Hunting My Vampire (Immortal Vampire #3)

Chapter 25

Kaya

As soon as Jack left, I took a bottle of whiskey over to Tamara’s place. It was the middle of the night but I needed to talk to her. It was urgent.

I banged on the door until she opened.

“What’s going on?” She opened the door, looking disheveled. She had obviously fallen asleep on the sofa. She reeked of alcohol and was clearly still drunk.

“What do you want?” she asked me. “It’s the middle of the fucking night!”

“I need your help,” I said. “There is literally no-one else I can ask. There is no single member of the tribe left. You are the only one.”

Tamara stared at me with bloodshot eyes.

“Ah... fuck off,” she said, trying to push me out the door.

Something came over me. It had something to do with this woman, the last known member of my mother’s tribe refusing to honor her people and our tribe. She was the only one with the knowledge I needed. I couldn’t search for this stuff on the internet.

“Who are you to turn me away?” I thundered at her.

“Who are you to refuse me knowledge?”

“Why are you denying your ancestors?”

I am not sure where the words came from, but they must have worked because she stopped moving, and started staring at me, her mouth slack.

“Who… who… are you?” she asked in a small voice.

“It’s Kaya, Tamara, you know me,” I said impatiently. “Look, I’ve got the occillite, I am wearing it as you told me to,” I took the stone out from under my top to show it to her.

She was muttering words now that I didn’t understand but knew to be from the tribe language.

“You’ve got to help me, Tamara, I don’t know the ways of my people. You are the only one who knows.”

She blinked, I wasn’t sure she understood.

“When the sho’qa’i had to take on some bad people or spirits. What would they do? To prepare? To plan?”

“The sho’qa’i?”

Tamara sat down on the sofa, sinking away into the cushions. She muttered again to herself.

“Tamara, think!”

“They would wait for the dark moon,” she said. “Best time to deal with evil spirits, to banish darkness.”

The dark moon? When the hell was that?

“They fasted, didn’t eat anything and went away to be alone to focus the mind.”

That sounded a lot like how I prepared for my work as an assassin when the time came to execute a plan. I would withdraw to some quiet place, go over the details and plan out all eventualities.

“Sometimes, they drank a special potion, to talk to the spirits,” she said.

But I didn’t want that. I needed my senses sharp.

“I am going after a very bad man,” I told her. “He may be a vampire pretending to be human.”

Tamara shook her head and muttered more. “Too strong,” she said. “Too strong.”

I nodded and got up. “Maybe, but I am going to try.”

“Wait!” she said and went off into a drawer, looking for something, handing me something slim. It looked like a letter opener.

“Silver knife,” she shrugged. “Could come in handy.”

The knife was dull and ornamental. It hardly inspired confidence but I took it anyway.

As I opened the front door, she said, “It is dark moon in two weeks. That is the best time. Good luck.”

I went home, packed a few things, got my bags with weapons and headed north.

I bought supplies at a small shop along the way, then had breakfast at a spot off the highway. I needed to make a few calls before I turned into remote mountain country. I left messages for Fuzz and Tina, apologizing for my sudden disappearance.

Then I called Josie.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

“I need you to get me everything you can on Leo Da Salle,” I said.

“Why?”

I trusted Josie but the less she knew about all of this, the better.

“It’s dangerous,” I said.

“I’ll say,” she snorted. “He’s just about the biggest prick in the West and East, pretty much all over,” she paused, “I’ve heard a rumor he may be running for president.”

Jesus, I thought.

“Just get me whatever you can find on him,” I said, “and his movements for the next month. I’ll call again in a couple of days.”

“Kaya? What’s going on?”

I didn’t want to talk much more but I couldn’t leave my friend hanging.

“Look, there is more to him than meets the eye, ok?”

“How?”

“I think he’s one of them,” I said.

“One of…oh..” she said, catching on. “But… how is he able to act, all human-like? Go out in the middle of the day, eat food, all that?”

“But does he, eat? I mean, he could be pushing food around on a plate,” I said. “And you know there are things they can take for that.”

Jack had told me about this.

“I did see a dossier recently…” Josie’s voice trailed away. “All about power dynamics in the US and how things are changing politically. Just like elsewhere in the world. Shifting away from the moderates,” her voice was uneasy. “There is talk of greater regulation from the state, taxes and stricter controls.”

“What’s been happening in New York?”

“It’s the wealthiest city in the country in the most prosperous state,” Josie said.

“Some people say it is like a country, all independent-like,” she laughed uneasily.

“I’ll call again in a couple of days,” I said, ending the call.

My last phone call was to Jack. He didn’t pick up.

I simply sent a text: I love you x

Then I headed off the highway and into mountain country. It had been a long time since I had been back here but everything still looked so much the same. When I came to live in the town, I still sometimes went back by myself, but it was never the same. There were so many memories here. I found the dirt track that led to Sheriff and Aunt Stephanie’s place and had to slow down because the track had become so bad, full of boulders and ditches that could wreck the car. I parked my truck out of sight in a grove of trees behind the house.

Then I headed to their place to see what was left of it.

It was a ruin, though.

The roof had fallen in. Most of the furniture was gone and what was left had rotted through or fallen apart. There were signs of animal habitation and there were insects everywhere. I carefully walked around the place, not wanting to step through a hole. My room had been the little space at the back, not so much a room as a kind of closet space but it had been big enough for a bed. There was nothing here now.

I remembered the red crocheted bed spread that Aunt Stephanie had made for me and the bright curtains she’d hung here. She had tried so hard to create a happy space for me and it had worked. It was all because of her that I had managed to turn out not completely messed up.

I headed back outside, heaving a heavy pack onto my back.

Then I headed into the mountains, via a track that had completely overgrown in the years since I’d been there last. I had a tent with me and some provisions, not a lot, because I wanted to stay sharp and focused. It was cold but there was no snow and I fell into a fast rhythm, walking up and around the ridge, through the valley. I made a campsite next to the river and slept by the fire, holding the occillite all night long. It was warm in my hand, like a living thing.

The next day, I crossed the river, holding the pack over my head, losing my footing once and getting completely drenched in the process. But I kept walking and at the end of the day, I was on the slopes of what my father used to call Second Peak.

Home.

I looked for any sign of our shack but there was nothing. I knew the view from the front porch and kept turning around every so often to compare my memory to what was there, but I couldn’t seem to find the place. Finally, I realized that the trees must have grown in the twenty odd years since I’d been there last. I needed to go down and to my left, and that was when I found it. Our little cabin or what remained of it.

Like Sheriff’s house, it was pretty much ruined but the walls still stood and the porch was sound. My mother used to sit here peeling potatoes while my brother played in the dirt and I made little dolls of grass.

I put down my pack and walked around, immersing myself in my memories. Things came back to me, like my father chopping wood and giving me the axe, showing me how to split the logs, telling me that girls were as strong as boys were.

It felt like I was walking on hallowed ground.

I walked inside and saw the walls were blackened from the smoke of the fire. Twenty years later, the memories of that night could still be seen seared into the walls. Had our attacker set our house on fire or was it the stove that had fallen over? I couldn’t remember but everything had been burnt.

I went outside to look for a good place to camp. I set up my tent and got wood for a fire. Then I made coffee.

“I am here,” I said out loud. “I am back.”

“Talk to me.”