Still singing, I put the car into gear and we headed toward Durholm Hall. Probably to our deaths, I thought, but hey, at least we’d be together.
Chapter 10
BEDLAM ISLAND WAS heavily wooded. The town proper was centralized and most of the inhabitants lived on the outskirts. Durholm Hall was further out than my house, along Razor’s Edge Road, a narrow two-lane road bordered on both sides by deep ravines filled with massive ferns, tall fir and cedar that reached for the sky, and birch and madrona trees. Brambles grew thick in the ravines and traversing through them could be an adventure in piercing all sorts of body parts you never considered piercing.
The road was of a fairly steep grade—a good seven to eight percent, uphill all the way. Though the two solitary snowplows the city of Bedlam owned got a good workout during the winter, Razor’s Edge Road was one of the last to be plowed. It had been scraped clean a few days back, but the latest buildup of snow had left a thick covering of compacted ice and frozen snow on the asphalt, making the drive slick and dangerous.
“How on earth does the Arborview Society come out here every day to open up their offices? Or do they?” I gripped the steering wheel, leaning forward to make certain I could see clearly. The extra caffeine in my system wasn’t hurting matters any, either. I had snow tires on my car, but it still felt like the tires weren’t fully gripping the road.
“They don’t. Except for a skeleton staff a couple days a week, they close down right before Thanksgiving and open up again in mid-January.” Sandy stared out the side window. “You might want to pull toward the center a bit. You’re getting awfully close to the edge of the ravine over here.”
“That’s because this damned road is a narrow-ass strip that should probably be one-way, but they decided to try to make two lanes out of it. I can scrunch over a little more but if anybody on the way down took one of these S-curves too quickly, we’d be toast if we get any farther toward the center line.” I eased over another foot, but that was the best I could do. “I’m going twenty miles an hour right now.”
“And you’re doing just fine. At least we don’t have that far to go. It’s only about fifteen minutes away from your place.”
“Makes me glad I didn’t choose to buy farther out. My house is plenty rural, thank you.” I let out a short breath. “So, do you happen to know anything about the layout of this place? How big is it? You said there are tunnels below it?”
“Tunnels, yes—they’re sealed brick, I gather. No dirt walls. I don’t exactly know why but they’re there. They can’t be terribly extensive, though, or the house would cave in on top of them. The land up here isn’t all that stable and one good quake could probably send a wall of mud and debris sliding down the ravines. Any house built near the edge of one would go right along with it.”
“Is the land gated?”
“Gated, yes, but not to keep the public out. One of the purposes of the Arborview Society is to promote an understanding among the woodland Fae and others. They’re working to protect the environment, so they make themselves as accessible as they can to humans and Pretcom alike. Because you know as well as I do that the werewolves and some of the other shifters aren’t nearly as eco-conscious as witches and Fae.”
She was right. The preternatural community had its problems, and one of them was an inborn tendency to cling to one’s own kind. The werewolves and a few of the other shifters tended to be more human in nature than the rest of us. They had learned to walk among human society for years before we all just came out of the broom closet, so to speak.
When the clock turned over to the year 2000, the Otherkin slipped out of the shadows. The next couple years had been rocky, with a number of skirmishes, but society had finally quieted down. The hate groups were still around, but for the most part they were more afraid of us than we were of them. They kept their rhetoric on the verbal side rather than putting it into action. The few times the backlash reached violence, the Otherkin had made certain to exhibit exactly what we were capable of. There would be no repeat of the Spanish Inquisition, no government-sanctioned witch hunters. That was a given—not up for debate.
But a subset of humans preferred some of the Otherkin over the rest because they seemed most familiar. The good old boys tended to like the werewolves. The feminists liked the witches. Everybody both gravitated to—and feared—the Fae. And so on.
Sandy pulled out her phone and consulted her notes. “Durholm Hall is about the size of your place, in terms of the house. But it sits on fifteen acres, so there’s a lot of land there and most of it is heavily wooded. There’s a grove in the woods somewhere, about an acre in size, that they use for public rituals and ceremonies. I think they must have private areas that are cordoned off, too, but that’s my own speculation.”
“I doubt if we can cover the entire area—not thoroughly—before four o’clock, but we should be able to scope out at least part of it. What are we looking for?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Anything that seems odd or out of the ordinary. Anything that seems misplaced.” She glanced at me, then lifted her backpack that she had brought along. “I know you’re going to yell at me, but I brought along a few things.”
“You didn’t.” I had asked her time and again not to bring any wooden stakes to the house, in consideration of Aegis’s feelings. Sandy tended to go around armed with whatever she could find that would fit in a tote bag. She owned a pearl-handled gun, though our magic was stronger than most bullets—stronger, though maybe not as lethal, usually. Bullets had one use: to shoot things and/or people. Magic could be targeted in a number of directions. Sandy also carried mace, pepper spray, brass knuckles, and a switchblade. I had to hand it to her—she lived by the motto, “Be prepared.”
“Yes, I did. I brought four stakes in case we find more vampires than we bargained for. And given the text you received, that’s a distinct possibility. We can’t just sit back and wait, Maddy. The more we find out, the more it sounds like we’re at the tip of the iceberg, the edge of a vampire war. If Essie or Rachel intend to take over Bedlam, it doesn’t matter which one it is. We’re all in trouble.”
She had a point. I just didn’t want to think about it, but since I had somehow been dropkicked squarely in the center of this altercation, I had better face it. “Fine. We’re going vampire hunting. I just hope we find them before they realize we’re tracking them down.”
“Me too,” Sandy said. “Me too.”
THE GATE AT Durholm Hall was closed, but unlocked. I stopped while Sandy jumped out from the car and waded through the snow to open it up. She waited until I pulled through, then closed it behind us. No use in drawing attention to the fact that we were here. The drive to the house only took a couple of moments, but the snow was fresh and unmarked by tire tracks other than ours. We were the only ones who had come through today, as far as I could tell.