Flood

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” Amanda Silverman said with a sniff and got up from her couch. She looked about forty and crushed by her loss, constantly dabbing at the corners of her red-rimmed eyes while she spoke. Alas, she didn’t have much to say besides how great of a man her husband had been and what a monster his killer must have been. Fros agreed it had to be a monster although she wasn’t as concerned as Amanda apparently was about said monster coming after her, just like Kircher. Silverman’s wife stank of grief and fear in equal measure.

“That’s all right.” Fros’s knee cracked when she stood up. “Everything we know for certain helps.”

Amanda tried to smile but the weak quivering of the lips wasn’t worth the effort.

“I keep asking myself who would do this to another human being. What kind of person would cut another person this way?” A sob interrupted her as she led Fros to the door.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to this question yet,” Fros lied.

A person who believed they were doing the right thing – this was the kind of person who would hurt another one this way. Sam had believed she was doing the right thing in punishing her sister for being born the way she was. So had Rory. As for the second wife of Rory’s father, Alice, who had helped them kill said father and capture Fros, she had to have had a reason, too. There was always a reason and despite the picture of a true saint that Amanda had painted her over the past half an hour, Fros was certain that William Silverman’s killer had a good reason to do what they did the way they did. Whoever it was, they were certain they were doing the right thing.

“We will call you when we have something to report,” Fros said. “Thanks again for your time.”

Amanda sniffed again. Fros sniffed, too, and wrinkled her nose. Grief and fear wouldn’t make a bestselling perfume.

“Thank you for what you’re doing,” Amanda said. “I really appreciate it.”

“We were hired to do it by Mr. Kircher,” Fros said with a frown.

“Yes,” Amanda said quickly. “Yes, of course. It’s very kind of him.”

The woman clearly had something against Tony. Her smell had changed the moment Fros mentioned his name to the rancid meat stink of disgust. It wasn’t an emotion people experienced as often as they said they did. But this here was pure disgust.

“Have a nice day,” Fros said instead of asking the woman what exactly she found so disgusting about her husband’s business partner.

Amanda wished her a nice day and looked around, pulling her cardigan more tightly around her body.

“Where is your car?”

“I don’t have one,” Fros said. “I’m walking today.”

Leaving the woman with her unspoken question at the door of her house, Fros marched down the alley and turned on to the street. She had consumed three large doner kebabs the previous night and while the meat had done its job in filling the great big hole in her belly, it had made her feel heavy and this heaviness needed to be walked off. Fros had no urgent business for the day except hope to run into Peter somehow. She could afford a day’s walk around.

The city was unusually quiet around her as she strolled past cafes, shops and buildings whose purpose was not immediately apparent. Tal called three times in an hour but Fros let all the calls go to voice mail. Obsession was a real thing, it was also an annoying thing, and Fros had no time for it. She was too busy floating on the golden sea under the golden sky from her dream – the image she had crafted for herself after reading some random article about the easier ways to meditate. It helped with taking her mind off Peter and her sister. It didn’t help with the hunger. She would have to pick up the next time Tal called since she had been stupid enough to turn him into her dealer of criminals.

A distant roll of thunder pulled her out of the golden sea to inform her that she was entering a narrow street that she had visited only a day ago. Fros hadn’t meant to come here but here was where her brain had led her. The place still smelled of smoke but it was aged smoke now, smoke and charred wood, and paint, and metal. The remains of the house drew the eye like a rotten tooth beyond saving draws a restless tongue. The roof had fallen through and the windows had burst but the door, a gaping mouth on seared hinges, was only smoked.

A police line circled the house but there was no one around. The house still radiated heat. They were probably waiting for it to cool off before they got in. There was no one on this street at all. That was probably why Peter had chosen it as a shelter – Fros had no doubt Peter had something to do with the fire despite the absence of evidence. And what better time than now to go in and check if there really wasn’t any evidence linking him to the fire? She looked around, saw nobody, smelled nobody, and stepped forward to the gaping door as another thunder rolled above. Fros scowled at the sky and slipped under the tape and into the house, careful to avoid touching the roof in case that brought it all down on her head. It would be difficult to explain how she survived a collapsed roof without a scratch if anyone caught her.

The tiny hall reeked of smoke, soot, and something that reminded Fros of vodka. He must have helped the fire spread. The paint on the upper half of the wall to the right was eaten through by the flames but the lower half was almost intact except for a few dark spatters near the floor. Fros squatted by the spatters and touched one. There was nothing unusual about the feel but when she raised her hand to her nose and smelled her fingers she got her evidence. The spatter was blood – old, roasted blood.

Cursing under her breath, Fros took a couple of steps towards the charred door jambs that led into what had been a room and was now a box full of rubble from the walls and the roof. Glass clinked under her boots. Careful to skirt the fallen piece of roof, Fros squeezed between its edge, which hung low over the corridor between the front door and the back of the house, and the wall into the former room. The stink of smoke and soot prevailed. There was no smelling anything else unless it hit her in the nose. She poked a pile of rubble with her boot only to have the top collapse, revealing more rubble. Perhaps there was some furniture in it but to Fros it was all unrecognisable bits and pieces of char. Then one stick-like piece caught her eye – it was thin and long and slightly bent, lying on top of what looked like a shattered roof beam.

As Fros leaned over to pick it up the sound of approaching cars shattered the peace and quiet. There was no siren but Fros would bet money it was the police coming to see if the house had cooled enough to inspect it. She grabbed the suspicious stick, shoved it in her jacket pocket and looked around for an exit. The front door was out of the question – the cars were stopping there already. The alternative was the window of the former room, which currently resembled a schizophrenic’s rendering of a supernatural beast with a square head and glass teeth.

Before she could weight the pros and cons of such a move, Fros kicked out the lower pieces of jagged glass and climbed over the mercifully low window only to find out that in the last five minutes it had started to rain and she had been too busy to smell it. It wasn’t a gentle rain, either. It was a full-bodied, abundant torrent of water that pinned her to the spot for a second before her sanity resumed operation and prodded her to run through the overgrown thickets separating this house from the next one. Most of the growth, likely a former hedge, was burned down, which made it easier to dart over to the next house, sneak around to the side and hide in the shadows and whatever shelter the roof provided. Once this was taken care of and she could hear at least three crime scene investigators or policemen enter the house, Fros was free to panic.

She had been working on her problem. For the last year she had built tolerance to light to medium drizzles to such an extent that she no longer noticed these. But she had also built tolerance to the car – with it, she always had somewhere to hide when the rain started. Now she was reaping what she had sown – she was without the car and she was without an umbrella. Her one feeble attempt to conquer her environment ended with her yelping when an explorative boot got wet. It was time to face a harsher reality Fros had expected when she’d left her house this morning. She needed help.

“Hello?”

Fros licked her lips.

“Listen to me and don’t ask any questions.” She waited for three seconds and continued “I’m in Pembroke Terrace and I need you to come and get me. There are two police cars in front of the first house on the right, which is burned down. I’m at the back of the next-door. You’ll need to leave your car somewhere where they can’t see it and think of an excuse to be there. I’m at the back of the second house. Bring an umbrella.”

Jules hung up without saying a word and Fros wondered if she’d finally had too much. The executive decision she made was to wait for another half an hour and then, much as she didn’t want to show any weakness to her father, she would call him to come and get her, like a silly little girl who’d overshot on her ambitions.

Twenty-five minutes later, after a change in wind direction sprinkled her generously with rainwater, Fros was contemplating suicide and wondering how exactly she would get a fire going in this rain and with police next door, when a car pulled up in front of what she had come to think of as her house.

“Okay, I’m here but you aren’t,” Jules’s cheerful voice said to an invisible interlocutor. “It’s pouring down, so if you’ve had a change of heart you could’ve told me. I’ll wait ten minutes and then I’m gone, all right?” Pause. “Picking the rainiest day of the week for this, how typical.”

Moments later she appeared in the dim light with a huge black umbrella over her head. The instant change in her expression when she saw Fros told Fros more than she wanted to know.

“What happened?” Jules asked after Fros dove for the umbrella, almost wrapping her arms around Jules to make sure she will remain under it.

“Are there policemen around the house?”

“Not in the front.”

“Good, let’s go.”

A mad dash through puddles that looked like oceans later Fros and Jules were in the warm, dry confines of Jules’s car, which turned out to be much smaller than Fros expected.

“What is it?” she asked catching Fros scanning the vehicle incredulously. “Is there something wrong with my car?”

“No, I just…” She shrugged and even managed a short laugh. “I just always imagined you’d have a big car. I don’t know why.”

“Well, I happen to like economical, practical cars. Much easier to find parking spots, too, unlike yours,” Jules declared as she put her seatbelt on. “Where are we going?”

“The office,” Fros said. “And thanks. Really.”

“I expect you have no intention of telling me why I had to come get you from some abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. Should I bother asking?”

“That’s not fair. I’ve told you a lot more than I’ve ever told anyone else.” Her fingers wrapped around the piece of char she’d taken from the house and she pulled it out of her pocket.

“Right. Vampires and basilisks and human sacrifice.” Jules snorted as she turned right. “Hilarious.”

“You saw where Peter had jumped through the window. You saw he was not there. Do you have an explanation for that?”

“Of course I do. Even if it was Peter, which I still find pretty hard to believe since I saw his beheaded body a year ago, someone took the body. Have you really not thought about this possibility?” She dared a glance away from the road to make sure Fros had indeed not thought about this possibility, which she hadn’t.

“I saw him yesterday,” Fros said quietly. “He’s alive.”

Jules very deliberately nodded at the traffic light ahead of them.

“You really believe all this, don’t you?” she said.

Fros groaned but only on the inside. She had spent her life trying to tell people around her as little as possible about herself and now she was tempted to say it all and show it all to this infuriating woman who so calmly and rationally refused to believe the truth.

“The reason I called you to get me is because I can’t bear the rain. I’ve taught myself to stand drizzles but not a rain like this one. It messes up my nose and it messes up my orientation, and I hate this, and it scares me. Also, I ate the dog that was about to kill you at the Peterson mansion. I ate evidence.” Part of Fros wondered what had possessed her to make this specific revelation. Another part raised an eyebrow – it was obvious what had possessed her. Like so many before her, she had been compelled by Jules’ skepticism to prove she was not lying, even if proving it would expose a secret Fros had been so careful about keeping for decades.

Jules made a sound like a clogged drain. Then a longer one. Finally, the clog was flushed away by an outpour of laughter. She was squeezing the wheel and laughing until tears started pouring down her cheeks. Fros waited, crossing her arms. Not for the first time she thought it might be best for everyone if she turned Jules into her next dinner. Of course, that would constitute failure to follow her self-imposed rules, the rules her mother had taught her. But her mother had turned out to be a liar and that had let to a fast loss of credibility.

“Are you done?” Fros asked after a while, when the outpour weakened to hiccups and giggles.

Instead of answering, Jules turned on her blinkers, got out of the traffic and stopped by the pavement. For a while she sat there, staring into space. Then she turned to Fros.

“You really ate that dog?”

“I’m afraid so. I went there in case you needed backup and when I saw that dog it was the only thing I could do.”

“How did it taste?” Jules said with what looked like genuine interest.

“Disgusting.” Fros shivered at the very memory. She uncrossed her arms and rubbed the charred piece with her thumb. It was oddly calming. “But what’s worse, I ate evidence the police needed to charge Peterson’s wife. If Tom knew…”

“You ate the dog,” Jules repeated. “You know, for some reason I can actually believe this. I realise it sounds ridiculous and you’re probably just playing a prank on me or something but I can believe it.”

Fros sighed.

“That’s because it’s true. It’s all true. You saw Tal. Did he look like he was delusional? He’s an accountant, for God’s sake. He’s also a sort of adoptive son to Peter and he sewed Peter’s head back on and took care of him over the last year.”

Silence followed, for about three seconds.

“How do you take care of a recovering vampire? Did he feed him his blood?” Jules asked, a hint of caramel joining her aromatic aura. Jules was curious. Jules was conducting an interview. Jules was no longer dismissing the supernatural story in bulk. Belatedly, Fros considered she may have made a mistake in telling that story.

“Well?” Jules prompted. “Did he?”

Fros made a face. Part of her missed the feedings. They made her feel better because she was doing something to help Peter. It wasn’t much help but it was something. And now this was over and she didn’t even know if he needed help. Unlikely, she suspected, and that made for a much more rotten feeling than the simple absence of the need to feed him.

“Not exactly. But he did take care of him.”

“What’s this?” Jules nodded to the charred piece in her hands.

“I took it from the burned house. I found blood, too.”

“Blood? How did you know it was blood?”

Fros scowled at her.

“I smelled it.”

“Really?” A flash of excitement lit up Jules’ eyes before going out under the weight of momentary embarrassment. “So that sniffing thing back at Silverman’s office wasn’t just for show.”

“No, it was not.”

“Okay, what do I smell like?”

“Are you really going to make me perform like some circus freak?”

“I want proof. Give me proof.”

Fros heaved another, heavier sigh. She had definitely made a mistake in telling her story. But w some mistakes, Fros was discovering, all you could do was double down, to avoid a not strictly necessary death.

“You smell of wet leather, some floral perfume and toothpaste,” she said. As the fascination on Jules’s face began to fade, Fros added, a little smugly “You also smell of embarrassment because you don’t want to be curious about whether I’m really what I say I am, excitement because you really hope I am telling you the truth, and fear because if I am telling you the truth then I may be very dangerous. Oh, and you had a croissant for breakfast. And cappuccino. Also you’re right. I am dangerous.”

“I can see that,” Jules murmured. “Do you have any cigarettes on you?”

Fros passed her the pack and her lighter. Jules lit up, cracked open the window of the tiny Mazda on her side and took a pull on the cigarette. This was followed by a coughing fit.

“Are you being stupid right now?” Fros said. “You don’t have to smoke if you don’t want to. It’s not exactly a situation of some great revelation.”

“Isn’t it?” Jules said and took another pull, this time cough-free. “I did use to smoke along with everything else. I was proud when I quit. I had two croissants with the cappuccino,” she said after a pause. “So, you kill people and you eat them.”

“Only bad ones,” Fros said promptly.

“Was that another bad one?” Jules nodded to the charred piece that was still in Fros’s hands.

“What?”

“This bone you’re playing with. Did someone burn the house to punish someone in it?”

Fros lifted the piece to her face and peered at it. It was about the length of her palm, slightly curved, one end smooth and the other jagged as though it was part of a larger piece that was broken before it burned. A sniff confirmed Jules’s observation.

“This is a bloody bone,” she announced.

“Yes. And you said there was blood in the house?”

Fros shook her head.

“Only a spatter by the door. I thought…” She’d already crossed a line of secrecy. Crossing another one might be a bad idea but it was too late.

“You thought what?” Jules prompted.

“I thought Peter was hiding there and hiding his victims in the house, too.” The freshly crossed line burned like a wicker bridge. “Tal and I, we were sure he’d need to drink a lot of blood to recover after we starved him and we kept expecting reports of dead bodies or disappearances but they never came. And yet he found someone to feed on.”

“Could be some homeless person. I can’t believe I’m discussing the dietary needs of vampires,” Jules said. “But from a purely rational point of view homeless people are as easy prey for killers as prostitutes used to be two hundred years ago.”

“Yeah, that’s rational.” Fros stared at the bone. “Do you think this could be dated?”

Jules looked at it, glanced at Fros and started the car.

“Of course it could,” she said with the conviction of someone who had personally developed a dating method for burned bones.