Vampire Blood (34 page)

“Then what?” He was curious.

“We study it. Quickly. Then we go kill them; burn that hateful place to the ground with them in it if we have to.”

Jeff was surprised at that bit of news. He knew how Jenny loved the old theater, and he was achingly aware of all the work they’d just done restoring it.

He didn’t have to ask, though, she answered it for him, “No matter how lovely it is on the outside, it’s an evil place. It’s always been evil. It’s time for it to die once and for all, forever, as well.”

He was quiet for a minute or two, thinking. “Burning it might not be quick enough. We should
blow
it up. It’s the only way.”

“How do we do
that,
Jeff?”

“A box of dynamite would do the trick.”

“Where would we buy dynamite? Doesn’t it take some kind of a permit or something?”

“I don’t know.”

She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. Dynamite is probably expensive, and we can’t afford it. I’m flat busted broke. I sent my bills out last week, and my money’s gone. Since my last divorce, no credit cards yet, either. Of course, I didn’t know that this week we’d need to buy dynamite.”

“Neither did I,” Jeff tossed in. He thought for a second, and snapped his fingers. “Is there any gasoline in your dad’s garage, or do you have any at the trailer?”

“Yes, here somewhere. In the garage, I think.”

“I have an idea. Let me kick it around a little longer then I’ll tell you all about it.”

“I’ll check on Joey while you do that,” Jenny said.

* * * *

“What’s going on?” Joey questioned weakly, waking as Jenny was tucking the blanket tighter around him. “What are we doing in Dad’s cellar?” Then without missing a beat, “Jenny, what did you
do
to your face?”

She’d turned Jeff’s flashlight on and set it upside down on the packed dirt floor. For a few moments it’d provide just the right amount of soft light to see Joey by.

Jenny smiled for the first time in days. “We kidnapped you from the hospital, and we’re hiding out until dawn.” She didn’t want him to know about their mom yet. He was still too weak. She lightly touched a finger to her face. “I was in a fight, you might say. I still am, but I’m going to win.”

“Where’s Laurie?” he asked, and heaved a sigh of relief when he heard she was all right.

With that, his head drooped, and just when Jenny believed he’d fallen asleep again, he opened his eyes and murmured, “You finally believed me. I’m
so
glad.”

“I believe you,” Jenny whispered softly.

“They’re after you now, aren’t they?” he exhaled in a dead, hopeless voice, taking her off guard. “They’re gonna get all of us in the end anyway, Sis. We’re as good as dead now.”

“Stop it, Joey! We’re going to survive, you’ll see, I promise. Jeff and I are going to destroy them, and the theater, forever, as soon as light comes.”

“Oh, I sure do want to believe you in the worst way, but I can’t.” He turned his head away from her, his covered body shuddering, and fell back into a fitful sleep.

She and Jeff huddled together, waiting for the dawn, and finally their exhaustion caught up with them.

When Jenny awoke later, horrified at having drifted off, she shook Jeff roughly. There was faint light seeping from under the cellar doors, and the darkness was now a shade of gray around them. “Jeff, wake up! What time is it?”

He checked his watch.
“We made it,”
he divulged with groggy relief, stretching and yawning the cramps away. “By my watch, the sun should have come up two hours ago—and we’re still alive!”

“That late?” Jenny crawled to the cellar doors and threw them open.

Outside, the day had begun, but was heavily overcast with inky storm clouds. It felt more like late evening.

“Great, it’s going to storm.” Jenny rubbed her eyes, looking out into the angry gray world. “I wonder if this counts as daylight or not?”

Jeff grinned weakly. “Looks like daylight to me. Let’s go.”

Together, they took Estelle’s stiff covered body upstairs and laid it on her own bed and established Joey in the front room on the sofa. Jenny was grateful that he remained asleep, because she didn’t want to answer any more questions about the fresh tears that covered her face.

Jenny telephoned Laurie and asked her to come take care of Joey; informed her of some of what had happened, telling her she’d explain the rest when she got there.

“Let’s get some food into ourselves before we start looking for weapons, that vampire kit and that book,” Jenny suggested. “We’re going to need the energy, and I’m so hungry.”

“Me, too,” Jeff tossed in and looking hard at her face, added, “That ugly cut of yours has stopped bleeding.”

“Good. I’ll slap a couple Band-Aids on it before we leave.” She headed into the kitchen.

“Coffee first sounds like a fantastic idea,” Jeff said, “or I won’t be able to stay awake another second. Then I’ll fix up that face of yours. I have a certificate in first aid, did I ever tell you that?” Jeff slumped on a kitchen chair, studying the lightning that roiled across the skies.

She threw him an amused look back at him, as she made the coffee. “Isn’t there anything you can’t do?”

He thought for a minute, gave her a grin back. “Nope. I’m just a multitalented person, I guess. Wait till you see what I concoct for that theater.”

Thunder broke the stillness as Jenny chuckled and prepared a quick breakfast.

She still couldn’t bring herself to turn the lights on.

Chapter Seventeen

September 13 11:15 A.M.

“Jenny, it’s getting late,” there was a growing urgency in his voice.

“I know, I know,” she grumbled from behind a stack of dusty crates and boxes. The one bare bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling hardly provided enough light to see by, but she was doing the best she could. She had a flashlight in one hand. “I know it’s here somewhere, Jeff. All the rest of my stuff is up here. I know I didn’t get rid of it. Don’t ask me why, I just didn’t.”

Laurie was downstairs tending to Joey. They’d told her the whole truth, and somehow she hadn’t laughed at them. Jenny wasn’t sure how much she actually believed, but Laurie had consented to stay with Joey and not let anyone know about it. She’d said that the hospital had alerted her and the police as soon as Joey’s disappearance had been discovered, and she’d been in a frenzy with worry until Jenny had called. She’d been just relieved that he was unharmed. Safe.

When she’d arrived, she gawked at Estelle’s body with startled eyes, crossing herself like someone in an old horror film. She had easily consented to take Joey and run as far away as they could from Summer Haven if Jenny and Jeff didn’t come back or call her by nightfall. She’d been silent since.

“Jeff, that cigarette?”

“Yeah?”

“Put it out, would you. You want to burn the whole house down? Besides that, I can’t breathe.” Jenny grimaced, digging into another old chest.

The attic was a confined, enclosed space, and Jenny couldn’t take the smoke any longer. Jeff had been smoking like a fiend since they’d begun searching. Finding the wooden box and the book was taking far too long.

“Ah, Jenny, if I ever needed a cig, it’s now.” He dutifully put it out anyway.

He’d helped her look for a while until she’d ordered him to get out of her way. She had a better sense of where to look than he did.

Then Jenny had handed him her father’s shotgun. Her mother had discovered it in the backyard a few days ago, covered with mud, but had never cleaned it, merely shoved it into the closet and left it.

“Not in bad condition, mechanical wise,” he’d remarked, sliding his hand down its barrel. “It looks like someone dropped it into a garbage disposal.”

“We won’t be able to use it. Won’t do us any good,” Jenny had humphed in the corner amidst the cobwebs.

Jeff glanced at her strained face.

“A shotgun won’t kill vampires.” Her shoulders sagged. “Remember?”

“Yeah,” Jeff had said quietly. “You’re right.”

He tossed it haphazardly into a corner then abruptly retrieved it. “I’m going to take it along anyway, just in case. It might not kill them, but it might slow them down.”

“Fine with me,” Jenny said, too busy to really care, continuing her search for the book and the kit, leaving him to his own devices.

Now he was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the attic beneath the dirty window, where the most light was, resting a moment, sharpening another of his homemade wooden stakes with his army knife. He’d found the wood behind the garage. A pile of it in different shapes and sizes.

“I found it!” she yelped about fifteen minutes later, popping up with something in her hands. “The box. Found the book, too.” She grinned through the sweaty grime on her face.

It was hot in the attic. Her wound, now covered with a white gauze patch surrounded by bruises and smaller cuts, looked like a badge, a grim battle scar of what she’d already been through.

Jeff laid the stake he was working on aside and peeked over her shoulder as she inspected the book.

“How to Recognize and Destroy Vampires
by Professor Ernst Blomberg,” Jenny read. The book was tattered, a faded purple in color, with a threadbare binding. “This is truly amazing.” Jenny leafed through it after Jeff snatched the wooden box from her.

He opened it. Inside lay a thing that looked like a huge crucifix, a silvered powder flask, two silver bullets with crosses embedded in them that looked more like silver balls, a small bottle of something labeled “Professor Blomberg’s new serum” and a tapered silver-capped loading rod. The crucifix-pistol could also be used as a stake when in close quarters, he supposed.

“Only
two
bullets left.” Jeff whistled between his teeth. “There are places for six. Not much room here for error. I wonder what happened to the rest of them?”

“Someone else became a believer, that’s what. I hope he got what he was aiming for. ”Jenny put the book down on a nearby trunk and took the open box out of Jeff’s hands. “You said this is a gun? It looks like a big cross to me. How does it work?”

Jeff lifted it from its red velvet bed. “There’s a steel barrel, I think, inserted into the body along its length.” He pointed to the lower side of the head of the cross. “This is a crude cap lock firing mechanism of some sort, and here, at the bottom, is what they call a percussion nipple. I imagine the lock works, the guts of the gun, is this flat spring that runs along the underside.” He turned the cross over and showed her the long spring that ran beneath a notched sear.

She watched intently.

“To cock and fire it, you just pull the folding sear, or trigger, back, then manually lift this flat spring and lock it into the sear’s notch.” He demonstrated. “Then when you pull the trigger back, the notch will release the spring, which also serves as the hammer, and it’ll detonate the cap, firing the pistol. Voilá!”

“You seem to know a lot about guns, too. You never cease to amaze me, Jeff.” It was another compliment.

“I told you I learned a lot on the road.”

“Interesting,” Jenny uttered, her brows creased, as she studied the crucifix gun in her hands. “It’s so little, so beautiful with all that designed ivory, to be so deadly. You think it still works?”

“I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t.” He took it apart expertly, examining the pieces, and then snapped them back together. “It looks sound to me. I’ll have to trust it. We can’t waste any of the silver balls practicing.”

“And that silver flask?”

He opened it and took a whiff. “I think it’s black powder, but I’m not sure where it fits in exactly. It’d be handy to have if you want to start a fire, though.” His expression settled into contemplation as he put the flask back in its place.

“There’s an inscription here,” Jenny disclosed, running her fingertip over a faded paper label pasted on the inside of the lid. “I can barely make it out. ‘This box contains the necessary items for protection of persons who travel into certain parts of Eastern Europe or—”

“Or Summer Haven,” Jeff tossed in sardonically.

Jenny continued without acknowledging his snide remark, “‘where the populace is plagued by evil manifestations of what is known as vampires.” Jenny read the rest out loud, frowning deeply. It explained how to recognize a vampire and described their care, feeding and habitats.

Jeff muttered something every once and awhile she couldn’t catch.

“Listen to this.” She read again from the book. “‘Vampires are at their weakest at that precise moment when the night kisses the dawn, and they are anxious to find their safety and their coffins lined with their native earth. Dawn?”

“I suggest we don’t wait that
long,” Jeff advised caustically, rubbing his aching neck, a finished stake lying in his lap.

She skipped through pages until she came to the chapter on
How to Kill Vampires
. “To kill a vampire, it says here, ‘You can plunge a wooden stake, or any kind of stake, including steel, through their hearts; or you can leave them to the mercy of sunlight; or you can burn them. Contrary to old myths, garlic and crosses
can’t
always protect you; it depends on the age and the evilness of the vampire you’re facing. Fantastic,” she muttered. “They come in different levels of evil.”

Jeff groaned. “Wonderful.”

Her eyes slid to the bottom of the page. “‘Vampires have a great fear of water. Water saps their strength, and in large quantities, can actually immobilize them.’ We have to remember that. It says the silver balls in the kit were fashioned from a fifteenth-century saintly pope’s melted down crucifix, and they’re deadly to vampires. It warns that only those
true
of heart can hope to win against vampires. Others will perish. ”Jenny looked up and met Jeff’s worried eyes.

“He writes as if he knows what he’s talking about.” Jeff gazed up at the raftered ceiling, his voice thoughtful. “And to think, when you first received that so-called vampire-killing kit all those years ago, you thought it was a joke. Now ... it might save our lives. We better
hurry,
Jenny.” He twisted his wrist at her, showing her his watch, his mouth a slash in his gaunt face. “It’s already twelve. It gets dark these days around seven.”