She said, "Since my rather...premature burial."
Although obviously weakened, her movements were oddly fluid. As if I were being approached by a ballerina. A very pale and hungry-looking ballerina.
"So, you've been living here secretly for, what, over a year and a half?"
"It's no bother, really," said Mrs. Perkins nervously. "It's such a joy to have her back. We missed her so much. She stays in her room all day, sleeping. She's such a hard working dear. And when we go to bed at night she leaves for work. Works all night, and sometimes she's just coming home when we awaken. Always so tired and dirty." The mother looked at her daughter with so much love in her eyes that my heart nearly broke. Evelyn was now about halfway across the room.
"Your daughter was killed, Mrs. Perkins," I said. "An autopsy was performed on her. She was buried."
"Ooh, we don't talk about that," said Mrs. Perkins, clearly living in denial. "Mistakes are made."
"Mother and I have an agreement to keep my presence a secret," said Evelyn, still approaching me. She looked weak, almost helpless, but there was something in her eye that scared the shit out of me. It was the look of a killer. A predator. A hungry predator. "In return, she gets to see her daughter."
I looked at her mother's wounded neck and arms. "And you get to feed."
"Mother loves her baby girl," said Evelyn.
My stomach turned. I tried to picture a daughter drinking blood from her own mother and it was too disturbing an image to hold for long.
"And what of your own children?" I asked Evelyn.
"My children have moved on, Mr. Spinoza," she said, glancing at my card that was still on the coffee table. "They think mummy is dead and we'll just leave it like that. My kids were always...in the way. And just a little too tempting."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Young blood...is particularly fresh."
She looked at her mother who was watching this whole exchange with a frozen smile. Her cheek muscles twitched as she held the smile.
"You kill people," I said.
She grinned. "I kill lots of people, Mr. Spinoza. It's kind of what I do."
"What are you?" I asked.
"What do you think I am?"
"A bitch. A user. And a parasite."
The mother looked at me sharply. "I will not have such language - "
And that's when Evelyn Drake lunged forward, leaping -
Chapter Twenty-one
I didn't want to kill her.
Especially not in front of her own mother. It was all so fucked up.
But she didn't give me much choice.
Her strength was alarming, especially when she had appeared so visibly weakened. Or perhaps that had all been an act to catch me off guard.
With her mother screaming behind her, Evelyn's hand went straight for my throat and squeezed with such force that my neck would have snapped or been crushed within seconds.
The angle of her body was such that I didn't have to even adjust the crossbow. As darkness rapidly approached the corners of my vision, I fired the weapon.
The first thing that I notice was a loosening of her grip. The next thing I noticed was the strangled sounds I heard...of course, those strangled sounds were my own feeble attempts to breathe.
The next thing I noticed was the woman on the ground, kicking and clawing her chest. It was a site I'll never forget. Steam hissed from between her fingers. Her screaming mother dove on her, pulling at the silver shaft that protruded from her chest.
"My baby! My baby!" She worked the bolt with both hands as the vampire writhed and twisted and screamed.
Gasping, I found my feet, and just as the mother pulled free the bloody crossbow bolt, which dripped blood and meat, the woman on the floor lay still.
Mrs. Perkins threw herself on her daughter, wailing and begging her to come back to her.
And that's when I turned my head and heaved until my stomach was empty.
Chapter Twenty-two
I was in my office drinking a latte from Starbucks. Starbucks has a new scone, called a petite vanilla bean. Being petite, I got three of them. They were damned good.
Too good.
I had just finished the last of the scones when Detective Hammer and his thick cop mustache came in through my door and set a big bag of greasy donuts on my desk. He looked at my empty Starbucks package.
"Don't tell me you had one of those scone things."
"A petite vanilla bean. Three of them."
"Oh, God. Any room left for a real breakfast?"
"You mean a real breakfast of donuts?"
"Is there anything else?"
"You are propagating the cop stereotype," I said. "And there's always room for donuts."
He placed a cup holder on my desk filled with two steaming cups of coffee. Coffee had splashed out of the little holes in the plastic lids and had stained the rims. I knocked back the last of my Starbucks, tossed the empty cup in the trash, and started on the fresh coffee Hammer gave me. We both picked our donuts, sat back in our chairs, and took a few bites before Hammer got things started.
"You work some strange cases," he said.
"Lately."
"This might be the strangest."
"Would be hard to top this one," I said.
Hammer finished his first donut with a massive bite. He washed it down with coffee and then dug out a maple bar from the bag.
"We made some calls," he said. "Talked to the right people. A very strange conference ensued between the prosecutors, myself and the warden at San Quentin, and ultimately the governor himself. And due to extraordinary circumstances, Edward Drake is now a free man. All charges have been dropped."
"It's hard to keep someone on death row," I said, "when his victim has been alive and well for a year and a half."
"She's dead now. At least, we think she's dead, whatever the fuck she is." He looked at me. "What are you some kind of vampire hunter?"
"Slayer," I said. "And, no."
"Well, needless to say we got the DNA to confirm the boy's status as her biological son. The kid will get his full inheritance. So you did do some good."
I nodded, happy for the boy, but feeling so weird inside that it was hard to put a finger on how I felt about anything these days. I have now killed two vampires.
Hell, maybe I was a vampire slayer.
Jesus.
I voiced a question that had been gnawing at me. "Did her DNA come back with any, I dunno, abnormalities?"
"You mean, did she have some weird vampire DNA?"
"Yeah."