Daywalker chronicles com.., p.38
Daywalker Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 38
“I don’t think this thing wants us to leave.” I stared down the hall waiting for another bang.
“Perhaps it knows what we’re going to do,” Dracula suggested. “It may be that Abraham doesn’t want us to learn the truth about the pendant before we use it. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a far more insidious plan in his ethereal back pocket than Samuel.”
“Have you ever sat down and had a serious conversation with Abraham?” I asked.
Dracula huffed. “Of course. Between all the times he tried to shove a stake into my heart, we decided to chat about Transylvanian weather in the summertime. Of course we don’t talk. We’re mortal enemies. Always have been.”
“You were mortal enemies, Drac. Unlike you, while you were off mastering the path of light, I was stuck in the Scholomance with his ghost. He’s not an evil man. He hated you for the same reasons you hate who you used to be. You and he aren’t all that unalike.”
Dracula folded his arms in front of his chest. “You’re right. He wasn’t a bad man. He was closed-minded, bigoted, and naive, though.”
“Bigoted?”
“He hated all vampires!”
“Or did he only hate the vampires who were like you used to be? You know, the ones who fed on innocent maidens in their sleep and terrorized poor Jonathan Harker.”
“He wanted his own son to change. He convinced his other sons to deceive us into arranging for a golem to make it happen.”
I shook my head. “Did he? The golem was our idea.”
“One we talked about here in this schoolhouse,” Delphine reminded me. “Where Samuel was listening in. He saw an opportunity to shed his vampiric body and took us up on it.”
“I’m not sure why he’d do that,” Dracula argued. “Isn’t the power of the Scholomance especially suited for vampires? Didn’t you say, Sienna, that the Babylonian god wanted us to be his knights of the night to defend the world against greater evils like demons and such?”
“I did. But humans, like Abraham, have embraced the paths of the Scholomance as well. Perhaps rejecting his vampirism was a part of his effort to reject what Ennigaldi told me we were made to do.”
Delphine shook her head. “You two could go round and round about this until the moon rises and the wolves get hairy. Are we going to go see Mitchell, Garret, and Daniel, or not?”
I nodded. “Poltergeist’s warnings or not, we have no way of knowing what it means. We’re going.”
No sooner did I say it than a louder bang emerged from somewhere deeper in the school.
Dracula shrugged. “Don’t say he didn’t warn us.”
I smirked. “Yeah, right. If that’s even what it’s about.”
When we arrived back in the Garden District, one of the three homes had its porch lights on. The windows were also illuminated. The other two houses were pitch black. It made sense to check that house—Garret’s house—first.
We got out of the van and walked up the sidewalk toward the house. Delphine put her hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you allow me to speak to them first?”
“Okay. Why?”
Delphine tilted her head. “You’re both vampires. If Samuel was here, before, and stole the pendant from them and that’s why they were gone and hiding earlier, how do you think they’ll react if the first thing they see is the likes of you two? Sienna, you might look like a nice enough girl, but Dracula? Well, you look exactly like everyone thinks you’re supposed to look.”
“I’m not even wearing my cloak!”
Delphine shook her head. “You still look like yourself.”
I smiled. “That’s usually what people say about someone when they’re looking at a corpse in a casket. Gee, he sure looks like himself.”
“I’ve been in a casket a few times.”
“That’s the thing,” Delphine said. “Dead people in caskets never look like themselves. Take the life out of someone, and even the body changes. The point, Dracula, is that your face probably isn’t the one they’d most welcome after what they’ve recently endured. And Sienna, no offense, but you smile too much. When you smile—fangs.”
“I can go resting bitch face instead if that helps.”
Delphine tilted her head. “That doesn’t tend to win friends and influence people. Just let me take the lead on this one. These are old spirits. I’m used to speaking to old spirits.”
I sighed. “All right. You make a good point.”
I allowed Delphine to walk up ahead of us. Dracula stayed back on the sidewalk while Delphine ascended the four marble stairs that led up the porch between two white Corinthian columns.
She pressed the doorbell.
With my enhanced hearing, I picked up on the sound of footsteps approaching the door. The lock clicked and the door swung open. “May I help you?”
Delphine nodded. “Are you Garret Schumer?”
“I am.”
Delphine extended her hand. When Garret shook it, he gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Delphine asked.
“Nothing. Your touch. It tingles. It must be my circulation. Apologies.”
Delphine smiled. “We’re here to talk to you about an item we believe was stolen from you or one of your friends. We’d also like to talk to you about the man who took it.”
“Who are you!” Garret shouted. “How do you know about that!”
“What is it, dear?” a tall curly-haired blonde woman of around forty approached.
“Nothing, Leslie. I’ll handle this.”
“Are Mitchell and Daniel with you?” Delphine asked.
“How do you know our names?” Garret demanded.
Delphine raised her hand as if seeing her palm might calm him down. He looked right past it and saw Dracula and me. He gasped and took a step back.
“They won’t hurt you. They’re not like the man who came before.”
“He was no man! Neither are they! Demons!”
“Not demons,” Delphine corrected him. “Vampires. But don’t judge a monster by its cover. After all, you’re not really Garret, are you?”
Garret’s jaw dropped. “I’ve gone by that name for decades.”
“But it’s not you. Not really.”
Garret gulped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Garret is in there. Funny, I can sense his spirit. You’ve got him chained up in your mind. I can’t usually detect the spirits of the living, but I suppose, given that you’re possessing his body, he’s more like the dead than you now, isn’t he?”
Garret turned. “Leave us alone.”
I ran up and grabbed Garret by the arm. “We aren’t here to harm you. In fact, I bet having another soul rattling around inside of you, and a disturbed soul at that, isn’t always pleasant.”
“I’m not talking about this with any of you.”
“What if I said we could help? We could separate the two souls and the poor spirit whose body you stole could finally be put to rest?”
“You don’t understand. I had to take this body. You don’t know what he did to us.”
“Feuerhahn?” I asked.
Garret gulped. “How do you know that name?”
“We know everything,” Dracula approached Garret and put his hand on his shoulder. “Almost everything. If you can answer a few questions for us, we’re willing to give you new, better, bodies of your own. They can look just the same if you’d like. They’ll be healthier, and more importantly, they’ll be yours.”
“What are you? Gods? No one can do anything like that.”
I shrugged. “I’ve met a few gods. Dicks, mostly. You’d be surprised. But there are a few good ones, and I have a crystal that I can use to form what’s called a golem. A soulless body. If you leave the body you’re in, the golem is yours. You can go on living forever if you’d like. Golems don’t age, just as the body you possess won’t so long as you’re within it.”
Garret’s eyes shifted back and forth. “This sounds too good to be true. How can I trust you?”
“I’ll make one for each of you. You and your friends. But you need to tell us about the trinket that the vampire stole from you. Can you do that?”
“All you want is information?” Garret asked.
“A little information for a new body,” Delphine confirmed. “I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a good trade to me.”
“Besides, what do you have to lose?” Dracula pointed out. “You already lost the trinket, right?”
Garret huffed. “We only took it so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. You wouldn’t believe what that little thing can do.”
“I understand what Feuerhahn did to you. I can only imagine how he terrorized you in that asylum.”
Garret nodded. “It was a long time ago. I try not to think about it. Mitchell, Daniel, and I have new lives. Technically, Thaddeus and Vernon. My name was Earl. It was a long time ago.”
I shook my head. “Let me guess. Feuerhahn decided that Earl had to die. Na na na na.”
Delphine backhanded me on the shoulder. “Excuse her.”
Garret—Earl—laughed. “I picked up the reference. It was funny. Still, I’ve gone by Garret far Ionger than I was ever Earl. I know the name belongs to…him. Still, it’s odd to hear my old name.”
“I remember those names from the files,” Dracula said. “Your deaths were listed in the asylum files as by natural causes related to your conditions.”
“I was an alcoholic. That’s not what they called it back then. But I didn’t drink after I was committed. Mitchell suffered from hysteria, what they call anxiety nowadays. Daniel was probably schizophrenic, but he hasn’t exhibited those tendencies in ages.”
I nodded. “You mean Thaddeus and Vernon.”
“Right. Sorry. Like I said, it’s been a long time.”
I reached into my pocket and retrieved the trinket. “So, what can you tell us about the doctor’s pendant?”
Garret looked surprised. “Well, I can say for certain that’s not it.”
“Say what?”
“That’s not the trinket that was stolen from us. I don’t know where you got that from, but that’s not it.”
Dracula and I exchanged glances. “Well, shit.”
“Is the deal still on the table?” Garret asked.
I nodded. “We still have questions. If this isn’t it, the vampire who attacked you before still has it. We still need to know what it can do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I expected Garret to invite us in. Instead, he told us to wait a moment. One moment turned into about thirty. I suppose he had a lot of explaining to do. He finally returned with who must have been Mitchell and Daniel—or Thaddeus and Vernon.
“Sorry,” Garret said. “We’ll go do this at Mitchell’s. Our families are very close, but our wives don’t know the truth about our past.”
I tilted my head. “How can you keep that a secret from your wives?”
“How couldn’t we?” Mitchell piped up. “It’s not something you can just lay on someone and expect them to be okay with it. Hey, honey, just thought you should know that I’m actually dead and that you’re marrying a body older than your grandfather’s.”
I smirked. “All right, good point. Still, that must be hard.”
“We lived a long time, just us three, before we all agreed it was time to start families and move on. We’ve all been married over fifteen years. The truth is so far in the past that it doesn’t feel like a lie.”
“Except for the fact that you still have troubled souls trapped within each of you,” Delphine reminded him. “You can’t just ignore that.”
“You’d be surprised what you learn to ignore over time,” Garret said.
“Don’t you feel guilty about that?” I asked. “I mean, you took someone else’s body.”
“The original Garret, Mitchel, and Daniel were three of the worst cases in the entire asylum. They were catatonic most of the time. When they weren’t, they hardly made a lick of sense.”
“It hasn’t changed much,” Mitchell added. “The old Mitchell hardly speaks at all. Every now and then I hear a groan or something, but that’s about all there is to it.”
“What will happen to them if we leave and get new bodies?” Daniel asked.
Delphine shook her head. “It’s impossible to know. This isn’t exactly common. They may age at an accelerated rate and die very quickly. Or, they may continue as they were.”
“They want to die,” Garret said. “At least mine does. He has for a long time.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know if that’s something we can just make happen.”
“You’re vampires,” Garret said. “Surely you could.”
I sighed. “You don’t understand. We aren’t like you assume. We don’t like to kill.”
“Not even me!” Dracula put in. “Despite what you might have heard.”
“Sorry,” Garret said. “I don’t think I caught your name before, sir.”
“I am Dracula!”
Garret and the others laughed. “No, really.”
“What? I am! The one and only!”
“He’s not joking,” I assured them. “He’s actually older than you three.”
Mitchell tilted his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. I mean, I hope not. But damn! I thought you were just a story.”
I shrugged. “He’s more of a sorta-living breathing cliché. But he’s not who he used to be in those stories.”
“And those stories do not contain the whole truth.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Garret allowed. “Well, boys. It’s been a crazy couple of days.”
“Would you like me to make your new bodies now?” I asked.
“You can just do that?” Mitchell asked. “You don’t have to grow them in test tubes or something?”
I laughed. “It’s not like that. I just have to know what you want your bodies to look like. I suppose you want them just the same, you know, since you have wives who might have a lot of questions otherwise.”
“Maybe a few minor alterations,” Garret suggested. “Could you give Daniel a bigger penis? He’s never been able to satisfy his wife.”
Daniel punched Garret on the shoulder. “You’re an ass!”
Garret laughed. “I’m joking. Chill.”
I smirked. “Anything serious you’d like to modify?”
Garret nodded emphatically. “Less ear hair would be nice. I swear, I trim that shit all the time and it comes back before I realize it.”
“Thin out my back hair a bit, too,” Michell requested.
“He’s right,” Daniel put in. “He’s like sasquatch.”
I smiled. “Won’t your wives notice?”
Mitchell shrugged. “I’ve been considering laser hair removal. This will just save me a few hundred bucks.”
“I have a club toe,” Daniel added. “Gives me all kinds of trouble. My wife doesn’t pay that much attention to my feet. Should be fine to fix.”
I never should have asked them if they wanted any modifications. They each had a dozen different things they wanted altered. All small things, but programming those details into an archeus crystal took time. I knew the commands. It was a hassle, but I suppose it was worth it. I was taking notes on my phone.
“All right, I’ve got it.”
“Tell us everything you know about the trinket,” Dracula pressed.
“It’s very simple, really,” Garret reported. “It’s sharp on one end. The other side is jagged, as if it was broken off something.”
“The doctor had it wrapped in some kind of twine and wore it around his neck,” Daniel added. “When we were ghosts, if he touched us with it, it captured us.”
“It captured you? Like a prison?” I asked.
Mitchell nodded. “It also glowed like the sun when the doctor held a spirit within it. When he put one of us inside of it, he could tell us to do almost anything. For a day or so it was like we’d lost our will. Even as spirits, after he released us, we had to do what he told us.”
I sighed. “I’ve seen that before. It’s the tip of a reaper’s scythe.”
“A scythe can break?” Dracula asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I should call Zoey. She’ll know.”
“So it didn’t repel spirits,” Dracula mused. “It just put them under a temporary mind-control spell?”
“Pretty much,” Garret confirmed. “After a while, it did repel us. Even though we wanted nothing more than to kill him, fear is just as powerful, if not more, than revenge. When he came, the spirits ran. Not because the trinket forced us to, but because we were afraid he’d take us into it.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “Samuel must’ve used it on his father. That’s what caused so much angst. It’s why Abraham created the poltergeist in the schoolhouse.”
“Did you say poltergeist?” Garret asked.
“Right. Do you know something about that?”
The three men exchanged glances. “When a spirit was captured by that thing, new entities often emerged after the spirits were freed. Angry spirits. They weren’t human. I don’t know what they were.”
Delphine sighed. “That explains why there were so many poltergeists in the asylum.”
I nodded. “To get rid of a poltergeist we either have to kill it with another poltergeist or we have to free the spirit who made it. The spirit has to move on. If we can get the trinket away from Samuel, eventually, it should free Abraham from his control. My guess is that he has Abraham trapped within it.”
“It’s no wonder Morty could sense the energy from the trinket. It’s a reaper blade. Of course he’d sense it. And remember, Morty only sensed it when Samuel called the spirit of the doctor back out of his old body, out of the rat.”
“That’s also when Alexander and Reginald showed up. My guess is they’re the ones holding the trinket right now. At least they were at the time.”
“Then what is the significance of the trinket that Samuel gave you?” Dracula asked.
