For the next two days Fros largely stayed in bed. There was too much to think about to do it on her feet. Or, if she was being perfectly honest, there was little to think about but it was enormous and it pressed down on her like tropical heat in peak season.
The story sounded like a bad joke made up at the cost of great personal effort by someone who was born without the advantage of a sense of humour. A significant length of time went into Fros wondering how Peter had learned all this and whether he was not making it up in order to convince her to… she hadn’t got to that point yet. There was an even more unpleasant question, too. That question was whether Peter had known all this when they’d met.
An answer was no more forthcoming than an answer to the question of how he had learned all this, because she wasn’t planning on calling him any time soon and she wasn’t picking up her phone when he rang, either. He wasn’t the only one. A day after Fros had called Jules to inform her she would be taking a few days off work, she’d had to turn her phone off because the bloody woman called and texted nonstop. Jules had even come to the house – twice – but Fros had refused to open the door.
On this fine late April afternoon, two days after Peter had informed Fros that first, she had a vampire grandmother and second, sex with a vampire was not safe, Fros lay on her back and stared at the exposed beams in the ceiling.
That story couldn’t be true. It was the stuff of fairy tales, a Romeo and Juliet-style romance of the sort that gave Fros acid reflux. The only part that was relatively believable was the part where vampires demonstrated marked intolerance to someone who’d strayed off what probably passed for the righteous path among the bloodsuckers. Only Fros shouldn’t call them names because she herself was one quarter vampire. The thought made her queasy.
Fros took a deep breath and shooed that thought to focus on the relatively believable part. Vampires, for all the progressive pledges made in the Children of Ishtar manifesto or whatever they called it, were not particularly progressive, not when it came to other species, not from what her own mother had told her. That same mother whose own mother had been one of them.
Maybe Olga had been a bad parent. Maybe that’s why Alexandra had been so wary of them and had taught Fros to avoid them at all costs. Maybe she’d hated her mother and had loved her father, and that’s why she’d grown up to be…
The sound of glass shattering cut off Fros’s thought and prompted her body to sit up before she’d had time to think if she wanted to get up and check what’s going on.
Yet get up she did, and tiptoed down the stairs, muttering ‘Now what’ under her breath, expecting to find one or more of the vampire elders in her kitchen. At least that would settle matters. Fros could simply ask them if that story about Olga was true before they ripped her apart of whatever they did to abominations. She’d die knowing the truth and while that was a small consolation it was better than no consolation.
“What the hell are you doing here?” flew out of her mouth the moment she saw the figure brushing off bits of glass from what looked like a crime scene investigator’s coverall. The reason it looked like a crime scene investigator’s coverall was that this was exactly what it was.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jules spat back and took off her hood. “You can’t just call and say you’ll be taking a few days off when we have so much work. Did you know that Osman Atkins-Perry vanished into thin air right when Bobby was closing in on him? Atkins-Perry? The chef? And the guy who his sister suspects of trading in child porn, remember? We could have used your powers of smell to find him, you know. We suspect a vampire – another vampire – might have got to him and speaking of vampires, do you know who will be defending Jasper Collins in court?”
Fros slumped on a chair by the table.
“I know that my mother’s mother was a vampire who had a child with a basilisk and the two got killed as punishment from the fellow elders of the mother,” she said.
Jules gaped and her eyes became very big and very round. She sat heavily in the chair opposite Fros.
“What?” she said.
“Alexandra’s mother was called Olga and apparently she was one of the vampire leaders. She made the mistake of falling for a basilisk by the name of Till, which tells me he was German, too, on top of being a basilisk, because what’s a little more irony. Apparently, vampires are not entirely dead and they can produce offspring, which is exactly what Olga and Till did. And then they were killed.”
Jules appeared to have forgotten her eyes had a blinking function.
“Peter?” she asked with uncharacteristic brevity.
“Yep.” Suddenly thirsty, Fros got up, went to the fridge and took out a can of beer. “Peter.” She snapped the can open and took a long sip.
“Are they coming for you?” Jules asked. “And I could use a beer, too, thank you.”
Fros grabbed another can and took both to the table.
“If they were coming for me they’d already be here, I suspect. Peter said I was under surveillance.” A thought struck then, causing a small gasp she couldn’t hold in.
“What is it?” Jules was on her immediately. “You just had an idea. What is it?”
Fros slowly moved her eyes from the broken window to the one who’d broken it, giving herself time to digest the new thought.
“I need to call Peter,” she said and got up. “And you’re paying for that window.”
“Yes, of course, but, Fros, what is it? You looked like I’d just slapped you. Fros? Fros!”
Fros left Jules’s pleas for explanation trailing her and walked up to her bedroom. The phone lit up when she turned it on and informed her she had forty-two notifications. Fros ignored them all and went straight to her address book.
Peter picked up on the first ring.
“Fros? Are you all right?”
Creaking behind her back told her Jules had spat on the concept of delicacy and giving people privacy. At least she smelled embarrassed. It didn’t matter.
“I have to ask you a question and I want the truth,” she said without turning.
“Of course.” He said it as though telling the truth came naturally to him.
“When you said that Mikkel would kill me if he could get his hands on me did you mean me personally or any basilisk?”
The pause that followed told Fros everything she needed to know but she waited for the verbal confirmation. Or a lie.
“They don’t know what you are,” Peter said. “Or who you are. Yet. All they know is that you’re important to me. That’s why they threatened to take you if I didn’t do what they told me. You and Tal were leverage. My feeding on other vampires was the excuse to use the leverage,” he added glumly.
“Why did you make it sound like they knew?”
The answer, delivered after a pause as eloquent as any words, stated “I wanted to scare you into being careful. I knew you’d want to do something reckless otherwise.”
“And you’re sure they haven’t followed me around,” Fros continued, storing Peter’s admission for a future argument.
“If they’d found out what you are – who you are – they’d caught you already,” was Peter’s grimmer than grim answer.
“So you haven’t told them who ended my mother’s life,” Fros pressed on, discovering a hitherto latent penchant for turning metaphorical knives in emotional wounds. She’d ended her mother’s life and her brother’s, too. A brother she’d only learned she had a day before she killed him. The number of forced fatalities in her past was well above average and that didn’t even include the food.
“Of course not,” Peter said, a note of outrage ringing out loud and clear. “I told them it was Marlena, killing allies to avoid leaving any traces leading back to her after she spread the disease. Needless to say, this did nothing for Mikkel’s mistrustfulness, hence the surveillance and the threats. But it kept him away from you.”
“Thank you,” Fros said and made to hang up.
“Fros,” he called and she stopped.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know any of this when we met. I only learned it about a month ago. Mikkel mentioned Olga and I asked about her.”
“And there is absolutely no reason to suspect he was telling you fairy tales?”
“Not the way he told the story. I think he was personally offended by Olga’s betrayal, which is how he called it. Fros, can we talk about it in person?”
Quiet electronic chirping behind her back momentarily distracted her. Jules creaked back into the corridor to answer the call.
“Are there any more bombshell secrets you need to tell me?” she asked.
Peter sighed.
“Not that I know of. But I think you are planning to do something dangerous and I don’t want you to. Not before talking about it.”
Jules’s smell had suddenly changed into a mixture of bitter almonds and mint. Something had scared her and seriously worried her at the same time.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
“Please promise me—”
“I promise,” she said, turning. “I won’t serve myself on a plate to the elders.”
She hung up before Peter could say anything.
“What is it?”
Jules was the image of concern when she looked at her.
“Jasper Collins has been released on bail in his lawyer’s custody,” she said. “His name’s Horace Windermere. Remember him?”
It took Fros a second to take that in. The lawyer who had come to bug her office under the pretence he wanted her to find Peter. His handlers must have thought it was hilarious. Or at least clever.
“Don’t worry, we’ll make sure he doesn’t run,” Fros said. She should probably call that lawyer and keep up the pretence a little longer.
Jules scoffed.
“I’m not worried he’ll run, Fros,” she said with the most pointed and meaningful look Fros had ever felt directed her way.
Realisation dawned like a spark in a pile of firewood. At first, the firewood began smouldering. Then it burst into flames.
“Why would they even release a serial killer on bail? A killer of children?” she began, her voice gaining in volume as she went along. “What is wrong with the authorities? They let a mental hospital burn down and never found the one who did it. They let someone keep children in a shed behind his bloody house and now they’ve let a serial bloody killer out on bail? Just because he has a fancy lawyer? And how is it that he has time to be chief operating officer of an investment firm and defend serial killers and kidnappers? What the hell is wrong with this world?”
As she spoke Fros tore off her clothes and threw them to the floor until she was left in her underwear only. She stank and she needed a shower. She also needed new underwear, Fros noted, spotting one end of the lace lining her bra that dangled free. This infuriated her further.
“I’m going to take a shower and then we’ll go find Tom,” she declared and stomped out of the room.
“I tried calling him but he’s not picking up,” Jules called after her.
“We’ll find him,” Fros barked and slammed the bathroom door after her.
Tom was still not picking up when she came out of the bathroom, so Jules suggested the next most obvious move. Surprisingly, she also insisted on driving. The insistence was so sudden and smelled so uncompromising that Fros yielded and took the passenger seat.
“Why do you suddenly want to drive?” she asked for lack of anything better to do and for refusal to think about what sort of scene they might come upon at Jasper’s house if Tom had already reached him.
Jules turned onto the street that would take them out of the neighbourhood with a jaw set so tight she could crush walnuts with it.
“Because you look like you might blow up any second,” she said. “Based on the news you just told me you got, I can understand why. Have you thought about what you’re going to do about it?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d just get all the elders together and kill them for what they did to my grandmother, which probably had a lot to do with what my mother ended up turning into.” A chill ran through her chest prompting her arms to cross. This was not what she had originally intended to say. Yet motive for murder was most often selfish, not altruistic.
“I guess anyone would want to take revenge on the people who killed their parents,” Jules said. “Or vampires, as it were,” she added. “Where are we going, by the way?”
With a pointed sigh, Fros turned on the satnav and entered the recorded route.
“Bromley,” she said as the satnav told Jules to turn left at the next intersection.
“Bromley?!”
“Yep. One-forty-seven, Rosewood Lane.”
“That’s miles away!”
Fros shrugged.
“Not my fault Jasper is a snob.”
The smell hit her nose the moment they turned onto the alley leading to the house. Tom was here all right. And he was feeling righteous.
They found them sitting in the kitchen. Tom hadn’t bothered to lock the door when he’d got in. When Fros pushed open the door that was hanging ajar Tom rose from his chair so fast she startled. For such a tall man, Tom could move surprisingly swiftly.
“Fros.”
“Jules is here, too,” she said conversationally as she strolled into the kitchen. A glance at Jasper, who hadn’t moved, confirmed he was still alive and tied to the back of the chair. A fresh bruise was ripening on his left cheekbone. Tom had had to make a point.
“Tom!” Jules burst in and stopped in her tracks when she saw Jasper. A moment later her shoulders slackened with visible relief. “You didn’t lock the door!”
“We were just talking,” Tom said and sat back. “What are you doing here?”
“Making sure talking is the only thing you’ll do,” Fros said. “How did you get him released on bail?”
Jules turned her head from her to Tom and back.
“What?”
Tom had the decency to look and smell embarrassed.
“I pulled a few strings and Bobby pulled a few more. Hers were more than mine,” he said.
Instead of saying anything in response to that confession, Fros raised her eyebrows.
Tom rubbed the back of his neck.
“She has these vampire contacts in high places,” he said as if that explained anything.
Tom didn’t smell so righteous any longer. Embarrassment was still there and now disappointment was rearing its head. But what was more interesting was Jasper’s smell. He was not afraid. He was intrigued.
Part of the reason was perhaps that he didn’t know Tom and what he did when he felt a grave injustice had been committed. Yet anyone, even a serial killer, would instinctively be alarmed when someone basically kidnapped them and tied them to a chair. Unless he was a sociopath or a devout believer in something, both of which tended to produce similar behaviour. Fros had really caught up on her crime-related reading in the past year. To her, sociopaths and cult members were pretty much the same.
“Tom, you promised you’ll try to quit,” Jules began, glaring at Jasper as though he had somehow lured Tom in to make him break the promise. “We talked about it. It’s dangerous.”
Fros chuckled, immediately suffering an attack by the twin force of Jules’s eyes. Deceptively warm at first glance, Jules’s windows to the world were now more of a pair of battering rams. It was the destructive power of love at its finest.
“Okay, stop it,” Fros said, raising her hands defensively. “It sounded funny, like you’re trying to stop him gambling or smoking pot.”
“It is not funny,” Jules said. “You know this better than anyone else.”
“Look,” Tom said, standing up. “Nothing dramatic is happening here. I wanted to talk to Jasper, try and understand why he did what he did, try a new way of doing things.”
“And then kill him,” Fros finished for him, sneaking a sideways glance at Jasper whose only reaction to the statement was a blink and a slight narrowing of the eyes. He wasn’t even looking at Tom or any of them. He was staring at the door.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Fros turned to him. “Do you have no sense of self-preservation at all?”
“Fros, don’t…” Tom began.
“Excuse me?”
That voice made them all turn to the door and ignited a burst of bitterness in Fros’s mouth. She clenched her teeth and swallowed.
The man at the door was tall and large, a moderate but well-defined belly pushing against his blue-striped white shirt over a sturdy-looking belt that held in place a pair of plain blue jeans. A brown leather vest concealed the sight of the gun but not the smell of it, or the smell of the man. It was an unexpected one – a smell Fros had never encountered before. The man smelled of desert winds and scorched earth. But in a nice way.
“Which one of you, ladies, is Euphrosyne Kirova?” the man asked with a heavy drawl that put Fros in mind of heat, oceans, and oil rigs, turning his head from Fros to Jules and back. His right eye was a bright blue. His left one had a black patch over it. It didn’t really fit with the worn-out blue baseball cap the man had on. Eyepatches required 18th century pirate captain hats.
“And who are you?” Tom said while Fros mused about the man’s patch and cap, and the strange smell that wasn’t really human. Strange the smell may have been, but Fros discovered with some surprise that nothing in it or the man himself alarmed her.
He looked like he could take each of them on and overpower them with one hand tied behind his broad back but Fros was not frightened. The bitterness had disappeared. Perhaps it was the white hair showing underneath the cap and the closely trimmed white beard. They made the man look like someone’s favourite granddad from Texas or possibly Louisiana. And he smelled safe.
“Ken Harker, pleased to meet you,” someone’s favourite granddad said, touching the rim of the cap. “Now, if you’ll excuse me I really need to speak with Miss Kirova.”
“That would be me,” Fros said, stepping forward. “What do you want to talk about and how did you know I was here?”
Ken Harker thrust out his shovel-like hand and smiled.
“It’s a real honour to meet you, ma’am. A real honour.”
Fros took the hand and shook it. It was warm, dry, and, like his smell, safe.
“Who are you, Mr. Harker,” she asked, staring into his eye as if the answers would all be there. “And how did you find me?”
“We have an excellent research department,” Harker said as if this was any kind of explanation. “And I’ve been tracking your phone since I arrived last night. Now, we don’t normally stalk people like that but this is an emergency.”
“Who’s we?” Jules said, crossing her arms belligerently.
Ken Harker raised his hands in the classic calming way that rarely did a calming job.
“Miss Kirova, I need to speak with you privately. Please.” For a fraction of a second his eye darted to Jasper and his mouth twitched. “Another room, maybe?”
“No,” Fros said. “Whatever you want to say, you can say here.” Despite the warm feelings this man was evoking or because of these feelings she would rather have company in his presence.
“Okay. Just a second,” he said and, moving much faster than he seemed capable of, walked over to Jasper. As Jasper looked up and opened his mouth to say something, Ken Harker whistled softly and Jasper’s head fell on his chest.
“Right,” Harker said and clapped his hands. The right cuff of his shirt slid up, revealing something that looked like a scar on the inside of his wrist. Before Fros could get a good look, the man dropped his hands and the cuff hid the scar. “Now, on to business.”
“Wait a minute, what did you just do?” Jules demanded. “Is he dead?”
“No, ma’am, he’s just asleep. Something told me he’s not really your kind of guy, what with that rope around him, and to be honest, I didn’t like the look of him, not one bit. Is he a child killer or something?”
Fros felt her eyes widen and her mouth open with zero control from her over the embarrassing process. Control caught up a second later. She pointed towards the table and followed her own instructions, walking over to the nearest chair and sitting slowly in it. Tom sat, too. Jules planted herself over him, her arms still crossed tightly.
“Start talking,” Fros said when Ken Harker took the chair opposite her, next to the unconscious Jasper.
“I’ve come to warn you,” Harker said, propping his hands on the table. “There’s a plot for your kidnapping. We picked it up a couple of weeks ago during a routine scan. It took us a while but we finally managed to locate you and I decided to come warn you personally in light of your status. A private eye, eh? I loved that part. So did my wife. And she insisted that I invite you to our place in Lubbock until we get to the ones who want to kidnap you and neutralise them.”
Silence descended, stayed for a couple of seconds and shattered when Jasper snored loudly, making everyone jump – everyone but Harker, who ignored the sudden burst of noise as naturally as though he’d been ignoring sudden bursts of noise since he was born.
“I need a drink,” Jules declared and stalked off to the cupboards.
Fros leaned forward and fixed Ken Harker with a stare she could only hope disguised her growing confusion as well as she wanted. This was a stranger, a possibly dangerous stranger, and yet her internal alarm system was silent, twiddling its thumbs.
“Who are you, Mr. Harker?” she asked slowly. “And what are you?”
“Ken, please. I’m the chairman of the Lubbock Origins Society,” he said cheerfully. “Officially, we are a charity that preserves local culture, architecture, and traditional values. Unofficially,” he said, returning the stare, “We protect creatures such as yourself from their many enemies.”
Jules slammed a cupboard door.
“Not a single bloody bottle,” she muttered.
“There’s a drinks cabinet in the living room,” Fros said without taking her eyes off Harker.
Jules stalked off, trailing white-hot fury and confusion. Fros heard her open the cabinet, take out a bottle and a glass, and fill the latter with the contents of the former while Fros studied the man opposite her.
“And what sort of creature are you?” she said after the study failed to produce any immediate result. He was not a vampire. Not a basilisk, either. This raised the question of how many different creatures there were around and that question twisted her stomach into a tight, cold knot. “Ken?”
Anger was beginning to bubble up from that tight cold knot and still the alarm system remained inactive. There was not a trace, not a whiff of the venom descending.
“Oh, I’m pretty much pure human,” Ken said casually. “But I’ve got some gorgon blood in me. Stheno’s, not Medusa’s, obviously.”
“Gorgons?” Jules’ voice cracked the air like a whip. “Gorgons?”
She walked over from the door where she’d stood listening to Ken, clutching a glass half full of whiskey so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
“Gorgons?!” she shouted in someone’s favourite granddad’s face. The man blinked at the onslaught and smiled an encouraging smile.
“Come here, Jules,” Tom said reaching out for her.
“Gorgons!” Jules said without moving.
“Could you please stop repeating that,” Fros mumbled, her lips suddenly numb.
“Gorgons,” Jules said, glared at the glass and emptied it in one gulp. She then proceeded to slam it on the table before wheeling on Ken again. “What else is there? Demons? Angels? Santa and the Tooth Fairy? Bloody Greek gods?”
“Well, I haven’t heard of…” Ken began.
“Gorgons!” Jules insisted.
“Come on,” Tom said and got up. He wrapped an arm around Jules’s shoulders. She tried to shake him off. “Come on, Juli, calm down.”
“I won’t calm down! This is crazy and you know it. Why the hell are you so calm? Have you known about this all along?”
“No,” Tom said, “But if there are basilisks and vampires, there’s really no reason why there shouldn’t be others as well.” He spoke quietly and softly, a voice of reason in a sea of confusion and stress. “Breathe,” he said and hugged her despite her attempts to break free. “Breathe.”
“Who wants to kill me?” Fros asked. “And what’s that status you mentioned?”
“We believe,” Ken said with a brief sigh, “that you’re the last remaining basilisk in the world.”
“And someone wants to kill me to end us once and for all, is that it?” Fros said. The thought of being the last of her kind caused discomfort. It forced a feeling of importance Fros had no need for right now.
“Ah,” Ken said. “I never said they wanted to kill you. In fact, they want to keep you alive. Very much so.”
“The Children of Ishtar,” Tom said as soon as Fros thought it.
Ken looked up.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“We have,” Fros said, the numbness spreading. “But I was assured they had no idea about me.”
“Well, it’s a big organisation,” Ken said. “I’m sure not all of its members know about you. But some do,” he said with a nod. “And they’re after you.”
“Vampires?” Fros could barely articulate the word as coldness tightened around her.
“No, ma’am,” Ken said. “A human.”