Mercy's Destiny: Montgomery's Vampires Trilogy (Book #3) (Montgomery's Vampires Series) (11 page)

There really was not much else I could do other than sleep—would it have killed them to leave me with a book or a couple magazines? I was still pretty groggy, anyhow, from the drug they’d injected me with. I flopped down on the mattress, pleased to learn that the blanket wasn’t as itchy as I’d assumed. Under the blanket, the mattress had been made up with simple white sheet. I pulled off my constricting jeans and curled up under the blanket. I yawned. It was actually quite soft . . . and . . . cozy . . .

The sound of the lock rattling awakened me. Without the tiny bit of light shining through the vents and underneath the door, the room had gone pitch black, which meant the sun had set.

Heart thudding, I jumped to my feet, forgetting for a moment where I was.

Jason walked in, flipped on the light, and closed the door behind him. He was holding a jumbo iced soda and a paper bag with the unmistakable shape of a foot-long sandwich pressing through the paper. He looked me up and down, as if halfway surprised that I was still there. Yah, like I could have gone anywhere else.

I realized, then, that I was standing there in only a sweater and underwear. I grabbed for the blanket and wrapped it around my legs like a skirt.

“Relax,” he said with a snort. “You’re not my type.”

Yes, because why on earth would it cross my mind that a man who’d drug and tie up a woman may not also take it upon himself to cop a feel? I’m so sorry to offend you, my honorable kidnapper.

I pulled on the sweats while Jason pretended to be interested in a hangnail on his index finger. I noted that he was wearing a wedding ring, which I found reassuring, though it’s not like married men weren’t capable of hurting women.

When I was decent, he thrust the bag and the soda at me. “Here,” he said. “I know some girls are picky about what they eat. I don’t know if you’re a vegetarian or what, so I got you tuna. There are a couple chocolate chip cookies in the bag. I’ll see if I can bring you some books tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Jason,” I beamed. I figured that being polite to my captor could only help my cause. Maybe I could sweet-talk him into letting me go, because no way could I overpower him, not with the good hundred and fifty pounds he had on me.

“Yah,” he growled. He wouldn’t make eye contact, which led me to believe that he had already decided that he was not going to form a bond with me—that he was making a conscious effort to be distant. Another bad sign.

He turned to leave and I quickly asked, “How long are they going to keep me here?” I purposely used the term
they’re
instead of
you’re
so that Jason would know that I didn’t think
he
was the one keeping me there. No siree, it was
them
. Jason, nice guy that he was, would
never
do such a thing.

He shrugged. “I have no idea.” His hand closed around the doorknob, and for an insane panicked moment I actually
did
consider trying to beat him up. I didn’t.

“Do you share Richard and Maxine’s beliefs about, uh, stuff?” I wanted to discern how much Jason actually knew about vampires.

“Girlie, the only thing I share with those people is my bank account information, so that they can pay me.” There it was—he was just there to do a job. No wonder he didn’t want to talk to me about the situation. He didn’t care.

“Did they tell you that I’m related to them?” I asked. “I’m their great-granddaughter.”

Jason’s back straightened. He turned around and stared at me levelly. “Seriously?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head but said nothing.

I asked, “They’re going to kill me once they get what they want, aren’t they?”

Still, Jason remained silent. But now he’d stopped shaking his head.

11

Richard and Maxine paid me a visit the next morning. As Richard held the door open for Maxine, I eyed the lawn behind them, thinking how easy it would be to overpower these frail old people. I’d probably end up breaking their hips in the process, but I’d have a fair chance at getting away. I imagined it would sound like silver balls cracking together, like those metal pendulums people keep on their desks.

Richard perceived my peeping. “You can try to make a run for it, Mercy, but I assure you that Jason is standing by.”

As if the confirmation had been choreographed, Jason poked his head in and gave me a two-fingered wave. “Yo.”

“Don’t you like the clothes we left for you?” asked Maxine. Yah, like
that
was the most pressing issue, me not being happy with the sweats they’d laid out for me.

Maxine handed me an iced coffee in a plastic container. It did not go unnoticed that they’d selected coffee that wasn’t hot or in an actual mug. They probably worried that I’d throw scolding coffee in their faces or break the mug and shank them with the shards. You know, me, their perilous inmate.

“I prefer my own clothes, thanks,” I snapped. “Just like I’d prefer to be in my own home, sleeping in my own bed.” 

Richard patronized, “Now, Great-Granddaughter, let’s not pretend that this is anyone’s fault but your own.”

“My fault? You’ve got to be kidding me!” I went to take a sip of the coffee and reconsidered. I shook the cup. “Is this drugged? I know how much you like drugging me.”

Richard sighed and furnished me with a look of forced patience, like he was contending with a petulant child.

Jason came in with two folding director’s chairs and set them up for Richard and Maxine to sit on. Richard waved a hand towards my mattress and said, “Won’t you please sit down?”

I saw no point in arguing, figuring that the sooner I allowed them to outline their list of demands—or whatever the hell it was that they wanted—the sooner they’d leave me be. I was felling awfully rundown and was looking forward to going back to sleep.

I flopped down on the bed, which put me about eye level with their legs. It was weird sitting below them like that. I felt like a dog.

“Okay, so now what?” I asked.

“We began to tell you about Francine yesterday,” Maxine said. “But we never finished.”

Uh, because you were too busy kidnapping me
, I wanted to say.

Richard said, “We are hoping that if we finish explaining things from our perspective that—”

“That what, I’ll be on-board with your vampire genocide?” I sneered.

Richard pursed his lips and gave Maxine a look:
I simply cannot deal with this vulgar commoner.

Maxine gave me a brittle smile and rested her hand on her husband’s forearm. She seemed to be the more easygoing of the two.

Still, it would behoove me to not keep pushing it, or they probably
would
drug me again. Perhaps if I managed to play along with them convincingly enough, I could even trick them into believing that I was on their side. And then maybe they would let me go. But I’d have to be sly about it. If I all of a sudden started going along with everything they said, they’d know I was full of it.

“We were hoping you would appreciate our cause better,” Maxine said, “if we finished our story.”

I moved to the rear of the mattress so that my back was resting against the wall. “I
would
like to hear more about Grams,” I said as sweetly as possible—but not too sweet. “So, yes, I would like for you to finish your story.”

“Very well,” Richard said.

“You were at the part where you joined the hunting club,” I prompted.

“Oh, yes. I believe I was.” Richard nodded. “I belonged to the club for a great many years. I’m still affiliated with them as a board member, but I no longer go out hunting with them.” He smiled forlornly. “I’m afraid my bones are too weary for such shenanigans.”

When was he going to get to the part about Grams?

Patting his wife’s hand, Richard said, “I met Maxine one night after a show.”

“I was a chorus line dancer,” Maxine said proudly. “Best legs in the business.”

“It was love at first sight. I was older than Maxine by a few years—”

“Twenty-six, dear,” she corrected her husband cheekily.

“—but we fell in love nonetheless.”

A beautiful dancer and a man twenty-six years her senior . . . I wondered if Richard having money didn’t help grease the wheels of love some.

“Through my associates at the club, I’d made many savvy investments,” Richard said. “I had gone legitimate by that time.”

“Or else I would have had nothing to do with him,” Maxine said, which almost made me snort. Guess she wasn’t as opposed to criminal activity now as she was back when she was a gold-digging dancer.

“Okay,” I stated. “But I’m having a hard time connecting this back to Grams.” And I’m tired and I want to go back to sleep, I didn’t add.

“I was just getting to that,” Richard said. “Around the time Francine was a teenager, the practice of offering entertainment at dinner parties was quite standard. It was, at least, in our circle.” He meant rich people, I assumed. “Sometimes the host and hostesses would hire opera singers or magicians to keep guests occupied while dinner was being prepared.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Both Maxine and I were big fans of the occult, as were our friends. During one of our dinner parties, we thought it would be a hoot to hire a fortuneteller.”

“She was very extravagant,” Maxine said. “She wore the most beautiful scarves you’ve ever seen, Mercy! She even came with tarot cards and a crystal ball.”

Richard seemed annoyed with Maxine’s unneeded addendums. Ignoring his wife, he said, “Francine, of course, being your typical teenager, did not want to hang around with a bunch of fuddy-duddies. She never included herself in our dinner parties, which we allowed because we did not wish to subject our friends to the whims of a juvenile. Francine was rather chatty, and we knew she would monopolize dinner conversations.”

“So, win-win for both of you if she stayed away,” I said, feeling sad for Grams. I would have done just about anything to have five minutes with her at the dinner table, even if it was only to chat about her favorite soap opera or to go over a grocery list. I missed her so much.

Richard said, “On the night in question—the night we had the clairvoyant over to entertain our guests—Francine wandered into the living room. We were having a tarot reading. Though I do believe in a great many things supernatural, I’d dismissed the clairvoyant as a charlatan.”

“I didn’t,” Maxine said. “I knew she was for real.”

“Anyhow,” Richard powered on with a cold look aimed at Maxine, “things changed when the clairvoyant saw Francine.”

“How?” I asked my great-grandfather.

“The clairvoyant had been boisterous prior to the arrival of Francine, cracking off-color jokes to get a rise out of our guests, which they secretly enjoyed, and telling everyone fortunes they’d want to hear: you are greatly loved, your brilliance is celebrated by others . . . That sort of thing.”

“So what changed?” I said.

“When the clairvoyant set her eyes on Francine, it was like she’d been struck by an invisible bolt of lightning. She grew very quiet and serious,” said Maxine.

“She jumped up from the table so quickly that she knocked over a few drinks.” Richard seemed particularly agitated by this fact. Oh, the humiliation of having your preforming monkey spill over the martinis! “She swept her cards up off the table and pocketed them, and then she bolted toward the door.”

“Had Grams said anything to her?” I asked.

“Not a word,” Richard answered.

“I caught up with her before she had a chance to leave,” said Maxine. “I demanded to know why she was behaving so peculiarly. She tried to tell me that she was feeling ill and needed to go home.”

“She was blatantly lying. I told her that I would not pay her until she explained herself,” Richard said. “She then told me that we could keep the money and then ran out.”

I asked, “Why didn’t you stop her?”

“We couldn’t very well hold her prisoner, now could we?” Maxine answered, which I found to be a rather audacious thing to say, considering my current circumstance.

“We tracked the psychic down a few days later and demanded an explanation,” Maxine said. “She took some persuading, but eventually she talked.”

I could only imagine what they did to the poor woman to scare the truth out of her.

“She was reluctant to reveal what she had seen about Francine. It would have made her sound mad, for starters. She was also afraid of inciting our anger,” Richard said. “We promised that we would pay her handsomely and that we would not take our rage out on her, if she talked.”

“What had the psychic seen?” I asked. “In her bolt-of-lightning vision?”

“Many things,” Maxine answered. “She told us that our daughter was with child, which we just could not believe.”

“But she was,” I said. “With my mother.”

“Yes,” Richard confirmed. “And she told us that the fetus was tainted, that the father was supernatural. An abomination of nature.”

I leaned forward. “Supernatural?”

“Yes. Not of mortal origins but not immortal, either,” Richard said. “And Francine would be in danger simply for associating with the father.”

“You mean . . . No . . . Not like a vampire?” I said.

Maxine smiled with coldness. “Yes, like a vampire. A half-breed.”

“But . . . That doesn’t make sense. Vampires are unable to procreate. And what is a half-breed?” I asked. There had to be a mix-up. If my mother’s father was a vampire, then that would mean that I was part vampire, which I plainly wasn’t. I was
incapable
of turning vampire.

“I didn’t know,” Richard admitted. “Nor did the clairvoyant. She could only tell us that the child was not of this typical world and that our daughter was in danger. She said that Francine would
always
be in danger as long as the father was in her life.”

Maxine said, “We went home right away to talk to Francine. After much badgering on our part, she admitted that she was pregnant. But she swore that the only thing off about the boy was the he was—” she sniffed haughtily “—from New Jersey.”

I asked, “Did you track him down? The father?”

“No,” Richard answered. “He tracked me
down.”

The suspense was killing me. “And?”

“He said that he’d been watching us,” Richard said.

“Who? You and Maxine?”

“Yes,” Richard confirmed. “And my hunting club. He said that he’d been keeping an eye on us, because he knew that we were hunting vampires. Falling in love with Francine was a byproduct of his stalking.”

“So he
was
a vampire, then? My grandfather?”

“No, he wasn’t. I know this unequivocally, since we met while the sun was out,” Richard told me. “But he was something else. Something . . . supernatural.”

“How could you be sure?” I asked. “Because of what the clairvoyant told you?”

“There was that, and the fact that he’d been following my hunting group for many years.”

I frowned. “I don’t follow. How old was he?”

Richard said, “He couldn’t have been a day older than seventeen, maybe eighteen.”

“Okay. So . . . ?”

“The boy told me this in the year 1970. He said that he’d started following my group a few years after it was established . . .” He paused for dramatic effect. “In 1780.”

“Oh my . . .” There were so many questions I had. “So, okay, he wasn’t a vampire. Then what was he? An alien?” But how could that be? There was absolutely nothing supernatural about me, unless the ability to plow through an entire pint of ice cream in a single sitting counted as an unearthly talent.

Richard smiled blandly. “I don’t believe so, no. I never found out what he was. But I gathered that he was affiliated with the vampires, somehow, because he’d been keeping an eye on our club. He made it clear that he wasn’t an ally.”

“If he wasn’t an ally, why didn’t you just take him out then and there?” I asked. “Sure, Grams would have been upset, but I gather that you were just as equally upset that he’d gotten your teenaged daughter pregnant.” I didn’t say what was really on my mind, which was:
And you obviously weren’t too concerned with Grams’s happiness. Or committing crimes.
“You could have told your hunting buddies to take care of him.”

Richard shook his head. “There were a couple reasons I kept quiet and didn’t hurt the boy. Both of them had to do with Francine. I know you may find this hard to believe based on the way things turned out, Mercy, but Maxine and I loved our daughter very much.”

Next they were going to throw the old “you always hurt the one you love” adage at me.

“We did,” Maxine concurred, as if sensing my skepticism.

Richard continued, “But some of the men in my hunting club were fanatical in their beliefs—” this coming from
him
, I thought
“—and I feared they might hurt Francine if they knew what sort of child she was carrying.”