Rule of Vampire (9 page)

Michael had warned, “You mustn’t tell Sylvie. She isn’t as adept at hiding the truth as you are.”

Terrill turned to Sylvie. “We have to go with them,” he said dejectedly. “I’m sorry about Jamie, but she’s managed to take care of herself so far.”

Sylvie turned away. She’d go with him; there was no other choice. But it might take a while for her to totally forgive him. He wished he could tell her what Michael had said: “I’ll look after Jamie, Terrill. As if she was my own progeny.”

Sylvie walked over to the bed, crawled under the covers with her clothes still on, and turned her back on him.

“First thing tomorrow, we head back,” Clarkson said. “There’s a private jet waiting at the Redmond Airport.”

She left without another word.

Chapter 14

“What are Council goons doing in a Podunk town like Crescent City?” Jeffers couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice. They’d traveled all the way up here from L.A. in hopes of never seeing a vampire.

“Well, Jeffers,” his partner shot back, “what are
we
doing in a Podunk town like Crescent City?”

Jeffers snorted. “Vacationing vampires?” He looked out the window at the ever-darkening skies of the coast. “Well, I guess they picked the right spot.”

They’d been waiting for their seafood in a restaurant perched on the end of a pier. They couldn’t see much of the ocean through all the rain, except for the white crests of the waves. A black SUV had pulled up outside and two tall, burly men in black suits had gotten out, looking up and down the pier.

Both Callendar and Jeffers had immediately realized that the new arrivals were vampires. The two agents had been chosen young for their jobs because they could both sense the supernatural. Since their recruitment, they’d been trained to recognize even more clues. But neither of them had been looking for action on this day.

“Whoa!” Jeffers said as the SUV’s passenger emerged. Even in the gloom, her blonde hair stood out. She was as tall as the goons, but slender, and she moved with a natural predatory grace that told the two agents that she was a fighter. “Never mind the goons.”

“What?” Callendar said. In the back of his mind, alarms were jangling.

Jeffers was suddenly all business, his relaxed vacation persona dropping away. He dug out his cellphone. “I’ve only seen sketches of her, but unless I’m mistaken, that’s Clarkson, the American representative on the Council. What’s she doing here?”

Callendar tried not to stare at the woman as she entered the restaurant. Her eyes swept over the diners and passed over him, then came back to him as he busied himself with the menu.
Screwed that up,
he thought. But he hadn’t been ready for anything to happen this week, not on the far northern coast of California. He was dressed in a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. His bulging belly, which was usually covered up by impeccably tailored suits, was hanging over his belt, his brown, thinning hair blown off his bald spots by the constant breezes. As a concession to the coastal weather, he also wore a yellow, fleece-lined hoodie. His weapon and cellphone were back in the motel room.

Jeffers was always more vigilant than Callendar: taller and trimmer, too, his dark hair always in place no matter the weather. Even on vacation, he was wearing slacks, a dress shirt, and a coat, and Callendar saw him surreptitiously adjust the holster at the back of his belt while he held the cellphone to his ear. “Hey, this is Jeffers. I’m thinking that I might head back early. I’ve been having some neck pain.”

Callendar tried not to smile. Vampires could hear much better than humans, so Jeffers was using a crude code. Neck pain… nice.

“Yeah, I’m in Crescent City. No, in California. Callendar is with me. What? We’re on vacation. Yes, together. Did you hear what I just told you?”

Jeffers’s eyes drifted over to the vampires, passing over them casually. Callendar had managed not to look their way since that first awkward glance.

“We’re staying at the Comfort Inn, Room 207. Yes, together, dammit! Right, we’ll be waiting.” He stabbed at the cellphone in frustration, ending the call. “Jesus, what an idiot!”

“Hollander?”

“I used to think getting him out of the field and behind a desk was a good thing. Anyway, I
think
the message got through.”

They waited for their meal, trying to look relaxed, trying to look as though they were on vacation and didn’t have a worry in the world. It seemed to be taking forever for their food to arrive. “Shall we get out of here?” Jeffers finally asked. But just then, the waitress appeared with their orders.

The chowder and shrimp were so good that they nearly forgot that only a few dozen feet away, three vampires were ordering a bottle of wine. When the agents finished their meal, however, the realization of that danger came back to them in full force.

They left the restaurant without looking back, though Callendar was curious to see if they’d been made.

“What do you think?” Jeffers asked as the door closed behind them.

“It’s the middle of nowhere,” Callendar said. “If we weren’t expecting them, I doubt they were expecting us.”

“Which raises the question, what the hell are they doing here?”

#

Inside the restaurant, Clarkson didn’t see the two agents leave. Ordinarily, she might have realized who and what they were, but she was so troubled by her interactions with Terrill that she didn’t even notice them.

Terrill wasn’t what she had expected. He seemed so physically weak, so emotional; so human.

That had been a surprise. She’d never heard of such a thing, but the truth of it was undeniable––she’d smelled his flowing red blood, so unlike the slow blue blood of a vampire.

She hadn’t told Terrill this, but her own Maker had also been his progeny, which kind of made her his granddaughter––though most vampires wouldn’t see it that way. Other than one’s Maker, it didn’t matter to most vampires what relationship they had to each other. But Clarkson had studied Terrill since she’d first been Turned, trying to figure out what made him different.

There was an unexpressed uneasiness among most vampires that the two surviving eldest of their kind, Michael and Terrill, had started exhibiting unusual behavior, such as not feeding on their natural prey and disappearing for decades, even centuries, at a time. It mystified the vampire community––and there was the fear that with age, they too would turn soft. It was the equivalent of humans worrying about getting Alzheimer’s.

For Clarkson, it was especially worrying, because she couldn’t help but wonder if the weakness had descended from Michael to Terrill to her. Quite obviously, it had skipped her own Maker, who had been an especially clever vampire, a corporate raider who had been visiting his offices in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Not even a vampire could have survived that catastrophe.

But from the beginning, Clarkson had found herself feeling unexpected empathy for some of her victims, feeling sad instead of thrilled as the life blinked out of their eyes. She’d cultivated an icy, affectless demeanor to disguise the roiling emotions beneath the surface.

She’d hoped for answers from Terrill. Instead, she’d found a human she simply couldn’t read, much less understand.

A human. She sensed that this development was historic and important, but she couldn’t figure out the ramifications for the political waters she found herself swimming in. The Council had barely accepted her, and then only because she had been voted in by the large and wealthy American contingent. She found her fellow Council members to be backward and hidebound. Most of her time on the Council was spent trying to convince the European faction to join the modern world. They were technologically ignorant, though they had more than enough money to hire people to teach them about computers, smartphones, and other such marvels. But all the money in the world didn’t help if you didn’t know the right questions to ask… or didn’t care.

Still, Clarkson knew better than to be fooled by the outside appearances of her colleagues. None of them seemed especially clever or dangerous, but none of them would have reached their positions without those characteristics.

She snapped out of her reverie, realizing that her two companions were waiting for her. “I’m going back to Bend in the other SUV with Holder and Simms,” she told them. “I want you two to stay here and find this baby vampire, Jamie.”

“Shall we bring her back?” one of the goons asked.

Clarkson pondered this. The young female vampire was without a mentor. She was probably out of control, breaking every Rule. She probably didn’t even know the Rules. What would the Council want her to do?

“No… kill her. Kill her before she Turns anyone,” Clarkson said finally. One thing she’d learned that always served her well: when in doubt, eliminate the problem and explain later.

She took a sip of her wine. She’d learned to like the taste of fermented grapes and always tried to make sure her victims were nice and drunk when she drained them of their blood.

“Don’t say anything to Terrill,” she said.

Chapter 15

His friends were out of control. He should’ve known: Pete had always been a loser and Jimmy and Greg were immature assholes.

“Look, guys, we can’t be leaving dead bodies everywhere,” Stuart said one night when Pete showed up on his doorstep with blood on his lips. Stuart’s parents turned pale and retreated to the TV room, which is where they’d stayed most nights ever since they had realized that their frighteningly changed son wasn’t interested in watching any of his favorite programs.

Pete shrugged. “What can humans do to us? We’re stronger and faster than any of them.”

“Can’t outrun a bullet,” Stuart reminded him.

“So?” Jimmy asked, sounding genuinely curious. “That wouldn’t kill us, would it?”

“We don’t know what will kill us and what won’t kill us,” Stuart said, exasperated. “You want to try to find out? Besides, it would hurt no matter what.”

“Got that right,” Greg said. They’d been returning from one of their hunts when he’d been hit by a car (whose driver hadn’t seen them, of course) and sent flying for what seemed a hundred feet in the air. He’d landed with a grunt, his arms all twisted, but had still managed to get up and run away. “I spent all day in bed before my arms straightened out.”

“Besides,” Stuart continued, “If we don’t destroy the bodies, the victims will come back. We don’t really want the competition, nor do we want a bunch of undead running around. People are going to start to notice.”

As he had feared, he hadn’t finished the job with his first victim. Old man Harker had wandered into the police station the next day, complaining that he’d been attacked. He’d looked near-dead, which wasn’t unusual, and when he’d gotten belligerent, the cops had put him in a cell with an eastward-facing window and gone off to breakfast. When they’d returned to the station, they’d smelled a peculiar odor, as if someone was barbecuing, and found Harker’s burned-up body curled up in the middle of the sunlit cell.

“I’m just saying, take it easy,” Stuart said. “Try to pick off people nobody will notice are missing. Try to finish off the bodies. Don’t leave any evidence.” He wasn’t sure why, but unlike the mostly fastidious vampires in the movies, when he fed on a human, he felt a ferocious hunger that wasn’t satisfied until he’d consumed most of his victim’s flesh. Pete was equally savage, while Jimmy just drained the blood, wiped his face, and walked away. Greg was somewhere in between, depending on who he was hanging out with at the time.

At first, none of them had gone anywhere without Stuart, but as the days passed, they were reverting to their old shifting alliances and associations. It seemed that no matter how sociable they had been as humans, vampires were loners by nature.

Stuart was already making plans to get out of Crescent City, and he wasn’t planning to take his loser friends with him.

#

Despite his warning, their hunt that night quickly devolved into chaos. It turned into the Night of the Long Knives as each of them took revenge on their individual adolescent tormenters.

Greg was still angry with Jodie Fergus, who had dumped him in the ninth grade, and he crawled up the walls of her house like a spider and sneaked in her window. His vampire friends heard screaming, and then the lights went on, followed by the sound of a man bellowing. Finally, there was silence, and then Greg returned, covered in blood and laughing.

“Her dad tried to get in the way,” he said, running past them. “I never did like the old bastard.”

They heard sirens as they followed him into the woods. They stopped at the top of the hill, barely winded.

“You know, I always wanted to get back at Coach Wenders,” Pete said. “Half the team was drunk that night, but because I was too wasted to run away, I’m the only one he kicked off the team.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea…” Stuart started to say, but Pete was already trotting toward a subdivision about half a mile away.

Coach Wenders was in good shape and put up a struggle. He broke Pete’s nose, but other than that, he mostly managed to smash his own furniture before he was taken down for the final time.

Stuart walked over and looked at the mangled body. The coach wasn’t going to revive, vampire blood or no vampire blood, but he kicked the man’s head to an unnatural angle just to make sure.

Then it was Jimmy’s turn. He told them about an incident that until then had been a secret: some of the football players had beaten him up once. This seemed like a great excuse to take out some of the big men on campus who had lorded it over all of them for years.

It turned into a real mess. The vampires found the boys at a kegger along with a hundred other people, many of them classmates. Before Stuart could stop his friends, they walked into the middle of the crowd and started attacking the three boys they had deemed the most guilty. Most of the others ran away, but there were still far too many witnesses to what happened next.