The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (22 page)

The SUV pulled alongside us, and Pleasance was there behind the wheel, looking tiny and harmless, though I knew she had the same core of steel and venom Edwin did. Hermet was in the back, looking rather less harmless. “Hi, guys,” Pleasance said. “Climb in.”

“I’ll drive,” Edwin said, and Pleasance rolled her eyes but climbed into the back seat with her brother. I got into the passenger seat and pulled the seatbelt on. My brain was whirring, in overdrive, overclocked.

“Uh, so…” I said. “What’s the plan, exactly?”

“Drive,” Edwin said. “Stop driving in a thousand miles or so. Then reassess the situation.” He started down the road at high speed, hitting bumps hard enough to make me fly up against my harness. Before long we turned onto a paved road, and began picking up speed. I was surprised a vehicle that looked this old and innocuous could hit speeds like this, but I shouldn’t have been—these were people who were used to having to move fast, I guess.

“Turn left up here, Edwin,” Pleasance said.

“Um, okay,” I said. “So, this is kidnapping, then?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Edwin snapped. “This is
rescue
. If we don’t get you well away, and quickly, Gretchen will come for you.”

“You really should’ve disclosed your crazy ex before we started going out,” I said. “But that’s another issue.
I
don’t think I’m being kidnapped—but some other people might take it that way. Like my dad, for instance. He knows I went to your house, and he’s expecting me to come home. Now, being police chief of Lake Woebegotten doesn’t exactly come with attack helicopters and hot and cold running SWAT teams, but Harry’s a friendly guy, well-liked, and I know he plays Left 4 Dead 2 online with a guy high up in the state police. If his only daughter disappears, he’ll start making calls. Are you okay with having that kind of heat on you? Your family will have to pull up stakes, leave Lake Woebegotten, everything.”

Edwin drove on, grimly. “We’ve been fugitives before. We’re adept at burning up our pasts and forging new identities for ourselves.”

“Okay. That’s cool. So you’re planning to make me a vampire, then?”

His eyes flicked over toward me. “What?” That tiny movement of his eyes was enough to tell me I had his whole attention.

“Well, you’re effectively ending my old life,” I said reasonably. “I won’t finish high school, right? Going to college is going to be tricky. Getting a job. All that stuff.”

“I can support you.”

I snorted. “As the one living girl in a house full of vampires? I don’t want to be a house pet, Edwin. I’ve got
ambitions
, you know that. I’d be perfectly happy to join your family, but only as a full member. Otherwise, if I have to be mortal, I need the freedom to do
mortal
stuff.”

“This—that—I can’t—”

“Pull over, Edwin,” Pleasance said from the back seat. “We need to think this through.”

“What? No! This is
Gretchen
, Pleasance, she was always cruel, and she’s a better natural hunter than
any
of us. Plus, she’s
motivated
. She won’t lose interest, or get bored, or change her mind. She wants to hurt me, and Bonnie is my most vulnerable place.”

“Pull the fuck over, bro,” Pleasance said, rather pleasantly. “We’re going to talk this out.”

I found myself liking that girl more and more.

Edwin made a noise of frustration and slowed down, cutting over to the shoulder. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. “My past coming back to haunt me.”

Vampires. So prone to brooding and melodrama.

“Not to point out the obvious,” Hermet said, “but maybe it needs doing. There are
six
of us—vamps, I mean, Bonnie, no offense—versus three of them. And to be honest, I’m worth any two of them in a fight. Plus, I’m not sure Jimmy and Queequeg want any part of this. I say we stay and fight. I was a bushwhacker in the War of Northern Aggression, Bonnie, and I
like
to fight. You know what else I like? I like it here, and I don’t want to pull up stakes just yet. I think we can take them. We should’ve dealt with this Gretchen thing a long time ago.”

“But the
risk
,” Edwin said. “What do you want to do, use Bonnie as—as
bait
? The problem with bait is,
the fish eats it
!”

“Hermet is good at laying ambushes,” Pleasance said. “I think we could keep Bonnie safe.”

“I have a suggestion,” I said. “Or is the worm on the hook not allowed to have an opinion?”

Edwin sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Of course, Bonnie. What do you think?”

“I think you should take me home—under guard—and let Harry know you haven’t stolen me away. That way, he won’t call the
bigger
cops, and your family won’t have to take off, and be forever remembered in these parts as weirdos who stole the police chief’s daughter. And then… you lay a false trail.”

“How do you mean?” Hermet said.

“I mean, I don’t
have
to be bait. Gretchen thinks Edwin is in love with me—knows he is—which is why she wants to kill me, right? So she’ll assume he wouldn’t leave my side.”

“Because I
won’t.”

“But you
should
, Edwin.” I gently touched his face—so sweet, so cold. “That’s the point. She’ll think I’m with you. She’ll
expect
you to run with me. So she’ll pursue you. Take Hermet, too—she got a look at him, she knows he’s the biggest physical threat.”

“Aw,” he rumbled. “You noticed.”

“The two of you take off for wherever—Canada, the deep south where I’m guessing Hermet comes from, wherever. Gretchen will chase you. Kill her when you get a chance.”

“But I can’t leave you here unprotected!” Edwin protested.

Pleasance cleared her throat. “Rosemarie and Garnett and I can keep watch over her.”

“I’m not so sure I’d trust Rosemarie to protect her,” Edwin said darkly. “After her little tizzy out on the hockey rink.”

Pleasance shrugged. “Fair point. She can stay home. I’ll just have her whip up some fog or something to conceal Bonnie’s house… and us watching it. I believe we can keep Bonnie safe.”

I could see him wavering. “But… to
leave
you…”

“It’s to protect me,” I said. “Besides, you really should end things with Gretchen yourself, in person. It’s only polite.”

He barked a laugh. “Pleasance,
promise me
, you’ll take care of her.”

“Or you could turn me into a vampire so I can protect myself.”

Edwin looked at me thoughtfully. “Let’s table that for now, all right? Perhaps if you survive this, we can talk about whether I want to risk a two-in-three chance of killing you by trying to make you immortal.”

That was the closest he’d come yet to a “maybe,” so I kissed his cheek. “All right. So it’s a plan?”

“Call Rosemarie,” Edwin said. “Get her to whip up a concealing fog so no one can see you sneak Bonnie back home. And you, Bonnie, you don’t leave your house, tell Harry you’re sick.”

“Yes, sir,” I said brightly.

“You take the car,” Pleasance said. “You and Hermet. Get started on laying a false trail. I’ll pick up Bonnie and run her home on foot.”

“Oh, goodie,” I said.

SKANK CALL

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

P
leasance got me home—but being carried at incredibly high speeds by a woman who weighs less than you do is a weird experience. She assured me she’d keep an eye on the house, with Garnett soon to join her, then faded back into the growing shadows of dusk. Harry wasn’t home yet, so I went upstairs and sat in a dark room (as ordered) and looked out the windows at the fog. Rosemarie was a bitch, but she was also a hell of a weather witch: I was used to fog in Santa Cruz, but this was a cloud so dense it looked chewy, and when I opened my window, swirling tendrils of white came in.

I heard the door downstairs slam, and tensed, then forced myself to relax. If Gretchen was coming for me, she’d probably do so silently. Unless she wanted to taunt me. That was an unpleasant thought.

“Bonnie?” Harry boomed. “You home?”

I came downstairs. “Hey, Dad.” I did my best to sound casual. “I’m here.”

He took off his hat and his gun belt and hung them on the coatrack, then ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Oh, good. I was afraid you’d be stuck at the Scullens. That fog out there is unreal. I’m going to have some car accidents to deal with, I bet, and I’ll be lucky if I don’t get into an accident myself on the way. How was your visit with Edward’s family?”

“Ed
win
,” I corrected, knowing he was just needling me—maybe
that’s
where I inherited my tendency to pick at people for my own amusement. Though I doubted Harry took it to the extremes I did. “It was fine. They’re all very nice. But I left early, because I’m not feeling well. I think I’m coming down with something.”

“You want me to call Doctor Holliday?”

“No, no, Edwin’s dad looked me over at their house, he says it’s probably just a bug that’s going around, it’ll pass on its own. I don’t know if I’ll make it to school tomorrow though.”

He nodded, then kissed me on the forehead. So damn
fatherly
. “All right, sweetie, you just let me know if you need anything. I’ll be around tonight, unless I get called for some mess out on the roads. I’ll be out tomorrow—you might’ve heard, a fella who lives out by the lake’s disappeared, so me and my guy Stevie Ray need to look into that when it’s daylight. We’ll be way the heck out of cell phone range, but you can call the station and leave a message on the machine, I’ll call in and check from time to time.”

“Sure, Dad.” I went back upstairs, pulled my curtains closed, and stretched on my bed in the dark listening to music through one headphone, and listening to the empty sounds of the night with the other. It was rare to spend a night without Edwin beside me, and it was surprisingly hard to fall asleep. I didn’t like that—don’t like being dependent on anyone.
When I become a vampire
, I thought
, I’ll never sleep again.

But that night I was still human, so I did sleep, eventually.

Pleasance called me in the morning, as I sat eating a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal at the kitchen table. “Hey, Bon-bon,” she said brightly. That hideous nickname, one she’d arrived at independently, but somehow, I didn’t mind it from her. She was such a nice monster. “Edwin doesn’t want to call you directly, but he asked me to let you know, it’s working. Gretchen and Queequeg are tracking them—apparently the other guy, Jimmy, didn’t want any part of this, and he took off, but I guess Queequeg and Gretchen are a couple, so he’s along for the ride. Anyway, Edwin and Hermet are halfway to the west coast by now. They’re working on setting up an ambush. With luck, this will all be over in a day or two.”

“You still keeping watch?”

“Oh, yes, just in case. I’m across the road with a clear view of your front door, and Garnett’s watching the back. Well, except for the
fog
, which Rosemarie says will dissipate on its own, eventually, but it hasn’t, yet. I can’t see a thing, but it’s okay. Vampires can sense each other, so I’ll know if Gretchen or Jimmy or any of them come within a mile.”

“Nice trick,” I said.

“Keeps us from stumbling over each other in the wild. Saves a lot of bloodshed. Not that we have blood, really, unless we’ve recently fed. Second-hand bloodshed. Anyway. Just sit tight.”

“You’re so nice to me,” I said. “And I’m just a human. I don’t get it.” I really didn’t. I wouldn’t bother with humans if I were a member of a superior species.

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re likable enough,” Pleasance said. “But I’m looking out for you because of Edwin. You make him happy. For the first time in about a century he isn’t
moping
all the time. The only other girl he’s gotten halfway close to in all the time I’ve known him is Gretchen, and that was all about lust, he never even seemed to
like
her much.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I said. “She’s so charming.”

Pleasance laughed. “Just lay low.”

So lay low I did. Doing
nothing
doesn’t appeal to me, and I didn’t dare go on Facebook or Twitter or anything, because Gretchen hadn’t been dead
that
long, it seemed, and was probably pretty tech-savvy for a vampire. I’d hate for a bored status update to give away the fact that I was sitting snug in Lake Woebegotten when I was supposed to be in a speeding car out west, running for my life with a couple of dead men.

So I watched TV, and ate a bowl of ice cream—another good reason to become a vampire, I could drink all the tasty blood I wanted and not worry about putting on weight—and mostly just waited. Harry wasn’t home by nightfall—he called to tell me he had to take some samples to a lab in another town, related to the disappearance case he was working on, and wouldn’t be back until late. I asked when he’d be home, but his cell phone broke up before I heard the answer. There’s a lot of wilderness out there, inimical to the trappings of civilization. More than I’d ever realized.

The fog had dissipated a little, but was still thick enough to limit visibility sharply, so even the view from my window was dull. I kept waiting for a call from Pleasance, to tell me things had worked, Gretchen and Queequeg were dead, I could go back to my life, so when the phone rang, I jumped on it, even though it was Harry’s landline and not my cell.

“Bonnie.” It was Harry’s voice, but as I’d never heard it before—breathless, worried, tense. “Bonnie, there’s a woman here, she says her name is Gretchen, and she, ah—Bonnie. Don’t do what she says, call the state—”

His voice abruptly cut off, replaced by Gretchen’s raspy chuckle. “Hi there, Bonnie. I’ve got your papa here with me. He’s a feisty one, isn’t he? So, listen. Your boyfriend Edwin
almost
fooled me. I chased him quite a while before Queequeg got a look inside the car and realized you weren’t there. It didn’t seem likely they’d wrap you up in a blanket and stuff you under the back seat, so I realized I’d been faked out.”

Shit
, I thought.

“Queequeg’s still after them, don’t worry, making them think I’m in hot pursuit. But I doubled back. I assume your house is under surveillance, which is why I didn’t just go knock on your door—believe me, I’m not normally this roundabout. But, now, I’ve got your father. And I know girls like you, Bonnie. You’re a daddy’s girl, aren’t you? You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to old Harry, would you? So I’m going to need you to come to
me
. Do that, and I’ll set him free. Fair enough?”