FAMILIARS

By

George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

About The Author

Copyright 2016 by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

Cover design by: 187designz@gmail.com

This is a work of fiction and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

BLOOD RUNNERS: ABSOLUTION (Book 1 of 3)

BLOOD RUNNERS: DESIGNATED SURVIVORS (Book 2 of 3)

AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS (Book 1 of 2)

AMITYVILLE: REVENANTS (Book 2 of 2)

RAZORBACKS

RAZORBACKS II

RAZORBACKS III

THE PACT

THUNDER ROAD (Book 1)

THUNDER ROAD (Book 2)

VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (Parts 1 through 4)

Who can live with this consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?

- Allen Ginsberg

Chapter One

Two little blobs of light. Evan saw them in the distance, or at least he thought he saw them. The road was dark and there was the mist and of course Lucy was driving like a crazy person, so he couldn’t be absolutely sure.

He turned from his perch behind the car’s headrest, a sober-faced boy of twelve with the soft, yet haunted eyes of a combat veteran. His gaze hopped from the rural seaside highway to the dark shadow in the back of the car, the bulky thing under the heavy plastic sheet that lay under the hatchback. For a second he thought it moved.

“Do you see them?” a voice barked.

Evan didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he turned and studied the woman driving, his mother Lucy, who was nervously running a hand through a dark canopy of greasy hair.

“Goddammit, Evan,” Lucy said, flinging a volcanic look at him, “do you see the headlights or not?”

“I don’t see anything, Miss Lucy.”

Lucy let out a ferocious sigh and eased up on the gas.

“You said a curse word,” Evan said, slumping in his seat, staring through the windshield at a glimmer of water just over the horizon.

“I know I did. I’m sorry.”

“You said never to say a-”

“I know what I said.”

“You’re scared, Lucy.”

“Am not.”

“You only swear when you are.”

“I’m totally fine so drop it,” she said, lowering a quivering hand down to float the dial on the dash radio. It was full of static.

“Are they gonna catch us?”

Lucy arched an eyebrow in Evan’s direction. He was holding her look, trying to be something other than the impulsive boy that he was. She could tell by the way he didn’t break gaze that he still trusted almost everything she said. That’s one of the things she loved about him the most. She wondered how long that would last.

“Have we ever been caught before, Evan?”

“There’s always a first time for everything.”

“Says who?”

“Nobody says, that’s just something you know.”

Lucy turned off the radio and headlights, taking a sharp left on a dirt road only she could see.

Minutes later, the car gouged down a switchback barely wider than a goat path. A ribbon of dirt that curled over a hillside to the ocean.

A quarter mile in, Lucy wedged the car between a brace of boulders and a thicket of saltbrush, leaving the keys in the ignition.

Lucy and Evan exited the car and Lucy scanned the dunes and cliffs that rose up over them. The moon was full and afforded an excellent view of the rural high ground. Lucy smiled because there were no signs of movement. She opened a rear door as Evan shadowed her. He watched her remove several items from the car: a plastic squirt bottle, rubber gloves, a sponge, and a jug of gasoline.

“I ever tell you how brave you are?” she said, turning back to him.

“All the time.”

“Don’t sound so excited.”

“When you say something over and over it kind of loses its meaning.”

“How old are you again?”

“Uncle G says twelve going on fifty.”

Lucy frowned, tossed the squirt bottle, gloves, and sponge to Evan who crawled inside the car and spritzed the surfaces with a water/bleach solution, wiped it, then chucked the items on the front seat. Lucy waited a few seconds for the solution to dry, then doused the interior and exterior of the car with gasoline.

Evan’s nose curled up, the air tanged by the gas scent. Lucy popped the hatchback and assumed a lifting position near the bulky item in the back.

“Gonna need your help.”

Evan didn’t respond.

“Ev?”

Evan remained as inscrutable and rigid as a fence post.

“Can’t do this without my main man.”

Evan slowly nodded.

“On three we do like before,” she said.

He mustered another slight nod and moved aside Lucy, sliding his hands under the bulky item. His fingers felt the cool plastic sheeting and the contours of the thing hidden beneath it. He tapped a finger on it, expecting something to rise up and attack him. Nothing did.

“One, two,” Lucy said, crouching low, hands under the object, “three!”

They torqued the item out of the car and began carrying it down to the beach.

In seconds they were hauling the plastic-wrapped object down over the scrub-studded steppes that spooled to the water. Evan watched the waves pounding the surfline. His shoes filled with sand and his little brow knotted with sweat.

“Almost there,” Lucy said, Evan wondering how much the item weighed. One-hundred twenty pounds? One thirty maybe?

Lucy planted a foot in a hole and fell forward as Evan lost his grip and the item crashed into the sand. An arm slid out of the plastic. A bone-white limb attached to a hand with manicured nails. A little tributary of red ran from some point inside the plastic and pooled in the palm of the hand before dribbling into the sand.

Evan blinked. It was the juxtaposition of the white arm against the red blood under the moonlight that was so jarring. He crouched and looked into the plastic and saw the faint outline of a young girl with a savaged neck.

“What was her name?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He looked up at Lucy.

“What was her name, Lucy?”

“I don’t know. I swear I don’t. But she’s okay now, Evan. She’s not in any… she’s gone to her rest.”

Evan reached for the girl’s hand.

“Don’t,” Lucy said. “Do not touch that.”

“Prints?”

She nodded and Evan helped her lift the body and carry it into the freezing water. Sandy muck sucked at Evan’s shoes as he helped Lucy slide the body out into the deeper water. They watched the body rise and fall as the waves ushered it into the darkness.

Evan collapsed on the beach and Lucy plodded past. She marched forward and flung a lighter at the car, causing it to erupt in flames. Lucy was eerily backlit by the burning car as she raced down the beach and stood before Evan.

“I know what you’re going to say, Evan, but this is our job, okay? This is the way it’s always been and will always be.”

Evan stared at his mother and then his mouth unhinged and he screamed and screamed.

Chapter Two

Five Years Later

The once soft eyes had gone hard. That’s the first thing Lucy thought as Evan pulled up in the primer-splotched Audi hatchback and doffed his dark wraparounds.

She rose from the curb in the summer heat and scoped the ride as Evan’s window powered down.

“You like the new wheels?”

“Very snazzy,” she said with a nod. “Where’d you get them?”

“At the place where such things are gotten.”

Evan eased his lanky, nearly six-foot frame out of the car as Lucy did a lap around it. She stretched out her hands to measure the length of the space in the back.

“Don’t worry,” Evan said. “I checked first. Little shy of six by five. It’ll fit him.”

She looked back as Evan reached into the vehicle and grabbed an oversized duffel bag.

“I feel like, maybe, we should’ve gone with a minivan,” she said after a moment’s pause.

“You’re actually complaining?”

“Merely thinking out loud.”

“Know what I had to go through to get this thing?”

“Know what I had to endure to bring you into this world? We’re talking sixteen hours of labor, kiddo, and the goddamn epidural didn’t even work.”

“You said a curse.”

“Probably the least bad thing I’ll do today.”

He shrugged the duffel bag over one shoulder, Lucy at his side.

“Remind me why we have to do this, mom?”

“Lucy or Miss Lucy if you please,” she said, mimicking a southern drawl.

“Why am I still calling you that?”

“Because when you’re on the clock you use business names.”

“But it’s weird, like you’re the madam of a brothel in New Orleans or something,” Evan replied.

“And how would you know about that?”

“Given what we do for a living, Miss Lucy, there’s lots of stuff I shouldn’t know about that I know about.”

Evan walked down a trail toward an inner city park as Lucy hustled after him. They passed a few joggers and families with kids, the trail leading to an asphalt path that serpentined to a plaza of cement wreathed by greenery. The families appeared to have retreated from this area which was peopled by surly-looking teens who were slapping palms and capering about near warped picnic tables and rusted barbecues.

Evan tossed the duffel bag open to reveal several items: a chest-protector of the sort a baseball umpire might wear, a dented catcher’s helmet with a tongue of plastic to shield the throat, and a four-foot long wooden dowel.

Lucy donned the protector and helmet and adopted a defensive stance.

“Do you know how ridiculous we look?” Evan asked, fighting to avoid the glances from the other kids.

“I’d rather look ridiculous than be unprepared. Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

“This is totally your thing.”

“It’s our thing and one day it will be all yours.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“It’s steady work, Evan.”

“So’s cleaning the floor at a slaughterhouse, but you don’t see people lining up to do that do you?”

Lucy punched Evan in the side of the head. Evan startled from the stinging blow which caused him to bite down on his tongue. He tasted his own coppery blood and his eyes narrowed. He fists balled up and then he eased back and thumped Lucy in the chest.

“Here we go, here we go,” she whispered.

Evan proceeded to bob and weave, sparring with his mother. He threw a series of punches that she parried. She swung back and he ducked and dodged and responded with three wicked jabs.

She smiled while watching her son shuttle and pivot on the balls of his feet. He didn’t have the same build as his father, but the moves (at least when Clark was younger) were similar. Clark had been more powerful, but the bulk that drove the power slowed him down. He was lead-footed and predictable, especially toward the end, but not so with Evan who was cat-quick and agile.

Lucy dropped to her haunches and grabbed the dowel. She swung it at Evan who jumped, the wood grazing the heels of his shoes.

“Whoa! Attaboy, Evan,” she said, delighted.

She brought the dowel down and Evan caught it between the palms of his hands. A moment passed between them and then Evan wrenched it loose and flung it away. Lucy snapped back the catcher’s helmet, winded.

“You’re getting better. I mean it, Evan, you’re stronger and I can tell that your stamina has-”

“Soon as I’m eighteen I’m gonzo, Lucy. I just wanted you to know that.”

She mulled this over for an instant.

“Gone as in-”

“Boom. Resigning my post. Out of here.”

“Okay, so where will you go?”

“Figure I’m just gonna bolt. Get the hell out of Dodge. Leave it all behind.”

“Your father and I tried leaving it all behind once.”

“And?”

“Sometimes ‘all’ has a way of following you.”

Gales of laughter and a few barely audible expletives caught Lucy’s attention. She looked over a shoulder.

Some of the teens from before, three males, two white and one black, swaggered across the grass. They shared a whisper and laughed again, separating to encircle Lucy and Evan.

“You beating up your old lady, bra?” the black teen asked.

“Not exactly,” Evan answered, peering at the ground, twisting his foot in the grass.

“Well what the hell exactly you doing, dude?” one of the whites asked, “practicing for some bullshit cage-match or something?”

The other boys roared with laughter.

“We’re doing our jobs,” Evan replied.

One of the white boys, a wannabe gangster with tatted, pipe-cleaner arms, sauntered forward and planted a finger in Evan’s chest.

“Anybody who fights a girl is a pussy.”

“Actually, we were training.”

“Anybody who trains with a girl is a faggot.”

“Leave him alone,” Lucy said.

“Fuck off, grandma,” the boy said, waving his hand dismissively.

“Why don’t you come make me,” she said.

The boy turned and smiled and his comrades hooted and hollered.

“Wouldn’t mess with her if I were you,” Evan whispered.

The boy shoved Evan back and advanced on Lucy who removed the chest protector and dropped it to the ground.

“Better leave that thing on, bitch, ‘cause when I finish with you you’re gonna wish you had-”

Lucy’s hand shot out so quickly, the boy’s words collapsed in his throat. She latched onto his neck and brought a knee up into his chest. That’s all it took and down he went. The black boy saw this and pounced, throwing a fist that Lucy caught in her left hand. The boy’s eyes were as big as hubcaps, shocked at the woman’s strength. The ropy muscles in Lucy’s arms snapped taut like rubber bands. She angled her body around and punched the boy in his solar plexus. He let out a puff of air and folded up like a pocket knife. The last boy was dancing back and forth, enraged and terrified all at once. He ran screaming at Lucy who punted him in the groin, dropping him like a poled animal.

Lucy rubbed her hands and cracked her neck side-to-side, staring down at the heap of boys near her feet. The black boy looked up at Evan.

“Shit, man, that lady fight for a living or something?”

“Yeah,” Evan said after some thought, “I guess you could say that.”

Lucy gathered up the gear in the duffel bag and Evan threw it over a shoulder. He headed back to the car as Lucy shadowed him.

“I could’ve handled myself back there,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then I assume you also know that what just happened is totally not normal, right?”

“Yep, know that too,” she said, a zippered smile on her face. “But since when were we ever normal?”

Evan stopped and pointed at the sky. Twilight was just beginning to cloak the land, the sun sinking like burning gold over the horizon.

“Better get our stroll on,” he said. “Gideon will be getting up soon.”

Chapter Three

Evan jimmied the screwdriver into the steering column and gave the boosted Audi some gas. He and his mother motored down through stretches of Baltimore City that had seen better days. Evan gaped out his window as a landscape of desperation and decay swept past: weed-strewn lots drowning in rusted car carcasses, block after block of rowhouses in formerly blue-collar neighborhoods now on life-support.

The Audi shot down Key Highway and was soon moving through the high fence that protected one of Baltimore’s six public marine terminals. Lucy directed and Evan drove past men and machines hauling and stacking cargo containers of all shapes and sizes.

There was a guard holding up his hands at a security gate that wreathed the actual docking areas where the cargo ships disgorged their contents.

“You know this guy?”

“No, but the Gentry does.”

Evan slowed and powered down his window, keeping his knee in front of the screwdriver. Lucy handed Evan a laminated badge with numbers and symbols.

“Ultimate backstage pass,” she said.

Evan flashed the badge at the guard who waved them past.

Evan eased the Audi down a gravel road and parked between a pair of titanic, dry-docked tanker ships. He clutched a series of lifting straps while exiting the Audi. Lucy greeted him, a small handcart at her feet, hands outstretched, as if she expected him to lob the straps.

“I’m seventeen,” he said.

“Really? I had no idea.”

“I told you before. I can handle myself.”

“I realize that, but I didn’t get permission for you to go in to do the actual initial extraction.”

“Since when does the Gentry micro-manage?”

“They don’t usually, it’s just… what’s the sudden interest?”

“If you’re working somewhere it’s good to know the business from the ground floor up, right?”

“Thought you were quitting.”

“I’m hedging my bets.”

A moment and then Lucy smiled and nodded. She reached in the Audi and grabbed a small black backpack hidden under her seat. It was an old canvas thing with a wonky zipper that was acquired at a county fair in Northern California. It housed her “tools”: a tiny UV light, a pry bar, a CO2-powered ballistic knife that held three long silver blades, a fist-sized pistol, and a small centrifuge-like contraption that was taped to several vials of liquids.

Evan hated the idea of actual violence and because the backpack symbolized that to him, he loathed it. He’d dreamed of tossing the thing away and had gotten up the stones to hide it a time or two, but in each instance she’d found it.

“You’re actually bringing that?” he said of the backpack.

“You wouldn’t expect a cop to walk a beat without cuffs and a Glock would you?”

“But we’re not cops. We… we’re Familiars.”

Her face fell at this.

“That’s certainly an archaic term and has been since ‘The Change,’ which you’re well aware of, mister.”

“We’re glorified bullet stoppers.”

“Bullets can’t stop them.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Whatever, Evan. I’m tired of the snark so if you’re coming let’s go.”

Lucy checked the pistol’s magazine and then secreted the weapon near the small of her back. She slipped on the backpack and signaled for Evan to grab the handcart and follow. The pair soon found themselves standing in shadows cast by the ships that were so dense they nearly turned dusk to midnight.

Evan followed Lucy who consulted a map on her smartphone as the two nimbled over a path made of wooden planks the width of a large man’s shoulders.

The sounds of men conversing and jawing mixed with the whine of engines on lifting machines somewhere off in the distance. Lucy and Evan steered away from this, moving to an older section of the port.

The ground was soon spongy and small herds of insects flew sorties around Evan’s head as he swatted ineffectively at them. More vessels were visible up ahead, smaller ones, older, far less impressive than the mighty ships they’d seen before. They made their way to a sad-looking dry bulk cargo container whose exterior was tagged with Turkish lettering.

Evan pointed at the lettering.

“Is that Turkish for ‘Demeter’”?

Lucy ignored this, moving around the side of the ship. There were two ways onto it: a metal ladder bolted to the side, and a ramp that had been lowered on the aft of the vessel.

They entered the hold via the ramp and the tiny hairs on Evan’s forearm immediately stood at attention. The air dripped with the miasma of decay and nothing stirred. Not even an insect.

Evan looked back and could see clouds of gnats hovering just outside the ramp. It was as if there was some invisible field that prevented them from moving inside.

He looked ahead to see boxes and containers of all sizes strewn across the hold.

“We better hurry.”

“Cool your jets,” she said while hunting through the containers.

“You know what happens when the sun goes down.”

At this, she glanced back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know how their kind is.”

“‘Their kind’?”

“You’d prefer I say-”

She held up a hand to silence him.

“Don’t – do not call your Uncle that.”

“He’s not my real Uncle.”

“And you’re not to use that word. The ‘V’ word. It’s offensive to them. It – it’s a slur, okay?”

“What would you have me call him?”

“How about his name?”

“Gideon Redmayne?”

Lucy nodded.

“Right, because that totally doesn’t scream the ‘V’ word at all.”

“You’re a snot, Evan.”

“Come from a long line of ‘em,” he replied, turning, scanning the things in front of him. He set the handcart down and spied crates of clothes from Indonesia, barrels of Olive Oil from Greece, and cases from China overflowing with plastic dolls.

One of the dolls had spilled through a gap on the case, a tiny female baby with a lazy eye that was fixed on Evan. For an instant the doll’s visage resembled someone Evan had seen in the past. A nameless face from one of the young, usually pretty women that he and his mother had periodically disposed of. There had been a few men as well, a teenager in Arizona and a middle-aged father in South Carolina, but the women always came back to him.

There was the redhead in Sarasota, for instance, and the tall one with the gapped teeth and excellent legs in Chicago, and the young girl from back on the beach who made cameos in Evan’s nightmares every now and again. She’d been about his age when it happened.

Evan heard the low throbbing of drums. They weren’t real of course, he knew that. The sound began as little more than a whisper and increased in intensity depending on the circumstances. Lucy and the doctors had chalked it up to some kind of tinnitus or Evan’s fascination with drumming, but Evan thought of it as, among other things, his natural “Spidey Sense.” Whenever danger was near, the drums would start to thrum.

“Bingo,” Lucy said and Evan nearly jumped out of his shoes.

He backtracked and vaulted over a heap of wooden boxes to the far corner of the ship. Lucy had a penlight on, sweeping it in the general direction of a long, nondescript pine box. The box was nestled amongst a series of metal lockers in an area of the ship cloaked in shadows.

“The shape. It looks… different,” he muttered.

“They’re using irregular boxes now,” she replied with a nod.

“To avoid detection?”

“To reduce waste. These new ones use twenty-percent less material than the old ones.”

A snicker escaped from Evan’s mouth.

“They’re being eco-sensitive?”

She looked back at him and flashed the light in his eyes.

“They’re the original recyclers if you think about it.”

She thought this was awfully witty and offered a smile to Evan that wasn’t returned.

“You gonna help me here or what, bub?”

Evan stepped toward Lucy and the air near the box felt charged, like it did before a summer squall. Evan’s goosebumps soon had goosebumps and in the final few steps a deep coldness gripped him and he noticed a dead bird lying at the side of the box.

“Don’t you need to check or something?” he asked, Lucy sliding the lifting straps under the box.

“Yes, sometimes I check.”

“Well, we should probably do that now. We don’t wanna hump the wrong dude out of here, right?”

Lucy stared open-mouthed at Evan and then she slid her pry bar under the outer edge of the box. She found the smallest of gaps and jimmied the bar in and then tugged back. The wood groaned and then the staples holding the wood together pulled free.

Lucy gripped the box’s lid and a funk, an almost biological stench, seeped out as the lid eased back. The interior was veiled in darkness and then a sliver of illumination from Lucy’s penlight ricocheted off the boat’s ceiling and reflected the pearlescent eyes of the man who slumbered inside.

Evan immediately thought of a time down in Texas when he’d spooked an opossum with a fireworks sparkler. The man in the box had the same kind of eyes which appeared to be covered by some kind of marble-white membrane.

Aside from his eyes, the man in the box was large jointed with a shock of sandy-colored hair, of indeterminate age, and his long face and high cheekbones gave him the look of a someone who was famished. He simultaneously sickened and intrigued Evan.

“Jesus,” Evan whispered.

“What?” she said, closing the box’s lid.

“It’s been a while, but… he looks so old.”

“He is.”

“I mean old even for his kind.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

“Dad always said they’re like bears. In hibernation. Can’t hear a thing.”

Lucy snapped off the light and used the heel of her shoe to press the staples back into place.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Evan and Lucy hefted the box and with some effort hauled it onto the handcart and then worked it slowly back outside until they were able to place it in the rear of the Audi. Lucy made sure to shroud the box with a set of old curtains she’d copped from the ship. When that was done she climbed into the car and slumped in the shotgun seat. Evan stared at the dashboard.

“Are we evil, Lucy?”

She blinked and then her eyes found his.

“How could you say that?”

“We just picked up a man who’s been alive for, like, several hundred years to hide him in a basement from people and things that want to kill him. It’s a reasonable question given the circumstances.”

“Can you just drive?”

“Can you answer the question?”

“You have a way of making things sound so… sinister sometimes, Evan.”

Evan keyed the ignition, but didn’t put the Audi in gear.

“Fine, okay,” Lucy said, drumming her fingers across the dashboard. “Let me ask you a question. Are zoo-keepers evil because they toss meat to the lions?”

“No, I guess not,” Evan said after some thought.

“Because they’re just facilitating what comes naturally to the lions, right?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“So there you go.”

“So that’s what we are? Facilitators? Zoo-keepers?”

“In a sense.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Lucy’s eyebrows elevated.

“It’s the family business, son.”

“Since when is indentured servitude a family business?”

Lucy wouldn’t dignify that with a response, preferring instead to stare straight ahead. Evan studied her face and knowing there was little percentage in continuing the discussion, he wrenched the Audi into gear and drove off.

Chapter Four

After navigating the downtown city streets north of the port for twenty minutes, the Audi stopped before a string of rowhouses in an area the locals called “Sandtown.” Sandtown was once known as the Harlem of Baltimore, but had, like most parts of the city, fallen on hard times.

More than a third of the houses in Sandtown were abandoned, unemployment was at twenty-percent, and it had more people in prison than any other neighborhood in all of Baltimore. It was a place where people hid or hunkered down before moving on to other, better places.

It was nearly dark out and the streetlamps were sizzling to life, casting light over a passel of older men that Evan watched from the Audi. They were shooting the shit on sagging stone stoops while delegations of younger teens rode bikes or tossed around old footballs. Beyond the outer edge of the light, however, Evan could make out more sinister happenings: older teens smoking and throwing mock punches and exchanging small objects that he couldn’t quite make out.

“Jesus, could you have picked a sketchier place to drop anchor?”

“You’re always complaining.”

“I think this is where they filmed ‘The Wire.’”

“Well, it is largely African American and that’s a good thing. They’re not as nosy as white folks, Evan, you know that. They’re also more understanding of differences and distrustful of the cops which means less chance of them reporting us.”

“Pretty sure that’s some kind of soft racism, Lucy.”

“The world we live in,” she replied with a shrug. “There’s an alley around back where the movers delivered our stuff.”

Evan drove through the alley, piloting the Audi between a chain-link fence that protected a backyard garage made of warped, wooden planks. A set of stormdoors had been thrown up on the back of the rowhouse.

Lucy and Evan exited the Audi and grabbed the pine box and lugged it across the backyard. In the past they’d taken great pains to conceal the placement of the box when moving out in the open: covering it with blankets or causing a distraction or waiting until the blue of night to move it in. Recent experience, however, had taught them that you were less likely to get noticed doing something that seemed part of your regular routine.

They paused near the stormdoors and Evan looked into the basement. The floor appeared to be equal parts crumbling cement and dirt, the walls made of quarried stone.

Evan hated places like this.

He hated how they had basements with sodden walls built of disintegrating stone or saturated cement block that seemed like an afterthought. He hated how you could close your eyes and listen to things dripping and smell the sour old funk of disuse. He hated their ancient, uneven floors and small rooms and copper wiring that frayed and caught fire if you turned on too many electrical thingies at once. And he hated, perhaps most of all, how they spoke of his (and his mom’s) station in life.

Amongst the Familiars and those they served there was a caste system. People didn’t like to talk about it, but it existed nonetheless. If you worked directly for one of the original families you lived in castles and high-rise apartments and yachts and mansions overlooking great bodies of water. You served and protected the kinds of graceful creatures you saw in movies and books. The ones possessed of the vague melancholy of the born beautiful, prancing around in velvet suits and silly hats to show off gym-torqued bodies as they frolicked with starlets and the well-heeled. The underworld’s version of the one-percent.

If, however, you worked for the offspring of these core families or (God forbid), the offspring of offspring, you slummed in places like Sandtown. You were, in the world of Familiars, little more than a blue-collar laborer who served things that were sloppy and unbalanced and intentionally kept out of sight in third and fourth-tier cities.

Oh, there were always stories about Familiars working their way up the ladder, but usually those kinds of things happened to younger people. Lucy was on the wrong side of forty and had lost her husband in the line of duty so the way things were was how they would probably always be.

Evan sighed.

“Nice digs.”

“Don’t knock it,” Lucy said, “free room and board.”

There didn’t appear to be a light anywhere so Evan whipped out his cellphone as Lucy raised a finger in protest.

“Relax,” he said, “it’s not like I’m gonna put him up on Instagram or something.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Social media.”

“My guess is it’s neither social nor media,” Lucy replied with a snort.

“How old are you?”

“Forty going on eighty.”

Evan waved the cellphone to get his bearings and then he and Lucy lifted the box and dropped down a short set of wooden steps. They moved across the basement and wedged the box near an old boiler, much like they’d done in countless other buildings on more occasions that Evan could remember.

They backtracked and stared at the wooden box. Lucy folded her arms across her chest. A small congregation of rats scurried near their feet.

“Free range, organic rodents,” Evan said. “Nice.”

“No, not nice at all.”

Lucy frowned and pointed to an area near the box where the Gentry’s movers had dropped off some of their belongings, including several metal lockers. They both knew that the lockers contained dry ice and a healthy supply of blood for Gideon.

The boxes were on their sides, either dropped or errantly unloaded. There was a gash in the side of each and red liquid could be seen seeping out.

Evan groaned.

“Don’t even tell me-”

“We need to make a run tonight,” she said.

They retreated back up the steps and closed the stormdoors. Lucy reached in her pocket and pulled out a chain-lock. She fastened it around the door’s handles and then tugged back on the lock to test it.

“C’mon, mom, I’m gassed.”

“You think I’m not?”

Evan’s head dropped. He knew she was going to ask him about the places he’d researched online. The ones that potentially housed food for Gideon.

“You have the address?”

He turned and stared down the street, catching sight of someone staring at him from a window. The person (he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman), quickly vanished behind a set of curtains.

“Yeah,” Evan finally said, “I found us a place.”

“How well is it stocked?”

“It’s solid,” he said softly. “Chock full of the red stuff.”

Chapter Five

A little after eleven, the Audi slipstreamed through the inner portions of Baltimore. It dipped down through a naughty part of the city, easing past a block of neon-bathed juke joints and peel parlors on Baltimore Street, then lapped up and around Saint Paul Street. Lucy stared outside until the Audi stopped near a veterinary clinic housed in a semi-industrial area.

“Sure they have a supply?”

“Four people on Yelp say they do.”

“We’re relying on Yelp now?”

“You asked me to gather intel.”

“I meant reliable intel.”

“Next time specify.”

She grumbled as he pulled the car over in a parking lot outside a dormant earth-moving company. Lucy and Evan sat in the car, staring at the vet clinic. There was a single light on inside the establishment, but no sign of movement. Better yet, there was no fence around it and no bars on the windows.

“Think they’ve got security?” she asked.

“What kind of lunatics want to steal animal blood at night?”

“Just you and me, pumpkin,” Lucy said, manufacturing an oversized smile.

They crouch-ran down the street, making sure to keep to the shadows. Evan carried an insulated duffel bag while Lucy clutched a small attaché case that contained several items that allowed easy access into most places: a set of lock-picks (including one fixed to the end of an Oral-B electric toothbrush), a small screwdriver, a pry-bar, and a long, thin knife.

Evan signaled for Lucy to follow him around back. Rear entrances were generally the best to access since most proprietors expended their energy safeguarding the front door. The light above the rear door was out which suited Lucy just fine. Evan held up his cellphone for illumination, revealing a padlock on the back door that could be bought at any hardware store for a few bucks.

Lucy pulled out the Oral-B toothbrush and fitted the lockpick attached to the end into the padlock and depressed the push-button. The device whirred to life, Lucy gently moving it up and down until the padlock popped open.

“Does your mom have serious skills or what?” she asked.

“I’ll remember to ask Child Protective Services the next time they’re around.”

“Oh, hush.”

Evan pocketed his cellphone and Lucy turned the doorknob, pulled the door slightly open to scan the frame for wires and/or pressure-plates.

“Nothing,” she said, “no security at all.”

“That’s a first.”

She shouldered open the door and the two moved through a back storage room. The air was heavy with the smell of animals and chemicals, the floors still damp from the evening’s mopping.

In Evan’s experience vet clinics were often cleaner than the inner-city hospitals and facilities that Familiars often scoped for human plasma. This was one of the primary reasons they lifted blood from them. That, along with the fact that Gideon was often paranoid about the stuff that came from human banks which were always more secure, in better neighborhoods, and difficult to tap anyway.

They breezed into a short hallway and Lucy caught sight of a door tagged with a bloodborne pathogen insignia. She continued toward that door while Evan stared down another corridor where a food dish was visible on the ground.

A damned large food dish.

A chill drove through him. He heard the faraway whop whop of his internal drums. The hair on the back of his neck ridged like porcupine quills. The drums quickly faded and he followed after Lucy who’d opened the door to reveal a region of pure blackness, a space with a single window that was as dark as the bottom of a well.

The room was divided by metal shelves that stretched floor-to-ceiling, but was so gloomy they couldn’t discern what was on either side. Paranoid about flipping on a light (or using a cellphone), they paused as the murkiness partially ebbed, allowing them to see a series of refrigeration units on the left side of the shelves.

They crept over and opened the units to reveal bags full of animal blood. Evan had done research and discovered this location stored blood for other clinics in the area. Peering down, he realized there was enough plasma to hopefully satisfy Gideon for several weeks.

When he was younger and first became aware of what his parents did, Evan was terrified at the thought of living with something that subsisted on blood. But as he got older, Lucy told him about “The Change,” the schism that developed between the families of old in the 1970s.

Spooked by the savagery that seemed to be engulfing the country toward the end of the ‘60s, the more progressive families (of which Gideon’s family was one), proffered the idea of rejecting violence and the drinking of what they called “Hemo,” human blood (specifically from the still living).

The more conservative families, those with lineages going back hundreds or thousands of years, refused to be anything other than what they were. They wouldn’t abandon the old ways or deny the thirst, and so the bloodlines bifurcated under a truce arranged by the council of elders, “The Gentry,” who still oversaw everything like some kind of long-distance guild.

Gideon and others like him, agreed to fight their urges and subsist on animal blood, and usually everything worked out. Emphasis would have to be placed on the word “usually” since Gideon had, in his mom’s words, screwed the pooch at least twelve times that Evan could remember.

“Score,” Lucy whispered as Evan roused from his daze. He opened the duffel bag and they quickly deposited the blood bags into it. That’s when he heard what he thought was a whimper. His back stiffened.

“What?” Lucy whispered, reading Evan’s look.

Evan didn’t respond, putting a finger to his lips, turning, squinting. Something moved in the shadows. He took a step toward the metal shelves and more things moved. Evan could see rows of metal cages with animals inside. Mostly cats and dogs presumably left for boarding.

Evan heard Lucy curse and then the first cat meowed. Lucy picked up the long knife, intent on silencing the feline when Evan grabbed her hand.

“Don’t,” Evan said to his mother, “don’t touch a hair on its head.”

She didn’t and this set off a chain reaction as a dog barked, then another, and finally a whole chorus of shrieks and whines ripped the air.

“Happy now?” Lucy growled.

A moment of confusion and then Lucy and Evan stumbled toward the hallway as a note echoed from somewhere up ahead.

Deeper.

Harsher.

The kind made by a large creature.

Dread gripped Evan as he realized the place actually did have security.

They sprinted down the hallway and Evan caught sight of an animal sharking through the pitch.

A colossal black dog.

The owner of that titanic food dish.

Coming from the other corridor.

Evan was unable to discern the breed, but the dog was thickly muscled and howled like an animal at a branding as it charged forward.

“MOVE IT!” Evan screamed as Lucy hit the back door, fumbling with the knob. The duffel bag dropped and she picked it up and Evan slipped and slammed into her.

They crumpled in a heap as the dog accelerated. Evan held his cellphone up. He could see ropes of saliva dangling from the beast’s mouth as it lowered its snout and went airborne.

Chapter Six

Time seemed to slow for Evan as the dog rocketed toward him. His hands shot up defensively and at the last second, hands grabbed and pulled back through the door as WHUMP! the dog smashed against the other side of the door with a whine. Evan fell on his ass, then looked up to see Lucy peering down at him.

She grabbed Evan’s wrist and muscled him up, the pair scrambling back to the car.

The Audi smoked off down the highway seconds later, Evan swerving through traffic. After a few miles, Lucy put a hand on Evan’s knee.

“Slow, slow her down, kiddo.”

Evan eased up on the gas.

“That was nuts wasn’t it?” Lucy said with a nervous laugh. “Perfect story for this year’s Gathering.”

Evan’s ears pricked up at the mention of the “Gathering,” which once had a much more elaborate name that was all but forgotten. The event was a once-a-year soiree for Familiars and the old-time vamp families and had, in the past, been held in secret on the tops of mountains or in little grottos carved into the middle of black forests. Generally speaking, it was off limits to anyone under the age of twenty-one.

“Mind explaining what happened back there?” she said after a few seconds of silence.

He didn’t respond.

“Ev? What was that whole thing with the cat?”

He looked over at her.

“It’s just… there’s been too much killing already hasn’t there?” he replied.

She didn’t have a response for this and turned to her window. She was worried about Evan in a way that differed from how a mother generally feels about their child. She was worried that he’d gone soft. The word “liability” crept into her head as it had several times in the past when the visits occurred.

Some of the Gentry (or their representatives) had dropped by several times over the years, both when Evan’s father was alive and shortly thereafter. The visits were always brief and cordial, ostensibly social, but Lucy believed the visitors had ulterior motives. She thought they really wanted to see if she could handle the job (sexism being one of the numerous things vampires were not immune to), and whether Evan would be up to taking over for her if and when she died or retired.

Whereas they focused on the physical attributes of some of the other Familiars’ children (breathlessly detailing 40 yard dash times or abilities to lift X times bodyweight), the best that could be said of Evan was that he was an exceedingly bright and thoughtful young man.

Bright and thoughtful.

Not the characteristics one associated with such a physically demanding job. Lucy responded by emphasizing that reasoning and strategy were increasingly replacing brute force. Wasn’t she a prime example of this? Weren’t her fluid movements and forward thinking the things that had saved her life back in Texas and countless other times? No, she’d repeatedly say to them, Evan wasn’t a liability at all. He was, how had Gideon described him? Differently circumstanced.

Lucy wished away the memories and bad thoughts as the lights of the city sparkled and danced across the windshield.

Fifteen minutes later, the pair were staring at the façade of their Sandtown rowhouse from inside the still idling Audi.

“We’re going to need to get rid of this car,” Lucy said.

Evan caught the glare from a streetlamp’s yolky halo of light and squinted.

“Somebody might have seen us,” Lucy continued, “and it’s probably been reported and God knows what else-”

“What will you do when I’m gone?”

Evan’s words hung for a moment.

“Excuse me?”

“Was the question not clear?”

Lucy bit her lip. She saw so much of herself in Evan at that moment. The nose that was crooked ever so slightly, looking like a piling on an old bridge. The way he held his head and looked her dead in the eye. The way he asked pointed questions that were difficult to answer and refused to give any ground.

“Do we have to discuss this right now?”

“I’d sure like to.”

“Because right now I’m thinking back on the time when you were hellbent on attending that summer camp for future business leaders when we lived in Sarasota.”

“I liked numbers.”

“Remember how I drove you down to sign up? Remember how I waited in the hall and then you walked out and said you’d changed your mind because the other kids were too pedestrian - your words, not mine.”

“I was nine.”

“You were no less mature than you are now.”

“What does my maturity level at that age say about you?”

“That I raised a well-adjusted kid.”

“Think my future psychiatrists will share that sentiment?”

Lucy’s hands went to her ears. She thought back on a time when Evan had gone to a public school in fourth grade. Assigned to write an essay on what his parents did for a living, Evan detailed the sometimes sordid life of a Familiar. Lucy had been contacted by the school nurse and given the name of several great mental health practitioners. She’d made the mistake of sharing this with Evan who’d never let her live down the fact that she’d chosen a lifestyle that forever would make him an outcast. 

He asked the question again, emphasizing the various ways in which their situation had caused him psychic trauma. Lucy looked like she might scream and then her hands stuck out as if she was trying to regain her balance. What an ungrateful little brat, she thought. Whining for the umpteenth time about everything she’d taken from him.

What about her? What about all that she’d sacrificed? Her family wasn’t a part of this, she’d married into it after falling for Evan’s father. Hell, they’d been going out for six months before he dropped the bomb and told her what he did for a living. She didn’t believe him at first, who would have? But even she would have to admit that it was exciting in the beginning. Learning the truth, discovering the secret world of the shadow dwellers.

Then the reality of it set in. The repetition. The inability to form and sustain real friendships. The shitty backwaters where they were forced to hide with their meager stipends, facing down death every day as they acted as overwatch for the sometimes bumbling and occasionally sociopathic scion of a family whose members she’d rarely even met.

She could’ve bolted when the marriage ran cold, but she’d stuck around for Evan. He was the first and last thing she thought about every day. She just wished he’d be a little more appreciative for all she’d done for him over the years.

Lucy took a deep breath and when she spoke her voice sounded unnatural, forced.

“Do you want to dispose of the vehicle or should I, son?”

“No, I’ll ditch it,” he replied.

She nodded, grabbed the duffel bag full of animal blood and opened her door. Then she leaned down and flung a final look at Evan.

“You worry me sometimes, Evan. I feel like … you want to unravel everything we have.”

He stared down at his hands, cracking his knuckles. There were a few seconds of silent introspection and then he looked up.

“God, mom,” he whispered, “when was it ever raveled?”

Chapter Seven

Evan removed the plates from the Audi and ditched it behind a half-vacant strip mall a quarter mile away from the rowhouse. Just as he’d done so many times before, he doused every inch of the interior with bleach and rubbed it down in order to obviate the need for a torching (only in exceptional circumstances did they still burn the cars).

When he was satisfied that every print had been snuffed out he removed the screwdriver from the steering column and headed back to the rowhouse. Along the way he got bashed with a few nasty looks from passersby, but the sight of a young white kid, screwdriver in hand, prowling the mean streets of Baltimore at midnight unnerved most of the locals. Most, but not all.

He was probably a hundred yards from the rowhouse when the hairs on his arms stood at attention. The drums started thrumming and his fear meter slowly ticked up. He felt eyes on him. A few more steps and then he did what Lucy had taught him to do when he suspected being tailed. He slid to a sudden stop. Whatever was following him, didn’t anticipate this and stutter-stepped. Evan heard the footfalls. Someone was definitely close by. He didn’t look back, choosing instead to walk briskly.

The footfalls matched him step for step Evan began to run. The drums in his head were pulsing, threatening to rupture his eardrums. He could see the streetlamps near the rowhouses shining like salvation in the distance.

The patter of feet echoed behind him.

Growing closer.

Louder.

Evan’s heart hammered his chest and his arms chopped the air. Terror leavening his steps, he wondered whether it was somebody who’d been following them or tracking Gideon.

A father, a brother, a heartbroken lover?

Coming to pay the bloodsucker back for some sin he’d committed in the past. He wondered whether his father heard the same thing when they’d come for him? Evan leaned into a dead sprint as the sound of heavy breathing grew louder.

He juked over a curb and hooked a right toward the edge of the first rowhouse. Invisible fingers danced off his neck as he turned the corner and a light blinded him.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

Evan skidded to a stop, hands up in a defensive gesture.

He blinked, eyes blinded by what he could see was a flashlight. A flashlight held in the hand of a powerful-looking black man sitting in a wheelchair. The black man held the flashlight in one hand, and a small baseball bat in the other.

“Take two steps forward,” the man with the bat said.

Evan did and heard footsteps behind him.

“Not you two fools,” the black man said, waving the flashlight at somebody behind Evan. “You, Caspar,” he said, aiming the flashlight at Evan’s face.

Evan moved ahead and looked back over his shoulder to see two young black teens in white T-shirts. They were smiling at Evan.

“We wasn’t gonna do nothing to him, Dez,” one of the teens said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Just welcoming him to the ‘hood.”

“You know what the problem with youth is?” the black man in the wheelchair asked one of the teens. The kid thought about it and then shook his head.

“It’s wasted on the young.”

The teens smirked.

“Do some laps, the both of you,” the black man said as the two teens took off, vanishing into the night.

Evan heard the hum of tiny motors as the black man swiveled a small joystick, piloting his wheelchair in an arc. He was five or six years older than Evan, legs as spindly as waffle-ball bats, his upper body ballooned with muscles. He waved the flashlight in the general direction of where the teens ran off.

“I used to run with the brothers of those two for a minute back in the day. One that was on the right of you is named Demarcus. He was dropped on his head as a child, though that don’t excuse nothing. The other one goes by T-Ball and he just drop outta his mama a dumb ass.”

Evan remained silent.

“Can you speak?”

“Yes, sir,” Evan muttered.

“Don’t you know bad things happen when the sun goes down?”

“You’re telling me.”

The black man’s head canted. He couldn’t tell if Evan was serious or making a joke at his expense.

“You get yourself lost or something? Real talk time: you’re a little light skinned for these parts, bro.”

Evan looked down at his own arms, white as sugar under the streetlamps.

“Pikesville and Roland Park are north and west of here by the way,” the black man said, stabbing the air with his flashlight.

“I don’t know what those are.”

“Natural habitat for people like you.”

A moment of silence and then the black man directed a half-smile in Evan’s direction.

“I’m just messin’ with you, man. I seen you and your old lady pull up earlier today.”

Recognition flashed in Evan’s face.

“You were the one behind the curtains?”

“Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t.”

“I saw you too,” Evan said.

“No, troop, you saw something.”

The black man spun his wheelchair around and headed toward the rowhouses. Evan walked alongside him.

“You and your mom Section-8?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Evan said.

“Means you’re in a bad way. Ain’t got two nickels to rub together. See, only the poor and folks on the run from something coop in these here houses, so which one is it?”

“Guess we’re a little down on our luck.”

The black man chewed on his lips.

“You got a name, light skin?”

“Evan Devine.”

“Well, I was born George Desmond Brown, but someone told me George in Greek means farmer and seein’ that I ain’t tillin’ no ground, I go by Dez.”

“Thanks for helping me out, Dez.”

“Ain’t no thing. White lives matter too, right?”

Evan smirked and they continued on until they were close to Evan’s rowhouse.

“Your moms in the construction business? I seen you two carryin’ that big ole box in.”

“No, that was clothes,” Evan lied.

“She in the clothing business?”

Evan stopped and put his hands on his hips and sighed.

“Actually, that was a lie. The truth is we’re Familiars, my mother and me. Just like my grandparents were and my great-grandparents before that. We’ve always worked for the Redmayne family which was originally from the south of France but came over in the early Nineteenth Century.”

“Familiars, huh? You don’t mind me asking, what kinda work ya’all do?”

“We watch over the youngest son. Gideon. He’s kinda the black sheep of the family. A reformed vampire that lives in our basement. A lot of the old rules and superstitions about them are crap, but they still need someone to safeguard them during the waking hours. That’s what we do, protect him from the sun, from people who are trying to kill him, stuff like that. You’ve probably seen that in the movies.”

Dez stared at Evan, mouth adroop. A few seconds of awkward silence and then Evan smiled ear-to-ear.

“Just kidding.”

Dez’s grin was so wide it made him appear like a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life.

“You ain’t right dude,” Dez said, chuckling.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Evan replied softly.

“Well, I think I just made me a new friend, Evan Devine.”

Dez held up a fist that Evan bumped before climbing the front steps of his rowhouse.

“Evan.”

Evan looked back at Dez.

“Where’s your pops?”

“He’s out of town,” Evan said after a brief pause.

“Well if you and your mom need anything, you let me know, okay? Us weird ones gotta watch out for each other.”

Evan smiled and nodded, trotting up the stairs. He opened the front door to find Lucy waiting for him.

“You’re late.”

“I was accosted.”

“By what?”

“Um, have you taken a look around outside?”

Evan took a step to move past Lucy and she grabbed his arm.

“I saw you talking to that man out there. The one in the chair.”

“His name’s Dez.”

“You know the rules.”

“Fear not, he’s neither an ally nor an enemy, mom.”

“Miss Lucy.”

“I’m off the clock and I’ve decided not to call you that anymore so goodnight, madam.”

Evan shrugged off Lucy’s hand and did a quick bow before strolling around the first floor. The rowhouse was narrow and long with a family room up front and a kitchen in the back.

Evan could see that Lucy had already started placing foil over some of the windows. Not enough to draw notice, but a sufficient amount to create little pockets of darkness during the day for Gideon to move about if he was so inclined.

Evan entered the kitchen and peered up a staircase that led to the second floor. Below and to the right of this was a door that led to the basement. The door had a pair of heavy bolts thrown across it. Evan heard something thump downstairs and so he bounded up the stairs to a short hallway dotted with four doors. He poked his head into a bathroom and then examined the three bedrooms, finding one at the end of the hallway with his belongings.

There was a mattress on the floor and a few suitcases and a duffel bag, stuff that had been delivered by the moving company contracted by the Gentry.

Evan closed and locked his door and deposited himself on the mattress. He fought to think pleasant thoughts, but he brooded, as he always did, on the days ahead. He fretted about his mother and about whether he’d be able to convince her to see there wasn’t a future in what they were doing. And if he was able to persuade her to start a new life, how would they do it? And what would be the price? Would the Gentry just let them walk away from what might be considered a lifetime commitment?

Time slowly passed, but sleep didn’t come. A gunshot echoed somewhere outside, but Evan wasn’t concerned. The only thing that worried him was hidden twenty-five feet below in the basement.

Chapter Eight

Evan woke early and found Lucy in the kitchen preparing a steaming pot of greens mixed with herbs, hardboiled eggs, and turkey bacon.

“Sleep okay?”

Evan nodded, tapping some ketchup onto his plate as Lucy shuttled past, frying pan in hand. She plopped the grub on Evan’s plate and he commenced to wolf it down.

“I put up the sun blockers and changed the locks on the front door.”

“I saw,” he said, food dribbling down his chin.

“When you’re ready maybe you can see about getting us some new wheels.”

“The five-fingered kind?”

She shook her head.

“The Gentry’s allotted twelve thousand.”

“That’s it?”

“Hey, kiddo, everyone was affected when the economy tanked.”

“What happened to them being ageless and full of wisdom?”

She shrugged.

“I’ll need a ride for the Gathering so get something that doesn’t stand out.”

“No candy-red Mustangs, huh?”

She mimed laughing and then set the frying pan down in the sink.

“He asked about you.”

Evan paused, fork in hand.

“Who?”

“Who do you think, silly? Him. He wanted to know how you’re doing or if you needed anything.”

Evan’s eyes quickly catalogued the room.

“But it’s daylight. Isn’t he supposed to be asleep?”

“He said the move threw off his biorhythms or something.”

“So get him some sleeping pills.”

“You’re a laugh a minute.”

Evan placed his fork on the plate and stared at the small mountain of ketchup which was dark and shiny. He felt his stomach turn over.

“So… where is he?”

Lucy’s eyes rotated toward the floor.

Evan thought about running out at that moment. Of just gathering up what little he had and making for the front door, but he suspected that if he left that abruptly, things might not end well for his mother.

The Gentry might be liberal in thought and purportedly gentle in disposition, but Evan had heard that they kept a close eye on those who served them (“Like Scientologists with fangs.” Lucy had quipped). There was an unwritten understanding that children would follow after parents, serving the same families, doing the same work. Year after year. If a child strayed from the fold or chose not to follow in his or her parent’s footsteps, the Gentry might hold the family responsible (though it was unclear what that meant). Evan didn’t normally like to use double negatives, but bailing on a vamp family was a not insignificant act of defiance.

Rather than cause his mother additional heartache, Evan finished his food and turned to the kitchen door, pulling the bolts back on it. Motes of dust sprang free from a staircase that would have felt at home in one of those old Universal horror movies.

There was a bare bulb overhead connected to a pullchain that Evan yanked down. He took the steps one by one, staying to the outer edges of the stairs, keeping his tread as light as possible.

Farther down, the light from behind dimmed, the walls transitioning from drywall to stone. The stairs ended at a wooden landing which opened to an open, unfinished space. Evan stopped to orient himself and then moved past old filing cabinets and rusted tools, a forlorn water heater, and a fuse box fixed to the wall.

He stumbled along at the outer edge of what little light remained. There was a discord of voices up ahead, people chattering. He moved past the columns that supported the house and spotted a door that was ajar. A blue light glowed from within and somebody laughed.

Evan crept closer, striding by cast-iron pails and small wooden tools that lay on the ground next to a forgotten coal furnace. He surmised that the room must have been the place they stacked the little briquettes of fuel back in the day.

Evan tiptoed a few steps closer, past an empty whiskey bottle and dozens of rat corpses that looked like deflated balloons, as if they’d been sucked clean of fluids. Something shimmered off to his left and he caught sight of a handful of the bloodbags from the night before. Jesus, he thought, how much did the guy need to get by?

Reaching a hand out, he pushed the door back to see two chairs and a tiny television perched atop a rickety table. The space looked like a homeless person’s crash pad, but Evan knew the Gentry would find a way to remodel it in the coming weeks and months.

The TV screen was snowy, the volume amped, a gameshow on. Some porcine woman was cackling and sweating because she’d just won a small car. Evan immediately wondered how she would fit into it.

“The lord of the manor,” a voice boomed from behind and Evan whirled so quickly it felt as if he was levitating.

The man from the box, Gideon Redmayne, all six foot and several inches of him, was standing in front of Evan. Gideon’s head nearly scraped the exposed ceiling boards, but otherwise he appeared robust and in fine spirits: color in his cheeks, flesh firm, looking well-rested with a broad smile that gave him a veneer of trustworthiness.

“You – you’re a-awake,” Evan stammered.

“I’m always kind of awake,” Gideon replied with a wink. Evan chuckled nervously.

“What do you think of the place, Master Evan?”

“Pretty shitty if you want to know the truth,” Evan said.

“It is now, but in ten years the yuppies will lay siege to this block and the whole neighborhood will be condofied with enough funky coffee joints to drown a Guatemalan farmer. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times.”

Gideon tapped his forward, eyes straying toward the roof as if running down a mental checklist. He had a habit of doing this and chalked it up to living what amounted to five or six normal lifetimes.

“I remember the same thing happening in France in the Fifteenth Century. There was this stretch of hovels that pilgrims rented down the street from the monastery of Saint-Jacques. The location was fabulous and much prized by a group of burghers and their Blackfriar brethren. You know what the Blackfriars were?”

“Dominicans?”

“Good man,” Gideon said with a smile. “Now both of them wanted the hovels to tear down and build bigger homes, so they demanded a thousand livres from the pilgrims.”

“Pilgrims don’t have money.”

“Precisely. So they couldn’t pay and refused to leave. Do you know what the burghers and Blackfriars did?”

Evan shook his head.

“They accused them of heresy. First known instance of gentrification in the modern world.”

Gideon grinned, waiting for Evan to do likewise and when he didn’t, Gideon twirled a finger in the air as if conjuring a spell before adding, “true story, true story.”

He said this in a kind of bewildered reminiscence as Evan slumped in one of the seats. Gideon did likewise, angling his body in such a way that his movements looked more feline than human.

“You get the stash from last night?”

“Indeed I did and it was just what the doctor ordered,” Gideon said with a nod.

Evan found himself staring at Gideon’s skin. Luminous and glowing under the light cast from the TV, as if he was a creature carved from marble. Gideon pointed to the screen where a bald man was jumping for money inside a glass booth.

“There are two universal truths in life, Evan. The first I can’t share with you because you’re not old enough, but the second holds that life is precious. And how does that chucklehead on the screen choose to spend it? By jumping up and down like a trained cur.”

“I’m gonna be leaving soon, Gideon,” Evan blurted out for no good reason.

Gideon’s expression darkened. He held up a remote control and muted the TV.

“Leave as in… leave the nest for good?”

Evan nodded.

“Does your mom know about this?”

“Yep,” Evan replied, trying to will away the quivers that were making his fingers tremble.

“What was her reaction?”

“About what you’d expect.”

Gideon sucked on his teeth, his decidedly ordinary-looking teeth (which, contrary to lore, did not enlarge unless he was on the cusp of feeding).

“She’s a tough lady, Evan. She has to be given the business we’re in.”

“But I’m not like her.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, Gideon, it’s not that I don’t think I could be tough like her, it’s that I don’t want to be.”

“But your grandfather, your father-”

Gideon knew he’d made a mistake the moment he mentioned Evan’s dad Clark. He could see it in the anger that flashed in Evan’s eyes.

“I’m sorry about that, I really am. I know it’s still pretty raw. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t say a prayer for Clark.”

Evan sat corpse still. He fought to stifle a flash of anger, but the words slipped out:

“But he’s still not here is he?”

“I tried to save him, I want you to know that. I told him that I had the power to bring him full circle right up until the end and he turned me down.”

“Because he didn’t want to end up like you.”

Evan couldn’t be sure, but for a moment Gideon’s eyes seemed to glow like the tips on a pair of knives. He looked simultaneously wounded and pissed, his smile stitching to an anxious grimace.

“Is your decision to leave because of something I did, Evan?”

“No.”

“Because I’ve always tried to help.”

“I know.”

“Remember all those projects with your classes? Remember how I always gave you the inside scoop?”

There really were only two projects, Evan thought. Both were for an online class on American history. The first project revolved around the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (with Gideon providing Evan very specific information on what truly caused the so-called “starving times”), and the second project concerned internment camps.

Gideon had told Evan about how the very first one in America didn’t involve the Japanese (as commonly assumed), but Native Americans. A camp had been established for Indians in the 17th Century during King Philip’s War on Deer Island in Massachusetts. Gideon claimed he knew another vampire who’d been imprisoned on that horrible spit of land and provided Evan with numerous details that even the teacher was unfamiliar with.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

Gideon’s cheeks flushed.

“Well, then you’re free to come and go as you please, Evan. It’s always been like that.”

“You won’t stop me?”

Gideon shook his head. Evan stood to leave and Gideon’s hand shot out like an adder and gripped his wrist, nearly jerking his arm from its socket.

“But do me one favor, por favor?” Gideon said, letting up on Evan’s arm a bit.

“A-anything,” Evan said.

“Tell your mother not to put so much garlic in the greens next time.”

“H-how c-come?” Evan mumbled.

Gideon’s nostrils expanded.

“Because I can smell it in your goddamn blood.”

Gideon’s lips pulled back and Evan nodded and for some reason refused to turn his back on Gideon as he made his way out. He stumbled and bumbled backward, Gideon watching him go as he fled the basement. Evan hit the landing and took the steps two at a time as he hustled back up to the kitchen.

Chapter Nine

For Evan and his mother, the rest of those first few days, like most other days, were spent planning and preparing and fortifying the house.

There were locks to purchase and install, a new wireless security system to engineer, and maps to pore over and highlight. Being the most tech-savvy member of the household, it was Evan’s job to download every nearby location that might conceivably contain food for Gideon: vet clinics, industrial stores, human bloodbanks, and collection centers. These were juxtaposed on Lucy’s smartphone with avenues of escape and addresses for a Gentry safehouse if things got particularly hairy.

In additional to his regular routine, it was Evan’s job to monitor the six motion sensors strategically placed in the backyard. The sensors were camouflaged and positioned to capture every conceivable point of ingress. Evan checked and rechecked the sensors every morning, afternoon, and night, ensuring that the signals were true and beaming back to a small smart-phone-sized tablet that Lucy kept in a hip holster.

Even though they were of dubious legality, the tablet was additionally synched to two traps positioned in the rowhouse. The trap in the back was comprised of a section of one inch thick plywood mated to a torsion spring hanging above the back door. The wood was linked to a strand of ankle-height wire. Once set, anyone unlucky enough to break through the back door would find themselves shishkabobed by a dozen sharpened carriage bolts.

The trap near the front was far more insidious, involving a length of metal leader fastened to the door-knob and hooked to a battery from a diesel truck. The knob was fine if you remained on the other side of the door, but, if you forced your way in all bets were off. A break-in, for instance, would propel the leader down into the door’s metal strike-plate, sending enough electricity into the trespasser to cause unconsciousness. Or death.

Lucy had been hesitant about using traps when Evan was younger, but her husband was still alive then and he’d made sure to keep him out of harm’s way. It wasn’t until Evan turned fourteen that Lucy began letting him near the hard stuff. There were obvious premises liability issues with setting traps in a home, but the Gentry had teams of ex-cops, lawyers, and other professionals standing by to handle messy situations.

The sensors and traps were the last line of defense of course, so Evan did his best to keep an eye on them. Even as he did this, however, a still, small voice in him wondered (as it always had) why they needed traps to protect someone like Gideon. Wasn’t he a badass? Some kind of shit-kicking immortal?

“Jesus, Evan, he’s trying to keep a low profile,” Lucy had said to him, “we need the traps because he’s only at ten percent strength when he’s not on the good stuff.”

When his work with the sensors was done, Evan turned to the same job his father once had: reconning the house. He swept the structure from top to bottom, searching for anything that might cause harm to him, his mother, or Gideon. Much of the old vampire legends were nonsense, the stories about crosses and running water being effective at warding them off, for instance.

Other tales were true, including the inability to cast a reflection in a mirror. Some of the Gentry had commissioned a scientist at Duke University to research the reasons for this, but no good answers had ever been found. There was talk of being able to create a pane of mirrored glass with hi-tech meta-materials that might reflect a manufactured image, but such things were still in the planning stages. For the time being, it was considered in poor taste to have mirrors indoors and so any reflective glass that Evan found was broken, bundled up in heavy-duty garbage bags, and disposed of in the backyard.

Once the mirrors were taken care of, Evan and Lucy practiced infiltrating the rowhouse. Lucy lurked inside and Evan tried to find a way in and then they reversed roles and did the same before finishing things off with a little hand-to-hand combat.

When all of this was done, Lucy stayed inside to rest while Evan pocketed a wad of cash (money from the Gentry), in order to procure a new car.

Evan bounded outside and felt the sun’s warm embrace. His mind strayed to the thought of how long an exposed Gideon would last on a day like this. Would he fry like an egg or curl up and die in a puddle of his own fluids like a slug? Evan reached in his pocket and pulled out a pair of medium-weight drumsticks hand-made by a guy named Vic Firth that his father had given him on his eighth birthday.

He sat down on the steps leading to the house and began pounding out a beat. His old man was a drumming aficionado and told him it wasn’t how hard you hit, but the angle of the strike. Evan took great pains to pound the right spot on the bricks. He started with a few Buddy Rich beats and then moved on to those by Ginger Baker mixed with a few grooves from Bonham and the drummer whose name he couldn’t remember from the band Rush.

“That’s pretty tight,” somebody said and Evan looked up to see Dez wheeling toward him.

Evan beat out his version of a shimmying samba shuffle as Dez clapped his hands.

“I always had a soft spot in my heart for the drummers. I feel like they never get the proper credit, y’know? They’re all up in the background, but if you listen close, they’re the ones holding the whole thing together, laying it down beat by beat. They’re like gods stitching up the firmament and whatnot.”

Evan smiled.

“You want to be one when you were younger, Dez?”

“What? Me? A drummer? Nah, man, I was more into sports. Football ‘specially. I always wanted to be a wide receiver and I was one for a hot minute. A damn fine one I might add.”

“What happened?”

“I crewed with the wrong folks and some unrighteous stuff went down and I ended up with these two bad boys,” Dez said, pointing to his legs.

“You mind if I ask how?”

“It’s pretty simple. I was all-city, fast as gossip, but even yours truly couldn’t outrun the 124 grains that lodged itself near my spine.”

“When?”

“Been manning these wheels right here for goin’ on five years.”

“Had a friend who lost an arm,” Evan said. “He told me he could still feel it after the accident happened.”

“For the first year or two, yeah,” Dez replied, “but not so much lately.”

“You miss them?”

“Only every day of my miserable little life.”

Dez took the drumsticks from Evan and rocked out his own little beat. Evan smiled again, impressed.

“What would you give to walk again?”

Dez stopped drumming.

“Shit, you actually going there?”

“I’m segueing.”

“Cause that’s kinda a damn personal question.”

“Hey, I spilled my guts to you. I told you what me and my mom were really up to.”

“The vampire bodyguards thing, right?”

“‘Familiars,’ Dez. It has a much nicer ring.”

Dez smirked.

“Well, to answer your question, it would probably depend on how much it’d cost, Evan.”

“Who says it would?”

Dez smiled again, but there wasn’t a hint of levity in his face.

“There ain’t nothin’ worth anything that don’t come with a price, man. Everyone knows that.”

Dez tossed the sticks to Evan and wheeled around as Evan followed. The pair tooled down through the neighborhood for the next twenty minutes. Dez ran the conversation for most of the time, talking about a new drug that had hit the streets called “Black Sunshine” and about how his father had bailed years ago, his mother confined at a hospital up north for having an “unquiet mind.” He told Evan how he made ends meet, living primarily on disability and a small settlement payment he received as a result of being exposed to lead paint as a child.

Dez also showed Evan places to steer clear of, the location where he was shot, and the addresses of a handful of neighborhood lifers who could be counted on if trouble arose.

After grabbing a bite at a take-out joint that specialized in fried lake trout, Dez took Evan to a friend name Chauncey Jacobs who operated a used car lot situated between a liquor store and a church.

Evan bought a 1992 Toyota Cressida from Chauncey for three thousand in cash, then paid another thousand for plates and paperwork, and a sweet detail job. The car had almost two-hundred thousand miles on it, but the interior was mint, with leather seats, and the engine was a robust six-banger that got respectable mileage. Best of all, the exterior was a dull gray, not the kind of finish that warranted attention.

Dez headed back to his rowhouse and Evan broke the car in, driving down to Fells Point and then over to Baltimore’s touristy Inner Harbor.

Evan figured he had an hour or so before Lucy was looking for him, so he parked the Cressida in a garage on Commerce Street and strolled, drumsticks in hand, several block down to the water. It was the weekend and the place was jammed with families heading over to the Power Plant Live and the city’s aquarium.

Evan ambled through the Harborplace, a market that was at the heart of the inner harbor. As he walked through the harried masses, he noticed a few women who appeared to be sizing him up.

Their faces were distorted: ghostly white, mouths smeared a shockingly vibrant red, necks and wrists torn open to the bone so that little streamers of flesh flapped in the wind. They were the accusatory faces of those Evan had helped dispose of in the past. He looked to the ground, longing to be free of them, but there they were, just as they’d always be. His stomach churned and he summoned up the strength to stare right back at them. They lingered for a moment and then melted from sight, whispering things that he was not privy to.

Evan window-shopped and stopped to buy a shrimp-salad sandwich at a deli named after a Jewish man. He finished the sandwich on a bench on the backside of the market that fronted the harbor. There was an old wooden ship docked in front of him and Evan watched packs of incredibly normal looking people board the ship.

Everyone laughed and smiled as they took in the scenery. Lucy called people like this “civilians,” because they were soft and unfamiliar with how the world really worked. She said they had nothing in common with them and Evan thought, on certain occasions, that she had a point. After all, how would these people react if Evan told them what he and his mother did for a living? What would they say? Who the hell would believe that something like a Familiar existed in the Twenty-First Century?

He brooded on this and feelings of anger at both his mother and situation filled his head. What kind of life was he living? What kind of parent would sacrifice a normal childhood for their kids simply to keep a job? His face flushed and he had the strong desire to run back to the house and plant a stake in the middle of Gideon’s goddamn heart.

If he left now, he might be able to do it. He had a length of sharpened ash hidden in his bedroom. He calculated the odds that he’d be able to sneak in through the back door while the sun was still high and pray that Lucy was napping. Gideon would probably be snoozing downstairs and if he was quiet, if he was very quiet, he could sneak up on him and end the charade once and for all.

He paused for a moment of introspection and then drummed feverishly on the bench, pounding out a beat. His mind fogged and out of the blankness arose a series of images: the towns and dives he and his mother had lived in, the primer-splotched shitboxes he’d driven or copped. His mother literally cleaning up Gideon’s messes: mopping up blood and disposing of plasma-like fluids and bits of tissue and torn clothing and personal belongings. Fleeing the cops in California and the axe-wielding mobs organized by grieving family members in Texas and Florida and Indiana.

When he looked up there was a girl staring at him. About his age, tsunami of long, sandy-colored hair covering most of her face which was crooked in a pleasant smile.

Hers was a familiar face.

Where had he seen it before?

He didn’t stop drumming even as he plumbed his memory, terrified for a moment that this girl might be the specter another one of Gideon’s victims.

Evan closed his eyes and when he opened them, the girl was still there. Smiling. Oh, God, what a terrific smile she had. One that seemed to leap from her face. Flustered, he stopped drumming and set the sticks down.

“Wow,” she said, “you absolutely, positively must take a bow after that performance.”

Evan smiled sheepishly, dipped his head, and she clapped.

“What was that?” she asked.

“My own thing, but I kinda borrowed the vibe from this guy who died a long time ago.”

“Really famous guy?”

Evan nodded.

“Let me guess. The drummer from Zeppelin?”

He shook his head.

“There was another one, a guy who basically wrote the book on drumming in the eighties and nineties-”

“Oh, yeah, what’s his - the guy from Toto!”

Evan stared at her, dumbfounded.

“T-that’s right. Jeff Porcaro. How did you-”

“My dad used to love dino-rock. He basically worshipped at the altar of Steely Dan.”

Evan twirled the drumsticks.

“I heard that Porcaro guy died because he got too near some bug spray or something,” she said.

“That’s an old myth.”

“What’s the truth?”

“Drugs. Pretty sure it was cocaine.”

“Wow. A rock star dying of drugs,” she said.

“Shocking, huh?”

She smiled.

“You in a band?”

“Not yet. You?”

“Nope, but I like to follow them around.”

“Groupie or stalker?”

“I’m simply a fan, sir, thank you very much,” she said with a sly smile.

“So who are you liking these days?”

“There’s this three-piece out of Philly that calls itself ‘Shelter in Place.’”

“Like the name.”

“Love it. There’s a club, “The Red Headed Stepchild” in Fells Point where the band’s playing Sunday night. If you dig that kind of thing, the establishment is highly recommended.”

“Do you frequent it?”

“On occasion.”

She smiled and Evan was delighted; such off-the-cuff repartee was generally not in his wheelhouse. Sure there’d been other girls before, friends mostly, but never had he engaged in such delightful banter with a member of the opposite sex.

“If I go, might you be there?”

“You never know,” she said with a wink.

“Sounds pretty cool-”

“Harmony,” she said, reading Evan’s searching look. “My name’s Harmony by the way.”

“Great name for a musician.”

“It was destiny,” she laughed, twirling before extending a hand to Evan.

“I’m Evan.”

She took his hand and saw that it was welted and bruised. The aftermath of several undercover operations with his mother.

“Got that from the drumming,” Evan said, embarrassed, pulling his hand away.

“Didn’t realize your calling was so rough and tumble,” she replied.

“Only when you’re a full-contract drummer like me.”

This made absolutely no sense, but it sounded cool and they shared a final smile before she waved and ducked into the crowd. Evan rose and looked after her. For an instant he thought he saw her shadowed by two slightly older guys, but she melted into a horde of tourists so quickly it was impossible to tell.

It was dusk by the time he arrived home. He parked the car and entered the rowhouse where Lucy greeted him.

“Where the hell were you?”

“I’m seventeen and eleven months.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not responsive,” she said, approaching him. Evan tried to brush past his mother, but she grabbed his arm.

“Please stop bracing me, mother.”

“Answer the question, Evan.”

“I was out getting us a car, okay?”

She softened.

“Where?”

“From this guy Dez knows. He totally hooked us up. It’s a Toyota and it only cost a few thou.”

Lucy stepped to a window and peered outside. Evan pointed at the Cressida, then handed over the remaining money she’d given him to purchase the car.

“Happy now, warden?”

“Takes four hours to buy a car?”

“I had to test drive it.”

“Where?”

Evan tapped a shoe on the floor.

“What does it matter?”

“You know the rules.”

“Sure, I know ‘em. Back by sunset, eyes everywhere, trust no one and keep all potential friends at a safe distance aside from the freaks I meet online as ‘Jon Harker,’ which no one ever gets by the way, because none of them can possibly ever know what I and my saintly mother do for a living.”

“You’ve got a real lip on you.”

“Can’t be much of one ‘cause apparently you haven’t heard me before, but in nineteen days I’m out of here. Some real hashtag Audi Five type stuff, mother.”

“I literally did not understand a word you just said.”

“It means I’m gonna be vacating the premises. Oh, and I’m not following your rules anymore.”

Evan trotted up the stairs and into his room. He locked the door and turned out the light. Then he hit the mattress and the unfairness of the whole situation suckerpunched him. He was almost eighteen, a young man coming into his own and what did the future hold? He was graduating from high school, but then what? Familiars didn’t go to college. They didn’t get to enjoy stimulating discussions in lecture halls or football games in stadiums or fraternity parties or any of the other things he associated with higher education. They waited and served and hid in the shadows, always mindful of their position on the food-chain.

An image of Harmony came to him and he thought about how she was unlike any girl he’d ever met. Not that there’d been very many before her. Only a few might even theoretically qualified as girlfriends, the rest mostly acquaintances and friends of friends who were left behind as he and Lucy moved from place-to-place like nomads.

His eyes drifted. He saw the faces of the women from earlier in the day on the walls and ceilings. They called to him and smiled, black tongues slithering over impossibly large teeth. Evan thought this was what it must be like for soldiers returning from combat. The sights and sounds and faces never really left you. His eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep for some indeterminate period of time.

At some juncture he was transported in a dreamy daze back to the darkened home he’d loved so much in Santa Monica. The one that was just a few blocks from the beach and kissed every morning by a lovely ocean breeze. In the dream he was up at the top of the stairs late at night, peering down, listening to his mother and Gideon argue.

How many times had Gideon pleaded with Lucy? Told her that there wouldn’t be another “episode,” that he was sick and could only get better if she and Evan stayed to comfort and watch over him.

Gideon’s voice faded and then a ghostly image of his father appeared. A flashback from that gutwrenching night in Texas. He was just a boy when they came for him. He could hear the shrieks as three men battered down the door. Someone shouted in Spanish and then the guns went off. Evan’s dad took two of attackers down before he caught a rifle blast full in the chest. Evan could smell the gunpowder, could hear his father’s final breaths rattle around in his chest. He knelt by his father whose life was seeping away. His father had whispered something about not ending up like him as Lucy appeared and loosed a primal shriek while planting a knife in the neck of the wounded man who’d killed her husband.

Evan stared down at his hands and for an instant they were smeared with his father’s blood. It sluiced between his fingers, hot and sticky like warm syrup.

He awoke from the dream, physically experiencing the sensation of blood on his hands. He cried out and wiped nightmare sweat from his face and rolled over on his side. He looked at his cellphone to see he’d been asleep for several hours. He was about to power the phone down, when he heard it.

A whimper, barely audible at first.

Coming from the floor grate on the other side of the room.

Evan crawled over and listened. Faint sobs filtered up through the grate. He sat in silence and then he heard Lucy’s voice.

She was screaming in anger at someone or something in the basement.

Chapter Ten

Evan exited his room and tiptoed down the stairs, head cocked to one side. He was surprised to see that the door to the basement was open.

Evan took to the steps when Lucy screamed again. He vaulted down into the basement, which was rinsed with light from the ceiling’s unshaded bulb, and was immediately confronted with the following: a young girl in her early-twenties lying on her side, eyes closed, blood jumping from a spot in her right wrist where flesh had been scooped out; and aside this Lucy, who was struggling to tie a tourniquet just north of the wound.

Evan saw Gideon near the rear wall, eyes bugging out, smears on his mouth the color of pasta sauce. There was a telltale horseshoe wound on the girl’s wrist which Evan knew was left by Gideon’s mouth.

“Grab my pack, Evan,” Lucy said.

Evan’s eyes roamed around the space and settled on Lucy’s black backpack.

“Grab it!”

Evan hesitated. The girl whimpered, then started to convulse.

“Goddammit, Evan, grab the pack!”

Evan reeled over and grabbed the backpack.

“Mistake,” Gideon sputtered, wobbling toward Evan, his mouth flecked with spittle. “It was all a horrible, terrible error of judgment, Evan. You have to believe me!”

Evan stared at him, wondering how anyone over six-hundred years old and make so many goddamn mistakes. Gideon continued to plead with Evan, angling for sympathy as Lucy shouted:

“Shut up, Gideon!”

“But I was just telling him how-”

“SHUT THE HELL UP!”

Gideon shrunk, head pressed to his chest as Evan knelt in front of his mother.

The young girl was seizing, her eyes rolling, her arms thrumming as if she was being electrocuted.

“Remember what we did in Spartanburg, Evan?”

Evan was too shocked to reply, mesmerized by the blood as it streamed down the girl’s arm.

“Evan?!”

He looked up and nodded.  He remembered. He opened the backpack to reveal the gear housed inside: the syringes, the centrifuge-like contraption, the vials of liquids. He pulled these out.

“Get a sample.”

Evan withdrew the syringe and inserted its tip into the girl’s arm. He pulled back the plunger on the syringe which sucked up a few beads of blood.

“Run the test.”

The girl’s body was bucking now. Evan could see Lucy’s muscles flexing as she held her down.

“Mom-”

“JUST DO IT!”

Evan held the syringe in his teeth, ripped the caps off two of the vials of liquid. He poured these into an opening with a rubber cap on the centrifuge-like device and followed this with the girl’s blood.

Then he secured the rubber cap and pushed a button on the device as it whirred to life.

“What happens if it’s blue, mom? What happens if she starts to turn?”

Lucy pointed to the pistol in the backpack and Evan remembered. Remembered being lectured on the contagion, the virus, whatever the hell it was that caused the victims of things like Gideon to turn. Nothing was known about the genomic structure of the bacteria, but Evan remembered reading that it overpowered the body’s natural antibody and T-cell responses.

Evan had been told that there was a brief window, mere seconds perhaps, where the microorganisms transmitted from Gideon to victim were incapable of maliciously interacting with the host. It was during this period where the infected could still be put down by traditional methods.

He looked at the gun again.

“If it’s blue, don’t you hesitate-”

“I won’t.”

“-right between the eyes is where you put it.”

“Didn’t you hear me?!”

“You can and you will.”

We’re going to hell, mother, Evan thought. Just as surely as the sun rises, the two of us will be in the Lake of Fire forever along with Dad for all that we’ve done. 

Evan gripped the pistol which was dark and oily and evil-looking. Like the head on a serpent. There’d been other times like this, other women who were bitten, but never had he or Lucy had to pull a trigger.

The centrifuge-like device rattled to a stop. Evan was almost too terrified to look at it, but he did. The liquid inside was amber-colored. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Lucy motioned for Evan to toss her the pack which he did. She pulled out another syringe and bottle of liquid and shot the liquid into the girl’s veins. The girl’s tremors ceased and from what Evan could discern she began to breathe normally.

Lucy dressed her wounds with a salve and thick gauze and then she had the girl up and was dragging her toward the open stormdoors.

“Where are you going?!”

“I’m taking her back to where Gideon found her.”

Lucy disappeared up the steps as Evan’s gaze swung to Gideon. A feeling of instantaneous revulsion came over him. Gideon sat there, cowering, looking like the poster-boy for PTSD. There was blood and muck under his fingernails and tiny bits of what Evan surmised were flesh on his teeth. The vampire wiped his mouth and looked away in shame.

“I’m sorry, Evan. I am so fucking sorry…”

The same lines, the same apologies, Evan had heard it all before. He closed the stormdoors and plodded past Gideon and back up into the kitchen. He shut the door and threw the bolts across it and slid to the floor, too overwhelmed to cry.

Chapter Eleven

There would be no breakfast waiting for Evan the next morning. Just Lucy, seated at the kitchen table, looking bleary-eyed and world weary. There were what looked like little droplets of black ink all over her arms and shirt. Evan thought that was one of the things the movies always got wrong. Dried blood never remained bright red, it always turned black.

“I had a long talk with Gideon,” Lucy said softly.

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“We’ve got to go out again tonight.”

Evan grabbed the edge of the refrigerator and shook his head.

“He’s running low, Evan. That’s the reason he attacked that girl and-”

“Bullshit.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“He’s a liar and he drinks too much.”

“You know how it is. He’s like a car and when he gets low and wonky-”

“The check engine light comes on?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

”If he’s thirsty there’s another vet clinic fifteen minutes away that’s-”

“It needs to be the real deal this time.”

“You promised we wouldn’t.”

“I know what I said.”

Evan slammed his hands against the refrigerator.

“Never again, that’s what you said!”

“He’ll die if he doesn't get it.”

“And?”

“Evan, it’s a one-time thing.”

“How come your one-offs always become two and three-offs?”

Lucy locked on Evan with her best interrogative stare.

“I don’t need this crap from you right now, Evan. I’m under a lot of pressure as it is and-”

“Fine! Okay. This one time. But no backpack.”

“For God’s sake, Evan – you know I need my-”

“No, mom,” Evan said firmly. “I’ll go, but only if you don’t bring that thing.”

She dead-eyed him and nodded.

“Eighteen days,” Evan replied softly, “eighteen days and then I’ll be old enough and I’m going ghost.”

They waited until after eleven to head out that night with Lucy carrying the tools to the car while Evan stayed behind to set the traps and check the sensors.

Lucy drove, following Evan’s directions as they buzzed through Fells Point. Evan stared outside at the lights from the bars and clubs, wondering whether Harmony was inside. He saw the sign for the “Red Headed Stepchild” bar and smiled nervously. He planned to drop by the next night and see if she was there.

Eleven miles later, they were at the north end of the city. They shot past a large hospital, heading east for a few blocks, then south, then north again. Finally, they motored under the overpass for I-83 and into an industrial park lined with low-slung commercial buildings.

Lucy pointed at one with a sign pinned to the front that was partially visible. Evan mouthed the words “Biological Services” as Lucy pulled to a stop down the street.

The building, a long, two-storey brick structure, was a collection and processing center for WB, “Whole Blood.” Evan and Lucy had hit a few of them before. Evan always wondered why Gideon and the Gentry just didn’t process their own blood or buy it on the black market, but apparently much of the quasi-legal and illegal stores were tainted or already accounted for. Lucy said the Gentry was working on perfecting a manufactured plasma as a substitute, something synthesized from stem-cells extracted from the umbilical cords of babies, but Evan thought that was just more of the same. Talk.

They headed outside without the tools to make a dry run. They noticed a few workers straggling home for the night. Most of the businesses were deserted, however, or soon to be.

They roamed back and sat in the car and waited until every business was completely shuttered. Evan drummed his fingers across the dashboard.

“Must you do that?”

“Would you like to know why I do it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Sometimes I do it because I like the sound, but other times it’s so I won’t hear the voices. Do you ever hear them?”

Lucy turned on the radio. Evan drummed louder. Lucy reached over and grabbed his fingers.

“I’ve been thinking again, mother. If we’re zoo-keepers like you said, what does that make Gideon?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

“I’ll tell you what it makes him. A big fat old toothless tiger stretched out in the sun, waiting for someone to toss him a lump of meat.”

Lucy snatched up her attache case and opened the door as Evan scanned the backseat. He saw that she’d kept her word, she’d left her backpack. No guns on this gig, he thought to himself. No violence. He grasped his insulated duffel bag and jumped outside to follow her.

They stayed beyond the spillage of light from the streetlamps, making for the back of the blood bank. They dropped behind a truck and scoped the rear of the bank which was larger than Evan had first thought.

There was a single CCTV camera hanging from a rear awning like a gargoyle. Evan recognized the make and model. A few years old, not particularly expensive, not particularly effective either. It was stationary and focused on one spot, so all they had to do was tiptoe past the camera’s eye which they did. The back door was metal and secured by a cheap lock that Lucy made quick work of.

The interior of the bank was sterile, lit only by a few pulse halogen bulbs that popped to life as mother and son slinked past. Evan studied everything as they inched down a hallway: walls shingled with photos and company memoranda and signage and regulatory notices from various three-letter government agencies.

He cocked his head and closed his eyes and listened. He searched for the white noise generated by the refrigeration units that kept the blood at a cool 33.8 to 42.8 degrees. He heard the hum of the refrigerators coming from somewhere above him and grabbed Lucy’s arm and pointed to a nearby, open stairwell.

They shuffled up the steps and down another hallway toward a door at the end protected by a keyless digital pad. If experience was any indication, the collection room lay on the other side.

Lucy opened her attaché case and plucked out some tools and quickly disassembled the touchpad. Then she pulled out her pry-bar moved aside several strands of colored wire and a circuit board. She severed the wires with the thin knife until she was faced with a simple lock which she attacked with her lock-picks.

As she was doing this, Evan swung back down the hall, peering into rooms and through windows. There were cubicles and spaces filled with supplies and long metal tables with thawing baths, platelet shakers, incubators, and containers of glycerol.

Evan inched back and his mouth froze as he listened to two sounds at the same time: Lucy exhaling in delight as she gained access to the collection room, and the slow, plodding steps made by somebody below.

The echo of the footfalls was faint, but unmistakable. Evan’s head whipped around and his mouth made a “fttt” sound that Lucy recognized. They shared a look and then Evan pointed down. Lucy nodded and signaled for him to follow her and he did.

They moved breathlessly through the now open door and into the collection room which was clogged with refrigeration and freezing units. They headed for a walk-in unit and Lucy yanked open the door to reveal bags of blood hanging like meat at a butcher’s shop.

As Lucy layered the bags in the duffel bag, Evan stole back to the door. He snuck a look through the door’s glass window.

“Anything?” Lucy asked.

“Clear… for now.”

She filled the bag up and whirled and they crouched behind the door, ready to exfiltrate the room.

“Ready?”

Evan held her look.

“What happens if-”

“It won’t.”

“-but what… if?”

“You should’ve let me bring my backpack,” she said while shouldering the door open.

All was silent, Lucy and Evan creeping down the hall, nearing the stairwell. Evan silently counted every step he took, listening for something, anything.

He turned the corner and meaty hands telescoped out at his throat. Lucy screamed as a white-whiskered man in a security uniform stumble-stepped forward.

“What the hell are you doing?!” the man bellowed.

The hands opened and then closed around Evan’s throat. Evan gasped, nearly swooning before he threw a punch that caught the man—the guard—in the stomach.

The guard tottered in wonderment. He was older than Evan first thought, probably in the middle of his years. His face was well-creased, but he possessed the broad-shouldered frame of a much younger man.

White Whiskers advanced and Evan threw two additional punches. The guard dodged Evan’s fists and lashed out at him. Evan darted and danced on the balls of his feet, just like Lucy had taught him. He popped White Whiskers in the shoulder and then the older man used his bulk to overwhelm Evan, bear-hugging and then shoving him into a nearby wall.

Evan’s head slammed back and his vision swam with stars. He dropped to the ground, turning to see Lucy unleash a wicked kick that caught White Whiskers in the hamstring. Down went the guard as Lucy grabbed Evan and pulled him up. The two dashed for the stairs and White Whiskers pursued.

Evan could hear footfalls behind as he and Lucy bombed down the hall. White Whiskers cursed and shouted as Evan descended the first step and then his momentum stopped. Evan’s arms swung and his feet pedaled, but he couldn’t move. He was being held in the guard’s vice-like grip.

“C’mere, you little bastard,” the guard growled, teeth bared.

Evan planted his feet on the edge of the stair tread and pushed back. He glimpsed the wide-eyed panic in White Whisker’s face. The older man lost his footing and somehow fell forward, smacking against the railing, his heavy frame carrying him over it. In a flash he was hanging by one hand from the other edge of the banister. Fourteen or fifteen feet above the cement floor below. Lucy moved back to assist Evan in what seemed like slow-motion.

The guard grabbed for Lucy’s ankle and she instinctively kicked him in the nose. Evan screamed as White Whisker’s fingers, suddenly liberated from the handhold, fanned out. He managed to grab at Lucy a final time, dislodging several packets of blood and then he fell.

Evan and Lucy watch in stunned silence as the guard slammed into the hard surface below. The blood packets burst open and it was difficult to discern what injury or injuries the guard had sustained. The guard’s body bucked once and a little rill of blood issued from his mouth.

“Oh, God,” Evan said covering his mouth.

Lucy grabbed at Evan’s arm and he shoved her away. He raced down the stairs and moved toward the stricken guard who was lying in a pool of blood from the ruptured packets.

The man was on his side now, moving spastically like a fish on the deck of a boat. Evan approached, wanting to reach out and help the guard who coughed and moaned.

Lucy yelled at Evan, imploring him to run, but he could barely hear her. He watched the guard’s arm shoot out, fingers pawing for something… a small device that resembled a cellphone.

The guard’s glassy eyes ratcheted toward Evan. They shared a look and then the guard plucked up the device in a quivering hand and pressed a button.

Sirens wailed in every direction.

Evan stumbled back as Lucy grabbed at him. Evan continued to stare at the guard whose body was twitching now, as if he was being jolted by a thousand volts of electricity.

“What about-”

“Leave him! There’s nothing we can do!” she said.

They burst through the back door and sprinted down the street. Evan expected spotlights to snap on or dogs to bark at any second, but nothing happened. They hit the Cressida and clambered inside, Lucy behind the wheel this time.

Lucy did a few circuits around the city, killing time, checking for tails and not a single word was exchanged between them.

Later, they parked in the back of the rowhouse and sat in silence for nearly ten minutes until Evan looked over at his mother.

“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t alive,” he said.

“Don’t even joke about a thing like that.”

“Who said it was a joke?”

“If your father was here-”

“But he’s not is he? He’s dead and buried because of that fucking thing in the basement.”

“Jesus, Evan, what’s gotten into-”

“Reality, mom. The truth.”

“-you - you’re tired, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“We could leave,” he said, reaching over and grabbing his mother’s wrist. “Don’t you ever – we could go somewhere else. Santa Monica maybe.”

“Are you nuts? They’re probably still looking for us there.”

“So there are a million other places we could-”

“And do what exactly?”

“Live for once!”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

“We’re slaves, mom! Jesus we probably killed a guy back there and who’s to say the girl that Gideon attacked before isn’t-”

“They’re just injured.”

“That’s a lie and you know it.”

Lucy pulled her hand away from Evan’s.

“We had a job to do and we did it.”

“We’re criminals, mom. And after tonight I’m beginning to think we’re pretty shitty ones. Petty little, half-assed bullet-catchers in the service of a family of killers.”

Lucy’s face flushed.

“When your father passed they were very good to me, Evan. You were young so you probably don’t remember-”

“I remember those men coming for Gideon because of what he did and then Dad screamed and they busted in and – and the blood – there was so much-”

“Your father was a hero.”

“Heroes don’t die for nothing!”

She turned from Evan.

“They paid for the funeral and bought an annuity that you get when you turn thirty and set up an impressive retirement account for me.”

“They can keep their blood money.”

“It’s not like it used to be in the olden days, okay? It’s not like it was with Mister Renfield and the Bolthouses and the Stonestreets and all the others that came over from-”

“What’s the life expectancy of a Familiar?”

Lucy wrung her hands until they were white.

“I’m done talking about this.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay, fine, you wanna continue, let’s continue. How ‘bout we start with you, huh? You think you’re the only one with dreams, don’t you? You think I never wanted to do something else? You don’t think there were times, lots of goddamn times, when I wanted to run out at night, just run the fuck out, and start a new life?!”

Evan was silent. It had been years since his mom had dropped an eff-bomb. 

“But I didn’t because I’d made a commitment to your father, to you, and, for better or worse, to them.”

She smacked her hands together after Evan didn’t respond.

“Goddammit this is my job! It’s not always pretty, but it’s the business we’ve chosen so quit the weepy scenes and suck it up!”

“I won’t, mom,” he said, kicking open his door. “I won’t suck it up and I won’t shut up and I’m not gonna do what we did tonight ever again.”

Evan slammed the door and ran up into the rowhouse. He didn’t take a breath until he’d banged shut the door to his room and locked it and belly-flopped onto his mattress.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about the injured guard with the white whiskers. For an instant he wanted to check the news, the internet, to make sure the guy was okay. He wondered if the man had a family and what they might be going through. It was the same sensation he’d felt on other jobs in the past.

In the dusky fringes of his mind, an image of the feedlot they’d hit on the outskirts of Chicago a year ago suddenly appeared. It was the one that collected and stored copious amount of blood from all of the animals slaughtered at nearby farms.

It had been an August night, hot and tacky. There’d been a guard there too. Some old chain-smoking farmhand in overalls with a face that was weathered and gnarled like the root on an ancient tree.

Lucy had coshed the guy over the head with a piece of rebar. Evan remembered watching him crumple to the ground, his body twitching a few times before he lay without moving. Evan had cried and Lucy had given him hell. Told him she was worried he didn’t have what it took to do her job. When he conceded that he didn’t possess what it took to do the job that seemed to piss her off even more.

The images faded and Evan’s jaw locked. He rose from the mattress and moved over to the closet and threw open a suitcase. He checked to make sure his door was locked again and then he reached into the bottom of the suitcase where a small wooden box lay.

He opened the box to reveal a cluster of baseball cards, pieces of jewelry, civil war bullets, and arrowheads. Pressing down on the wood, the bottom of the box popped up to reveal a hidden compartment that housed a sixteen inch piece of ash. A length of wood that had been polished, its end whittled down to a fine, glimmering point.

A stake.

Evan held the wood up until it was illuminated by a splash of moonlight from a nearby window. The stake was a thing of beauty. Evan daggered it above his head and imagined plunging it down into Gideon’s chest. Something slammed downstairs and Evan flinched and then placed the stake back in the box, hiding it near his mattress under an old blanket.

Within reach.

Just in case he needed it.

Chapter Twelve

In the days that followed, Evan went about his daily routine and interacted very little with Lucy. He was still angry with her though they never spoke again about the debacle at the blood bank. He’d checked and there was an article online from a local newspaper about the break-in. The guard was injured, but would live. Not that she’d know. She’d never bothered to discuss it or apologize or ask Evan how he felt after what happened, which seeded Evan’s anger.

Evan was done with it, finished with the life of a Familiar. He was counting down the days until he was eighteen and old enough to ship out on his own. He planned to give Lucy a formal two weeks notice before he did.

The countdown was the only thing that kept him going. That and the possibility of seeing Harmony again because tonight was the night that the band she liked would be playing.

He was busy in the backyard a few days later, checking the motion sensor cameras when Lucy sidled up.

“Can we call a truce?”

Evan didn’t answer.

“No talking for days? I can’t live like this, Evan.”

“Which is why I’m gone soon, Lucy. A few more days and I hit the big one eight.”

“I hate when you say things like that.”

“So I won’t say them anymore.”

She grabbed his arm.

“How many different ways can I apologize?”

“Actually you never formally apologized.”

“Well, I’m sorry, okay? I really am. And he’s sorry too.”

“Who? The corpse in the basement?”

“Evan…”

“I’ve got nothing to say to him.”

“I need your help.”

“Not tonight. I’m going out.”

“To do what?”

“I met a friend.”

“You did… what?”

“Remember what a friend is?”

She paused.

“I’m your friend, Evan.”

“No, you’re my mom. There’s a big friggin’ difference,” he said, heading back to the rowhouse.

Evan fumed as he slammed the rear door, making sure to slide by the unarmed booby-trap. He swiped a few sheets of foil from the windows, hoping to piss Gideon off. He’d seen him walk into a ray of sun before, seen how he yelped as the steam rose from his singed flesh. Evan smiled at the thought.

He descended the front steps. The street was deserted as he trotted past the Cressida to Dez’s rowhouse.

Evan mounted the steps to the rowhouse and looked around for Dez. No sign of him anywhere. He peered in the windows and seeing nothing, was readying to leave when he heard a crashing sound from inside.

Even turned the knob and nudged the front door, but it wouldn’t give. Evan put a shoulder against it, pushing it open. He stepped over a towel that had been wedged under the door. He immediately saw Dez splayed on the carpet. His wheelchair had overturned and the big man was sweat-slicked and flopping on the ground like an overturned turtle.

Evan reached for Dez who gestured for him to back off.

“Get the hell back!”

Evan withdrew.

“I’m just trying to - you need any help?”

“I don’t need shit, man,” Dez hissed.

Evan watched as Dez righted his wheelchair. Then, with the precision of a contortionist, Dez planted one arm, then another, and finally torqued his body up until he was in the chair. His powerful arms maneuvered the machine around until he was facing Evan.

“The hell you doing anyway? Don’t you know it’s a crime to bust into a man’s place like that?”

“Pretty sure there’s an exception for helping people. Thought you might be in trouble.”

“I can handle myself.”

Evan looked around. He smelled the faint odor of smoke and saw a charcoal grill propped up on a table near a stack of newspapers, lighter-fluid, and a box of matches. Recognition washed over Evan as he realized why the towel had been under the door.

“It ain’t what you think,” Dez said.

Dez snatched the towel from Evan’s hands.

“You want to talk about it?”

“What the hell you know about what I’m going through?” Dez said, his fists balled up. “What the fuck you know about loss?”

“I know a lot about it.”

“Bullshit.”

“I know about my dad.”

Dez’s eyes narrowed to slits.

“The hell you mean, man?”

“I lied when I said he was out of town.”

“Yeah? So where is he?”

“Gone away.”

“Gone?”

Evan nodded.

“How far?”

“So far he’s never gonna come back.”

Dez’s fists relaxed. His gaze smoked into Evan’s.

“This got something to do with what you and your moms is up to?”

Evan nodded again.

“Does it concern that fella that’s allegedly in your basement?”

“There’s nothing alleged about it.”

Dez opened his mouth, but no words came out. After a long pause Evan said:

“Some men came for my dad one night. I was just a little kid but I remember it like it was yesterday. He’d just kissed me goodnight and then the screaming started and he was just… gone. You know what the worst thing is? I’ll never see him again.”

“That ain’t necessarily true.”

“No, it is. I didn’t want to admit that for the longest time, but I know it now. I guess that’s the one thing I don’t think I’ll ever get over. The finality of it.”

“Is that your way of saying you know what I’m goin’ through?”

“No, it’s my way of saying that folks who check out early leave a ton of pain behind.”

“Nobody gives a shit about me,” Dez said, slapping his hands together. “I got nobody and can’t do a goddamn thing. Shit, I ain’t even gone more than three blocks in two years.”

“I give a shit about you. I’ve only known you for a few days, but it feels like I’ve known you my whole life. You’re probably one of the better people I’ve ever met. What does that tell you?”

“You need to get out more.”

Evan smirked.

“I appreciate the words, but I ain’t exactly in a good place right now, Evan. You feel me? I am righteously fucked up.”

“So am I.”

Dez bit his lip.

“I want – I just need to be alone now, okay? I gotta work it all through.”

“You gonna be okay?”

Dez waved Evan off.

“Leave it alone, Evan. I ain’t gonna do no harm to myself right now.”

“How about later?”

“Depends on how the rest of the day goes.”

Evan turned to leave when Dez whistled and Evan looked back over his shoulder.

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Evan.”

“I don’t.”

“Cause I don’t get off on pity.”

“Good, because I’ve got none for you.”

Dez dredged up a half smile and then Evan walked over and grabbed the towel that had been under the door from him. Then he spun and ambled outside into the light.

Chapter Thirteen

Evan was shocked when later that afternoon, Lucy didn’t object to him taking the Cressida out for a few hours. He assumed it was her way of trying to smooth things over.

He headed out around eight and found the club Harmony had mentioned twenty minutes later. A steroidal bouncer was herding a line of young people out front under a sagging neon sign with a caricature of a young boy with spiked fire-hydrant red hair that blinked “The Red Headed Stepchild.” Evan circled the block and parked in a side lot.

The sidewalk was still heavy with men and women waiting to get into the club and the bars next door. While ordinarily a kid his age would be concerned about how to gain access to such a place, Evan, as a result of his work with Lucy, had a number of professionally made fake ID’s.

He fished in a pocket and pulled out a driver’s license from Arizona with his photo and the name “Ellis Devine.” The name was by design since Lucy had always said to use his real last name in case somebody called for him in public.

He flashed the ID to the bouncer whose eyes were glazed from either booze or drugs. The bouncer squinted once and then stared at the ten spot Evan had in his hand as cover. The bouncer snagged the ten in his mitt and waved Evan in.

Evan drifted through the door and between herds of people swaying metronomically to a righteous beat pounded out by the onstage band.

He waded into the din of music and bodies and sidled up to the bar. He didn’t order anything, choosing instead to rise up on the lip of the bar to gain a better view of his surroundings.

Something lodged in the middle of his back and a voice barked:

“Where’s your ID, mister?”

Evan froze, hands up in the air, expected to be busted for his fake ID. He turned slowly to see Harmony grinning ear-to-ear.

“You showed, Evan!” she shouted.

His heart leapt. She’d remembered his name!

“Actually, the name’s Ellis,” he said, flashing her his phony ID.

She grinned and air-kissed him on the cheek, just like Evan imagined cool people in Europe did. Then she waved her own ID.

“Sara St. James,” he said, reading the ID before she pocketed it.

“Totally sounds like a porn name, but it was the best they had.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Twenty, thirty minutes,” she replied. “You come with anyone else?”

“Just me. You?”

“I’ve got friends of friends somewhere out in the madness,” she said sweeping her hand toward the crowd.

He nodded, leaning in close because he could barely hear anything over the echo of the band.

“You have trouble finding it?”

He shook his head.

“It’s pretty close to where I’m crashing.”

“You a lifer?”

“No, I just moved to the city with my mom a few days ago.”

“From where?”

“California.”

“Why would anyone voluntarily leave California for Baltimore?”

He suppressed a smirk.

“Didn’t have a choice.”

“Still under her thumb?”

“Yeah, but only for a few more days.”

“Whoa. Then you hit the big one, huh? Eighteen?”

He nodded.

“Soon as I’m a day over seventeen I’m outta here.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Where will you go?”

“To the land that lies between somewhere and nowhere.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“They say the view’s beautiful.”

“I’d like to see it some time.”

“Company is always appreciated.”

“Why you barely even know me, Evan,” she said with a half twirl. “I could be a total psycho.”

Evan laughed and then saw a young man staring at him from the other side of the dance floor. He looked familiar. Had he seen him back at the Inner Harbor? Somewhere else? A figure slipped past Evan and the man vanished and Harmony continued:

“I could be an axe-murderer for all you know.”

“I doubt it.”

“Yeah? How come?”

“I can tell by your eyes.”

She fluttered her eyelashes and smiled again. They both looked back at the stage.

“The guys I told you about before, ‘Shelter in Place,’ they’re up next.”

Evan nodded, enjoying the moment. Harmony had a hint of a southern accent that he hadn’t noticed before. It was sexy and somehow mysterious and soon he was swaying to the beat, forgetting about Lucy and his life and the secret hidden in the basement of his house. For that night at least, he was just an ordinary kid having a good time.

They parted ways a little after midnight, Harmony scribbling a time and location on a scrap of paper so they could meet up again in a few days. She handed the paper to Evan and squeezed his hand and he headed back toward the Cressida.

Evan felt a terrific sense of life for the first time in a very long time. His head buzzed with so many disordered thoughts it was impossible to concentrate. He realized that he’d just met her and it was a silly thing to do, but his mind conjured up an image of him explaining why he wanted to leave the life of a Familiar behind and then asking her to leave Baltimore behind for California or somewhere else and her nodding and kissing him. She beamed, whispering that it was a lovely idea, the kind of thing that was perfect to do when you were young and unburdened. He broke into an exultant run and raced down the street toward the Cressida.

Chapter Fourteen

Evan was still giddy from the prior night’s activities as he strolled down the staircase for breakfast. Lucy was seated at the table, tapping her fingers.

“So how’d it go last night?”

Evan shrugged and opened the fridge.

“You meet up with your friends?”

“Yep.”

“Are they nice?”

“Wouldn’t be friends with them if they weren’t.”

“Any females?”

Evan grabbed a drink, closed the fridge door and sat across the table from his mother.

“What are you? A prosecutor?”

“No, I’m your mother.”

“Sometimes it’s tough to tell the two apart.”

She smiled broadly.

“I got them to let you go with me.”

Boom. There it was. Evan was speechless for a few heartbeats.

“Come again?”

She pounded the table and squealed with delight.

“You heard me, bud! You’re going with me this time to the Gathering!”

Lucy’s words fell like a thousand-pound anvil.

“Wait – the Gathering – it’s tonight?”

“Didn’t I mention it before?”

“Hell, no you didn’t.”

“Well, that’s probably because I didn’t think they’d let you go, but they have and it’s on and the two of us are invited!”

“Why – why me – why this year?”

“Because I’ve been listening to you. I can tell you’re tired of the status quo.”

“You sound like some corporate honcho.”

“Well you and I run our own business don’t we? And that kinda makes me the CEO.”

“Of what? Vampires ‘R Us?”

She smiled, knelt before him, and took his hand in hers.

“I know you’re a little disillusioned and still haven’t gotten over what happened to Dad. Neither have I and I don’t know if I ever will. But we have to keep going, okay? He’d want that and I want you to see behind the curtain for once, Evan. To see that this whole thing can be positive if you just give it a chance.”

“Jeez, mom.”

“Whaddaya say, Evs? It would mean the world to me. Can you do this one thing for your dear, old mom?”

Evan wanted badly to say no, to tell his mother to go to hell or worse. But he knew she’d probably called in a lot of favors to get permission for him to go. Not just anyone was permitted to attend the Gathering. All of the representatives from the progressive families and their primary Familiars would be there and it occurred but once a year. It was big freaking deal and Evan was worried about what might happen to his mother if he didn’t go. He didn’t really have a choice.

“Okay, mom,” he said. “I’ll go.”

She clapped her hands.

“Then it’s all set!”

She threw an arm around him.

“Me and my little guy riding front and center into the lion’s den.”

“Probably not the best imagery.”

She laughed.

“What about … him?”

“Oh, he’s already there. Made the trip up last night. He’s making sure everything is perfect. Oh, you just wait and see.”

He hadn’t seen his mother this happy in months as she flew upstairs. Soon he could hear the bangs and thumps as she rooted around in her dresser. She yelled that she was taking the time to find just the right outfit as he ventured outside to clear his head.

The sun was low and the bell on an ice cream truck could be heard warbling from a few streets over. Evan moved down the front steps.

“What’d you think of the car?”

Evan looked over to see Dez popping a wheelie on his chair, gesturing at the Cressida.

“Sweet ride, Dez, thanks a bunch.”

“Always willing to hook a friend up.”

“So what can I do for you?” Evan asked.

Dez threw his hands up.

“Don’t you think I got everything I ever needed already, Evan? Take a look around. I am truly blessed twenty-four seven.”

“You have a change heart?”

“Let’s just say I did some heavy thinking last night.”

“Care to share?”

Dez shook his head.

“Some shit you gotta keep to yourself.”

Evan smiled, squinting in the sun.

“I ask you something, Evan?”

Evan nodded.

“You really believe all that stuff you told me about your father and the dude in your basement?”

“It’s the truth.”

“As you see it?”

“The way I see it is the way it is.”

“If what you say is so, how come you’re not livin’ in some castle or something? I always thought them vampires were high rollers.”

“Some of them are. Others are basically one step removed from a trailer park.”

“How ‘bout the one in your basement?”

“Somewhere in between.”

Dez registered this and then a long moment of silence ensued.

“Can you keep an eye on the place tonight?” Evan asked. “Me and my mom are going to this party out in the country with all the families.”

“Want me to tag along?”

“No, they’d kill you, Dez,” Evan replied. A chill worked its way up the back of Dez’s neck because Evan said this with absolutely no emotion in his face. Up until that point Dez had convinced himself that Evan was lying about the vampire stuff, but now his doubts were lifting.

“If I don’t come back, I got a phone and some electronic stuff up in my room I want you to have.”

“Jesus, man, you don’t know me like that.”

A slight smile danced across Evan’s lips.

“I think I got a pretty good idea of who you are.”

***

That night Lucy and Evan were elegantly turned out: Lucy in a black dress that accentuated her sleek figure and Evan in an almond-colored suit and dark shoes that were shined so slickly he could see his own reflection.

Though he didn’t want to, Lucy made him pose for a series of pictures that she took with her phone. Evan had received his GED a few months back online. He’d gone to several schools over the years, but didn’t have much to show for it. There’d been far too many moves to set down roots and in a twisted way, Evan felt that posing with his mom was his version of prom. The culmination of his teenage years. After tonight, he had the funny feeling that nothing would ever be like it was before.

Chapter Fifteen

Lucy and Evan left a little after eight at night and drove north out of the city. After twenty miles or so, they motored through Hunt Valley and into the countryside of Baltimore County. They had the radio on and were singing classic rocks songs.

“Just like old times, huh?” she said, finishing up the chorus on a Beatles song.

Evan looked over and smiled.

“Remember that time you were air-guitaring to that Black Sabbath song in Wichita and almost ate the back end of that semi?”

“It was a Hendrix song,” she corrected. “Something from Monterey Pop which I do believe was the greatest live concert ever.”

“Get out of here.”

“You’ve got something better than M.P.?”

“Little thing called Woodstock.”

She turned up her nose.

“Too crunchy.”

“The Stones at Altmont.”

“Too gritty.”

“Queen at Wembley Stadium.”

She considered this for a moment.

“Freddie Mercury at the height of his powers?”

He smiled and nodded.

“Okay, I can go with that,” she said. “Greatest live concert ever.”

Lucy smiled at this and at the thought that, at least for the moment, the old Evan was back. She hoped that he’d forgotten the last few days and would be open to what was to occur that night and perhaps the idea of staying around, maybe for a few more years. She looked up and spotted a sign for their exit and then another one for the Pennsylvania border.

There were fleeting thoughts of missing the exit and just driving on into the night, through Pennsylvania and possibly into New York and the lands that stretched beyond. They could make it work couldn’t they? Evan would go to college and Lucy would find a place to work. She pictured filling out job applications and staring at hiring managers whose faces collapsed into puzzlement when she described her special skills and precisely what she’d been doing for the last nineteen years.

She’d gone to a temp agency once on a lark where a perky young recruiter engaged her in exercises to assess her employability. She was asked to create a chart of old job skills, new job skills, and transferable skills. She’d written down “conceal, evade, and kill” as special skills on the paper and after the recruiter noticed something under Lucy’s fingernails, which Lucy conceded was probably dried blood, the recruiter nervously smiled, ended the meeting, and said the agency would get back to her. 

No, she knew that it was impossible to try and leave now. They almost certainly wouldn’t be noticed for a few days, but then someone, Gideon probably, would whisper things and a search party would be sent and then what? No matter where they hid, they would eventually be found. The Gentry had numerous former FBI agents and military intelligence officials on the payroll, men and women who were well-versed in hunting down people who tried to leave. A middle-aged woman and a young kid wouldn’t stand a chance. 

She shivered at these thoughts and feelings of regret gnawed at her. She took solace only in the fact that she and Clark had collected evidence, video footage, taped calls, photographs and the like of what they’d endured and done on behalf of the Gentry over the years. All of this, together with the identity of the only person who was known to help ex-Familiars go “ghost,” had been gathered several years before and buried in a metal coffin in a cemetery down south, to be accessed only in a time of utmost emergency. It represented the only modicum of leverage she had if the shit truly hit the fan. Her right temple suddenly ached and she felt old and worn out, so she took the next exit.

They drove over a strip of blacktop that snaked through densely forested hills. The Cressida sped by an old stone mill before thundering over a metal bridge that spanned the Gunpowder River.

The yearly soiree was always held at different locations. Sometimes in the city, other times in the country or the suburbs and, Lucy had told him, in the rear of a large gothic church on one occasion. That night’s Gathering would be held in the weekend home of a family that had done exceedingly well selling commodities.

The Cressida crested a ridge and in the distance little orbs of light could be seen and then an estate presented itself. A sprawling complex built in the middle of a field that was hemmed on all sides by woods.

A heavy fog hovered over everything, but Evan could make out the palatial digs, the expansive circular driveway, the small army of attendants who were scurrying around, parking cars and greeting guests.

The Cressida passed through an imposing gate manned by two beefy guards and rambled up the driveway. An attendant flagged Lucy and Evan down and they parked the car and exited.

Evan stepped back and took in the small front pond where a trio of swans were drifting across the dark water. His gaze hopped to the massive main house, a structure of slate and stucco that rose over the countryside like some pagan temple.

Lucy was busy greeting a few of the guests so Evan took up a position behind the Cressida. Through the miasma he watched the cars arrive, one after another, all long and dark and generally foreign in make. So many black cars were assembled that Evan thought they resembled the coils on a snake.

More attendants hurried out to the cars and doors were opened to disgorge men and ladies who dressed and carried themselves as if they were of exceedingly high station. Evan could hear a blitzkrieg of voices spoken: European, Asian, and some tongues that he surmised were native to the Middle East.

There was a great abundance of polished and glittering flesh, men and women dressed to the nines, appearing ageless. There were lots of cravats and velvet suits for the men and jewel-bedazzled clingy dresses for the ladies. A few of the male vamps sported facial hair including some intricately-groomed beards, but the majority were cleanshaven. Evan watched everyone ghost past, some blowing kisses at each other, others shaking hands, and still more smooching each other on the forehead which Evan had heard was some kind of secret vampire greeting.

And behind the members of the families (always behind) were people like Lucy and Evan. Familiars… servants. Most looked road worn and in their autumn years, but a few were on the youngish side, including a striking man with a mop of black hair that appeared only a few years older than Evan. This man, clad almost entirely in green (including a green waistcoast and suit), stared hard at Evan hard before entering the house.

Lucy spotted Evan and waved and grabbed his arm and led him inside.

The interior of the main house was well-appointed and sparely lit. Garlands of flowers were draped on the walls which sported oil paintings of dour-faced men and women and strange scenes from what Evan assumed were points in the past. Evan studied one in particular, smeared orange, red and black paint on a canvas that showed a ravenous pack of peasants burning a country manor.

“That really happened,” Lucy whispered, bobbing her head at the picture. “I think it was in Bavaria in the 1700s. Villagers storming the castle.”

“Sure those are the villagers?”

“Who else would they be?”

“The hired help?”

She pinched Evan’s arm as he yelped and they continued on down a hallway that spilled to a circular hall adorned with ancestral portraits and strange symbols and a few mounted animal heads.

The guests milled about here, touching glasses of what Evan assumed (and hoped) was red wine, munching on snacks and chatting amiably.

The whole event was a little underwhelming. He hadn’t known precisely what to expect, but Evan had imagined a gathering full of vampire families would be a little sexier. This was more like a weekend jaunt for money massagers in the Hamptons or a Thursday night carouse in Georgetown for the string-pullers in D.C. From what Evan could see, the centuries old cult of the blood-worshipper had decided to ditch its forests and catacombs for boardrooms and mansions. They’d sold out. For God’s sakes, they’d gone corporate.

“Doesn’t everything look beautiful?” Lucy asked.

Evan forced a smile.

“Real nice, mom.”

“This is how it always is. First class all the way.”

Evan spotted a tall, lithe man with a shag of beautifully coiffed gray hair who was being greeted by all of the guests. Evan thought he resembled a greyhound wrapped in a three-thousand dollar suit.

“Who’s the high-roller?”

“Leopold Vonnegut. He’s the head of the Gentry.”

“So what’s Leo’s day gig?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“Figures.”

She swatted his arm and looked around.

“Sit tight and don’t overuse your talking muscles. I’m going to try and find your Uncle.”

“He’s not my real-” Evan reflexively said, but she’d already disappeared into a pocket of partiers.

Evan did a quick circuit of the room, perusing some of the artwork, books, and a few of the slickly-produced magazines churned out by the fake-news organizations in the employ of the Gentry. The ones with the bold colors and slippery stories (conspiracy and otherwise) designed to confuse the public and surreptitiously cast favorable light on politicians (including someone just elected President) who were in the pocket of the Gentry or soon to be.

He snatched a snack from a tray and inspected it. It was some sort of glazed flesh on a stick. He held it up to his nose and thankfully it smelled like chicken.

“Fresh meat,” a voice said and Evan looked across the room at a man who gazed deeply at him. The man was in his thirties, bald as a stone with alabaster skin. He lifted his nose and scented the air.

“That I mean,” the man said, pointing at the hors d’oeuvre in Evan’s hand, “not you.”

Evan smiled nervously and blinked. When he looked back the man was nearly upon him and had somehow taken the stick of meat from Evan’s hand. How he’d managed to cross the distance between them in a millisecond, Evan didn’t know. The man sucked the meat down in a single bite and held up two glasses that were full of red liquid. He handed one glass to Evan and nudged him to sip at it, which Evan did. The liquid was room temperature and tasted of fruit punch mixed with honey and cloves.

“You’re new,” the man said.

Evan was too startled to speak, so he simply nodded.

“Who do you belong to?”

“My mother.”

The man giggled.

“Your mother, huh? Very cute,” he said, the man so close Evan could smell his musk, a mix of wine and copper and freshly plowed earth. Evan’s nostrils curled up.

“What’s your name?”

“His name’s Evan Devine, Julian,” a voice said as a hand came down and slapped Evan’s shoulder.

Evan wheeled around to see Gideon who was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. He’d never seen Gideon in anything other than jeans or dungarees and was shocked at how well he’d cleaned up.

“He’s a bright young thing,” Julian said of Evan and Gideon nodded, pulling Evan closer to him.

“He’s a good kid,” Gideon replied. Evan watched the muscles in Gideon’s neck throb.

Julian returned Gideon’s gaze and whatever existed between them passed. Julian nodded and walked off.

“Steer clear of that,” Gideon said.

“Who is he?”

“Julian Stoneburner.”

“Cool name.”

“For a terrible person. He’s a vestige of our past and a man I wouldn’t turn my back on.”

“I’m pretty sure you can say that about everyone here.”

Gideon made a gesture as if to say touché.

“Can we put aside whatever differences we have for one night, Evan?”

Evan slowly nodded and Gideon smiled, relieved.

“Follow me,” he said, “there’s some people I want to introduce you to.”

Gideon led Evan around for the next ten minutes, giving him a mini-tour of the house. At every instance, Gideon took great pains to emphasize how good everyone was, how normal, how the Gathering was not unlike attending a family reunion. Evan soon realized his mom and Gideon had brought him along to pitch him on the idea of becoming a Familiar in the future.

He recognized they were grooming him and so he smiled and nodded and listened as Gideon mingled with the other vamps, holding forth on a number of historical topics: the background of Judas Iscariot, the death of a woman named Hypatia in ancient Egypt, the real cause of the black plague, and a vampire scare in New England in the 1850s.

Nearly everything Evan heard was directly at odds with what he’d always been taught. His mind raced as Gideon recounted intricate details, as if he’d been an eyewitness to history.

Evan downed a few more snacks and nursed glasses of the red punch while listening to Gideon debate a well-heeled older vampire on the reasons why George Armstrong Custer had been the victim of a massive conspiracy.

“Well, of course, I should know,” Evan heard Gideon saying. “I was there.”

“Where?” the other man asked.

“The Little Bighorn.”

“Get out,” Evan said as the older man grinned.

“I’m quite serious,” Gideon replied. “Do you want to know a deep, dark secret?”

The others around leaned in close, smiling.

“He was set up. Assassinated.”

Gales of laughter from the others.

“True story, true story.”

“Why was Custer set up?” Evan asked.

“Two reasons. One, he bailed on his unit’s most popular soldier, Joel Elliott, several years before the final battle. Left the guy high and dry and he was killed by the Indians. Two, Custer testified against President Grant’s brother in a huge scandal involving kickbacks from Indian trading.”

“I never heard about that.”

“Because history’s whitewashed,” Gideon said.

“But that doesn’t prove that he was the victim of some vast conspiracy,” the older vampire said.

“Check the testimony of the Indians, ask any historian. There’s plenty of evidence that white people were fighting with the natives.”

“And you?” the older man said, pointing at Gideon, snickering.

“I don’t need to ask them,” Gideon said, “because I was there. Along with a team of assassins assembled by railroad interests and powerful industrialists. Somebody should write a book, ‘Killing Custer!’”

“Oh, Gideon,” the older man said, “I do love your fanciful stories.”

Gideon’s silky voice coupled with the laughter of the others caused Evan’s head to swim. Heady with drink, he spun and drifted through the crowd, looking for his mother.

Evan shuttled between rooms, the light growing dim as he moved toward what he assumed was the heart of the house. He called out for Lucy, but she was nowhere to be seen.

The crowd thinned the farther he went. Sounds dulled and colors became more vibrant. There was incense in the air that made his eyes water and he felt disparate tastes on his tongue.

He brushed through a heavy metal door that was lit only by a skylight. On the other side of the door the darkness seemed to fold around him. Two women were visible, embracing on a landing over a set of stairs that led down into the belly of the house.

The women were startlingly beautiful: tall, long-limbed with radish-white hair. They smiled at Evan and went back to their business, muscular lips locked together as more incense swirled. As he passed them, Evan thought one of them whispered, “Don’t be like Lot’s wife, don’t look back,” and so he didn’t.

At the bottom of the stairs was another landing and another heavy-looking door. Everything felt dreamy as he pushed on the door and entered a hallway echoing with music from various rooms.

Doors were open as Evan reeled past. His vision was woozy and things wavered in and out of focus. He saw what he thought were men and women, vamps and Familiars alike, engaged in sordid things. One of the Familiars, an older woman cradled in the arms of a large vamp with scarified flesh that was so pale it was nearly transparent, looked at Evan and mused, “The snake can’t help being what it is, can it?”

Evan looked away, inching forward, the air tinged with the odor of rot. He gazed at bodies intertwined and people smoking and injecting things and in one room there were cages hanging from the ceiling and in another a bear tethered to a wall by a thick chain.

The bear lunged at him as some unseen hand slammed the door shut and Evan startled and began to run. He sprinted back down the hallway as high, crazed laughter and elongated moans echoed. He reached the other door and bounded up the stairs past the two women whose visages had changed.

They’d appeared beautiful before, but now he saw them for what they were. The flesh on their faces was a web of raised veins that throbbed under gray flesh that had been shrink-wrapped around sunken eyes and gums eaten away to reveal diseased teeth. The air all around them turned stale and seemed to crackle with static electricity.

One of the ghoulish women snarled at Evan who stared at her, fear surging in him as he darted past. He levered the door open and crashed to the ground at the feet of the younger Familiar he’d noticed earlier in the night. The man who was dressed almost entirely in green.

“You a freak or something?” the young Familiar asked.

Evan stared, unable to speak as he gathered his thoughts.

“I asked whether you were a freak, kid.”

“No.”

The man closed the door and peered back at Evan.

“The PG shit is up here, okay? Behind that door and down the stairs it’s strictly NC-17. Adult themes, strong sexual content. You feel me?”

Evan nodded.

“You see some stuff you probably shouldn’t have?”

“Probably.”

“We’ll keep that between us.”

“Thanks,” Evan said weakly.

“Who the hell are you?” the man asked.

“Evan Devine.”

“No, I don’t give a rat’s ass what your name is. Who are you?”

“I just said-”

The man placed a finger on Evan’s lips.

“I’m going to ask you the only thing that matters to anyone at this little bash and I’d appreciate an answer,” the Familiar whispered. “Who do you serve?”

“I don’t serve anyone,” Evan replied, returning the man’s gaze and removing his finger, “but I assist Gideon Redmayne.”

At this, the man’s face pulled back in a taut smile.

“Why didn’t you say so? The House of Redmayne is one of the plank-holders. They’re good peoples.”

The man shot a hand out that Evan reluctantly pumped.

“Bram Blackledge. I’ve been told it sounds fake as shit, but it’s the name I was given. Honest. I’m the personal assistant to Mister Julian Stoneburner.”

“I met him.”

“Course you have, but don’t believe the hype. He’s one of the good ones,” Bram said with a wink. “When I’m with Julian it’s like being the roadie for the world’s greatest band. Every minute’s a blast.”

At the same time that Evan was listening to Bram’s stories, Lucy was on the other side of the room. This was, for all intents and purposes, a business affair, so she’d intentionally positioned herself near the members of better families. Not the one-percent mind you, but individuals from solid, second tier tribes that owned avocado farms in Florida and race horses in upstate New York and small tech companies on the west coast. In so doing, she hoped to make a pitch to them for her own skills in the event they were searching for additional help. This was not at all uncommon or frowned upon, the idea being that more seasoned Familiars would eventually move up to better families, thereby giving younger ones the chance to get their feet wet.

Lucy stood silently, smiling, nodding as the vamps talked about business and politics and history. Suddenly, there was a sour smell followed by a disturbance in the air. She noticed one or two other Familiars react. They sensed it too. The longer you were around the undead, the more you picked up on things civilians never noticed, almost like a dog responding to one of those silent whistles. Every one of her internal alarms was starting to sound and so she swiveled and moved through the crowd, looking for Evan.

Evan and Bram were similarly on the move, drifting between the party-goers, looking for food and drink. Bram stopped near a wall of ancient books and flared a smoke. He offered another one to Evan who deferred.

“Your first time?”

Evan nodded as Bram took a long pull from his smoke.

“So when’d you pop your cherry?”

“I – wha - what do you mean?”

“When’d you put your first one down in the line of duty?”

Evan didn’t immediately answer and Bram read his look.

“Jesus, you haven’t done it yet have you?” he said with a dark smile.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you kidding – you mean nobody’s told you?”

Evan shook his head as Bram sucked on his cigarette again and leaned in close.

“In order to be let into the club, to become a real, actual Familiar, you’ve got to spill some blood protecting the host.”

Evan saw his mother on the other side of the room. She looked alarmed and waved, wading into the crowd toward him. Bram spotted her as well.

“Oh, man, don’t tell me - you’re Lucy’s kid?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother’s well known. She’s a straight-up hive-kicker. I heard she’s put down damn near two-dozen attackers over the years.”

“That’s a lie.”

Bram ashed his smoke in a ceramic tray.

“If that helps you sleep at night keep believing it. But you don’t get to party, bra, ‘less you got some blood on your hands.”

Lucy approached and Bram headed off, mimicking a bow as he brushed past her.

“What did he say to you?”

“Not much.”

“Don’t believe anything he says. He’s a known liar and an asshole to boot.”

“You said a curse.”

She just stared at him.

“You only curse when you’re scared, mom.”

Lucy used her wrist to blot a snail of snot from Evan’s nose.

“Where the hell were you?” she asked.

“Looking for you.”

“I was back there.”

“Yeah, well, I got lost.”

“You didn’t go downstairs did you?”

“No,” Evan lied, his answer undercut by a slight delay in responding. “Why? What’s downstairs?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

“I wanna go home.”

“We just got here.”

“It’s weird.”

“It’s perfectly fine.”

Evan stared at his mother, his equilibrium still a bit off. His teeth felt mossy and everything was muffled, as if he was hearing things underwater.

“Can I ask you something and you promise not to be mad or think I’m super weird.”

“I already think that, Evan.”

“I’m serious.”

Her eyes spun toward him.

“How come you and dad never had another one?”

“Another one what?”

“Kid.”

“Good lord, Evan…”

“How come?”

“Now is not the time to talk about-”

Before another word could be uttered, shouts echoed from the middle of the room. Evan and Lucy couldn’t see who was yelling, but they watched as the crowd of partiers parted.

Julian, the vamp who’d given Evan the drink before was staggering, bellowing. He had an empty bottle of wine in hand and was clearly three sheets to the wind, piss drunk, his speech slurred. He jeered the partiers. Lucy held Evan’s hand as they took a few steps forward, looking over the shoulders of the others. Julian’s words became clearer with every step:

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it!” he said. “It’s the self-denial that mars our lives!”

Another of the guests approached Julian who shoved the man back.

“Didn’t Wilde say that all influence is immoral?!” he raged, “Didn’t he?!”

“How so?” someone shouted which seemed to enrage Julian.

“How so?! Why, to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul and to make it so that the influenced becomes an echo for another’s music!”

There was a fusillade of footfalls as Evan turned to see Leopold, the older, distinguished man with the excellent mane of silver hair that he’d seen before. He was flanked by several imposing guards who were icing Julian with nasty looks. One of them whispered into the cuff of his jacket.

Julian smiled and then aimed the wine bottle like a six-shooter, firing imaginary shots at the onlookers. Evan watched Gideon receive a nod from Leopold as Julian suddenly ran up the side of a wall and somersaulted backward like some jungle cat. Bram, Julian’s Familiar, struggled to hold his master back.

“We are punished for our refusals!” Julian screamed, his eyes glowing like two candles in a cave. “I’m the only one here who’s remained true to himself! I’m the only one that realizes every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in our mind and poisons us! And for what reason?! To find favor in the eyes of these – these sheep?!”

There was a moment of silence and then Julian turned his laser-like focus on Evan. What happened next was so incredibly quick that it took Evan four or five seconds to realize it had actually happened. Bram muttered something to Julian and made a move for him. Julian’s mouth distended and he swiped his hand like a conductor flicking a baton. The talon moved with such force that it seemed to make the air sing.

The nails on Julian’s fingers divested Bram of his right ear. There was a muted scream and a gush of red and then Julian was on all fours, breathing deeply in anticipation. He quickly lapped up the blood and greedily devouring the little nuggets of flesh from Bram’s ear.

Someone nearby retched, but Evan didn’t react. He was rooted in place, watching Julian’s eyes shudder with pleasure, his tongue darting and dipping into the steaming blood and strands of gristle. He stared at the vampire for longer than seemed right.

Julian finished and stopped and sniffed the air. His loathsome, bloody maw opened and closed and then he flung Evan a contemptuous look. His lips pulled back, almost ear-to-ear, a dark smile creasing his lips.

Evan thought he heard Julian say the word “piglet,” in a guttural howl as he leapt to his feet. He drew in a long breath and then sprinted toward Evan.

What happened next was less reality than fever dream, everything condensed to a single image of Julian traversing the room toward Evan. There was no way to avoid him, the vampire was too fast, too agile. Evan crouched and held his hands up, bracing for impact, as Julian threw himself at Evan and—

WHAM!

Lucy hurled herself into Julian, knocking him off balance. Evan watched Gideon quiver and then reluctantly tackle Julian, the pair rolling violently sideways in a mass of flailing limbs and snapping teeth.

Julian came up on his feet and Lucy kicked him so hard in the face that a rope of blood spattered Evan’s cheeks.

Screams followed, Lucy shielding Evan with her body. Julian’s face was screwed up and he howled like a caged animal.

Guards charged and Julian threw three of them off before Gideon pinned him to the ground. In a flash Leopold juked forward. He held a knife with an eight-inch blade fitted to an ivory-colored handle that looked as if it had once belonged to the skeleton of some great beast. Evan could see strange markings and symbols filigreed down the blade as the older vampire held it over his head.

Gideon and the others held Julian back, everyone watching, absolutely rapt, as the older vampire plunged the knife down. In several swift moves, he sliced Julian’s mouth up, cutting through his gums to remove the offending teeth.

The canines were cast to the ground and a barrel-chest man with a bulldog neck (the old master’s familiar Evan presumed), took them up in his hands and slashed off down the hallway.

Gauze was jammed into Julian’s wounds and a metal muzzle fitted tightly around his bear trap of a mouth. Lucy grabbed Evan and pulled him back.

Evan struggled as Lucy yanked him away from the scene. He turned back to see two things: Julian being dragged off, his mouth leaving a wending trail of gray and amber ichor down the hallway, and Bram, on his knees, severed ear geysering red.

Lucy still had her arms around Evan who was wriggling like a worm on the end of a hook. At the front door he broke free and bolted outside and across the lawn.

“Evan! Slow down, Evan!”

He surged past startled attendants and flummoxed guests. Lucy tossed her shoes to catch up with him.

Twenty yards from the pond she finally grabbed and pulled him to the ground. Evan rolled over, hair slicked with sweat, face still daubed with Julian’s blood.

“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry, sweetie.”

She rubbed the blood away, but a silicone-like residue (unique to vamps) remained.

“That was a mistake back there – a horrible mistake. That’s never happened before. That isn’t who they are.”

Evan’s chest rose and fell.

“No, mom, it’s exactly who they are.”

Lucy didn’t respond, her breath steaming the air. A ripple of fear pulsed over the entirety of Evan’s body and Lucy feared, for a moment, that he was going to faint.

“Evan, listen to me-”

He held up a hand to silence her.

“I - I want to go home now.”

Chapter Sixteen

Evan had his headphones on the entire ride home, blaring hard rock and rap. When they reached the rowhouse he bounded outside and neighborhood be damned, went for a long walk to clear his head. There were a few gangbangers out prowling the streets, but when they noticed his feverish eyes and the blood on his face they gave him a wide berth.

When he got home a little over an hour later, the rowhouse was silent. He listened for Lucy, but assumed she’d headed off to bed. He went into the kitchen and leaned an ear against the door. There were no noises coming from the basement and for that he was grateful.

Evan crept slowly up the stairs, not wanting to wake Lucy. He kept to the balls of his feet and tiptoed down the hallway. He heard a floorboard creaking and stopped, but nothing stirred.

He entered his room and crumpled on the mattress and rolled over. He stared at the ceiling and that’s when he saw it.

Saw him.

Gideon.

Perched on the edge of his dresser like a crow.

“Jesus,” Evan said, flinching, fighting like hell not to shout. “Gi-Gideon – you sc-scared me.”

“I get that a lot.”

Gideon pointed to the floor.

“May I?”

“Do I need to invite you in?”

“I think that ship’s already sailed.”

Gideon eased himself down from the dresser in one fluid motion and closed the door.

“Wouldn’t want to wake your mom.”

Evan slid his hands under his legs so Gideon couldn’t see that they were trembling.

“I’m a little tired, Gideon, so-”

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. So very sorry about what you witnessed before.”

“Which before?”

Gideon smiled darkly and as his lips parted, his features somehow mutable. Evan thought, for an instant, that his canines had grown. Evan blinked and when he looked back, Gideon’s lips were drawn closed, his teeth impossible to see. When he spot next his voice seemed to come from every corner of the room. 

“I screwed up, Evan. I mean not once, but a lot of times. Tonight being the latest example. Of course this isn’t news to you.”

“I guess – it’s - I understand.”

“That’s a lie,” Gideon replied, some heat in his voice. “I know what you really think. That I’m a freak. A loser. An addict that needs to be what? Put down like some wounded animal?”

“I never said any of that.”

“But you felt it. You feel it now don’t you?”

Evan shook his head, but his look betrayed his words.

“That’s one my gifts, Evan,” Gideon said softly. “I can smell and sense things people like you can’t. I can sniff fear, I can taste deceit. Lies are like wine, each one has a slightly different bouquet.”

Evan was silent as Gideon loomed over him. Evan thought he smelled the noxious odor of liquor mixed with the fermented funk of blood.

He experienced an upswelling of shame. At that moment he hated himself. He hated the fact that he was scared and he hated that he’d never have the guts to tell Gideon what he really thought. An image of his father flashed before him again and Evan clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles cracked. He realized there was no time left for prevarication and so against all odds he mustered the courage to blurt out:

“You want to know what I really think, Gideon?”

A curious look swept over Gideon, something halfway between laughter and indignation.

“Of course I want to know what you think. That’s why I’m here.”

“Okay, well, I think you choose to be like this.”

Gideon fell silent. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe for a few heartbeats and then his eyes rotated around and fixed on Evan. Evan wondered whether this was the last thing so many of Gideon’s victims had seen. Those cruel black eyes as they bore right through you.

“This isn’t a lifestyle choice, Evan. This thing that I have, it’s a sickness.”

“That’s what you say.”

“I’m the one talking so of course it’s what I fucking say.”

Evan felt his temperature rising, the drums and the blood roaring in his ears. He elbowed himself up.

“All the problems you have, Gideon, they’re of your own making.”

Gideon’s mouth drooped open, but he didn’t say anything. He seemed to withdraw into himself, somehow becoming smaller, less imposing.

“There was an old blues singer once upon a time. Robert Johnson. Met him once years ago down in Helena, Arkansas. He had this song about a man being stalked by a hellhound. That’s me, Evan.”

“Your past-”

Gideon nodded feverishly. His lancet eyes were shrouded, looking like the dusky backroads of some wasteland.

“I’ve ripped flesh, I’ve seen the fear in so many eyes and when the red spills, when it comes out hot and pungent you take a taste and that first droplet, I shit you not, is like seeing the face of God.”

It took Gideon a few seconds to realize he was licking his lips. He stared down at Evan whose legs quivered.

“B-but that’s all behind me now,” he said, trying to play it off. “For Crissakes, I need you and your mom – really need you – to help me – to help me become better, a better person.”

“It’s too late.”

Gideon ignored this.

“You think I don’t see their faces every night? You think I don’t suffer from some kind of post-traumatic guilt?”

“So why go on?”

“Because we, I, am selfish. I admit that. I’ve been given this thing, whether it’s a blessing or a curse, and for some reason I can’t, won’t, give it up.”

Evan registered this, but it had no impact. He’d heard some version of Gideon’s sob story for as long as he could remember.

“I didn’t used to, but I feel sorry for you, Gideon.”

Gideon reflexively threw out a hand with such force that his fingers seemed to split the air. He slashed the air again from left to right, taking a step, nearly tottering. Evan realized he had indeed been drinking.

“I don’t need your pity, Evan.”

Evan recoiled as Gideon slapped his palms together.

“Back at the party. I could’ve let that man, that thing, drain every last drop of your blood, but I didn’t.”

“My mom protected me.”

“But I’m the one who saved your life.”

“You think I owe you?”

“Everything you have comes from me.”

“I’d like you to leave now.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll scream.”

Gideon grinned.

“Your mother’s not around to come to your rescue. Besides, it takes your ilk three, sometimes four seconds to undertake the physical act of screaming, Evan. I speak of this from experience. I’d be on top of you in less than one.”

Evan’s bravado wilted as fear stole into his heart. His hand dropped down to the side of the mattress and his legs quaked. He was so scared he couldn’t remember whether he’d hidden his stake there.

“Looking for this?”

Evan’s eyes leapt up to see Gideon holding his stake. The contempt in the vampire’s eyes flashed like heat lightning.

“You think you’re so goddamn smart, don’t you?”

Gideon snapped the stake in half with two fingers.

“Remember what I’ve always told you? There are two universal truths in life. The first I still won’t speak of, but the second, as you know, deals with the preciousness of life. Never risk your own trying to take someone else’s unless you’re certain of succeeding.”

Gideon flipped the broken pieces of the stake at Evan.

“And ash doesn’t work on us, remember?”

Gideon spun with a mewling note of disgust and was gone so quickly through the door that Evan didn’t seem him go. He heard the bolts on the kitchen door open and the door close and then all was silent.

Evan raced to the door and checked to see that it was locked and then he looked down. Looked down at the puddle of urine from where his aching bladder had just emptied itself.

Chapter Seventeen

The next morning Evan slept late and Lucy didn’t bother to wake him. She was giving him his space, fully cognizant of how the prior night had been an unmitigated disaster.

When Evan did wake he sat in his room, stewing for hours, angry at how his mother had conspired with Gideon to convince him that everything was above board, normal even. But he’d seen behind the curtain. He knew what they were really like now. The Gentry might possess a veneer of civility, but in reality its members were little more than a nest of bloodthirsty vipers ready to strike at anyone or anything that posed a threat.

Evan sat on the mattress, clutching the pieces of his broken stake. He practiced daggering them over head as a likeness of Christopher Lee (aside from Robert Quarry, Lee had been the best Dracula, Evan thought) appeared and moved menacingly forward. When an imaginary Peter Cushing failed to materialize and come to his aid, Evan brought the stake halves down and pounded them into Lee’s chest as the monster squirmed and hissed like a rabid cat.

Evan turned over and looked at a scrap of paper on the floor. In the all the bedlam and terror he’d totally forgotten about it. It was the note Harmony had written. The one with a date and location for their next rendezvous. He smiled, realizing, at the very least, that he might get another chance to see her.

Evan headed downstairs an hour later. Lucy was nowhere to be found. He called out for her, but she didn’t respond. The dragging of a chair in the other bedroom on the first floor got his attention and that’s where he found her. Seated at a small desk, loopy smile on her face, squaring off against a bottle of booze and a small glass. He considered telling her about Gideon’s appearance in his room the prior night, but realized she was in no condition to do anything about it.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What does it look like?”

“Getting wasted.”

She pointed a finger gun at him.

“I’m going out,” he said.

She nodded, her eyes vacant.

“Do you know what I think, Evan?”

“No, mom.”

“I think you think you’re the only one who ever had dreams, but you’re not.”

Evan took the bottle away from her.

“I had dreams once too. Such dreams…”

“You’re worn out…”

“Your father and me were going to buy some land in the mountains of North Carolina. Just enough to have a small garden and a few animals. God, that sounds so silly now doesn’t it?”

“Not at all.”

“We didn’t do it because we’d just had you and were afraid of what they’d do if we left. Do you know I realized the other day that almost everything I’ve ever undertaken in my life was done out of fear?”

“You should go lay down…”

“You were right I think,” she said softly.

“Right about what?”

“About what you asked before. About whether we’re evil.”

Evan stared at her.

“I know you’re not,” she said, smiling warmly. “I thank God for that because it’s the only thing that matters.”

Her smiled slipped away. She reached out a hand and touched his wrist.

“You’ll always be my little boy, Evan-”

“Jesus, mom.”

“-till the end of time, you’ll always be the best thing I ever did.”

Lucy sobbed. Evan backed up out of the room, uncertain of what to do so he grabbed the keys to the Cressida. He was confused, the events of the last few days having left his mind disordered. He was about to go back and check on Lucy when his phone buzzed. He slipped it out of a pocket. There was a text. He didn’t recognize the number, but it read: “U coming tngt?”

Evan fought off a smile, realizing it had to be from Harmony. He couldn’t remember whether he’d given her his number before, but so what? She had it and was texting him and that’s all that mattered.

He looked back at the room where his mother was. For some reason, an old quote he learned in Sunday school years ago came to him. Something about how when you grow up you’re supposed to put away childish things. A few years ago he would’ve run back to his mother and buried his head under her arm, but not now. Now he was older, on the cusp of official adulthood and it was high time he stopped acting like a baby. He couldn’t hide behind his mother forever. It was time he went out on his own.

Besides, his mother was a badass just like Bram had told him back at the Gathering. She could deal with her own problems and handle anything that came her way. She didn’t need him and so he struck off through the rowhouse and stopped one last time when he spotted it.

The thing lying on a chair near a window.

Lucy’s black backpack.

It symbolized all that was wrong with being a Familiar. Instead of checking the house’s traps and defenses, he grabbed the backpack and headed outside.

Chapter Eighteen

The last tatters of daylight streamed down as Evan drove past Dez who was shooting baskets from his wheelchair into an old milk carton.

Evan waved to Dez, but didn’t have the strength to talk to him. There were too many emotions welling up inside.

He cranked the radio and willed away every last thought of his mother and Gideon. He projected an image of the house in Santa Monica, the beach, the weather.

An hour later he stopped near a defunct warehouse down past Boston Street and chucked Lucy’s backpack into the Patapsco River. He smiled, watching it disappear from sight, and then drove on by himself, exploring the city for the next several hours.

Much later, the moon hung low as he drove past the bars and cantinas in Fell’s Point.

Guided by Harmony’s scrap of paper, he soon found the name of the bar, “Slippery Slope,” and being thirty minutes early, made a few circuits around the block to kill some time.

He was air-drumming to Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life,” when something caught his eye peripherally.

It was Harmony, or a person he believed was Harmony. He could only see the back of her head, but the hair and the way she carried herself made it look like her. She was moving down an alley off to his left, toward a stand of old rowhouses.

Evan stopped the car. He was conflicted. On the one hand, he knew how fatal it was to be branded a stalker by a girl. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but be curious, Lucy having drilled into him the notions of exploring every angle, trusting, but making sure to verify. These things were ingrained and it would likely take years of therapy to break the habits.

He found himself slipping away from the Cressida which he parked on a sidestreet. Heading out, Evan slid by a crush of people until he was strolling down the alley.

Turning a corner, Evan saw Harmony (it was definitely her, he could see that now), speaking with a man who was leaning out of an SUV. The man looked similar to someone Evan had seen before. One of the guys at the bar the other night? Back in the Inner Harbor? He hoped like hell she didn’t have a boyfriend and then the SUV peeled off and she entered one of the rowhouses alone.

Evan searched in every direction, but there was nobody in sight. He paused and then padded down the alley toward the rowhouse. There was no way he’d ring the front door or let Harmony know he was there. No, he’d just sit tight and do a little surveillance to see what was up.

The rowhouse, an end unit, was two stories high with an apron of quarried stone and brick above that. It had a stoop that fronted the alley and an eight-foot tall wooden fence that surrounded the backyard.

The front door pushed open and Evan assumed somebody was coming outside so he crept to the right. A hand appeared from inside the rowhouse and dropped a bag of garbage. The front door closed and Evan hid behind a car before stealthing toward the backyard.

The gate on the backyard fence wasn’t locked and so Evan nosed in and looked around. There was a small garden and a single fruit tree along with a walkway made of cobblestones that snaked to a tiny deck.

There was a sliding glass door above the deck.

The door was partially open.

Evan made himself small in the garden’s shadows. Doubt began to eat at him. That still small voice told him to back up, to leave, that it wasn’t worth it. You’re gonna blow this, buster, the voice whispered. The first real girl in a long time and you’re spying on her?

Evan planted a foot to leave when a woman’s muffled scream sounded from somewhere inside the rowhouse. Don’t go anywhere, he chastised himself. What if she’s in trouble? What if somebody like Gideon was doing terrible things to her? Wasn’t it possible he’d followed Evan? Wasn’t it possible that he knew who Harmony was and had come after her as a result of what Evan had said to him before?

Evan paused, heard another scream and then the tom-toms, his internal drums, started up again. They were thicker this time, resembling a foot stepping into a puddle. It was as if the tension on the heads on the drums were out of whack.

Evan felt his foot sliding out, taking one step and then another, ten more in all as he crossed the distance between the garden and the back door.

He was up on the deck, peering through the open slider. Darkness peered back. He sucked in a breath and stepped inside and stumbled over an object that caused him to pitch forward.

Evan landed on something wide and soft and rolled to his left. He found himself in a rear room of the rowhouse that was unlit. His eyes acclimated to the gloom, allowing him to see the mattress he was slumped on. Squinting, he could see the room he was in was filled with at least four or five other mattresses.

Rising, he realized the space resembled one of the flophouses he and Lucy had stayed in between Gentry-approved abodes while on the run down south.

There were the mattresses and small piles of clothes covering the floor. Evan waded across carpet heaped with food wrappers and takeout containers until he was near an interior door.

Hearing the woman’s scream again, he edged through the door, entering an adjacent room to see a television.

There was a horror movie playing.

Evan watched as a young lovely ran through a field, chased by a brute wielding what looked like a lawnmower blade.

He held up his cellphone for more light and his blood froze.

The walls behind the TV were covered with photos.

Photos of Evan and Lucy.

Some had been taken at great distances, others were close-ups. Evan could tell by the length of his hair that they’d shot over the last year or two.

The voice from before, the still small one came to him again, whispering: Run, run as fast as you can, Evan. Run. Run! Run! Run!

“So now you know,” said a woman’s voice behind him.

Evan whirled in a flourish, feet tangled up as he crashed to the ground.

Harmony was standing in front of him, one hand behind her back, the other flipping on the light switch.

As the light blitzed on and hit her face, Evan noticed a change. Her hair was shorter now because of what was in her hands:

A set of hair extensions.

With the shorter hair and the play of light on her face it all came back to him. He remembered where he’d seen her.

She was younger that night, her eyes brighter, more full of life, but it was her just the same. A country girl from a small town in South Carolina. Some place that had been built around an old Civil War brick factory if Evan remembered correctly. He’d seen her down on in the middle of town during a Fourth of July festival. She was there with her brothers and parents.

He remembered these things because Gideon had murdered her father.

Evan wasn’t there when the deed was done, but he’d overheard Gideon’s breathless confession to Lucy, bawling about the ancient urge that had compelled him to follow and then swoop down on Harmony’s dad near the rear of a factory where he worked the night shift.

Evan had seen the end results, the dull red stains on Gideon’s clothes and hands. He knew the man’s neck had been ripped wide so Gideon could feast even as the vampire cried and promised never to do it again, that it was simply a biological impulse that could be controlled with time and practice.

Evan remembered how much Harmony’s father had weighed when they slipped him into the dark, roiling river that ran cool and deep on the outskirts of town. He also remembered seeing her face in the bubbletop lights of the cop car as they drove past the scene of the crime. Evan’s face was pressed to the car’s window and his eyes locked with Harmony’s, if only for an instant. He remembered all of this now.

“You - your father,” he croaked.

“His name was Nicholas Jessup.”

Evan stared at her.

“Say his name,” she said.

Evan did. She took another step forward. A dark light seemed to vibrate in her eyes and Evan thought she looked capable of almost anything.

“Your name’s not Harmony is it?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry.”

She didn’t respond.

“My dad died the same way,” Evan said. “Some men came for him in Texas and they shot him down. I watched him die.”

“My dad was innocent.”

“So was mine.”

She shook her head, tears in her eyes.

“What do you call a person who covers up the crimes of something else, Evan?”

“I don’t know.”

“An accomplice to murder. Your dad died because he was involved in horrible things.”

Evan thought about responding to this, but realized it wouldn’t do any good to argue. And besides, she was right wasn’t she? Didn’t they all have blood on their hands?

“How long have you been following us?” he asked.

“Long enough.”

“How?”

“It wasn’t that hard. There are people out there that turned us onto you.”

“Other vampires?”

“None of that matters anymore.”

Evan stared at her as she tapped her foot on the floor.

“What are you going to do?”

“What would you do if you were me?”

Her other hand came from behind her back and that’s when Evan saw it.

The Taser gun.

It was bulky and dark and there was a blue light on the end of it that winked at Evan.

A picture of his mother flashed.

She was back at the house, probably still half-drunk. And the traps, what about the traps? What about her backpack? He’d forgotten to set the traps and had taken her backpack!

“My mom – please don’t do anything to my mom.”

She just stared at him and Evan knew there would be no more witty banter. No holding of hands or secret sojourns to California or loose-limbed dancing while watching bands in sweaty bars.

She fired the gun and two electrodes slammed into his chest. There was a look of bafflement on Evan’s face and then every neuron in his body seized all at once and he hit the ground and blacked out.

Chapter Nineteen

Some time later, Evan roused awake. He pushed himself up, but fell to his knees. His muscles ached and his body felt heavy. Fighting to his feet, he realized after glancing at his cellphone that he’d been unconscious for fifteen minutes. Harmony wasn’t around and that sent chills down his spine because he knew where she was headed.

Staggering outside, dizzy on adrenaline, Evan hobble-stepped through the alley under a sliver of moonlight. The few people he passed barely gave him a look, assuming he’d just come from one of the nearby bars or clubs. Fumbling with his cellphone, he called Lucy, but her phone was off. He prayed he wouldn’t be too late and took some comfort in the fact that he hadn’t received a call or text from her.

Evan raced through the city, redlining the Cressida.

Dawn was only twenty or thirty minutes away as he parked the car in the middle of the neighborhood, engine still running as he quickstepped toward the rowhouse.

He’d expected the lights to be on, or a commotion visible, but nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Closer now, a sense of dread gripped his heart.

The drums were pounding, blood beating a hi-hat tempo, obliterating all other sounds. The drums soon merged with the percussion of his heart which sounded like a hammer striking a piece of granite.

He was a hundred feet away yet it felt like he was moving in slow-motion, his shoes filled with sand, his body wrapped in a steel-lined vest.

A few more steps and that’s when he saw that the front door was open. It was ajar only by a few inches, but that was reason enough for concern as Lucy always made sure to lock it.

Ten more steps and his boots crunched the shards of glass that littered the front steps.

Evan could see that a window was broken.

He flung himself up the steps.

The air was thick with screams followed by a crash and finally a gunshot that iced Evan’s blood because he knew that without her backpack Lucy was missing her last line of defense.

“NO!”

Against the din of neighbors waking and the far-off echo of police sirens, Evan barnstormed up the front steps. He pulled a fist back, ready for anything. Expecting hell, he entered the open front door and was not disappointed.

The first body lay in the threshold. It was one of the men Evan had seen Harmony with before back in the bar. He was on the ground and had been electrocuted by the trap. Evan could smell the stench of burning flesh and saw the man’s hand, the one touching a portion of the trap, blackened and smoking.

Evan hurtled the body and glass from the busted window, his breath coming in stabbing gasps.

He could see another man (the one Harmony had spoken to in the SUV), hanging near the back door, suspended by the torsion-spring-powered trap, speared by the sharpened carriage bolts. Lucy had probably remembered to deploy all of the traps, but likely not the sensors. The fact that he’d selfishly refused to do his job meant that they were able to sneak up on her.

Harmony, or the girl he knew as Harmony, lay ten feet away from this man and perhaps another five from Lucy. Her neck had been punctured by a kitchen knife that still jutted out at an odd angle.

There was a small crimson pond under her head and a shotgun and a metal-tipped stake lay near her outstretched hand. Harmony had probably triggered her shotgun at or around the same time that Lucy knifed her.

Evan’s eyes moved from the still-smoking barrel of the shotgun to Lucy, who was on her back in a red, glistening heap.

Evan dropped to his knees as Lucy fought to elbow herself up. There was a nasty black hole where the shotgun slug had chewed through her stomach.

She wheezed with every breath and blood dribbled between the gaps in her teeth and out of the piping of her nostrils.

“I almost did it,” she rasped. “Almost… took them all down.”

“Jesus, mom,” Evan said, head sagging as he leaned down and cradled Lucy in his arms.

“But I understand it, Evan,” she said, bobbing her head in Harmony’s direction. “I know why she did it. I recognized her as soon as she came at me. I remembered… remembered her face. Remembered how she looked at me when we drove past. It’s so hard to lose your father.”

Tear stung Evan’s eyes, his gaze hopping over to Harmony.

“Don’t,” Lucy whispered, clutching Evan’s wrist. “Do not touch her.”

“But she did this…”

Lucy slowly shook her head.

“We’re in a trap, Evan, and it’s one your father and I laid. I didn’t want to believe that, but it’s true. And if you take a life, you’ll never get out. If you spill blood you’ll end up like me. Indebted to them forever. I thought I could change things, make them see it all differently, but I was wrong.”

Evan hugged his mother tightly.

“What am I going to do without you?”

“The same thing you would have done anyway. Go out and live your life. You were always destined for bigger things anyway. Your father and I always knew it.”

Lucy’s eyes rolled heavenward and a ghost of a smile blossomed on her lips.

“R-remember, before?” she asked, barely able to keep her head up. “Remember you asked why we never had another child.”

He nodded and wiped a tendril of hair back from her face.

“It’s because I knew when you came out, Evan.”

“Knew… knew what?” he asked, his words escaping as a sob.

“That I could never love anybody more than I loved you.”

Evan felt the press of tears, laying his head on his mother’s chest while silently mouthing the words:

I love you.

She smiled again and Evan could see the blood pooling at the edges of her lips, a steady flow of clear liquid oozing out one ear. She gripped his hand and her eyes rolled back. She shuddered out a sigh and then the light winked out of her eyes and she was gone. Just like that.

Evan kissed her on her forehead and fell to his side, nose burning, barely able to breathe.

A rustling noise drew his attention and he looked back to see Harmony. She was staring at him, eyes glazed, a bubble of blood on her chin.

Her mouth opened and closed slowly, like a dying fish.

“My d-dad,” she muttered.

“My mother,” Evan replied.

“He was…” she said softly, groping for the words. He… he was my whole world.”

“My mother was mine.”

Her eyes locked on him.

“I had to do it… I had to… but I-I’m sorry it h-happened like t-this.”

“I am too.”

He reached for her hand which lifted for an instant and then fell slack. Something gurgled in her throat and she spit up a ball of blood and bile. Her eyes held the watery gaze of death. She was gone too.

Evan’s heart fluttered and it all came out in a long, painful wail. He screamed for his mother and Harmony and all the others that had died because of the goddamned thing in the basement! Anger welled up inside him. He knew he couldn’t rely on his mother anymore. He knew now was the time to confront the horror that was ten feet below him.

A bar of light hit his face.

Dawn was very near.

Evan grabbed the stake that lay near Harmony’s hand and threw open the basement door. He tugged on the light and advanced with a determined gait, suffused with the unshakable conviction that Gideon had to die.

His grief super-charged to rage, Evan barreled down the stairs, holding the stake up like a pile-driver.

He screamed out Gideon’s name.

Beyond the reach of the light, something stirred.

Evan stumbled over a collection of empty liquor bottles. The bastard had been too cowardly or too drunk (or perhaps both) to help his mom, Evan realized. He was hiding down here in the shadows when she was attacked.

He gripped the stake with everything he had, wondering how Gideon would look when he drove it into his chest. He’d never seen a vamp die, but had heard tales from his mother. The skin would sizzle like bacon in a skillet and then the chest would implode like a dried gourd and the whole rotting carcass would turn to dust.

“HAVE THE GUTS TO SHOW YOURSELF!” Evan railed.

Evan saw something peripherally sharking through the grainy darkness. A pair of eyes glowed like pieces of blown glass.

A form rose up and there was a flash of slicked skin with an alabaster hue. Gideon’s hand swung out, connecting with Evan’s shoulder with sufficient force to knock him back on his ass.

Gideon appeared, eyes saucered, his face a mask of rage. For an instant he almost looked cartoonish, like some hack horror actor dressed up for a B-movie. He drew up on Evan who noticed the color had run away from his face. Gideon had the complexion of a cave dweller now as Evan wrestled himself up and Gideon matched him, step for step.

A surge in anxiety washed over Evan which was soon replaced by white-hot anger. He adopted an offensive posture, measured his weight and lowered a shoulder, ramming into Gideon with surprising force.

Gideon fell back and spider-scuttled to the right before taking a few predatory steps forward. Then he clamped his hands around a joist and swung himself around and dropped to his haunches. The dark energy a trapped animal possesses blazed in Gideon’s eyes.

His lips pulled back, teeth bared, a runner of drool hanging from them.

Gideon’s eyes seemed to double in size. He hissed and spat a gob of fluid at Evan.

“I could’ve killed you a thousand times before! I could’ve crept up through the air vents in your room and eaten your fucking soul!”

“You never had the guts! Everyone knows you’re a goddamn coward!”

Gideon threw a punch that caught Evan in his chest. The force propelled Evan back near a basement window.

Evan levered himself up and swung the stake, shattering the window. A few slivers of light crept in. One of them hit Gideon’s hand which sizzled and smoked. Evan laughed. 

Gideon’s flesh smelled like a burned match as he withdrew past the fringes of light. Evan saw panic grip the vampire’s face and he used the moment to throw open the stormdoors. More light shafted down and Gideon clamped down on Evan’s ankle and yanked him back. With his other hand, the vampire grabbed a piece of rebar and swung it at Evan.

Just like back with Lucy and the wooden dowel, Evan caught the rebar between his hands. Gideon’s eyes went wide as Evan wrenched the rebar away.

Gideon howled and sprung at Evan when—

WHAM!

A football slammed into the vampire’s face.

Evan looked back to see Dez, peering at him from the top of the open stormdoors.

“GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” Evan screamed.

Dez couldn’t or wouldn’t move. Gideon took a step toward Dez and Evan surged headlong into the vampire, head down, pistoning into his ribs.

Gideon exhaled and fell to the floor. Quicker than he could believe, Evan mounted Gideon who stiffened and shrunk, not expecting such an attack.

“SHE’S DEAD, GIDEON!” Evan screamed, raising the stake over his head.

Gideon reflexively threw his hands up.

“My mother is dead because of you!” Evan said as a torrent of tears rolled down his cheeks.

Gideon’s hands came down and what followed next was a few seconds of cold, deep silence.

The fire died in the vampire’s eyes and his rage expired. His entire body wilted, making him look very small and insignificant. Evan rolled off of him.

Sunlight swelled the broken window and stormdoors. Evan felt the warmth of the light and rose to his feet. He could hear Dez calling out to him, but he didn’t look back.

Gideon lurched over and knelt at Evan’s feet like a penitent seeking clemency. He blubbered, dredging for the right words, the same ones he’d spoken so many times in the past:

“Help me, Evan. God knows I don’t deserve it, but this time it’s different. I swear it.”

“I’m leaving, Gideon.”

“You can’t just… leave. For God’s… they’ll send someone for you! You know that don’t you?!”

“So let them come. Go on and tell them if you want. Tell them I’m going to go and get some things my mom kept hidden and blow the lid off this. And if they mess with me, I’ll burn the whole goddamn thing down.”

Evan turned and Gideon heaved his agony-wracked body sideways to clutch Evan’s ankle.

“The one thing I didn’t lie about is that there is one universal truth, Evan. Oh, I know now is not the time, but you need to know. You need to. It’s that no matter how many lives you lead, you keep making the same mistakes. Over and over. At least I have.”

Gideon pointed to the stake and then thumped his chest.

“Here I am, Evan, offering myself up to you. Clothed in all my weakness. Please. Go on and get it over with.”

Evan gazed at the stake and then broke it over his right knee. He flung the pieces at Gideon.

“I’m free, Gideon.”

Evan pivoted and marched back up the staircase as Gideon screamed, calling out to him:

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry for everything! I love you, Evan! I loved your mother!”

Evan moved up through the stormdoors under the bleak light of dawn, listening to the racket coming from behind as Gideon frantically searched for a forgiving section of shadows, anything to hide himself from the sun’s cleansing rays.

Dez helped Evan up, the two just standing there silently for an instant. Evan had fleeting thoughts about going back for Lucy’s body, but what good would it have done? The woman back there, the one marinated in gore and splayed on the kitchen floor, wasn’t his mother. Not anymore. He wanted to remember her the way she was, an effortless beauty holding his hand as they walked down to a beach on the Pacific Ocean.

“Evan, hey, Evan you hear me?” Dez asked.

Evan nodded.

“What the hell just happened back there?”

“You saw it, didn’t you? You saw… him.”

“I saw something.”

The police sirens were close, just a block or two away. Evan moved in a daze past curious neighbors as Dez wheeled alongside him.

“What about your mother, man?”

“She’s gone.”

Dez studied the bloody splotches on Evan’s clothes.

“Jesus,” Dez said. “Jesus.”

“I gotta go.”

“To where?”

“Anywhere but here.”

Evan saw the lights from the cops and the first responders at the bottom of the street.

Evan tried to will some normality back into his face, planting a foot to leave when Dez called out:

“Can I come?”

Evan looked back at Dez.

“Somebody might be coming for me because of what happened, Dez. I’ve got to head south ‘cause there’s something I need to find. Something important my mom and dad buried a long time ago. I’m going to get that and then if they come for me I’m gonna start a war.”

“So let’s get the party started and get your shit. If the black hats follow, let ‘em follow. I’ll carry my own weight. I can give as good as I receive. There ain’t no quit in me and I’ll go as far you want me to go.”

Evan paused.

“Why?”

“Cause neither of us got nothin’ here no more and you look like you could use a real friend, Evan. Besides, fellas like us, strays, ‘cause that’s what we are, we gotta stick together.”

There was something in Evan’s face, a change in the way he held his head that Dez thought looked a bit like guarded hope.

Evan nodded in Dez’s direction and then he cast a final look back at the rowhouse.

He saw something, little more than a shadow really, a ghostly face pressed to the glass.

Watching him from an upstairs window.

It looked like Gideon.

Evan blinked and when he looked back whatever had been there was gone.

His jaw locked and he set off down the street with Dez at his side as the sun broke overhead.

THE END

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About The Author

George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a practicing lawyer and screenwriter. His script HEATSEEKERS was bought by Paramount with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov directing. In addition, he’s sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Jason Blum, Benderspink, director Louis Leterrier, and is the creator of IN THE DUST, an action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce, and the author of BLOOD RUNNERS, Books 1 and 2, and the horror novellas, AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS, AMITYVILLE: REVENANTS, RAZORBACKS, RAZORBACKS II, RAZORBACKS III, THE PACT, VERTICAL CITY (Books 1-4), as well as the THUNDER ROAD action series (Books 1 and 2).

www.georgemahaffey.com