Brock (10 page)

He moved so quickly to his car that he dropped the papers out of the file.
Ryland had just picked them all up when McKinney turned to them. He looked ready to bolt, but he came back and handed Brock another file. He didn’t explain but got into his car and left. Brock turned to his family.

“He’ll not be back.”
His mom laughed. “And you scared him when you growled. What was that all about?”

“I
thought he was reaching for a gun. It’s that show I was watching last night. Some gangster show that had me up half the night watching it and the other half worrying that someone was gunning for me. That charming man in that show looked like he was as sweet as honey, but he had such a dark side too.” She shivered. “Well, it got rid of him quick enough, didn’t it? So I would appreciate it if you’d back the hell up off me, thank you very much.”

She huffed at him and
turned on her heel and moved toward his house. When she disappeared behind the broken door that he just noticed, Brock looked at Ryland. He looked pole axed.

“I’m going to have to put a rating on her television. She’s getting more and more like Bronwyn
every day. I think maybe the two of them need to stop hanging out together, too. She’s become really scary lately.” Brock threw back his head and laughed at his brother. “You try having her watch your kid one of these days. Just last night I caught her reading Gabby
Crime and Punishment.
And she was reading it in a voice that sounded like she was reading her a fairytale story. Scared the shit out of me.”

Brock took his brother in the house. When he asked where Em was
, Roland said she’d left him in the kitchen not a minute ago. He assumed she’d gone up to change. Brock nodded and handed his brother a bottle of beer. It was only ten in the morning, but he drank it down like it was his last meal. He sat the empty bottle on the table and looked at his mom, then at him.

“What the fuck happened here today?”

~~~

Em went down to the kitchen after shifting back. It hadn’t hurt her either time
, but she could feel the pull of a couple of muscles. She looked at Brock, then at Ryland. He was probably going to yell at her. She handed him the note she’d written before coming down.

“I’m sorry.
I don’t know what came over me, but when I saw you hit Brock, I needed to kill you. I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’ll pay whatever fine there is that you feel I owe you.” He handed it back to her.

“You should know that I would have done the same thing.”
She didn’t understand what he meant and tried to hand him the note again. “I know you’re sorry. And it’s mostly my fault. I should have asked him what happened before I went off half-cocked and hit him. I wasn’t aware that he’d changed you.”

Taking out her pad
, he touched it and she looked at him. There was that feeling that she was a part of him again, and her cat stirred under her skin. Em hadn’t told Brock yet, but she felt like there were two of them in her and they both had wanted to kill this man.

“You can speak to me now. When you took my blood and we made the connection
, we can now speak to each other. I know you can with Bronwyn, but I think you still need to pledge to her.”
Em nodded.
“Good. Now, I’d like to talk to you about the man who said that—”

Brock handed him a file
, and Em looked at him.
“There’s a bunch of pictures of you and me together in town. I think someone has been following us for about a week now if I’m seeing that right. And also there’s a committal paper in there that is dated about two weeks ago. It basically says that you’re under a doctor’s care and that you need to be kept under lock and key. Your father signed it.”

“He put my mom away a long time ago.
He said she was insane to think that they were all vampires.”
Brock nodded
. “You don’t believe that, do you? I know you are aware there really are vampires, but I mean that my mom is insane. Well, she might be a little, but not about what she was saying.”

“No. I know there are vampires as well as
other creatures. But we need to contact someone to find out what’s going on.”
Sandra sat down next to her at the table and smiled.
“Something isn’t right here, and I don’t mean just with your family coming. You were going to kill Ryland and shifted like someone who had done it before. Mom said you startled her when you did.”

“
I’ve contacted Alistair. He can get this straightened out. He’s coming here now to get these papers. He said that Peter is with him. He was bringing him here so that he could speak to you both.” Sandra patted her hand as she continued. “I think that there is more going on here than these ridiculous papers. I think that that man was to lure you away so that they could get you. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before and rip his throat out for good measure. I guess you can’t really kill the messenger though. But I do believe that you’re much more than a simple tiger, and I think we all know it.”

Em was afraid of that too. She looked at
Brock, who winked at her. She flushed when she realized that Ryland had seen him do that. The man was so much bigger than her, yet she’d tried to kill him not half an hour ago.

When Peter and Alistair showed up
, she was ready to run. Peter made her uncomfortable still, but not like before. She didn’t think he’d harm her, but he still made her feel like he was about to do something to her. She watched as he stood near the door and didn’t speak. She watched as Alistair went over the papers that had been out of the file as well as the ones that had been in the one that Brock had. She looked up when she felt someone touch her mind. It was Peter.

“You and I are related
, though I’m not sure how
.” She looked at Brock, then at Peter.
“You felt the moment your brother was killed, as did I. Do you know which one is dead?”

“
Steven. He’s the oldest. I think Wilfred killed him.”
Peter nodded.
“Why can I feel them when they die, and how do I know who did it? Also, you said we’re related; how is that even possible? I’ve never seen you before moving here.”

He
didn’t move, and she was aware that no one else seemed to know they were talking and looked at Brock again. He and Ryland, along with Alistair and their mom, were looking over some of the papers. Peter smiled when she looked at him.

“The man Jimmy, the one that turned your family, he was my child.
When he was killed not long ago, his children became a responsibility to me. Is he the one who gave you that scar,
too?”
She nodded.
“I thought so. He was trying to convert you as well, and I’m assuming that’s when the connection was formed.”
He moved to the chair on the other side of her and held out his hand.
“My maker is concerned that they will harm you, but…you’re not human any longer, are you?”

“No. We did the
conversion thing last night.”
Peter nodded.
“But something else happened. I don’t think it worked like it was supposed to. I can feel something else. I think it’s another cat inside of me.”

“It’s the match to Brock’s.
He calls him his beast, and I’m reasonably sure that he is. He comes out when he needs him most. Like the other day when we were all together and you’d been hurt.”
She looked at the others before Peter continued.
“You’re a rare and wonderful creature, Emma. And as such you’ll not be harmed by your family ever again. But I need your help, that of you and Brock. They need to be destroyed. Your brothers have killed a great many people, and they need to be rid from this place.”

She thought about her brothers and father. They were horrible beings even when they’d been humans
…cruel to people who did nothing to them, stealing from others when there was no reason to. Nothing or no one had been safe from their cruelty, and now that they were vampires, she was pretty sure that they didn’t improve with the change. She looked at Peter and nodded.

“Tell me what you need me to do.
But Wilfred is mine. He’s the one that held me down when Jimmy bit me. I have some payback to give him.”
Peter nodded.

Chapter
10

Bert looked around again. There was no sign of Steven anywhere. And he couldn’t find Wilfred either. He was just about ready to go out and look for them both, something making him think that they’d been hurt, but he nearly fell over in relief when Wilfred came from the attic. He looked behind him to see if his brother was with him, but he wasn’t there.

“He’s gone off on his own.”
Bert looked at Wilfred when he volunteered the information. “Last night after you all went to rest, he said he’d had enough and was going back home. He said to tell you he’d see you there when you got back.”

“Home? Why? I thought he was going to help us bring your sister home.
We all agreed to change her here and take her back before her first rising.” Wilfred shrugged, and for some reason Bert didn’t believe him. “What really happened to your brother? Did the two of you get into a fight?”

He’d started to add
“again” on the end of that statement but didn’t. There was enough tension in the air that you could choke on it. When Wilfred stretched his neck muscles, Bert had a feeling that Wilfred was trying his best not to attack him, and that made Bert take a few steps back. Then he looked at where his son had been sleeping last night.

There was a faint outline where he’d been
, like the floor surrounding him had been scorched. He nearly leaned over and looked at it but stopped at the last second. Wilfred was looking at him again with a look that said “go ahead and do it.” Fear curled around his belly, and he took a step back.

“You all should get a good meal in your
bellies. As soon as it’s dark enough, we’re going to pay our little solicitor a call and see if he got to talk to the Goldens.” Shawn and Erwin looked to him, and he nodded. He felt anger boil off Wilfred and looked at him.

“Soon they’ll be looking to me for answers and not you
, old man. You’re nothing but an incompetent fool, and we all know it.” Bert was surprised by the venom in his son’s voice. “You’ll see. I should have been made in charge from the very beginning, and there would be no way that Emma would have gotten this far.”

“She’s near here
, and we’ll get her back. She will learn her place, and when she does, we can go back to being a family again.” Wilfred grinned, and the hair on Bert’s arms danced. “You should go and feed.”

Wilfred
nodded, and when he left, Bert sat down on the floor and took several deep breaths. His son had scared him, and not just a little, either. Looking at the place on the floor, Bert ran his fingers over the area, and his fingertips came away with soot on them. He leaned down to sniff the area and jumped back. It was Steven. Someone had killed him. And Bert knew it had been Wilfred.

But why?
What would have driven him to murder his own brother, not to mention doing it right before they were so close to getting all that they’d come for? He tried to remember the conversation last night, and only remembered that Wilfred had been upset about talking to a vampire, and he’d known his full name. But why that would be enough to cause him to murder him, he didn’t know.

By the time the others had returned
, Bert was no closer to figuring how what to do about Wilfred than he’d been before. He’d gone out to get a quick meal, not able to get his fill from the woman he’d pulled into the darkness. He’d been able to bite her, but not feed. She was dead by now anyway, as he’d neither bothered closing the wounds at her throat, nor worked very hard at concealing her body. What the hell was going on? He had a dead son that he was sure his brother had killed, a daughter to bring back, and now he couldn’t feed. He wondered if Wilfred had anything to do with that, too.

They went to McKinney’s office and found the place locked up tight and all the lights off.

“He said he’d meet us here after the sun went down.” Shawn looked in the windows and then around the yard. “His car isn’t even here. Where the fuck could he be?”

“He’s probably at home watching television with his family.
The mother fucker is going to pay for this.” Wilfred broke the window and nearly tore the door off the hinges, opening it up. “We’ll just wait for him here. If he’s not here within the hour, we’ll go and see if we can find him on our own.”

The waiting only lasted until the first cruiser pulled
into the lot less than five minutes later. When the second one pulled in almost immediately, they all went out the back door of the building and spread out like cockroaches when the light came on. Bert found himself teaming up with Erwin when they found a hidey hole by crawling into a hollowed-out log.

“They sure were fast.”
Bert nodded. “It’s almost as if they knew we were in there. We probably set off one of them alarms and they sent the police after us.”

“
Wilfred didn’t check when he just opened the door by breaking in. I would have checked first to see.” Bert had no idea why he’d said that to his son, and knew that he wouldn’t have checked for an alarm either. “He’s going to get us caught. And what will happen if we’re in a jail cell when the sun comes up?”

Erwin looked at him like he’d never thought of that.
In fact, Bert hadn’t thought of it either until that very second.

They’d been moving along all this time as if they were
omnipotent, and they were more fragile now than they’d been as humans. At least as a human they’d been a great deal more cautious when they’d been bullies. Now they had become stupid, lazy even. He wondered how much they’d left of them behind when they’d killed the other night at that party and shivered. Fuck, they’d been stupid. But not anymore. At least he wasn’t planning on it from now on. He thought for a moment and decided that having his daughter home with them wasn’t a good idea, and wanted to go back home. There they were safe.

He turned to tell Erwin about his thoughts on it when he saw someone approaching them.
They both hunkered down behind the log that they’d been hiding in when a voice, a strong and cultured voice, reached them.

“You’re going about this all wrong. When you break and enter into a
lawyer’s home, you should always expect a security system in place.” Bert looked at Erwin, who had fallen asleep. He reached to wake him when the voice spoke again. “Leave him be. Your other son, Wilfred, is trying to get you killed. Are you aware of that?”

“
Who are you?” All he got in answer was laughter, cold and chilling laughter. “Show yourself to me now or I’ll come out after you.”

“No you
won’t. You’re not only too afraid of your own shadow, but you’re also mine and you cannot harm me.” The laughter again, and it made his skin crawl. “You’ve no opinion on your son? Did he tell you that you can no longer feed? That because of him I’ve taken that away from you? You know that he killed the oldest, Steven, don’t you? Why haven’t you confronted him? Found out the answers that burn in your mind?”

Because
, as the man said, he was afraid, but he wouldn’t say that to anyone, especially to one he didn’t know. He looked at Erwin and wondered if the man out there had done something to him, and when he woke, it would be too late to get indoors. He shivered, thinking about what Jimmy had told them about what happened when they were caught in the sun.

“You should heed his words.
Jimmy would know more than others what happens when the sun touches our bodies. Though I must tell you, he cannot tell you himself now. Because of his crimes, he is no longer substance, but ash in the wind.” That terrified Bert a great deal, and he wasn’t even sure why. “Of course you know why. You think that your son is going to leave you out in it. He might, too. He is unlike any of you. He has no qualms about killing his own kind.”

“You lie.”
The heat seared his skin almost as soon as the words left his mouth, and he fell back from it. He looked up to see a man, large and dark, as he hovered just above him in the starless night. Bert tried to scramble away from him but only succeeded in getting lodged against the log tighter. Terror rolled over him, and he whimpered like a child, more like a dog.

“I do not lie.”
The man, a vampire he could tell, now faded out as he continued. “You will find out soon enough. The next one he tries to kill will be you. Should you find yourself…when he attacks, you simply say ‘I command you to back off.’ It may work. Then again it may not. We’ll see, will we not?”

“
I don’t understand. Why is he going to kill me? I’ve done nothing to him. And I’m his father. He loves me.” Bert knew that to be a lie the moment he said it. “He cannot kill his own kind. Jimmy told us that.”

“Did he tell you that you
couldn’t
or that you
shouldn’t
?” Bert couldn’t remember. There had been so many rules, and he’d not really been paying attention.

“He can kill us then.
Kill all of us without anyone caring at all.” He sounded afraid, even to his own ears. “What is the point of all this power if someone like us can kill us without anyone doing anything about it?”

“You mean like the people in the house that you killed?
Or the ones you’ve murdered on the way here? Someone will pay for all those crimes, trust me. And as you are as guilty as your sons, you’ll pay the price as well. The sun does not care who it touches when we stake you out in it,” Erwin stirred as the man faded. “He comes now to tell you that you’re the problem. I would be careful of him.”

As soon as
Wilfred came into view, Erwin sat up and looked at him, too. There was something very off about his second oldest son, and he was sure that the man was right. Wilfred was going to kill him.

“Where the fuck did you go?”
His fist lashed out before either he or Erwin could move from it. “You were supposed to spread out and come back to see if the rest of us were caught. What the fuck did you suppose was going to happen if we were taken to jail?”

“You’d
have had the sun touch you.” Erwin didn’t move fast enough after he spoke, and he was suddenly flying across the wooded area as soon as Wilfred touched him. When he hit the tree, Bert heard his bones break, and then suddenly Erwin was aflame. He must have hit a broken branch, and it entered him at his heart. Both he and others watched as Erwin burned out and his ash rained to the floor of the forest.

“Mother fuck.”
Shawn looked at them. “You killed him. You fucking killed him. You know what Jimmy said…there would be consequences if you killed one of our own.”

“Fuck Jimmy. What the fuck good is it to quote him when he left us to fend for ourselves? And what the fuck was I supposed to do when he makes an idiotic statement like that?
Agree with him? You said yourself that he and Dad should have come back for us when we were caught.”

They’d been caught?
He looked at his two sons very closely. They were covered in blood. Christ, they’d killed while he talked to the vampire. He stood up and looked at the tree where his baby had been killed, and then at Wilfred.

“Is it your plan to kill us all off before we can get Emma?”
Wilfred didn’t even try to deny it, but walked to where he and Erwin had been sitting and picked up the bag that Erwin had had on him when they’d left the house. “I asked you a question. Are you planning to kill us like you did Steven and Erwin?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes.
And whatever I have to do to bring her back. She’s fucking going to do what I tell her, when I tell her, or she’ll earn the same fate as those two.” Bert looked at Shawn as Wilfred walked deeper into the woods.

“
So you did kill Steven. And those others, did you kill those cops, too?” Shawn nodded when Wilfred didn’t. “Did
you
kill them or did Wilfred? Because either way it went down, we’re going to be in big trouble when someone finds out. We’ve not been taking precautions to keep anyone from finding us. And they will, too. And once they do, we’re as good as dead.”

“We’re vampires. They can’t hurt us.”
Bert pointed to the tree where his brother had just been killed. “That was Wilfred, not a stupid human. If we’re going to just get Emma, then we should go and do it, then get back home and pretend none of this ever happened.”

Bert followed Shawn in the direction that
Wilfred had gone. He thought about what the other vampire had said. They were going to pay. Bert thought of all the things they’d done and figured that they were all going to be staked. If that was so, then it didn’t matter if they killed or not. He smiled. They might as well have as much fun as they could before then. He reached out and put his hand on Shawn’s shoulder.

“I need to feed
; I couldn’t earlier, could you?” Shawn shook his head. “You want to come with me and find a nice, big place for us to stay that has heat and running water? We could have a lot of fun if there are humans in the house.” Shawn grinned.

“I’d like that.
Wilfred said we were commanded not to feed, and he said it was entirely your fault. That we’d been cursed because you can’t keep your mouth shut.” Shawn didn’t notice that he’d stopped walking as he continued. “I don’t believe him, of course, but it is really strange that we can’t get a meal now.”

“
I didn’t do anything, Shawn. I swear to you. And I don’t doubt that Wilfred is the reason we can’t feed.” Bert looked around as if Wilfred might be close enough to hear them.