United Service (19 page)

“No.”

“Ok. I got the answer,” Ben said as he reached for the super glue in the bag. “I’ll rig a transmitter to resemble a filling in one of her back molars. They won’t be pulling out her teeth and I can track her with my phone.”

Kate smiled. “They have an app for that?”

“Baby, there’s an app for everything.”

“No.” Sterling shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We didn’t bring any equipment with us.”

“Oh, please,” Ben said holding up his phone. “With all the nanotechnology out there you can almost get cyborg teeth from your dentist. Just last week I read about people who are hard of hearing getting hearing aids attached to their back molars.”

Sterling seemed skeptical. “Really?”

“Radio Shack, my man.”

“Plus, I look human,” Kate added. “The plan is perfect! They won’t be able to tell that I’m a vampire.”

Sterling glanced towards Kate, still unwilling to allow her to take the risk. He shook his head. “They’ll stab you to see if your blood is red and if your body will heal.”

“I got it covered,” she said. “I’ll drink before they even see me. Besides, I heal slowly. They won’t be expecting that.”

Ben’s eyebrow rose to that bit of information. “She can control her fangs and her eyes. She seems like the perfect choice. Even her body piercings make her appear young.”

Sterling had forgotten about the piercings. They did make her appear more human. “So she allows herself to be kidnapped?”

“No. Of course not,” Ben said. “We can work out the details in the car, but I was thinking she poses as Brooke in the school. Volleyball season is over, so she takes the bus home. I found her locker number in the school’s records,” Ben held out the super glue, “Kate glues the lock shut, giving her enough time to get to the bus first and pose as Brooke.”

Ben tapped on his phone and pulled up some information. “She takes bus #116 after school. It’s the only one that runs past her house. We still don’t know if a vampire is helping the kidnappers, so since you appear somewhat human, Sterling, you can pose as the bus driver.”

“Yeah, and what about you?” Sterling asked Ben.

“I’ll get the parents out of the house. Kate will handle the school. We lure the kidnappers out into the open. If they try to get her between school and the bus, or the bus and the house, you can protect Kate and capture the bad guys. If they try it at home, I’ll be here to take care of everything.”

Sterling dropped his head into the palms of his hands. After school probably meant 3pm. The time was already after 9am and Ben had said Brook was a few hours away. He looked up at Kate and saw the determination in her eyes. Using the palm of his hand, Sterling rubbed his jaw. “If the kidnappers are human, we can compel them for the information. I could even touch their person and tell where they’ve been.” He gritted his teeth. “At no point does Kate need to be taken. We’ll call this plan B. We’ll come up with something better in the car.”

The drive to the school was long. The only stops they had made were to Radio Shack and a hardware store. Sitting in the car in the parking lot of Home Depot, Ben created the new filling for Kate. Sterling thought the transmitter was small, yet sturdy enough to do the job. With the extra wiring Ben attached to the device, it did resemble an orthodontic contraption.

Kate sat still in the backseat as Ben fitted the tiny piece of metal into her mouth. Sterling glanced away during the procedure, not wanting to see Ben sitting so close to Kate. The backseat was small, and her head nearly lay in his lap.

Sterling listened as Kate assured Ben she couldn’t feel a thing as he cemented the transmitter onto her molar. Kate’s phone beeped and chirped several times during the ten minute process it took to put the thing in place. Each time her phone made a noise, Kate rolled her eyes and signaled with her hand to ignore the call.

Ben tested the receiver a few times, and once he was satisfied with its performance, they left the parking lot of the hardware store and continued to the school, which was a few miles away. They didn’t get far when Kate’s phone buzzed again.

It seemed to Sterling that Kate made very few phone calls; she just received more than her fair share of them. He heard her texting quickly as her fingers danced over her phone. A moment later she gave an exasperated groan from the backseat of the car.

“Kate?” When there was no answer, Sterling turned around to look at her. He noticed Ben checked on Kate by looking at the rear view mirror. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m great,” she said in a cracked voice.

Feeling the lump in his throat, Sterling knew he needed to say something. Anything halfway soothing would be good. Of course, he didn’t know what to say. He never cared enough about a woman to even try to talk to one on any real level. He couldn’t tell if she was just angry or perhaps upset and about to cry.

“There. There,” he said. It sounded better in his head than coming out of his mouth. When he heard Ben’s chuckle, he knew he needed to come up with something better than that, especially since Kate was now staring at him. “You want to talk about your family?” he asked.

Kate made eye contact with Sterling. At first, he thought she was going to say ‘no’. But, after a brief moment of silence, she asked, “You two are a lot older than I am, but do you remember when you lived at home and your parents would drive you crazy?”

Sterling couldn’t think of a solid 24–hour time frame when his father wasn’t pushing at least one of his buttons. “Kate, I still live with my father and even though I love the man, he can drive me crazy most of the time. I think he sees it as part of his job.”

Ben added, “And he does a good job, Sterling.” Ben made eye contact with Kate through the mirror. “I live with both of them, and even though I get along with the man just fine, I can understand how his father would drive me nuts at times if I were his son.” When Sterling gave Ben a puzzling look, Ben added, “What? He needs to give you more slack on the entire ‘remedy issue’ and you know it.”

Sterling cleared his throat and glared at Ben. It was a can of worms he didn’t want opened quite yet, and any good wing man should know better than to bring something like that up. He noticed Kate gave him a curious look, so he quickly changed the subject back onto her. “What’s going on with your parents?”

“They’re constantly fighting. They hate each other and I have seven half–siblings who are taking sides. I’m the only child from both of them, and I can’t side with one over the other.”

“Hold on. How many kids you got in your family?” Ben asked.

“I’m the youngest of eight. My father has
many
ex–wives. Mom calls them his harem.”

“The Vampire Council only allows each household to have two children, Kate,” Ben said. “He has a few too many.”

“Only the oldest is listed in his family line, so I can’t claim my father’s name with the Council. His ex–wives claim the others in their family lines, so no Council rules are broken. I’m my mother’s only child, so I’m listed in her bloodline. I think much of the fighting is because they can’t have more children and ensure any financial standing or status for them with the Council. Of course, they don’t fight directly over that; they fight over other stuff. Today’s fight is over some property they own. My father had bought an apartment complex before they separated, and my mother has been managing the place for the last five years. Now with the divorce settlement, she insists that she is entitled to half of the units plus any lost salary. She’s demanding they sell the property and split the money evenly and her salary to come from his half. My father argues that she isn’t entitled to any salary and he doesn’t want to sell the complex in this economy.”

“Sounds like a genuine concern, about the economy I mean.” Ben shifted his eyes back to the road and concentrated on the drive.

“The lost income is a good point. The mother should be compensated,” Sterling said, shooting a glance over to Ben. Focusing back on playing a neutral party, Sterling added, “So you’re between a rock and a hard place.”

“Yeah. And now my brothers and sisters have taken sides and are arguing among themselves and trying to drag me into the middle of the mess. Some of them even live in the apartment complex.” Her phone buzzed again signaling another text was coming in, but she didn’t bother to read what it said. Instead, she flipped the silencer switch to meeting mode and tossed the phone down on the seat next to her. “How do you politely tell someone you love to fuck off?”

Sterling checked his watch again. Some members of the Colony, those who could be spared from watching the President, were already on their way to Tennessee. They wouldn’t get to town until after dark, long after Brooke would be taken. The school would let out in another hour. Sterling, Ben and Kate sat in their rental car in the school’s parking lot going over the only plan they had come up with.

Sterling’s phone rang. His father called with more Intel on the Hands of God. Sterling listened intensively on the phone, but then hung up with a grim expression on his face.

“The kidnappers have a longer history than we thought,” he began. “We already knew the Hands of God kidnapped at least a dozen kids, but my father confirmed that lately all the parents had been murdered as well. Tiffany’s parents seem to be the only exception in the last three years or so – probably because Tiffany’s parents weren’t with her.”

“I was with her,” Kate said. “Why didn’t they kill me?”

“They may not have attacked you because you were in a public place or because they thought you were human,” Ben suggested.

“Regardless, we now have more information about them. The team tracked down the origin of the group and, let’s just say, they don’t have a humble beginning. A woman named Victoria Fuller seems to be their ringleader. My father found news articles and video clips of her from all parts of the country preaching and trying to spread the word that vampires are among us.”

“Holy shit,” Ben cursed. “Anyone believe her?”

Sterling nodded. “Some. For a while, the Vampire Council was looking for her. She managed to elude them, but eventually she was placed in a loony bin in upstate New York with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The Council thought they had seen the last of her. Unfortunately, she gathered some followers while on the inside. She escaped almost two decades ago from the institution, which is when these kidnappings started. She’s flown under the radar until now.”

“Why didn’t the Council kill her when they found her locked away?” Ben asked.

“I guess they didn’t anticipate her being a problem since the humans found her mental and not credible. Sulie traveled to New York to study the medical records and the facility. She spoke with some of the older staff and patients about Victoria. Turns out, the woman was charismatic. One of her followers was a patient named Henry Phelps, who has since been released. Many other patients also believed Victoria’s claims, but they are still being treated and are locked up. This Henry guy had a mental disorder – mega something or other.”

“Megalomania?” Kate asked.

Sterling eyes darted over to Kate. “Exactly.”

“Megalomania is an inflated sense of self–esteem and overestimation of one’s powers and beliefs.” Kate furrowed her brow and bit her lip. “Did either Henry or Victoria have a history of violent behavior?”

“Henry? No. He was locked up when he was fifteen years old. He had been an inmate already ten years when Victoria joined the party. The two remained in the facility for another seven years together. Interestingly enough, Victoria’s parents went missing before any of this happened. No charges were pressed because of a lack of hard evidence, but my father is trying to find the records to see if any vampire dust was found.”

Ben’s eyes grew wider. “Are you saying she’s a vampire?”

Sterling shrugged. “Possibly. If so, someone had to be helping her while in the loony bin to get blood to her.”

“That bitch!” Kate yelled. “She is kidnapping and killing us, and she’s
one
of us?”

Ben touched Kate’s arm. “Calm down. We have a bigger problem than her being a hypocrite.”

“Yeah,” Sterling agreed. “We might be up against a vampire who thinks she’s holier than everyone else. She’ll also be able to detect us once we get close.”

“She can’t sense you or Kate. Our plan is still the best one.” Ben took out a Sharpie marker he had bought at Walmart and wrote “Brooke Smith” on the back of the new backpack before handing the bag over to Kate.

“She doesn’t attend elementary school,” Kate said. “Is this Brooke girl in special ed?”

“Blatantly obvious is better than some idiot kidnapper not noticing you,” Ben said.

Sterling noticed the school buses had begun to pull into the back of the school. Bus #116 was one of them. “That’s my ride,” he said handing the car keys to Ben.

“They live fifteen minutes away, and they’ll be the third stop,” Ben said, accepting the keys. “The father is out of town on business, so if the mother is home I’ll bring her up to speed quickly. Although she works full–time at IBM. I’m betting the house will be empty.”

Kate slung the now–weighted backpack on. A solitary brick filled the bag, but it felt weighted down enough to appear like books were inside. She looked at her own overnight bag. “I have Tiffany’s favorite teddy bear in my bag. Make sure she gets her stuffed animal.”