Frostbitten: The Complete Series (56 page)

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED

Once the town of Snowbrooke had gone to sleep and the glowing living room lights turned black, Kane found himself back on the street. With his headlights turned off, he carefully drove down the snowy streets, looking for a very specific address—an address that he found in the hidden university records.

Just a few blocks from the campus, he found the address he was looking for—the house of Eric Daniels. He slowly rolled up to the house and stared at it for a moment. The lights were out and there was no sound, except for that of the howling wind.

Kane counted the number of houses on the block—the house was the fourth from the corner. Kane put his car back into first gear and continued to roll down the street, and around the corner. Out of sight and away from the glow of the streetlights, he parked his car. He waited a moment as he scanned his surroundings—making sure there were no witnesses. Then, he stepped out of his car and made his way to his trunk. He equipped himself with his usual gear—stakes, holy water, a small emergency pistol and his trusty automatic crossbow. He hid everything in his coat, and then he made his way down the alleyway, counting the houses.

Finally, he came upon the fourth house—Eric’s house. He looked around carefully and then he pulled himself up, over the fence. He snuck up to the backdoor and gently tried the handle. The door was unlocked.

Kane opened it with extreme caution. He stepped in slowly and looked around. The house was dark, still and silent. Lightly, Kane closed the door behind him, making no noise.

He walked down the hallway of the small house, towards the little living room area. The blinds were open, and there were no markings on the wall, no jars of rats’ blood, no occult bookshelf. The house was messy—just like any bachelor pad, but there was no sign of a vampire.

Kane stopped in the center of the living room and looked around. Near the television was a small picture frame—It was a photo of Eric and Andrew together, out in the sunshine, dressed in formal suits—Eric’s wedding day.

If Eric was the vampire, he did a great job of hiding it.

Creak!

A gust of wind caused the house to settle, startling Kane. Acting on instinct Kane quickly pulled out his crossbow and turned towards the sound.

It was a false alarm.

As Kane lowered his weapon, he noticed something—on the coffee table was the red glowing sunstone. Letting his armed hand fall to his side, Kane walked over to the pendant. He put the crossbow down on the table and then he picked the sunstone up and looked at it.

It glowed with a red pulse, just like the same stones he’d seen in the possession of vampires.

“What are you doing?”

Kane quickly spun around. Eric had a pistol in his hand—pointed directly at Kane’s chest. Kane was caught off guard—without his weapon. He froze in his place, considering his options. He tried to slowly move his hand towards his crossbow.

“Stop!” Eric yelled. “I’ll shoot you—I swear to God, I will shoot you.”

Kane froze completely.

“Who are you?” Eric asked.

Kane didn’t reply.

“Tell me, God damnit,” Eric said. His hand was trembling. He’d never pointed a gun at anyone before.

“I—I’m just trying to find the killer.”

“Why are you in my house?” Eric asked. “Step away from that.”

Kane took a step away from the crossbow. “I—I saw your pendant at the bar. I’ve seen it before.”

“So?”

“Where did you get it?” Kane asked.

“Answer my question.”

Kane stood silently.

“Who are you?” Eric shouted.

“My name is Kane. I—I was in your brother’s class. I—I’ve been looking for the killer. I’m undercover.”

“I don’t believe you,” Eric said. The palms of his hands were beginning to sweat as the trembling became more overwhelming.

“It’s true.”

“I don’t believe you,” Eric said again.

“He’s still out there—The killer. They caught the wrong guy.”

“To the wall…” Eric demanded. “Put your back to the wall.”

Kane stepped further back—further away from his weapon. Eric walked over to the table and looked down at the unfamiliar firearm.

“What is this?” Eric asked.

“It—It’s a gun.”

“I can see that. Why does it look like that?”

“It’s a special gun…” Kane said. He took a deep breath. “For—For vampires.”

There was a long silence in the room. “What did you say?” Eric asked.

“I hunt vampires. The killer out there is a vampire.”

“You’re full of shit,” Eric said.

“No—You’ve heard the news. They call him the Vampire Killer for a reason.”

Eric looked back down at the gun. The ammunition: stakes. A stake killed Andrew.

“Where did you get that pendant?” Kane asked.

Eric was silent as he looked back up at Kane—at his brother’s murderer. “I got it from Andrew…” he muttered. The shaking in his hand stopped as he lined the barrel up with Kane’s chest. “Andrew had it when you killed him.”

“W—What?” Kane said.

“You killed him. You killed my brother. Why?”

“I didn’t,” Kane said.

“Don’t lie to me,” Eric shouted.

“I—I didn’t mean to. I mean—It was an accident.”

“You killed my brother—my best friend…” Eric said as he looked down at the crossbow again. “You killed him with that thing—”

Bang!

A piercing gunshot rang through the small house.

The ears of both men rang. Eric’s eyes turned wide. His hand opened up and then he watched his gun drop to the floor. He slowly moved his hand towards the fresh hole in his shirt, just over his heart. His shirt began to soak through with blood.

Eric dropped to his knees.

Kane was a sharpshooter—an expert gunslinger. He only needed that quarter-second, when Eric looked down at the crossbow, to make his move.

Just as he had done to Eric’s brother-in-law, Kane had killed Eric. Eric fell to the ground, a lifeless corpse, face down on the floor of his own living room. The bullet from Kane’s pistol penetrated Eric’s heart—killing him instantly. Kane didn’t want to do it, but survival was on the line. He didn’t have another choice.

Kane put his pistol back into its holster and then he carefully walked over to Eric’s dead body. He couldn’t believe what he had done. He couldn’t believe what he had been overlooking for so long—

Brittany was the Vampire Killer.

Finally, Kane was able to see what had been right in front of him, all along.

Before leaving, Kane cleaned up his tracks. Using a cloth he kept in his pocket, he went to every single surface that he had touched. He carefully wiped everything down. He took a hand towel from the kitchen and wiped up his footprints, leaving no traces behind.

Within an hour, the snow had covered the rest of his tracks.

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.”

—HENRY MILLER

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
THE NIGHT IT ALL BEGAN

The coldest night in Snowbrooke’s history was much more than record-breaking temperatures. It was the night of Wallace’s big party, it was the night Derek was stabbed by Philip Riley, it was the night I became a writer, it was the night Megan, James and Wallace became vampires—It was the night everything changed.

Something else happened that night—something that would inevitably change the lives of everyone in Snowbrooke. That was the night that Kane Patrick became a vampire hunter.

As Wallace’s party was beginning, and his loud music was booming through the small blizzarding town, Kane and Tanner were hiding out, after their escape from the juvenile detention center. The night before, Kane had killed Kyle Riley with a portable defibrillator unit before sneaking out of the facility with Tanner.

When the morning broke, the guards discovered the boys’ empty cells. Tanner and Kane had already made their way across town, snuck into the local tow-yard, and rescued the old ’69 For Mustang Mach One. They took the car to an old warehouse across town, where they waited for the nasty snowstorm to clear before moving on to through the mountains.

By the evening, the young Tanner White’s face was all over the news, and police were out in numbers, patrolling the streets, looking for any sign of the escaped boy. The news didn’t mention Kane specifically, only saying that “another boy escaped as well”. Kyle’s murder had been put on Tanner.

As patrolling police made their way closer to the warehouse district of Snowbrooke, Kane and Tanner decided: “It’s now or never”. In the small town of Snowbrooke, staying hidden was a dead-man’s game. The moment the power went out, the boys decided to make their move. With the police side-tracked by sudden power outage, Kane and Tanner were confident they could make it out of Dodge, unnoticed. They got into the old Mustang and took off down the icy highway.

It was a nervous decision, but it was a hopeful decision. For once in their lives, freedom was more than a fantasy—it was a possibility. For once, there were no cruel foster parents, abusive fathers, strict prison guards, or sociopathic delinquents to tell them what they could and couldn’t do. For once, they were able to make their own decisions—decisions they would live the rest of their lives with.

The decision was made—Kane and Tanner were headed for the country’s border. They wanted to go some place warm, some place vibrant and exciting. They wanted to move around, they didn’t want to be bound to any one place. They were ready to live their lives.

How naïve they were…

Before they could live their lives, they had to jump their first hurdle:
They were out of gas
. They had no food, no water, no map, no anything. To make matters difficult, they had
no money
. Fortunately for Tanner, he had years of practice getting the things he wanted without a nickel in his pockets.

About ten miles outside of Snowbrooke was a little gas station—the last gas station before a long, winding mountain drive. Conveniently, the little stop doubled as a convenience store, and was aptly called “Gas and Convenience”. The shop had gas, it had food, it had water, maps, money—it was the one-stop solution to all of their dilemmas.

The boys turned off of the icy roads and pulled to the small gas station, right next to the pump. The blinking ‘
open
’ sign was hardly visible through the thick wall of blizzarding snow. Kane got out of the car, covered his young face from the harsh wind, and began to fill the stolen car up with gas. Tanner hurried through the cold, inside to address the other issues on the list.

The gas bar was small, no more than four-hundred square feet. A small island in the middle, stocked with small bags of chips and nuts, provided the only cover from the attendant in the open space. There were three doors on the off-white wall adjacent to the clerk—an office door and two gender specific bathroom doors, one of which was out of order, as informed by a recycled piece of notebook paper and some masking tape. Next to the out-of-order bathroom door was a pile of old rusty plumbing and a red bucket full of old heavy tools.

The forty-something year old clerk sat behind a short counter, reading what appeared to be a biology textbook. He looked up at Tanner, over the reading glasses on the tip of his nose. “Hey there,” he said. His voice was deep but soft—hoarse but clear. He looked the young dark skinned boy up and down.

“Hi,” Tanner said as he walked over to the snacks.

The wind whistled against the thin store’s walls. The snowstorm was so bad, the gas pump was invisible from the shop.

“You aren’t heading through the mountains, are you?” he asked.

“Uh—No,” Tanner said. His eyes shifted quickly from the clerk, back to the snacks. He knew his face had been on the television all afternoon, and he wasn’t sure who had seen it—who would recognize him Being one of very few black people in Snowbrooke, laying low wasn’t a simple task.

Above the counter was a muted television, which was frozen on the local station’s “severe weather warning” notification. Snowbrooke’s electricity was still out, and that meant the broadcasting station was off-air.

“Did you just come through the pass?” the clerk asked, keeping his eyes glued to the fidgety boy.

“Yeah,” Tanner said. He grabbed a couple bags of chips.

The clerk tilted his head down towards his textbook, keeping his eyes above the pages to watch Tanner. “The power is out in town, just so you know. Hotels are probably all closed or full. You got a place to stay in town?” the clerk asked.

“Yeah,” Tanner said. He walked anxiously over to the counter with a couple of bags of chips. He placed them down and then picked a map out from a tall rack.

“A map? Can I help you find something?”

“No. My parents asked me to grab one.”

The clerk looked out the window. “Sure is a nasty one out there—can barely see a thing. The car out there—is that your parents?”

“Yeah,” Tanner said.

“They going to come in to pay?”

“No. I’ll pay,” Tanner said.

“Alright,” the clerk said. He looked back down at his textbook.

“How much?” Tanner asked.

“Meter’s still running. They aren’t done filling up. Just hang on for a minute.”

A minute may as well have been a lifetime. Tanner’s trembling palms became sweaty. He was used to stealing—this wasn’t the first gas station he’d knocked over. Between his exhaustion, his hunger and the fact his face was on nearly every local television channel—this particular job had special circumstances.

“He done yet?” Tanner asked. The clock on the wall had barely ticked five times.

“Not yet, kid. Just hold on.”

Tanner looked around. “Do you have a bathroom?” he asked.

“Just over there. Here’s the key,” the clerk said, sliding Tanner a small key locked to a giant metal ladle. “Men’s is under renovation, so you’ll have to use the ladies. Hope that isn’t an problem.”

Tanner snatched the key and hurried over to the bathroom. On his way through the little shop, on the ceiling he noticed a black dome, nestled in the corner: a camera. As Tanner stared into its blinking red light, his face flushed and his heart stopped. He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

Tears welled up in his eyes: He was going to get caught. He was going to spend the next five years in that horrible juvenile detention center, and then he was going to get the chair. The little remains of his life were crashing down around him.

He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, took a deep breath. As his eyelids peeled open, he noticed the uneven pattern on the dropped ceiling; the ceiling’s tiles continued past the wall of unpainted drywall behind the toilet.

“The office,” he muttered to himself. That must be where the recording tape is. If he could steal that tape, the police would have no idea where he went.

Tanner closed the toilet seat and stepped his light body up onto the back of the toilet. He reached up and carefully pushed one of the ceiling panels up and to the side, revealing three feet of space between the bathroom ceiling and the building’s roof. The bathroom wall cut off before the hidden space.

Tanner reached and pulled his body up into the narrow attic space. He crawled over the wall, towards the office, and gently pulled one of the foam panels out and placed it aside. Down below, he could see the office—a computer sat on a desk, next to a disorganized pile of paperwork. Against the walls were file cabinets, and in the corner was a television and a VCR—exactly what Tanner was looking for.

Carefully, Tanner lowered himself down onto one of the filing cabinets, into the office. He snuck over to the television. The screen was divided into four quarters, two of which were black. In one quarter, Tanner could see Kane standing by the Mustang, replacing the fuel nozzle into its holster. In another, he could see the inside of the convenience store, and the clerk reading at the counter.

He wasted no time—he pushed the eject button on the VCR and pulled the tape out. Then, he carefully tip-toed back over to his filing cabinet step. He climbed up and prepared to crawl back into the empty ceiling space.