Always the Vampire

Lia piled nine jars containing candles in my arms, while she snagged pouches, crystals, and a handful of sage bound in rough twine.

“Hurry, now,” she said and motioned me outside.

She walked straight to the center of Cosmil’s circle of trees. I followed with glass jars clanking.

“Put the colored candles in the cardinal directions. You know which color goes where?”

Amazingly, I did. A quick vision showed me what to do.

“When you’ve done that, put the white candles in the noncardinal directions, and set the black candle in the circle center.”

While I distributed the jars around the perimeter, Lia laid a length of white cotton on the grass and arranged the healing aids she’d carried. As I started to place the black candle, Cosmil and Saber exited the shack carrying Triton. Saber had Triton’s shoulders, Cosmil his feet. I hesitated.

“Give me the candle, Cesca, and leave the circle.”

“You don’t want my help to do the healing?”

She shook her head. “It’s too soon. You and Saber need to practice, and I fear your energy in particular may agitate Triton.”

“Understood, but, Lia, can you pinpoint what caused the flare?”

“Is the cause important?”

“It just bugs me that Saber and Triton are infected when I’m not.”

Lia patted my shoulder. “We’ll try to discover the underlying reason Triton has suddenly become so sick, but treating him quickly is more important. You must go now.”

I hustled out of the circle as Saber stepped into it.

“You two may go home,” Cosmil said when they’d laid Triton on the ground. “We will do better alone.”

Saber nodded. “Lia, do you want my car keys, or do you know your way back to my house?”

She glanced at Triton’s still form and shook her head. “I will be staying the night.”

A vision flashed of Lia and Cosmil working on Triton, but it went blank before I saw the outcome. My heart hurt with sympathy for Triton. My head locked on one fact. Damn, a man down and the battle hadn’t even begun.





I led the way home in my truck and Saber followed in his SUV, but when we arrived at the cottage at midnight, we were of one mind.

We needed to conduct a good old-fashioned investigation.

Saber had retrieved his own laptop when he’d picked up Lia for training. With a chair from the kitchen, he set up next to my workstation at the desk. Snowball shadowed him, but she must’ve sensed our urgency, because she didn’t leap onto the keyboard tonight. She curled on an armchair.

We started with an online phone directory and found ten Heaths. No listings for Lynn Ann, Lynn, Ann, or L.A. No hits in the towns around Daytona, either, and we did searches from Flagler Beach to Ormond Beach to New Smyrna, and even Deland.

“Why couldn’t she be easy to find?” I muttered.

“What would you have done? Driven down to confront her?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“You really are a little tyrant.”

I heaved a shoulder-slumping sigh. “Tonight I was worse. I should have been more tactful. Triton has waited over two centuries to find a mate, and I accused her of being an enemy spy.”

“Honey, he had his own doubts, or he wouldn’t have been defensive about Lynn to begin with. And if he’d been in his right mind, he would’ve blown you off. Instead, he went from annoyed to angry to black rage in minutes.”

“Did you smell his breath as he collapsed?”

“It’s from the infection. It may not be a universal sign, but about ninety percent of the vampires I met with had that rank breath. They were sucking down more breath mints than blood.”

I reached for his hand. “Are you feeling okay?

Saber laced his fingers through mine and gave me a long look. “Triton made a lot of accusations. Were any of them true?”

“I admit to having a few what-if twinges that first day I saw him, but he was right all those years ago. We knew each other too well to marry. We’d have snipped each other to death inside a year.”

“One more question. Did you ogle Triton?”

“More like glanced.”

“And?”

“I might’ve admired some aspects of the view.”

“You’re a tease.”

“Not about this.” I framed his face with my hands. “You’re my guy, Saber. Only you.”

He leaned in for a kiss. “I’m available for ogling later.”

“I’m counting on it.”

One more kiss and we each turned back to our monitors.

Saber accessed law enforcement and background check websites to which he had access while I thought back to what little Triton had revealed about Lynn.

One, she’d been shifting about five years. Two, she lived with college friends. Three, she worked at a New Age shop. Not a wealth of information to go on, but three clues were better than none. Plus everyone over twelve seemed to be on a social network. Couldn’t hurt to start with a general name search. Maybe I’d get lucky.