“Creepy,” I whispered.
I was about to return to my body when something told me to keep searching. For what, I did not know, but I’d learned to trust this something, this inner guidance system, so to speak.
So, I continued scanning the house, slipping in and out of rooms and hallways and bedrooms. I came across a door and pushed through it, and ended up going down a narrow flight of stairs. The stairs dead-ended into another door, which I mentally pushed through.
Basements were uncommon in California, but not unheard of, especially if someone was a psychopath or a vampire running a secret blood ring. Or both.
The room beyond was small and composed entirely of brick. My guess would be very thick bricks. Sound-proof bricks. There was a drain in the center. Most important, there was a young woman in the room, shackled to the wall, her arms above her head, whimpering uncontrollably. Like something out of a medieval dungeon. She looked like anything but a willing donor.
Jesus.
I snapped back into my body. I considered all my options, from calling Sherbet to breaking the girl out of the basement prison.
In the end, I decided on one course of action.
One obvious course.
I continued up the driveway and up the front steps. There, I gathered myself, and was about to break off the doorknob, when the door opened, and the broad-shouldered man smiled at me.
“Samantha Moon,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing toward the interior of the house. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Chapter Thirty-one
My inner alarm remained silent.
Except this seemed like a damn good time for my inner alarm to be going crazy, but it wasn’t. Not a peep. I opened my mouth to speak, to ask who, exactly, had been waiting for me, and who, exactly he was.
Instead, I studied the man before me. Thick, broad-shouldered, handsome. He wore a frozen smile. Not quite the demonic smile I’d seen recently at the Washington island, but pretty damn close.
“You’ve been expecting me?” I thought of my conversation with Sanchez. Had she compelled him to report to her, as well? I think probably, which is why he’d called at such a strange time. To follow up. To see where I was in my investigation. And report his findings.
“Yes, Ms. Moon. Won’t you please come in? We have some things we need to discuss.”
“Some things?”
“Yes.”
“What things?”
He smiled even bigger, and now it did look demonic. “Inside, Ms. Moon, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do mind?”
He said nothing, only smiled and cocked his head a little, and it occurred to me that he didn’t have an answer for that question.
Or, I thought, he wasn’t given an answer.
I hadn’t come across many instances, if any, of another vampire compelling a mortal, but I thought I was seeing one now. Trusting my inner alarm, I nodded and stepped past him. He turned and watched me as I went, and shut the door behind me.
I knew Hanner’s home well enough. It was a big home, with the bottom floor dug into the hillside. The upper deck overlooked the rare Orange County woods and the many larger homes beyond, one of which I’d ventured into, meeting, perhaps, the creepiest man on planet earth. A man who had bargained with years from my son’s life.
But just as quickly as the old man entered my thoughts, he left again. After all, the smell of blood was thick upon the air.
My stomach growled, and I salivated like the ghoul that I was.
I ignored my stomach, too, and followed the broad-shouldered man through Hanner’s home, following a path from the front door to the dining area, a path I had taken a handful of times before this.
The house was dark, except for a single light in the kitchen. Back in the day, back when Hanner and I had been pals, I’d rarely ventured through the house. In fact, she had almost always made it a point to lead me from the kitchen to her balcony with its majestic view of the woodsy canyon.
I hadn’t known about the basement.
No, not a basement, I thought, as I followed the man into the kitchen, a dungeon—a torture dungeon.
I shuddered. And as I did so, I saw three figures waiting for me in the kitchen. Two were living, and one was very much dead.
The living figure was the woman I had seen in my surveillance of the house. She was sitting alone at the far end of a long dining room table. Before her was a cloth napkin. There was something clearly under the napkin, something small and lumpy. The cloth napkin was stained crimson. The woman, who was maybe in her early thirties, was smiling, too. That same serene and creepy smile.
The ghost behind her was of a woman, but decidedly younger, perhaps in her early twenties. The ghost was particularly bright and well-defined, which meant she’d died recently. At least, that was what my experience told me. Anyway, her ethereal, energetic body crackled with living shards of light, light so bright that I was stunned these two couldn’t see her. Then again, maybe they could and were ignoring her, but I doubted it. I had only to remember my pre-freak days, back when I couldn’t see such spirits, either. Those were good days.
It was obvious that her neck had been cut open with something sharp. Her staticy body was so well-defined that I could actually see ghostly hints of tendons and muscle inside of her exposed neck. Whoever she was, she’d been drained and killed, right here in Hanner’s house.
The man, oblivious to the spirit, went over and stood by the side of the seated woman. They both smiled at me, both cocking their heads, both compelled to act against their wills.
“How do you two know Detective Hanner?” I asked them.
The man spoke. “We are her private source.” He sounded excited, like this was an honor, a privilege, and something as great as being chosen for the next manned mission to the moon.
“You live here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered, sounding, if possible, even more excited. “We both do.”
I noticed their wedding rings. “Are you two married?”
“Yes,” said the woman. As she spoke, she kept her head tilted to the side. “We met Detective Hanner on our honeymoon.”
“How long ago?”
The man and woman continued staring at me, continued smiling and tilting their heads. “Over three years now,” said the man.
“You’ve lived here for three years?”
They both looked at me, blinked, and smiled. “Oh, yes,” they said in unison.
I shook my head and took in some air and continued smelling the strong scent of the red stuff. Blood, that is. Everywhere. In particular, something bloody under the napkin before the woman.