Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (35 page)

So Vlad didn’t fit the pattern, and not a
single vampire apparently knew Vlad’s real identity.

Cory handed back the paper. The details were
the same, except this time the victim was a ninety year old lady.
He thought he’d seen somewhere in the article about her
disappearing in the middle of the night from a nursing home a day
and a half before her body was found. Although he hadn’t been able
to make himself care much about the other murders, this one seemed
to him to be particularly heinous. This old lady had been like him,
broken down by the world, and all she had wanted was to live her
days in peace. Not only that, but she had been left in one of the
most high profile dumping spots yet, on the front lawn of the
Octagon House. It was a local landmark, known originally as a stop
along the Underground Railroad. Cory supposed it was going to be
known for something else for awhile now.

It was also only a few blocks from Lynn’s
building. Cory tried not to let in the image of Lynn walking home
at night, a shadowy form coming up from behind her…

“The article didn’t say anything about the
Dusters,” Cory said.

“Of course not,” Fancy said.

“What, you expect the humans to just announce
to the sky that they’ve got their very own gang of monster slayers
running around town?” Dancer asked.

“Most people are still trying to deny what
Vlad is,” Fancy said. “The Dusters aren’t going to just announce
themselves to the world. No one would take them seriously.”

“You said they killed some people, though,”
Cory said.

“Yeah, and from the one eyewitness we’ve
talked to who got away, ‘Duster’ isn’t the right word for what they
do to us when we die,” Dancer said.

“No body left afterward,” Fancy said. “So it
wouldn’t be found and end up in the papers.”

“But it’s like what we saw happen to the
guards that woman killed in the cave,” Dancer said. She spoke about
the mystery woman quietly, almost reverently. No one had seen her
since that day, but every vampire who had escaped with enough
sanity left to be grateful knew they owed her everything.

Fancy nodded. “Break down into sludge.”

“You mean goo,” Dancer said. “It was
definitely goo, not sludge.”

Fancy flashed her an annoyed look. “They’re
the same damned thing, and that’s not the point.”

“Who was it?” Cory asked.

“All the Lakeside vampires except one,”
Dancer said. “That was the witness.”

“And Cold Ethyl out by Merc,” Fancy said.

“Also Judy No-Last-Name.” Dancer shook her
head. “She had heard about the Dusters going around and hid out for
a night in the Loving Hands Shelter. Judy should have been safe.
Apparently a Duster came right in off the street, screaming and
looking for her.”

“They’re used to abusive boyfriends and
husbands trying to come in there after their girlfriends and
wives,” Fancy said “They got him to leave by threatening the police
on him, but when they tried to find her afterward she was
gone.”

“They had no idea what the mess on the floor
was afterward,” Dancer said. “The best we can figure is they
somehow managed to get someone else in there to kill her while the
other one was distracting the people who volunteered there.”

Cory could tell how much this story upset
both of them, but Cory himself was more concerned about what they
had said just before it. Cold Ethyl (a man, despite the name) out
by Merc. Merc was short for Mercury Marine, a factory that made
outboard motors and was one of the biggest employers in the city.
The factory in question, though, was way out near the edge of town.
It was quite the distance from the supposed turf of the Dusters.
He’d thought it was scary that they had just expanded down Main
Street, but now they were hunting in every corner of Fond du Lac.
He’d never felt safe to start with, but this information made him
feel particularly vulnerable.

“I’m telling you, it’s got us scared
shitless,” Dancer said.

“We have no idea how they’re even finding all
of us,” Fancy said. Dancer made a suspicious grunt, and Fancy
frowned at her and said, “We still don’t know that for certain.” To
Cory, though, she sounded worried. Cory had an idea that they both
had a good idea after all exactly how the Dusters were finding
them, but they didn’t necessarily want to say anything to him yet.
On the one hand he was instinctively leery of any secret they might
have, but on the other he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He was
already freaked out beyond any point he thought he could handle.
Right now all he wanted was to go back to the burned-out blue
building, curl up in the bed despite all his earlier attacks, and
let Lynn tell him everything was okay right where he was.

That’s why he took a defensive step back at
Fancy’s next words. “We need you to come with us.”

“What?” Cory asked. “No. I can’t.”

“Meateater, you have to,” Dancer said.
“Unless you want to get shot through the heart and turned into
black pudding.”

Cory took another step away from them.

Fancy flashed Dancer an angry look before
tentatively moving for Cory with her hands up. “Just take it easy.
She didn’t mean that as a threat or anything.”

“Why the hell would we threaten you?” Dancer
asked. “We’re just concerned.”

“You can’t stay out in the street like this
anymore,” Fancy said. “They’ll find you.”

“But you two don’t have a place either,” Cory
said. “You can’t help.”

“We do have a place that’s safe,” Dancer
said. “We guarantee it.”

He could hear the kindly old voice protesting
in his head as the paranoia returned, but the voice was simply not
strong enough to overpower the growing illogical panic.

“No, no. You can’t take me anywhere.”

“It might not even be for that long, for all
we know,” Fancy said.

“This might all blow over soon,” Dancer
said.

No. Those were lies and Cory knew it. There
was never an end. The pain and the fear and the suffering in the
dark were never-ending. No one could save anyone. It never stopped.
FancyDancer were targets, too. The Dusters would come for them, and
he couldn’t be there when they did. He had to be somewhere else, if
not somewhere safe then someplace that at least no one else knew
about. With Lynn. Lynn was the closest thing to safe he could
possibly hope for at the moment.

“I have to go,” Cory mumbled.

“Meateater, don’t,” Fancy said. She reached
for his arm to grab him. A long while later, when his mind was in a
rare moment of clarity, he understood that she only did that
because she, too, was too afraid to think clearly. Because she
should have known better. The absolute last thing that would get
him to calm down and go with them willingly was to make any attempt
at restraining him.

“My name’s not Meateater!” he screamed, then
violently shoved his way between the two of them and ran back for
the tunnel. Just in that brief time that they’d been talking he’d
felt more of his strength and stamina returning, but it was still
low enough that FancyDancer should have been able to stop him. He
realized as he ran, though, that the simple act of coming between
the two had thrown them off, that the presence of anyone suddenly
between them had been a shock to their systems. Maybe too they knew
trying to stop him would do more harm than good. Either way, they
let him go, and he moved, with a speed greater than most humans but
still far from his top range, out onto Main Street and back to
Lynn, crying all the way.

Oh, but how the
soul of this city churns! We can feel it screaming out in its
sleep, trying to somehow will our presence away, yet instead
focusing all its misspent efforts on other threats that are not
threats at all. And even while we see that as the way of things on
the surface, we can sense that this is somehow an illusion. We have
our suspicions as to how this might be, but we must find out for
certain.

We also must feed.

We search the city, flitting through it along
with the cold wind. The spring is late in coming, and we likely
have something to do with that. Our simple presence disrupts the
balance, but maybe not for much longer. We believe we are coming
closer to the true nature of the rampant grown garden. Once our
curiosity has finally been sated we may leave. Or we may try our
own hand at tending the garden. We have not decided yet.

The night is still new, the sun barely set,
but this only bothers us slightly. We have existed long enough to
learn to resist the pain. It no longer means anything to us. But it
still means something to the fruit of the garden. We can feel some
of the fruit at this very moment, one going one direction away from
us and two more, ripe and succulent fruit indeed, heading toward
the first. They will meet shortly, we think. Perhaps we will go
back after we have fed and observe their meeting, hide in the parts
of the shadows they don’t yet understand and quietly tend to them.
But before that we feel someone else ahead of us, someone in pain,
someone with the distinct feel of dying upon them. That, then, will
be our meal tonight.

We see her, a small morsel of a creature,
pacing outside an abandoned blue building. She is blond, frantic,
furious. Something has clearly enraged or upset her. But that is
not our concern. We stand nearby, preparing to calm her, to let her
find peace before we take her away, but as we approach we suddenly
understand that something is wrong. The scent of death about her is
not correct. It doesn’t come from her but rather from the building.
Someone died here, someone who felt such agony in their final
moments that the feeling stays still after many long months. It is
something we have experienced before, getting accidentally fooled
by a presence that has long lingered, but we understand
instinctively that this time is no accident. The woman, whoever she
may be, has been hiding here for exactly this reason. She knows
more than she should.

We stop behind her, far enough away that even
if she could see us we would be hidden by the waning light. There
is nothing that appears outwardly interesting about her, and more
appropriate prey awaits us somewhere else in the city tonight. But
we do not leave yet. We are intrigued. We must investigate.

As we start to push at her with our greater
senses, though, she is startled and turns around. We immediately
stop any attempt to probe her and wait. She blinks at us several
times before speaking.

“
Are you him?” she asks. Her voice barely
registers over the squeak of a rat. We do not answer. We merely
wait, watching, calculating, beginning to understand.

“
He told me this building would attract
you,” she says, her voice becoming more confident. “I wasn’t sure
he was right.”

We work the problem together in our thoughts
and understand quickly who she is referring to. We also begin to
see the true shape of what is going on here in this city. The plan
is clever, multi-layered, but still lacking a subtlety that would
have been present had we been the ones doing this. Then again, we
would never have needed such a plan in the first place.

“
He said he’s been trying to contact you,”
she says. She has lost any and all fear now, as well as most of her
rage. She is curious instead. At every few words she takes a small
step toward us as though she thinks we are a wounded puppy that
will dash away in fear at the slightest provocation. So she does
not truly understand us, nor does she likely have a complete
concept of what exactly she is involved in. She certainly is not
close enough yet to see us as more than an amorphous
shadow.

Yet she can most definitely see us when she
shouldn’t.

“
He wants to speak to you,” she says. “She
wants you to be a part of all this.”

She cannot be more than a child. She thinks
she is an adult, but that word takes on entirely different meaning
among our kind. We decide we want to watch this one closely. The
time will come when she will understand, and in that moment her
absolute horror will be fascinating and exquisite.

But if she sees us now that beautiful
surprise will be ruined. She grows bolder, coming to us quicker,
but we do not let her continue. We move fast, although we are
certain her perceptions are such that she can still see the
movement, and we are gone from her view.

From far above the city we can still view
her. She knows we have gone up and she searches the sky, but we
easily avoid her scanning eyes. She should be frightened by what
she has seen, but she is not. Her agitation from earlier is now
completely gone, and she flashes a wide smile at the clouds.

The gardener has new tools, and we are now
quite anxious to see how it uses them.

Cory didn’t dare
stop anywhere along his route with the sun now completely down and
the threat of the Dusters still everywhere around him. He knew
there was nothing supernatural about them, but the conversation
with FancyDancer had expanded the already intimidating place they
took up in his mind. All the way back to the burned-out building,
as short as that journey was now that he was feeling stronger and
healthier, he kept thinking about the way they had seemed to so
quickly expand throughout the city, covering every inch and
insuring that few places were protected from them. Lynn’s small
apartment should be relatively safe, but he couldn’t help but think
how close it was to the site of his attack. They were already
showing that there was no place vampires could hide from them. He
didn’t know how they were doing it, but he knew his increasing fear
was, for a change, a completely rational response to the
situation.

For perhaps the first time in the last year
he wondered if maybe he needed to leave Fond du Lac. At first he
had continued to live here purely because he had nowhere else to
go. While that still held true, it wasn’t like he had a lot holding
him here. He had a nice little secluded dumpster, a few other
monsters of his kind that didn’t hate him—even occasionally seemed
to care about him if that was possible—and now a person who had
been nice to him and could even be called a friend. But he didn’t
think his overall life here was any better than what he might find
elsewhere. In fact, he might even have a better time of it if he
made his way to a larger city, maybe south to either Madison or
Milwaukee or north as far as Green Bay, someplace that had more
resources and more places to hide. Definitely a place that didn’t
have a roving band of pissed-off citizens taking out their fears on
creatures that just wanted to be left alone.