Blood of Gold (12 page)

When that cop had come in, giving her his card and telling her there was money to be made for any report of a vampire, she had taken the card but never expected to use it. But now there was a hundred bucks in it for her. Not bad, especially since the girl had been stupid enough to pay in advance.

Now, where had she put that card? She fussed around the messy desk, then looked around in frustration. Ah, there it was, tacked to the bulletin board. She called the number on it.

“Officer Butler?” she said, lowering her voice. She’d heard vampires had heightened senses. “This is Deb Hutchins at the Beachwood. I think I’ve got one!”

Chapter 11

Sergeant John Butler cruised the streets of Crescent City, looking for vampires. He’d been promoted to sergeant mostly because there weren’t enough cops in town to promote before him. The department had been desperate. He knew that and didn’t resent it. He still liked patrolling around town in his cruiser, keeping on top of the action, though he should have been doing paperwork back at the station.

Butler had fought at the Armory alongside the FBI guys, Callendar and Jeffers, as had most of the other cops in the area. He’d also fought alongside vampires, including his old boss, Robert Jurgenson. These unusual allies had fought off the Wildering horde and then disbanded, each aware that the next time they met, it would be as foes.

Then
The Testament of Michael
had started to appear in pamphlets all over town and all over the Internet and the news. No matter how much the authorities denied it, too many people had tweeted, posted on Facebook, and taken pictures and video, and it seemed like everyone had started believing in the Golden Vampires, and suddenly it wasn’t so clear-cut that vampires were always malevolent. Perhaps humans and vampires
could
live together, if the vampires could give up their evil ways.

Butler didn’t know what to believe. He’d seen the faces of the monsters, the slavering bloodlust of the Wilderings, but he’d also seen his old boss protecting his woman, acting all noble. Robert Jurgenson. Good old honest Robert Jurgenson. It was hard to imagine him as a vampire, but even harder to imagine him killing people.

So Butler knew about good vampires and bad vampires.

But even more importantly, he knew about vampires with money and vampires without money. Vampires with money would pay to save themselves and their friends.

He had been visited in the middle of the night by a huge vampire who could have killed him in his sleep. The creature had stood in the shadows, and there’d been something different about him; he seemed more knowing, more sinister than most vampires.

“You hunt vampires,” the voice from the darkness had said. “You kill them.”

Butler hadn’t been sure how to respond. “Uh… it’s my job,” he’d finally said. “Nothing personal.” He’d started to reach under the bed, where he kept his shotgun. Not that he thought it would do much good.

“I won’t interfere with your job,” the Darkness had said. “Do as you will. I am looking for three vampires who have the appearance of girls from eighteen to twenty-five years old.”

“Yes?” Butler kept his hand on the gun, but didn’t pull it out.

“I want you to contact me when you find any vampire who meets this description.”

“Why?”

“I will pay you ten thousand dollars if you find the right girls, but only if they are alive. Call me at this number.” A piece of paper had came floating out of the darkness. Butler didn’t move toward it until the Shadow had disappeared.

That was different,
he’d thought.
A vampire who will pay for information!

So far, he’d called the number six times. Each time, his description of the girl had apparently ruled her out and the vampire had hung up on him. Butler had dispatched the vampire girls as usual.

So much for vampires with money. Meanwhile, vampires without money were worth a bounty.

Oh, they didn’t call it a bounty. “A reward for information” was how it was phrased, but it didn’t seem to matter to those paying whether the “information” was the whereabouts of a living vampire or the corpse of a dead one. Whenever possible, Butler preferred the latter, to the tune of five hundred bucks per headless corpse. He had every teenage hooligan in town out looking, mostly acting as scouts, though sometimes they actually brought him a body. He offered to pay them a hundred bucks, or if they were willing to take less, supply them with beer. They usually took a couple of cases of beer.

Two weeks after the battle, the pickings were getting slim. It appeared that all the vampires had either been killed, left town or were deep in hiding. Things were getting back to normal. Butler admitted to himself that he was ready for some routine duty. It had been exciting while it lasted, but it had also been dangerous. Now that it was almost over, he was remembering how close to death he’d been more than once. Vampires were swift and hard to kill.

His cellphone rang, and for a moment he was confused at the ringtone, a
Twilight Zone
-sounding thing. Oh, yeah. It was the number he’d put on the card he’d handed out. It had been a full week since he’d last gotten a call.

“Yeah?” he answered.

It was the old bat who ran the rundown motel south of town. Beachwood, it was called, though it was miles from the beach.

“I’ve found one for you,” the woman was saying, speaking so low Butler could barely hear her. “Hard to tell under all the grime, but she looks about eighteen years old.”

“All right, Deb! Way to go!” he said in a cheerful voice. “Don’t go near her. I’ll be right there.”

Butler turned the patrol car around and accelerated down the highway. He felt an adrenaline rush and tried to calm himself. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure he had all his equipment in the backseat. It wouldn’t do to underestimate a vampire, especially one who had survived this long.

It looked as if the return to good old boring routine duty would have to wait for another day.

#

Patty woke up with her toe on fire. She opened her eyes to see her big toe burning like a candle.
Curious
, she thought drowsily. Then the pain hit, and she yelped and pulled her foot away from the light streaming through the window. She’d fallen back on the bed and dropped off to sleep. Fortunately, only her feet had been exposed to the morning light.

She hobbled to the kitchen, looked in the refrigerator and found some raw steak. The house reeked of rotten meat, but she wasn’t desperate enough to eat two-day-old corpses. Even animal flesh was better than that. She gobbled down the steak in a few gulps. Her toe started healing almost immediately.

Looking out the window over the sink, Patty spotted the three teenagers coming down the street from a long way off. They were peering into the windows of every house. Sometimes they went to the door and knocked. If someone answered, the kids acted sheepish, as if they were apologizing for getting the wrong house. As soon as they were out of sight of the residents, they dropped the humility act and reverted to their cocky selves.

They’re looking for something,
Patty thought
. Most likely, they’re looking for me, or someone like me.

They were big guys, maybe high school football players, and they carried wooden bats. If you looked closely, you could see that the handles had been sharpened to points. From a distance, they looked innocent, like kids coming back from a ball game, but they were systematically searching the neighborhood.

They seemed particularly interested in the burned-out house, Patty’s old prison, going around and lifting lumber, shingles and masonry as if looking for something. A body, perhaps?

Finally, they walked down the sidewalk toward the house Patty was hiding in, and she stepped a little farther back from the window. She saw them catch the scent of the dead bodies and stiffen, unconsciously lifting their wooden bats-turned-stakes and holding them at the ready.

It was late afternoon. Patty could barely see in the light, it was so bright. She glanced around. There was nowhere obvious to hide. She ran down the hallway, looking to see if there was a way into the attic. Instead, she spotted the outline of a trapdoor in the floor. It looked exactly like the trapdoor in the house she had spent the last decade under. Apparently it was a feature of the houses in this subdivision.

The trapdoor wasn’t obvious. She’d only noticed it because she’d seen one before. There was a throw rug in the next room, and she ran over and got it. She opened the trapdoor, backed down the steep steps to the basement and tried to maneuver the rug over the top of the trapdoor as she closed it.

Just in time. She heard a timid knock, followed by the doorbell, and a short time later, by someone pounding on the door. Then she heard the teens break the kitchen window and tumble into the house.

“Gross, man!” one of them shouted. They’d found the bodies.

“Well, one of them’s been here, that’s for sure. We just need to find out if the ghoul’s still here,” said another.

“How much is Butler paying, again?” one of them whined. He sounded as if he was ready to quit this particular adventure.

“Last I heard, we could get a hundred bucks. Or even better, a couple cases of beer.”

“That’s a rip-off.”

“Yeah, well. So take the hundred bucks and try to figure out how to get the booze yourself, wanker. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m planning to get totally hammered tonight.”

Patty heard them walk over the trapdoor, and it was obvious they were going to miss it. She had an urge to fling open the door and spring out at them. Suddenly, she was ravenous. They wouldn’t be expecting her. She could kill them in seconds, she knew. It would be so easy.

But… she still hadn’t killed anyone. Strangely, it was the look of disappointment that she envisioned on Simone’s face that stopped her. What the hell? She didn’t even like the bitch, most of the time. But at the same time, she loved her like a sister, just as she loved that empty-headed Laura.

“Shit,” one of the teens said, sounding disappointed.

“There’s always Kate.”

“She’s my sister, man! You expect me to turn in my own sister?”

“Well, you said you wanted to get hammered.”

“It’s my
sister
! Well, at least, my half sister. OK… if I turn her in, I want at least half the beer.”

The trio of vampire hunters left the house, laughing. Patty was so angry she didn’t even hesitate; she burst out of the basement and went after them. She wasn’t sure why she was angry, or why she cared about some girl she didn’t even know, but she was as incensed as she’d ever been. It was too much, the way men treated women. She’d had enough, damn it. She threw open the trapdoor and ran to catch the boys, but they were already out on the sidewalk. She watched them go down the street. As they turned the corner, the sun seemed to blink out. Patty looked up to see dark rain clouds rolling toward her. They stretched as far as she could see, and there wisps of rain falling in the distance.

She ran out of the house and followed the boys.

Chapter 12

Kelton woke up inside a rat-trap trailer. The space was barely big enough for him and his six followers. The owner had been their last victim, taken right before dawn. Kelton looked across the dining table and saw that Feller had snagged the other sleeping space, while the other vampires were sprawled on the linoleum floor, dried blood caked on their mouths and chins.

They were all converts to the Shadow and could walk in the daylight, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable for them. Kelton, for one, much preferred to operate in the dark, where he was nearly invisible when he wanted to be as long as he stuck to the shadowy corners.

It still amazed him that he could walk around at all hours of the day. The light simply couldn’t penetrate the thick layer of gloom that surrounded him. It was if he had a protective force field.

Which made him a little conspicuous, frankly. The fact that he was a huge, shaggy-haired man made it worse. He looked like a mountain man and was surrounded by a dark cloud that people couldn’t see, but could sense. And now six other suspiciously hard-looking men were accompanying him. No wonder everyone stared. Not a great thing if you happened to be a serial killer.

He opened the trailer door. There was still enough daylight to disturb the sleepers. They turned away from the light, groaning. Kelton kicked angrily at the man lying closest to the door. He hated that he was being forced to associate with these losers. He’d always been a loner. He liked it that way.

But the Shadow Master insisted.

The bones of their last victim were spread out on the ground outside the door, where they had tossed them as they ate. It didn’t matter; this far from town, there wasn’t anyone to witness the carnage. As the week progressed, they’d had to travel farther and farther from civilization to find food. The authorities were finally getting things under control. Most of the Wildering vampires had been destroyed. It was getting harder to find new disciples and to feed the ones he already had.

Kelton would never have found these followers on his own. Like the Turning of Feller from an everyday vampire into a Shadow Vampire, the Shadow Master had selected each of these hard men. The empty voice that emerged from the floating darkness had told Kelton where to find them. Though it was Kelton who had injected his blood into them, it was the Master who had given it power.

Kelton recognized two of the men as career criminals who had spent half their lives in prison. Another he’d seen on the news, getting arrested for DUII every other week. The other three converts had been surprises. Kelton wouldn’t have suspected that an FBI agent like Feller would have such a rotten core, and the last two men were pillars of the community: Howie Smith, the head of a local bank, and Jeff Miller, a schoolteacher. Smith was portly and bald, wore ill-fitting but expensive suits, and seemed entirely unremarkable. Miller was tall and gawky, with sideburns, horn-rimmed glasses and spiky hair. He looked harmless.