I left that little girl’s apartment barely able to contain myself. My anger that this little human had been so terrorized was only exacerbated by the fact that I was overtired, so my control wasn’t what it perhaps should have been. I knew that it was stupid to get worked up over human doings, but just as vampiric strength is greater than humans’, so is the depth of emotion we can and do feel. It was one of the reasons we tended to remain solitary. While we had those greater emotions, it didn’t mean we were any better at maintaining our composure than a human could their own. Those few vampires who had long term romantic relationships walked an emotional tightrope more like Occam’s Razor than what was contained within Ringling Brother’s Big Top.
I could feel my fangs trying to force themselves out of the cover of my gums, and I couldn’t allow that to happen. I wrapped every ounce of control I could muster around myself as I strode to my car.
I almost made it before two thin, though surprisingly strong arms wrapped themselves around my midsection and pulled back, hard. Having been startled to the point of breaking my concentration, my full set of fangs burst forth and my normal appearance followed close behind. Without thinking, I turned, glaring down at Megan, with what in no way could be considered a friendly expression, and that little girl who had already seen such unimaginable horror in the past few hours saw my real self. She never flinched, only looked me in the eye with a completely serious expression.
“Find the people who hurt my Mama and my little brother. Don’t let them do this to anyone else,” she said earnestly, and then turned me loose. I turned away quickly, working desperately to put my mask back on, maybe make her think she had imagined what she saw, but I was so shocked I couldn’t pull that kind of control together. Walking around me to face me once more, Megan wrapped her arms around me one more time and hugged me tightly, squishing her small face to my chest and screwing her eyes shut, squeezing tears out from beneath those tiny lids.
Fred came running up and gently took her into his arms, eyes wide with his own shock, his skin pale, but not at what he was seeing about my appearance.
“I’m sorry. She wiggled her way down and was out the door before I could stop her,” he apologized. “I’ll get her to CSD right away.”
That little girl looked at me expectantly. She wanted a response from me. I couldn’t bring myself to let her down.
“I promise, Megan. I’ll do everything I can for you,” I promised her.
“Thank you, Mr. Reese. I’m sorry if I scared you,” she told me in all seriousness. I couldn’t help the bark of laughter that escaped me. The world had indeed been turned on its ear. Then her next words, softly spoken, as if she knew they were private words, shocked me even more. “Mama had a friend like you. Pat. She comes over a lot.”
I stared at her in disbelief. Flabbergasted, I sat on the curb. Fred lowered her to the ground and she sat beside me.
“Pat told Sam and me that we couldn’t tell people about her, and I never did till now. But I thought it would be okay to tell you, since you’re like her. She would come over on Friday nights and we’d play Scrabble and other games till Mama said it was time for bed.”
“How did you find out that she is like me, Megan? We don’t normally show ourselves as we are,” I asked the disturbingly mature little girl.
“She came over after Daddy came over and hit Mama. Daddy was gone when Pat got to our house, but Mama was all bloody from what happened. When Pat got mad about it and started asking questions of Mama, she didn’t look like regular people anymore. I didn’t get scared because Mama didn’t get scared. I think Mama knew what she was before that. After Sam and me saw her like that, she never looked like regular people again. She said it felt good to be herself. I’m glad she’s my friend,” Megan told me with a proud little smile. “I have her phone number if you want to talk to her. Maybe she can be your friend, too.”
Betcher ass I’d want to talk to this she-vampire I’d never met in the two and a half years since I’d come to Los Angeles. Vampires tended to be rather solitary, which could really suck after awhile, and maybe this vampire would know something that would help me to solve this case and make things better for the little girl who stared at me with a trust I didn’t feel I’d earned.
“Where is your Daddy now, sweetie?” I asked her. More often than not, victims knew their attackers, and from what Megan had already shared, this asshole seemed perfectly capable of violence. It wouldn’t be the first time things got so horribly out of hand with a noncustodial parent. That whole “if I can’t have them, no one can” crap.
“He lives with a friend of his in Woodland Hills, so we don’t see him very much,” she told me. I nodded, knowing this was going to be one of the first aspects of this investigation for me. Then I asked her how I could get in touch with this Pat (Patricia?) vampire.
Megan rattled off a string of numbers which I committed to memory. I’d been blessed with perfect recall, even while I was still human, so paper wasn’t necessary for me. It sounded like a downtown L.A. number. Perfect recall had its good and bad points. It was great in situations like this; however it cursed me with being able to remember tiny but still terrible details of my past, before and after my turning.
I stood, Megan following suit, just standing there, watching me.
“Fred, I don’t think that Children’s Services is the best place for her right now. I think we have to keep this in-house, if you know what I mean.” My assistant nodded his understanding and carefully took the girl into his arms, cradling her to his chest carefully. She turned that same very trusting look on my sometimes furry friend and rested her head against his chest, looking at me with one eye and a crooked smile. Was her trust misplaced? She knew about vampires, and that made her life forfeit if word of that simple fact reached other vampires who weren’t quite so stick in the mud about things when it came to what they would and would not do to potential food. Knowledge was dangerous in this case. So very dangerous for this small person.
Fred gave me a look I was sure I didn’t like, apologetic as it appeared.
“I don’t have anywhere to bring her, Terry,” he told me, professionalism gone when it was pretty much just us monsters. “I’ve got family over.”
Shit. I hadn’t realized it was that part of the Cycle again so soon.
This was not my preferred way of doing things at all, but it looked as though I had absolutely no choice in the matter. After pulling off my coat, I held out my hands for the little human and took her from Fred, wrapping her in the blue pinstriped Brooks Brothers blazer. I tried not to glare at Fred, but knew it was pointless to be mad at him. I knew what he was trying to very carefully tell me. He was right. His place was not the place to bring little Megan right now.
“Come up with something reasonable for them,” I told him, gesturing toward the cops with a quick jerk of my head. “I’ve got to get some rest and it’s going to be interesting, at the very least, with Little Miss Sunshine here visiting.”
Exhibit A was now snoring softly in my arms, the fingers of one hand tangled in my hair and the other hanging limply. I shook my head as I looked down at her pale face turned inward toward my thinly covered death-chilled flesh and headed the few feet to my car.
Helpfully opening my car door for me, my friend and assistant settled Megan into the back seat without waking her and expertly strapped her in. Fred had a lot more experience with young ones in his short twenty seven years than I’d had in my much longer lifetime. Parts of me envied him that, but most of my other parts were just as grateful I didn’t have descendants to worry about. My part of the family line had ended with me, so there was no one for me to be checking up on, which was just as well. How did one explain one’s existence to modern family plausibly? That whole “Cousin Barnabas” thing just does not work in Real Life.
Not saying a word, Fred nodded at me once and left for the house of horrors, coming up with whatever excuse his clever mind would use to explain why I was taking the lone witness with me. I had faith in my only friend. I guess I had to, since we knew each other’s dirty laundry and kept it secret.
I slid tiredly into the driver’s seat, sighing deeply. Looking in my rear view mirror as I pulled away from the curb and looking at Megan sleeping peacefully, listening to the unaccustomed and odd sound of breathing in my car, I found myself wondering, not for the first time…
What have I gotten myself into this time?
