The Vampiric Housewife (31 page)

    
“And once he found a living vampire?” She could feel her voice tighten as she asked. She was one of those found vampires.

    
“He would buy or kidnap the child,” Jonathan said. He had a very soothing, calming voice. She would imagine that it could put most people at ease. Not her though. Not when she was hearing this. “Very few living vampires make it to adulthood. They are generally found in Eastern Europe and Africa though Venjamin has discovered them all over the world. They are usually found in small villages which have stories about vampiric children. They need blood to survive. This is why they die. Either malnutrition or the village kills them because they know what they are.”

    
“What about me? Where am I from? What happened to my parents?”

    
“We believe you are from Romania. That is the project name for your family at any rate,” Jonathan said. “We don’t know for sure. We have only been able to infiltrate on lower levels. Charlie would know. That’s why we were hoping to bring all of you in. We believe you were about three years old. More than likely as a child you liked to suck on raw meat rather than your mother’s teat. They knew what you were, but couldn’t bring themselves to dispose of you.” Even that he could say calmly. Dispose of her. Kill her, was what he meant.

    
“They loved you. If you made it to three or four years old, you have to know that they loved you,” Alessandro said as if he could read her mind.

    
“But they were probably frightened of you. Venjamin may have paid to take you. He may have kidnapped you. He may have promised that he could cure you,” Jonathan said. “If we could find out what village you were from, we could go there, look for your parents, and find out how Venjamin took you, how he tracked you down, how he tracked down others.”

    
“You need Charlie for that.”

    
“Yes,” Alessandro said.

    
“So immortality . . . that’s only for made-vampires then. If living vampires were generally killed as babies—“

    
“No,” Alessandro said excitedly. “You have to understand, you are the first living vampire we’ve met. So all we have are theories. And immortality goes right to the core of everything—the science of it and Tobar’s purpose—“

    
“Maybe we should finish with Venjamin’s history first?” Jonathan interrupted. “If we jump around, we may never finish any one piece.”

    
“Yes, yes, you’re right. Why don’t you continue?”

Chapter Thirty-two

Filthy Humans

    
John threw some books around his room, broke a lamp, a mirror, a vase of sweet smelling red flowers. By the end of his heated destruction, he was out of breath. He didn’t want to be here, millions of miles from his father sleeping in the same house as humans, his mother purposely keeping him in the dark. This was going against everything his father had ever told him. Humans were dangerous and if you weren’t careful, they would drive a stake through your heart, burn your house down. And here they were sleeping under the same roof as one. Not just any human but some bitch who thought she was superior to him just because she was beautiful and hung out with vampires. He would show her. He didn’t care about territories. Or the wrath of other vampires. And he would show his mother too, dictating what he could and could not drink as if he was a child. Forcing them to come here. Abandoning Charlie.

    
He put on his varsity jacket and dropped down onto the four poster bed. He had already ripped off the embroidered comforter and high thread count sheets. The room had actually been quite nice before he decided to take his anger and frustration out on it. One wall was lined with bookshelves and a desk with a computer. Tribal masks hung on the light green walls. The single exterior wall was all glass revealing a partial view of the ocean. The clothes the human slut had bought him were in the dresser. On the night stand were the remnants of a broken lamp and a telephone.

    
A telephone.

    
He sat up and stared at it. If he could call Lisa . . . maybe she would know something about his dad, or could get a message to Venjamin not to hurt Charlie. He picked it up. Dial tone. He had half expected it to be dead, just a prop. He didn’t dial yet. He had to decide what he would say—that is if he got through. After all his attempts on the cell phone, he doubted he would be able to. But maybe. Hope was bubbling up. At the moment, that telephone was all he had. If he couldn’t call Lisa, he had no plan, no way to get his dad back. No control over his life. So just in case that call went through, he had to know exactly what to say.

Chapter Thirty-three

The History of the Great Doctor Venjamin

    
“So Venjamin had found living vampires, but he was no longer a licensed doctor. All he had left was family money. As much as that may have been, it wouldn’t have been sufficient for the labs or machinery or tests he needed to perform let alone build an entire town,” Jonathan said.

    
“So who funds Venjamin?” she asked.

    
“We only haves guesses. It could be the U.S. government. Or perhaps the military. Or a pharmaceutical company. The government always seems to have its hand into everything. The implications for a vampire army are limitless for the military. But we believe it’s a pharmaceutical company,” Alessandro said. “The cash flow is too substantial.”

    
“Why would they want to experiment on vampires?”

    
“Our venom is deadly. We have superior strength, speed, immortality. If Venjamin could come up with a drug to increase a human’s strength, or speed, or make them live forever, the company would be very, very rich,” Jonathan said.

    
She nodded. “What about Venjamin? He’s not looking to get rich.”

    
“No. We believe Tobar’s ambitions are much grander,” Alessandro said, his tone relayed that it was also more sinister. “Tobar did not handle his father’s death very well. They never did totally reconcile after Tobar left Europe to pursue medicine. Even though he validated his father’s work in his own mind, Engles Venjamin never believed for a moment in the actual existence of vampires—his father did not live long enough to see his son’s accomplishments. After losing his medical license, Tobar became the laughing stock he had always resented his father for being. He doesn’t want to die a joke.”

    
“Venjamin doesn’t want to die at all,” Jonathan said.

    
“Tobar wants to continue his work indefinitely. He wants to be recognized for his brilliance. He does have quite the ego. Tobar also likes the power he has accrued over vampires. He loves having the monopoly on them. He loves the fear he imbues in them. His very own empire. But he detests made-vampires. We’re walking corpses to him, perversions of nature. Savages. He wants immortality on his own terms. That means being like you.”

    
Chills ran up and down her spine. “What does he do at the hospital?”

    
“That is somewhat of a mystery,” Alessandro said. “We have a few low level humans that spy for us employed in the hospital. They mostly have access to the studies that don’t interest Tobar. Psychological studies, anthropological studies . . . anything outside the scope of medicine. Most of our information has come from Jonathan’s computer skills.”

    
“Since even the low level secretaries and such we having working for us have access to computers, they were able to pass along passwords that allowed me to gain access to Venjamin’s computer system then hack into restricted files. But I don’t like doing this because it puts our spies in danger if someone ever realizes security has been breached. So what I have done is infiltrated the hospital system and altered their software so it automatically makes a copy of all of Venjamin's files. The only problem with this is that we don’t have access to the information while it’s accumulating. To extract the information, someone has to be onsite, and once it’s pulled out, it will set off Venjamin’s security so he will know about the breach.”

    
“In other words,” Alessandro said noticing that every other word Jonathan spoke made no sense to Valerie, “we have very little information on the work Tobar actually does. Only the doctors that work inside his project, his personal secretary, and made-vampires with families have access to his experiments, and even then the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. So when we pull the information from Tobar’s computers, it had better be good because it’ll be all that we get.”

    
“We have gotten a few minor characters in town. Your old bloodman was one of ours. Did a wonderful job in getting us not only a population count but the names of every vampire living in Sangre Valley as well as a detailed map of the town. Unfortunately Venjamin got suspicious and had him murdered,” Jonathan said.

    
“Does Venjamin know about you?”

    
“We don’t believe so. He knows that his town is no longer a secret among vampires. Despite everything that his town has proven about us, he still sees us as monsters. Loners who are incapable of any human emotion, or any emotion at all higher than our stomachs. It is beyond the grasp of his mind that other vampires would be concerned with the fate of their own species. He only uses them as pawns in his bigger plan. But if he thinks a vampire in his employment has talked too much, he will dispose of him.

    
“So to answer your original question: what does Tobar do at the hospital, here is what we know to the best of our knowledge. He is trying to isolate the ‘vampire gene.’ He wants to know how a vampire—both born and made—stays alive. He himself wants to become immortal without becoming a made-vampire. At least part of the purpose of Sangre Valley is to keep Tobar in supply of subjects so he can hopefully trace the gene through generations.”

    
“Why breed the living with the dead?”

    
“A fun experiment?” Alessandro pondered. “An exercise in power? Just to see if he could? Or maybe he’s looking for a different method in finding immortality.”

    
“That’s why he wanted Amelia bred with living and made-vampires and then with her brother? To look at the different combinations of immortality?”

    
“Is that what made Charlie run? All we know is that you and your family have been extremely important to Tobar since your first pregnancy.”

    
Valerie’s head was spinning. This was too much information, and too much of it went over her head. Science had never been her strong suit in school. And the computer mumbo jumbo was like another language to her. She felt like she was finally getting her answers, but instead of clarifying the situation, they only muddled it leaving her with more questions.

    
“Okay, so explain immortality to me,” she said. There was no such thing as immortality in Sangre Valley. You got old and died. But as she thought about it, doctors Venjamin and Henrick were the only old men in the entire town. Her parents died in a car accident. Marie’s parents in a hiking accident. Betsy’s in a house fire. All their parents had been human and died prematurely, all around the time they got married.

    
Alessandro and Jonathan looked at each other as if to decide who was most qualified to explain. Alessandro spoke. “Tobar believes that living vampires have a genetic mutation that is recessive and only appears once every couple of generations. We have a different theory. Have you ever heard of the Mitochondrial Eve?”

    
She shook her head.

    
“Do you know about DNA?”

    
She nodded. “We get half from our mothers, half from our fathers. It makes us who we are.”