Immortal Coil: A Novel (Immortal Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

Maggie woke when Gardner began to stir. She looked out the window at the bright morning light. The vampires had returned, and like the phantoms that they are, left her to sleep. She loved them so much.

She fixed Gardner a bottle and fed him, played with him and napped when she could. The day passed quickly and the vampires woke to find her walking the floor with a crying baby in her arms. David leaned over and whispered something in the baby’s ear so low all Maggie could hear, even at such close range, was a light breeze. But whatever David had said quieted Gardner. He kissed her cheek and followed Antony into the den.

The den was the computer room Maggie and the vampires used to oversee the acquisition of prey. Randal took note of a child killer that he decided would never see the inside of a courtroom. He headed out with the information he needed to track down his prey. Antony scanned the clutter of notes and scrap paper, where Maggie had jotted down the different dreams and visions she’d had. He didn’t seem to see anything that truly spoke to him.

Maggie entered the room, bouncing Gardner in her arms.

“Not much to choose from,” Antony said.

David picked out who he would track down and disappeared in a crackling puff of wind.

Maggie stepped closer to the desk and looked into Antony’s eyes. “I have been having a dream lately that has been disturbing me. I’ve been avoiding telling you because I was having trouble pinning down exactly what—or who—I was seeing. I have what I need now, and I think it’s time to track him down. His name is Dylan Moyer and he lives in Delaware. Exactly where, I’m not sure, because he moves around a lot. He’s a nomad, homeless. He is a cannibal, stripping naked and eating his prey alive. He’s an exceptionally horrendous individual, and my dreams would indicate that I might be one of his victims one day.

Antony set his jaw. “I will find him. And you will have nothing to fear from him.”

Maggie sighed, relieved to hear this. She handed Gardner to Antony and jotted down the information Antony would need to find the cannibal killer. Antony, rarely made to hold Gardner, now held the baby out at arm’s length, unsure what he was doing. The baby dangled there, staring at Antony with a dull expression of curiosity. A line of drool dripped from the child’s bottom lip to his onesie. Antony scooped up the notes and was gone as soon as Maggie took the baby out of his hands.

Maggie’s notes were surprisingly detailed. Antony used vampire speed to travel to Delaware, and learned that there was a Dylan Moyer at the homeless shelter. He captured Dylan easily, and after looking into the auburn haired man’s hazel eyes, he could not determine if there was evil in this man. Dylan definitely had murder on his soul, but there was something else there, too; something that looked like…innocence. How could someone be guilty and innocent? Antony finally decided that Dylan would have to go back with him to Philadelphia. With Maggie’s help, perhaps they could get to the truth. He drugged the man and carried him over his shoulder, running at the speed of sound.

Antony had spent the entire night hunting Dylan, and then had not even taken him as food. David saw the desperation in Antony and brought back three pedophiles for Antony. Pedophiles were the easiest prey to catch. David enjoyed taking them off the street.

Having fed, Antony woke Dylan. The drowsy man sat up on the sofa and looked around. He was definitely not at the home. He looked over the trio of individuals standing in front of him. He lingered a little longer on Maggie. He smiled at her. She did not smile back.

“You have murdered, but you are not evil; you must explain this inconsistency.” Antony drew Dylan’s attention away from Maggie.

“Who are you?” Dylan asked. He showed no fear of them. Instead, he seemed almost to pity his captors. His eyes were almost sad.

“It would seem to me that the abducted person should answer the abductor’s question, not the other way around; is that not a clear assessment of this situation?” Antony moved closer to him as he spoke. He recalled Maggie’s fear of being eaten by the cannibal and he didn’t want to take any chances.

Dylan considered this and concluded his abductor was correct.
              “I have murdered, but it was out of my control.”

“Why is this?”

“You’re better off not knowing. Why have you brought me here? Who are you people?”

Maggie couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “You have eaten your victims. I have seen you do it. Do you deny that?”

Dylan turned and looked at Maggie once again. However, this time he did not flirt. He looked at her with fear, but not for himself. He feared for
her
. When Maggie saw him giving her this look, as if he could kill her and yet still feel remorse about it, she grew annoyed. She needed pity from no one. She squared her jaw and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest.

Then suddenly the man’s expression changed. Now he looked at her as if he had forgotten to turn the oven off before leaving home. He tried to stand but Antony knocked him back down.

“You saw me kill?” he asked, looking at Maggie. “You said that. You saw it?”

“It was in a vision.” Maggie dropped her hands.

“What did I look like…in this
vision
?” He said this last word as though he were only humoring her, and did not believe her.

Maggie was confused. She turned to Antony for guidance. He urged her to continue with a glance.

“You looked like you do now, only you were…” She thought about what she should say. She just said it. “You were nude.”

Dylan nodded, fascinated by this revelation. Finally, he turned to Antony and spoke. “I have a personality disorder,” he said. “I have a dual personality that I have no memory of when it is in control of my body. This other personality is very violent. I have tried to keep this personality in check, but sometimes I mess up.”

“How do you keep this personality in check if you do not know when you might relinquish your control over to it?”

Dylan laughed. “Oh, trust me I know when this personality takes over. It’s like clockwork. I lose control to my murderous side every twenty-eight days. Like I said, I know when I lose the control; I just have no memory of anything that happens during that time. I can lock myself up before the time comes, and let myself out when I regain control.

“So you say you have a pretty regular cycle then,” Maggie said.

“Pretty much, yes,” Dylan gave her a knowing smile.

“When do you expect this cycle to occur next?” David asked. Dylan looked at David now. He seemed to consider whether or not to answer him, and then sighed and continued.

“In about 48 hours. Trust me, guys. You don’t want to be near me when this happens.”

“We’re in no danger from you, David Banner,” Maggie said.

“You are going to be our guest for the next 48 hours: I insist,” Antony said.

“You’re kidnapping me?” Dylan asked.

“Look on the bright side,” Maggie said.

“Yea? And what’s that?”

Antony finished for Maggie. He spoke in a whisper, and with a demonic smile stretched across his handsome face. Dylan tried not to show a response, but he shivered at the words anyway.

“We
were
going to just kill you.”

Maggie was captivated by their mysterious guest. Who was he? Why did he project so much violence? His aura was strange, too. It was an oily brown color. There was something preternatural about him, but she didn’t know what. She was determined to resolve the secret. She visited him several times throughout the day. She was constantly coming up with new reasons to check on him. He smiled, knowing what she was doing. “Back again,” he would say to her. He was always polite and tolerant of her visits.

Dylan was tall and handsome with unruly auburn hair. She wanted to run a brush through the man’s hair. He smiled when Maggie entered the room with Gardner in her arms. He was impressed she trusted him enough to allow him to be in the same room with the baby. He felt maybe things were beginning to look up for him.

Maggie kept a firm grip on Gardner as she entered the room and took a seat in the recliner situated at the foot of the bed. With his hands bound, Dylan bowed to the young master of the house.

He was a very well-mannered prisoner, but a prisoner just the same, she reminded herself.
Do not let your guard down.

“Is this handsome man your son?” he asked, and Gardner smiled at him. He reached out to Dylan but Maggie turned him away from the man.

“His name is Gardner.”

“Who’s the Daddy?”

“Not your concern,” Maggie said angrily.

“It is the tall blond guy, right?”

“How did you know?” Maggie said, impressed.

“He has his Daddy’s eyes and chin. Are you and he married? Or, should I say; are you and he a couple?”

“No, not a couple. That didn’t work out for us.” She didn’t want to talk about that. Dylan understood her reluctance to continue with that line of conversation and he was happy to change the subject. There was something else he wanted to talk to her about anyway.

“I’d like to ask you more about this vision you had of me.”

“I thought I told you everything there was to know about the vision.”

“I’m just fascinated by the fact that you had a vision of me at all. Are you psychic?”

“I see things that have happened, or sometimes things that are going to happen. The latter are harder to pin down because events that haven’t happened yet are very likely to change as events change. For instance, if I see you kill someone and I send Antony out to stop you we have just changed the events enough to alter the original vision. See what I mean?”

Dylan nodded.

“So you have these visions and you send the two men out to kill the perpetrators of your visions. I wouldn’t want to be on your bad side. I might be a victim of your “vision” just so that I am taken out of the way.”

Maggie was offended. “It’s not like that. There are checks and balances. Antony and David can see the truth when they look into the eyes of the prey—or, uh predator.”

Dylan had heard the first word she had said: prey. It was an odd word to use.

“These are some amazing talents you all have. I’m wondering what other talents the men have. For that matter, where are they now?”

“Antony and David are here in the house,” Maggie said. She was suddenly regretting the visit to their prisoner.

“They are pretty quiet during the day. And I notice that when Gardner cries, only you go to him.”

Maggie turned to leave.

“Please don’t go yet. I have one more thing I wanted to ask you.”

Maggie turned back to Dylan, and he could see his time was up. He asked his question as succinctly as possible.

“In your vision of me, was I human?”

Right away, he could see she was hooked.

Maggie bounced Gar in her arms as if she were trying to calm him from crying even though he wasn’t. Was she nervous? Dylan thought she was.

“Human?” She found that to be an odd expression. “Yes. You were in the nude but you were definitely human. Why would you ask that?”

“Let’s just say that I was under the impression that my alternate personality was…less than human.” Dylan shrugged. “Anyway, the important thing is my alternate personality is strong. These handcuffs and chains will not hold him. Do you have an iron cage? I need to be well confined and far from you and Gardner when my personality changes. Do you have something like that here?”

“We have a steel panic room in the basement. It locks by remote. Not even a rampaging rhino could get out.”

“That would work then, I guess.” Dylan wondered why anyone would need a room like that. Who has a panic room with the purpose of locking someone in, rather than locking them out? Then he answered his own question: someone who kidnaps people with the intent to kill them if they are deemed to be evil.

“So you really do turn into the Incredible Hulk or something?”

“Sort of, that’s why I’m shocked that you see me as an ordinary man. I would have expected you to see some changes in my appearance.”

“Well, that’s not impossible. My vision is just an interpretation of the event. It’s not like I’m seeing the actual event as it happened. My vision might be stripping away the unnecessary details in order for me to recognize you.”

“An interesting analysis,” Dylan said.

“Anyway, why do you think you would look differently? What do you do: turn green or something?”

Dylan laughed.

“Something along those lines, I guess.”

Maggie was intrigued by this man.

Dylan was being held in a spare room on the second floor. The only furniture in the room was a bed, a recliner and a dresser. A whitewashed iron radiator next to the bed locked Dylan’s chain in place. The chain was attached to his handcuffs, leaving Dylan plenty of room to stretch out on the bed, but little else. There were no decorations on the clean, off-white walls of the room. Dylan sat on the edge of the bed. Maggie sat back in the recliner. Gar climbed down out of Maggie’s arms and played on the floor at Maggie’s feet. As Maggie and Dylan talked, Gar abruptly jumped up and in a surprising show of speed, ran right into Dylan’s arms.

Maggie jumped up.

Dylan held Gar up at eye level and looked into the boy’s eyes. Then Dylan looked at Maggie. Maggie’s eyes filled with tears and her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She wanted to snatch the boy out of Dylan’s hands and then decapitate him, but she was afraid that any quick movement would cause this tense situation to turn tragic.

“Please give me back my son.”

Dylan continued to hold the boy at arm’s length, but was looking at Maggie.

Dylan looked at Gar again. The boy was laughing. Dylan smiled, pulled the boy closer to kiss him on the cheek, then put him on the floor. Gar ran back into his mother’s eagerly waiting arms.

“He wasn’t afraid of me,” Dylan said. “He has no reason to be. Neither do you. For now, anyway.”

“I don’t care. You don’t go near him or I’ll kill you myself.”

“I would never hurt your son, or anyone else for that matter. Not until the night following tonight, that is. In fact, I am kind of interested in seeing how this is going to turn out. I want to stick around. Just remember to move me to the panic room before it’s too late, though.”

Maggie wasn’t really listening to Dylan anymore. She was scurrying out of the room with a death grip on Gar. The boy did manage to blurt out one word before being escorted out of the room. He turned to Dylan, pointed at the man chained to the radiator near the bed and said what was very likely his first word.

Gar said, “Doggie.”