H.T. Night's 8-Book Vampire Box Set (126 page)

He wasn’t smiling now, though, and I was out
of the car when I realized he was heading toward the passenger
side.

He yanked open the door and pulled Parker
out with a gruff and non-negotiable “Come on!”

He wasn’t overly violent, but I could see
the potential simmering there. The man clearly had a volcano buried
inside that beatific mountain of a head.

Parker let out a moan of “Daaaad” that was
more embarrassment than fear.

I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I didn’t
want to tip my hand early, before I knew more about the situation.
While I trusted Parker, I also knew people tended to be too close
to their own drama to be able to examine it with anything
approaching rationality.

Erasmus glared at me and I saw something in
his eyes that wasn’t present in his Internet avatar—a strange glint
of the pupil, a spark of reddish orange.

Parker was also glaring at me, with an
imploring look, clearly expecting me to spring to the rescue.

A car horn blared behind me and I turned to
see Frank the night-school bully hanging his head out the window.
“Hey, Nancy, get that pile of junk out of the road before I
bulldoze it.”

So there was no way I could launch into
butt-kicking Vampire Poster Boy without the whole world catching
on.

“You stay away from my daughter,” Erasmus
said, his voice deep and gruff, like a bag of broken glass dropped
down a well.

Well, Plan A of me pretending to be her
boyfriend and getting an invite to the cult compound was shot. Time
for Plan B.

“Sir, you misunderstand,” I said. “I was
merely sharing with Parker about the path of personal growth
through metaphysical self-empowerment.”

It was some phony-baloney New Age
gobbledygook I’d lifted straight from his website. One way to get
people on your side is to let them think they are geniuses.

Or gurus, in this case.

Some of the tension dropped from his
shoulders. “Acceptance through surrender,” he said, another of his
catchphrases.

Frank locked down on the horn again, and
traffic was piling up.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Mr. Cole,” I
said. “Or should I say, ‘The Answer’?”

He hadn’t released Parker’s wrist yet, but
he didn’t seem to be hurting her any. “You should move your
vehicle,” he said.

Turning to Parker, he added, “Get in the
car. We’re going home.”

So Plan B wasn’t working, either.

Plan C was to fly through the air and knock
Erasmus Cole silly, rip him into a thousand red bits as the whole
night school watched, and then howl at the moon in triumph.

But then I’d have to drop out, and I was
determined to pull up my history grade.

“It’s okay, Parker,” I said to reassure her
that I’d be watching. “I’ll call you later.”

Erasmus glared at me one more time and got
behind the wheel of his Volvo, Parker climbing into the passenger
seat with a disappointed expression.

As the Volvo backed up and pulled away, more
car horns blared. There were at least a dozen behind Frank’s car,
and Frank was now slapping sheet metal with his open palm.

“Move it, Pencil Neck,” he bellowed. There
were a couple of his goonies riding with him, and I heard them
laugh. Apparently my little display of flinging the pencil with
enough force to kill had failed to make the proper impression.

Again, I couldn’t launch into a wild display
of carnage, as hungry as I was, but it was mighty tempting.
Instead, I flipped him the bird and got into the Mustang and drove
home without stopping for coffee, which I couldn’t drink
anyway.

Chapter Six

I lived in a subterranean apartment in Bell
Town. It was sort of a bohemian district, lots of artists and
neo-hippies and musicians, and I liked it because of the night
life.

Nobody thought my schedule was weird, and I
never bumped into anyone who said, “How come you only come out at
night?”

People think vampires live in musty cellars
without windows, with rats crawling all over the place. I prefer
dark décor, but I do have an aesthetic sense. I’d collected a few
sculptures over the years, and a couple of Magrittes and a Dali. I
can’t say where I got them, and of course my infrequent visitors
assume they are reproductions.

And, like any self-respecting modern
vampire, I had wireless access and an awesome computer. Unlike
sunlight, the glare of a computer screen was not painful at all. I
could even look at virtual pictures of the sun without turning into
a smoking ball of ash.

After turning on some Thirty Seconds To
Mars, keeping the volume low so as not to disturb the neighbors, I
finished my homework. While history was easy for me, geometry was
always a pain in the butt. No matter how many classes I took, I
could never tell a hypotenuse from an isosceles.

Once I packed everything, I went back to the
Internet to learn more about Erasmus Cole, aka The Answer.
Apparently he was still underground enough that his cult-leader
thing hadn’t affected his demand in the square world of physicists.
His official bio didn’t say anything about blood sacrifice, his
career, or his family. It was all suntans and smiles.

Heck, before I turned him into my enemy,
maybe I could get him to help me with my homework.

According to his site, The Answer operated a
resort called Cloudland in Mount Shasta, just over the Oregon line
in California. The 300-acre property was billed as a retreat
center, but if you read between the lines, you could see the
customer base wasn’t your typical family with 2.3 kids.

Cloudland catered to those “seeking
spiritual enlightenment through therapeutic treatment and holistic
integration of the feminine divine.”

Now, the first question I’d ask if I were a
woman is, “What’s a dude doing heading up a center marketed toward
women?”

The first answer would be “money” and the
second answer would be “sex,” but if you put them together, you
probably got the real answer: “power.”

The fact that Erasmus billed himself as The
Answer suggested he was on a power trip that would rival those of
any modern-day politician, evangelist, military leader, or
celebrity.

No wonder, as Parker had stated, men weren’t
drawn to his little self-improvement center in the woods, although
one had to consider that the odds were probably good if you were
looking to hook up.

Unless, of course, access was one of those
little avenues The Answer used to pile up the cash. Plenty of rich
guys would pay a lot of money to get a chance at a vulnerable
population of nubile young women.

The website didn’t show much, just a couple
of pages of The Answer’s gibberish, a contrived concoction of all
the best add-water-and-stir New Age religions. The articles were
accompanied by a few photographs that showed flowering trees, a
pond in a meadow, and a few women in muted cotton shifts frolicking
in a flower garden with the snow-covered Mount Shasta towering
majestically in the background.

All in all, it was presented as a pleasant
way to spend a week and meditate in between lunches of little
sandwiches made of cucumbers and watercress.

The prices weren’t listed, but when I went
through the registration process, I found that a week’s stay cost
$3,995, plus additional menus where one could sign up for day spas,
intensive training sessions, and group therapy, all for “only
hundreds more.”

If The Answer hadn’t started killing people,
he probably could have done like all the other cult leaders of our
times and make a mountain of money and retire in luxury on some
deserted isle where followers never bothered him.

No, he was one of those weird ones—a sincere
guy who apparently believed in his own brand of Armageddon.

In Plan A, I would have walked through the
front gate holding Parker’s hand, blinking all wide-eyed and
innocent, saying “Aw, shucks” a lot while I asked her dad what his
favorite sports teams were.

Plan B and C were already out, and now I was
at Plan D. I was a little concerned that I’d been working this case
for less than 24 hours and I’d already used up a good chunk of the
plan alphabet.

I registered for the following week, since
night school was about to have its fall break.

I signed up as “Summer Rain,” which had
actually been the real name of a real person at one point. I know,
because I had the credit card to prove it. I suspected Summer was
long dead, though, and probably wouldn’t mind a big hit to her
credit rating in a few months.

Now all I had to do was make sure Parker
stayed well out of the way while I took care of business.

Well, that and not flunk geometry.

Chapter Seven

Friday night. A week later.

Parker had cooled it a little with me,
whispering that her dad had laid down the law and that I looked
like “bad news.” Score points for Pops, because I was.

The following night, I would leave for the
retreat in Shasta and see for myself what was going on. That I had
registered under a female name didn’t stop me. Summer Rain, in this
case, was going to turn out to be a dude.

Daddy and his creepy cult of women were just
going to have to deal with it. But first I needed to recharge the
old batteries.

I keep chilled blood in my refrigerator,
behind some empty cartons of milk and an old watermelon that I
really ought to toss.

Not the world’s greatest hiding place,
granted, but I wasn’t too worried about that, and it’s not like I
could hide it in the back of the toilet like a drunk hiding
whiskey. I lived alone, as I had for many, many years. I had few
guests, and fewer still randomly opened my refrigerator for
anything. Still, on the off-chance that someone did, I would prefer
not to explain the packets of blood that I kept in the fridge.

I had just fetched such a packet, which was
provided to me at great cost from a contact who worked in a
hospital. Do you ever wonder why phlebotomists take three and
sometimes four vials of your blood? Don’t you think all that blood
might be overkill? Well, it is. Some of the blood gets sold to folk
like me.

The undead like me.

Many phlebotomists are the true drug
kingpins of this world. Peddling the drug of blood.

The packets are handy, designed for impulse
consumers. With a quick swipe, one end was open and I was guzzling
it hard when there came a knock on my door.

One thing you don’t do is cross between a
grizzly cub and its mother. The other thing you don’t do is disturb
a vampire when he’s feeding. The image I had was tossing the cold,
crappy blood and replacing it with some fresh, warm blood. The same
blood currently pumping through the veins of whoever was standing
outside my door.

In fact, it took all my inner strength,
honed from years of self control, to not throw open the door, pin
down whoever was standing there, and sink my teeth deep into their
soft neck.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

Just drink. Drink.

I did, guzzling, feeling the warmth spread
through my body, despite initially going down cold. Warmth and
strength.

The knocking came again.

And I nearly tore myself away from the bag,
thinking of that hotter, fuller bag standing mere feet away.

Nearly.

But I kept guzzling, and soon I was
squeezing out the last few drops like a miser squeezing out the
last of his cheap toothpaste. The bags of blood are perfectly
measured out to give me all the fuel I need. Or crave, as I thought
of it. I never drank too much, but Lord help you if I didn’t drink
enough. If I didn’t drink enough, and I was still hungry, anything
was fair game, including kittens and puppies and
kindergarteners.

I never said I was a saint.

Just a guy with an unhealthy appetite.

With the last of the bag consumed, I tossed
it in my trash compactor with the other empty bags of blood and
headed to the door.

And when I peeked through the peephole, I
could not have been more surprised to see Parker standing
there.

Looking cute and impatient.

Chapter Eight

I unlocked the door and opened it. Parker
stood there with a big smile on her face. I couldn’t tell if it was
because she was embarrassed that she came to my apartment, or if it
was because she was generally glad to see me.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Standing. Do you never answer your
door?”

“No. I mean, how did you find me?

“You’re not the only one with secrets. Are
your parents here?”

“Uh. Mom’s out visiting her sister.” I
wasn’t sure I had a mom, or whether she was alive or dead. If
you’re not a saint, you get to lie once in a while. “Come on
in.”

Parker entered my house carrying a bright
yellow purse. She walked over to my Victorian couch that cost more
than all the furniture in the place combined and dropped her purse
beside it.

“Please have a seat,” I said, sitting at my
kitchen table that was virtually in the living room itself being
that my apartment was as small as a New York loft.

“Did you sneak out?” I asked, not sure if
she would tell me the truth. I trusted her, but I was beginning to
catch on that she was no saint, either.

“Yeah, I did. My dad actually left on a big
all-night road trip.”

“Road trip?”

“It’s one of his little habits. For all I
know, he’s dropping off dead bodies.”

Parker was staring at my mouth. She had a
puzzled look with a hint of dread behind her eyes. She put a finger
against her lips and did a wiping motion.

Crud, some blood had dropped on my
cheek.

“What were you eating, strawberries?”