The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 1): Death of an Immortal: Page 2

  He hadn’t left Bend until six a.m., but he’d have to find a way to prove that. Forensics had already determined that she had died sometime between midnight and dawn.

  With or without the help of the Portland cops, Carlan was going to find whoever had done this. He was going to make the killer pay. He wanted whoever had done this to feel the same despair, the same sense of loss, that he did.

  Whoever had killed Jamie must have family, friends. He’d find the murderer. But more, he’d find whoever the murderer loved most and…

  “We’re ready to move her now,” the forensics guy said to Brosterhouse.

  The big cop waved Carlan out of the room. They stood to one side of the door, on the landing, as the body was loaded onto the gurney and wheeled from the motel room.

  “Wait,” Carlan said suddenly.

  “What is it?” Brosterhouse asked. Something in his tone suggested that he was expecting Carlan to confess or something.

  “Let me see her again.”

  “She’s gone, pal. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “No… I need to check something.”

  Brosterhouse hesitated, then went over to the gurney and unzipped the body bag. Carlan leaned over. He tried not to look at her face as he stared at her punctured neck.

  “She’s missing a necklace, a silver crucifix. Her mother gave it to her.” Unbidden and unwanted, the image came to him of the last time he’d seen her: her battered face, her bloody fingers holding the crucifix as if it would protect her from his blows. He felt a moment of doubt; then his hunger for revenge returned.

  “Whoever killed her took it.”

  Chapter 4

  As he drove up the Mount Hood pass, the thick forests of the Cascade Mountains reminded Terrill of the old Black Forest of his youth. He was comfortable with the shadows, the darkness of the rocks and streams. Once, upon arriving in the Northwest, he had experimented by bundling up and walking the Pacific Crest Trail in daytime, just to see if he could do it. He had gone for miles, evading sunlit areas, hopping from shadow to shadow. He loved the rain and the thick growth of trees and vegetation.

  He had never been east of the summit.

  At the top of the pass, the trees changed––within seconds, it seemed––from thick fir forests with heavy underbrush to larger and more expansive ponderosa pines with little undergrowth.

  The air became dry, fragrant with the smells of pine needles and bitterbrush. The sun seemed brighter and lower to the earth.

  Terrill almost turned around. He could do nothing to bring the girl, Jamie, back. What would he accomplish by putting himself in danger? In the rearview mirror, he saw comfortably slate-gray skies with dotted trails of rain clouds overhanging the Willamette Valley. Ahead, he saw brightness and danger.

  The High Desert, a part of the Great American Basin, was something he’d purposely avoided, flying over by airplane every time he needed to travel. East of Bend, he knew, were miles and miles of lava rock slopes, filled with low, scraggly juniper trees and dry, woody sagebrush. He felt exposed just thinking about it.

  Vampires thrived in the visceral fluids of men and of the earth; in the darkness and the cover of the cities, in dark and rainy forests and mountains. They avoided the sparseness of small towns, where a local might be immediately missed and a stranger immediately suspected. Above all, vampires avoided the sun.

  Terrill pulled over to the side of the road.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked himself out loud.

  He could turn around, head farther north, into Olympic National Park and on to the equally rainy Seattle area. It wasn’t too late.

  #

  “Where are you from?” Jamie asked. It was after their first lovemaking session. She had started off stiff and uncomfortable, but his need had been great and he had ignored her discomfort at first. Then something had changed inside him, and he had slowed down and tried to bring her along with him. That had never happened before. He took what he needed and wanted from humans, without caring whether they liked it.

  But he had to admit, it had been a more satisfying experience somehow when she had climaxed with him… or at least pretended to. She was a whore, he reminded himself.

  “Nowhere and everywhere,” he answered finally.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. She frowned.

  “Why?” he asked. Most people were intrigued by his answer, envious of his world-weary traveler pose, but she seemed almost to pity him.

  “I love Bend, my hometown. It’s the best of all worlds. It has everything I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Yet here you are, in Portland.”

  “Only for awhile. I’ll go back as soon as…”

  “As soon as what?”

  “I have a couple of things I have to work out. There is… someone… I need distance from. But eventually, I’ll go back. I know it.”

  He watched her face as she was speaking, and her enthusiasm was irresistible. He grabbed her and slid her underneath him while she laughed.

  “You should visit sometime. I think you’d like it there!” she said.

  “I like it right here, right now.”

  #

  The summit of the Mount Hood pass was half in shadow and half in light. Terrill pulled out onto the highway and drove down into the light.

  Half the trees he passed were orange, seemingly dead. Pine beetle damage, Terrill thought, thinking he’d read something about it in The Oregonian. The dryness didn’t make him any more comfortable. The mountain lakes were bright blue and the roads to them paved with red cinders. He kept to the main highway and drove through the quaint tourist town of Sisters and on into Bend.

  He’d become practiced at finding local motels where he could pass unnoticed. Not too fancy, not too seedy; not too new or too old; bland and slightly downhill of their peak: that’s what Terrill preferred. Bend had several that fit the bill.

  It was still hours until dark. This late in the year, he’d be able to venture out after about four p.m. as long as he wore his hat and gloves and a long scarf wrapped around his face. But he had a couple of hours to kill until then, so he drove around, exploring the town. It didn’t take him more than hour to drive all the main roads.

  Finally, he judged it dark enough to pull up to the office of one of the motels, park under the overhang there, and hop out. He rented a room with a queen-size bed, microwave, and refrigerator, and paid for a week.

  Terrill checked into his room and then consulted the Yellow Pages for the nearest independent butcher. He got back in the car and drove to the butcher’s, where he ordered several pounds of steak, and then drove back to the motel. He ate the meat raw, licking the butcher paper clean of blood.

  The blandness of the blood brought back the memory of his feeding on Jamie. He hadn’t wanted that. Especially not after trying for decades not to kill another human. Especially not her. He had really liked her, perhaps more than any other mortal woman in his long existence.

  Terrill felt defeated, sick, and the raw meat did little to make him feel satiated. He wouldn’t feel satiated ever again, not if he could help it. He would starve first.

  Or so he told himself.

  But the memory of waking up, staring into an empty mirror, and feeling the old bloodlust again was overpowering. Even as he’d sunk his teeth into her neck, he’d been aware of the wrongness of it. Even as he’d drained her, he had known he was killing her.

  But he couldn’t stop.

  Never again would he trust himself to seek comfort in another human being. Another human being? No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t human.

  He was a monster. He had always been a monster. He would always be a monster.

  Chapter 5

  In London, England, Horsham awoke at the exact moment the sun went down. There was a soft sound in the other room, and his fangs immediately extended, his face elongated, and his claws dug into the mattress. He leapt off the bed and was at the door in moments. Then he stopped and took a breath. N
o! he thought. Rule Three: Never feed where you live. Take hold of yourself!

  He was gripping the doorknob so hard that it had crumpled in his hand. Saliva dripped from his jaws to the floor, but he retracted his fangs. He rolled his shoulders, trying to relax them, and looked down at his claws and turned them back into human hands.

  The servant girl in the next room turned when the door opened. Her fabled master, whom she had never seen in person before, came in wearing a thick bathrobe, his dark hair tousled and an even darker look on his face.

  “You are never to be here when I awake,” he growled. “Get out!”

  She paled, as if realizing the danger she was in. “I’m sorry. The paperboy was late today, so…”

  “Get out!”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.” She fled from the room, closing the door behind her.

  Normally, the coffee and morning newspaper were waiting in the kitchen when Horsham woke up at dusk. The servants and guards who protected him throughout the day were gone––for their own protection. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself when he first woke up. At that vulnerable moment, his hunger was always at its strongest and most instinctual.

  He sat and drank the coffee in three gulps, glanced at the paper and threw it aside.

  Horsham walked to his desk and turned on his laptop. The Internet was the wonder of the ages. He should know: although he was a little fuzzy about computers, he certainly knew about the ages.

  For generations, Horsham had hired cadres of young women to scan the world’s newspapers for specific types of stories. He’d spent hours every week reading the stories that had met his parameters. As the decades went by without Terrill being found, those parameters had widened. Sometimes it had seemed like reading the news was all he did.

  Now all he had to do was turn on his computer. Through the magic of algorithms, he got a complete and accurate readout of the world’s news, from which he gleaned only the most pertinent stories. But even now, he had to read for a steady half hour every morning because of all the bullshit people printed. Garbage in, garbage out, he thought.

  He was eight minutes into his daily routine when an item caught his eye.

  Portland, Oregon. A young woman had been found murdered in a motel, drained of blood, with two puncture wounds to the neck. A broken mirror had been found near the body, and police theorized that one of the fragments had been used to kill her. They didn’t try to explain the missing blood.

  There was a vampire story nearly every day, somewhere in the world. But in almost every case, at least one of the details was wrong. This, on the other hand, was a basic news item, with no inaccuracies about vampires, and that made it interesting to Horsham. Even the fact that the victim hadn’t been consumed didn’t rule out Terrill. He wasn’t acting like a normal vampire anymore; killing this girl had probably been unintentional.

  Portland was a place a vampire might gravitate to, just as Horsham migrated to different parts of the world depending on the rainy seasons.

  He deleted the rest of the stories but left this one up, with a note to investigate further.

  Then he got dressed and went out to feed.

  #

  Europe was by far the best hunting grounds for a vampire. There were multiple countries––meaning multiple jurisdictions––within a few hours of each other. In the U.S., with its Homeland Security measures, it was getting difficult to find prey without attracting notice.

  Horsham employed a random location generator, and today the program had spit out Inverness, the de facto capital of the Scottish Highlands. It was about a 560-mile trip from London. He hesitated. He could overrule the random generator, but he preferred not to. He also preferred not to leave a record of where he traveled, or else he would have taken his private jet.

  He only needed to feed once a month, so a two-day trip to the Scottish Highlands wasn’t out of line. He needed a vacation. He certainly could afford it. Compound interest was a vampire’s best friend.

  He packed his overnight bag and took a cab down to the train station.

  Horsham paid in cash for a private room in a luxury sleeping car on the express train from London to Inverness. He stayed out of the public gathering spots on the train for the first couple of hundred miles, ordering his meals delivered to his room: raw steak, as raw as the law would allow them to serve. His hunger for blood was growing with every second, and now that it was about to be satiated, the urgency seemed to grow exponentially.

  He’d held off for months this time, trying to instill discipline in himself. But he didn’t want to wait too long––he had a theory that the longer he waited, the weaker he became. Being discovered––and having to move, to reinvent himself yet again––was less of a danger than being weak. Weak got you killed.

  That’s why he’d been certain that he could track Terrill down. Terrill couldn’t afford to be weak. At first, Horsham thought it would be a matter of days… then weeks, months, years, decades. Occasionally, his old enemy would slip up, but by the time Horsham would arrive on the scene, Terrill would have moved on.

  And then, for the past two decades, nothing. No news. Other, lesser vampires were at work in the world, but Horsham could sense that they weren’t Terrill. Sloppy and self-indulgent, these vampires were often caught and destroyed.

  Terrill and Horsham were the last of the old breed.

  Eventually, it would be only Horsham.

  #

  As night fell, he made his way to the dining car.

  They all looked up when he entered the car––of course they did. He was a striking figure: six feet, four inches tall, with solid black hair, dark eyes, and a silvered goatee (he’d added the silver), dressed formally, almost archaically, in a suit complete with a vest and boutonniere––a rich man’s affectations.

  Most everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts, even the well-off among them. Horsham looked around for young and unattached people––men or women, it didn’t matter to him as long as their blood was healthy. It was mere force of habit; he had no intention of feeding where he had been seen.

  There was a gay couple in the car, and both men eyed him. There were three tables of older couples, and one young family. There was a single female, better dressed than the other women and far better looking than the matronly American tourists. A working girl, he guessed from long experience. She gave off that flavor.

  Horsham sat down, ignoring his fellow passengers, waving away the menu offered by a server and ordering another raw steak, this time with a baked potato and green beans, which he wouldn’t eat but would push around on the plate like a six-year-old child. The proximity of so much human blood was almost too much, but he didn’t show his growing hunger.

  He ate the steak slowly, though he wanted to eat it in one bite, grab the nearest diner, and feast on him or her and then the rest of them. Short work. No witnesses. He could leap off the train at speeds that would kill a human. It would be a mystery, just another mass murder in the headlines.

  A shadow fell over him, and he wasn’t surprised when he looked up to see the single female. She was new at the game; disease or drugs hadn’t yet ravaged her blood. She smelled like the finest meal possible.

  He didn’t smile at her, but simply raised one eyebrow.

  “May I join you?” she said, and her voice was low and seductive. She’d spent hours cultivating that voice, practicing in front of a mirror, he surmised.

  Why not? He could smell her, if not taste her. She was beautiful as well, red-haired and heavily freckled, with deep green eyes, wearing a formal blue dress. I could eat her up, he thought, amused. No, really: I could eat her up.

  He smiled to himself, and she took it as an invitation and swooshed into the seat opposite him.

  He took his empty water glass, filled it from the wine carafe and handed it to her.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” she purred.

  They talked about nothing of consequence: the weather, the idiot Americans––raising their voices slightly so tha
t they could be overheard. It was fun, but Horsham’s bloodlust was rising along with his horniness.

  He knew himself. He wouldn’t be able to satisfy one need without satisfying the other. There were just too many witnesses.

  He paid for the meal, peeled off another hundred and laid it in front of her. “Thanks for the company.”

  “The night is young,” she said suggestively.

  Horsham was already shaking his head. “I have an early day tomorrow. Again, thanks for the company. Have a good night.”

  As he got up, her hand landed on his arm. “For what you just paid me, I could…”

  He snarled at her. Like a dog––no, like a wolf. He couldn’t help himself. He turned away at the last second as his fangs extended, so at least no one saw that. But everyone heard the snarl. Everyone’s hair had probably stood on end at the primal sound.

  He walked away without looking back.

  He didn’t sleep that night, expecting them to storm his cabin and put an end to him.

  #

  The next day, when the train arrived in the Highlands, Horsham was exhausted, hungry, and angry. He rented a car, headed away from Inverness and into the bright green slopes and valleys, and fell upon the first couple he saw: Americans, on bikes, wearing their ridiculous spandex. He took great satisfaction in devouring them, leaving only their broken bones.

  After he had fed, Horsham felt newly alive, and strength surged through him. He expended some of this new energy by piling so many rocks on the bones that it would take an ambitious and curious person to dig down under them. These days, hardly anyone fit that description.

  He drove the rented car back to London.

  Last night had been too close. He’d almost given himself away.

  Next time, he wouldn’t wait so long to feed. It had been an experiment: If Terrill could resist for decades, Horsham had thought, surely I can resist for a few months.