Earthbound: An Otherworld Novella (8 page)

“The YIA?”

“Y’Elestrial Intelligence Agency. The OIA is an offshoot of the branch. Anyway, it’s directly their fault that Menolly was turned. They sent her into a dangerous situation to spy on a nest of vampires. The leader—a vamp named Dredge, also known as the Scourge—is a terror. One of the worst vampires ever to walk Otherworld. He’s far worse than Dracula.”

Chase let out an audible gulp. “Dracula’s
real
?”

I gave him a long look, realizing that he had no clue how real some of the legends and nightmares were. “Yes, Dracula’s very real. He was going to be sent to the Subterranean Realms about a thousand years ago when he escaped over to Earthside, through one of the portals. I don’t know whether it was left unguarded or whether he was just clever, but he made his way over here and took up life as Vlad the Impaler. There’s a lot your history books don’t say about him, but yes, he was…and is…Dracula. And when Vlad “died” he just shifted back into his Dracula persona and took up from there. The stories of Vlad’s death are merely a cover-up. Dracula still roams the planet, though I have no idea why he’s stayed so low-key since then.”

“Well, what do you know? Maybe he got his fill of life in the public eye?” Chase let out a short laugh. “So, Dracula’s real. And Dredge is worse than he is.”

“Dredge is far worse than Dracula. Dredge is carnage incarnate. Anyway, so Menolly was sent to spy on him. She was a
jian-tu
, basically a super-athlete. She could climb walls, cling to the barest of outcroppings, put any acrobat to shame, walk tightropes…but our half-human blood landed her the curse of occasionally losing her grip. You see, the jian-tu are born, not bred. And now and then her skills would vanish. She fell from the hiding place where she was spying right into the middle of Dredge’s nest.”

“And they turned her?” Chase’s expression had gone from curious to horrified.

“Not at first. She actually managed to get free and had almost escaped. In fact, she made it out of the cavern system and to the hilltop above. She was hurt, but she still managed to escape. But just as she about to run over to the woods and hide, Dredge appeared. She couldn’t fight him. He took her back into the lair, where he spent the entire night torturing her. He used a dull knife to cover her body from her throat to her wrists with carvings—he basically carved her skin. Then he raped her, forced her to drink from him, and
then
he killed her. Of course, she was reborn a vampire. As a final insult, he sent her home to destroy her family.”

Chase leaned back against the railing. He closed his eyes as he rested his head on the newel post. “We have monsters like that over here. I suppose the fact that Dredge is a vampire makes it worse, but we have very real, very dangerous monsters of our own, Camille. Predators who prey on children, who maim and torture them. That’s one of the reasons I became a cop. I couldn’t face the thought that there were perverts running free, and I wasn’t doing anything to stop them.”

His words made me see him in a new light. Chase truly cared about his job. He cared about the innocent.

“Menolly arrived home, crazed. She was like a rabid animal, with Dredge’s instructions filling her mind. Delilah and I were home, along with one of the serving women. When Menolly came bursting through the door and I realized she was vampire, I sent Delilah upstairs to hide. I told the serving woman to get out. Then, I lured Menolly into the safe room that my father had provided in case of a vampire attack.”

“Vampire attacks are that common over there?”

I shook my head. “My father’s paranoid. He hates vampires with a passion. Menolly broke my arm in the process, but I managed to lock her in. The YIA took her away for a year. My father threatened to expose the fact that they had sent an agent, known for not having a lot of experience, into harms way. We had proof that Menolly had repeatedly asked for backup during the two weeks prior, when she was first assigned to spy on Dredge, but the YIA ignored her. Father made it clear that it wouldn’t look good to the general public to find out what had actually happened.”

Chase was silent for a moment, then he asked, “if your father hates vampires, how does he feel about your sister?”

It was my turn to hesitate. Father had treated Menolly like she had the plague. Oh, he was courteous to her, but all three of us knew that his love for Menolly had died the same day she had.

“Our father is a soldier. He loved our mother more than anything. Her death hit him hard. He withdrew, leaving me to take care of my sisters. I think over here it would be called emotional neglect. He tries to ignore the fact that Menolly was turned. He’s written her off.”

The words hurt, but they were true.

Chase sat down on the top step. He motioned for me to sit beside him. “My own father was addicted to heroin. He vanished by the time I was five. My mother had to go on social welfare—a system that’s supposed to provide for people in need, but all too often falls far short. She couldn’t cope very well. I found work as soon as I was fourteen. I worked at a fast food joint during the afternoons and delivered newspapers in the morning, while going to school and keeping up straight A’s. Later, when I was old enough to drive, I added a third job in the evenings. I became a delivery driver for another fast food restaurant.”

I looked at Chase. “I guess being a kid sucks no matter what world you’re from, doesn’t it? But to answer your original question: No, you don’t remind Menolly of Dredge. But you’re a man in a position of authority. All she’s ever received from men in power has been pain and neglect. When Dredge turned her, she lost her fiancé and her hope for her future. She lost the love of her father and bears constant reminders on her skin of that night. What can I say? Menolly doesn’t
have
a chip on her shoulder, she
is
the chip on her shoulder.”

“I guess that sort of thing would be hard to recover from. I can’t imagine what she went through. Please tell me that you found the vampire who did this to her? That you were able to stake him?”

I shook my head. “I wish, but no. He’s still out there, somewhere. If the YIA could find him, they would execute him. But Dredge has walked the world for thousands of years. The chances of finding him are slim.”

With a sigh, Chase pulled himself to his feet. “On that note, I’ll be off. Thank you for telling me about her past. It gives me a better idea of how to relate to her. She
does
make me nervous, but now I understand some of her reasoning.”

As he left, I slowly scanned the yard, searching to see if anything was out there. But all I could sense were the rustling of trees with their long roots diving into the earth, and the hush of animals creeping through the undergrowth. After a moment, I returned to the kitchen, locking the door behind me.

Chapter 7

The Indigo Crescent was gleaming by the time the taxi dropped me off the next morning. As I entered my shop, the smell of lemon and lilac filled the air, and Iris came bustling out from the back, a white and blue apron over her denim skirt and tank top. She was carrying a broom, and her golden locks were wrapped up in a braid that coiled around her head.

“How long is your hair?” It looked like she had masses of it.

“It reaches my ankles.” She flashed me a sparkling smile and my mood lifted. Iris had a way of making people feel happy when they were around her.

I shrugged out of my jacket and she held out her hand for it. “Have you ever cut it?”

A cloud washed across her face, then she shook it away. “Only once, and I never will again.”

It felt like there was a story there, but I decided it wasn’t my place to ask. Not if it made her look so glum. “So what’s on the agenda today?”

“Well, I pulled together a seating area over there, for customers,” she said. “And I thought we’d start out with me teaching you how to run the cash register, which will take about ten minutes. At ten, we open for business, and while we wait for customers, we can set up a ledger system. Sound good to you?”

I nodded, my mind still back on the creature we’d fought the night before. “Is there any coffee?” Ever since the first taste of the mocha the Chase had ordered for me, I had fallen in love with caffeine. In fact, it had only taken a couple days until I was hooked.

“There’s a coffee shop next door. Why don’t I run over and get us some coffee and pastries?”

“You’re just a bundle of energy aren’t you?”

Iris could run rings around all of us.

“It’s my nature. I’m a house sprite. We like to keep busy, and busy to us is what
overwhelmed
would be to most people. I like being active. I get antsy and edgy when I am forced to sit around too much.” And with that, she grabbed her wallet and headed out the door.

While she was gone I wandered around the shop, running my hands over the spines of the books. How many of these could I read before we were sent home? I decided to start keeping a running booklist. I hadn’t been kidding when I said that, when our time here was up, I’d be carting home boxfuls of books with me.

A couple minutes later, the jingle of the shop bell caught my attention and I headed toward the counter. And there he was: Henry Jeffries, with a huge smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers in a crystal vase.

“I thought these might brighten the shop for you.” He handed them to me, looking around. “Is Miss Iris here? I thought perhaps she could recommend a few books to me.” The sparkle told me everything I had suspected was true. He had a crush on her.

I had a feeling Iris wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic.

“She’ll be back in a few minutes. Feel free to look around. We have a new seating area over there,” I nodded toward the front of the store. Iris’s seating area was in front of the bay window on the left side of the shop, and she had positioned a sofa and a couple of recliners into a comfortable arrangement.

Henry headed toward the stacks.

I carried the vase over to the counter. As I moved behind the glass case, I spotted a pad of paper and a pencil. I decided I might as well try to draw the creature that we had seen last night, since we had found no usable information on the net.

I sketched away, doing my best to capture the image. A few minutes later the door opened and Iris came in, a bag in one hand, and a drink tray in the other. She handed me an iced triple cherry chocolate latte. Her own drink was a caramel macchiato.

“Anybody around?”

I nodded toward Henry, who was standing in front of the science fiction section, raptly staring at the wall of books. Iris let out a little groan, then hushed herself before he heard.

“Wonderful. Who the flowers from?”

“From Henry. He asked about you,” I said with a smile.

“What are you doing?” She leaned over the counter to look at what I was drawing. “When did you see a kerakal? I haven’t seen one in years, thank the gods.”

“You know what this is?” I stared at her.

“Of course. It’s a Germanic forest spirit, and boy is let me tell you, do those critters have nasty tempers. So, why are you sketching one?”

“Because last night one attacked me and my sisters out in the woods in back of our house. We were on our way down to Birchwater pond when the thing came out of the woods and jumped us. It knocked me into a briar patch, and I’ve got nasty little scabs all over my thighs and butt. We had no clue what the thing was. Can you tell me about it?”

“Kerakals are dangerous. They’re always hungry and always on the lookout for fresh meat. Some people get them mixed up with kobolds, but the fact is they’re an entirely different species of Fae. Not only are they nasty tempered, but they’re cunning, and they eat magic. If you’ve got one on your land you’re going to have to find it dispatch it because it won’t go away by itself.”

“It vanished right in front of our eyes.”

“What happened right before it vanished? And that’s a trademark—they can phase in and out, but they cannot do so quickly. If you catch it right after it phases in, it’s not going to be able to disappear for a while. I can’t recall how long the waiting time is.”

“The kerakal caught sight of Menolly’s fangs. Then it vanished.”

“That makes sense. They’re terrified of vampires and kelpies. I’m not entirely sure what the commonality between the two is, though. Kerakals make their burrows near freshwater ponds and lakes, which would make sense given you were on the way to the pond. I know how to sniff them out,” she said. “I was trained to do so because they are thick not only in Finland, but in the Northlands.”

“You spent time in the Northlands?” That meant that she was used to rough terrain and harsh conditions.

She nodded. “Tell me, did you happen to find any sort of bone magic there? Runes written on a bone?”

“Yes, actually. Chase said it was a metacarpus. It had runes all over it.”

“Then that means they are looking to establish a colony. It’s a beacon to others of their kind—kind of like a magical radar.” At my blank look she shook her head. “Never mind, but you have to destroy that charm or you’ll be overrun with an infestation of them.”

I sighed. “Lovely. Can you come over after work to help sniff the thing out? And how do you dispatch them?”

“Well, iron would be the best way, but we probably should forego that, given it affects all of us. Or at least, I think it affects you? I know you’re half human.”

“Cast-iron and wrought iron burns our skin, but we can touch steel without a problem.”

“I have no problem with steel, either. Somehow the blend of metals seems to temper out some of the effects. I’d be happy to come over, but you need to be aware that kerakals tend to wander around at night more. Although, if it’s out and about, that means we’ll have a better chance of tracking down its lair. They have peculiar smell, mossy and mildew and bitter orange and skunk cabbage. But since autumn isn’t the season for skunk cabbage, if we smell it then we can be pretty sure that the kerakal is around somewhere.”

“What skunk cabbage? Sounds horrible.”

“A flower, actually. But it smells like skunk.”

Just then, Henry wandered up and I motioned for Iris to go help him. She shot me a nasty glance, but did as I asked.