Blood Crimes: Book One (28 page)

      “I hope you had a pleasant flight,” she said.

      He shifted his empty stare to look at her. It seemed as if it were a struggle for him, as if the last thing he wanted to do was acknowledge her presence. “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he finally said.

      “Oh, darling, of course I’m not.
M
aybe a tiny bit surprised that you were able to find a flight so quickly out of LA—”

      “San Jose,”
M
etcalf corrected her.

      “San Jose, then,” she said, her smile stretching. “Always the stickler for details, aren’t we?” The sight of him brimming with all that violence excited her. It had been a long time since they’d been together. Thinking about one of their long-ago sessions made her face flush. She walked over to him and sat on his lap, her hand inching towards his waistband.
M
etcalf grabbed her wrist and stopped her. That surprised her and her eyes flashed dark for a moment, but she kept smiling, maybe even wanting him more than before. “Once I saw that you were trying to call me I knew you’d be heading here. And I knew you’d be clever enough to track me to my private eye’s hotel room. I assume you saw the CNN report?”

      “Yeah, at the airport.”

      “That was quite a video one of the bystanders made. Poor picture quality, but still very exciting. I could watch it over and over again.”

      
M
etcalf squeezed harder on her wrist. Serena had the distinct impression that he was trying to crush her bone into powder.

      “Let go, darling,” she said. “That is not very nice. And you know that I can be equally unpleasant if need be.”

      “What are you trying to do, ruin us?” he asked, his voice cracking with rage, but he released his grip on her wrist. Serena slid off his lap and moved over to the bed. Sitting down, she leaned backwards so she could support herself by her elbows, her long legs dangling off the edge of the mattress. A surging violence had darkened his face and it left her throbbing between her legs. She had to take a deep breath before she could talk, her voice huskier, her soft lilt gone.

      “Calm down, darling,” she said, her smile more of a tease than anything else. “No one is going to recognize me or any of my family from that video, so please don’t go all drama queen on me. It’s too late in the evening for that. Besides, that’s usually Zach’s job.”

      
M
etcalf stared bullets at her. She smiled back but was beginning to lose some of her enthusiasm. Enough was enough already. Screw him. She sat up and crossed her legs.

      “What happened?” he demanded.

      “Oh probably no more than what you’ve already guessed. We decided to take a trip to Cleveland after all, and it’s a good thing we did. You should be thanking me, darling, you really should. It turns out our
Jim
has gone berserk. He is completely out of control. We were driving on Euclid when what do we see but
Jim
out in the open feeding. This was in broad daylight, mind you. And as it turns out, he’s been doing far more than just that. If you watch any of the local news you’ll see that he’s also been ripping people’s heads off in motel rooms and their arms off in movie theatres.”

      
M
etcalf stared open-mouthed at Serena as if she were nuts. Quizzically, he asked, “Why would he do any of that?”

      Serena’s smile turned more into a cat-who-ate-the-canary variety. She told him Hayes’ guess about the Blood Dragons taking
Jim
’s girlfriend and the bloody aftermath that had since followed. To support this hypothesis, she showed
M
etcalf the drawing she had of
Jim
’s girlfriend.
M
etcalf looked intently at it and murmured that the girl was beautiful.

      “If you like trailer-trash, I guess you could consider her okay.”

      
M
etcalf shook his head, looked at Serena. “I know trailer-trash when I see it. This girl’s stunningly beautiful.” He put the drawing down, violence again darkening his features. “Why did you have to massacre those police officers?”

      “It couldn’t be helped.”

      
M
etcalf stared at her as if she had just sprouted horns. He dropped his face into an open palm and squeezed his eyes between his thumb and index finger. In a pained voice he asked her why it couldn’t be helped.

      “It just couldn’t be.”

      
M
etcalf sat for a while, frozen, then pushed himself out of his chair and paced the room, all the while squeezing his eyes. He asked Serena to explain why she couldn’t have helped it.

      “There was nothing else we could do,” she said, shrugging. “They showed up while we were trying to deal with
Jim
. And then they started firing at us—and those bullets sting! We did what we had to.”

      “You had to drink their blood in front of all those people?”

      “Darling, we made sure they were dead first. We didn’t spread the infection, if that’s what you’re worrying about. And the sunlight, it was awful, it left us ravenous. Why let all that good blood go to waste?”

      “You’re kidding me.”

      “Think about it. Those people already saw
Jim
drinking a person’s blood, so it was no big deal what we did. They probably only thought we were all part of the same satanic cult. And that we must’ve been wearing body armor.”

      
M
etcalf kept pacing, kept squeezing his eyes as if he were trying to fight back a migraine.

      “What about the limousine?”

      “What about it, darling?”

      “The limo and its driver, that will connect back to you, won’t it?”

      “No chance of that, darling. We had a previous arrangement with the driver where we always paid him handsomely for his discretion. Whenever we hired him it would always be off the clock so he could pocket the large sum of money we paid him. Even if the police are able to identify his body—which will be hard given that we removed his teeth and fingers, or the limo, which will also be hard after what we did to it, there’s nothing to connect him to us. And we burnt him and the limo to such a crisp before we left that there’s little chance anyone will ever identify him. There’s nothing to worry about, trust me.”

      “What if someone saw him parked out in front of your hotel when he picked you up?”

      Serena didn’t bother answering that. What was the point if
M
etcalf was going to ignore her explanations. After an uncomfortable silence,
M
etcalf asked her how large a party she brought from New York.

      “Why?”

      “Just answer me, okay?”

      Serena counted silently to herself. “Originally five, including myself.
Jim
killed Henry, someone you never met so I know you won’t be shedding any tears over him, but he was a valued member of my family. Someone very good with swords. I believe he would’ve given you a run for your money.”

      “Five of you and you couldn’t handle
Jim
?”
M
etcalf groaned, not bothering to hide his disgust.

      “The sunlight, darling. We just weren’t used to it—”

      
M
etcalf held out a hand to stop her. The swords that Stefan had cleaned earlier were left leaning against a wall.
M
etcalf picked up one of them and tested the sharpness of the blade with his thumb. He seemed satisfied with it.

      “What about him?”
M
etcalf asked, referring to Hayes, all the while keeping his stare focused on the blade, at the way the light reflected off of it.

      “
M
r. Hayes was beginning to put things together—”

      “Why infect him?”

      The flatness and pure psychopathic edge to
M
etcalf’s tone left Serena stumbling for words. For the first time she was beginning to fear him. Any sexual desire she’d had earlier was gone and was replaced by an icy coldness that swirled through her body. Once she found her voice, she started babbling. “W-Why? Darling, I thought he could be a useful addition to my family, and that it would be a waste to simply dispose of him, same as I thought with you all those years ago. Besides, as I had already mentioned, I lost one of mine, so I don’t see why there would be a problem adding a new—”

      
M
etcalf swung the sword downwards, lopping off Hayes’ head, then he looked up at Serena. She closed her mouth. She could see what he was considering, that he was trying to decide whether to cut off her head or to make her one of his experiments, weighing how difficult it would be to get her back to Los Angeles if he were to choose the latter. She backed away slowly and thought about the window. They were on the fourteenth floor. She wasn’t sure if she’d survive the fall—unlike
M
etcalf, she hadn’t spent years obsessed with those types of experiments. Somehow she knew he would know from what height a vampire would die if they fell to concrete, or would end up paralyzed or with broken legs.

      “Darling,” she said as softly as she could, trying hard not to stammer—knowing that would be all that was needed to spring him into action, “why don’t you put the sword down? It’s been so long since we’ve co-mingled and there are so many things I’ve been dreaming of us doing. No one’s ever left me purring the way you did.”

      “I thought
Jim
was always your favorite,” he said, his tone mocking her.

      “No, darling—”

      
M
etcalf put a finger to his mouth to quiet her and edged closer. She realized then that the window wasn’t an option—she’d never make it to the window in time. He would cut her down before she reached it.

      Her cell phone rang and that seemed to break the trance that
M
etcalf had fallen into. His eyes changed, subtly, but they changed, almost as if a veil had been lifted, and he lowered his sword and stood quietly while she answered the phone.

      “It’s Wilfred,” she said, fighting hard to keep the fear out of her voice, although she knew it didn’t much matter. Like a dog,
M
etcalf could smell it. “He knows where
Jim
is.”

      The moment had passed.
M
etcalf let the sword hang loosely at his side. He nodded, his expression tired, an exhaustion filling his eyes. “Let’s go then,” he said.

      He took the duffel bag and stored the sword in it so he could carry it out of the room without attracting attention. Jittery, her heart beating like a tom-tom, Serena followed him into the hallway. Slowly she got her nerve back, and whatever fear she had was replaced by a white-hot rage. Not only did he sexually reject her, but the sonofabitch psycho was going to kill her—or worse—and now had the audacity to act as if she should just forget about it and go on as if nothing had happened. She decided then that after they took care of
Jim
she was going to kill
M
etcalf.
M
aybe have Stefan cut his legs off first, but she was going to be the one to deliver the death blow.

* * * * *

      
Jim
found the Harley parked behind an apartment building. The building was different than the tenements that surrounded it; grander, older, as if at one time it had been a residence for a more moneyed crowd, but over the years had declined along with the rest of the neighborhood. While the other tenement buildings bordering it were brick, this one was stone, and had a cast iron gate surrounding it with each post topped off with a dagger-sharp spike. The gate was locked and a key was needed to open it.
Jim
scaled the gate, and once he reached the back door, used his shoulder to break it open. If anyone heard the noise, no one bothered to check it out.

      Once inside he took out Ash’s cell phone and dialed Raze’s number—the one Drum had given him. The phone kept ringing until it would go to voice mail, then
Jim
would hang up and redial. He did this while he walked the hallway along the first floor, moving past each apartment, listening, then when he was done he would move to the next floor. At times, dogs would start to whine from inside an apartment, making distressed, agonizing noises, as if they were being tortured, but after
Jim
would move on their whining would stop. He repeated this at each floor until he reached the seventh and top floor. There he stopped outside an apartment where he heard a phone ringing from inside. Shortly afterwards he heard Raze’s voice complaining how the asshole just won’t stop calling.

      “Why don’t you tell him to fuck off,” a different guy with a smoker’s rasp said.

      “I’m not giving the asshole the satisfaction. Let him keep dialing all fucking night if he wants. It ain’t going to get him back his bitch.”