Vampire Blood (37 page)

Jeff phoned the police, and afterwards the funeral home. The respective authorities came, asked a lot of questions, weren’t happy with most of the answers, but finally took her mother’s body away. There’d been a lot of similar killings. All unsolved. What else could the police do. It was then that they found out that Sheriff Samuels had never called in the FBI at all.

“I guess he never got a chance to,” Jeff said, “before they got to him.”

There would be an inquest, of course, but they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

It was over for them and that’s all that mattered.

After the new acting sheriff, someone neither Jenny nor Jeff knew, and the people from the funeral home were gone, they elected to stay at the farmhouse for the night. They were too exhausted to walk back to the trailer.

Once in the spare room’s bed, as tired as they were, they made love, as if having been so close to death had made them cherish their love more.

Jenny couldn’t stand for him to be out of her sight, and she struggled to make the connection between the man Jeff had been once and the man he was now. They were so different.

She kept seeing him in her mind, trudging behind her through the woods in the rain, fighting the vampires and lighting the cigarette that set the theater ablaze.

* * * *

Jenny slept better than she had in a long time, waking before dawn to a puzzling noise from down the hallway somewhere.

She sat up in bed, coming through the layers of sleep groggily, like a swimmer from deep waters to shallow, rubbing her eyes. Her senses were still dulled.

The sun was beginning to tint the windows, casting a pinkish blush on Jeff’s sleeping and bruised face. He’d taken quite a beating the night before. She didn’t want to wake him.

The sound of breaking glass in her mother’s room.

“Mom?”

But her mother was dead.

Jenny crawled out of bed, sore and stiff from the night before, her side a sharp pain probably from the broken ribs, and wandered down the hall into the last room. The window was wide open, and a chill draft brought goose bumps to her skin.

The room wasn’t vacant.

In the twilight of the impending dawn, a figure stood cloaked in darkness in the corner by the dresser. It floated forward and out of the shadows, glaring at her.

“Irene?”
Jenny whispered, too shocked to move.

“Yes,” the voice was muffled, distorted.

“I thought you were—”

“Buried in rubble and ash like the others?” Irene moved closer, the first of the sun’s rays sparkling behind her. Illuminating her for the first time.

Irene reminded her of a melted wax figure. Her clothes were still smoldering from the fire, her face and body horribly mutilated. Scarred.

The room reeked of burnt flesh. The apparition was enveloped in a filthy smoking mist that blackened everything it touched.

Jenny didn’t move. She found she couldn’t. She couldn’t call out for help.

Somehow Irene was holding her.

Brutal images assaulted Jenny’s thoughts, making her body flinch violently ... Michelson’s brutal death, the theater exploding and trapping them, Irene fighting the flames, screaming and cursing, crawling from the burning rubble of the theater ... scrabbling out and escaping into the cool night. Screeching to the dark skies her promise of revenge.

Evil glowed like hot coals from the sadistic eyes in a puffy, bloody face. A ghoulish smile showed gleaming fangs. Irene’s malice battered her like a sickness coming to its fever pitch.

With a contemptuous smile, Irene released her mind, and Jenny crumpled to the floor, a strange lethargy creeping into her limbs. She scooted up against the wall.

“It’s almost dawn.” Jenny’s voice squeaked out. “I thought vampires couldn’t tolerate sunlight?” She’d begun that shaking again.

“I’m not
like
other vampires.” Irene’s voice sounded savage now, but still in such a low register, Jenny had to strain to understand her. “Only direct sunlight while I’m in such a state will harm me. I am weakened,” she confessed bitterly. “For now.”

Jenny couldn’t move.

“I have lived over two millennia and never thought I’d die. Though I was ever stalked by your kind, hoping to ensnare and exterminate me. It’s why I despise humans so. Yet I have always gotten away until now. I
am
dying.
Because of you.”
Her voice was tinged with an intense malice. “All I have to do is drain every last drop of blood from your body, Jenny, before full dawn and I might still live. It’s painful, Jenny and when you’re dead, I’ll give you my blood, and you will become like me. A vampire.”

Jenny’s mind shattered.
To be like them. Monsters. To have to kill and drink human blood and take human lives. To live only at night. To sleep in a coffin. Irene’s ancient blood would make her like Irene. Damned and vicious.
No!

Irene was on her, and Jenny had no voice to scream with, had no will to fight her attacker. She fell to the floor, helpless, with Irene on top of her and Irene’s fangs tearing into her neck, ripping her throat open so she could slurp up the warm blood faster.

I’m going to die.
Jenny thought incredibly.
Like Mom and Dad, but worse ... worse ... I’ll be like her!
No, no.

With her will alone she freed her voice. “Someone help me,” she screamed. “Jeff!”

Suddenly Jeff was there, pulling Irene off of her. The vampire rolled to the floor and came awkwardly to her feet to face him. A pathetic figure, maimed and scarred as the victims she’d left strewn behind her over her lifetime, still Jenny had no pity for her.

The sun was coming up. Irene was having a hard time keeping out of its direct rays. She kept moving with the dwindling shadows in the room.

Jenny had covered her torn neck with her hands, trying to staunch the blood’s flow, trying not to pass out. She’d bleed to death.

“Now I’ll have both of you,” Irene croaked.

“Not if I can help it,” Jeff vowed with more courage than he felt.

His eyes rested a moment on Jenny as she lay on the floor bleeding and then traveled the room as if he were searching for something.

He edged towards the dresser, the vampire matching him step for step, and abruptly lunged for Estelle’s crystal bottle of holy water. He scooped it up in his hands, pulled out the tapered stopper and splashed the contents over her.

Irene wailed as the holy water, like acid, ate her skin.

Jeff smashed the empty bottle against the side of the dresser, and moving in swiftly, plunged the large glittering sliver of wet glass deep into Irene’s heart like a stake and then he shoved her out through the window into the full sunlight.

To her dying day, Jenny would never forget the vampire’s shrieking. It rose like a trumpet of hell, and only died away after there was nothing left of her.

When the body was a puddle of smoldering rags in the singed grass, Jeff knelt down by Jenny’s side and gathered her into his arms. She was barely conscious.

He ripped a section of material from the bed sheet, tied it loosely around Jenny’s neck and told her to keep pressure on the wound. Then he ran to the phone in the kitchen to call an ambulance.

She could hear him praying out loud that she wouldn’t die before it got there.

As they waited for the ambulance to arrive, Jenny was reminded of something she’d read in the book on vampires:
Only the true of heart can hope to kill a vampire.

She asked feebly, “How did you know she was here? How did you know what you did would kill her?” Jenny asked through bloody lips, so weakened she could barely raise her head as he held her.

“Your mother told me,” he said softly, an awed gleam in his eyes, now awash with tears. He brushed the matted hair back from her face. The pain was making her grit her teeth.

Her world seemed to cloud with confusion. “My mother?”

“Yes, your
mother
woke me and told me you needed me. Told me how to kill Irene.”

“My mother’s
dead.”
Jenny coughed, clutching at his arm, as the world wobbled around her.

“I know,”
Jeff said wonderingly, and his face broke into a beautiful smile. “She also told me to tell you she loved
you. She always has and always will.
”

His smile was the last thing Jenny saw before she passed out.

Epilogue

December 24

Outside, in the night, it was snowing, a light snow, but snow nonetheless. The first time, the weather person said, that it’d actually snowed in Florida in over fifty years. A true Christmas Eve.

It was thirty-one degrees, in Florida.

A Canadian cold front had rampaged across the whole United States and plunged Florida’s usually mild temperatures into a record breaking cold. Jenny knew it could ruin the orange groves, but hoped the damage wouldn’t be too bad. She’d only seen snow a couple of times in her life, and it was lovely.

The snow lit up the landscape around the old farmhouse, drifting and sifting, kissing the ground, but never really coming to rest for very long in any one place. It was so beautiful. Shimmering like tiny white stars everywhere. It would be gone by morning.

Inside it was warm and cozy. In the newly redecorated kitchen, Jenny was fixing mugs of hot chocolate for everyone, sprinkling them with miniature marshmallows. She added a plate of freshly baked Christmas cookies next to the mugs, humming an old Beatles’ song from her high school days.

It was good to be feeling like herself again. After Irene’s attack on her three months before, she’d had to spend a long time in the hospital in intensive care; she’d had to have plastic surgery. Joey and she had been hall mates. The scars on her neck were still red and angry. They would take more surgery and time to heal, but she’d been very lucky, a little more blood loss, and she would have been dead.

If it hadn’t been for her husband, Jeff. Husband.
That sounded good.

As soon as she’d gotten out of the hospital, Jeff and she had remarried. They’d sold the trailer and moved into her parents’ old farmhouse. In the last month, they’d begun renovating it with the money from the sale of the trailer: new carpeting, wallpaper, kitchen cabinets and furniture.

After Christmas they were tackling the upstairs, and in the spring, they would add siding and better insulation.

Right after the first of the year, Jeff was going to try his hand at his own contracting company.

Even though the theater had burned mysteriously to the ground, renovating it had gotten them lots of later job offers, though Jenny wouldn’t be doing that sort of work anymore. Jeff already had a new crew lined up and waiting.

In the hospital, she’d missed the inquest of her mother’s death. Since there’d been such a rash of the same kind of murders, all unexplained, the cause of death by the FBI, had been listed
Homicide by person or persons unknown. Investigations still ongoing.
Jeff, the only one talking at the time, hadn’t even tried to tell the authorities the truth. What purpose would it have served?

The burial had been swift and discreet. Jenny had been devastated that she hadn’t been well enough to attend, but she was sure her mother had forgiven her. She’d been out to the graves to talk to her parents and lay flowers many times since.

They were together again. Forever.

Jenny picked up the tray of hot chocolate and carried it into the living room. Her eyes smiled as they came to rest on the twinkling Christmas tree that dominated it.

There was a fake fire on the flickering television screen and laughter. What had happened in August and September now seemed, at times, a vague nightmare.

Joey, still recovering, sat on the new sofa, his arm around Laurie.

“I just told Jeff the good news.” Joey beamed, squeezing his girlfriend. “Since I’ve got a house now, it’s time to really settle down.”

The Albers’ will, it’d turned out, had left their house and everything they owned, money included, to Ernest and Estelle Lacey; with Ernest and Estelle both dead, it had gone to their survivors. Their three children.

Joey had been given the Albers’ house, because Jenny and Jeff had taken the farmhouse and some of the money. Jenny hadn’t wanted her childhood home to be sold, having discovered its true value to her heart.

Their older brother Tom had taken his share in money only. Everyone was happy.

“I need a wife,” Joey said red faced. “I guess it’s catching, and Laurie has said yes to marrying me.”

“Well, I’ll be.” Jenny laughed, putting the tray down. “It’s about time. Congratulations, you two.”

Jenny gave Laurie a hug. “Welcome to the family, Laurie. What’s left of it anyway.”

“Have you set a date, yet?” Jeff inquired, sipping his hot chocolate. His face had filled out as well as his frame. He had the look of a contented man. The restlessness was gone. He’d even gotten a haircut for their wedding.

“Yes, the nineteenth of January. It’s a Saturday. Jeff, you’ll be my best man, won’t you, since I was yours? For the
second
time.”

“You know I will.”

Joey had gotten up and was poking around in the presents again, shaking and squeezing them, trying to guess what was in the ones marked for him.

Jeff grinned at Jenny, nodding towards her brother. “Still a kid, ain’t he?”

“Yep. He never grew up,” Jenny sighed, making a face. “Peter Pan forever.”

Everyone laughed.

“Get away from those presents!” Jenny laughingly chided her brother for the third time that night. “Can’t you wait until the rest of the family gets here, for Pete’s sake?”

“You know me, Sis.”

“Yeah, I know you. You’re a sneak.”

Their older brother, Tom, and his family were due any minute, Jenny’s daughter, Samantha, her husband and child, too. They were all coming to spend Christmas with the family for the first time in years. Jenny couldn’t wait to see them.

She had a lot to be happy about.

She was writing again. After ten years. Really writing, with Jeff’s encouragement, and it felt good. Her writing would never cause her guilt again, only joy. She’d make her mom and dad proud of her again. Make herself proud.