Vampire U (11 page)

"That's not exactly a huge vote of confidence."

"Hey, I'm still driving away from campus," Jacob said.  "If I thought you'd cracked, I'd take you to the psych ward at the university hospital."

"I didn't know you had a sense of humor," I said.

"You think I'm kidding?"

I didn't tell Jacob about Mander or the fact that I'd been bitten.  He was skeptical enough, and I didn't want him to think I was hallucinating myself into some hokey vampire love story.  Besides, he might decide to ram a stake through my heart.  That thought wiped the faint smile from my face.  "So what do we do now?"

Jacob grinned.  "I need to think.  I've barely had any sleep, and I'm starving.  You still good for breakfast?"  He pointed at a tall yellow sign ahead, glowing in the night like a lighthouse beacon.

"Sure."  I glanced behind us again, but the lack of vampires behind us didn't give me much comfort.  I doubted I'd see them coming.

If I couldn't be at home, the Waffle House was the perfect place to hunker down at this hour.  The parking lot and the restaurant were both well lit and crowded even in the small hours of the morning.  Truckers, longshoremen, and commercial fishermen packed the counter, hunkered over huge plates of breakfast that would give a cardiologist fits.  The tired hostess directed us to a small booth in a back corner near the kitchen, and I sat facing the door.  If Alex or his buddies came for me, I didn't know what I'd do, but at least I wouldn't be caught by surprise.

I'd devoured a huge pizza just a few hours before, but when the smells wafting out of the kitchen hit my nose, my mouth began to water again.  I told the waitress to bring me a double order of sausage and eggs, then added a waffle with chocolate chips just for good measure.

Jacob asked for two egg whites and a glass of milk.  When our food came, he watched me gorge on my glistening pile of grease with a disapproving frown.  "How are you not obese?"

I shrugged, intent on my meal.  Why was I so 
hungry?
  Was I just replenishing my lost blood, or was it something more sinister?  
A good milk cow needs fuel.
  I shuddered at the metaphor, but it seemed appropriate.  Morgan had been eager enough to return to Vic.  Was that how this worked?  Did a vampire's victims 
want
 to be food?

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I wiped them quickly away, looking away from Jacob to hide my embarrassment.

"Hey," he said with something approaching tenderness in his tone for the first time since I'd met him.  "What is it?"

I bit back a sob and took a moment to compose myself.  The crowded restaurant and bright lighting made me feel safe, but I didn't want to break down in front of all these people.  When I could talk without bawling, I said, "I don't know if I can do this."  I told him about meeting Morgan in my room, how she'd changed since being bitten.  About how Mander wanted my help to kill one of the other vampires in a risky, convoluted plot to draw out the Elder.

Jacob soaked it all in, his eyes never leaving mine as I confessed almost everything.  I held only one thing back - the depth of my relationship with Mander.

"If I don't help him, I'm afraid Morgan will end up like the others," I finished.  "But I'm so scared, Jacob."

Jacob's eyes flickered around the restaurant.  It was too loud for anyone to overhear us, but he spoke softly.  "I think I know someone who can help you," Jacob said.

"Who?" I asked, my face brightening with hope.

"Momma Bones."

I frowned.  "Sounds like a bad funk band."

Jacob winced at my words and looked around as if I'd just denounced Christ in the middle of the Vatican.  "She's... a Baton Rouge fixture.  Big in the voodoo scene."

"Voodoo?"

"Yeah," he said.

"You're supposed to say 
hoodoo,”
 I said.  "Then I say 'you do!'"  I giggled.  Confession was supposed to be good for the soul, and I felt much better now.  Still, it was probably fatigue and the sudden rush of sugar and carbs that had made me punchy, bordering on euphoric.

Jacob rolled his eyes.  "I'm trying to help you, Danielle.  Momma Bones has been in Baton Rouge her whole life.  If anyone knows what's up with Beta House, it's her."

"You want me to go to a fortune teller with this?  Really, Jacob?"

He looked me in the eye as he absently stirred the untouched egg whites on his plate.  "You know me.  I'll trust Google over the mystic shit any day of the week, but all we're going to find on the internet is bad movies.  These vampires have been around longer than we've been alive.  If we want to beat them, we're going to need help."

"So it's 'we' now?"

Jacob gave a nonchalant shrug.  "If they're after you and they know you talked to me, they're going to figure I know too much already.  May as well go out fighting."

I looked down at my plate as I realized just what I'd done to him.  "I'm sorry I pulled you into this." 

"Don't worry about it."  He nodded at my empty plate.  I looked down and realized I'd sopped up every last drop of grease and syrup.  "Are you done?  They probably have another side of bacon in the kitchen."

I could have eaten it, but I didn't want to admit that to Jacob.  "I just need to use the bathroom," I said.  "Don't go anywhere."

I got up and headed toward a set of doors in the far corner.  The women's room was tiled in a gloomy dark brown that had gone out of vogue in the seventies, but it was cleaner than I expected from an all-night diner.  I went into one of the stalls and did my business, savoring a brief moment of peace as I relieved my bladder.  I leaned my head against the side of the metal stall and let out a long sigh, wishing that I could simply go to sleep here, then wake up in my bed as the worst dream of my life faded to indistinct memories.

But this was no dream, so I sighed, pulled up my tights, and pushed open the stall door.

Mander stood leaning against the counter.  He'd replaced the ruined dress shirt with a black button-down, and he looked far healthier than when I'd last seen him.  And far angrier.

"Danielle!"  He swept me into his arms before I could react to his sudden appearance.  I started to respond, but his lips cut off my words as he pressed them against my mouth, cool to the touch, yet hot with passion.  The yearning in my crotch awakened again.  How did he do this to me?  After the night I'd had, sex should have been the last thing on my mind, but I wanted him to take me right there.

Finally, he broke away, and those beautiful dark eyes searched mine.  "Are you unharmed?"

I'm tired, angry, and terrified,
 I wanted to say.  
I wish I'd never met you.
  But that last bit, at least, was a lie.  Since I'd seen him beneath my window, I'd thought about little else but Mander Deslauriers.  Knowing he was a monster had hardly fazed me.  "Yeah," I said.  "How did you find me?"

He stroked my jaw with tender fingers.  "I can feel you now.  I simply know where you are."

That sent a chill up my spine.  "Alex tried to take me at the dorm, Mander."

"I'll kill that bastard," he said through bared teeth.

"Can you?" I asked.  "I felt him in my head.  He's 
strong,
 Mander.  As strong as you, at least."

He nodded.  "Stronger.  Clever, too.  But he's dead.  I'll find a way."  The Waffle House bathroom seemed to grow darker, and Mander trembled with a wrath that frightened me.

"He didn't get me," I said, stroking my fingers through his hair in an attempt to soothe his anger.

Mander looked at me.  "I couldn't bear it if he did."  For a heartbeat, his words touched me deeply.  Then he continued.  "Alex can read your thoughts, Danielle.  If he suspects what I'm planning, we're both dead."

"What 
are
 you planning?  I'm scared, Mander."

His jaw tightened.  "It's best that you not know.  In fact, that may be our only hope."  He tilted my chin upward and stroked the line of my jaw, a loving, familiar touch.  "I have to go, darling.  But know that I am always near.  Always watching out for you."

He bent and kissed me again, and my desire swelled in response.  In the midst of all this surreal horror, Mander's affection was the only thing that still felt genuine.

"Soon, my love," he said.  Then he was gone.

The bathroom door thumped shut, leaving me alone to stare at my pale reflection and wonder whether he had ever really been there at all.

When I came back from the bathroom, our plates had been cleared and the check waited in the center of the table.  Jacob pushed it over to me.  "Thanks for breakfast," he said.  "I hope it doesn't get me killed."

I realized I didn't have my purse or phone.  Lara Bauer had rushed me out of my room during the fire alarm before I could grab anything.  "Uhm...  I can't pay," I said.

Jacob rolled his eyes and dug out his wallet.  "Looks like you owe me another one."

He dropped a twenty and we left, heading north on 61.  I leaned against the Toyota's side window, too tired to talk.  My body craved sleep, but the troubles rattling around in my head prevented me from nodding off, even for a few minutes.

We drove passed the airport and into the sparsely populated outskirts of the city, where shabby neighborhoods squeezed into the cracks between huge industrial parks and swampland.  As we drove, I saw the eastern horizon beginning to pinken with the first harbingers of daylight.  Dawn couldn't be more than an hour away.  Jacob got off the highway and turned onto a narrow gravel lane built a few feet above the swamp that stretched out into the darkness on our right.  In the headlights, the thick moss hanging from the low limbs of cypress trees looked like the hair of dead girls, their shadows moving across the trees like phantoms.

On our right, modest bungalows sat back from the road, a few hundred feet between each one.

"This is where your fortune teller lives?" I asked.

Jacob's mouth tightened in annoyance.  "Don't call her that."

"At least no one will find me out here," I said.  "I hardly know where I am."

"Listen, just be respectful.  Momma Bones is very... touchy about outsiders.  She doesn't want to be turned into some kind of novelty for tourists like the voodoo practitioners in New Orleans."

"How did you find out about her, then?"

Jacob slowed down and peered out at the houses on our left.  "Believe it or not, I don't want to be a graduate assistant forever.  A couple of years back, I realized I needed to build a portfolio if I ever want to land a writing gig.  Since the 
Scryer's
faculty board tends to reject most student-written articles about the college, I decided to write about the community.  Healthcare was the hot topic of the day, so I started investigating underrepresented segments."

"Hang on," I said.  "Healthcare led you to a voodoo psychic?"

He laughed.  "Well, she doesn't accept Medicaid, but most of the folks around here are pretty poor.  Even though they're good church-going Baptists, they turn to Momma Bones for help."

"What does she do?"

"I'll let her tell you."  Jacob pulled to a stop in front of one of the houses, a nondescript single-story dwelling with a neatly-kept yard.  Several wind chimes hung under the porch.

"Are you sure this is the place?"

Jacob smiled.  "You were expecting human skulls and dead chickens hanging from a post out front?"

I didn't want to admit that I'd imagined almost exactly that.  "Let's go inside.  I don't want to be out here in the dark."

We were halfway down the sidewalk when the porch light came on, bathing the house and yard in bleak yellow light that cast deep, sharp shadows.  The screen door swung open on rusty hinges, and a wide woman with a huge, sagging bosom and the blackest skin I'd ever seen stepped out on the porch.  She wore a well-used bathrobe so thoroughly faded that its original color was hard to guess, and her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a tight rope of dreadlocks.

"Jacob Crabtree?  What you doin' here at dis hour o' da mohnin, boy?  Who dat witchye?"

Jacob stopped on the sidewalk and called out to the old woman.  "I have someone here who's in trouble.  I told her you might be able to help."  Then he turned to me.  "You can tell her anything," he said in a low voice.  "But be remember to be respectful."

I turned in surprise.  "You're not coming in?"

"We've got to turn out a new edition next on Tuesday, remember?  
The
 
Scryer
 doesn't stop the presses for a few vampires."

I glanced at the brightening sky.  There was still time for vampires to find us before the sun rose.  I imagined Alex and his men somewhere just out of sight, waiting for the right moment to attack.  "What if they come for you?" I whispered.

Jacob shrugged.  "It'll be dawn soon.  If they haven't killed us yet, maybe they'll wait until tomorrow."  He chuckled.  "Hey, if they grab you, you didn't tell me anything, alright?  I've got enough problems trying to finish my thesis."  He nodded toward the woman on the porch.  "She'll take good care of you.  Call me when you're done, and I'll come give you a ride."  Before I could respond, he turned, climbed back into his beat-up Toyota and puttered off into the early morning darkness.  I watched him go, then turned back to the porch, where the old woman waited patiently.

 Momma Bones waved a big, beefy hand.  "Come up here, girl.  Dat's right."  I climbed the three steps onto the porch and inhaled that sickly sweet scent unique to very old women.  In the harsh yellow light from the bare overhead bulb, the wrinkles in Momma Bones's face looked like deep crags, the careworn face of a woman who has seen the world change around her.  The aspiring journalist in me wanted to spend days interviewing her, prying back the lid on decades of history seen firsthand.  She clamped her hands around mine as I came close and gave a firm squeeze.  Suddenly, her good-natured expression withered into deep sadness.  "Oh, chile..."  She shook her head.  "Oh, how sad."

Her midnight black eyes brimmed suddenly, and a single tear ran down her broad left cheek, gleaming bronze on her black skin.  Her grip tightened, full of a surprising strength, but I could see only doubt and despair in her expression.  "I don't know what dat boy tink I can help with.  De 
petro loa
 got they claws in you, girl."

"The what?" I asked, unnerved by her pessimism.  Until now, I hadn't realized how much I'd counted on the mysterious Momma Bones to solve all my problems.  How desperate had I become to hang my hopes on a bayou fortune teller?

The old woman stared past my shoulder into the darkness.  "We bes' go inside.  Ol' Lisa be risin' soon, but they got a little time yet."  She pulled me further into the porch with one hand and reached for the screen door with the other.  "Hurry now, chile.  Come in.  Come in!"