Vampire Beach Hunted (8 page)

‘Good. I want to meet,’ Brad said.

‘I’m going to grab the junk from my locker and dump it at home, then I’ll be over,’ Jason told her. He gave her a quick kiss goodbye.

‘Yeah, I’ll come with you. I’ll get my stuff and Van Dyke’s,’ Brad said. They walked down the corridor in silence. The school was already mostly empty. This late in the year there were no activities to keep anybody around.

Brad stopped short about six feet from the double doors leading into the gym. ‘Do you see that?’

Jason followed his gaze. Brad was staring at the ground.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Jason said.

Brad took a couple of steps forward and crouched down. ‘Right there. It’s blood.’

Jason knelt next to him. Now he could see a small smear of dark red.

‘It’s fresh,’ Brad told him.

‘So someone stubbed their toe,’ Jason suggested, straightening up.

‘There’s too much. There’s a lot of it. I can smell it. You can’t smell it?’ Brad darted forward. ‘There’s some more.’ He pointed to another smear along the bottom of the wall a few feet closer to the gym.

Brad rushed along the trail of almost imperceptible – at least to Jason – drops and stains of blood. It led around the gym to the locker room. Brad held one arm out, cautioning Jason, and pointed to a thin streak of blood on the long metal door handle. ‘Watch yourself. We don’t know what’s going to be in here.’

Slowly Brad opened the door. Jason strained to catch any sounds from inside. He could hear the shower running.

Brad moved toward the sound, fast and silent as a panther. Jason followed as quietly as he could. When Brad rounded the entrance to the showers, he stopped dead and let out a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. Jason looked around him and sucked in his breath with a hiss.

Van Dyke was huddled on the tiled floor, shirtless but still wearing his pants, the shower water streaming down onto him. Blood and dirt mingled in the water and swirled away down the plug. The water was obviously warm because steam filled the room, and yet Van Dyke was shivering violently. Brad raced to his side, turning off the water, while Jason ran to grab a towel from the stuff he’d cleared out of his locker.

Jason returned and helped Brad to wrap the towel around Van Dyke’s shoulders. Jason could see that his feet were bare and bleeding, one of his fingernails was halfway ripped off and his pants were torn. Despite the shower, some grime still streaked his chest and there was a perfectly round wound on his abdomen. A section of his scalp had been shaved and there was a neat row of stitches across it.

‘Who did this to you?’ Brad cried. ‘Van Dyke, who in the hell did this to you?’

Who
could
have done this?
Jason wondered.
Who could have been strong enough to do
all this
to a vampire?

Nine

‘
WHO DID THIS
to you?’ Brad shouted again.

Van Dyke didn’t answer. He just groaned weakly and pulled the towel more tightly around himself.

Brad sucked in a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle. ‘I’m going to take care of you, buddy,’ Brad told Van Dyke. Calmly, he pulled out his cell and punched in a number.

‘Who are you calling?’ Jason demanded.

‘School nurse,’ Brad answered.

‘Isn’t this a little out of her league? We need an ambulance. EMTs,’ Jason protested.

‘Can you come to the boys’ locker room? There’s been an accident. Nothing too serious. Some minor cuts. Thanks,’ Brad said into the phone.

Has he gone into shock?
Jason wondered, staring at Brad.

Brad took him by the arm. ‘This is what he
needs
.’

Finally, it clicked in Jason’s head. He got it. Van Dyke was dangerously weak. What he needed was blood. Brad had called the nurse so Van Dyke could feed on her. ‘Sorry.’ Jason shook his head. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Why don’t you go wait over by the lockers? I’ll wait with Michael,’ Brad said. Jason realized it was the first time he’d ever heard Brad call Van Dyke by his first name.

‘Sure.’ Jason automatically headed over to his own locker and sat down on the wooden bench in front of it. He knew all about the realities of vampire blood-drinking. But there was a part of him that was still deeply uncomfortable with the fact, even though he knew, knew from actual experience, that it was extremely pleasurable when a vampire fed on a human, and that the vampires never took enough blood to do any harm. Only a rogue vampire
drained
the donor when he drank.

About five minutes later, Jason heard the nurse hurry into the locker room. Heard Brad direct her to the showers. Then, about five minutes after that, he saw Brad and Van Dyke walk her back out into the main part of the locker room, and saw the dazed and happy expression on her face as they easily convinced her that Van Dyke was absolutely fine and his parents didn’t need to be contacted.

As soon as she was gone, Van Dyke’s pleasant expression hardened. ‘We need to get everyone together,’ he declared. ‘
Now!
’

Jason called Sienna as he strode across the parking lot to the VW. ‘Change of plans. We’re meeting at Van Dyke’s place in an hour. He’s back. He’s going to tell us everything when we all get there.’

Sienna hung up almost immediately so she could pass on the news. Jason hit Adam’s speed dial number.

‘What’s going on?’ Adam asked as soon as he picked up.

‘Just wanted to tell you I can’t do
Reservoir Dogs
tonight,’ Jason said.

‘Oh. That’s . . . OK. I figured it was off, with everything else that’s going down,’ Adam answered.

‘Yeah, I figured you’d figured, but I wanted to make sure. Also, Van Dyke is back.’

‘He is? Where was he? What happened to him?’ Adam asked in a rush.

‘I don’t really know yet. I’m not even sure how much he knows. He was hurt pretty bad,’ Jason said. ‘We’re meeting up at his place in an hour and he’s going to fill us in as much as he can.’

‘I’ll be there.’ Adam hung up before Jason could say that maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

Except it actually
was
a good idea. Adam had come through for the vampires in lots of ways this past year. Zach had even pretty much said so at Brad’s party. They’d probably be glad to have him around tonight. In Jason’s opinion, they were in a we-need-all-the-help-we-can-get situation.

‘Start from the beginning. We need to understand as much about the situation as we can,’ Zach told Van Dyke when everyone in the group was gathered. Everybody seemed fine with Adam being there. It had only been awkward on the weekend because he’d had Brianna with him.

Van Dyke wiped his face with his fingers. ‘I’ll try. But I’m telling you right now I don’t remember everything.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘So, the beginning: I get a call from Maggie.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘I start driving over there. On the way, there’s an accident blocking the road. I can see a body on the street.’

Jason heard Belle give a little gasp.

‘I pulled over and ran to check on the guy. I wasn’t sure if he was still alive. I had my cell out. I was about to call 911. But when I leant down to check his pulse, he sat up and zapped me with some kind of stun gun,’ Van Dyke explained.

Brad looked like he badly wanted to punch something again. Jason felt the same way.

‘When you get hit with one of those, your whole nervous system gets disabled. Human or vampire,’ Van Dyke continued. ‘So I’m on the ground. I can’t move. And five guys – I think five – pour out of the van. I forgot to say that one of the vehicles in the accident was a van,’ Van Dyke added, turning to Zach. ‘The guys had me in the back in seconds and we were out of there.’

‘One of them must have driven your car off,’ Brad said. ‘There was no sign of it when we followed your route to Maggie’s house.’

‘They really had the whole thing planned out,’ Jason added. ‘Not just staging the accident, but slashing Maggie’s tires. They must know you’re her boyfriend and figured that she’d call you for a ride. They knew exactly which streets you’d take to get to her place, too.’
They aren’t going to be easy to stop
, he thought.

‘They have to have been watching us closely to know all that. I don’t like it,’ Belle said.

‘That’s the kind of information we need about them. That kind of detail,’ Zach told them, his voice cold.

Zach’s not going to be easy to stop, either
, Jason acknowledged. He looked around the room. At Brad’s clenched fists. Maggie’s tight jaw. Erin’s ramrod straight posture. Sienna’s blazing eyes. None of them would be easy to stop. They were all pissed off. Even Zach in his own icy way. And Belle, scared as she was. One of their own had been hurt and someone was going to pay.

‘What do you remember about where you were held?’ Zach asked Van Dyke.

‘My cell was small,’ he answered slowly.

‘Cell!’ Belle exclaimed, outraged.

‘It was . . . maybe . . . nine by six,’ Van Dyke continued. ‘A cot. A bucket. Damp. Smelly, obviously. It’s weird, because other parts of the place were really hi-tech. They brought me into operating rooms a couple of times.’

Jason saw Sienna’s face pale. His hand drifted to the spot on his head that had been shaved on Van Dyke’s. When he realized what he’d done, he jammed his hand in his pocket.

‘Were the people who captured you human?’ Brad asked.

‘Yeah. But they had some hi-tech equipment. They strapped me on a gurney to move me and the straps were made of nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like something from a space shuttle. I couldn’t make even a tiny tear in them. Sometimes they half knocked me out with gas. Every time they wanted me not to use my strength, they gassed me.’ Van Dyke stared blankly into space for a moment. It seemed like he was focusing on a memory. Then he gave his head a brisk shake. ‘Like I said, I wasn’t always conscious, but I know they drew a lot of blood from me, and they took some spinal fluid. And they kept sticking me with these long needles. Not injecting me. Pulling stuff out.’

‘It sounds like they were doing biopsies of your organs,’ Adam said. ‘They were doing a real workup on you.’

‘Is that what happened to his head? A brain biopsy?’ Erin asked.

‘Maybe,’ Adam replied.

‘How did you get out of there?’ Maggie asked Van Dyke. Her eyes shimmered with tears she wasn’t allowing herself to shed.

‘They have another vampire,’ Van Dyke told the group. ‘I should have said that right up front. Christopher. I’ve never seen him around here before.’ Again his gaze went to Zach. ‘I think they’ve had him for a while. He doesn’t look too good. But he managed to pass me a key to the handcuffs they used.’

‘How did he get that?’ Zach asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Van Dyke answered. ‘I’m not sure about anything. We didn’t have the chance to talk much. Anyway, they were going to do some experiments on me – something where they had to take me outside the main location. They put the cuffs on and put me back in the van. They weren’t paying as much attention to me, because they were sure I was restrained and the van was moving. So I used the key to get the cuffs off, yanked open the door and jumped.’

‘Obviously, we don’t have any time to waste,’ Zach announced. ‘One of us is still being held captive. We don’t know how long he can survive, so we have to rescue him. We have to find the place where Van Dyke was held and shut it down before it’s too late.’

‘So you think you were held in a warehouse . . .’ Zach recapped, as Brad slipped out of the room.

‘The place was big, that’s for sure,’ Van Dyke answered. ‘And my cell felt like a warehouse, cold and damp. Definitely not heated like a building that was used by a lot of people. At least, not that part of it.’

‘Did you see anything that made you think you were being held by vampire hunters like Tamburo?’ Jason asked. ‘Any ritualistic objects? Anything with the phases of the moon as symbols?’

Van Dyke shook his head. ‘All the equipment these guys had was really hi-tech,’ he said, pacing back and forth across the living room. His wounds had visibly improved and he was clearly eager to go out and kick some ass. ‘The stuff could have come out of your dad’s labs, Sienna. It was that cutting edge. Some of the tech guys were even wearing what looked like hazmat suits. This wasn’t some rinky-dink operation.’

Brad hurried back into the living room. ‘I snagged this from the study,’ he said, spreading a detailed map of Malibu out on the coffee table. ‘I thought it could help. Let’s go over everything you remember about your escape. You said you jumped out of the van. Can you show us where on the map?’

Van Dyke sat on the floor and leant over the coffee table. ‘I hit the ground hard and rolled. I was going to try to stand up and start running, but I picked up momentum. It turned out there was a hill at the side of the road. A steep, scrubby hill. And I was going down it whether I wanted to or not. When I finally stopped, I got up and ran.’

‘I’m thinking the school must have been closer than your house and that’s why you went there,’ Brad suggested.

‘Yeah,’ Van Dyke agreed.

‘Any idea how far you ran?’ Jason asked.

‘It felt like a marathon. But maybe a mile. At least a mile,’ Van Dyke answered.

Van Dyke studied the map. ‘Here’s the school.’ He tapped the map. ‘And I think this has got to be the hill.’ He tapped it again. ‘So this has to be where I jumped out of the van.’ He pointed to a road.

‘Now we just need to work back from there,’ Sienna said. ‘How long do you think you rode in the van before the heroic leap?’

‘I probably had a brain biopsy before this all happened,’ Van Dyke reminded everyone.

‘Best guess,’ Erin urged.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Van Dyke told them.

‘And how fast do you think the van was going?’ Jason asked.

‘This is starting to feel like one of those word problems from the third grade. I never liked those,’ Van Dyke complained. ‘When I jumped out, it felt as though we were going about forty. Let’s say we were going around forty the whole time. I don’t remember speeding up or slowing down a whole lot.’