Blood Hunt

Thought of weight vanished as he stared at his reflected teeth. Drawing back his lips in the grimace revealed fully grown canines…narrower than his previous ones and grooved at the back, his exploring tongue found. As he opened his mouth for a closer look, they extended a half inch or better. As he relaxed, they retracted again. He thought of Marti and gave thanks she had at least been saved from seeing him like this!

The length of his stubble astonished him. How long had he slept, he wondered as he turned on his razor.

Shaving made him feel better…and look better, he decided. Almost human. Which thought made him eye the bandages on his neck. He unwound them. Beneath, only scars remained…silvery pale. Count the recuperative powers of the vampire as fact, then.

But a human could not heal that fast, so after using a pair of nail scissors from his shaving kit to cut and remove the sutures, he carefully replaced the bandages.

The cramps started again.

Garreth slugged down more hot water until he could stand and walk…then put on clean clothes and made his way downstairs.

Voices drew him to the kitchen and a familiar scene. Harry and Lien seated at the peninsula, Harry with coat and tie off, eating a supper kept warm by Lien. But more than the aroma of sweet-and-sour pork drifted into the hall and Garreth halted, recoiling. Blood. If he went in there he would be surrounded by the smell of it. How could he hope to act normal, when he ached with hunger?

He shook himself. Come on, Mikaelian…man up! You’re not a blood-sucking zombie like Miss Lucy. Lane obviously had self-control, despite the club being awash in blood scents. He needed to develop it, too, if he wanted to pass as human.

Garreth forced himself forward…through the doorway.

Lien looked around and smiled. “It lives!”

Harry also turned…for some reason appearing relieved.

“I told you.” She patted his shoulder. “Harry here kept wanting to call an ambulance because he’d look in on you and think you’d stopped breathing. I told him not to worry, that you were the same way the other day, that you’d wake up and be fine. Now here you are. And starved I expect.”

Panic exploded in Garreth. She knew! She had figured him out! Run!

“There’s still plenty of sweet-and-sour and rice left.”

The words needed a moment to reach him through the thunder of blood in his ears. When they sank in he swore silently…in relief and chagrin. What was that Biblical quote: The wicked flee where no man pursuith.

He took a breath to calm himself…regretted it when their scents filled his nose and burned down his throat. “I’ll take tea; otherwise I’m okay for now. I’m still sore from Chiarelli’s punch and trying to go easy on my stomach.” He glanced at the kitchen clock. Nine. It had been a shorter sleep than he thought. “I guess you didn’t notice I made myself a sandwich this afternoon about an hour after we got back from church.”

“Yesterday,” Harry said.

Garreth blinked. “What?”

Lien glanced around from filling the tea kettle. “We went to church yesterday. This is Monday.”

He slept thirty hours? “Yeah, I can see that might worry you. I guess it was good for me.” He gave them a lying smile. “I feel almost normal again.” God…the smell of their blood! Hunger screamed in him. He sat on the stool at the end of the peninsula to keep from doubling with a cramp.

Get a grip, Mikaelian!

“Speaking of normal…” Harry reached over to his coat and dug keys out of a pocket. “…here are your car keys back. Also, your med exam is set for Friday morning. Then you see the shrink after lunch. So eat up and rest up.”

Med and psych exams in daylight! How much power could he exert then? And how could he even think about strategy while fighting hunger?

So think about something else, man.

One distraction occurred to him. Never mind that it violated Lien’s no shop talk rule. “Harry, how are the cases going? Have you caught Wink O’Hare yet…or found any sign of Lane Barber?”

Harry glanced at Lien, who nodded. “Neither one yet. For Barber we’ve got APB’s out for the Barber name and Alexandra Pfeifer.” He paused. “Odd alias, isn’t it? I suppose it sounds more authentic than the standard Anglo-Saxon ones. But it’s all crazy. We dusted her apartment and the only prints we found belonged to your name on the letter, Madelaine Bieber, and she turns out not to be Barber, but a sixty-seven-year-old woman who was arrested for assault in 1941. We can’t find her, either.”

Garreth bit his lip to keep from telling them that Lane and Madelaine Bieber were the same woman. Once he accepted Lane as a vampire, it followed that her apparent age bore no relation to her actual one. No wonder Lane hunted so efficiently; she had decades of practice. “Did the lab recover anything from papers burned in the fireplace?”

Harry shook his head. “Not much…just a partial postmark on an envelope with two of the ZIP numbers, a six and a seven.”

“That doesn’t help?”

Harry grimaced. “It might if we knew for sure where they are in the ZIP. If the ZIP is sixty-seven something, the letter came from the middle of Kansas. If it’s something sixty-seven something, it could have been mailed in any one of nine states. I had the fun of going through a ZIP directory to check the possibilities.” He laughed. “Isn’t being a detective exciting?”

“Anything else useful left of the postmark?”

Harry dug his notebook out of his suit coat thrown across the stool next to him…thumbed through, and handed it to Garreth. “I copied it, thinking maybe I’d look at it and have a brilliant insight, or my artist wife would.”

The drawing showed a postmark circle with the two visible numbers at the bottom. At the top of the circle, partials of three letters also remained. A dotted line indicated the edge of the fragment. Below the postmark Harry had drawn an elaborate M.

He pointed at it. “That was written, not printed, so it had to be part of the address on the envelope.”

The address on the envelope Garreth saw in Lane’s apartment started with an M…Madelaine Bieber. So Lane burned the letter before leaving…or at least the envelope. What did she consider dangerous for them to find? Too bad the return address and so much of the postmark were destroyed. Addressed to her real name, it must have come from someone who knew her well and from a long time back.

“Did you learn anything useful from her driver’s license or car registration?”

“Just that the information given for the license was false.” Harry frowned. “We ran her through NCIC, and asked for Wants on anyone fitting her description. She was in the wind so slick she’s got to have done this before. She’s wanted somewhere for something.” He sighed. “Anyway, that’s where we are now.”

Garreth wished desperately for a way to slip away, too. The simplest solution that did not involve just running, or trying to hypnotize both Harry and Lien, was wait for them to go to bed. Except that meant trying to ignore blood scents and hunger for several hours yet. Cue the distractions.

He tapped the postmark. “Maybe we can get more out of this. Let’s see if we can figure out what these letters are.”

They bent over it. That close, their scents overwhelmed him. He forced his focus to just the sketch.

Harry sighed. “Even if we decide what they are, we don’t know where in the city name they are.”

“No,” Lien said, “this first letter is the first letter of the name. As long as you copied everything exactly, there’s enough space to its left to show there’s no letter there. And the letter has to be a B or D…curved bottom line with a straight edge on the left.”

The next letter ended in two slanted feet. An A or X.

“Unless I didn’t get it exact and it’s an H,” Harry said.

“I don’t think many town names start BH or DH,” Lien said.

Garreth said, “Not BX or DX, either.”

She nodded. “So I think Harry copied correctly and it’s an A…DA or BA.”

The curve of the last letter, they decided, made it a C, O, or U.