When I was ready, I opened the door of the unmarked car and stepped out onto the drive, my eyes slightly slit. At times like this, when I’m about to read the dead, I experience everything so clearly, the sun on my shoulders, the breeze like a wisp of pressure on my face, the feel of the earth beneath my feet, grounding me, the smell of late-blooming flowers. The scent of old blood. But I don’t like to open my eyes. The physical world is too intense. Too distracting.
Jane took my hand in her gloved one and placed it on her leather-covered wrist. My fingers wrapped around it for guidance and we walked to the house, the plastic shoe covers and plastic coat given to me by Brax making little shushing sounds as I walked. I ducked under the crime scene tape Jane held for me. Her cowboy boots and plastic shoe covers crunched/shushed on the gravel drive beside me. We climbed the concrete steps, four of them, to the small front porch. I heard Brax turn the key in the lock. The smell of old blood, feces, and pain whooshed out with the heated air trapped in the closed-up home.
Immediately I could sense the dead humans. Five of them had lived in this house, two parents, three children, a dog, and a cat. All dead. My earth gift, so much a thing of life, recoiled, closed up within me, like a flower gathering its petals back into an unopened bloom. Eyes still closed, I stepped inside.
The horror that was saturated into the walls, into the carpet, stung me, pricked me, like a swarm of bees, seeking my death. The air reeked when I sucked in a breath. Dizziness overtook me and I put out my other hand. Jane caught and steadied me, her leather gloves protecting me from skin-to-skin contact that would have pulled me back, away from the death in the house. After a moment, I nodded that I was okay and she released me, though I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see. A buzz of fear and horror filled my head.
I stood in the center of a small room, the walls pressing in on me. Eyes still closed, I saw the death energies, pointed, and said, “They came in through this door. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them. Fast.”
I felt the urgency of their movements, faster than any human. Pain gripped my belly and I pressed my arms into it, trying to assuage an ache of hunger deeper than I had ever known. “So hungry,” I murmured. The pain grew, swelling inside me. The imperative to eat. Drink. The craving for blood.
I turned to my left before I was overcome. “Two females took the man. He was surprised, startled, trying to stand. They attacked his throat. Started drinking. He died there.”
I turned more to my right, still pointing, and said, “A child died there. Older. Maybe ten. A boy.”
I touched my throat. It wanted to close up, to constrict at the feel of teeth, long canines, biting into me. The boy’s fear and shock were so intense they robbed me of any kind of action. When I spoke, the words were harsh, whispered. “One, a female, took the boy. The other four, all males, moved into the house.” The hunger grew, and with it the anger. And terror. Mind-numbing, thought-stealing terror. The boy’s death struggles increased. The smell of blood and death and fear choked. “Both died within minutes.”
I pointed again and Jane led me. The carpet squished under my feet. I knew it was blood, even with my eyes closed. I gagged and Jane stopped, letting me breathe, as well as I could in this death-house, letting me find my balance, my sense of place on the earth. When I nodded again, she led me forward. I could tell I was in a kitchen by the cooking smells that underlay the blood. I pointed into a shadowy place. “A woman was brought down there. Two of them… .” I flinched at what I saw. Pulled my hand from Jane’s and crossed my arms over me, hugging myself. Rocking back and forth.
“They took her together. One drank while the other… the other… . And then they switched places. They laughed. I can hear her crying. It took… a long… long time.” I blundered away, bumping into Jane. She led me out, helping me to get away. But it only got worse.
I pointed in the direction I needed to go. My footsteps echoed on a wood floor. Then carpets. “Two little girls. Little… . Oh, God in heaven. They…” I took a breath that shuddered painfully in my throat. Tears leaked down my cheeks, burning. “They raped them too. Two males. And they drank them dry.” I opened my eyes, seeing twin beds, bare frames, the mattresses and sheets gone, surely taken by the crime scene crew. Blood had spattered up one wall in the shape of a small body. To the sides, the wall was smeared, like the figure of angel wings a child might make in the snow, but made of blood.
Gorge rose in my throat. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. I turned away, my arms windmilling for the door. I tripped over something. Fell forward, into Brax. His face inches from mine. I was shaking, quivering like a seizure. Out of control. “Now! Get me out of here! NOW!” I shouted. But it was only a whisper.
Jane picked me up and hoisted me over her shoulder. Outside. Into the sun.
I came to myself, came awake, lying in the yard, the warm smell of leather and Jane all around. I touched her jacket and opened my eyes. She was sitting on the ground beside me, one knee up, the other stretched out, one arm on bent knee, the other bracing her. She was wearing a short sleeved tee in the cool air. She smiled her strange, humorless smile, one side of her mouth curling.
“You feeling better?” She was a woman of few words.
“I think so. Thank you for carrying me out.”
“You might want to wait on the thanks. I dropped you, putting you down. Not far, but you might have a bruise or two.”
I chuckled, feeling stiffness in my ribs. “I forgive you. Where’s Brax? I need to tell him what I found.”
Jane slanted her eyes to the side and I swiveled my head to see the cop walking from his car. He wasn’t a big man, standing five-feet, nine-inches, but he was solid, and beefy. I liked Brax. He was a good cop, even if he did take me into some awful places to read the dead. To repay me, he did what he could to protect my family from the witch-haters in the area. There were always a few in any town, even in easygoing Spruce Pine. He dropped a knee on the ground beside me and grunted. It might have been the word, “Well?”
“Seven of them,” I said, “four men, three women, all young rogues. One family, one bloodline. The sire is male. He’s maybe a decade old. Maybe to the point where he would have been sane, had he been in the care of a master-vamp. The others are younger. All crazy.”
For the first years of their lives, vampires are little more than beasts. According to the gossip mags, a good sire kept his newbie rogues chained in the basement during the first decade or so of undead-life, until they gained some sanity. Most experts thought that young rogues were likely the source of werewolf legends and the folklore of vampires as bloody killers. Rogues were mindless, carnal, blood-drinking machines, whether they were brand-new vampires or very old ones who had succumbed to the vampire version of dementia.
If a rogue had escaped his master and survived for a decade on his own, and had regained some of his mental functions, then he would be a very dangerous adversary. A vampire with the moral compass of a rogue, the cunning of a predator, and the reasoning abilities of a psychotic killer. I huddled under Jane’s jacket at the thought.
“Are you up to walking around the house?” Brax asked. “I need an idea which way they went.” He looked at his watch. I looked at the sun. We were about four hours from sundown. Four hours before the blood-family would rise again and go looking for food and fun.
I sat up and Jane stood, extending her hand. She pulled me up and I offered her jacket back. “Keep it,” she said, so I snuggled it around my shoulders, the scent of Jane rising around me like a warm animal. She followed as I circled the house, keeping between Brax and me, and I wondered what had come between the two while I was unconscious. Whatever it was, it crackled in the air, hostile, antagonistic. Jane didn’t like most cops, and she tended to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how insulting, offensive, rude, or blunt it might be.