By the time Fros got a chance to check her phone Jasper Collins was safely disposed of into the custody of the police – to the displeasure of Tom, who thought he could hide his thoughts on the matter from Fros – and she and Bobby were smoking in front of the house where they’d found Meena Damani. The house belonged to Jasper and Coochie as the latter had loudly informed them all while she was being led away with her brother.
“Why do you think the girl insisted so much on telling us the house was theirs?” Bobby said and took a deep drag. She would never again worry about any kind of cancer. It was probably a happy thought. “It was like she was being separated from her mother.”
Fros shrugged. There were three missed calls from Tal and two – surprisingly few – from Jules. There were also a dozen new text notifications that Fros refused to look at. Her throat still felt hot although breathing and swallowing no longer hurt and she was in no mood for lectures. Besides, Peter had said he’d take care of Tal. It was nice to have some help in the caretaking department for a change.
“Maybe that’s the house she grew up in,” Fros suggested and glanced up from the phone as she mulled over a text of her own. “Is something about this bothering you professionally?”
“I don’t think so,” Bobby said after a second’s pondering and blew out a plume of smoke, shifting her weight from one leg to another. “It just sounded a bit strange, that’s all.”
The glance turned into a long look. A frown joined them for a second before Fros finished her cigarette, put it out on the pavement, collected the butt in an empty cigarette box and strode back into the garden, which currently held a policeman standing guard at the door of the house. He was chatting with Tom.
“Would you mind if I look around?” she asked. “Just the garden, not the house.”
The policeman nodded, oozing self-importance like sweat. Tom gave her a quizzical look but Fros just turned her back on him and started walking slowly across the garden.
It wasn’t particularly big but it was a garden that was being looked after. Tufts of flowers burst like tiny explosions here and there, bees buzzing businesslike over them. The vegetable beds exuded the smells of growth, which mixed with those of the flowers for a thick layer of scents that was not unpleasant in itself but made Fros’s task more difficult.
“What is it?” Tom whispered in her ear and almost made her jump. “Sorry.”
“Do you think it was weird that Camilla kept repeating that this house has been in their family for two generations?” Fros asked, straining her nose. Growing plants. Life. Soil – rich soil, further enriched with manure and compost. Fifty shades of rot, that’s what this was. Spotting the fifty-first was akin to finding the proverbial needle in that haystack but Fros kept trying.
“Weird? Maybe a little, now that you mention it. I thought she wasn’t thinking clearly because of the stress of being caught,” Tom said. “Was it something about her smell?” he asked quietly, glancing back at the guard.
Fros shook her head.
“Bobby thought it was weird. Her smell was as you’d expect it.” Shock and anger had been Coochie’s dominant feelings while she was being handcuffed and led away but there was also a note of smugness because they’d managed to evade justice for so long.
Fros stopped abruptly a couple of feet from a patch of lush courgettes. She sniffed the air like a dog for a second and stalked off to the back of the house.
“Tell Bobby to come,” she called over her shoulder.
The back yard was all flowers – beds of petunias lined the fence like a coast ending at a sea of low, yellow-orange flowers that occupied one full quarter of the yard. Half a dozen hanging planters held a spectrum of geraniums on a wooden rack along the back of the house.
“Lovely nasturtiums,” Bobby murmured. “What are we doing here?”
“Do you see anything strange in these flowers?” Fros asked.
Bobby squinted at the sea of yellow and orange.
“Those closer to the fence are lighter,” Tom said. “More yellow than orange. Is that what you mean?”
Fros exhaled.
“I thought I was imagining it.”
Bobby stared at the flowers for a long moment and then suddenly turned to Fros.
“Oh, no,” she said, her mouth curving in disgust. “You think…”
“I think there may be a body or two under these whatever-you-called-them,” Fros confirmed.
There were two bodies or, more accurately, two skeletons. Both were small enough to suggest the victims had been children around Meena’s age. Tom had dug out the first one and Fros had insisted she started on the second body while they waited for the police to return.
By the time the boys and girls in blue reappeared, Fros had taken off, realizing she’d made a mistake in her insistence to dig up a child’s remains. She’d judged it risky to stay and had almost ran to her car, leaving Tom and Bobby to debate the subject of whether sociopathy could run in families. She did not trust herself around people after the discovery of the bodies. One close call a day was more than enough.
By the time Fros parked the car in front of the house dusk was falling. There were yet more missed calls and texts on her phone but Fros summarily ignored these again. There was a neat three-point plan in her head and she intended to follow it to the letter.
The plan went awry the moment she unlocked the door and opened it. Instead of the empty corridor, she was greeted by Peter, peeking out of the kitchen with smells of food wafting around him.
“There isn’t an emergency, is there?” were the first words out of Fros’s mouth. There was no space in her head for another emergency.
“No,” Peter said. “Just pork chops and roasted potatoes. I thought you could use a good meal.”
Her feet weighed a tonne while she took her boots off.
“I could use a good meal,” she agreed and let her jacket slid off her shoulders and fall to the floor. She had no strength left to pick it up. “I could use two good meals.”
“Just say the word,” Peter said and followed her into the kitchen where she dropped her bag on the table and plopped in a chair. “I’ve got a shortlist. Well, Tal has one and he shared it with me.”
Before Fros could open her mouth to express her dissatisfaction with the fact she had forgotten to get herself a beer, Peter opened the fridge, took out a bottle, opened it and put it in front of her. The hairs on Fros’s arms rose.
“What’s going on?” she said, her body tensing, ready to run. “You’re cooking, you’re serving beer before I ask for it, you’re being weird. What is it?”
Peter stopped with a hand on the oven door.
“Nothing’s going on,” he said. The look on his face was genuinely puzzled. “I thought you could do with a meal and I’m preparing it. Making up for lost time,” he added with a crooked smile and a pause. “Also, Bobby called me and said you didn’t look well when you left,” he finally admitted.
“Right. No, I probably didn’t look well,” Fros agreed and took a sip of beer. “The man we suspected of the double murder tried to kill me,” she said after a pause. It sounded weird, referring to Jasper this way. “He’s the one I… You know.”
Peter left the oven door alone and walked over to the table where he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Fros.
“I don’t want an amateur therapy session or your deep understanding,” Fros said. “I’m just telling you how my day went.”
“Is he alive?” Peter asked.
Fros snorted.
“Yeah. After I had to fight him off me with my eyes closed and holding my breath, the police took him away. And then we discovered two bodies. Children’s bodies. Skeletons,” she specified and took a gulp from the bottle. “I may be rushing to conclusions but I think Jasper and his sister were experimenting with a new sort of family arrangements for a while and they were careful to not leave any evidence of the failures.”
When Peter rose and pulled her up as well, Fros started. She tried to fight him as he drew her into a hug, only realising she was shaking when his arms wrapped around her tightly.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled into his shirt. “Really.”
Peter didn’t say a word. After a while the shaking reached a crescendo and the tears started flowing. It took them a while to stop.
When Fros woke up the next morning the only sign of Peter’s presence was a note on the pillow next to her head. The note contained a time and an address that made Fros blink muzzily. It wasn’t Peter’s address. See you there, the note said.
Getting up turned out to be harder than she had expected and it didn’t take long to find out why. It wasn’t morning. It was midday, which meant Fros had slept for more than twelve hours. And nobody had woken her up. She grabbed for her phone.
Not a single missed call or a text. The screen was as blank as her mind. With trembling fingers that didn’t feel like her own Fros tapped her contacts list and called Tom. If he didn’t pick up she was about to have a major breakdown.
“Hi Fros,” Tom’s voice said and the rising panic crashed down like a failed tsunami.
“What is going on?” she asked. “Why has nobody called me about anything?” It was beginning to sound stupid and she wasn’t even halfway through her tirade. “It’s twelve-thirty and nobody’s wondered where I am?” She shut her mouth and squeezed it in case it got tempted to continue producing sounds.
Tom chuckled, which didn’t help.
“Peter called. He said you were taking a day off, which I support fully, by the way. Why, has anything happened?”
Fros chewed her lip as if it had personally offended her.
“No,” she said with the tone of a sulking child that she couldn’t help. “Everything’s fine and I’m taking a day off, apparently. It would have been great if someone had told me.”
“He said you were asleep on your feet, Fros. You need a break. You deserve it. So have it. There’s nothing urgent happening, anyway. We’ll handle things here.”
“You, as in, you and Peter?” Fros didn’t like the suspicion in her voice but was powerless against it.
“No, everyone in the office. Peter just called to tell me about your day off. Although he did say he might drop by for a minute.” He was silent for a moment. “Is everything okay with you two?”
“How did you even know he was back?” Fros asked. Oversleeping was bad. It made her dumber than a plank.
“Jules told me. She’s very excited about the meeting tonight. Oh, and it’s only fair to tell you that she’s got it in for you for calling her off when she was making such huge investment plans.”
Tom talked like a man without a single care in the world, least of all a child killer who had just been snatched out of his vigilante hands by the police and would now survive and go to jail instead of the great beyond with an ounce of his flesh missing.
“Tom,” Fros said. “Are you okay? Do you need a day off? After all that happened with Jasper?”
“I’m fine, Fros. Don’t worry about me. These things happen. I can’t get them all now, can I?” he said quietly.
“No, you can’t,” she agreed. “None of us can.”
“Right. So, see you tonight, then?”
“Yeah, I’ll see you tonight.”
The location Peter had picked for the meeting was a warehouse in Brixton, perhaps to give everyone an appropriate sense of impending doom with a hint of ancient engine oil and decade-old dust, Fros suspected when she walked in through the back door as instructed in the note Peter had left her.
Inside, the place was not as bad as she had expected. It was, in fact, perfectly clean and tidy, with rows of cardboard boxes stacked neatly along the walls. The boxes looked big enough for each to house a small freezer or some such appliance but as she walked past them the labels on the boxes revealed there were no freezers inside. They were full of solar modules.
“Are we diversifying into solar power?” Fros asked as she approached Peter. He had set up at the far end of the warehouse, in a corner that was empty save for a pallet jack resting against one wall. The only light in the place – enough to dispel the deepest of the shadows but not enough for a random passer-by to see there was someone in there – came from something that looked like a lantern placed on the small desk by Peter’s side.
“Not yet but we might want to,” he said and rose to meet her, which was when she caught a glimpse of the body sitting on the floor behind the chair that Peter had just vacated.
“Who is this?” Fros asked, leaning to see around Peter.
“Our guest of honour, you could say,” was the answer, accompanied with a step aside so she could get a better view. “His name’s Kasper. You might remember him. Kasper will tell you a little bit about the Children of Ishtar.”
Fros had already established the body belonged to a vampire but the name surprised her.
“Yes,” she said. “How did you—” she began but the sound of the door opening interrupted her.
Jules walked in first, followed by someone who Fros did not expect to see here. Tom was last. He stepped in after the other two, turned, looked over his shoulder, and, failing to spot anything suspicious, closed the door.
“Rio?” Fros said, the tingle starting under her skin. “What the actual bleeding hell, Julianne?” She made to stride over and meet them halfway but that was where her current plans ended. Peter’s hand locking on her elbow prevented them from materialising at all. “Let me go,” she said, making no attempt to pull herself free. It would have been pathetic.
“It’s okay,” Peter said. “Rio’s okay.”
“Rio is barely twenty,” Fros bit back, glaring what she hoped were sharp daggers at Jules as she and Rio approached the circle of lantern light, followed by Tom. “Rio has no business hunting vampires or whatever Jules here has told him we’re doing and he’s thought that it sounds heroic or something.”
“I’m fine, Ms. Kirova,” Rio said. Embarrassment and self-consciousness radiated from him in heavy, bitter waves. “Juli only told me because I asked. And I asked because I knew those people we were meeting with were vampires and that’s because, well, because a vampire killed my dad eleven years ago.”
Fros could feel her jaw drop but she could do nothing to stop it. For about a second. Then she regained control over her facial muscles and shut her mouth.
“I’m sorry, did I somehow wander onto a movie stage?” she asked. Her nostrils flared as the door opened again, this time to let in Bobby, followed by Tal and Tony.
Fros threw her arms in the air. “Are we on some sort of a vampire reality show? What is going on here? How do you know your dad was killed by a vampire?” she asked Rio whose smell revealed he was in the grips of fear from the immediate authority but resisted the flight impulse that fear had triggered. Rio had chosen the fight option.
“I know because I saw him,” the boy said, his chin rising defiantly for that extra dose of adrenalin that so often passes for courage. “I was thirteen then. One night I got up to go to the loo and my parents’ bedroom door was slightly open so when I passed by it I had a look and I saw someone leaning over my dad.” Rio shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
“It was all quiet,” he continued. “That’s what I remember. There was no sound at all, just this dark shape leaning over my dad like he was whispering in his ear.”
“How did you know it was a man?” Fros asked as if that mattered.
Rio shrugged.
“It was big. It looked like a man. But I didn’t stick around to see him leave or, you know, notice me.” He shifted again. “I crept back to my room and waited for the sun to rise. I peed in my dustbin,” he added after a heavy pause.
“Go on, Rio,” Jules said in such a gentle voice that it almost knocked Fros over. A glance in Fros’s direction followed, overflowing with meaning, which seemed to come down to the suggestion that Fros was a clueless individual with emotional deficiencies – a fact Fros was already aware of.
“Well,” Rio continued, instinctively straightening his previously hunched back. His smell was improving, too, with embarrassment subsiding to be replaced by the sharp, grassy scent of bravery. “My dad was alive and well the next day although I was convinced that man had killed him and I kept waiting to hear my mum’s screams when she discovered the body.”
The trio of latecomers had meanwhile walked over and stood silently by Tom’s side. Tony eyed the nearest pallets and after a second’s hesitation, sat on one of them.
“I almost screamed when I saw my dad come down for breakfast,” Rio said with a half smile. “I thought I’d had a weird dream or something because there were no teeth marks on my dad’s neck. That was the first thing I checked. He was wearing a T-shirt and I looked for marks but there were no marks. And he looked as usual, you know, he wasn’t sick or weak, or anything like that.”
The neck myth was among the more enduring when it came to vampires. Fros had a suspicion the vampires themselves nurtured it so people wouldn’t look for marks anywhere else on the body. Or they simply didn’t care.
“I didn’t sleep well that night or the next night but by the end of the week I’d almost forgotten about it.” He flashed them a momentary grin. “School stuff to think about and all that.” Whatever powered the grin switched off.
“Then, about a month later, my dad died. They said it was untreated anemia.” Rio scoffed. “It was anemia, all right, only it wasn’t the natural sort. My dad had never had any health problems. He ate healthy, he exercised, he was one of those people who act like they plan to live forever, you know?” Another grin flashed like a lightning and, like a lightning, died a blink later. “Suddenly he has untreated anemia.”
Fros glanced at Jules who’d started smelling of dusty old books a while ago. Rio’s story was making her sad and she had to have already heard it. People were strange, Fros concluded, pointedly ignoring the sensation that someone had squeezed her stomach tightly and was twisting it.
“Did you tell anyone what you suspected?” she asked Rio.
“I didn’t suspect it,” he said. “I knew it. I researched anemia. You don’t just get it overnight. If my dad had anemia, our GP would have caught it in a blood test. There would be symptoms. Cold feet, headaches, this sort of thing. There was none of that. To the last day my dad looked just fine.”
Without quite knowing why Fros turned to look at Peter who cleared his throat.
“It’s what happens when a vampire decides to feed on just one person and is not careful,” he said for the benefit of the audience. He didn’t add that if the vampire feeding on that one human happened to have killed his maker and developed extra powers of self-control, you could end up with a new vampire instead of a corpse. Rio didn’t need to know that, although something told Fros he might get to learn it at some point. “I’m really sorry about your father, Rio,” Peter said.
Rio considered this for a second and nodded.
“What do you mean that’s what happens? What happens, momentary anemia?” Jules sounded like she was itching to pick up a fight for some reason. “How often does it happen?”
Peter shrugged.
“Not that often, I hope. Most vampires are careful and never feed on a single human for any period of time. But some are careless and, well, greedy.”
“So, how did you know about these vampires?” Fros asked Rio and wished she hadn’t.
“I saw that…” Rio began.
“You saw Massimo Whatshisname wince when he touched Jules’ rings,” she finished. “Of course.”
Silence fell over the group like a sudden bout of late snow. Also like late snow, it didn’t last long.
“Okay,” Fros said. “Fine. Welcome to the club, apparently. Not that there is a club.” She sighed and looked up at Peter. “What are we doing here, Peter?”
“We’re getting to know the enemy,” he said. “Stand up, Kasper.”
The body behind the desk unfolded and stood.
“Hi,” he told Fros and smiled. “I remember you.”
“Yeah. I remember you, too,” she said and crossed her arms. There was something about this man that made her edgy and it wasn’t the fact he was too tall or that he had tried to press himself on her.
“What did you do, Kasper?” Peter asked pleasantly, the way teachers asked their good students what two plus two was.
“I wanted to have sex with her but she rejected me. I was unhappy,” Kasper reported.
Bobby drew in a hissing breath. Tony gasped. Everyone’s eyes fell on Fros for a second before realising it was too obvious and dispersing.
Peter cocked an eyebrow at Fros.
“Oh?”
This was what was making her edgy. Peter’s apparently complete control over Kasper’s behaviour. No one in their right mind would relate their encounter the way he just had. But the tall vampire wasn’t in his right mind. It wasn’t his mind calling the shots at all.
“Yeah, it’s true. I ran away if you must know,” Fros said without looking around for reactions. “I thought he was too awkward, even for a new vampire. Don’t you give them basic training or something before you unleash them on the world?”
“We do,” Peter said grimly. “But they’re not all equally good at learning, I’m afraid. This is why Kasper is here tonight. It’s his last night.”
The air moved as Tom and Jules shifted, Jules sending a shock wave of bitter fear Fros’s way. Peter tipped his chin up.
“You think it’s cruel,” he said. “And it is. But it is also safer. Fros may have run away but two other women didn’t. They’re dead.”
“Are you the executioner?” Jules asked. Defiance and sarcasm did their best to beat the fear but couldn’t.
“In this case, yes,” Peter said. “But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because I want you to hear it from one of them. I want you to learn what we’re up against and yes, I had a part in it. A lead part,” he added. “But I didn’t do the training.”
From his pallet, Tony raised a hand like the good boy he had to have been at school.
“I’ve assembled quite a large file on the Children of Ishtar. There is a lot of information available publicly and it’s… concerning,” he said. “Those clinics, for example…”
Peter nodded, cutting him off.
“It is concerning. That’s why we’re here. That’s why I’m here. I need your help.” He only glanced at Fros as he addressed his audience. “We have to take them down.”
The sound of laughter bounced off the walls of the warehouse. Everyone, including Fros, startled.
“I’m sorry,” she said and cleared her throat. “It’s not funny but… No, it actually is funny. You’re telling us there is this massive vampire organisation – global organisation – and you want us – half a dozen people – to take it down? Is it just me or do we all realise this is neither a book nor a movie?”
The look she cast around the room revealed faces in various stages of cogitation. Bobby was the only one who met her eyes with calm resolve.
“Really?” Fros asked her. “You actually think it’s possible?”
Bobby shrugged.
“Anything’s possible if you work hard enough for it,” she said. “That’s what I tell the kids, at least,” she added with a hint of a grin. “But I agree with Peter. Something needs to be done and there’s no one else to do it.”
“Tal?” Tal had always been the voice of reason. He was down to earth and, for all his peculiarities, rational and clear-headed. Apparently, no longer.
“I agree with Bobby,” Tal said. “There’s no one else.”
“So we are in a movie and you all think it will have a happy ending,” Fros established. Her nose twitched when it caught a new smell rising in the air. Fros did not like that smell one bit.
“Not necessarily,” Jules said, stepping forward. The smell of fresh pine sap – the smell of defiance – intensified. Jules’s right hand was turning the set of thin silver rings on her left index finger slowly and rhythmically, like a rosary. “I think we’re all aware some of us might not make it.”
“Oh, come on!” Fros said and pulled the zipper on her bag as if it had just offended her. She started rummaging inside.
“We don’t need to be that dramatic, Julianne,” Tal said.
Fros found the cigarettes, took one and lit it for lack of other options for violence, such as shooting someone. The first cloud of smoke was puffed out with an extra dose of anger. It helped a tiny little bit.
“We don’t need to be dramatic at all,” she said. “This is not Lord of the Rings. It is not fiction. It’s real life. In real life, half a dozen misfits do not take down an army of vampires.”
“Unless they have special powers,” Jules said slowly and deliberately. Fros whipped her head towards her so-called friend. “Peter can control vampires’ minds,” Jules clarified, returning Fros’s furious look calmly. The whole warehouse now smelled of pine sap.
“And unlike most people, we know a bit about their weaknesses,” Tom added.
“Yeah. And we can spot them,” Rio said.
“So what?” Fros said. She was thinking unusually clearly. It had to be the good night’s sleep she’d got for the first time in months. It really put things into perspective and that was the perspective of rationality and sanity.
“You can spot a vampire in a room full of people,” she continued, pointing her cigarette at Tony, who shrank back on his pallet. “You know what can kill them. Do you just go in and behead them in a room full of people? Do you wait for them to leave? Do we pick them out one by one? Do you have any idea how long this would take? Do any of you even know what you’re talking about or you’re just feeling heroic?”
The late snow of silence returned for an encore.
“Let’s hear what Kasper has to tell us, shall we?” Peter suggested.