Moon Shadow (Vampire for Hire Book 11) (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

I was waiting in my minivan for the sun to go down.

Lake Elsinore wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to live, or second or third. Not because of the heat or isolation, or even the high-crime rate. But because of the damn mountains.

Although having the sun dip behind the mountains hours before the actual sunset gave me some relief, it was a false relief. It was, quite frankly, confusing. My eyes told me it was dusk. But my internal clock told me not yet. And, of course, it wasn’t my internal clock, was it? It was my internal demon who knew all too well where the sun was in the sky.

In my book, when the sun disappeared behind anything, it was called sunset. Not in her book, though. Nope. Her rules dictated only when the sun disappeared beyond the horizon. Granted, it was a moving horizon. After all, when I was recently in New Orleans, I noted that my internal demon adjusted instantly to the geography. Apparently, there was no jet lag for the evil.

Now, with the shadows deepening around me, and the lake darkening in my rearview mirror, I waited in an apartment parking lot, on a slight hill. I waited to feel good, to feel strong, to feel more alive than I ever had before. At least, that’s how it always felt. With each sunset, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling this good, this strong, this free. That is, until the next sunset.

I waited for it now. Yearned for it. Hungered for it. I sat forward in my seat, gripped the steering wheel, closed my eyes and breathed and waited. It was as if I’d had all the sun I could handle, all the light I could manage, and another fucking second of it would drive me ape-shit.

C’mon,
I thought.
C’mon!

I released the steering wheel and shook my hands and breathed faster and faster, and hated the bitch inside me, hated her fear of the sun and light and anything happy and loving and real. I hated her control over me, her hold on me. Who the fuck was she to do this to me?
Just who the fuck was she?

My head dropped, my chin pressed into my sternum, breathing, breathing, now wringing my hands, knowing that, to all the world, I might have looked like I was having a seizure. Which was why I stayed in the minivan. The windows were tinted, of course. After all, I often used the van for surveillance, too.

Her name had been Elizabeth—and maybe it still was. Then again, maybe she went by something new now. Like Zoran the Invincible. She had been the Librarian’s mother. And that’s about where her humanity had ended, as far as I knew. I hadn’t gotten the full scoop on her life on earth as a dark master. Or where, exactly, she’d been banished to—her and others like her. I also hadn’t gotten the full scoop on what went down and how it went down and how many good people had died in what must have been one hellacious battle of good versus evil.

She had fought her son, I knew that. And others like him. Alchemists, mostly. I myself was from a long line of alchemists. From the original alchemist, Hermes Trismegistus.

I wondered if my bloodline flowed through all my incarnations, or if it was isolated to just this current one. That is, my current and
last
incarnation on Earth.

My bloodline was highly valuable, I’d discovered. Which was why I had the pleasure of being targeted by Elizabeth, one of the strongest of the dark masters. My bloodline and her dark mastery were enough to turn the tide of power. That is, if I let her out, which I never did.

I say one of the strongest, because there was another, of course. The entity that currently resided in none other than Dracula himself, a prince of a man I’d encountered a few months ago—and a unique warrior who had saved my ass. Dracula, the original vampire. Dracula, who had given himself up as a vessel to the strongest of the dark masters. A dark master who just so happened to be the love of Elizabeth’s immortal life.

What tangled webs we weave...

The entity within Dracula had made it known that it wanted time with the entity within me. By time, I figured they meant some hot and sweaty dark master sex. After all, it had been centuries since they had been, ah, united. Centuries that Elizabeth had waited for me to be born. Why me, I didn’t know. Why not, say, my mother? I didn’t know that either. My mother’s bloodline would have been even closer to Hermes, less diluted. Then again, imagining my mother as a vampire nearly caused me to have a fit of semi-hysterical laughter in my minivan.

No, I thought. She waited for me for a reason. Perhaps it had something to do with my witchy heritage.

I nodded, knowing that was the key.

I continued breathing, sucking in lungfuls of worthless air, but not knowing what else to do. The sun was just minutes from disappearing from a distant horizon that I could not see—not with the damn mountain in the way.

Why did she hate the sun so much anyway? What was the deal with that? Kingsley operated in the sun, and he had a similar highly evolved dark master residing within him, too.

The answer came to me as an impulse, and it came to me from her, I knew. The thing within Kingsley was a different kind of dark master. A lower form, in fact. Okay, that made sense, although I would never tell Kingsley that. Then again, maybe he knew. The thing within him was hungrier, angrier, wilder. Hence, the beast he turned into each full moon.

I wrung my hands, breathed, rocked.

The sun, the sun, the sun...

I gripped my steering wheel. Too tightly. It creaked in my hands. Bent inward, threatening to snap. I didn’t care. I hated my skin, the sun, the light. I felt myself losing it, going crazy, completely fucking losing it...

And then it happened.

It was gone and the crawling sensation between my shoulders stopped and the air hissed out of my lips and I hung my head and found myself weeping... for joy.

Then, I sat back and found myself smiling, knowing I was surely losing my mind, but I didn’t care. Not in this moment of pure relief.

The sun was gone, and I had never felt so alive.

Chapter Seventeen

There was a chance I might have been in the bad part of town.

The complex was tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. Anyone on this street meant to be on this street. No one came through here. And those who did were high or wasted or up to no good. Okay, that sounded sort of judge-y.

The apartment complex itself was sprawling, with many wings and buildings and covered parking lots and entrances. The apartment was gated, sort of. Heavy iron gates blocked the entrances, opened by, I presumed, a scanner card. But the rest of the complex was fenceless. Foot traffic could get in, but cars couldn’t. Seemed sort of half-assed. If you’re going to gate a place, then gate it.

And here, there was foot traffic aplenty. Teenagers lounged in groups of three or four. They did most of their lounging around an old Mustang fastback, which, when you looked at it sideways, seemed to be lounging as well. Grown men lounged in front of their apartments, or on their narrow, feeble-looking decks. Two kids on trikes lounged near the main entrance into the complex. An old woman watched me from a chair, a wooden cane in her hands. Come to think of it, she was lounging, too. Exactly half of all males within eyeshot, from the very youngest to the very oldest, were shirtless.

The apartment complex boasted a network of catwalks, wobbly-looking railings, and stone pebble stairs with chunks missing. This was, I was certain, an insurance company’s worst nightmare.

There was a general shift in attention and body language as I moved through the parking lot. The closest group of teens seemed too young to be trouble, but not too young to be crude. I heard “MILF” and “booty” and “dat ass” as I moved past them, and, for some reason, I was grinning all the way up the ramshackle stairway of doom.

Somehow, I made it up without plunging through a step, or careening off a broken rail. Up here it was a bit livelier. The smell of barbeque and beans and curry filled the air. Cigarette smoke, too. And weed. And meth. Kids riding on plastic toys, moms talking out front, laughter and TV. Someone shouted from the far side of the complex. Someone shouted back. Human beings are weird.

I counted down the apartment numbers, moving past a little Hispanic girl standing out in front of an open door, chocolate on her face, eyes round and distant. I smiled, she didn’t. At the door in question, I rapped loudly enough to be heard by just about all in the complex. There seemed, if I was correct, to be a general hum in the air, and it wasn’t because a vampire was among them. Something seemed to be going on. People were on edge, lively, talkative, connecting. Perhaps more so than usual here in the complex? I didn’t know.

The door opened and a cute woman in her thirties appeared in the shadow. Correction. Not very cute, once I saw past the shadows and into the haunted eyes, the scars, the acne, the paleness.

“Police?” she said.

“No.”

“Come in.”

Chapter Eighteen

She didn’t offer me a seat, which was fine. The place was filthy, the broken couch was stained, and the single chair pushed under the dining table looked questionable. Yeah, I was good.

“You’re here about Luke.”

“I am.”

“The cops were just here.”

Ah, I thought. That explained the nervous buzz in the complex. There were a lot of drug dealers, drug addicts, hookers and petty criminals breathing a sigh of relief.

She picked up a broken, stained, half-finished cigarette, lit it with a match that seemingly came out of nowhere, and inhaled on it. Waste not, want not. She said, “You look like a cop.”

“I’m a private investigator.”

“Whatever. Why are you here?”

“My case might overlap your son’s case.”

“Stupid fucking kid.”

“Missing kid. Alone kid. Scared kid.”

“Whatever. He got himself into this shit, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to worry about him another second.”

“That’ll show him,” I said.

But she wasn’t really listening to me. She was sucking on the filthy cigarette that may or not have been found in a street gutter, and looking blankly into the far corner of her apartment. I wonder if she knew the sheer amount of spirit energy collecting in that very same corner. My guess, three or four spirits were vying for space. One was a new spirit, a young man wearing, big surprise, a wife beater. There was a bullet hole in one of his eyes, and a bigger hole in the back of his head where the bullet had exited. The other three were amorphous and not fully formed. There was other activity in the room, too. Spirits appeared through walls, swept across the room, and then exited again through the TV. Some of the faces turned to us as they slipped by. The apartment was a variable superhighway of the dead. Noticeably absent was the spirit of a young boy, who may or may not have returned to be with his mom. That absence gave me hope. Maybe, just maybe, he was alive.

“What did the police say?” I asked.

“That Johnny was found dead by the lake, an accident of some sort, and that they will be doing all they can to help me find my son. Same old shit.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Same old shit.”

“Fucking cops. Full of promise. But they never deliver. Except to harass hardworking people just trying to make a living on this shitty rock.”

“Rock?”

“Planet Earth.”

“Silly me. Did they tell you any more about Johnny?”

“Only that they would know more later.”

Probably for the best, although Carol Jensen probably could have handled the news that her son’s best friend had been eaten alive by a lake monster.

“What else did the police talk to you about?”

“Why do you fucking care?”

She had finished what was left of the cigarette, which seemed to irritate her further. These days, I smoked because I could. I smoked because any cancers would get obliterated the moment a mutation reared its ugly head. I smoked because, back in the day, it was one of the few things that helped me stay grounded, connected. It was also one of the few things I could put in my mouth that didn’t cause me to get violently sick.

Now, I did it because it helped focus my thoughts. Like alcohol, nicotine had no effect on me. Just as well. I didn’t want to be hooked on cigarettes for all eternity. For now, they were a pleasant distraction, and my “thinking cap,” so to speak.

I wasn’t sure what had prompted me to grab two cigarettes from my not-so-secret stash in the minivan’s center console, but I fished one out now from my back hip and handed it over to her.

She lit up in more ways than one. First, her eyes, and then, her lighter, which appeared in her hand like a magic trick. Before I could take a step back, she had already taken, precisely, two hits.

I sent her a small prompting that I was a friend and that I had nothing but her son’s best interests at heart. Unfortunately, while I was in her thoughts, I caught wind that she was hoping I would leave fast because her next john was due any minute.

Yeah, eeew.

She nodded after the small prompting and said, “They wanted to know if I could remember anything else, anything at all that might help them locate my son.”

“Detective Oster?”

“Yeah. Her, and another cop. I’ve talked to her. A dozen or so times. Her and the fucking feds. Feds! They all keep fucking coming here and shaking up this place. My neighbors are beginning to resent me.”

“Are your neighbors aware that your underage boy has been missing for two weeks?”

She shrugged, sucked, exhaled, looked at the front door, adjusted her tank top. No bra. Nearly see-through.
Eeww, again.
She shrugged at my question. Sucked long and hard on the filter, closed her eyes. Seemed to enjoy the moment. The calm before the storm, perhaps. The storm being whoever was going to show up next at her door.

“Did you provide any new information to the police?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing I haven’t already told them.”

“And what did you tell them?”

She looked at me. “You got another cig?”

I did. And handed it to her. She placed it on the edge of the dining room table, ready for a quick draw, so to speak. “I remembered that he started a new lawn-mowing business a few months ago.”

“A business?”

“Yes. The little fuck wanted to make his own money. Legal money. Clean money, he called it. Judgmental shithead.”

I took in some air, and it was all I could do to not slap the woman. If I had, I might have slapped her too hard. I might have just knocked her eyeballs out of her head. Instead, I exhaled and said, “Does he own a computer?”

“No.”

“Do you know who his clients were?”

“Oh, fuck no. I’m too busy to care about his stupid fucking job.”

“Of course you are,” I said. “Would anyone else know about his business?”

She shrugged.

“Try again,” I said, and gave her a prompt.

“Fuck you. And get the fuck out of here. I’ve got paying work...” She took in some air and her eyelids fluttered a tad. “Maybe the guy he rented the lawnmowers from.”

“Rented?”

“You think we have a lawnmower parked on our fucking balcony? Anyway, some old guy down on the corner, Raul or something. My son gave him a sort of kickback or something. Whatever. Now, are we done here?”

We were, and I couldn’t leave fast enough, passing a heavyset man coming up the stairs, a man with a hat pulled low over his face and sweat on his upper lip.

Again, eeww...