The Gathering, page 14
The girl dragged her nails down the window, leaving thin white scars in the glass.
“How do you like me now?”
“Get away from here.”
“What? You don’t like the truth?”
Beau turned and yanked open a kitchen drawer, fumbling inside. He found the old cross and held it aloft.
She laughed. “You really think that works? You really think that after all these years I’m not immune to your superstitious bullshit?”
He continued to hold the cross up with trembling hands. “What do you want?”
“You know what I want.” She thudded her fist against the window and a spider’s-web crack spread out across the glass. “I want them back, old man.”
“Go to hell!”
Beau turned and staggered back into the living room, slamming the door shut behind him. He leaned against the wall, struggling to get his breath. He needed his damn crossbow. And now he could hear something—a strange rustling, fluttering noise. Coming from his trophies. No, coming from behind the trophies. The chimney stack. Like the sound a bird made when it was falling down toward the grate. But this was louder. Far louder. Like a whole flock of birds.
The realization struck just as the room billowed with smoke and the bats burst out of the fireplace.
23
Tucker stared at himself in the mirror. His face looked odd and unbalanced.
Taking the heavy beard off had left the area beneath his nose looking strangely soft and pale, like baby skin, or a corpse left in the water for too long. In stark contrast, the skin above looked even more weathered and lined. Like tanned leather. The discrepancy wasn’t helped by the numerous bits of tissue paper stuck to his chin where it was bleeding from more than a dozen tiny razor nicks. Death by a thousand cuts, he thought grimly.
He was out of practice at shaving. Hell, he was out of practice at a lot of things. He wondered why he was even doing this. When Detective Atkins called, he had told her there was no way he was coming back to town as a temporary deputy. He had retired. He had nothing to offer. He couldn’t help her. He had messed up before. He didn’t intend to mess up again.
And yet he found himself thinking about the case. The ring. The jacket. Who had left them? What message were they trying to send? Could the same killer be responsible for two murders, twenty-five years apart?
Aaron had been adamant that Todd was alive when he left him all those years ago. But all the evidence had suggested he was lying or mistaken. They had DNA, they had the boy’s own confession that he had been with Todd that night. Tucker had been under pressure to charge Aaron with murder and request a cull.
“You were the last one to see him alive. You admit you had engaged in underage turning.”
“We loved each other. I wouldn’t kill him.”
“Maybe you didn’t intend to kill him.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“You didn’t mean to do it.”
“I’m not going to lie.”
“I don’t want you to lie. I want you to think of the Colony, Aaron. I want you to think of going to trial and the possibility of a full cull if you’re found guilty of murder…”
Tucker had seen the boy’s face falter. People think it must be hard to persuade someone to change their story. That police officers must have to intimidate and torture people out of the truth. The fact was, it didn’t take much to make someone doubt themself. Their recollection, their own actions. In a small police cell, when you’re tired, alone and scared, you start to doubt everything.
Aaron had admitted to manslaughter. A turning gone wrong. The courts would be more sympathetic, Tucker had told him. He would stand a far higher chance of getting a custodial sentence rather than the death sentence (“stun, stake and decapitate,” as some officers—the assholes—called it). Most importantly, a manslaughter charge meant that there would be no need to enforce a colony cull.
The boy had signed the confession with a shaking hand.
Tucker had told himself he did it with Aaron’s and the Colony’s best interests at heart. To save them. But was that true? Had he, subconsciously, wanted a vampyr to be responsible because to accept anything else would mean he had missed something?
It’s not that hard to convince yourself of a lie, either.
And now another boy was dead. Another cull looming. What if Tucker had got it wrong back then? What if the real killer was still out there?
“Fuck it.”
He needed a drink. He chucked the razor into the sink, walked into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge. There was no food or soda inside. Just several bottles lined up on the shelves. He reached for one, took it out and pulled out the stopper. Saliva flooded his mouth. He lifted the bottle to his lips, feeling the usual mixture of desire and disgust.
“Sometimes, I think I should have left you in the forest.”
“Maybe you should.”
“No, I think I like you better like this.”
Tucker closed his eyes and tipped up the bottle.
24
Barbara’s dad had taken her to the river almost as soon as Barbara could walk. Maybe even before. One of her first memories was of sitting on a shallow area of the bank, sharp pebbles digging into her chubby legs as the cool water lapped at her toes.
Behind her, Dad readied his line with bait, the pungent smell of one of his home-rolled cigarettes drifting across the air. Barbara kicked and splashed with her feet.
“You watch them little piggies, Babs,” her dad had chuckled. “Or the fish might just come and bite ’em off!”
Barbara had shrieked and snatched her toes out of the shallow water, tears blooming in her eyes.
Her dad had laughed harder as he cast his line into the river. “Aw, don’t be a baby, Babs. They’ll spit ’em back out.”
It had been a joke, but as she would learn, like all her dad’s jokes, it was laced with malice.
Barbara hadn’t dipped her toes in the river for a long while after that.
When she was older, she would watch as her dad reeled in fish and then killed them swiftly, whacking their heads on a flat stone. At home her mom would gut them for stews and pickle the flesh. They ate a lot of fish in the summer. For years after she left home, Barbara couldn’t stomach the sight or smell of fish.
Her dad had tried to teach her to hold the line, wait for a bite, but Barbara had never been patient enough and even when she caught a fish, she had felt bad for it, flapping wide-eyed on the end of the line. Gasping for breath, snatched cruelly out of its natural home. Once, she had thrown a fish straight back in and her dad had stormed over, eyes blazing.
“What in hell did you do that for, you damn stupid child?”
“I didn’t want to kill it,” she had mumbled.
His face had darkened. “You better get used to killing, Babs. Ain’t no one gonna wipe your ass your whole life. We’re fighting for our survival here, and this family don’t carry no passengers.”
Then he had backhanded her across the face.
Barbara never fished again with her dad. But as she grew older, she often went down to the river alone to read or swim, or just to escape the stultifying atmosphere of home, a slowly simmering cauldron of tension. Her mom, trudging heavily from sofa to stove and then collapsing back on to her armchair to lose herself in soaps. Her dad, sitting wired at the kitchen table, throwing back beers and bourbon.
At some point there would be an argument, always the same—about money, dad’s shit life, her mom’s weight, Barbara. “What the hell’s wrong with you,” she once heard him shout at her mom, “that you can’t carry me a boy? Hey? What kind of woman can’t give her husband a son?”
Things would be smashed, maybe there would be a slap or a punch, from either of them. Violence was as natural as breathing in her family. Her dad was wiry, but her mom outweighed him, two to one. Finally, her dad would storm off to “the lodge,” where he would throw back drinks with his “hunting” buddies and let off about stuff they couldn’t in other places, like “them damn negroes, whore bitches” or “those fucking blood-sucking spawns of Satan.” He spent more and more time there, especially after he was laid off from the post office.
“Is it like a secret club?” Barbara once asked her mom.
Her mom had rolled her eyes. “Something like that, hun.”
Sometimes, her dad would go away for days on hunting trips. Those were always calmer times in their household, and when he came back, he would seem happier, like something inside him had been released, at least for a while. It was only later—too late—that Barbara would start to wonder what her dad actually hunted on these trips. He never brought anything home to eat, nor any trophies to hang on the walls, like the deer heads in the living room or the hog’s head which snarled over the toilet in the bathroom.
“Gotta keep something for the lodge,” he would say with a wink. “Maybe one day, when you’re older, I’ll show you.”
Barbara didn’t really want to see. She liked the times her dad was away (and always felt a little guilty that she did). Her dad frowned on “wasted time,” unless it was his own. So, if Barbara wasn’t at school, her job was helping around the house: cleaning, sewing, “women’s stuff”; stuff her mom was too big to do anymore. When he was away, she would waste as much time as she liked. On hot summer days, she would hike through the woods and swim in the river or take her books and just hang out in a shady spot on the bank. Most of the kids at her school would take inflatables and swim further up, nearer the town. Barbara’s family lived a couple of miles out, close to the woods and the mountains.
Barbara didn’t mind. She didn’t really have any close friends at school. She wasn’t unpopular. Just invisible. And in truth, Barbara kind of liked it that way. Just like she liked the solitude here. The water was clearer and cooler. Barbara could float on her back and stare up at the sky, only the sound of buzzing bees and the circling eagles for company.
Until, one day, someone else came.
Barbara’s first reaction when she saw the girl sitting at the side of the water, in the shadows of the trees, was annoyance. This was her space. Her private space. And then curiosity took over. The girl was around her own age, fourteen or fifteen. Her skin was dark, but her hair was silvery white and it fell in a jumble of dreadlocks almost all the way down to her waist. For a moment, sitting there, legs curled beneath her, Barbara thought she looked just like a mermaid.
And then she had smiled, revealing the sharp glint of her incisors.
Mercy.
* * *
—
Barbara blinked her eyes open. The name lingered on her lips, mumbled into the hard pillow. She rubbed at her face, wiping away the cobwebs of the dream. But the strands clung on. The image of Mercy’s smile, the buzz of the bees. And then Barbara realized that the buzzing was coming from the room. The bedside table. Her phone.
Shit. She reached for it. Six twenty a.m. Caller—Decker. Great.
She fumbled the phone to her ear. “Hello, sir?”
“Atkins. You got an update for me?”
“Well, sir. Right now, it is 6:20 a.m. here. I’ve just woken up and I have a very full bladder.”
A pause and a heavy sigh. “About the case?”
She fought back a yawn. “It’s proving a little more complicated than I anticipated.”
“Complicated. How?”
“Well, turns out the video evidence is fake. A local doctor, Dalton, paid the three boys to fake the video showing Marcus being attacked in order to incite a cull.”
“You got this doctor in custody?”
“He’s on his way to Anchorage morgue, sir. Suicide.”
“What? What does Chief Nicholls say?”
“Chief Nicholls is in the hospital with a broken leg.”
A long silence.
“And when were you going to call and tell me about this?”
“You just beat me to it, sir. But you can rest assured it will all be going in my report.”
She could picture him pacing, rubbing his bald head, itching for one of the cigarettes that he had given up five years ago.
“So, what are you saying? You don’t think this is Colony? You think it’s a human homicide?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
A rattled sigh. “Atkins. I know you like to do a thorough job, but we cannot be seen to be weak on culling right now.”
“Making sure the right person is brought to justice is not being weak.”
“People need to have faith in the system.”
“Sir, the best way for everyone to have faith in the system is if I investigate the case thoroughly and follow the rules. Culls are only supposed to be a final…” She caught herself before she uttered the word solution. “They’re only supposed to be a last resort—when a colony won’t hand over a perpetrator or when the colony as a whole represents a threat to the human population.”
She heard him tut. “I can read the statute book too, Atkins, but you and I both know that the public don’t see it that way. They see that we’re toothless. Afraid to go up against the colonies. You know how close the VPA is to being repealed? If we don’t deal with this decisively, I guarantee it will be another weapon for the Helsing League.”
Decisively. She bristled.
“Sir, I am here to do a job, and I will do it to the best of my ability. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to pee.”
She ended the call, and then turned the phone on to silent. Not what she needed right now. She flicked on the bedside lamp and swung her legs out of bed. The room felt colder than ever, and the chill of the wooden floor permeated through her thick socks. Okay. She hoisted the blanket up over her shoulders. Plan of action. Brave the shower, dress and get her ass over to the police department to make an early start. She counted to three, threw the blanket off and scampered for the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, she was stepping out into the dark and cold. A blast of icy wind snatched her hood from her head and almost knocked her off her feet. Snow coated the road and parked cars. It had fallen heavily in the night and, from the look of the bulbous black sky, there was plenty more where that had come from.
She clomped through the fresh snow (already halfway up her shins) over to the police department and fumbled Nicholls’s keys out of her pocket. She inserted one into the lock and pushed open the door. There was a light on in the office. She walked inside.
A strange man sat in front of her desk. Huge with roughly cropped hair, a badly shaven face and dressed in a heavy jacket, threadbare shirt and jeans.
“Tucker?”
He inclined his newly shorn head. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Accepting the role of deputy.”
25
“You said you weren’t coming back.”
“I say a lot of things.”
“You kept your keys?”
“I guess I forgot to hand them in.”
Barbara regarded Tucker thoughtfully. The removal of the beard and dreadlocks had taken the edge off his “wild man of the woods” appearance, and he’d obviously made an effort in a clean shirt and jeans. But the sheer mass of the man made him seem like a bear in captivity.
“Look,” Tucker said. “If you’ve changed your mind, I understand. Hell, I’m not even sure if I should be here. So just say the word and I’ll disappear again.”
“Let me tell you where I’m at, sir.” Barbara pulled out her chair and sat down. “Right now, I’m up shit creek without a paddle. So, frankly, I’ll take any help I can get.”
A low laugh. “So, you want to get me up to speed?”
She filled him in on the events of the last forty-eight hours as concisely as she could. Tucker pulled out a battered notebook and jotted things down in a loopy scrawl. When she had finally finished, he deadpanned: “That all?”
Barbara smiled. “Anything leap out at you? Anything that might tie this case to Todd Danes’s murder?”
“Aside from the ring?”
“Yeah.”
He sat back and considered. “Not really. The blood-dealing—that’s an odd one.”
“You know Dr. Dalton?”
“No. He must have moved here after I left town.” He scratched at his chin. “Seems odd to me that this Doc would want a Colony cull when he’s making money selling blood to them.”
“Cutting off his nose to spite his face,” Barbara said. “Yeah. I thought that too. And it might have nothing to do with Marcus Anderson’s death.”
“No. But when something stinks there’s usually shit nearby.”
Barbara’s turn to laugh. “Yessir.” She studied him. “Tell me about the Colony. Some background.”
“Well, it’s always been an uneasy coexistence. Colony was here first. Had a settlement up in the mountains. When the mine moved in, they were displaced, hunted, captured.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen some of the trophies in the Roadhouse Grill.”
Tucker sighed. “A lot of folk here have views I don’t agree with. But it takes time for attitudes to change. Generations. And it takes both sides wanting to change. The Colony aren’t the Waltons.”
“I understand that, sir.”
“But I was working on it. Visited the Colony with clothes, medicines—even vampyrs get sick sometimes. Eventually got Athelinda to talk to me.”
“I met her. Out in the woods.”
“She’s centuries old, dangerous and maybe a little crazy. And she has no love for humans.”
“Yet she talked to you?”
“Don’t mistake self-preservation for friendship or cooperation. If she thought slaughtering every soul in Deadhart would help the Colony, she’d do that too.” He paused. “I thought I was getting somewhere. But then Todd was killed, and everything went to hell.”
