James Moore - Blood Red

“Okay. Have you seen anyone stranger than you?”

Soulis gave that little smile of his and nodded his head. “Nicely put, Detective. I had a man visit me the other day, asking if I was interested in purchasing sexual favors. His name was Tom Pardue, I believe. He struck me as rather unsavory.”

“That was the only reason Pardue came to see you?”

“Indeed. I declined his offer.”

“He was here for a long while.”

“Was he? I wasn’t aware. I was out looking at the ocean.” Soulis shifted slightly in his seat and rested one hand under his chin.

“Like the ocean, do you?”

“It’s why I moved here. The view is spectacular.”

“Where did you move here from, Mr. Soulis?”

“Ohio.”

“Why did you move?”

“My house was broken into and I no longer felt safe.”

“Did they take anything?”

“There wasn’t much worth taking. Most of my valuables were in holding.”

“Did you know that Tom Pardue was dead?”

“Yes. I am also aware of the tragedy at the university. Something about a fraternity house fire.”

“It’s been a busy week.”

“I suspect so, yes.”

Boyd couldn’t get a thing from the man in front of him. He might as well have been speaking about the weather.

“If I leave you my card, will you call me if you see anything suspicious?”

“Naturally. Has the police force considered a curfew?”

“There’s already a curfew in place for kids around here, high school and under. They have to be off the streets by ten P.M.”

“How’s that been working out?”

“Not so good. We have around fourteen or fifteen missing right now.”

He read a list of names to the man, and asked if he’d met or knew anyone on the list. The only ones he claimed to know were the kids he’d already mentioned.

“We’ll be in touch if that’s all right, Mr. Soulis?”

“Please, call me Jason and of course, if I can help in any way, you have but to ask.”

Boyd shook his hand as they were leaving and winced. The man had a grip that was intimidating.

On the way out to the car, Danny was grinning like a run-way model.

“What are you smiling about?”

“You don’t like him.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You think he did something, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I just haven’t figured out what.”

“You’re getting jumpy, Richie.”

Boyd shrugged. “It’s a hobby.”

“You think he took those kids?”

“I think he knows something is all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he looks like he knows something.”

Before Danny could come up with an appropriate answer they were called back to the station. O’Neill wanted to bitch them out again. He’d recovered from being called a bitch.

He hadn’t driven twenty feet before Danny started in again. “Are we there yet?… Are we there yet?…”

“I’ve still got the cigar, Danny. I can light it right up.”

“You’re no fun when you’re pissy, Richie.”

“That ain’t what your mother said.”

“Gave up on Whalen, did ya?”

“Again with the damned Whalen comments!”

“Somebody’s getting oversensitive.”

Boyd lit his cigar. Danny shut his mouth.

Soulis walked down into the basement of his house, smiling to himself. They were pleasant enough men, the detectives. Annoying, but pleasant.

It was easy enough to slide between the stones in the floor and move through the darkness until he reached the cave far below the house. There were a lot of tricks he’d learned over the years, and becoming a shadow was one of the simplest.

When he stepped into the cave, they were all waiting, most of them in a stupor, a few conscious and ready to escape if they could. The new ones were still dead. They would be until the sun had set. That was still a few hours away.

The cavern lay below sea level, a deep, dank secret place that only two living people knew about. It was one of the main reasons he had chosen Albert Miles’s house as the proper location for his experiments.

The problem had always been the same as far as he could figure: the newly risen were always rather stupid. It was hard to rise from the dead and come out of the entire situation feeling alert and perky. Not only did they lack any substantial strength, but they also looked like they’d just recently been killed. The average life expectancy of a recently reborn vampire was not very long. The ones that didn’t get killed by whomever they were attacking in the first few nights of their new lives usually didn’t make it past the first sunrise. They were delicate creatures, really, and the sun could destroy them in very little time.

So Jason had decided to experiment. He’d done well enough in Ohio, before Jonathan Crowley showed up and killed off his new prizes. After that, he decided it was time to get a little bolder in his tests.

He hid the bodies away and let them fester for a while; let them stew in their own death with just enough blood to keep them coherent and recovering from their journey back to the world. That was how they all explained it to him, the ones that had actually died: they said it was like coming back from a far darker place.

They also said they came back without their souls in a lot of cases. He wondered about that and whether or not there was any truth to the notion. Most of the time he didn’t give any consideration to the idea of a soul or a life force; it was something he’d never had to deal with.

There were different types of vampires; he knew that much for certain. There were the ones like what he had been leaving in this cave—killed as food, they would rise within a few days and continue the cycle of feeding and killing—and there were the ones who were created through the exchange of blood and other bodily secretions. The latter were far rarer to encounter. It wasn’t often that one of his kind decided to make a new Undead. He wondered if others thought of the distinction or if it was only him. Oh well, live and learn.

He knew a few others who had created Undead as opposed to merely vampires, but they seemed to find the entire affair some sort of secret, best left locked away. Jason couldn’t understand that notion. He had no shame regarding what he had created. The rest seemed to look on what they had done as a mistake of epic proportions.

Still, he supposed if he was going to experiment, he needed to cover all of the possibilities. Besides, it was only a rare few he had ever found who he felt could handle the changes in their lives.

Maggie Preston, for example, was virtually ideal for the part. What a lovely young woman. He wondered idly how angry she would be when she found out what he had done to her.

Back to business. He looked at the sickly things crawling or sleeping in the cave and smiled. Some of the braver ones had figured out how to escape around the same time they realized that breathing was not a necessity any longer. Most of them hadn’t come along that far in their thought processes.

Waking up, it seemed, took a while.

“Please, let us go.” Her name was Danielle Hopkins. He’d taken her from the campus of the university right after she’d dealt with the boy Maggie had befriended.

“Not yet, Danni. It’s not time.” He spoke as patiently as he could. That one tended to whine. She wasn’t doing well; her skin was sloughing off.

“When? Can you tell me that?”

“Maybe tomorrow night.”

“So long?” Her voice was miserable.

“Not so long, my child. Barely any time at all.”

“I’m so hungry.”

“I know. Soon, Danni. Soon.”

She slipped across the ground, her eyes wide and casting their faint silvery light. “Please, just for a short time? Just for a few hours?” Danni suddenly got a crafty look on her face. “I can tell you who has been sneaking out…”