Ten, p.32
Ten, page 32
“No cell reception,” Nadia snapped.
Lorcan walked over to the back door. As he got within a foot, a little panel popped open on the side with an old-school keypad. “Well considering that Mr. Blaylock’s corpse is not in here, I’m guessing he found a way out,” the vampire said. “Mr. DeMarco, do you have an access code?”
“Nope,” he said. “I would call my mom if I could, but I’ve got zero bars all of a sudden too. This does seem like the kind of slow deathtrap she would engineer though.”
“Kyle, you said that a “David Tennant” stole a really weird amount, right?” Paige asked as she looked at her fortune again. “It was from the Cayman Island account, right?”
“Yeah, $61,019.44,” Kyle said.
“Nineteen and forty-four?” Steve asked. “Like 1944 the year? It was a pretty big one for me at least.”
“Six-ten-nineteen-forty-four,” Paige said as she rubbed her temples. “Maybe June 10, 1944? Wasn’t that like D-day or something?”
“That was June 6th,” Steve said. “Pretty big day for me.”
Lorcan let out a deep sigh. “Stop thinking so American,” he muttered as he typed something into the keypad. A second later, there was a buzz and the light over the back door turned green.
“October sixth, nineteen-forty-four, the day that the Pendragons and Jaegers finally signed an armistice by formally welcoming the newest member of the Jaeger family into society. I do believe it was a day Lady Claudia vowed never to forget. Shall we?”
“Wow, that was my formal death day,” Steve said as he held the door.
“I guess even vampires use their kids’ birthdays as PINs,” Kyle muttered. “Good to know.”
“It’s still pretty cold,” Paige said. Now, as she rubbed her arms, she could actually feel thicker hair growing. “I hope this isn’t permanent.”
“Me too,” Kyle muttered as he tugged on his collar to reveal an impressive new tuft of chest hair.
“It’s creeping up your back too, Pipsqueak,” Steve noted ever so helpfully.
“Just when I couldn’t feel any more awkward—” Paige trailed off as she could detect blood over the menthol under her nose.
“Anyone else freaked out by that?” Kyle asked as he pointed to the bright red splatters across the strips of weighted translucent PVC.
The Jaeger’s stomach growled audibly. Everyone turned to face Steve.
“Sorry, should have eaten before I came,” he said.
Lorcan limped to the curtain first and gingerly pushed the flaps aside with his cane. His face tightened, and he held his breath. He finally turned to the group.
“This will not be pleasant,” he said flatly.
“Why do I have a feeling that is an understatement?” Kyle muttered as he took a brave step in front of Paige.
Nadia wiped under her nose and paled as she got a good deep sniff of the ambient aroma. Even the stoic Russian wobbled a bit at the intensity of the human smell. Paige grit her teeth.
She pushed past both the boys, and the curtain, and immediately had to fight her gag reflex. She nearly slipped on the plastic lining on the floor as she stumbled to fight the uprising in her belly. Paige tried to look away from the carnage but blood spattered every surface.
Paige finally lost it as she saw an amputated finger just lying on the floor.
“I am totally gonna throw up,” she warned the others. Kyle shoved a plastic bag in front of her face just in time. She heaved a few times but managed to get away without totally blowing chunks.
“I’m sorry, Steve, but your family is into some seriously fucked-up shit,” Kyle said as he surveyed a semicircle of six exam tables propped up in a vertical stance. Four of the tables still contained bodies that connected via plastic tubing to a sinister-looking chamber in the center of the room. A series of alabaster jars with animal heads lined up on top of the modern-day sarcophagus.
“This is messed up, even by our standards,” Steve said as he took a cautious step towards the first table. “Are those, um—?”
“Canopic jars that are connected to a glass sarcophagus?”
Lorcan asked. “Yes, yes they are.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus, those are pumps down there,” Kyle said as he approached. “Pumps that regulate—”
“The flow of blood from the donors to whatever was in the box,”
Lorcan said. He approached the sarcophagus slowly, constantly scanning around the room for any sort of devices. Bloody handprints lined both inside and outside of the box.
“Six-victim-feeding at once? What possible purpose would it serve? No vampire could consume that much at one time,” Kyle said.
“Bozhe moy,” Nadia choked out. She ran to one of the tables and lifted the slumped head. “No, no this can’t be—”
Steve lifted another head. “Oh crap,” he said. “This is not good—”
Paige zeroed in on the connections between the tubing and the bodies. Needles burrowed into the cold, dead flesh. Paige stumbled again and closed her eyes. For a brief moment, she could see a similar flickering scene of a circle of cages all dripping blood into troughs.
“Paige?” Lorcan asked.
“I’ve seen this before,” she whispered. Lorcan returned to her side and lifted her chin, so she’d have to stare into his eyes rather than anything else. “You’ve seen this before too, haven’t you?” she asked.
Lorcan nodded.
“Oh, god,” Kyle whispered. “Oh god, it’s—”
“This is some serious Dr. Frankenstein bullshit!” Steve cried out.
“We don’t do this. If we don’t like you, we just kill you! This guy was one of ours—”
“Nadia, Nadia, please let me—” Kyle said.
The room echoed with an earsplitting howl as Nadia started ripping away at the straps on table three. The dark-haired, dark-skinned corpse fell to the ground. The stunned face of Dr. Kunal Langer crashed to the floor.
“Nadia?” Kyle asked. She turned slowly to face him, her pale violet irises completely filling her corneas. Every breath became raspier as she flexed her claws in and out through her gloves.
“Figure. . . out. . . who. . .” she snarled.
“Nadia,” Lorcan said. “We will find out who did this.”
The purple-haired werewolf whipped around and pounced on the shocked Steve. She wrapped her claws around his throat and lifted him off his feet without blinking an eye. “Talk!” she barked.
Steve thrashed for a second before his own animal instincts kicked in, and he rammed his fist squarely into Nadia’s throat. The vampire fell to the floor with a squishy thud.
“Stop this at once!” Lorcan ordered. “There will be time to grieve soon enough, but for now, we have to be our monstrous selves and
clean up this mess. Volchitsa, that goes for you too.”
“I don’t really feel like a monster when I look at this,” Kyle muttered. “This was slow, calculated exsanguination. These people were hooked up to saline and sedated, so they would last longer while being bled dry. The hook and slash method would have been faster and more humane.”
Paige shuddered as the memories kept flooding into view. She could see a hooded figure dipping a chalice into a pond of blood.
“Lorcan,” she choked out, but he was too busy attending to the seething Nadia. He kept whispering over and over again in Russian as Nadia stared at the body on the floor.
“Volchitsa, please,” the vampire pleaded. “If we don’t get out of here, you can’t avenge him.”
Paige crawled along the floor until she reached her great-grandfather. Steve shook his head at the scene. “My mother just rips people apart,” he said. “This is—”
“This is my grandfather’s handiwork,” Lorcan said softly. He pointed to the jars. “He was and always will be terribly Egyptian.”
“What the hell is this?” Steve asked. He clawed his way up an empty table and sniffed the bit of blood left behind. The longer he breathed in, the paler he became. “No, no, no,” he moaned.
“Young master DeMarco!” Lorcan snapped.
“Your grandfather is killing my family’s bondsmen,” Steve snapped.
“And mine,” Lorcan said as he pointed to Dr. Langer. “We have to figure out what is happening before more innocents die.”
“The people here weren’t innocent,” Steve said as he looked at the other bodies. “At least mine weren’t, but this is draining and killing people. I thought you Pendragons were all high and mighty—”
Both vampires stopped as they heard footsteps coming from the freezer. Everyone scrambled behind the metal tables for cover. As they looked back at the entrance, they could all clearly see something written in blood over the door.
“Forhæte Moderātus,” Paige read even though it was a mix of Old English and Latin.
“I think someone left us a message, a very clear message,”
Lorcan said as he pulled his pistol out of his jacket pocket.
Steve whipped out his own gun as well. “Oh, yeah, crystal clear,”
he said as he looked at the words on the wall.
They heard the door swing open. A moment later two frantic-looking young women, each with their own guns, burst into the room.
“Holy fuckbuckets!” Toy cried as she saw the mess. “What the hell did you guys do?”
22
“GAIL FILIPOVIC, HOW YOU HAUNT ME,” Georgia muttered as she stared at her phone. She kicked back in her patio seat and twirled her noodle salad around with her chopsticks. She started typing up a quick “We’re sorry, but have no extra information in our files,” email while she enjoyed a little April warmth and sunshine.
Just as she was finally relaxed and savored a little edamame in peanut sauce, her stomach turned. She grabbed her chopsticks in a death grip as she started scanning the patio for anyone unusual.
Her ice cubes clinked in her glass as something streaked past the table. Neither the lovey-dovey couple at the other two-top, nor the family with the prime umbrella seat seemed to notice anything unusual. Even the hot young waiter who had made it a point to fill Georgia’s glass every time she took a sip seemed to have forsaken her now.
Georgia blinked and suddenly the chair across from her contained a young man in a white hoodie. He smiled as he stared at her through a lock of fire-engine red hair. Today the stranger sported an evil overlord goatee and serious guyliner around his dark brown eyes.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “Look at your phone like a normal person.”
Georgia picked up her phone and started scrolling through random screens. The stranger smiled again.
“You are exceptionally good at staying calm and following directions, Miss Sutherland,” the stranger said. “Yes, I know your name. I know all about you. Eat some noodles; don’t make a scene.”
Georgia took a nibble and a sip of her water. Sure enough, the waiter came by and refilled her glass, but he said nothing about the dude sitting at her table. Once he left, the stranger smiled.
“They won’t see me,” the stranger said. “I just have one of those faces that blend into a crowd. In fact, you are the first person to notice me in over a decade. Of course, if I want to be noticed, then I’m just like everyone else, but I really don’t want anyone to know that I’m here. Am I clear?”
Georgia pretended to text something and nodded at her phone.
The stranger gave her a big thumbs-up. “You are really rather remarkable, Miss Sutherland,” he said. “You lie with the ease of one of my kind.”
She took a bite of noodles and continued to play with her phone.
She could only keep the screen steady, however, by laying her wrist flat against the table.
“It’s good that you are scared, Miss Sutherland. I am a very scary monster, but I did want to apologize for our first meeting. I should have done you the courtesy of snapping your neck cleanly, or I should have simply left you alone. My indecision was. . . an embarrassment to my family.”
Georgia scrolled through another screen. “Well, that’s interesting,” was all she dared to mutter.
“I did not realize at the time that you serve an honorable member of my kind and that you were under their protection,” the stranger said. “If you are willing to disavow that you ever saw me and feign ignorance with as much sincerity and acting ability as you are showing right now, then I will be honored to apologize to you.”
“I did not see this coming,” she said, shaking her head at some celebrity gossip in her news feed. “Ugh, it’s awful, but what can you do?”
“Remarkable,” the stranger said. “How is it that a human has such poise?”
“Who believes this crap?” she asked rhetorically between bites of noodles. The next time she looked over her phone, the stranger had vanished. She dropped her chopsticks and took a long, slow drink.
“What the hell is that thing?” she whispered as soon as her stomach felt calm.
She picked up her phone in earnest and dialed up the new contact entry that was simply labelled “Colin.” Within ten minutes, an awkwardly stiff young man gingerly approached the patio seating at Green Galangal Thai Palace.
“Oh, Miss Sutherland!” he called out. “Miss—”
It took him a solid five minutes more to find his way through the restaurant and convince a server to bring him out to the patio. He perched uneasily in the very same chair that the stranger had slouched in a few minutes earlier and smiled a little too eagerly as he took in Georgia’s slightly sheer top and skinny jeans.
“I felt bad for you being all alone, while Steve is out of town,” she said. “Come to think of it, why aren’t you going with him again?”
Colin laughed. “Because he’s going on official Jaeger business.
I’m not vetted yet,” he said in a voice that very well could have burst out at any second with “Duh!”
“Vetted?”
“You’re supposed to be a vampire’s assistant, aren’t you? Didn’t anyone teach you about how the families work?” he asked with a snide laugh. “To be trusted with Jaeger business you have to be vetted, which means you have to prove that you can do whatever it takes to serve the family and their interests.”
“Every Jaeger is a hunter. Every Jaeger is a killer,” Georgia said sadly.
This time Colin did actually verbalize a “Duh!” She rolled her eyes at him, while he was engrossed with something on his phone.
“Well, I guess I just need someone to teach me then,” she said in her sweetest little voice. “I did want to apologize for sending you on some wild goose chase the other night. I’m starting to get past the intense post-hangover fog, and I must have been having some trippy raver moments from the club. I mean, I didn’t really see some sort of invisible vampire—”
Colin laughed. “I told you so. I mean you described a myth, a boogeyman used to scare real vampires when they sleep. You described Bam-Bam the Hundred Pacer.”
Georgia joined him in ridiculous laughter. “You’re just pulling my leg now,” she said.
“Worst name ever, right? Right! Yeah, he’s some phantom enforcer for the Lung family who was exiled for stealing some sacred artifact or nonsense like that, and they say he became cursed, for crying out loud. It’s so stupid, but he supposedly walks among the vampires and punishes those that have committed sins or something like that. It’s so stupid, but, hey, that’s the only entry I could find. So you see, you couldn’t have seen him because I don’t think that this Bam-Bam exists.”
“You know, you are so right,” she said, as she saw the white hoodie across the street. Even from that distance, she could clearly see Bam-Bam the Hundred Pacer smile.
“Should we just leave her in there?” Paige asked. She could see Nadia staring out the window of their appropriated van, while the rest of the crew sat at picnic tables. Toy dropped overflowing sacks of tacos at one end, while the twins worked furiously on laptops at the other. The two vampires sat in the shade with flasks and sprayed sunscreen on any exposed flesh.
“I don’t think anything is gonna get her to move right now, Shorty,” Toy said.
“But the—”
“Hey, if it was Morgan on ice in there, would you want to leave him?” Toy asked flatly.
Paige shuddered and shook her head. The two of them joined Kyle and Kayleigh who could somehow wolf-down tacos while staring at scenes of gore. Paige kept her eyes focused on carne asada rather than carnage.
“You know, it’s kinda cute when the bloodsuckers play nice together,” Toy muttered as she watched Lorcan and Steve drinking in the shade. “But what the hell was that shit show in the fertilizer plant?”
“I don’t know,” Paige said.
“Hey Toy, I think I got a match on number three,” Kayleigh said.
“There was a Triad enforcer named Billy Long reported washed up about two miles south of the plant. I wonder why they didn’t just use the chipper-shredder.”
“Because a dead Triad sends a message,” Steve chimed in from under the tree. “Why waste a bloodless body, if you can put it to good use?”
“And Knives Belinsky was found outside a Chinese restaurant,”
Kayleigh added.
“Everyone gets a warning,” Steve sighed. “That is definitely Mom’s style.”
“I need to run more tests. Grandpa, have we got any labs under Pendragon control near here?”
“I can get you into a paternity testing clinic in Santa Monica,”
Steve said. “Don’t ask but I needed it for certain family business from time to time.”
“I’m going through everything I could find on that flash drive, but, so far, it’s just some boring spreadsheets and some porn,” Kayleigh muttered. “Really awful porn called the Cunt of Monte Cristo.”
“Oh. . . ohhhh,” Paige said as she stared in horror at the plastic.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a line from the movie, Shorty,” Toy said.
She peeked around the screen and tilted her head. “Whoa, I have got to try that.”
Kayleigh turned her head as well. “She has got to have had surgery on that tongue. It’s not natural. Um, anyway, I’ll run more scans for hidden files, but it’s probably just a red herring in case anyone found it other than you.”
