“Way,” Jane said. “I’ve seen two small portraits, hand-painted, seventy years apart, and except for the beard, it’s the same guy.”
“I’ll be,” I said. “I know we have a lair in Asheville. Word is that the head vampire wants to start a barbecue joint in town.” When Evan paused with his spoon in midair, I said, “Down, boy. So far, it’s just a rumor.” To Jane I said, “Barbecued ribs are his favorite. So. We had a lair here, way back when.”
She nodded and glanced at Angelina, her look saying there was more to tell but not in front of tender ears. So I had to wait for details, and waiting never sat well with me. I have red hair. Some form of impatience is surely bred into me.
? ? ?
When Angie Baby was finally down again for the night, and Jane and Evan and I were all stretched out in the tiny living room, Jane finally dished. “Hainbridge was a vamp with a human son. The kid came down with what sounds like leukemia, when he was a child in 1845.”
“Vamps can have kids? I mean, human kids?” Evan said.
“Sounds like it, but it must be really rare,” Jane said. “According to the records, the doctor tried everything to cure the kid, and instead of being cured, the kid went crazy. The local newspaper called him a lunatic. He was seven.”
“The father tried to turn his son to cure him of the leukemia,” I whispered.
“Yeah. That’s what I got out of it. And from what I’ve read, that’s not permissible, to turn a child. And just as bad, Hainbridge didn’t chain his child up.”
I looked across the room to Angie’s door. It was half-closed and I suddenly couldn’t stand it. I stood and crossed to the opening and looked in. Angie was curled on her side, her thumb in her mouth. She didn’t sleep with her thumb in her mouth often, only when she needed comfort, and I had to wonder if she had heard us talking, even in her sleep, and become distressed. I studied the wards on the room and tightened them here and there where they had grown a bit frayed. And I prayed too. I wasn’t much of a prayer, not like Jane. She was a true believer and she prayed religiously—a small joke we shared. I was less . . . confident, less sanguine, about who and what God was, and about why He would give a rat’s behind about any of us. But I prayed anyway—God, keep my baby safe. Just in case. And oddly, when I finished, Angie pulled her thumb out of her mouth, sighed, and rolled over. Coincidence was a strange mistress. When I settled in my chair and picked up my tea, Jane went on.
“He was accused of having rabies. The kid was,” she clarified. “He bit several people, tried to chew off the arm of a little girl in town. No one got turned, but the kid disappeared and the doctor stopped practicing and went into seclusion. He wasn’t seen by the townspeople often, but when the war started in 1861, he totally disappeared.”
“The Civil War?” Evan asked.
“Yeah. And when he reappeared in Hainbridge in 1870, several years after the war ended, there weren’t enough people there to remember him. Sherman did a number on the town.”
“Is it true that Sherman was a werewolf?” I asked.
“No such thing as werewolves,” Evan said firmly, raising up the foot of his oversized recliner and pushing back. “No such thing as weres at all.”
Jane and I looked at each other and said nothing. There were witches and vampires and at least one skinwalker. Who could say about werewolves? “Anyway,” Jane said, “when he came back to town, he was all into treatments for lunatics and research.”
“His son was still alive,” I guessed.
Jane shrugged and curled her legs under her. She was long and lean, dressed in a T-shirt and worn-out, skintight jeans, her boots left at the door and striped socks on her feet in shades of fuchsia and emerald; the socks were a gift from me. I doubted that she ever wore them unless she came here. Jane Yellowrock didn’t have the most jocular of natures, but she was desperately appreciative of any small gift, which made my heart ache for her.
I shook my head as I remembered the storm that destroyed the mobile home we had lived in until a few months past when Angie’s power awakened way too early and ripped the place apart. Jane had saved us all that night by turning into a mountain lion and calming Angie long enough for Evan and me to bind Angie’s powers tightly to her. As if she knew what I was thinking, Jane met my eyes, glanced at Angie’s room, and shrugged as if it had been nothing. It hadn’t been nothing. If I believed in miracles, I’d say that was one.
“So, then he involved some witches who had come over from Ireland—a woman by the name of Ester Wilkins, her daughter Lauran, and her sister Ruth. They’d started a coven, under the covers, so to speak, out of sight, but they provided the doctor with herbal tinctures, decoctions, and concoctions.” She tilted her head. “There’s a difference between decoctions and concoctions?”