Serafina and the Silent Vampire (21 page)

Jilly hadn’t shut the laptop, though at least she’d changed position to sit in the armchair in the corner so no one else could see what she was doing. But her shoulders were tense, her eyes wary as she glanced up.

“Know everyone?” Sera asked casually. “Jack, Melanie, Elspeth, Jilly, Blair. PC McGowan. Anyone make that coffee?”

“There’s some in the pot in the kitchen,” Mel said.

“Not for me, thanks,” McGowan said, looking around him in some bafflement. The floor, the table, and every available space on chairs and the sofa were covered in books and handwritten notes. Everyone was reading large and ancient books, apart from Jilly, who hunched like an old woman over her laptop. “Have I interrupted some kind of study group?”

“Sort of,” Sera said.

His smile was slightly twisted. “I will say you keep taking me by surprise.”

“I think we can call that one mutual,” Jilly murmured, staring at her screen. She grinned at it. “Yes!”

“I think you have to have that coffee,” Sera said hastily, ushering him back out of the living room and into the kitchen. “We can talk in here. So,” she added as she reached for a clean cup, “what can I do for you?”

“Satisfy my curiosity,” McGowan said, leaning against the worktop to watch her. “I’ve been making enquiries about you. Very few of your clients are dissatisfied.”

“That’s nice,” Sera said inanely, pouring coffee into the cup. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Yes, please. But I have to say I find your scale of charges incomprehensible.”

“Depends on so many things,” Sera said vaguely.

“The Gordons told me you spent two evenings with them for the princely sum of ten pounds.”

“What can I say? I’m cheap.”

“Not according to Dianne Thomson. Do you adapt your charges according to what you think your clients can pay?”

“No, no. The charges are fixed. I give discretionary discounts.”

“Look, Miss Mac—Sera, I’m not trying to catch you out here. We both know ten pounds is a purely token payment. Why did you go to all that trouble for nothing?”

Sera shoved his cup along the worktop to him. “Because I can.” She poured another cup for herself.

His gaze was piercing. She thought he might have a future in CID. “Moira Gordon really believes you talk to the dead. So do a lot of other people.”

She met his gaze directly. “What do you want me to say, Constable? You don’t have to believe it. I don’t mind.”

“You can what?”

She blinked. “Pardon?”

“A minute ago, you said you went to all that trouble for the Gordons
because you could
. Because you could what? Free the spirit of her dead daughter?”

“Why are you so angry about the whole thing?”

He half turned away, dragging his fingers through his bright hair. “A so-called medium ripped off my mum a couple of years ago. She claimed to speak to the ghost of my dead sister while she milked my mother of her life savings. I couldn’t stop her. Now my mother, who worked hard all her life, lives in a shitty wee council flat, and no, she won’t take a penny from me.”

Sera nodded slowly. “I’m sorry. About your sister and the con woman. They’re all out there, and policemen’s families aren’t immune either.” She sipped her coffee and looked him in the eye. “If you’ve got someone who needs help, I’ll do my best. I don’t guarantee to do it for ten pounds, and I don’t guarantee it will be what you want.”

His lip curled. “It isn’t in your power to give us what we want.”

“Suppose not.”

“Is that what you’re doing with the Bells? Giving them what they want?”

So this was the real reason he was here… And yet, looking at him, Sera wasn’t so sure. She sensed some deep discomfort in him that certainly hadn’t been there on their first two encounters. As if he was beginning to believe in her and hated himself for it.

She smiled. “You really are a policeman, aren’t you? All right. The night Jason died, I admit I was taking the piss. I didn’t believe the vampire stories—who would? I thought he was taking the Mickey out of me and decided to do it back at him only better. I’d no idea it would backfire and Jason would end up…as he is.”

“And how is that?”

Sera spoke into her coffee mug. “You wouldn’t believe me, Constable. But I didn’t make it happen.”

“Are you still working for Ferdinand Bell?”

“I think so. Although I’m not sure I’ll get my fee.”

He took a final gulp of coffee and held out the mug to her. “Then why are you doing it?”

Sera reached for the mug and made a stab in the dark. “Why are you working when you’re off duty?”

Their fingers touched on the mug handle, and vision blasted into Sera’s head. Jason on his bed with puncture wounds in his neck. A woman with the same wounds, sprawled on a plush velvet sofa, the kind you got in certain bars. And behind both of those, the girl in the car crash.

Like everyone else’s, PC McGowan’s motives were mixed. As if he felt something, a frown pulled at his brow. Then a shadow darkened the doorway. She didn’t need to look up to know it was Blair.

Sera pushed both the mugs in the vague direction of the sink.

McGowan muttered, “I have to go. Thanks for your time.”

He edged past Blair with a hard, unsmiling stare that was returned in full. As the policeman strode along the hall and downstairs to the front door, Blair asked, “What did he want?”

“I don’t think he knows.” He was in good company. “Come on, back to drudgery.”

In the living room, Jack was saying, “Mel, we’ve gone through all the vampire references you listed, and there’s just nothing there that helps us.”

Melanie groaned. “There has to be something. What are we missing?”

Blair brushed past Sera, his fingers trailing against her wrist and making her shiver as always with the mixture of sexual awareness and the zing of dark, ancient memory. She stopped and stared at him as he walked across the room and sank back on the sofa beside his books.

“Vampires,” she said aloud.

The others looked at her doubtfully.

“What makes them vampires?” she said impatiently. “How do they get to be the way they are? How is it possible? If we knew that, maybe we’d have more chance of understanding what’s making Smith’s vampires different.”

Every gaze turned on Blair, who looked up from his book with odd reluctance.

Melanie said thoughtfully, “No one’s ever explained it to me, though in fairness, I’ve never asked before.” She waved one dismissive hand at the book-strewn table. “These books tell us what affects vampires, but not why, not how vampires came to be.”

Because they were linked, however much Sera might have been trying to break that link today, she felt Blair’s unexpected discomfort. More than that, she had the impression he didn’t really understand the feeling himself. It had something to do with vampire isolation. For centuries, perhaps forever, their survival had been dependent on the human belief that the undead were merely figments of legend and literary imagination. Now, everyone in this room was aware and wanted to know more.

Deep down, Sera could identify with Blair’s reluctance, but this was no time to consider the half-understood sensitivities of one being.

“The Founder,” she said briskly. “You’ve mentioned him a few times. Said that all vampires are descended from him, that you inherited his gift of telepathy and his lack of vocal speech. Who was he? What was his story? How did he get to be a vampire? Did he start off as human, or was he some other species altogether? What—”

She broke off as his lowered eyes lifted suddenly, harsh and accusing. As if she’d betrayed him.

“Stuff that, Blair,” she said evenly. “This is important.”

Blair’s mind shut down from her. No emotions whatsoever escaped, and some tiny, lonely part of her grieved at the loss. Why? She’d already lost him.

He placed his palms on the open pages of his book and gazed at them instead of at her.

“The Founder’s story is legend. I can’t vouch for any of the truth, although my maker was made by him. We don’t dwell in the past; it’s too long for most of us. But we know his story as a reminder of the very good reasons we live in secrecy from humans. We’re a different world that merely feeds off yours.

“According to this legend, the Founder was once a human male who lived thousands of years ago. Which millennium is scarcely important now, though it was before Christ. Various countries claim him, but the most common belief is that he was born somewhere in the Mediterranean regions. He’s been called a wise man, a sorcerer, a druid; different names, probably, for the same thing. He was a driven man, obsessed with the reasons for human existence and the need to extend that existence for as long as possible. He knew all about the human body, and about medicine, such as it was at the time. And, of course, his studies went further, into the spirits of the dead and magic. It wasn’t unusual then. Many people talked to their ancestors, spoke with the dead.”

Blair lifted his head, cast his gaze around all the blank, expectant faces watching him and hearing nothing, and came to rest finally on Sera as he sent her the next, deliberate words. “As I’m sure you know, Christians were not the first religious bigots. The Founder was discovering things that didn’t agree any more with anyone’s knowledge or beliefs. They hounded him out, abused him, half killed him on more than one occasion, but he kept on looking and studying.”

“For immortality?” Sera whispered.

Blair nodded. “Tell them.”

Stumbling, she repeated what he’d told her while he waited patiently and then began again.

“Rumors spread that he’d succeeded in his goal, and then, of course, everyone wanted what he had. He was pursued and captured and tortured for his secret. But the Founder, still human, although by this stage he knew how to achieve immortality, also understood that it couldn’t be for everyone. If the world was peopled by vampires, who would supply the blood? So he wouldn’t tell. He understood the awful abuses such power would open up in the wrong hands. So he never told. In the end, they cut out his tongue and damaged him so badly internally that his vocal cords never worked again.

“Almost dead, he escaped with the aid of magic and spirits.” Blair’s lip curled. “I know. Legend is curiously silent on the mechanics. One story says he had human help and that this human was the first vampire he made. Suffice it to say that ‘with one bound, Jack was free,’ and managed, as his body expired, to perform the magic that reanimated it. We know he drank human blood as part of this ritual and needed to do so ever after. So do we. It’s the Founder’s blood that makes us. We don’t bow to the Founder or worship him, but somehow, his story always stays alive.”

Blair’s eyes, briefly out of focus as he talked, came back to Sera. He jerked his head at the others, and Sera hastily repeated his words, rushing so that she could ask the questions piling up in her mind.

“What happened to him in the end?”

“In the end? I don’t read the future.”

Sera’s lips fell apart. “You mean he’s still out there somewhere?”

A faint smile crossed Blair’s closed face, briefly softening it. “Somewhere.”

“We need the Founder,” Melanie said determinedly.

“Well, you can’t have him,” Blair said, sounding more amused than anything else. The idea was clearly ridiculous, but Mel continued to gaze hopefully from him to Sera and back again.

“Couldn’t you find him?” Sera suggested. “And ask?”

“No one ‘finds’ the Founder. If necessary, he’ll come to you. I understand it’s a good thing if that’s never necessary. Shall we move on?”

With a quick shrug and a shake of her head for the benefit of the others, Sera tumbled into her next question.

“Okay. You inherited certain qualities of the Founder through his blood? Even things that he wasn’t born with, like muteness?”

Blair nodded. “Apparently.”

“But how? It’s like being born with one leg because your father lost his in the war. It doesn’t make sense.”

“True. But then, we still have tongues, which he didn’t when he died, and all our other organs are in perfect condition and remain so.”

Sera frowned. “As if the Founder chose what should be passed on? Why would he not let you speak?”

Blair’s smile was lopsided, and Sera understood.

“To further isolate you from humans, for all the reasons you said before, safety…” Her breath caught. “Smith’s vampires don’t want to be isolated. They
need
to be with humans to do the banking thing. Could Smith have altered the Founder’s original spell?”

She stared at Melanie, who closed her mouth with a snap.

“Does anyone
know
the Founder’s original spell?” Mel asked faintly.

Blair shook his head.

“But people must have discovered something similar,” Sera said excitedly, pacing across the room to her. “Even if it went down a different road. Point us, Mel.”

Although Melanie looked more alarmed than inspired, it didn’t stop everyone staring at her in hopeful silence. Only the faint rustling sound of Blair turning the pages of his book disturbed the quiet.

Then Blair stood up and walked over to where Sera stood with Melanie. Somewhat to Sera’s pique, he laid the book on the table in front of Mel, who glanced from him to Sera and down to the pages.

Blair put his finger on the page. “There’s a pre-death spell to animate the dead. To be cast several days before death takes place, to make the body responsive to reanimation. It’s associated with zombies rather than vampires, but the important point is it’s meant to instill obedience to the caster.”

“And if the spell’s cast before the turning, before the person is a vampire, then it bypasses the Founder’s magic,” Sera said triumphantly. “No wonder they seem a different species from you…”

Melanie began to read while everyone else watched her. After a moment, Sera peered over her shoulder. The words didn’t make any sense to her.

At last, Melanie raised her gaze to Blair’s face. “Would that work on a vampire?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I don’t think Smith knew whatever he used would work either. I doubt it had ever been tried before in conjunction with the creation of a vampire.”

“Then why would he risk it?” Sera asked.