Dad sighs.
“Yes, he did,” Mom says.
I lean back in my seat and stare at my parents. I’d imagined losing them hundreds of times to a vampire attack, but it never once occurred to me that they would get turned and one of us would have to …
I shudder. It makes sense. We often split up to get a job done faster or scout out an area. It would be easy to get turned and catch someone by surprise and what else could you do but …
A small laugh escapes my mouth. “Well, let’s just hope Dad never has to go there.”
“Daphne!” Dad says.
“Sorry,” I say bitterly. “But it’s not like it isn’t a possibility.” Anger wells up inside me like a crashing wave. For the millionth time I wonder why they didn’t quit after I was born and get some freaking normal jobs. Any jobs. Hell, I’d live in the worst trailer park in the world and proudly say my parents flip burgers for a living instead of doing this.
“Could you stake me?” I ask, the words coming out before I can stop them.
Dad shoots a look at Mom. “You had to go there.”
“This is Harker’s fault, not mine,” she insists.
“Could you?”
Mom turns around and faces me. Her cheeks are flushed and her jaw is clenched. “Yes, Daphne, I could.”
I look away from her, shaking my head. “I wish I could say I’m surprised,” I whisper.
Dad pulls the van into the police station parking lot and cuts the engine. He puts both of his hands on the top of the steering wheel and then rests his forehead on them.
We sit in silence for a few minutes and then Mom unbuckles her seat belt. “Daphne, you know what we’re up against. You know why we do this,” she says as she organizes the paperwork in her lap.
I look down at the binder filled with dreams and hopes I’ll never get to live. “I know why it has to be done; I just don’t know why it has to be us.”
Mom looks up at the roof and Dad reaches out and takes her hand. She bows her head and leans into him. “Who better than us?”
“It’s not fair,” I say. “Why don’t I get to choose whether or not I want to do this?”
“Look, Daphne, your mom and I each have our reasons. There have been some things from our past we wanted to shield you from—maybe that was the wrong approach. Maybe you’d be more accepting of what we do if we’d been up front with you.”
“Enough coddling her,” Mom says. “Daphne, we need this job. You know how tight money is. And with what the Harkers have told the police, we’re going to have some explaining to do. I just hope you’re mature enough to hear what we have to say and conduct yourself properly during the interview. None of your sulking. It was embarrassing watching your eye-rolling in the Buffalo office; that’s not the kind of behavior that will persuade someone to give us work.”
“Fine!” I snap.
“Maybe she should wait in the car,” Dad says. “We can talk to her later.”
Mom scoffs. “They’re expecting three slayers for the briefing. She’s coming with us.” She pulls down the sun visor and tilts her chin up, applying fresh lipstick in the faded mirror. She purses her lips and then flips the visor back up. “Are we ready?”
“Does my hair look okay?” I ask sarcastically. “Wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.”
Mom gives Dad an ignore her look and then they get out of the car. I shake my head, almost wishing I’d inherited Mom’s robotic lack of emotion. I open the door and think about the job we’re trying to secure, and all the jobs we’ve been on. My stomach churns and I swallow back some bile rising in my throat. What fresh nightmares could my parents have tried to shield me from? What could possibly be worse than this?
2.
“So you see,” Mom continues, “it wasn’t negligence on our part; we simply didn’t realize how far gone my father-in-law was.”
Officer MacCready sips his coffee and then swishes it around noisily in his mouth. “Leaving someone in his condition alone for any amount of time is never a good idea, and given his background, leaving him with a child—why, I might go so far as to call it gross negligence.”
Mom shakes her head rapidly. “No. I freely admit that was a misjudgment on our part. But you have to understand the pressure cooker we were in. And he’d never left a hotel room before so we had no reason to believe he’d leave.”
Officer MacCready picks up a sheet of paper on his desk. “But he did, and that little misjudgment caused an innocent person to get staked. I know you people are working under extreme conditions, but that is a serious safety issue. You get full government healthcare; it would’ve been easy to have him committed.”
Dad nods but doesn’t say anything, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I guess this is why Dad hardly ever talks about his father. Vince Van Helsing Sr.—his brain destroyed by dementia—left me alone in a hotel room and staked a fourteen-year-old honor student, thinking she was a vampire.
Un-freaking-believable.
I stare straight ahead and try to reconcile the vague memories I have of my grandfather reading to me in hotel rooms with the fact that he murdered an innocent person. I was four when he was taken away by the police. Mom told me he was going to a nursing home. I guess I should be thankful they spared me the gory details of what really happened.
Mom sits up and folds her arms across her chest. “No question it was a horrific incident, but the bottom line is my husband and I were not directly involved and we were cleared of any wrongdoing. As you can see from our résumé our record has been spotless and citizens’ comp payouts have been minimal. The fact that Nathan Harker brought this to your attention yet failed to mention his own unorthodox approach to extermination which resulted in having to stake his wife as she was attacking their own son speaks for itself.”
My mouth drops open and a queasy feeling overtakes me. This is getting worse by the second. I knew Mom would bring this up to help secure the job, but hearing her laying it out there—that Mrs. Harker was killed as she was actually trying to …
I bite my lip and try to erase the image from my head.
“Well,” Officer MacCready says calmly, like this isn’t stomach-turning news, “I called the folks heading up the Midwest/West Coast Vampire Control and that Harker fellow has himself a bit of a reputation. Seems he had a drinking problem. Authorities threatened to take his son, but …” He appraises Mom and Dad. “Well, you know how the government cuts you specialists some slack in the child-rearing department, among other things.”
Dad clears his throat. “Daphne here passed her GEDs with a ninety-five percent, and got her diploma at age fifteen. We in no way slacked off on her education.”
Officer MacCready’s eyes drift over to where I’m sitting in a corner and I turn away. It’s obvious he has little respect for my parents—can’t say as I blame him. Few people stick with the vampire-slaying gig for long, but those who do are given tremendous leeway about how they run their affairs, including looking the other way while bringing children on hunts.
“Harker is a bit of a loose cannon,” Officer MacCready continues. “He’s been written up for quite a few unnecessary stakings made in front of citizens and you know the municipalities hate having to pay the comp money to keep people from talking, but he also has the ability to clean a town up quickly.” He shakes his head. “It kills me when the federal government refuses to foot the bill. Like we have crystal balls that can predict vampire infestations when we do our yearly budgets? Add in a bad winter where any surplus we had goes to snow removal and we’re screwed.” He leans back and his computer chair groans under his considerable weight. “Where the hell are we supposed to come up with comp money?”
“Well,” Dad says, “there are times when dispatching vampires in front of citizens is unavoidable.”
Officer MacCready nods. He pats his large belly with his hands as he looks back and forth between my parents. “I suppose you’re right, but if I can’t get an assurance that the folks here in town are
n’t going to be exposed to a staking and beheading, what’s to keep me from hiring Harker? His bid came in a thousand dollars under yours. He had a lot of ideas about all of those babies ending up in the hospital too.”
I lean in, wondering if this was the “strange” stuff Mom was muttering about.
“Sounded like Harker knew what he was talking about,” Officer MacCready continues.
Mom takes a sharp intake of breath and exchanges a quick look with Dad. “We’ll match his price.”
“What?” I gasp.
Officer MacCready smiles. Even though we do get perks like full medical coverage, our fees are determined by how much a town can afford. With the recession showing little improvement and slayers underbidding each other, money has been tight. Mom and Dad keep talking about some of the repairs the van needs so I know knocking that much money off our fee is killing her. This also means I won’t be getting a cut like they promised, which means no curling iron and maybe even no magazines.
Mom and Dad have a great reputation, so even though there are at least a dozen other licensed slayers getting calls for bids, we usually get the higher paying gigs. Apparently the Harkers have something of a reputation too.
Mom folds her hands in her lap and puts on her best I-know-what-I’m-talking-about face. “And I’ve been giving the other problem a lot of thought. If your local children are falling prey to a mysterious malaise, I’m thinking there may be psychic vampires feeding off their energy much like a parasite.”
Officer MacCready sucks some coffee through the gap in his front teeth. “According to Harker, attacks on children like this by energy or pyschic vampires are almost unheard of, yet we’ve had sixteen infants hospitalized for anemia and unexplained weakness—four more this week—and no common denominator connecting the victims. With the influx of vampires our little town has attracted recently, Harker thinks something else is involved.”
“Well, it could be a number of things,” Mom says. She starts fussing with the papers in the folder, obviously trying to buy some time to think.
I’d heard Mom and Dad talk about psychic vampires before and I think Mr. Harker is right. Most psychic “vampires” aren’t vampires at all, just everyday people who for one reason or another have never been able to maintain their physical or mental energy and wind up “sucking” energy from their friends, family, or coworkers.
Dad said a lot of times these people are controlling or emotionally needy, but some aren’t even aware they’re doing it. I don’t know a lot about it, but besides being all kinds of wrong, sucking energy from an infant doesn’t sound very satisfying and I can’t help but wonder what the Harkers think is going on.
Dad clears his throat. “Did Mr. Harker share his thoughts with you?”
Officer MacCready shakes his head. “He didn’t go into detail but you can ask him yourself.”
He beckons with his hand and I turn to follow his gaze. A man is peering at us through the window next to the door. He nods and a cocky smile breaks out on his face. He struts in and I take an immediate dislike to him. He’s wearing a long, black trench coat over a dark turtleneck, jeans, and heavy black boots. His thinning hair is greased back and he looks—and smells—like he’s in need of a good night’s sleep and some body wash. His skin is paler than mine and his sunken eyes are underlined with dark circles.
“Vince, old buddy, it has been too long,” he says, “and Joy, looking good as ever.”
Mom jumps up and looks mad enough to charge, but Dad puts a hand on her arm and she simply stares the man down. “What are you doing here, Nathan?” she asks.
He smiles and fidgets with what I’m assuming is his wedding ring. “Same as you, looking for work. Seems we’d been doing such a good job out west that all the gigs dried up. I tried some construction work but that just ain’t for me, so the boy and I decided to expand our territory.”
“Seems to me,” Mom spits, “you got a reputation for being a jackass and couldn’t find any ‘gigs’ so you had to crash ours. We had an agreement to stay in our own territories.”
Nathan Harker bows his head. “That was a long time ago, Joy, and I have to go where the work is. Surely you can’t fault me for that.”
Before Mom can answer, his eyes find mine. My cheeks redden as he looks me up and down and a slimy smirk breaks out on his face. “Are you your mother’s daughter or what?” He laughs and slaps his knee. “Spitting image.” He turns to Mom. “Bet she’s got your fiery temper to go with that red hair.”
Suddenly the room erupts in yelling. Mom is in Mr. Harker’s face and Dad is trying to pull her back, begging her to calm down. Officer MacCready whistles loudly and everyone turns to him. “Folks, if you all were hoping to impress me, you’re going about it the wrong way. Let’s have a seat and discuss this like mature adults.”
Mom’s chest heaves up and down while Mr. Harker nods and smiles. “I would like nothing more than that,” he says. “I’m sure we can work out an amicable agreement.”
Mom wipes her mouth like she’s trying to rid herself of a bad taste and stalks over to me. “Daphne, I don’t see any reason why you can’t start on reconnaissance. You know the drill.”
“But we don’t have the job yet,” I say quietly. I look over her shoulder and see everyone is watching us.
“We will,” she says. “And the sooner we can get this over with the better. Go.”
I nod and grab my large purse off the chair. “Okay. I saw a pub when we pulled into town. I’ll start there.”
I shut the door on my way out and let out a long sigh. What a freaking mess!
“Hey,” a voice says right behind me.
I jump and turn around, heart pounding. A greasy-haired boy about my age smiles down at me hesitantly. He’s wearing a long, stained trench coat identical to Mr. Harker’s so I’m guessing this is his son. I try to remember what Mom said his name was, but decide it doesn’t matter. He’s got jerk written all over him just like his father.
I look him up and down the way his father did to me and take in the tragic Goth look he’s sporting. Head to toe black complete with tight jeans and T-shirt emphasizing his skinny frame, guy-liner, keys hanging from a chain off his belt loop, and a skull-and-crossbone–adorned messenger bag for which I decide to cut him some slack because he does need to carry his stakes and knives in something. “You always sneak up behind people?”
He smiles wider. “Ha, yeah, that wasn’t real smart of me.” He leans in close. “Lucky for me you didn’t pull a stake out,” he whispers like this is supposed to be funny.
I take a step back—the guy definitely needs a shower. “I gotta go.”
I turn and he puts a hand on my arm. “Wait.”
“Get off me!” I say, yanking my arm away from him.
He holds his hands out in front of him as if he’s going to deflect a punch. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, but I just wanted to talk.” He runs his fingers through his hair, pushing his long bangs aside. “It didn’t sound like things were going too well in there. My dad was hoping we could all, you know, work together.”
I give him an incredulous look. “Are you for real? Your dad tried to sabotage this job for us and he thought we’d want to team up and go all Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery special together?”
He bites his lip and looks down at the floor. “He kind of panicked when he heard it was your family that was going to be here. And he only said that stuff because we really need the work. He was kicking himself for it afterward, really, but he was also hoping maybe …” He shrugs.
“You know what I hope?”
He peers out at me from behind his bangs.
“I hope you two go back where you came from and leave us the hell alone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some recon to do.”
I storm down the hall and push the outside doors open as hard as I can. The cool air smells of low tide and my head starts to clear. That guy is seriously deluded. I can’t believe he even had the nerve to try to talk to me a
fter what his father did.
What an idiot.
I walk through the parking lot to the main street and admire the red-tinged clouds hanging in the darkening sky. I check the sunset schedule Mom printed out—the sun officially set fifteen minutes ago. It would be nice to go to the nearby dock and look out over the water and watch the stars come out, but I’ve got work to do. I undo my braid and put my hair band in my coat pocket. I shake my hair out and then reach into my purse for some red lipstick. I swipe it on and take a quick peek in my hand mirror. Amazing what some lipstick does to make me look a little older.
I zip up my purse and head for the pub. Hanging out in the local drinking holes is a great way to overhear gossip and look for vamps trolling for dinner. I’d already loaded my wallet with my fake Maine driver’s license and several credit cards to give the illusion that not only am I old enough to drink, but I’m also poised to ruin my credit by maxing out all my cards like so many other twenty-one-year-olds I’ll be pretending to be.
As I approach The Rusty Rudder, I pass an alley and catch a glimpse of a bright pink car. In some parts of the country pink cars aren’t that unusual, but the color seems glaringly out of place in northern Maine. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I turn back and duck into the alley dividing the pub and a bookstore. I unzip my purse and put one hand on a stake because finding vamps skulking in dark alleys is fairly common in any part of the country. Drunk guys pissing behind bars and restaurants make for perfect victims. It’s sad the number of drained bodies we’ve found with their pants around their knees.
As I get closer I see it’s a Cadillac—with a purple THE DISCO UNICORNS magnetic sign on the bumper—parked next to a Dumpster stinking of rotting food and stale beer.
The Disco Unicorns are a kiddie-rock band that I absolutely loved when I was little. They had their own TV show. It was hard not to wish I was one of the kids singing and dancing in the Unicorns’ Pink Pony Playhouse instead of watching my parents sharpen stakes or wipe blood off knives in whatever cheesy motel we happened to be staying at.