It was not my idea of fun, although a brief image of nibbling on Kingsley’s fat lower lip did pop into my mind. And I left it there, in my mind. Where it belonged. Hidden and buried.
No, I had nothing against Kingsley. Not even these days. But our time might have come and gone. He had had every chance to be with me, and, in a moment of weakness, had decided that some young floozy was worth more to him than me.
Yeah, it still rankled, and, yeah, I might never truly forgive him for it, even though he had been set up by Ishmael, my one-time guardian angel. Set up to fail.
Still, I happened to believe that his feelings for me should have been stronger than a few minutes with some stranger. But it hadn’t been, and to this day, we weren’t together because of that.
One strike, I thought, as I stepped into the middle of the mostly empty parking lot, and you’re out.
Of course, Kingsley had been trying to make up for it ever since, even standing by and mostly keeping his mouth shut as I had dated—and perhaps even loved—another man.
Now that I was single again, Kingsley had respectfully kept his distance, but he’d made it known that he was interested in more. A lot more. That he had gone out of his way, twice, to save me, were feathers in his cap.
We’ll see, I thought.
The parking lot was lit with overhanging industrial lamps high up on stanchions, spaced evenly throughout the unusually big lot. Surely, there was more parking here than the Starbucks needed. In fact, I knew this area to be a popular holdover or changeover for people on their way out to, say, Vegas, or down south to San Diego. This was a way station, so to speak, for travelers. Still, why the parking lot was so big was beyond me...until I saw the answer.
And it came in the form of a big, rumbling, diesel smoke-belching recreational vehicle, or RV, pulling into the parking lot from the side road.
As it lumbered toward me, I saw immediately the benefit of the epic space, to accommodate the bigger vacation vehicles, and, undoubtedly, big rigs, too.
Yes, it was a true way station.
The RV parked in due course. A moment later, an elderly couple stepped out, stretched, and headed up to Starbucks. Both smiled and said hello to me. I smiled, too, and turned and watched them go.
That I briefly envisioned pinning them down and feasting, first off the man and then off the woman, should have caused me more alarm than it did.
In fact, the thought seemed perfectly normal.
Uh, oh.
Snap out of it, kiddo, I thought, and heard Kingsley’s voice in my head. Or was it Fang’s? Maybe a blending of the two.
I focused on the task ahead. The task being, of course, to figure out how a grown woman had disappeared off the face of the earth inside of a Starbucks.
Standing in the center of the parking lot, I turned in a small circle as the sky above grew darker. As it grew darker, the tiny filaments of light that only I could see, appeared, slashing and darting and giving depth and structure to the night. A million fireflies. Hell, tens of millions. Billions. All flashing and forming and reforming.
Early on, the flashing lights had nearly given me seizures. They had taken some getting used to. Now, I knew that each particle of light was, in fact, giving life to the night itself. They formed a sort of staticy laser light show for me and me alone. Now, seeing them was second nature for me. Up close, there was less static. What these light particles were, I didn’t know, but I always suspected I was seeing the hidden energy that connected all of us. Humans and vampires alike.
Spirits themselves seemed to be composed of this very energy, as I had watched countless such entities form and reform, disappear and reappear, all using this sort of Universal Energy.
Weird shit, for sure, but welcome to my life.
Now, I searched within the staticy light particles for something that could be dead. Something that could be watching me in return. But I saw nothing. Just the dancing lights that jived and boogied through my vision.
The lack of spiritual activity was significant. It meant that someone hadn’t recently passed here. That someone hadn’t, in fact, been murdered. This, of course, was just conjecture on my part and was based on my own personal experience with the spirit world. Murdered souls often lingered, sometimes for decades, in the locations of their deaths. I had seen such souls. Hell, I had seen a few today when I was driving along the freeway, standing by the side of the crowded thoroughfare, and forlornly watching the living drive by. These, I knew, had perished there on the freeway, in car accidents, no doubt.
Why the dead lingered, I didn’t know, but I had seen my fair share of them. So much so that they were now part of my life. My creepy, creepy life. In my experience, spirits appeared in one of three ways: either as souls visiting the living, as the forgotten dead, lost and haunted, or as a memory of itself, neither alive nor dead, repeating itself over and over.
I saw none of that here.
Murder sites also had an effect on the environment. A very obvious effect. At such a location, the swirling light energy was even more chaotic. It would swirl and scatter and explode...reminiscent of an active volcano spewing magma. Often, though, I would see another kind of energy within this disturbance. Spirit energy, too. The murdered victim, in fact. Not always, but often.
There was no such energy here. Instead, the light particles swept through naturally, peacefully, unhindered by the shock of death.
I walked the perimeter of the expansive parking lot, which took a few minutes. The east side consisted of a low shrub wall that bordered the Taco Bell next door. At this hour, Taco Bell had more customers than Starbucks, with a line of cars wending through its drive-thru. I spied surveillance cameras above and around Taco Bell. Anyone heading this way would have been picked up by the Bell’s cameras, too. I logged this away for future inquiry.
I continued around the perimeter. The south-facing part of the lot, opposite the driveway into the parking lot, was interesting. There were lots of places where someone could hide here. A strip of land bordered it, with the freeway itself next to it. Trash and weeds crowded for space, all of which I saw clearly, thanks to the bright streaks of light that illuminated the night. I continued standing there, scanning.
Sure, there were lots of places to escape to, once a person actually left the Starbucks cafe. So far, there was no evidence of Lucy Gleason ever leaving, only entering.
I studied the Starbucks from the parking lot, taking it in. It was part of a small strip mall: attached to it was a dry cleaner, and next to that was a Subway. The Taco Bell was in the next parking lot over, separated by a shrub wall.
I spotted two surveillance cameras, one on each side of the building. Starbucks itself had only one entrance inside, with a rear entrance as well. I frowned and studied the scene, biting my lower lip, but not hard enough to draw blood.