Vamp-Hire (36 page)

The entire facility where they'd first met
Leonard had been shut down after the bodies of more than fifty men
and women had been discovered in a sub-basement. Most were
homeless, but about a dozen were civilian and military employees.
Apparently, the vamps that Leonard—Cain, if you insisted—had turned
had been feeding on about anyone they could get their hands on.

Dolph also guessed the only reason Leonard
hadn't been charged was the potential scrutiny his superiors would
have been subjected to. There may also have been a likelihood the
man's days could be limited.

“What about Cain?” Nick asked. “Leonard said
he was unkillable.”

“Officially, he is. I have a little more
lateral movement when it comes to Leonard. If I get my way, he'll
wind up in a place like the Pens before he gets shot.”

“Pop-Pop, that's not real, is it? The
government wouldn't just shoot him.”

Dolph looked at Phoebe. Without saying a
word, he told her he had firsthand knowledge of such things.

They rode in silence for a while. He didn’t
want to ask about the other vamps and he knew as much as anyone
about the ones that had been infected by Cain. All of them were
dead. Well, almost all of them.

Nick hadn’t consciously noticed, probably
because he’d seen them all as monsters. Most of them were clothed,
but a few he’d seen had been naked. If he’d been asked immediately
after, Nick would have said they were all male.

He had to admit in the quiet of his mind that
he hadn’t known.

Cameron, the vamp Dolph had nearly crippled,
somehow had survived, as if his distance from Cain had kept him
from being drained to death. However, he was comatose with no hope
of waking.

Nick wondered if it were possible for Cain to
have sent Alex away so some part of him survived. If she were alive
he could only wait for her to show up.

He decided in that moment he would be
ready.

When they made it home, Nick found himself
blooming with happiness. He actually liked the changes. The kitchen
walls had been painted an orangish color and it made the whole room
warmer.

That and the chocolate chip cookies sitting
on a plate on the kitchen counter. Nick had discovered at the
Center that the ‘additives’ Dolph had hinted at were all
synthesized from human blood. Dolph really had been lashing out at
the time.

Nick made a beeline for the cookies and was
about to grab one when a dainty hand reached out and slapped
his.

“Not even cooled yet and you’re already
trying to steal one,” a sixtyish woman in a blue kimono said. Nick
looked at her and knew this had to have been Dolph’s wife. Her hair
was silver-white and she was actually pretty—beautiful even, with
slightly upturned eyes.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” Nick said
automatically.

“And who are you, young man?” He had the
feeling she already knew who he was if he was right about who she
was. Introductions were probably more than a formality for her.

“I’m Nick,” he said.

“Nick who?” she asked.

Nick shook his head. “Ma’am, I don’t
know.”

Randy came around a corner. His eyes fastened
on Nick and he charged, screaming, “Niiiiiick!” He picked the boy
up and swung him away from the counter and high into the air. Randy
screamed and laughed and Nick was surprised at how much bigger he
looked.

“How are you, Randy?” Nick had never called
him that aloud and it kind of slipped out of his mouth.

“Good. We missed you, Nick.”

Nick held Randy up so they were eye-to-eye.
He was shocked. A full sentence from Randy. He’d never been present
when the boy had expressed emotion.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Are you coming home?”

“I...” He looked at Mrs. Stone. “I’m not
sure. I’d like to.” He looked at Phoebe and Dolph standing near the
mudroom door. “Am I?”

“Yes,” Dolph and Phoebe said in unison.

“We already have your room set upstairs,”
Mrs. Stone said.

Upstairs? He felt semi-overwhelmed. That
couldn’t be. Even if they did let him come back, he didn’t belong
upstairs. Mrs. Stone placed a tiny hand on his bare forearm. Her
skin felt like a mix between wax paper and silk.

“You’re family,” she said. “Anyone who would
put his life on the line like that has every right to call himself
a Stone.”

“I...” he was at a loss for words again. She
had to have known—they must have told her. He didn't have a place,
a family. The government didn't even have accurate records enough
to tell him his last name. He didn’t think appropriate words
existed to fill the space after she had spoken. “Thank you.”

“You can thank me by trying out one of these
cookies after dinner. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m starved.”

* * *

After dinner, Phoebe invited Nick out onto
the porch. He sat with her on the step in the cold air as the sun
began its descent. Phoebe didn’t have on a jacket and she was
twirling an unlit cigarette in her hand.

“You gonna light that?” he asked her. She’d
told him she’d quit, but he’d known she smoked still, maybe one or
so every four days when she was stressed. Whatever this was going
to be was stressful.

She looked at him over her shoulder, her
blonde brown hair tied up in a loose knot at the back of her head.
“Look, I’m just going to say I’m sorry.”

“Hmm?”

“About… about what I did. To you. I’m
sorry.”

Nick had the feeling this wasn’t a
conversation she entirely wanted to have. She looked at him as if
he were supposed to fill in the empty air between them and he
watched her. Nick tended not to have to blink as often as humans
did and she broke first.

“Randy… is like you. A hematophage.” That had
always been the term they’d used when he was back at the Center and
it was the same one they used on his most recent stay. Nick knew
the definition. It seemed so clinical as to not feel like it meant
anything.

“Okay, why all the secrecy about it?”

Phoebe put the cigarette between her lips and
plucked it back out, examining the purpling sky.

“You don’t know what it was like. Back home.”
She shook her head. “It was bad enough I was an unwed mother, but
his father was a vamp, no less. Every day was worse than the
last.”

“You had family, though. You had people you
could have leaned on.”

She fixed him with a stare she had to have
learned from her grandfather.

“They’re the reason I had to leave. My
mother. My mother, my mother, my mother, my mother.” Nick spotted
the lighter in her other hand and how tightly she had it
gripped.

“You gonna light that?”

Phoebe held the cigarette out in front of her
as if seeing it for the very first time. She considered it a while
then held it up by the butt and flicked the lighter under it. She
let it burn before flicking it onto the walkway.

“So I came here. I found a house and a job
and started all over. I’m not gonna say I’m overprotective, but I’m
overprotective. It kills me to know someone might think that way
about Randy, so I, you know, turn into the ice queen.”

She had tears in her eyes and Nick wanted to
put a hand on her leg, to comfort her. He held back.

“No, I’m sorry, Phoebe. I might not have
known, but I could have used a little more caution. I mean, all
I’ve been trying to do is find my connection to something. I wanted
to know and I never saw how I could have been messing things up for
you. But… Randy is going to grow up someday. You can’t hide him
from the world.”

“Shut up with your lies!” Phoebe half laughed
and Nick smiled. “I know. It’s not even Randy’s problem. It was
me.”

“Can I ask about his father?”

She shrugged. “Not much to know. Thought he
was the love of my life then he turned into a hematophage.”

Nick narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean,
‘turned into’? He wasn’t always?”

“Nope. We’d been together for a while, both
been tested clean and all of a sudden he gets really sick.”

“How old was he? I mean, when he got
sick.”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know.
Twenty-two, I think? I remember it was right before I found out I
was pregnant.”

Nick’s mind reeled. That meant this was a new
case, relatively speaking, and to someone above the age threshold.
He had no idea what that meant.

“Thank you, Phoebe, for telling me.” He did
put a hand on her leg and she looked at him for the first time in
about five minutes.

“You can thank me by us agreeing to never
have this conversation again.”

“Sure.” He wondered if this had been some
sort of trade-off. That Dolph had made concessions if Phoebe agreed
to have a certain conversation. He’d learned enough about Mrs.
Stone over dinner to know she was the peacemaker of the family.

“Okay, then let’s hug it out. I’m freezing to
death.” They held each other for a long moment then she smoothed
her hand across his back. “You know, it didn’t feel right with you
gone.”

“Thanks,” Nick said, his eyes dipping to
something that caught his attention on her chest, where her
loose-fitting shirt had exposed a patch of bruised skin. “Hey,
what’s that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I wake up with these
weirdo bruises sometimes. Almost like somebody is hitting me in my
sleep.”

She stood and stepped onto the small porch
and he looked at her. In that moment he had an intuitive leap that
he could not have explained if he sat down to piece out where it
had come from.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Nick said. Then, “Is Randy’s last
name Barker?”

“Whoa!” she said and smiled. “That’s too much
heavy for me in one day.” He stared at her. “I don’t even wanna
know why you know that right now. Yeah, okay, it would have been if
I’d married his father. He would have been Randall Thomas Barker.”
Another cigarette had appeared in her hand. She made a fist around
it. “Your friend Happy stopped by yesterday. You should call
him.”

“Lucky,” Nick said as she disappeared inside.
“Thanks.” He must have gotten Nick’s release date wrong. They’d
actually talked that last day through while Nick was at the Center
and he was lining up more jobs. As the sun winked out he thought
back to the boy’s words from a few weeks ago. The ghost father, the
abused mother. Phoebe had a mark on her forearm that could have
been an old bruise. Nick wondered if the address had even been
real. The voice hadn’t been familiar to Nick, but he should have
suspected something. The boy had known the number despite not going
through Lucky.

The boy had been so different, though, so
unlike Randy, why would Nick have suspected? And what Thomas had
said combined with what he knew now begged another question: what
had happened to Phoebe’s boyfriend?

The thing at the edge of the property
emerged. It turned its hollow eyes on him.

They watched each other.

Epilogue

It has been more than a week since the Nephilim has
been back in his home. Over the millennia her master has had many
temporary hosts and he believed falsely that this one would have
been a more permanent receveur. He has paid dearly for his
miscalculation, but now she knows it should have been her. Why else
would she alone have been spared?

The old ones have finally left and now
they're only the three in the house. It is simple enough for her to
get inside. She has already been in several times. She has watched
them all sleep in turn and has done nothing. She will continue to
do nothing until the time is right. Until she is strong. The
Nephilim was not a suitable host for the master. Over the millennia
they have feared and hated one another. All of the muskim.

She feels him swimming inside her mind, this
time a welcome guest. She wants him to know one of his enemies has
survived. She wants to be inside his head just as he is inside
hers.

She looks at her hands to show him the blood.
Tonight she has killed. Tomorrow she shall kill. Each night until
she has the strength to destroy the opposer of her master she will
kill.

“Soon,” she says, hoping he senses her
hatred.

About the Author

Gerald Dean Rice is hard at work on something
right now. Whether it's vampires, zombies, or something you've
never seen before, he's always dedicated to writing something
unique. He's the author of numerous short stories, including the
Halloween eBook "The Best Night of the Year," "30 Minute Plan," and
"Fleshbags." You can find him on Twitter @GeraldRice and visit his
website at www.razorlinepress.com for details about upcoming
works.