Margie looked taken aback. She blinked and played with a diamond ring on her right ring finger. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while… wait, do you think he could have been involved with what happened to Mike?”
I opened my mouth, but a quick glare from Lena shut me up before I could speak. “We’re not sure,” she said cautiously. “We’re trying to explore every possibility.”
“Charles and Mike used to go hunting every year with my husband, rest his soul. After Mike was-” Her shoulders shook. She looked up at Lena, her eyebrows bunched together. “I’m sorry, what was I saying?”
It was possible we were seeing the early signs of dementia, but I had heard no sign of confusion or uncertainty when she talked about Mike’s buck. Only when Charles was mentioned had Margie begun to stumble.
“You were telling me about Charles,” Lena said gently. “Have you seen him at all since he returned from Afghanistan?”
“Afghanistan?” She looked at Lena, her eyes glassy with tears. “I don’t… what did he do? Did Charles take my son?” Tears broke free, running down her cheeks, but her words were flat.
“We just need to ask him some questions,” Lena reassured her.
“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I asked. Margie looked up at me, her face blank, then nodded. I retreated down the hall into a bathroom decorated in orange and black, the colors of the local high school. I sat down and pulled out a paperback copy of The Odyssey.
When I returned, Margie seemed calmer. She was describing the disappearance of her son Mike. “We had gone to see a Tigers game. We went to the first home game every year. Mike always brought his glove. He wanted to catch a home run ball, but he never did.”
She shuddered and dabbed her eyes. “He had gone ahead to start the car. The police found no evidence of foul play.”
“You let a twelve-year-old boy run off by himself?” I asked.
Lena glared at me.
“We wouldn’t-we didn’t…” She trailed off, staring into the distance.
“What happened to Mike wasn’t your fault,” said Lena.
I leaned over, holding a sprig of Moly in one hand. “I found this on the floor. From one of your crafts?”
The moment she touched the magical herb, her entire demeanor changed. “He wasn’t alone. Charles had just gotten his driver’s permit. He and Mike-” Her eyes went round, and the white petals began to wilt as they battled whatever spell had rewritten her memories. She stared at me. “Who… what did you do to me? Where is Charles?”
“You remember him now?” I asked.
“Of course I remember him! I-” She clutched her head. “Who are you people? I want you to leave. Get out of my house!”
Lena touched her arm. “Margie, you’re safe. We’re trying to help you.”
Margie didn’t shake her off, but she glared at me like I was the devil come to take her soul.
I retreated toward the door. “I’ll be in the car.”
Back in the Triumph, I let Smudge out of his cage. He scurried up to the windshield, then turned around to look at me as if waiting impatiently for the drive to start.
“Charles Hubert comes back from Afghanistan with magic,” I said slowly, trying to fit the pieces together. “He overdoes it and ends up possessed. That much makes sense. An amateur libriomancer with nobody to guide him… but why was he alone? Why didn’t the Porters find him?”
I took out my phone and called Ponce de Leon. If anyone would know about operating under the Porters’ radar, it was him. He might also have an idea how someone could suddenly develop magical abilities. His phone went to voice mail. I left a brief message, then turned back to Smudge. When he wasn’t setting things on fire or running laps, the fire-spider was a pretty good listener.
“Two years ago, Margie was there to meet her son when he came home from Afghanistan. Between then and now, someone wrote him out of her memories.” Possibly Charles himself, building another roadblock to anyone who might try to find him. “And then he started killing Porters.”
No, first he had written V-Day. I picked up the book and began to read more closely, losing myself in the story.
Lena emerged from the house an hour later and handed me a withered, blackened flower. “She’s back to the way she was. As far as Margie remembers, she had only one son. She’s pissed as hell at you, but doesn’t know exactly why.”
“I think I know what happened to her other son.” I folded the corner of the page I was reading and flipped back to an earlier chapter. “Listen to this. It’s immediately after Jakob Hoffman’s first encounter with a vampire. He’s being debriefed and still doesn’t understand what it was he saw.”
The captain’s words were like flies buzzing in the stables back home. Discipline and training compelled Jakob to respond. “Yes, sir!” “No, I didn’t see anything, sir.” “I don’t know, sir.”
But he had seen something. He simply didn’t understand what it was he had seen. Not yet.
The first to die had been Private Sterling, a young-faced kid fresh from the States. Bright-eyed and bare- chinned, he made Jakob feel like an old man. Jakob remembered Sterling calling out a challenge, though he hadn’t seen anyone.
“You’re jumping at ghosts, Mikey,” Jakob teased. But Mikey insisted someone was out there. He slid his rifle from his shoulder and stepped away to investigate.
Jakob closed his eyes. Mikey was just a kid. The older soldiers were supposed to keep an eye on the new ones, to keep them out of trouble. It was his duty, and he had failed.
He remembered seeing movement behind the fence that marked the edge of their temporary base. Barbed wire snapping like guitar strings. Mikey’s shout, choked off as quickly as it began. Jakob raised his weapon, but by the time he had taken a single step, Mikey was gone, along with whoever… with whatever had taken him.
And then all hell had broken loose.
“You think vampires killed Hubert’s brother?” asked Lena.
“There’s more.” I skipped ahead. “Sixty pages later, Jakob goes back to confront his captain.
“You knew!” Never had Jakob come so close to physically attacking a superior officer, but even now discipline compelled him to add a grudging, “Sir.”
Captain Nichols didn’t say a word. He just stood there, his swarthy face a stone mask. The silence stretched on until Jakob couldn’t take it anymore.
“Well?” he shouted. “You knew these things, these vampires were out there. You knew what we were fighting. Why didn’t you warn us, sir? Why aren’t we sending patrols out with M2s to burn these bastards into ash?”
“Specialist Hoffman, are you suggesting you could run this war better than your superiors?”
Hoffman stiffened. “No, sir. I’m suggesting that if people were told the truth, that we could do a better job of implementing those orders. That if we had been warned, Mikey might still be alive. Sir.”
Nichols didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Nothing he could say would justify sending men out unprepared. Those men were Jakob’s brothers, and they were dying at the hands of German monsters. Nothing Nichols said could make that all right. Nothing could bring Mikey back.
Lena was looking at the house. “Charles saw something the day his brother disappeared, but he didn’t know what. He didn’t piece it together until years later, after he discovered the Porters and learned the truth.”
“After he learned what we keep hidden from the world,” I said. “He blames the Porters for his brother’s death, so now he’s sending vampires after us as punishment.”
She rubbed her arms together. “Margie said Charles was never right after he came home from Afghanistan. The doctors tried various medications, but he continued to hallucinate. He woke up screaming, and began showing signs of paranoia. They thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder. His memories were fragmented, and there was so much he had to relearn. He couldn’t even read when he first woke up from the attack.” She looked at me. “It was after he started reading that the hallucinations began.”
“They weren’t hallucinations. That was his magic.” I closed the book. “In the end, after they retrieve the Silver Cross, Jakob Hoffman discovers that Nichols and several other superior officers are under the influence of dark magic. He steals the cross and uses it to unleash the vampires against Nichols and the rest of the officers who betrayed them. It’s brutal, effective, and impossible to cover up. A two-page epilogue describes the public outrage.
