H.T. Night's 8-Book Vampire Box Set (127 page)

Strawberries aren’t dark enough. I had to
think quick. “Actually,” I answered, “I was eating beets. Lots of
iron.”

“That’s disgusting. You were eating beets.
Beets have got to be the grossest vegetable. They look like they
are dipped in blood.”

I smirked. She had no idea how appetizing
that sounded. Blood was my catsup. Blood on just about anything
sounded divine. “I’m a vegan at heart. And iron is good for the
blood system. Everyone should eat more beets. Life would be
better.”

“Still, beets are gross! They taste like
ass.”

Usually, when someone said that, my first
reaction was to ask how they knew what ass tasted like. But I kind
of liked her, so I let it pass. “If you don’t mind me asking, how
did you find out where I lived?”

Parker began to stammer. “Well,” she said,
“You’d be amazed how a short skirt and a pair of black nylons can
persuade a horny nineteen-year-old administrative assistant in our
school office.”

“He just gave it to you?”

“Yeah. I hope you’re not angry.”

“No, I’m not angry.” After all, how could I
be angry at the poor nineteen-year-old that Parker just threw under
the bus when I knew for a fact he was completely innocent. How did
I know this? The administrative office doesn’t have my real
address. Parker was up to something. Fair is fair, if she was going
to stalk me and come over then she was going to answer some
hardball questions. “I have another question for you.”

“Go ahead.” Parker appeared confident.

“How do you know for sure your father has
killed anyone?”

Parker took my question in and nodded. She
took her time to answer the question. I couldn’t tell if she was
trying to make something up or if she was just preparing to tell me
something insanely intense. “Well,” she said. “I don’t know for
sure. I just know he’s the one in charge and about once every two
months a girl very close to him disappears without a trace.”

“Without a trace? Don’t these girls have
families?”

“That’s why it’s without a trace. Their
families think they are still wrapped up in his cult. They think
they are still with them at his compound, and because they are over
the age of eighteen, there is nothing they can do about it.”

“So, these women go missing and no one
questions it?”

“That’s my point, Spider. If they truly do
leave and want out of life like the elders and my father lead
everyone to believe, wouldn’t they go back home to their loved
ones? None of them do. I have gone back to their homes and asked
about them, and all the parents say that their daughter is wrapped
up in a cult and they have no access to her. They usually say they
haven’t seen them in months or even years.”

“And when these girls become missing from
the compound? Your father claims they have left the movement?”

“Yes, he tells everyone that they have lost
their way and have returned to their sinful nature. But they don’t
return home. He leads us to believe that that’s where they were
headed, or sometimes to Hollywood to become an actress, or Las
Vegas to become a legal prostitute. Which amounts to the same
thing, really. But none of them make it home. Ever.”

“Why do you think they are dead? Maybe
they’re embarrassed to go home.”

“It doesn’t fit the profile of people who
leave a cult. It is human nature to want to go back to where you
were safest and to the ones you know love you unconditionally,
regardless of your beliefs. Assuming you’re lucky enough to ever
break your brainwashing.”

“Still, to claim that they’re dead. It’s a
pretty big assumption.” I was trusting my gut on this, but my gut
gurgles sometimes, especially after a recent feeding.

“They’re all dead. I know it.”

“Why do you know for sure?”

“One of them was my best friend...and I
found her body.”

Chapter Nine

“So,” I said. “You have a body but you
didn’t go to the police?”

She gave me a furtive glance from the couch.
“This isn’t a police thing. It’s way too weird.”

“I take it your friend was murdered?”

“Worse than that.”

“What’s worse than that?” I hoped it wasn’t
rape or some kind of kinky mutilation. That always sickened me.

“She was in the storage compartment of my
dad’s Volvo. Like, where the spare tire is. I was...uh...trying to
hide something from him, and then I found the thing he was hiding
from me.”

“A body in the car. Even the cops could nail
a case on something like that.”

“Cindy was naked, and all curled up like a
fetus in the womb. I didn’t recognize her at first, but she had
this single purple streak in her blonde hair. I’d gone with her to
the stylist’s to have it done, because she said it would piss off
her parents.”

“Did you ID her face?”

“I was afraid to touch her. I was freaking
out. And it was almost like she wasn’t real, like she’d been
bleached or something. Her skin was pasty white and she looked a
little shriveled up like an old mummy. But she was only
eighteen.”

The operative word here was “was.” Her aging
had stopped. Once you’re dead, you pretty much stay at “dead”
forever. Unless you’re like me.

“What’s your best friend doing joining a
cult?”

“Why does anybody join a cult? She wanted to
piss off her parents and get some good drugs, and maybe some group
sex.”

“None of that stuff is on your dad’s
website.”

“Yeah, right. Like you’d advertise a cult
like that?”

“Yeah, it would get way too many
applications. So she gave you some inside info. That’s how you
figured out what was going on.”

“Yeah. She was only at Cloudland for two
weeks before she texted me. You’re not supposed to have any form of
outside communication there—”

“Rule of thumb for cult leaders everywhere.
Isolate and re-educate.”

“The text was like, ‘This place is soooooo
boring.’ Just like that, with six O’s and everything. Then she
followed up with ‘All we do is meditate and tend the flower garden.
If I have to pick one more weed, I’m going to turn into a
goat.’”

“Doesn’t exactly sound like party time.”

“I texted her back, and I didn’t get another
message for three days. Then one came that simply said, ‘I’m going
home, Parker.’ And that was that. Until I found her body two weeks
later.”

I got up from the kitchen table and strolled
over to the couch, thinking. I was probably stroking the little
stubble on my chin. I’ve heard I do that a lot. When I sat down, I
was done thinking. Parker’s proximity pretty much brainwashed
me.

“Well, that sounds reasonable enough,” I
said. “She was bored and she went home. Maybe that wasn’t even her
body you saw in your dad’s car.”

“Does it really matter if it was Cindy or
not? I mean, that still makes him a killer.”

“But if you’re tying in this cult angle, and
you have a reason to hold back from the cops, there’s a whole lot
more than you’re telling me. To be honest, it feels like you’re
setting me up for something.”

Her brown eyes flashed anger, like amber
rotated in the fire. It’s one of my weaknesses. I like girls when
they’re mad. And I tend to make them that way a lot. “Well, you’re
the one playing ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ with me. Maybe you’re the one
who has something to hide. The guy without a past, no hobbies,
perfect tests in history, you only see him at night. I mean, tell
me that doesn’t sound suspicious.”

I avoided her mesmerizing eyes, annoyed that
she’d turned the whole thing around and put it on me. I wasn’t the
one with a cult murderer for a dad. I almost made a crack like
“What is this, ‘An interview with a vampire’?” but I caught myself.
If she was already asking questions, she might make the next leap
of logic. Every time that happened, it ended up in one of two
ways—either I made a fast exodus from town or somebody ended up
dead.

“I say a corpse in a car trumps a weird
loner in night school,” I said. “I thought you wanted my help, not
to piss me off.”

She cooled down a little. Good. I hadn’t
liked the way she was gripping the arm of the couch. The fabric was
kind of delicate.

“That last text wasn’t hers,” she said. “I
mean, it came from her cell, but she would never say ‘Parker’ like
that in a text. I am always ‘P,’ just the letter, not the stuff you
do in the toilet.”

“Thanks for clearing that up, Parker with a
P.”

“My dad must have found the cell, did away
with her, and then sent that little text to throw me off the trail.
Probably sent the same message to her parents, too, so they’d be
expecting her and then weeks go by before they call in the police.
But since she’s eighteen, they’re not going to do anything, right?
She’s a legal adult.”

“But why haul her around in the Volvo?
Waiting for a good chance to dump her body? Sounds like he had
plenty of chances, as much as he traveled.”

Parker shook her pretty head. “No. I don’t
think he was finished with her.”

“Finished? You said she was dead.”

“I think she was his fast-food happy meal.
Her blood had been drained, Spider.”

I thought about that. The guy didn’t sound
like any vampire I’d ever heard of. Most creatures of the night
that I’d crossed paths with tended to stay just that: creatures of
the night. As in, they kept to themselves under the veil of
darkness. I’d never heard of one who craved attention. Craved
power. And could keep a suntan. One thing I was certain of, as
Parker was watching me expectantly, was that he wasn’t a
vampire.

What he was was anyone’s guess.

“Where’s your father now?” I asked.

“He left last night for Mount Shasta.” And
then she looked at me with huge, rounds eyes that were quickly
filling with tears. “And he took my little sister with him.”

I frowned, letting this sink in. I had
planned to leave tomorrow night, without Parker, but I could see I
wasn’t going to be able to shake her. Not with her sister in
potential danger. Shasta was about nine hours from Seattle. If we
left right away, we could get there by morning, and I could crash
during the day.

I grabbed my keys. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go where?”

“Road trip.”

Chapter Ten

Parker didn’t protest.

As I threw together my travel bag, she told
me a little about her mother. And people call me a monster.

Apparently, Pops had a heavy influence on
his wife, and she was the true tyrant in the house. Parker had
suffered many beatings growing up and had rarely, if ever, been
given any kind of freedom. Her mother had not always been like
this. The change had only come within the past seven or eight
years, which, coincidentally, was about when her father launched
his cult.

Now with her mother passed out—apparently,
she always passed out after taking her nightly dose of medication
on top of the booze—Parker had taken the city buses to find her
way.

She didn’t admit it, at least not yet, but I
was certain she had followed me during the week. I knew she didn’t
drive, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t followed me with a friend.
Which meant that a friend now knew where I lived, too. I would have
to find out who this friend was. I have my ways, but hopefully
she’d just come clean. And if her friend was trustworthy or just
minded her own business, then we wouldn’t have a problem. If the
friend came snooping around, we’d have a problem.

Or, rather, they’d have a problem. A very
big problem.

For now, though, I let it go. We had a more
pressing matter. With my bag in hand, we hit the road. It was
coming on 11 p.m. and I was going to have to eat some road to get
there before dawn...and to check into a nice hotel with even nicer
curtains. Thick curtains that kept the sun out.

Parker didn’t complain about not having
enough clothes. She didn’t even ask to use the restroom. Instead,
with her jaw set in grim determination, she sat by my side in my
Mustang as I headed south through the bright lights of downtown
Seattle.

* * *

Parker slept most of the trip.

Me, I was wide awake and feeling more alive
than ever. I wondered what awaited us in Mount Shasta. That her
father was dealing with something unknown and nefarious was a
given. The evidence was there. The body, in particular. It had been
drained dry, according to Parker.

I looked over at her now as we wound through
the deep-cut canyons that would eventually lead to Mount Shasta.
She was still sleeping, her head propped against the seatbelt
mechanism. Not comfortable, but she didn’t seem to care. It was
pitch black out and I shouldn’t be able to see her, but I could.
The night was alive to my eyes, filled with light and color unseen
to mortal eyes. I saw her every feature clearly. She was a pretty
young girl. Too young for me, but someday she’d make a geeky teen
boy the happiest geek on earth.

Had she known who—or what—was sitting next
to her, I wondered if she would sleep so contently. Then again,
when you’re raised by monsters, and her father was very much
looking like something out of a Dean Koontz novel, perhaps an
everyday, run-of-the mill vampire wasn’t a problem.

There had been a time in my past when Parker
should have feared for her life. I have gained some semblance of
control over the creature inside me. I didn’t have to kill to feed,
and this epiphany had been a long time coming.

Many had died by my hand. By my mouth.

But never again.

Or so I hoped.

With the sky beginning to brighten in the
east, and as my energy began to wane, the stunning Mount Shasta
appeared on the far horizon. The mountain with presence, as I
thought of it, and I was not the only one. Down through the ages,
many had ascribed power and legend to the mountain, and for good
reason. The mountain loomed above the smattering of foothills and
lesser mountains like a white god. Its barren white slopes,
striking in their purity, resonated on a soul level that needed to
be witnessed to be felt.