Vampire Blood (11 page)

The girl was glaring at her from a lounging position across the lobby. Jenny could have sworn her eyes were narrowed with arrogance and something else ... something darker. She was scrutinizing Jenny like a frog would a bug before it devoured it. It sent shivers rippling up Jenny’s spine.

“A lot of work,” Terry concurred with her, shaking his head.

“It’d be safer,” she told him, “if you had an electrician check all the wiring out before the electricity is turned back on. A plumber should look at the plumbing first, too. Might save you some heartache.”

He faced her, then, excited. “Jenny, you sound like you know about such things—plaster, plumbing, paint and all. Do you?”

“Yes, my father and I do small home improvements around town: paint houses, fix things, a little carpentry work. You know,” Jenny waved her hand around them languidly, “if you need help cleaning this place up, we’ll be free to hire in about a week or so. We’re painting the house of some friends out on the edge of town right now.”

Irene was listening attentively, actually motionless for the first time.

Jenny shook off her feeling of inner disquiet. She had always been fairly perceptive about people, but there was something
odd,
she couldn’t exactly put her finger on it, about these
...
owls. For that’s what they reminded her of suddenly. Owls. A family of owls. With their hungry, staring, wide eyes.

They also seemed to have an aversion to mirrors. Jenny had caught them, at different times, purposely avoiding coming near any of the mirrored walls. They held back.

No wonder.

They
were
strange. Looked and dressed strange. The more Jenny studied them, the more aware of it she became.

The teenage girl, Irene, had on so little it was almost indecent.

Not only did the woman, Annie, have on a long evening dress, but the man, Terry, had on a dark velvet lounging jacket and matching pants. In August?

Well, so what? Nowadays, people seemed to wear whatever they wished.

Jenny’s misgivings vanished as she gazed lovingly at the muted beauty of the old theater and knew that to be able to help restore it to its original magnificence excited her far more than anything else had in years, even if what it needed the most was probably basically a ton of elbow grease.

“That’s a splendid idea, Jenny.” Terry beamed, seeking approval from his wife, which he received in the form of a hopeful smile.

“We, er, work during the day, so we wouldn’t be able to do a lot around here. Only at night. We’d like to reopen the theater by fall and,” he explained, “it would help us immensely if you and your father lent us a hand. We’d pay you well.”

There was a sardonic, but muffled cackle from the young girl in the corner. Jenny stole a glance towards her, slightly peeved by the rude way the girl had behaved since she’d come in. What was her problem anyway?

“Splendid idea is right. I’m not cleaning up this flea bag; not dirtying my hands on this mess,” the girl said disdainfully. “This wasn’t my idea.”

Terry ignored the snide remarks and continued, holding Jenny’s attention. “Don’t mind her, she resented leaving the last place. You know how teenagers are? They can be so difficult.” His face was friendly in the candlelight.

When he looked at her like that, she felt dizzy. She cleared her head willfully and replied. “Yes, how well I do.” Jenny remembered Samantha’s rages and her moodiness all too well before she’d run away. This girl couldn’t be much older than sixteen or so, by the look of her.

The girl laughed spitefully and began pacing around them like a child throwing a tantrum or a cat stalking its prey. As if there were someplace else she wanted to be and was being kept from it against her will.

Jenny’s eyes followed her fluid movements, puzzled.

“Stop that!” Terry ordered his daughter as they exchanged dark glances. Then the girl plopped down angrily on the bottom step of the velvet-covered staircase, slapping her foot restlessly against the banister. The flickering, elusive shadows created by the candlelight hid her. She leaned back into them and disappeared. Only a melodic humming, something Jenny had never heard before, remained.

If she was my child,
Jenny fumed to herself,
she’d have her behind spanked for that little display.

“Like hell, I’d kill you first,” the girl spat into the still air, as if she’d heard Jenny’s words.

Jenny jumped. A crawling dread curled up tightly in her stomach, but, reasonable creature that she was, she pushed it away.

“Never mind her, Jenny.” Annie laughed, speaking for the first time since she’d invited her in. “It’s been a hard week for us. Moving and all. We’ve come a long way.” Her black eyes smoldered at the young girl humming in the gloom. Irene promptly shut up. “You know how stressful moving can be, especially for the children?”

“Yes, I know,” Jenny agreed. She met Annie’s eyes, swayed in her strong gaze like a slender tree in the wind.
It’s as if she sees right through me, as if she knows what I’m thinking. Ridiculous,
Jenny scolded herself, tearing her eyes from Annie’s.

She’s very strong,
Annie thought at her husband, and he nodded silently in reply.
She can almost hear us.

The thoughts breathed on the dimness around her, and Jenny cocked her head, listening, her heart pounding in her own ears. She kept hearing something. Like tiny whispers.

What’s wrong with me? Now I’m hearing things,
she thought numbly.
I
must be really exhausted.

She dragged herself back to the present. “I just got back here myself, in Summer Haven that is, after having lived somewhere else the last ten years, but this
is my hometown,” Jenny found herself telling them.

Annie nodded as if she already knew that.

Jenny blinked. The air rippled in front of her.

It must be smoky in here or something. It’s irritating my eyes.

It was unsettling the way they acted towards her, like they knew her and everything about her.

The theater was suddenly unbearably hot, dusty.

When Jenny glanced up again, the young girl was behind her, blocking her exit. A look of pure hatred ... of hunger ... quivered malevolently over her beautiful face. Her eyes were haunting as they glittered at Jenny, pulling her in.

Again Jenny jumped, startled, held stiff by the girl’s contemptuous scrutiny.

More whispers on the murky air.

Surprise mingled with the contempt in the girl’s sly eyes, and Jenny backed up a step.

“Well, you must all be tired,” Jenny hastily inserted, tearing her gaze away from the girl’s. “Since I’ve had a hard day myself,” she laughed nervously, “I’ll say good night. It’s been nice meeting all of you.”

It happened so swiftly, Jenny wasn’t sure later what
actually occurred, only that in a span of a heartbeat, Terry was between her and his daughter, Irene, and some sort of silent battle of wills had passed between them.

Out of the corner of her blurry eyes, Jenny thought
she saw him grab the girl’s wrist menacingly and hiss something into her ear. The girl’s face went blank.

Then, no more than a second later, when Jenny looked again, the girl was gone.

Completely gone.

There was only Terry Michelson smiling at her, as if nothing had happened at all.

Jenny felt that falling away of reality she’d encountered earlier, but only far, far stronger.

She leaned against the wall, breathless, glanced at the bottom of the stairs, and the girl, now on the steps, sent her a smug grin.

Jenny rubbed her eyes, her heart slowing down to normal speed. “It must have been all the sun today,” she murmured, confused, shaking her head. She found Terry’s somber eyes, and smiled absentmindedly.

“I better get home.”

Before I hallucinate anything else.

“It was nice to meet you, Jenny.” Terry had taken her hand and he stood close, peering down at her. His hand was like ice.

“We’ll talk about your pay and when you can start tomorrow night. After you talk it over with your father. We’ll be here. Since we work out of town, for a while, you won’t be able to reach us during the day. I can’t wait until I can open her again.” His eyes adoringly scanned around them. “I’ve dreamed of it for so long.”

Annie had come up to the door. Terry put an arm around her.

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Jenny. I’ll look forward to seeing you again soon. Say hello to your brother for me,” Terry said.

Annie was staring intently at Jenny, and Jenny shivered again.

What the hell was wrong with her tonight?

“Good night Terry, Annie. Nice meeting all of you. Good night, Irene,” she called out to the morose girl sulking in the corner. No reply.

Jenny slid out the door and groped her way towards her waiting car in the moonlight. The murky shadows behind her seemed to pulsate with a secret life of their own.

With a sigh of relief, she closed and locked the car door, and drove off.

Boy, was she beat. Stressed out.

Between her mother’s little escapade this evening and that queer scene in the theater, she was glad to pull up into her own driveway and lock herself safely in her own snug little trailer.

She switched on the air-conditioning as she walked in the door and headed for the bathroom.

After her bath, she scrubbed her long hair and toweled it dry in her bedroom, peeking out the window facing her father’s farmhouse. She could see no lights from across the field, so she guessed that he was asleep. Like she should be.

Somewhere a horse whinnied in fear.

The bath had helped her aching body, but had done little to untangle her busy thoughts. She’d been so sure that after her bath she would collapse into bed and plummet into a deep sleep. She was so bone-weary.

No such luck.

More whinnying pierced the night’s silence. Along with her disturbed emotions, it made her too jumpy to sleep.

“Ah, the hell with it,” she grunted, got out of bed, and started rummaging through the top drawer of her dresser.

She wiggled into clean shorts, a tank top, and a pair of tennis shoes and wandered out into the warm night. She switched off all but the kitchen’s small under-the-counter light before she went.

The moon had risen to the top of its arc and shone down on her from a velvet black sky. The stars twinkled icily above as she strode purposely towards the pasture where the horses usually slept on temperate nights.

She didn’t have to find them to know something was wrong. Their whinnying had already told her that.

Carefully, she made her way through the moonlit pasture. She knew every inch of it by heart, but it somehow looked different tonight.

Mingling with the moon glow, the mist was back. The wispy whiteness slithered along the grassy ground, clinging and filling the hollows and swathing the trees. It was unnatural how it covered everything.

She squinted to peer through it. Distorted, elongated faces hidden in its swirlings seemed to peer back at her, hungrily watching. Nervously, she shook off the eerie fancy.

Damn her overactive imagination.

She called the horses, but they seemed to have merged into the haze somewhere.

Climbing the fence that ran parallel to the road, she made her way carefully along it.
Wouldn’t do to walk through a pile of something, even with old shoes on,
she thought, hoping to lighten her mood.

She came to the towering tree next to the road where as children she and her brothers had dropped rocks and mud balls down on unsuspecting cars.

Jenny halted under the huge oak in the moonlight and leaned up against it to rest. She laid her cheek against the tree’s rough bark.

She kept seeing their hungry eyes—the family who’d bought the theater—in the candlelight. She couldn’t seem to shake them. She was uneasy, but of what she didn’t know.

The clinging mist made her anxious. It seemed so
alive.
She pushed away from the tree, forcing herself to stay calm, and continued her search for the horses.

She discovered Black Beauty and Lightning huddled together behind some thorn bushes, trembling and swaying in the moonlight. Shiny sweat flecked their hides.

“Whoa, whoa there, you two.” She tried to soothe them, patting their quivering flanks as they skittered past her and rushed back again, nickering with relief that she was there.

They were terrified. Of what?

Black Beauty kept falling to her knees. Lightning would smell the night air and whinny in fright over and over, rolling his eyes, rearing in panic. His hooves flashed in the smoky air, attacking emptiness, as if he were trying to defend himself from something.

“What is it, my old friends?” she asked, disturbed at their condition as she soothingly stroked first one and then the other.

“What has you so spooked?” She stared into the mist, waiting.