Moon River (2 page)

Chapter Three

We were driving.

While we drove, I looked through Detective Sanchez’s police file. In particular, I studied photos of the bodies. Two women. Both with grisly wounds to their necks. Not so much bitten as
torn
.

“
Who found the bodies?” I asked.

“
Hikers.”

“
The same hikers?”

“
No. Two different hikers. Two different days. But the bodies were left on the same trail.”

“
Or killed on the same trail.”

“
That, too,” said Sanchez.

We were winding our way through heavy traffic along the I-5. It was past seven p.m. and the sun had set and I was feeling damn good.

Sanchez glanced at me. “You look a little different.”

I was intrigued. “Different how?”

He studied me for a heartbeat longer, then looked forward again like a good boy—or a good cop—keeping his eyes on the road. “I dunno. You have more color in your face. You seem...”

“
Peppier?”

“
Cops don’t say words like
peppier
.”

“
Sure they don’t.”

We drove some more. I continued studying the photos of the two dead women. I searched for a psychic hit but found none. What kind of a psychic hit, I didn’t know. Hell, I would have taken anything: a face, a name, a distorted image. However, nothing came to me.

“You know a friend of mine,” said Sanchez, as he pulled off onto Los Feliz Boulevard—along with about half of Southern California.

“
Oh?”

“
Well, he’s not so much a friend but a great admirer of mine.”

I groaned. “Knighthorse.”

“How did you know?”

“
Because you two are the cockiest sons-of-bitches I’ve ever met.”

Sanchez chuckled. “Does he know about your...secret?”

“No,” I said. “Which raises a concer...”

Sanchez, perhaps even catching a whiff of my own thoughts, nodded. “I know what you’re going to say: what’s to stop me from telling Knighthorse—or anyone else for that matter—your secret? That is, before you erase my memory.”

“Right,” I said. “For all I know, you could have texted your wife that you’re on a ride-along with a vampire.”

He chuckled. “Ride-along. Funny. But, no, I haven’t texted anyone. Is
texted
even a word?”

“
My kids use it, so that’s good enough for me.”

Sanchez grinned, but then turned somber. “Truth is, I’m damn nervous about having my memory erased. I mean...how much of it will you erase?”

“I can be fairly exact,” I said.

In fact, I had been practicing the technique for the past few months with Allison, or, as I called her, my guinea pig. She didn’t mind being called my guinea pig, and she also didn’t mind helping me practice my various vampiric talents. Mostly, she didn’t mind me feeding on her. In fact, she encouraged it.

Strange girl, yes, but there was a reason for her madness—the more I fed on her, the more her psychic skills developed. The more they developed, the stronger she got. The stronger she got, the more of a pill she became.

Sanchez shot me a look. “How does it work?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s based on autosuggestion.”

“
Like hypnotic suggestion?”

“
Right.”

“
Are you kind of new to all of this?” he asked.

“
Being a vampire?”

“
Yes.”

“
New enough. Turns out, there’s more to it than running around graveyards at night.”

“
Do vampires do that?”

“
I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s what I always thought. In my ‘before’ life.”

Sanchez laughed a little and made a right into Griffith Park, thus bypassing what looked like hours of traffic ahead on Los Feliz Boulevard.

“I read somewhere that Los Feliz Boulevard is the busiest street in Los Angeles,” he said, seemingly out-of-the-blue.

But it wasn’t out-of-the-blue. Little did Detective Handsome realize that he was already picking up on my thoughts. I must have been feeling pretty comfortable with him. Comfortable enough that our connection was growing stronger. Granted, getting comfortable—or cozy—with Sanchez wasn’t an entirely an unpleasant thought. His psycho wife, however,
was
an unpleasant thought.

As he pulled into a parking space along the perimeter of the quiet park, he looked at me curiously. “Did you just call my wife a psycho?”

“No, I
thought
it. And I’m sorry.”

“
No worries. She
is
kind of psycho...wait, you what?”

“
I
thought
it,” I said. “As in, you just read my mind, Detective.”

“
No...”

“
Oh, yes.”

“
I
heard
you.”

“
You heard my thoughts, Detective. In your head.”

“
This isn’t happening.”

“
I’ve said that a thousand times, Detective, but yet, it still happens. And it’s happening now. To both of us.”

“
Shit.”

“
You can say that again.”

“
I’m a detective. I don’t read minds. I read...” he stumbled for words. The handsome cop looked truly perplexed. He reached up and removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. “I read police reports, study crime scenes, deal with real facts, real people.”

I reached over and pinched his shoulder. “That’s for insinuating I’m not a real person.” And, yes, I wanted to pinch something
else
, but I didn’t want Mrs. Psycho Wife showing up on my doorstep.

“
She’s not that bad,” said Sanchez, and then started nodding. “Yes, I’m aware that you didn’t actually say anything, that your words just appeared in my thoughts. I...think I can tell the difference now. The words are softer, whispery.”

“
Like a ghost,” I said.

He snapped his head around. “A what?”

“You scared of ghosts, Detective?”

“
Who isn’t?”

“
Well, you’re safe. I’m just your garden-variety bloodsucker.”

He kept looking at me. Sweat had appeared on his brow. Some of it had collected at his temple and was about to trickle down. And, as I thought these words, he reached up and wiped the sweat away.

“Yes,” he said, “I heard that, too. Does this happen with everyone you meet?”

“
No. But this is certainly the fastest.”

“
What does it mean?”

“
Maybe we were married in a past life.”

“
Are you being serious?” he asked.

“
I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it might explain what’s happening.”

“
And what is happening?”

I gave him my biggest grin. “Congratulations. You’ve just mind-linked with a creature of the night. Your life, I suspect, will never be the same again.”

“Until you wipe my memory clean.”

“
We’ll talk about that later,” I said.

He nodded and rubbed that spot between his eyes. His oversized ring caught some ambient lamplight and flashed brilliantly. He got control of himself, took in some air.

“Can we talk about something else now?” he asked.

“
Like murder?”

He exhaled. “Like murder. After all, this is where the bodies were found. Come on.”

Chapter Four

We followed a narrow trail.

Dusk was a special time for me. The disquiet of the day was forgotten. That I could ever feel less than I did now was inconceivable. Now, at this hour, at this time of day, I felt like I could conquer anything and anyone. Literally. I was bursting at the seams. I wanted to climb the highest cliff or tree or whatever the hell was out here. The Griffith Observatory was nearby, with its massive dome that was visible for miles all around. It could see into the universe and all its secrets.
Not my secrets,
I thought. Yes, the observatory would work. Give the astronomers
something to really look at
.

Mostly, I loved that quiet moment just before I leaped, just before I was about to cascade out into the night, just before I was about to turn into something much greater than I am.

I felt the animal within me wanting out. Nothing that I couldn’t control, no. More of a polite request. A mild urging. Was the animal me? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever it was, I briefly inhabited it as this body of mine slipped away. To where, I didn’t know. And from where the creature came, I didn’t know that either.

Another world, I’d heard. Summoned from
elsewhere
.

Sanchez, who had been leading the way along the trail, looked back at me. “I’m hoping like hell that you just made all of that up.”

Oops. I probably should have closed off my thoughts. I didn’t want to overwhelm the poor guy. Better to break him in slowly. This was, I suspected, only the beginning of the freaky crap he was about to face.

Then again, maybe a part of me wanted the detective to see a little more, to know a little more about me. Why, I didn’t know. I felt a connection to the man. A professional connection, yes. Maybe even a brotherly connection. Or, maybe I wanted him to know what he was in for. What he had signed up for, so to speak.

Or maybe I had a crush on the man and had simply forgotten to shield my thoughts.

Maybe.

So, I did so now, shielding them with an imaginary wall that wasn’t so imaginary. It really worked.

“
Yes,” I said, as I kept pace behind him. “Just a flight of fancy.”

“
It didn’t seem fancy. It seemed real. I saw it. Or I saw you become something...huge.”

“
Well, we all dream of being something a little more than we are, right?”

“
That was a lot more. That was actually quite fucking cool.”

Soon, we were following a narrow trail that wound up into the park. Although the trail was dimming rapidly as the sky darkened, Detective Sanchez picked his way over the trail like a true expert. Myself, I wasn’t much of an expert. Although I had spent the early part of the summer hiking through trails on a remote and private island up in Washington State, I hadn’t sniffed a trail since then. And, if it hadn’t been for my enhanced reflexes and my own version of night vision, I was fairly certain I would have hit the dirt a few times. After all, if there was a tree root, I seemed to find it. Who knew vampires could be so clumsy?

We continued along, picking our way quickly, brushing past only slightly overgrown bushes and plants. For the most part, the trail was well-maintained. Beyond, through the trees, I could hear the steady hum of L.A. traffic. It was an angry hum.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, as the dusk was beginning to turn into night, Detective Sanchez fished a small flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on. He shined the beam just off the trail, to a flattened clearing that I suspected had been trampled to death by police activity.

And sitting next to the clearing, shimmering in and out of existence, was a ghost.

A young woman who was watching us.

Chapter Five

To my eyes, ghosts appeared as concentrated light energy.

How and why I could now see into the spirit world was still a mystery to me; although, truth be known, it’s probably one of the least mysterious things in my new life.

Well,
relatively
new life.

I’d been a vampire now for over seven years, long enough that I almost—almost—forgot what it was like to be mortal. To be normal. To sleep normally, to eat normally, to exist normally.

Then again, what was normal?

Certainly not me,
I thought, as I approached the ghost sitting there on the boulder.

She wasn’t fully formed. In fact, she was exactly half there. As in, I could see one of her arms, but not really the second. One of her legs hung below her as she sat on the rock...and the other, not so much. The staticy light particles that composed her ethereal body crackled with bright intensity, which signaled to me that she was a new spirit. Then again, what did I know? I was still fairly new to all of this.