“She said,” I translated as I unlocked the door, “that they went west and south, and she lost them after a few hours.”
“Could be anywhere by now. Here.” He shifted Snowball’s box to me. “I’ll get the other things from the car while you talk to Pandora.”
I nodded, pushed the door open, and put Snowball’s box on the coffee table before I hit the code to turn off the alarm. Pandora padded in behind me, pausing to sniff each room in general, then stretching up to sniff Snowball again.
“Uh, Pandora, it’s just a plain kitten.”
She will sense spirits for you.
“Okay, good to know. Do you have anything else to report about the vamps? Did you tell Triton about the trouble? Is that where you’ve been all this time?”
She swung her head around. Triton will speak to you. Listen. I will keep watch. With that, she trotted out my open door.
Triton would speak to me, huh? He’d better, and he’d darn well better speak to me clearly, not through another dream. I was so over these veiled messages.
Saber and I settled Snowball and organized Saber’s command central space in the kitchen. Laptop on the table, VPA files in their storage box stowed underneath.
I checked Maggie’s Victorian wraparound porch for the cabinet hardware. No delivery yet, so I watered her plants which, thankfully, were still thriving. On the way back to my cottage, I turned on my vamp hearing to see if the Listers were home yet. Silence. Good.
Saber got to work on entering digitized log information of Laurel’s movements into a GPS charting software program. The printouts would not only time stamp everywhere Laurel had been but would also plot the times her tracker had been working and when it hadn’t.
I remembered to make the hotel reservation for Jo-Jo, and since I’d sadly neglected my art institute classes, I booted up my own computer.
When Saber went to bed, I played with Snowball until I wore her out again. Then it was time to knock on Triton’s mind door. If nothing else, I’d tell him to stay out of my dreams.
I’d missed the cushy embrace of my leather couch and took a moment to get comfy. With the charm in my left hand, the static quickly morphed into the sound of waves breaking on a shore. Triton’s mind door appeared in my third eye, already cracked as if he knew I was coming.
“Do you know what’s been happening?”
I know.
“A vampire named Ray mentioned a madness in the senior vampires. And a darkness. Is that what you’re hiding from?”
The darkness is the Void. It consumes powers, and its victims descend into madness. I blinked. I was finally getting real answers instead of double talk?
“Why does this void thing eat vamp powers?”
It devours the power of all who are Other. Vampires, faeries, the elves.
“Wait. Faeries and elves are real?”
Francesca.
“Don’t take that long-suffering tone with me. I get it. Void thing is hungry and shape-shifters are on the menu, too.”
Yes. We must destroy it.
“Well, of course we must. You get me the destroyer handbook, and I’ll jump right on it.”
In my mind’s eye, Triton shook his head. The Void is not a joke.
“I’m not laughing. I’m trying to understand. Don’t you give this thing more power by fearing it?”
It feeds regardless. You must help me.
“How? From behind the scenes, like the way you held land in trust for me? Wanna talk about that?”
You know, then.
“I know. How much do I owe you for back taxes? You might as well tell me, because you know I won’t be in debt.”
What you owe can be paid when we meet.
“There you go with nonanswers again.”
I must go, but be ready to act when it’s time.
The door slammed shut. Damn it.
August thirteenth. I woke slowly from a dreamless sleep, savoring memories of this time last year. The lucky day for me when Maggie’s hefty construction foreman had stepped just so on a rotten part of the kitchen floor and fallen into the tiny basement where I had been trapped for over two hundred years.
The man had landed on the lid of my coffin and might’ve broken through that, too, except that the wood had been darn near petrified when King Normand had put me there. After another couple of hundred years of curing, it didn’t give an inch. His plunge had jarred me, though, and if I screeched a little, who could blame me? Maggie didn’t, even if it did cost her the man’s construction expertise. He scrambled out of the hole he’d made yelling about the dead talking, and dashed out of the house just short of vampire speed.
Maggie? She lowered herself into the hole and removed the worst of the debris from the coffin, talking to herself the whole time. When she tentatively knocked on the lid, I knocked back.
“Hello out there,” I remembered saying. “Please don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Okay, in retrospect, that sounded lame, but my friend Maggie is about as fearless as they come. When she said to hang on and she’d get me out, I stopped her.