Blood Hunt

acting to re-create order must be done with proper authority. Setting one’s self up to alter things according to one’s own judgment can end in mistake and failure.”

That sounded like a warning against vigilantism. But he had no plans to take the law into his own hands, just find Lane and see she was arrested. “What else? The change lines make a new hexagram.”

“The second one is number fifty-nine, Dispersion. It suggests success, especially after journeying and, of course, perseverance.” She smiled sadly. “That’s when I knew what you were going to do. Persevere, Garreth, and be true to yourself.” She threw her arms around him, hugging him fiercely. “Stay safe, please.”

He buried his face in her hair, throat tight. “I’ll do my best.”

9

While not dinner-plate flat as Garreth expected, the gold-brown Kansas hills, so unlike the yellow ones of California or those in San Francisco, rolled to an almost unimaginably distant horizon, sparsely dotted with trees and human constructs. The sky arched overhead, a cobalt bowl of infinity broken only here and there by wisps of cloud. The sun burned Garreth’s eyes even behind his glasses. Driving south toward Bachman out of Hays, he felt overwhelmed, a mote crushed between the immensity of earth and sky. He wondered whether it might have been wiser to drive from Davis during the day instead of only at night, sleeping wrapped in his air mattress pallet in the car at public campsites by day. Then he could have gradually accustomed himself to the broadened horizon instead of being suddenly hit by it on this drive.

To take his mind off the unexpected agoraphobia, Garreth thought ahead to Bachman, rehearsing his search strategy and cover story. Knocking on Bieber doors asking if they had a sister, aunt, cousin, daughter named Madelaine would alerting Lane to his pursuit. Instead, he had come purporting to hunt relatives named Pfeifer. Last month before her death, his grandmother had dropped a bombshell on the family, that she was not the natural mother of Garreth’s father. Phillip had been born to a Mary Pfeifer, who roomed with them for seven months… pregnant, though they never realized it until they found a newborn baby wrapped in a blanket on her bloody bed one morning with a note from Mary saying she was unfit to be a mother and she was leaving the baby for someone who would be a good mother. They never saw Mary again. Garreth’s newlywed grandmother raised the boy as her own. She knew nothing about Mary except a mention of Hays, Kansas, and a town name, Ba-something, on the smudged postmark of a letter Mary tore up. Garreth’s father had no interest in the woman who abandoned him at birth, but Garreth had decided to look for this unknown branch of the family tree…and maybe learn what happened to Mary. Among old family photos they had found one of three young women with his grandmother, the back labeled: Me, Bridget, Mary, Kathleen…without indicating which girl was which.

The photo and writing were real, one of Grandma Doyle’s taken in the late twenties when she and the other girls were all sixteen and seventeen and fresh from Ireland. The cardboard square stiffened the inside pocket of his jacket. Feeling it, Garreth remembered three days ago, when she handed it to him.

“May it bring you she who killed you,” his grandmother said, “and then a peaceful sleep.”

She had known what he was the moment he walked in the house that morning. Behind his mother exclaiming in horror, “Garreth, you’re turning into skin and bones!” she reached for the silver cross on her neck.

After hugging his mother he reached out to his grandmother…only to have her back away and hurriedly leave the room. “Grandma!” He stared stricken after her.

His mother touched him on the arm. “Please forgive her. I think she just needs time to accept that, for once, her Feeling was wrong.”

Garreth gave silent thanks his mother misinterpreted the reason for his distress. “I understand.” Which did nothing, however, to lessen the pain of being feared.

Dread lay more on his side in telling his father about Harry when his father came home at noon…out in the back yard, away from his mother. He turned the incident in the restaurant into a little dizziness, which he said he had experienced now and again since “the Barber woman” caught him by surprise and slammed his head into the wall, the resulting concussion enabling her to overpower him. In Phil Mikaelian’s opinion, only psychos and wimps had panic attacks. Otherwise Garreth told everything fit for humans to hear, making no attempt to minimize his screw-up. And braced for the reaction.

Jaw tight, his father listened without interruption before exploding. “Son of bitch! Who the hell did you think you were: John Wayne, or Dirty Harry! Of all the stupid, irresponsible — ” He sucked in a breath. “I understand wanting to nail this scumbag, but it’s not like Shane strapping a blown knee and injecting pain-killers so he can play another game. No one’s life is on the line in football. You — ”

He cut his father off. “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t already hit myself over the head with a hundred times. Not even I.A. can make me feel worse than I do already.”

His father’s scowl smoothed. He sighed. “So what are they going to do to you?”

Garreth shrugged. “The review board won’t hold its hearing for weeks, probably. I won’t know until then.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter.” His father slung an arm across Garreth’s shoulders. “You’ll man up and take your lumps without whining, right, even if it means suspension and being busted back to uniform?”

And lots of couch time, which Garreth refrained from mentioning. Shrinks, too, being only for psychos and wimps. “Right.”

“Oh, and you’re going to straighten Judith out about this adoption nonsense, right?”

That mention tightened Garreth’s gut but he said, “Right,” again.

To his relief, after a slap on the back, his father left him alone, heading into the house for lunch.

Garreth sat down at the foot of their big oak tree. The earth welcomed him, easing some daylight’s discomfort. Lying back against the trunk, he had looked up and seen the platform his father built for Shane and him when they were kids. His father still tended it religiously, keeping it safe for Brian, and for Shane’s kids when they visited.

Brian. Garreth sighed. As soon as he went over to visit, the question of adoption was bound to come up again. He closed his eyes wearily. What should he do about it?

Feet whispered down the back steps and across the lawn toward him, but he left his eyes closed. The scent of lavender overwhelming that of blood told him who it was.

The feet stopped a short distance away. “Dearg-dul. Undead,” his grandmother said quietly.

Fighting his eyes open, he saw her lower herself into a lawn chair.

“Why is it you’re walking?”

He sat up. “Grandma, I’m not dead! Look at me. I walk; I breathe; my heart beats. I reflect in mirrors. I can touch your cross, too.”

“But what do you eat? Do you still love the sun?”

Rather than answer that, he said, “I’m still and always your grandson. I won’t hurt you or any of the family.” Then after hesitating: “I don’t drink human blood.”

She regarded him uncertainly, then, with a quick touch on the cross around her neck, patted the side of the chair. “Come to me.”

She sat in the sun, but he moved to the ground beside her.

She reached out to touch stroke his hair. “Is it to avenge yourself on she who did this to you that you can’t sleep?”

He considered several answers before giving the one she seemed to want. “Yes.”

She sighed. “Poor unquiet spirit.”

While he winced at that, he welcomed the easing of her fear. “I need your help.”

“To find her?”

Garreth nodded. “And get away from here without upsetting Mom and Dad. I can’t stay without giving away that I’ve changed.”

She nodded. “So what will you be wanting me to do?”

At the fierce tone of her voice, he had to laugh. She looked so righteously angry, so ready to go into battle