun beat down on a partially devoured boy.