Page 5 of Sleeping With the Vampire

It was a good question, I had to give her that.

“Someone must have told him that I did not see eye to eye with MoZa.” That was putting it mildly. As Chairman of the Council, MoZa had a lot of authority. But I had grown in stature and MoZa was trying to curtail my powers. He used his position to manipulate people behind the scenes. He was a dangerous enemy.

“Who was my father hunting?”

“It was one of us, going by the name of Chakrat. Very old and evil. He’d been accused of going on a killing spree in the Wildlands. There were numerous witnesses but your father could not track him down. He suspected someone was helping him from inside the Council.”

“MoZa?”

“Your father couldn’t be sure.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to stay away from Chakrat. If he had MoZa’s backing, it would be fatal to try to bring him in.”

She mused, “Sometimes having a bounty out is enough, it does not have to be fulfilled. The council shows willingness to pursue justice but does not always push for it to be fulfilled.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m guessing, my father wouldn’t hear of it?”

I sighed. “He was honorable, wouldn’t hear of MoZa being anything but a faithful servant of the council.

“Do you think he was responsible for having my father killed?”

“I don’t know. But I suspect that he is involved in my wife’s death as well. That is too much of a coincidence.”

“I need some time to process this information and do some research,” she said. “I looked at the file, by the way, and your wife’s death was ruled accidental. What makes you so sure that it was not accidental?”

“We were leaving a dinner party,” I said slowly. “We were outside, I was talking to some people, she was walking towards a maze in the garden. I heard her scream. I was by her side within seconds. A stake had been driven through her. There was a wooden trellis and one of the pillars had come loose, fallen down. The report into her death said she must have tripped, pushed against the trellis, forced one of the poles to come undone, and fall on her, piercing her.”

“You don’t believe this?”

“Who would?” I said drily. “And besides, there was the angle of the spike,” I said. “It had not entered her from above, but from the side. It was driven through her with some force.” I paused. “There was damage to the hedge, it looked like someonewas standing on the other side of the bush when they attacked. It was quite dense.”

“Who was at this dinner party?”

“I will give you their names but they are friends. Mostly. Our kind.”

“Vampires?” she asked

I confirmed.

“You think you were the target, why?”

“I was the one who wanted to see the maze. When we were standing outside, I said I wanted to walk over there and have a look. Tanata started walking but a message arrived on my phone and I checked it. I stopped walking and she walked on. I think someone was waiting for me to walk past and had not seen it was her. It only took a moment, that spike coming out of the hedge, killing her.”

“Did you go into the maze to look for the attacker?”

“I did, there was no-one.”

I had acted very quickly, moving through the air fired by fury. If there had been anyone there, I would have found them. But they had already fled.

“I did find something though,” I said. “Boot prints. Plenty of them, from a man. Someone had been there, cutting the twine around the poles. It wasn’t an accident. I told the investigator, he said it could have been from anyone walking the maze.”

She said, “I see.”

I snorted. “He didn’t want to investigate. that much was clear. Vampire hater.”

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