Charming (14 page)

C
hoo joined me as I made my way toward the front of the house. He was carrying a metal spray gun attached to two plastic tanks on his back by a hose.

“Where are the sunshine twins?” I asked.

Choo grinned. “They’re guarding Dvornik’s body while his spirit tries to come all the way back home. That’s standard operating procedure. It’s not like we can talk with each other anyway.”

I frowned doubtfully. “Who’s going to talk to them if Dvornik dies? Are they good at charades?”

Choo looked amused. “Why? You planning on killing him?”

“I wouldn’t call it a plan,” I said. “A really vivid fantasy maybe.”

“Don’t let the way Sig talks to Dvornik give you the wrong idea,” he advised. “The man’s been killing people like you for a long time.”

“I was born before World War Two, Chauncey,” I said softly, the formal use of his first name deliberate. “I’ve been killing people like him for a long time.”

He looked at me, then looked away.

The front door had an old-fashioned mail flap. I crouched in front of it and opened the flap, taking a deep whiff of the house. I caught traces of disinfectant and fear sweat and vampire stink and blood and loosened bowels, and underlying those were fainter traces of chewing tobacco and spilled beer and solo sex. The air inside was so stale that I could tell it had been at least a few days since a door or window had been opened. Whatever this house was, it wasn’t where Steve Ellison had been holing up lately.

“By the way,” I said to Choo, standing and looking over my shoulder as I fiddled with the lock. It was a cheap lock, and I didn’t bother with the tension picks I’d brought along, just used my laminated Clayburg public library card. “The number of new vampires I’ve smelled is now up to four.”

“Yeah?” Choo said tensely. “Dvornik said there aren’t any vampires in there.”

I popped the door open. “I didn’t say they were in here now. Just that they were in here at some point.”

“Give me a second,” Choo said. “Just in case.” From his bag he removed a metal cylinder about the length of a standard-size flashlight and three or four times as wide. It was white with bright red Japanese letters crisscrossing it. The top of the cylinder had a folding tab that Choo pulled out and then up.

“It’s a refillable steam canister,” he explained, tossing the object into the house and shutting the door. “This one is full of compressed holy water. We’ll be able to walk through it no problem, but for any vampires, it ought to be like getting caught in an acid cloud.”

After a few seconds I could hear a hissing sound emerging from beyond the door. “Nice,” I commented, and meant it. “Will it fill the whole house?”

“No,” he said shortly, removing another cylinder from the bag. “One of these will fill up an area about the size of a living room. Give this one two minutes to stop spewing and another minute to let the steam settle after that.”

I nodded. “How did you meet Sig?” I asked.

“We got a mutual friend,” Choo said. “And I’ll die before I tell you that person’s name because you’re some kind of freaky-ass half-monster thing and I don’t know you from nothing, so don’t ask.”

Actually, he stopped after “We got a mutual friend.” The rest was said too, but it was communicated nonverbally.

We didn’t fill up the rest of the three minutes with a lot of talk.

It wasn’t like a London fog when we opened the door. The air was a little damp, but visibility was normal. The living room was decorated with a big Confederate flag and pictures of NASCAR events mixed in among photos where everyone had a beer or a cigarette in their hand and was trying to look excited. A rectangular metal box with a glass front had been hung on the wall, but instead of a fire extinguisher there was a can of beer in it, the words “In case of emergency, break glass” painted on the outside.

I pulled my wakizashi from the canvas bag slowly.

Choo pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of his bag. I smelled salt. The Catholic Church doesn’t just bless holy water—it also makes a sacramental out of salt, though not as commonly. You can pack shotgun shells with blessed salt the same way some people pack them with rock salt, and the resulting ammo will hit vampires like a blast of acid.

Choo repeated his trick with three more steam canisters as we swept through the house, removing wall panels and
examining interior spaces, checking for any inexplicable presences. He unscrewed the air vents and peered around in them using mirrors on extendable rods while I checked out the fridge and washer and dryer. The washer and dryer were both full; the refrigerator wasn’t. Making our way to the bedrooms, we found the other side of the homemade plywood trapdoor that I’d seen in the basement. It was in the central hallway and poorly concealed by a rug. We slid the plywood aside but didn’t say anything as Sig looked up at us, illuminated by red flare light. She appeared sinister and otherworldly and preoccupied.

“I know you’re not a plumber, but… do you have stuff in that bag for getting into pipes?” I asked Choo quietly.

He gave me a dubious look. “What you got in mind?”

“Check out the bathroom,” I said, and left it at that. The smell of Clorox coming from there was so strong that it felt like my nose hairs were shriveling.

Choo grunted unhappily but obliged, and I went back to check out the main bedroom more thoroughly. There was a personal computer in there, and I wanted to see what I could see.

I had been tooling around Steve Ellison’s browser and Internet options for about ten minutes when Sig came up the ladder. “Sig,” Choo called from the bathroom. “Get in here.”

Choo, good old friendly nonjudgmental Choo, had found something in the bathroom I had pointed him toward and then waited for someone else to come in rather than call me over. Maybe I shouldn’t have made that comment about killing people. I’ve never been good at small talk.

When I joined them Choo was crouched in the bathtub. He had removed the drain cover, and half a dozen clotted clumps of hair and flesh were on a towel laid out on the floor beside him. The water collected around the drain was red.

“Do you see that hole?” he was saying to Sig, nodding upward.

She looked. From over her shoulder I could see a hole where something big had been screwed into the ceiling. Sig’s shoulders hunched and her head went back down. “That explains the marks on their ankles,” she said quietly.

Choo didn’t hear her. He held up one of the stiff tendrils of hair and dried blood. “I’m thinking they hung people over the bathtub from the ceiling by a hook and bled them out like they were butchering hogs,” he said grimly.

Sig looked at me. “Did you tell him about the bodies?”

I shook my head. Maybe Choo wasn’t the only one who had to brush up on teamwork skills.

She turned to Choo. “When the vampires were done, they buried the bodies under the house.”

“I didn’t see any blood stored in the refrigerator,” I told her. “I haven’t seen any other kinds of refrigeration units or coolers around here either.”

Choo interjected. “Is that wrong?” He was watching the dawning comprehension on Sig’s face warily.

“Vampires don’t need to feed every night, and they don’t need to drain a human when they do it either,” Sig explained. “It’s more like putting oil in a car than it is a human being eating their normal amount of food in blood. If John is right about the amount of bodies under this house, the vampires have been taking a lot more blood than they needed just to survive. So where is it?”

Choo swore angrily. It was the only indication I’d seen that any of this was getting to him. “This isn’t their base, is it?”

“This used to be Steve Ellison’s house,” Sig said grimly. “But I think he was one of the vampires sleeping in the attic space above Faulhaber’s apartment complex. The vampires were just using this place as a… what? Butcher shop?”

“That fits with what I found too,” I told them. “Come here for a second.”

Sig and Choo followed me back to the bedroom, where I sat down and showed them what I’d found on the computer. “I haven’t been doing anything fancy here,” I said. “Just seeing what comes up in the search history. I’ve only gotten to
B
.”

“Somebody likes their porn,” Choo commented, reading down the list of phrases with references to babes, bikinis, and bimbos.

“Skip to the word
blood
,” I said quietly.

They did. It was quite a search query list. Blood bags. Blood banks. Blood coagulants. Blood clotting. Blood diseases. Blood donors. Blood draining. Blood regeneration. Blood restoration rates. Blood storage. Blood transfusion. Blood transport. Blood types. And farther down, after lots of references involving bodies and boobs, there were also references to bottling wine and butchering.

“This is worse than we figured,” I said. “One of the vampires we haven’t met yet spent a lot of time at this computer. I’m pretty sure it was a female—it wore a lot of perfume, anyway. And it was much smarter than Steve Ellison.”

“I’ve been wondering about that ever since you mentioned it,” Sig said. “Smarts, I mean. If there are as many bodies under this house as you say there are, this hive has been active a lot longer than two weeks.”

Oops. I could have told her that. I’d known this operation was at least a few months old the moment I’d opened the crawl space and gotten hit by that blast of decay and decomposition.

“And they weren’t just abducting locals either,” Sig continued. “They must have been taking people from other towns and cities and bringing them here. Clayburg just isn’t big enough for this kind of body traffic to go unnoticed.”

“But you did notice it,” Choo pointed out.

“Yes, and very quickly after locals started disappearing too,” Sig said impatiently. “That’s my point. For some reason, this hive’s hunting pattern changed.”

“I think I know why,” I said. “I’ve smelled four new vampire scents, and they haven’t been in this house in a while.”

Sig raised her eyebrows. “As in a couple of weeks?”

I met her gaze levelly. “Something like that.”

“OK, what are you two talking about?” Choo demanded. “Don’t go looking all significant at each other. This is my first vampire hunt.”

“We’re thinking that the original hive split into two different groups a couple of weeks ago,” Sig informed him. “That’s why there were only four mattresses in the den above Faulhaber’s place. That’s why their hunting pattern changed.”

“Something’s been off about this from the start,” I added. “I couldn’t figure out how a moron like Steve Ellison lasted long enough to form a hive. But if he broke off from a larger hive where a smarter vampire was helping him survive, it makes more sense.”

“Or maybe the smarter vampire broke off from Steve,” Sig said. “Maybe he turned her, and she started struggling for power as soon as she realized how limited he was.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It would explain all the weird discrepancies.”

Choo sighed theatrically.

“Like turning the crawl space under the house into a private cemetery,” I elaborated. “That was smart. Dumping the dirt outside in the public common area? That was lazy and stupid.”

Choo didn’t look convinced.

Sig pitched in. “Pretend you’re a smart vampire for a second, Choo. You’ve been draining bodies in your bathtub, and you want to build a trapdoor to the basement below so that you
won’t have to carry the bodies outside when you’re done with them.”

“OK,” said Choo.

“How would you do it?” Sig asked him. “Think about it.”

“I guess I’d cut a hole in one of the closet floors in one of the bedrooms,” he said slowly.

“Right,” I said. “Some out-of-the-way place where people wouldn’t walk much and you could cover it up with shoes or dirty clothes or something.”

Sig vaulted off the bed and marched into the hallway, pointing at the hole in the floor. “Look at this, Choo! Some moron didn’t even use a saw. He just punched a hole in the floor right outside the bathroom because he was too lazy to do any work or carry the bodies any further than he had to!”

Sig walked around the hole, demonstrating how hard it was to get around to the bathroom or the far bedroom now. “They had this big awkward ugly hole that everybody had to step around, and they didn’t even conceal it very well. They put plywood over it because they either didn’t know how to build a trapdoor or they were too lazy.”

“You’re saying the smart one would have done a better job,” Choo said.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “A smart vampire was coming up with bright ideas. A dumbass vampire took advantage of those ideas but kept screwing them up because it was too lazy or too stupid to do them right.”

“So why didn’t the smart vampire kick his ass or kill him?” Choo said.

“Because the smart vampire wasn’t in charge,” Sig speculated. “It could make suggestions, but it must have been weaker than the dumb vampires, either physically or socially.”

“This isn’t usually how hives work,” I said for Choo’s benefit.
“Usually an older, more experienced, smarter vampire is in charge. No new vampires are made without the boss’s permission, and when a new vampire gets turned, the hive explains the realities of how to survive to it. Sometimes vampires will break off and become loners, but lone vampires who can’t adapt or control themselves wind up getting hunted. Idiots don’t last.”

“But sometimes the checks and balances get thrown out of whack,” Sig added. “Like when the knights raid a hive and kill the older, more experienced vampires. You might have a few survivors who are newbies and don’t know the ropes running around, left to their own devices with no clear leader.”

“Or a vampire might crawl out of the ground, and there’s no one there to supervise because the vampire who made it was killed,” I said. “Like the one we found today. That vampire might try to start a hive of its own with no real idea how to go about it. It might turn some dumbass friends from its former life, and they might start doing dumbass things.”

“Sounds like you’re both getting too much from not much to me,” Choo grumbled.

“Want to bet?” Sig challenged. “Loser pays for pizza.”

Choo made a
psssshhht
sound. “The way you eat?”