Chapter Eight: Beneath the Rocky Path
The night was uneventful. No sign of life from the castle at all, apart from a flickering light of a fire in the main keep. Truman had expected an attack of some kind, if only to test the Team’s surveillance. The Andrastes must have known that they were watching.
In any case, they were now safe until nightfall. Truman left Skylar to watch the castle and took the rest of his Team to Beck’s house. The constable had called late in the night and said he wanted to help however he could.
Beck answered the door very quickly after Truman rang the bell. He was dressed in a shirt that had, presumably, been fashionable at one time, though Truman couldn’t pick when. Over it he’d put the kind of tweed jacket usually seen in heart-warming comedies about a determined teacher trying to reach a group of disenfranchised inner city kids. It even had elbow patches.
Beck’s left hand loitered on the doorknob while the thumb on the right hand ran across his fingernails. It made him seem guilty, even if it was just a nervous habit. “Captain.”
“Constable. Something wrong?”
“Me? No, nothing.”
“Good. Can we talk?”
Beck stood aside for them, then shut the door. When he turned back to the room, Clarkson was right in front of him. “Hiya,” he said.
Beck screamed. Truman rushed back to Clarkson and shoved him away from Beck. Dammit. They’d arranged how the introduction was to go and that wasn’t it! Truman had been concentrating on his phrasing rather on where Clarkson was.
“Constable Beck!” Truman shouted. Beck couldn’t hear him, though. He was staring transfixed at Clarkson while backpedalling until he hit the wall, dislodging a print of a Parisian café.
“Joel!” Truman yelled.
The screaming stopped only because Clarkson had clamped a hand over Beck’s mouth. Beck was still trying to scream through it, but not successfully. “Kind of the nervous type, isn’t he?” Clarkson said.
Truman leaned into Beck’s field of vision. “Joel, Clarkson is going to remove his hand. I need you to stop screaming.”
Beck motioned Clarkson and then held two fingers down in front of his mouth like fangs.
“Yes he’s a vampire. But he’s on our side.”
Beck’s eyebrows raised: your side?
“That’s right.”
The screaming had died off, so Clarkson removed his hand.
“This is Private Clarkson,” Truman said.
Beck scratched an eyebrow. “You’re… you’re really one of them, aren’t you?”
“Dude, it’s not polite to stare.”
Beck kept staring. “Sorry, it’s just, how often will I have a chance like this?” he said. “Your eyes are slits.”
“What? They are?” Clarkson ran over to the mirror on the dressing table. “You’re right! And I can see my reflection!”
“Clarkson, knock it off,” Truman said. “Slitted eyes is a vampire characteristic.”
“How is he out in daylight?” Beck asked.
“Doctor, a brief tutorial if you please.”
McGregor ran Beck through the basics of vampirism: how it was spread, how it manifest physically, what they should expect in a fight. Everything he’d told them last night or they’d learned on Archi.
“Any questions, constable?” Truman asked when all was finished.
“If they can only eat meat, why do they drink blood?” Beck asked.
Good question. They hadn’t done so on Archi – or if they had, they’d kept it very quiet – and Clarkson made disgusted faces whenever they suggested it to him. “We don’t know, but perhaps it’s worth investigating.”
Beck nodded. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“You can give us the town tour on the way,” Truman said.
They left the cramped apartment and climbed into the Team’s jeep. “It’s not a very big town,” Beck said as Mitchell pulled away from the curb. “The castle’s at the north-west tip; the coast runs south from there. The hospital is just a few streets away.”
It was more like a clinic with a few dozen beds, but what it lacked in size it made up for in overbearing gothic architecture. The building seemed to loom down at them with the promise of surgical horrors, leeches, and plague.
Inside, however, all was pristine and white, top-of-the-line. Beck got them past the nurses and into the a room with the two women who had the doe-eyed look of the gullible and hot twenty-year-old bodies that made hospital gowns look shapely. At Truman’s insistence, Clarkson remained out of sight by the door. Seeing a vampire probably wasn’t what they needed right now.
“Hello ladies,” he said, “I’m Captain Truman. I’d like to hear what happened to you.”
“Nothing,” one said, with a faintly superior air.
“Blood loss,” McGregor said, the doctor’s chart in hand. “On multiple occasions: these puncture holes aren’t quite round. Someone tried to bite in the same place several times.”
Truman turned to the women lying in the bed. “Ladies?”
“We’re fine,” the other said with the same confidence. Where was the fear? If the Andrastes had fed on them, why weren’t they begging for help?
“I’m here to help you,” Truman said, “but I can’t do that unless you tell me what they did to you.”
“Who says anyone did anything to us?”
Had they wanted it to happen?
“Clarkson,” Truman said. “See if you can talk some sense into them.”
Clarkson sauntered into the room, full of confidence and allure. “Let’s start with something easy,” he said, “how did they hold you? Was it like this?”
In a flash of movement, he was at one of the bedsides, leaning over the woman almost from behind, teeth inches from her neck, eyes gazing across into hers.
“Or was he a gentleman and looked you in the eyes?” Clarkson stepped back so he was in front of the woman and bent close to the right of her neck, wrapping one hand around the left of it.
“He was a gentleman,” the woman said. Truman didn’t like how deeply she was staring. When she had recognised him as a vampire, her whole body had changed. The hostile superiority was replaced by childlike suppleness and vulnerability. She was his plaything.
“What colour hair?” Clarkson asked.
“Blond,” one of the women said.
That was Leander, the eldest child.
“Black,” the other added.
Melanthios, the youngest.
“Were the others there?” Clarkson’s hand had slipped to rest on her shoulder while his thumb caressed her neck.
“Some of them.”
“We were chosen.”
“Did you want to be?” Clarkson asked.
“Of course.”
He leaned in. It almost felt that the others were intruding on a private moment. Truman reminded himself that this was supposed to be an interrogation. “Why?” Clarkson asked her.
The girl with Clarkson didn’t answer; couldn’t answer, possibly. She seemed too overjoyed at being touched by him to speak. The other said, “Because we love them. We give our lives to fuel theirs.”
Truman cocked an eye at McGregor, who understood the implied question. “I still maintain they don’t drink blood,” he said.
“We need to go now,” Clarkson said soothingly. “You ladies get well soon.”
It was Clarkson who led the way outside. Mitchell was a step behind, watching him closely, then Truman, and Beck at the back. When they were out in the fluorescent-lighted corridor, Clarkson spun to them. “We don’t drink blood. That’s just nasty.”
Beck looked lost. “But they…”
“So there must have been another reason to bite them,” McGregor said.
“Worship,” Mitchell said.
“Why would the Andrastes need worshippers?” Truman asked. “Why drain so much blood that they had to be hospitalised?”
“Because they like it,” Mitchell said. “Toying with people.”
/> That was enough of that topic. This was guesswork, not evidence. Time to move on. “Let’s go. Show us the sights, constable. Let’s take away their home-ground advantage.”
“Do you have a plan?” Beck asked.
“I want to be ready for whatever they do next. That means I need to know the battlefield. Do you have somewhere we can set up a proper base?”
“There’s an abandoned suburb to the east,” Beck said.
Within a few minutes the tall black buildings had given way to smaller dwellings more typical of a seaside town.
“This is the older section of town,” Beck said. Odd, really, since the tall buildings in the town centre were so obviously old as well. Older, judging by the architecture. Probably the town had expanded, but not had the population for both regions and these outskirts had died off.
“Looks like it might have been a nice place once,” Mitchell said.
“It was, I think. I was only a few years old when everyone moved to the centre of town, but it sounds nice.”
“It is. I grew up in a town like this.”
That was news to Truman. Mitchell’s file started with him living in an orphanage for a few days until the Mitchells adopted him. Truman had assumed he was abandoned there. “Where?” Truman asked.
“Three towns over. I recognised the road when we left yesterday.”
“The road?”
Mitchell just drove for a minute, but no one else spoke. “Where I was found,” he said at last.
“Found?” Clarkson asked. “I thought that story about the stork was just to throw kids off the scent about sex; are you saying—”
“I’m saying that when I was three, they found me wandering back to town, sopping wet, and with a broken arm and ribs”
“Where were your parents?” Truman asked. The conversation had become too serious for Clarkson to remain in charge of it. The wrong comment and Mitchell would put a bullet in him. Soon, judging by the sound of his voice.
“About a mile away, wrapped around a tree. Paramedics think I was thrown through the windscreen and into the stream beside the road.”
Truman remembered the road leading to Estika. It was quaint; one lane each way, with a tree-lined river running along one side and a stone fence along the other. Rolling hills, cows. Pleasant.
Until you thought about a car wrapping around one of those trees and a toddler being shot from the front into the grass and dirt and water.
“If I’d been wearing my seat belt, I’d have been killed,” Mitchell said. “My father was.”
“That sucks,” Beck said.
“No,” Mitchell said. “What sucks is that after his death, my mother put me up for adoption without so much as coming to see me.”
No one had anything to say to that. Any consolation would feel like making light of what had happened. There was no way any of them could understand what that must have been like, so they didn’t say they did. They didn’t say anything for a long while.
“You ever track her down and kick her in the teeth?” Clarkson asked.
“I don’t remember her. She’s nothing to me. Why should I find her?”
Truman hadn’t had the best relationship with his parents, but at least he’d known them. Although, if it had been a choice, he couldn’t say for certain he wouldn’t have rathered being alone. “Do you remember your dad?”
“I remember kindness, mostly. And the smell of toffees. He ran a sweet shop. I quite liked the orphanage and the Mitchells; they kept throwing parties for me. It was like my birthday and Christmas all in one.”
“You liked lollies?” Truman asked.
Mitchell grinned, a genuine grin of pleasure. Truman hadn’t seen one of those on his face in… years, maybe. He never looked away from the road, but Truman knew he was remembering a happy childhood or a particularly good haul. “I liked them okay,” he said, “but I lived for presents.”
“I never got anything good,” McGregor said. “My family tried, but they were buying the junior chemistry set when I was reading the A levels textbooks on the subject.”
“Do I even want to ask how old you were then?” Clarkson asked.
“About nine.”
Beck hesitated, then asked, “You’re some kind of genius, aren’t you?”
“I prefer the term ‘academically well-endowed.”
“Compensating for something?” Clarkson asked.
“You want another probing?” McGregor asked. “You can find out firsthand.”
Feisty. Sharing life stories was good for team-building. Truman would remember that.
“We’re here,” Beck said. Around them were streets of neglect, with the occasional spot of vandalism. “Once people started moving to the centre and a few houses emptied, it was harder to keep out the bad element. Eventually it was all bad element. Then they, too, moved on and entire streets were vacant.”
The Team picked a single-storey house for their makeshift hideout, broke in via one of the side windows, and unlatched the front door. Truman and Mitchell did a full sweep; McGregor and Beck waited in the main lounge room at the front. The previous occupants had left their furniture behind: old couches, a table and chairs, a creaky wooden-posted bed, an oak bookcase.
The place was utterly deserted and anonymous. Just what they’d need if the Andrastes attacked the nest overlooking the castle. They carted Mitchell’s weaponry out of the jeep. He’d brought more than Truman had told him to: tranquiliser guns, rifles, ammunition, a box of grenades, flares, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests and helmets, pistols, a rocket launcher, and enough PE4 to level a small suburb.
“You realise that if we use even half of this,” Truman said, “we’ll bankrupt the Team?” Financially managing a mostly-forgotten department was his least favourite part of leadership.
Mitchell shrugged. “I’d rather have it and not use it than not have it and need it.”
Truman nodded. “Fair enough.” He helped McGregor finish setting up his scientific equipment and turned to Beck. “Where to next, Joel?”
“West. We’ll follow the coast north back to the castle before cutting to the centre of the town. It isn’t very big. Maybe three thousand people, a square mile or so of land.”
Back to the car, back on the road.
“Did anyone ask about us yesterday?” Truman asked.
“I told people you were a crew location scouting for a gothic noir film,” Beck said.
“In costume?” Mitchell asked.
“You’re method actors.”
Crossing the town centre didn’t take long and soon they were at a lookout. The day was bitterly cold, the sun trapped behind clouds that teetered on the edge of rain, snow, or hail. Dark clouds flashed and swirled far out at sea, a wash of black and grey.
Since the storm wasn’t here yet, they left the jeep to stretch their legs. The cliffs were tall, as much as sixty feet above the beach and waves, and Mitchell and Clarkson admired the view as Truman stared over the town. Why had the Andrastes come to this town? Why here of anywhere in the world? What was so special about this place?
“Do many people commit suicide off these cliffs?” Mitchell asked.
“That’s a particularly macabre question for this early in the morning,” Beck said.
Mitchell pointed. “Or is that guy anomalous?”
“Where?” Clarkson asked from beside him. “I don’t see it.”
Beck rushed to his side, followed his gaze, then ran to a small path that wound back and forth along the edge of the cliff. Before the Team was halfway down, it was obvious that the pink shape was a person and, since it hadn’t moved and wasn’t in a comfortable position, probably a corpse.
Clarkson reached the beach well before the others, leaping down from zig to zag, landing easily despite the fifteen-foot drop between each path. Was it so easy for the Andrastes? Truman hardened his resolve; if he did his job right, they wouldn’t have to find out.
Clarkson reached the figure and stopped, panting. “Uh, you’re n
ot going to like this,” he said.
Down the narrow strip of beach they ran, Beck long since left behind, lacking the fitness of Truman and Mitchell. Even McGregor wasn’t too far back. Mitchell swept the area with his rifle for potential dangers. Truman just ran, eyes ahead. As he did, features on the figure became identifiable: he was completely naked, lying on his back with one arm slightly under him, brown-haired, tall, thin, and in good physical condition both athletically and decompositionally. He was blue at the ears, fingers, and toes, but didn’t seem to have any broken bones or missing limbs. His right hand had a fairly fresh gash across the palm, though. His head was away from them, his bearded chin pointing up to the sky, so Truman was standing above him before he saw the man’s face.
It was James Paddington.