“You know about that, huh?”
“I read the paper every morning.”
“There’ve been fifteen disappearances from this neighborhood.” Boyd shrugged and sipped at his coffee. It was disgustingly good. He could get used to coffee like that.
“Well, I know about the Listers, of course. And about the Tripp family.”
“Did you know any of them personally?”
“I met both of the boys from the families and I tried to offer help when the Lister boy took ill.”
The man was calm and cool. He was exactly the sort of person that Boyd distrusted on sight.
“Have you seen anyone strange hanging around these parts?”
“My good man, I’m sure you’re aware that I have only recently moved here. Everyone is still strange to me.”
“Okay. Have you seen anyone stranger than you?”
Soulis gave that little smile of his and nodded his head. “Nicely put, Detective. I had a man visit me the other day, asking if I was interested in purchasing sexual favors. His name was Tom Pardue, I believe. He struck me as rather unsavory.”
“That was the only reason Pardue came to see you?”
“Indeed. I declined his offer.”
“He was here for a long while.”
“Was he? I wasn’t aware. I was out looking at the ocean.” Soulis shifted slightly in his seat and rested one hand under his chin.
“Like the ocean, do you?”
“It’s why I moved here. The view is spectacular.”
“Where did you move here from, Mr. Soulis?”
“Ohio.”
“Why did you move?”
“My house was broken into and I no longer felt safe.”
“Did they take anything?”
“There wasn’t much worth taking. Most of my valuables were in holding.”
“Did you know that Tom Pardue was dead?”
“Yes. I am also aware of the tragedy at the university. Something about a fraternity house fire.”
“It’s been a busy week.”
“I suspect so, yes.”
Boyd couldn’t get a thing from the man in front of him. He might as well have been speaking about the weather.
“If I leave you my card, will you call me if you see anything suspicious?”
“Naturally. Has the police force considered a curfew?”
“There’s already a curfew in place for kids around here, high school and under. They have to be off the streets by ten P.M.”
“How’s that been working out?”
“Not so good. We have around fourteen or fifteen missing right now.”
He read a list of names to the man, and asked if he’d met or knew anyone on the list. The only ones he claimed to know were the kids he’d already mentioned.
“We’ll be in touch if that’s all right, Mr. Soulis?”
“Please, call me Jason and of course, if I can help in any way, you have but to ask.”
Boyd shook his hand as they were leaving and winced. The man had a grip that was intimidating.
On the way out to the car, Danny was grinning like a run-way model.
“What are you smiling about?”
“You don’t like him.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You think he did something, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I just haven’t figured out what.”
“You’re getting jumpy, Richie.”
Boyd shrugged. “It’s a hobby.”
“You think he took those kids?”
“I think he knows something is all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he looks like he knows something.”
Before Danny could come up with an appropriate answer they were called back to the station. O’Neill wanted to bitch them out again. He’d recovered from being called a bitch.
He hadn’t driven twenty feet before Danny started in again. “Are we there yet? . . . Are we there yet? . . .”
“I’ve still got the cigar, Danny. I can light it right up.”
“You’re no fun when you’re pissy, Richie.”
“That ain’t what your mother said.”
“Gave up on Whalen, did ya?”
“Again with the damned Whalen comments!”
“Somebody’s getting oversensitive.”
Boyd lit his cigar. Danny shut his mouth.
Chapter 18
I
Soulis walked down into the basement of his house, smiling to himself. They were pleasant enough men, the detectives. Annoying, but pleasant.
It was easy enough to slide between the stones in the floor and move through the darkness until he reached the cave far below the house. There were a lot of tricks he’d learned over the years, and becoming a shadow was one of the simplest.
When he stepped into the cave, they were all waiting, most of them in a stupor, a few conscious and ready to escape if they could. The new ones were still dead. They would be until the sun had set. That was still a few hours away.
The cavern lay below sea level, a deep, dank secret place that only two living people knew about. It was one of the main reasons he had chosen Albert Miles’s house as the proper location for his experiments.
The problem had always been the same as far as he could figure: the newly risen were always rather stupid. It was hard to rise from the dead and come out of the entire situation feeling alert and perky. Not only did they lack any substantial strength, but they also looked like they’d just recently been killed. The average life expectancy of a recently reborn vampire was not very long. The ones that didn’t get killed by whomever they were attacking in the first few nights of their new lives usually didn’t make it past the first sunrise. They were delicate creatures, really, and the sun could destroy them in very little time.
So Jason had decided to experiment. He’d done well enough in Ohio, before Jonathan Crowley showed up and killed off his new prizes. After that, he decided it was time to get a little bolder in his tests.
He hid the bodies away and let them fester for a while; let them stew in their own death with just enough blood to keep them coherent and recovering from their journey back to the world. That was how they all explained it to him, the ones that had actually died: they said it was like coming back from a far darker place.
They also said they came back without their souls in a lot of cases. He wondered about that and whether or not there was any truth to the notion. Most of the time he didn’t give any consideration to the idea of a soul or a life force; it was something he’d never had to deal with.
There were different types of vampires; he knew that much for certain. There were the ones like what he had been leaving in this cave—killed as food, they would rise within a few days and continue the cycle of feeding and killing—and there were the ones who were created through the exchange of blood and other bodily secretions. The latter were far rarer to encounter. It wasn’t often that one of his kind decided to make a new Undead. He wondered if others thought of the distinction or if it was only him. Oh well, live and learn.
He knew a few others who had created Undead as opposed to merely vampires, but they seemed to find the entire affair some sort of secret, best left locked away. Jason couldn’t understand that notion. He had no shame regarding what he had created. The rest seemed to look on what they had done as a mistake of epic proportions.
Still, he supposed if he was going to experiment, he needed to cover all of the possibilities. Besides, it was only a rare few he had ever found who he felt could handle the changes in their lives.
Maggie Preston, for example, was virtually ideal for the part. What a lovely young woman. He wondered idly how angry she would be when she found out what he had done to her.
Back to business. He looked at the sickly things crawling or sleeping in the cave and smiled. Some of the braver ones had figured out how to escape around the same time they realized that breathing was not a necessity any longer. Most of them hadn’t come along that far in their thought processes.
Waking up, it seemed, took a while.
“Please, let us go.” Her name was Danielle Hopkins. He’d taken her from the campus of the university right after she’d dealt with the boy Maggie had befriended.
“Not yet, Danni. It’s not time.” He spoke as patiently as he could. That one tended to whine. She wasn’t doing well; her skin was sloughing off.
“When? Can you tell me that?”
“Maybe tomorrow night.”
“So long?” Her voice was miserable.
“Not so long, my child. Barely any time at all.”
“I’m so hungry.”
“I know. Soon, Danni. Soon.”
She slipped across the ground, her eyes wide and casting their faint silvery light. “Please, just for a short time? Just for a few hours?” Danni suddenly got a crafty look on her face. “I can tell you who has been sneaking out . . .”
Jason looked from her to where the Lister family was sleeping, pale, yes, but far better nourished than she was. They had barely decayed at all. “Oh, Danni.” He patted her pale blond hair and felt a few strands fall out at the light touch. “I already know who’s been escaping.”
He did, too. He knew by how healthy they looked. The children normally managed to figure it out first. Sometimes they even caught on to the limitations of their abilities and got back before the sun incinerated them.
Yes, he was very pleased with how this was going. There were more of them surviving and getting stronger. He rubbed the hairs off his fingertips and smiled. Danielle was crying again. She cried a great deal of the time.
“Danielle, my dear, only until tomorrow night and then you will be free.”
“Do you really mean it?” Suddenly another day or two in the ground seemed like a small price to pay to her, and she was smiling.
“Of course, child. I would never lie to you. Tomorrow night, and then the world will be yours for the picking.”
She wept again, this time they were tears of joy.
II
It was almost four in the afternoon when Maggie woke up. She stretched and realized that Ben’s bed was empty, except for her.
With just a moment’s concentration she realized that he was in the kitchen, cooking something that smelled absolutely heavenly. The scent of coffee coming into the room didn’t hurt either.
She was wearing a pair of his pajamas. Mostly they fit, but she had to hold up the waistband with one hand and her chest was straining a few buttons.
She walked down the hall and into the kitchen where he was just finishing with his preparations. Grilled cheese sandwiches on rye bread and a pot of cream of tomato soup.
The room was bright, but not uncomfortably so. She sat down at the table and watched him while he finished up the last of the sandwiches.
“Good morning, Ben.”
“Afternoon, sleepy head.”
“Thank you.” She looked into his eyes and he quickly looked away. He was cute. She’d never known a college-aged boy who was so shy around her.
“You haven’t tasted it yet.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He finally looked back at her and flashed a tentative smile. “I know. You’re welcome.”
They ate in almost complete silence. The food was good and she was ravenous.
When they were finished, he cleaned the dishes, waving off her offer to help.
Parts of his apartment were messy and looked lived in. The kitchen and the bedroom were the exceptions. In those two places he was a bit of a neat freak.
“So, what happened last night, Maggie?”
She had to think about that, because, honestly, she didn’t really understand it all herself. “I don’t know. I have a few suspicions.”
“You don’t know what happened to Tom?”
“That I do know.” She looked him in the eyes and this time he didn’t look away. “I killed him, Ben. He went too far and I killed him.” She looked away from him for the first time, suddenly worried. “Do you hate me for that?”
“I don’t think I could ever hate you, Maggie. No, I think he got what he deserved.”
“He did. He definitely did.”
“Then why would you think I would hate you?”
“I killed a man.” She’d killed several, actually, but he didn’t know about them and she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him.
“Well, no, I don’t hate you. I’m just a little worried about you.”
“So am I.”
“I didn’t know if I should take you to the hospital or what, Maggie.” He was starting to get a look of panic on his face. “I was afraid the blood was all yours and I was afraid you were going to get sick and die on me.”
“I didn’t, though.”
He nodded his head and closed his eyes for a second. “I know. I just . . . I don’t normally get close to people. I’m not used to it. So when I do, I get a little weird.”
“Well I don’t really go out of my way to meet new people either. My profession doesn’t really encourage it.”
He nodded again. “Yeah, what are you gonna do now? I mean, you don’t have Tom there to help you set things up or whatever he did.”
She smiled. He was very diplomatic when he wanted to be. “I’ll figure something out. I’ve got some cash stowed away.”
“Yeah, well, about Tom . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I sort of stole his money. All of it.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No. No, I stole it and put it in a safe place. Not easy to access, but I figured if you wanted to check into it, I can give you the account numbers.”
“What the hell made you do a thing like that, Ben? That’s just dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, him kicking my ass the other day sort of made me angry.”
“So you robbed his accounts?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Well, I don’t know if it maybe caused whatever had you so pissed off at him.”
She had to think about it. Yes, it probably had been an influence, but not the biggest one. “No. He was just a dick.”
“Good, because I would hate myself if I did something that hurt you.”
“Don’t hate yourself. There’s enough of that going around already.”