Blood Walk Part 28

Maybe with the realization that the only h.e.l.l is what people make for themselves, Garreth thinks, lying with his arms around Maggie three nights later, breathing in the sweetness of her blood smell and the musky scent of their lovemaking. Maybe it ends with retribution. He has penalties to pay for killing Lane and the manner in which he has used the Dreiling boy to destroy her; that is only just. As much as he dislikes the boy, he felt sorry for him at the hearing today, no longer looking arrogant but white-faced and frightened at the consequences of his recklessness, clinging to his parents' hands. Garreth commits himself to making friends with the boy. It might even help straighten him out. He commits himself, too, to giving Anna Bieber friendship and support, to becoming a great-grandson. He regrets that the cemetery plot containing Lane's ashes cannot be marked with her name, but he will tend the grave. That should keep him reminded of responsibility and accountability.

Maggie stirs in his arms. "Why don't we move more to my side of the bed. Your side is so lumpy, like you have rocks in the mattress.""Nothing would be wrong with that," he answers, though he carefully shifts to her side, off his pallet. "Earth is healthy. It sets up positive vibrations with the human body." Grinning, he adds: "My veins carry the blood of an ancient lineage who always keep close contact with the earth and, barring accident or murder, live very long lives."

She sighs. "You're crazy, Garreth."

"Ah, yes, but it's part o' me charm, Maggie darlin'."

She giggles and snuggles against his still-bandaged shoulder.

He smiles down at her. Maggie is not Marti-how can there ever be another Marti?-but she fills some of his needs, as he does some of hers. If he cannot share his soul with her, perhaps that will save him future pain when he has to give her up. His differences cannot be laughed away forever.

A gulf stretches between him and normal humans, but perhaps it is not as wide as Lane tried to make him think, and a few slender bridges can span it if he makes the effort to maintain them.

"What did you talk about with your ex-wife today?" Maggie Murmurs.

"Brian." Dennis will adopt his son. Not that Garreth intends to give up all strings on him, though; he wants to keep track of his descendants. "Go to sleep. I want to run."

"You can't lay off until your shoulder and side finish healing?" She shakes her head and pulls the blankets over her head. "I always knew runners have a cog missing. Happy anoxia."

The bandages are nothing but props any longer, of course, hiding the fact that only slight scars remain of his wounds. But he does not tell her that. Sliding out of bed, he dresses in a warm-up suit.

The night outside is clear, the stars and sliver of moon bright as crystal in the icy sky. Garreth draws the air deep into his lungs and blows it out in an incandescent cloud of steam. He runs easily, taking quiet pleasure in his strength and endurance and in the vision that turns darkness to twilight. Briefly, he still wishes he could share it with a companion, then shrugs. Nothing is perfect and the solitude has a loveliness he is coming to enjoy.

The frozen ground streams beneath his feet. When something moves in his peripheral vision, he smiles. Three coyotes are falling in behind him, tongues lolling in predatory laughter.

He glances back. "Hi, gang."

Facing forward again, he lengthens his stride. Far ahead, a herd of cattle lies dozing. With his shadow escort pacing him, he aims for them. Nothing is perfect, but this is not bad. It is enough.

1

He dreamed of death, and Undeath. Inspector Garreth Mikaelian stood backed against the wall of an alley in San Francisco's North Beach, pinned by the hypnotic gaze of eyes glowing like rubies, unable to move even enough to ease the pressure where the handcuffs looped over his belt pressed into the small of his back. Red light glinted in the vampire's hair, too . . . not a beautiful woman, some distant part of him noticed, but she used her long, showgirl legs and mahogany hair to seem like one.

"You're going to like this, Inspector." She gave him a sultry smile. "You'll feel no pain. You won't mind a bit that you're dying."

There was pleasure in the touch of her soft, cool lips, and it persisted even after the kisses moved down his jaw and became bites pinching his skin in hard, avid nips. High-heeled boots made her five-ten tower even higher above his five-eight. La.s.situde held him pa.s.sive while she tipped his head back to reach his throat better.

Her mouth stopped over the artery pounding there. "Lovely," she breathed. "Now, don't move." Her tongue slid out to lick his skin. She stretched her jaw. He felt fangs extend, then she bit down.

A spasm of intense pleasure lanced through him. Catching his breath, he threw his head farther back and strained up against her sucking mouth.

Presently, though, as cold and weakness spread through him, concern invaded the ecstasy, a belated recognition of something unnatural, wrong. Evil. Fear stirred. He started to twist away sideways, but to his dismay could not move. Her body slammed into his, pinning him helpless against the wall . . . despite the fact that he outweighed her by a good fifty pounds. The fear sharpened.

Use your gun, you dumb flatfoot,a voice in his head snarled.

Her grip blocked him from reaching the weapon. He sucked in a breath to yell for help, but her hand clamped over his mouth.

In desperation he sank his teeth into it. Her blood scorched his mouth and throat . . . liquid fire.

The vampire sprang away, ripping out his throat in her retreat.

He collapsed as though drained of bone as well as blood.

She laughed mockingly. "Goodbye, Inspector. Rest in peace." Her footsteps faded away, leaving him face down in his blood.

Leaving him to listen in helpless terror to heartbeats and breathing that gradually slowed, stumbled, and stopped.

Garreth woke shaking.

Sitting up in bed, he leaned his forehead against updrawn knees, waiting for the adrenaline rush to subside. s.h.i.t. How many times did that make for the d.a.m.n dream this week?

Except that it could not be called a dream exactly. A dream was something one woke from, returning to the ordinary. For him that would be his San Francisco apartment, and joining his partner Harry Takananda in the Homicide squadroom at the SFPD's Bryant Street station. Instead . . .

Garreth raised his head to look around the den-come-efficiency above Munic.i.p.al Court Clerk Helen Schoning's garage in Baumen, Kansas . . . wood paneling, leather chairs, kitchenette, and closet forming one side of the corner bathroom. The uniform hanging on the open door, tan shirt with dark brown shoulder tabs and pocket flaps to match the trousers, belonged to the Baumen Police Department. Despite heavy drapes which left the room in midnight darkness, he saw every detail clearly, even to the lettering on the shirt's shoulder patch. The daylight outside pressed down on him like a great weight. And his throat already tickled with building thirst.

He did not wake these days, merely exchanged one nightmare for another. The vampire was memory, not dream. She had existed . . . Lane Barber, born Madelaine Bieber seventy years ago in this little prairie town where he tracked her, where he had killed her. But not destroyed her.

Falling back against the pillow to the accompanying grit of dried earth in the air mattress beneath the sheet under him, he sighed.

In all honesty, he had to agree that Bauman probably deserved better than to be called a nightmare. Everyone believed the cover story he used to justify asking questions about Lane, that his father had been her illegitimate son. They accepted him as one of the Biebers, albeit a strange one, no doubt because he came from California. The 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM shift despised by Baumen's five other officers suited his needs perfectly and the rolling hills around town pastured plenty of cattle who never missed the blood he took from them.

Vampires did nothave to drink human blood.

It was a quiet town, unnoticed by the rest of the world, a good place to hide, to bury himself-he smiled wryly-at least until someone began wondering too much about his quirks, and why he never aged.

And then? When he wanted to leave this nightmare, what did he wake up to? Where did he go?

The pressure of the unseen daylight outside shifted. Approaching sunset.Rise and shine, my man. Garreth swung out of bed and after folding it back into a couch, headed for the bathroom.

He shaved without turning on the light so his eyes would not reflect red. A sharp-boned face with sandy hair and gray eyes stared back at him from the mirror, boyish-looking despite the mustache he had grown and still a stranger's face even a year and half after replacing the beefier one he had grown up with.No, boys and girls, he mused, running the humming razor around the edges of the sandy mustache,it isn't true vampires don't reflect.

As he dressed, the tickle in Garreth's throat grew, flaring to full-blown thirst. Taking a thermos from the little refrigerator, he poured some of the contents into a tall gla.s.s and leaned against the counter to drink.

The cattle blood tasted flat and bland, like watered-down tomato juice, never satisfying the appet.i.te, no matter how much he drank; but he refused to become what Lane had been, preying on people, drinking them dry whenever she felt it safe to do so and breaking her victims' necks to keep them dead. He scowled down into the gla.s.s. Since he got along on animal blood, that was all he would use! He just wished . . .

Garreth finished off his breakfast in a gulp and rinsed out the gla.s.s in the sink.I just wish 1 could like it .

2

Garreth's key let him in through the back door of the police department's end of City Hall. Chief Danzig and Lieutenant Kaufman had both been gone since four o'clock, when Nat Toews-p.r.o.nounced "Taves"-the Evening officer, came on duty, but as usual Danzig had left a written briefing. Sue Ann Pfeifer, the evening dispatcher and clerk/typist, looked up from the communications desk dividing the office and reached across it to hand Garreth the notes . . . warrants issued by the sheriff's office down in Bellamy and in surrounding counties, requests on activity to be watching for, a bulletin on a nationwide manhunt for two men who had robbed a bank in California then killed a highway patrol trooper in Nevada, a synopsis of the day's activity . . . items the shift sergeant in a larger department would have covered verbally at rollcall.

"Nat's rattling doors downtown. Maggie radioed that she's on her way in," Sue Ann said. "Have a cookie."

Garreth grimaced. "I'm allergic to chocolate, remember?"

"I wish I was." She sighed, patting a generous hip.

The smell of her blood curled around Garreth, warm and tantalizingly salty-metallic, pulsating with the beat of the dispatcher's heart. Thirst flared in him.

Pretending to become engrossed in the briefing notes, he unzipped his fur-collared winter uniform jacket and strolled away from her back to a desk by the locker room, where the other odors permeating the office drowned the blood smell: sweat and gun oil, coffee, the eternal plate of donuts and chocolate chip cookies by the coffee urn, scents of urine and disinfectant in the four cells upstairs.

Item Ten brought a groan of dismay. The bloodmobile visited Bellamy in two weeks. Not that again? "Does Danzig really want every one of us to drive down and donate?"

On the other side of the communications desk, Sue Ann smiled. "He says it's good public relations."

Vampire blood dripping into the veins of someone with a weakened immune system would not be good for the public, Garreth thought.

Lane had believed in a vampire virus carried in the blood and saliva. According to her, a healthy person's immune system easily destroyed small inoculations of the virus. The virus triumphed, however, in a severely weakened body, invading every cell and altering the host's DNA. Anyone transfused with Garreth Doyle Mikaelian's blood would certainly live, but at what a price. Worse, some nurse or doctor might discover what the patient had become, might realize that far from being just myth, vampires actually existed.

He had to find some way out of donating.

A key clicked in the lock on the back door. Moments later Baumen's bestlooking officer strolled up the short hallway between the locker room and Danzig's office. Grinning at Garreth, Maggie Lebekov tossed her cap onto a desk and combed the fingers of both hands through her curly cap of dark hair. "You'll have fun out there tonight."

He pushed aside the problem of the bloodmobile. "Rough shift?"

Her blue eyes crinkled. "Mine wasn't, but . . . it's the first Friday after Easter and all those virtuous abstentions for Lent are over with. Business is booming at the bars and private clubs. By midnight, you'll have your hands full of DUI's. Oh, and take your slicker; there's rain headed our way."

"d.a.m.n." Kansas spring storms could be exhilarating with their roiling purple clouds sweeping in from the west in a spectacular play of lightning and thunder, but on a night like this shift promised to be, rain meant only headaches.

Maggie followed him to the locker room. As he took his equipment belt and clipboard out of his locker, she wrapped her arms around him. The speedloader cases on her belt pressed into his back below his jacket. "What say I set my alarm for 0400 and come over to your place in time to soothe your aching body after the shift?"

The scent of her blood enveloped him, beating at him. Pretending he needed the room to buckle on his equipment belt, he moved out of her arms.

He ought to tell her not to come, he knew. It would be in her best interest to break off the relationship entirely. Over the year and a half that they had been seeing each other her nearness and the blood running warm and salty beneath her skin increasingly brought the hunger boiling up in him with such a fierceness that the effort of denying it left him shaking. And yet . . . he could not face the thought of always coming home alone.

Hating himself for his weakness, he said, "I'll look forward to seeing you," and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. Maybe her presence would chase off the nightmares.

3

Rain coming in indeed. Thunder grumbled to the west while he checked the equipment in the patrol car's trunk. Climbing into the car, Garreth racked the shotgun and switched on the ignition prepatory to testing the lights and siren.

All h.e.l.l broke loose. Above him the siren screamed. Red and white lights flashing across the building and the other cars in the lot told him the light bar was on, too, and the left turn signal. Both the car and police radios blared at top volume and the windshield wipers sc.r.a.ped across the windshield at full speed. The air conditioner blasted him with cold air. A knee cracked against the steering column as he jumped in startlement. With the pain, though, panicky confusion-what did he turn off first?-gave way to a return of rational thought. He switched off the key, then opened the door to lean out and glare back at the department's rear door.

"You're dead, Lebekov."

Maggie grinned wickedly from the top of the steps and jumped back inside.

Shutting off all the switches before he tried the ignition switch again, Garreth chuckled. But amus.e.m.e.nt faded by the time he pulled onto the street. The problem of the bloodmobile seeped back up. What could he do? He had manufactured a bout with flu the last time, so the excuse of illness had been used up. He needed something else this time.

"Bellamy S.O.," Sheriff Lou Pfeifer's voice drawled on the radio, calling his office. "Emma, call Dell Gehrt and tell him he has cattle out on 282 north of the river again. I almost hit one of his steers."

Garreth swung the car onto Kansas Avenue. The motorcade was in full swing, two lines of traffic on each side of the railroad spur running up the middle of Baumen's main street, teenagers from Baumen and surrounding farms and smaller towns driving cars, pickup trucks, and vans on an endless loop that stretched north to the Sonic Drive-in this side of the railroad station, across the tracks, and south past Baumen's three-block shopping area to the A & W near the edge of town before turning north again. The vehicles parked down both sides of the street and along the tracks belonged to patrons of Bauman's movie theater, open only on weekends, and to adults drinking and dancing in the local bars and private clubs.

Garreth cruised south. His radio muttered sporadically, mostly with traffic from the Bellamy PD and sheriff's offices in Bellamy and surrounding counties. Around him kids honked horns at each other and shouted back and forth between cars. A few cars zigged around others to catch special friends and he kept an eye on one pickup he remembered citing twice last month for jumping lights, but for the most part, traffic remained orderly, following its ritual pattern.

He pa.s.sed Nat Toews checking the doors of businesses and honked a greeting at the stocky cop.

When the cruise circuit crossed the tracks and turned north. Garreth did, too. Presently a sleek black Firebird with four girls inside pulled up beside him on the inside lane. A blond girl in the pa.s.senger seat rolled down her window and leaned out, smiling.

"h.e.l.lo, Garreth."

Garreth sighed. Amy Dreiling. Well, it was inevitable that he run into her sooner or later this evening. "Good evening, Miss Dreiling."

"Do you have to be so formal?" She pouted prettily. "You always called my brother by his first name."

Only to his face. For a long time Garreth had other names for the banker's son he used in private and with fellow officers.

"Scott and I shared what you might call a professional relationship."

"If I buy a customized van and drag race and run stop signs with it like Scott did, will you call me by my first name, too?"

Mention of the van abruptly took Garreth back to another night on this street, an icy one two Thanksgivings ago with him struggling across the treacherous, deserted thoroughfare, bleeding and weak from arrow wounds Lane had inflicted. He held the beautiful vampire prisoner, helpless in the rosary he had managed to wrap around her neck. At the roar of a motor he looked up to see Scott's van and a pickup dragging on the far side of the street. Inspiration flashed . . . a way to destroy Lane by using this boy who continually dared the police to arrest the son of a city father. He hurled himself and Lane across the tracks into the van's path, snapping Lane's neck as he did so.

Brakes screamed in memory, followed by the shriek of metal as the skidding van wrapped around a telephone pole in a vain attempt to avoid hitting the two of them. Then fire enveloped it, set by Garreth to incinerate Lane's body.

Later, however, he had made friends with the boy, stabbed by guilt at the sight of a pale, frightened Scott facing charges of vehicular homicide in juvenile court. With the arrogance knocked out of him, Scott was not a bad kid. Garreth had actually come to enjoy having him ride along on weekends.

Garreth smiled politely at Amy. "You'll do better driving carefully. Good night, Miss Dreiling."

He turned right at the next corner and patrolled the side streets. It netted him two cars with expired tags and one without handicap identification parked in a handicap zone. It gave him satisfaction to call for a tow of the latter, then while waiting for the truck, he also wrote the car up for a broken outside mirror and a missing lens on a tail light.

Thunder growled louder in the west.

Nat's voice came over the radio announcing he was back in his car.

The pace of the evening picked up. Garreth answered a complaint of a barking dog and vandalism on parked cars in a residential area. Between calls, his mind churned. Whatwas he going to do about the bloodmobile?

Lightning flashed in the west, now, accompanying the nearing thunder.

On a swing back down Kansas Avenue, Garreth spotted Nat parked at Schaller Ford and turned in to pull up window-to- window with the other officer's car.