6 Under The Final Moon (10 page)

“He’s not right anymore,” Nina said the words slowly, carefully, as she balanced the business end of a wet nail polish brush over her big toe and our carpet. “That kind of seems like the understatement of the year, doesn’t it? I mean the kid just beat and incinerated his parents. ‘Not right’ doesn’t even being to cover how seriously not right the little socio is.”

I balanced my chin in my hand, mesmerized by the bubble of lavender paint beading on the end of her nail polish brush. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Nina swiped the polish over one nail. “Of course it doesn’t seem right. This is real life. This is San Francisco. This is not the opening montage of
Halloween
, parts one through eight.”

“He smiled at me, Neens. He smiled and he waved. He was clutching a teddy bear and he just looked so innocent and peaceful.”

“You mean he wasn’t foaming at the mouth and gnawing on a neck bone like all the other serial killers you meet.”

“He’s a
kid
, Nina. An eight-year-old
kid
.”

Nina swiped the paint over her pinky toe, dropped the brush into the bottle, and attempted to blow on her wet toes. “Let me tell you a little story. Back in, 1951, I think—yeah, it must have been fifty-one because the UDA-V bylaw didn’t go into effect until fifty-three. Or four.”

“The kid is going to be an adult by the time you get to the point.”

Nina rolled her eyes and slid the nail polish jar across the coffee table to me. “Anyway. There was this rash of murders—horrible, horrible things. Schoolgirls, mainly. Pretty little things with young, pink complexions and bright, wide-open eyes. And their throats were torn clean out.”

My stomach lurched. “That’s horrible.”

“Of course it is. They were these lovely maidens, six of them, if I remember correctly, cheerleaders, too, if I’m not mistaken. They were strewn all through the French Quarter. That was why I was back in New Orleans.”

I sat up straighter. “You never told me you did any investigative work before me.”

She shrugged. “I thought my skills spoke for themselves.”

I thought of the time Nina dressed me in a black evening gown and cashmere gloves when I asked her for burglar wear and decided to stay quiet. I brushed a lavender streak across my thumbnail. “So you had a previous incarnation as a paranormal investigator.”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Does it have a point?”

Nina’s nostrils flared and her voice went tight. “Six lovely girls, throats torn clean out, left all over town. In the city’s best date spots as a matter of fact. It was tragic and the crime scene was horrific. Scattered remains, very little blood . . .”

Despite my stomach threatening escape, my interest was piqued. “Vampire?”

“Indeed. A very young one. An attractive, sweet-faced boy.”

“I really don’t see what this has to do with anything. Oliver is clearly not a vampire.”

“And you wouldn’t think that Vlad was the type of boy to rip out the throats of six teenage girls.”

“What?” My stomach was truly starting to revolt, and I swigged a tiny sip of my half-flat Fresca, hoping what remained of the carbonation would settle it. “Vlad did that?”

“Yeah. I did what?”

Vlad stepped out of Nina’s room looking red-eyed and disheveled as though he had just woken up. Which was weird because vampires never slept.

Nina wrinkled her nose. “What were you doing in my closet? If you say something disgusting I’m going rip your head off.”

Vlad let out a sound like a rapidly deflating balloon and held out his cell phone. “I was texting Kale. Don’t be so gross. Why were you talking about me?”

“I was telling Sophie that you don’t look like a rabid killer, but, well, you kind of are.”

Vlad’s eyes went wide and there was—shame?—in them. “That was a long time ago, Sophie. And God, Nina, you said you wouldn’t tell! I was just a kid!”

“Sophie’s family, Vlad. And I was just using your criminally bad behavior to illustrate a point.”

“Which is?” I asked, still caught.

“That even someone who looks as soft and dough-like like our little Vladykins here, can make a few seriously bad decisions.”

“I didn’t know my own strength yet.”

“He is an eight-year-old boy, Nina!”

“I was sixteen.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Not you, Vlad. Oliver. This kid. This case tonight. This kid killed his parents.”

“Meh.” Vlad shrugged.

“I’m so glad you two can be so cavalier about human life, but the rest of us can’t. I have one life. And I consider it pretty precious. As do most of the other breathers I know. That’s why murder is a serious crime and it’s not something routinely committed by little boys who still sleep with teddy bears under sailboat sheets!”

“Okay, okay.” Nina patted the air and pulled me to sit next to her. “I can see this is obviously bothering you a lot. What can we do?”

I looked from Nina to Vlad, pausing on the sweet-faced little death machine who was currently kicking off his shoes, unceremoniously dropping them—and a limp pair of socks—in a pile in the center of the living room. He looked so harmless, so unassuming—so annoyingly regular, leaving messes and being completely oblivious to the fact there was a hamper thirty feet away.

“Did you really do what Nina said, Vlad?”

Vlad suddenly focused very hard on balling up his socks and using them to swish an arc across the toes of his black boots. Just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, his head bobbed slightly, almost imperceptibly, and his broad shoulders seemed to sag.

“It was a long time ago.”

Nina leaned close to me, resting her head on the pillow between us. “It’s not always easy . . . when we start. That was before UDA was established. Part of why it was established.”

The pitiful look on Vlad’s face was fleeting, and in a half second, his expression was back to vast indifference.

“But Oliver is just a child,” I said softly. “He’s not—he’s just a kid. A little kid.”

“‘The lion shall lay with the lamb and a little child shall lead them,’” Vlad said.

“What?”

“Apocalypse. Armageddon. End of times. ‘The lion shall lay with the lamb and a little child shall lead them.’ Isn’t that in the Bible?”

A leaden rock sat in my gut and fear pricked the back of my neck. I recognized the phrase—vaguely—but hearing it come out of Vlad’s mouth made it all the more chilling. My lip started to tremble. “Wh-what are you saying?”

“This kid set fire to his parents. And there have been other signs, everywhere.”

“Like what?” Nina spat.

“Earthquake?”

Nina snorted. “If it were Armageddon every time an earthquake hit the Bay Area, we would have been Satan’s minions years ago.”

I glanced at Nina. Vlad glanced at Nina.

“You know what I mean!”

I gulped. “Yesterday? The earthquake?”

“But it’s not like we’re living in Iowa. We’re living in San Francisco. We’re filthy with quakes. So the earth shook a little. Any reports of brimstone vapors of the fires of Hell coming up through the Union Square? No. You’ve got nothing”

“We’ve got the three-headed dog,” Vlad said. “You said it yourself: he’s the guardian of the gates of Hell.”

I surreptitiously pulled the collar of my shirt over my bandage. “Who I may or may not have seen. And there are supposed to be horsemen.” I wracked my brain for every other Apocalypse-type reference I had ever heard in my brief stint in Bible school. “And fish boiled in blood and—and—stones falling from the sky.”

Nina grimaced. “And we’re supposed to be the evil ones?”

Vlad remained uncharacteristically silent, and goose bumps shot up along my spine, then radiated outward until they were covering every inch of me. I shivered and pulled my hands into my sweatshirt. “Nothing to say to that?”

Vlad ignored me and went back to typing on his computer. I was about to tell him that it was rude, even for him, to go tech in the middle of a conversation, but he turned the screen to face me and sat back in his chair, not even attempting to hide the enormously smug smile splitting across his face.

I leaned in, examining the four aging men on the screen. They were standing in a line, one under the other on descending steps, their traffic-cone orange shirts pressed, black rope detailing on their chest pockets and cufflinks.

“What am I looking at?”

Vlad scrolled down a little further and a newspaper heading popped up.

“
Four horsemen to be parade grand marshals,
” I read.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest and eyed Vlad. “Really, Vlad? This is a team of geriatric horse wranglers from Bend, Oregon.”

“The four horsemen are mentioned in the Bible. Did you expect them to be a bunch of teenagers? And they’re coming. It says it right here.” Vlad jabbed an index finger toward the screen. “They’re coming from Bend to grand marshal the parade after the Slow Foods conference.”

“They’re coming from
Bend, Oregon,
Vlad. Not Hell. And they’re coming to lead a parade. Not the world into a fire and brimstony war of the ultimate good and evil.”

Vlad rolled his eyes. “Well, they’re not going to say they’re coming to bring on Armageddon, now are they?”

I gave Nina my “Do you believe this guy?” stare, but she shot me back her own and it leaned more toward “He does have a point.” I felt myself shiver, ridiculously.

“Coincidence,” I said. And then, correcting myself, “Stupid coincidence.”

“Okay, how about this.” Vlad pulled a
Metro
newspaper off the counter and thrust it at me.

“Great, the Rolling Stones are in town. Another farewell tour?”

“No,” Vlad clarified, handing Nina the paper. “Would you do the honors, Auntie Nina?”

She raised her eyebrows but took the paper anyway. “Uh, ‘the Rolling Stones enter concert at AT&T Park with an eye catcher.’” She murmured a few more unremarkable lines about the fourth annual farewell tour and then paused. “They skydived into the concert,” she said slowly.

“So?”

Nina looked at me, her eyes huge and dark. “Stones. Falling from the sky.”

There was a beat of tense silence as we all stared at each other, eyes wide. The silence was only broken when Vlad started howling, his laughter popping in the quiet room.

“You should have seen your stupid faces,” he said between breath-stealing giggles. “You were like, you were like—” He went on to imitate Nina and me with a glazed-eyed, slack jawed look before he doubled over again, snorting this time. “You guys are so lame!”

“You were making this all up?” Nina said sharply.

“You’re such an ass, Vlad!”

He paused long enough to gauge how serious—and how pissed—we were. Then he went back to chortling like a goddamned hyena, and I felt the heat, the adrenaline, those pinpricks of body-alerting fear whoosh out of me. Vlad stopped laughing long enough to point at me. “Armageddon! It’s Armageddon!” he screamed while I wondered how far I could ram a wooden soup spoon into his heart.

I don’t know how long I laid there that night, staring at the ceiling, but I remembered the shadows changing from a faint pale blue to dark outlines of angry black and soothing back again once the sun started rising.

My mind was a constant churn of the sweet, innocent face of Oliver Culverson, the resolute terror in the eyes of Effron Salazar, and Sampson, eyes focused hard on me when he mentioned my father—maybe he really meant that I should find him. The thought of that terrified me, and I padded to the bathroom and spent post-daybreak hours waiting for it to be an acceptable time to call someone and popping Tums by the handful.

At a quarter to seven I was burping up orange-flavored chalk and in desperate need of a Valium. I dialed Alex, ready to fire back when he complained about the early hour.

“I’m surprised it took you this long,” he said, his voice raspy—and sexy—with sleep. “The boy started talking.”

I swallowed hard, the action suddenly taking all my concentration. “And he said he didn’t do it.”

It was silent for a beat, and then I heard Alex suck in a breath. “No. No, he took full responsibility, again.”

“No.” I shook my head, knowing that Alex couldn’t see me. “I don’t buy it.”

“He had details, Lawson.”

“Because he was there, Alex.”

“No. He had details that even an onlooker couldn’t know. He was the murderer, Lawson. He murdered his parents and set fire to their bodies.”

I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I worked in an industry and lived in a city where crime, albeit unfortunate, was commonplace. Horrible stories came up in the papers, and I had waded through my own horrible crime scenes—broken, decimated bodies laid out at angles no healthy human would ever be able to mimic. Rooms where the walls seemed to be bleeding. Flesh torn and puckered by knives, by teeth, by whatever could be considered a weapon enough to cause pain and destruction. I was getting used to them—at least as used to as anyone could expect. But I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to “get used to” any crime that involved children—whether they were the victims or the perpetrators.