“What did you do for Lester?”
Karson kept his eyes on the road as he drove. “He was undercover on a drug assignment, they found out, I heard screams coming out of an old, abandoned warehouse by the docks, they were torturing him, I disposed of them and set him free.”
The visions of blood and bodies I’d seen in the book struck my mind, making my stomach drop with a sickening rush. I stared off into the darkness and shoved them away, burying them down deep.Looking at the past serves no purpose but to distract from present circumstances.The past didn’t matter; all that mattered was now.
I reached across and squeezed his arm. “You have a good heart.”
Something uncomfortable flickered across his face, as if he wasn’t used to people paying him compliments. He shrugged. “I had seen him around a few times. He is ethical and brave, and I thought he deserved to live.”
“Weren’t you worried he would tell someone about you?”
“No. If he didn’t name his partner while they drove screws through his hands, I knew he could keep secrets.” The scars on his hands, the pain he must have gone through, was unthinkable. “Besides, if he did, I would kill him and whoever he told.”
I ignored the last line. “And he helps you now?”
“Yes. I have eyes and ears everywhere, but sometimes things get missed, and he informs me of any vampire wrongdoings so I can sort out the problem.”
“Do you remove any human problems, any of the bad guys too?”
“Sometimes,” he responded bluntly. “Not often. I don’t involve myself in human matters usually. It is for them to sort out.”
I glanced out of the window. The neighborhood we were in was old and run-down. Not the sort of area you would want to walk in at night—not that there was any area women could walk safely at night. There were too many monsters amongst men for women to be able to enjoy basic freedom.
Houses were small, timber clad, and many in disrepair. Lawns were mostly long and unkempt, and yards were filled with discarded rubbish, furniture, and tires. A group of four boys hung by a building with barred windows, their jeans hanging halfway down their asses as they passed around a fat joint. A couple of teenage girls, makeup piled on, thighs hanging from skimpy skirts, seated on a concrete bench, smiled up at them like they were the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, even all put together, they would be lucky to make up a few of the ingredients.
An older man seated on a chair on his front veranda watched us with wary, worn eyes as we drove past.
A few minutes later, we pulled up at the curb outside a tiny brown fiber-cement house. The lawn looked like it hadn’t beenmowed for months. Weeds grew wild in what was once a garden bed. Yellow police crime-scene tape was crisscrossed over the front door.
The house beside it had the same tape around the yard. It was a little white-painted home of equal size, but the lawns were mowed and the garden was neatly pruned.
“Lock your doors,” I said as we stepped out.
“I would hear them coming long before they even placed a finger on my car,” Karson answered with his usual arrogance. Even so, I noticed he locked it.
Monique and Michael pulled up behind us. We opened a wire gate, a creak filling the air. Small weeds burst up between long, gaping cracks in the concrete path leading to the house. The mat placed outside the door once readfuck off, but the F and U and C were worn, so it readk off.
I held out my hand and used my powers to unlock the door. We stepped into the wooden-floored hallway. The smell hit me first—musky—and the unsettling scent of food left to rot. Not horrific, but I had smelled nicer homes. I flicked on the lights; the vampires didn’t need them, but no sunlight came into the hallway and it was dim. The walls were covered in grimy fingerprints, and a discarded child’s jacket lay on the floor near a ragged doll. We moved through the hallway and into a kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, and the kitchen table—old vinyl-looking yellow-specked top that you rarely saw these days—had an ashtray with a heap of cigarette butts and ash piled up.
Monique’s nose crinkled. “If she smells anything like the house, she won’t be hard to trace.”
I wandered into the lounge. There was a card on the mantelpiece that was hand-drawn in yellow-and-red figurines, two children and a mother holding hands, and a big, bright sun in the left-hand corner. It read,I love you Mommy, Billy and Lottie.
I left the vampires to do their thing, while I headed down the hall. The door to a bedroom was slightly ajar. It creaked as I pushed it open and entered. The carpet was beige, stained, old, and worn. The bed was queen-sized and timber-framed, with a white quilt left rumpled. A few bottles of perfume sat on an old dresser. Leah’s room.
I kept going to an end room, where the door handle was dangling from shredded wood. Stepping inside, I flicked on the lights. It was the little boy’s bedroom. Superman posters adorned the walls, and like the little girl’s room I passed, a jumble of clothes and toys littered the floor.
I could feel the fear in this room. It prickled against my skin as if their terror still breathed in the walls. I stepped over the clothes and went to a wooden desk. Pictures he had drawn of superheroes covered the top; he was a good little artist.
As my fingers trailed down to the pillow on the boy’s bed, my vision blanked. The room was lost behind my mind’s eye, but then it reappeared again. I wished it didn’t.
Black claws wrapped around the door; there was a terrible scraping sound as they scratched into the timber. A brown-haired, freckle-faced boy and a blonde-haired girl huddled together on the bed, terrified. The boy was shaking all over as he opened the window and shoved his sister out. The next image was outside. Leah’s face was ghoulish white, her eyes dark and deranged. Red ran down her chin,drip, drip, drippingon her shiny black leather boots like bloody rain. The little girl screamed.
I yanked my hand away from the pillow and the room filled my eyesight again.
“You alright?” Karson stood at the door, running his gaze over me.
Seeing the children’s terror—feeling it—I teetered on the cusp of crying. I couldn’t cry, or he’d never bring me out again.
