17.

We were alone in an alley behind some apartments.

The early morning sky was still black, save for the faint light from the half moon. I was nestled between a Dumpster and three black bags of trash filled with things foul. A small wind meandered down the alley. The plastic bags rustled. My hair lifted and fell�Dand so did the hair on the dead guy.

After my runs, I usually feed on cow blood. The cow blood is mixed with all sorts of impurities and foul crap. I often gag. Sort of my own private Fear Factor with no fifty grand reward at the end of the hour.

Before me lay Switchblade, the punk who had no doubt organized the gang bang. I had ferreted him away before anyone could investigate the shooting and now he lay at my feet, dead and broken.

I looked down at his chest, where blood had stained his flannel shirt nearly black.

Blood....

I ripped open his flannel shirt, buttons pinging everywhere. His chest was awash in a sea of caked red. The hole in his chest was a dark moon in a vermilion sky.

His blood would contain alcohol, as he had been drinking. I didn't care. The blood would be pure enough. Straight from the source. The ideal way to feed. Then again, ideal was relative. Ideally I would be feasting on turkey lasagna.

I dipped my head down, placed my lips over the massive wound in his chest, and drank....

I returned the body to the same house, left it where it had fallen. I drifted back into the darkness of the school grounds, where I knew in my heart they were going to drag me off to be raped.

It was still early morning, still dark. No one was out on the streets. Curious neighbors had gone back to sleep; there were no police investigating the sound of a gunshot. Apparently gunshots here were a common enough occurrence to not arouse that much suspicion.

The attackers themselves were long gone. They were scared shitless, no doubt. One of their own had been shot by one of their own. Each would awaken this morning with a very bad hang over, and pray to God this had all been a very bad dream.

Instead of their prayers being answered, they were going to awaken to find the body. What happened next, I didn't really know or care. I doubted a group of men would even attempt to identify me, lest they reveal the nature of their true intentions the night before.

At any rate, using a half empty can of beer from the nearby dumpster, I had cleaned the wound of my lip imprints. Let the medical examiner try to figure out why someone had sloshed beer all over the gunshot wound.

As I stood there in the darkness, with a curious phantasmagoric mist nipping at my ankles, I remembered the taste of his blood again.

God, he had tasted so good. So damn good�Dand pure. The difference between good chocolate and bad chocolate. The difference between good wine and bad wine. Good blood and bad blood.

All the difference in the world.

I left the school grounds and the neighborhood as a slow wave of purple blossomed along the eastern horizon. I hated the slow wave of purple that blossomed along the eastern horizon. The sun was coming, and I needed to get home ASAP.

Already I could feel my strength ebbing.

Since my belly was full of Switchblade's blood, I did not want to cramp up and so I kept my jog slow and steady. On the way home, as the guilt set in over what I had just done, I held fast to one thought in particular as if it were a buoy in a storm:

I did not kill him; he was already dead....

I did not kill him; he was already dead....

18.

The kids were playing in their room and Danny was working late. Tonight was Open House at the elementary school, and he had promised to make it home on time.

The words "we'll see" had crossed my mind.

I had spent the past two hours helping Anthony with his math homework. Math didn't come easily to him and he fought me the entire time. Vampire or not, I was drained.

All in all, I just couldn't believe the amount of work his third grade teacher assigned each week, and it was all I could do to keep up. Didn't schools realize mothers want to spend quality time with their children in the evenings?

So now I was in my office, still grumbling. It was early evening and raining hard. Occasionally the rain, slammed by a gust of wind, splattered against my office window. The first rain in months. The weatherman had been beside himself.

I liked the rain. It touched everything and everyone. Nothing was spared. It made even a freak like me feel connected to the world.

So with the rain pattering against the window and the children playing somewhat contentedly in their room, I eventually worked my way through all of Kingsley's files. Only one looked promising, and it set the alarms off in my head. I've learned to listen to these alarms.

The case was no different than many of Kingsley's other cases. His client, one Hewlett Jackson, was accused of murdering his lover's husband. But thanks to Kingsley's adroit handling of the case, Jackson was freed on a technicality. Turns out the search warrant had expired and thus all evidence gathered had been deemed inadmissible in court. And when the verdict was read, the victim's brother had to be physically restrained. According to the file, the victim's brother had not lunged at the alleged killer; no, he had lunged at Kingsley.

There was something to that.

And that's all I had. A distraught man who felt his murdered brother had not been given proper justice. Not much, but it was a start.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the file. The rain was coming down harder, rattling the window. I listened to it, allowed it to fill some of the emptiness in my heart, and found some peace. I checked my watch. Open House was in an hour and still no sign of Danny.

I pushed him out of my thoughts and logged onto the internet; in particular, one of my many investigation data bases. There had been no mention of the brother's name in the file, but with a few deft keystrokes I had all the information I needed.

The murder had made the local paper. The article mentioned the surviving family members. Parents were dead, but there had been two surviving siblings. Rick Horton and Janet Maurice. Just as I wrote the two names down, the house phone rang. My heart sank.

I picked it up.

"Hi, dollface."

"Tell me you're on your way home," I said.

There was a pause. He sucked in some air. "Tell the kids I'm sorry."

"No," I said. "You tell them."

"Don't."

I did. I called the kids over and put them on the phone one at a time. When they were gone, I came back on the line.

"You shouldn't drag the children into this, Samantha," he said.

"Drag them into what, pray tell?"

He sighed. When he was done sighing, I heard a voice whisper to him from somewhere. A female voice.

"Who's that whispering to you?" I asked.

"Don't wait up."

"Who's that�D"

But he disconnected the line.