Deamhan (4 page)

Veronica again felt the tingling sensation. He even knew her name.  This time, it hurt.

Remy persisted.

Veronica ran toward the front exit. She plowed through the crowd, knocking past people and Deamhan alike. The sensation continued until she passed the security guards outside. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she drank fresh air in huge gulps.

As she reached the corner and turned in the direction of her apartment, she slowed her pace. When she neared the end of the block, she paused and checked the street behind her.

Sloppy. Mother would never have acted like that.

As she continued her walk home, thoughts about her father’s warning before she left San Diego repeated over and over in her mind. He’d said she wasn’t ready to come back to Minneapolis. Nonsense.

She had to be.

The full moon filled the night sky. Veronica zipped her jacket as the wind picked up. She turned her face to the wind and inhaled, letting the crisp air fill her lungs. Fall was the best time of year in Minnesota. She shoved her hands into her pockets and mounted the steps to home.

CHAPTER TWO

A loud slapping sound woke Veronica, and she jerked upright on the couch, startled. She cocked her head, listening for the arcane sound to repeat itself but nothing came.

Moving her head from side to side, she stretched her neck. A sharp pain in her back reminded her why she should have slept in the bed last night.

The apartment building, Palm Oaks (once a shoe factory that fell victim to a wave of new development) sat facing the bank of the Mississippi River. She’d considered a larger apartment, but the river view kept her there, despite the fact that in only a few days, she felt she’d outgrown the tiny space.

Since childhood, Veronica felt a weird attraction to water. Watching vast amounts of it rush downstream, caught her attention as a child. The Mississippi River was her favorite. She marveled at its course and the history behind it thanks to Mark Twain’s majestic adventures.

She released an audible breath as she turned her head to look out of the window. The leaves on the trees that banked the edge of the river were in the middle of changing colors. Her gaze drifted near the red asphalt bike path to the old gazebo. Now weather beaten, its white paint cracked and peeled at the edges. Its once-detailed walls were nonexistent, destroyed by the harsh Minnesota weather.

Yep, I’m in a great location.

The apartment building was also located near many of the dance clubs and bars littering downtown Hennepin Avenue. The area seemed perfect for her. At night, the street came alive with tourists and Minneapolis citizens crowding the sidewalks along with young adults who bar-hopped to relieve themselves from the job pressures of corporate America.

Hennepin Avenue ran the length of two miles from east to west, beginning at the bank of the river and ending near the freeway. Its warehouse district rested near the eastern edge, close to Dark Sepulcher. With huge, boarded-up vacant buildings, the district felt desolate and quiet until nightfall; except for the occasional police sirens in the distance. It agitated her that many of the buildings, part of original downtown Minneapolis, were shamefully left to rot in disrepair. Finally, the city decided to renovate half of the buildings, turning them into condominiums and businesses instead of tearing them down.

Veronica stretched her arms overhead, then reached for the remote control on her coffee table and flicked on the TV. In her still-groggy state, she paused on a breaking story about a house fire near the warehouse district. The camera crew panned on the ruins of the destroyed home behind the newscaster. The report showed a crowd gathering across the street from the fire, watching smoke escape into the sky from smoldering pieces of wood and debris.

A newswoman dressed in a bright red shirt with short, carrot-colored hair, spoke into the microphone about the fires. The news surprised Veronica. Before coming to San Diego, she thought she’d researched all there was to know about the state of Minneapolis until her best friend, Sean warned her about the fires. Crime wasn’t high but from the news report, anyone else not knowing about the city would have thought differently. She didn’t know what this had to do with her search, but the news report gave the impression that the fires were frequent and out of control.

The camera panned right to left, filming the other homes on the block. Old Victorian homes with bright green lawns and brick lined porches came into view. Tall red oak gates separated the properties and expensive cars parked on the streets and driveways.

Sean told her that the Deamhan in Minneapolis now violated their Dictum—basic rules laid down by their ancestors centuries ago on how to survive in the human world without risking your privacy. Now the Deamhan of today in Minneapolis released their transgressions on each other. Besides the fires, they killed each other by the hundreds. Veronica knew about these dangers. And Remy and Alexis’ reaction to her last night proved that the creatures remained unstable.

Still, the Deamhan had turned a total one eighty from their Dictum. Some of its rules were simple, yet explicit: maintain secrecy, dispose of human remains, and respect the Ancients, the oldest of the Deamhan. Something caused them to sway from those rules decades ago and Veronica blamed that something on her father and The Brotherhood. Her father declared the city an off-limit zone for all Brotherhood members, right around the time she boarded her flight. It was typical Brotherhood behavior.

Veronica finally pulled herself from the couch. The bright sunlight crept through her window and blinded her. She twisted the window blinds to block the rays and smiled to hear and see the birds chirping outside her window. When she opened the window, the smell of wet leaves and dew entered her nostrils. Below, the sidewalk came alive with cyclists and rollerbladers. The Jubilee Coffee shop across the street spilled its patrons onto the sidewalk. The clear blue sky showed nary a cloud.

“This is the Minnesota I remember,” she said to the robins beneath her window ledge. The Minnesota that surprises me when I least expect it.  A beautiful state with breathtaking scenery, lavish forests, and ten thousand lakes.

 And Deamhan and vampires.

Little did its residents know what lurked in the city and slithered from the burrows at sunset.

She sat back on the couch, wiping the morning sweat from her forehead. The smells and the scenery made her think of her mother and her childhood. Reliving her childhood without the tragedies became her one thing she wished for in her teenage years. Just the thought of her mother coming back home from her assignments felt like needles puncturing her skin. One Saturday evening, at the age of five, Veronica used bright pink crayons to scribble a Welcome Home sign for her mother while she sat on the dining room floor of her parents’ shabby two bedroom apartment in south Minneapolis. Her father paced back and forth in the living room, puffing on his tobacco pipe.

On her piece of construction paper, below her child-written words which read “Welcome Home,” she’d drawn three stick figures in black of mom and dad with her in the middle. In the foreground she attempted to draw a pyramid. She’d never seen one before but from what her mother told her, it was a huge triangle with four huge and uneven bricks.

The front door creaked open and she had jumped to her feet. With her drawing in hand, she raced to the door and collapsed into her mother’s arms. The smell of wet leaves emitted from her brown wool jacket. She watched her mother reach into her purse and pull out a sandwich bag filled with dirt and small pieces of limestone.

Veronica took the bag and ran back to her safe spot on the dining room floor. The beautiful limestone and rough speckles of sand sparkled. She poured a small amount in the palm of her hand but her excitement was short lived when she heard the deafening sound of her father’s hand hitting her mother’s cheek.

Veronica didn’t remember if her father had really slapped her mother’s face, or if the abundance of the memory caused her to think he had.

She rubbed her eyes with her fists to erase the vision.

On the other hand, she felt thankful that her mother still appeared so lovely and fresh in her dreams and memories. She knew her mother believed in what she was doing, but Veronica had never understood the reason she’d involved herself in The Brotherhood. It wasn’t like her father’s side of the family, who had a history with the organization. Her mother started at the bottom and, over time, she’d moved up in the organization’s status to researcher and she was good at it. The Brotherhood’s historical research department in San Diego often sought her mother’s opinion on the Deamhan. The staff and administration admired and respected her mother at the same level which they feared her father. Veronica remembered being forced to play with the other kids whose parents were also researchers. She was home-schooled and she attended high school as a teen.  

Veronica remembered the McKenzie twins, Joseph and James, the nerds of the group. They excelled in academics, but sucked in athletics. Kelli Simpson, a pudgy blonde girl, had a crush on Joseph, but he claimed she had cooties and broke her heart. She loved to drink Kool-Aid and once claimed to a teacher that she was allergic to prune juice. All three of them became researchers and they were moved to the Eastern Division with its headquarters based in New York.

Her thoughts moved to Sean Fechin, her best and only friend in The Brotherhood. He was the only person she could trust. With her own father hardly at home, he became her adopted brother and he stuck his neck out for her. His family also had ties in The Brotherhood, except that his parents both retired early and didn’t force their son to follow in their footsteps. It was Sean who secured the secret documents about the Deamhan for her. He supported her decision to go to Minneapolis.

And then there was Kenneth Dearhorn. Even now, sitting alone in her apartment, Veronica sighed to think of him. Kenneth Dearhorn was smart, athletic and handsome for his age. She could still picture his hazel eyes and smooth skin. He claimed Native American and Irish ancestry. He was also cocky, arrogant, and fickle. Every girl in school had a crush on him—including Veronica. At the time of her mother’s disappearance, his father, Peter, was the President of the Midwest Region with Veronica’s father serving under him. He trained his son rigorously to one day become a researcher and take his father’s place as President. Unlike Veronica’s father, Kenneth’s father didn’t shelter him from the Deamhan. Instead, he allowed his son to marinate with them. When Kenneth’s father was killed, Veronica’s father sent Kenneth along with her to San Diego to continue his training. Now he had the job of lead researcher of the Western Division. Soon, he’d be President.

The pressures of representing the Austin family name became a burden to Veronica. Her father expected Veronica to be like Kenneth and to not question but to remain silent, but she proved to be nothing like him. The Brotherhood was engrained in her family genes. Her grandparents and her great grandparents both worked for The Brotherhood. It was her mother who had no family ties in the organization and who also viewed any teachings of The Brotherhood to be propaganda and argued that no child should be exposed to it by force.

Veronica paced the floor. A morning of reminiscing caused her to yearn to hear Sean’s voice. She pulled the cell phone from her coat pocket and dialed his number.

“So now you call,” he answered.

“It’s only been a couple of days, Sean,” she replied.

“Three, to be precise. Besides, you told me as soon as you arrived in Minneapolis you’d call.”

She remembered. Their short conversation about her trip became clear as though it had happened yesterday. “Well, I had to get settled first.” She headed for the kitchen. “I still haven’t unpacked everything yet.”

“What do you have to unpack? It’s not like you’re staying there forever.”

“So now you’re my self-appointed protector.” The noise of rustling papers and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon rebounded from the ear piece. “I thought you didn’t like Pink Floyd?”

“What makes you think that? I’ve always like Floyd.” He grunted. “So, how is it up there?”

“So far, so good”—she opened the door of her fridge to retrieve a carton of orange juice from the top shelf—“I guess.”

“And Dark Sepulcher? Was it like I said it would be?”

“Uh, I went last night.” Veronica heard his audible gasp across the miles.

“I thought you were going to wait a couple of weeks.”

“I was, but I changed my mind.” She heard more clattering in the background.

Sean lowered his voice. “So, what happened in there?”

“They were everywhere.” Veronica pulled an empty glass from the cabinet. “You should’ve come with me, Sean. It’s unbelievable.”

“I’m sure it was,” he replied, “but you know I don’t have the stomach for that.”

Veronica knew all too well. Sean didn’t plan to head out into the field as a researcher. He avoided danger like the plague. He was most comfortable sitting behind a desk at The Brotherhood headquarters in San Diego.

“You know I don’t want to be anywhere near them, Veronica.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me twice, Sean.”  Veronica heard the twinge of excitement in his voice. She pictured him sitting in a dark enclosed office, his back to the wall, his hand cupping his mouth, and his eyebrows raised in elation. “Well, I really didn’t think they’d let me in.”

“They? The Deamhan?”

“And the vampires.”

“Well, did anyone recognize you?”

“One Deamhan accused me of being a researcher”—she poured herself a glass of juice from the pitcher in the fridge— “so yes, I think they recognized me.”

Everything she knew of Dark Sepulcher came from Sean’s excellent ability to obtain secret Brotherhood files. He’d taught her that the building that housed Dark Sepulcher had been through many facelifts in the past: a bar, a theatre, a hotel, and even a house of ill repute. Its vibrant history placed the building and surrounding structures in the historic district of Minneapolis. The building still maintained the look of an old two-level warehouse, complete with a small upper level and fire escape stairs on the outside of the building. It had been Sean’s suggestion that she begin her research there. He’d told her it was common knowledge that no researcher had stepped inside the venue since the day the Chapter left the city. While there, they’d avoided the building at all costs.