Page 60 of Sundowners
“If it helps, I know the gate password. They must have some sort of security, but I don’t think it’s sophisticated. I’ve never seen anyone outside, never seen any cameras. They are kind of…arrogant. They think no one can get to them.”
Vanessa spent a bit more time talking to her, had her draw a map as best she could of where the house was, what the layout was like, and as many of the names as she could recall. Meanwhile, I checked my texts. Still nothing from Creed. I was going to confront him tonight when I went to see Lola. He couldn’t just spend a wonderful day with me and open up about his life, and then ghost me. I wouldn’t allow it.
19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Creed
For the first time,I was not looking forward to going to work. This business with the attackers had me tied up in knots. Cross, Mark, and I had talked into the night and brainstormed what to do about them. We determined we needed to find out who was behind them and agreed that we needed to intervene, although Cross had been hesitant about it.
“I’d say I’m of a mind to let them be, but you’re right. They’re punks, and they’re going to out us with this stupid behavior. And if Stephen’s behind this, I want to punish that motherfucker.”
“And it’s personal now, for me,” I said. “I can’t take the chance of Roman or his family getting hurt.”
Cross raised his thick eyebrows. “Are you going to initiate him?”
I’d frowned. “What do you mean? No. It’s always been my plan to find those who killed the Source and the members of my cohort, take care of them, and then stop. Settle down someplace and live out the rest of my natural life. Do no harm, just as we were taught.”
“What do you mean, stop?” Mark asked. “No more exchanges? Creed, you can’t.”
“Sure I can. They taught us that if we chose to no longer use the tools we’d been taught, to live by The Way, we would live out the rest of our natural lives and then be reabsorbed into The Source.”
Mark snorted and shook his head.“You mean—”
“Creed,” Cross said. “If you stop drinking blood, you stop existing.”
“But I rarely ever drink now. Maybe once a month?” How long had it been since I’d last had an Exchange? Now I was nervous. “I can mostly get by just on energy.”
The two of them looked at each other gravely. “We had another with us, Creed. Lourdes, do you remember her?”
I shook my head, but then I thought about it. “Guardian Lourdes? She escaped, too?”
“She did. But she was distraught over failing The Source. She never drank again. She aged rapidly, grew weak, and within a couple of months…she didn’t wake up one morning, and that was it.”
I sat down hard on a bench. We’d been talking outside the bar on the back patio for a long while. I could tell the two of them weren’t ready to invite me back to wherever they were staying, and I didn’t want them to find Rhonda. I didn’t want to hear it from them when they discovered that I’d kept my only companion alive for thirty years.
At first I’d been so lonely that I couldn’t give her up, and I figured out I could travel around with her under the right circumstances. Then she tore her ACL while we were out running, and I’d been devastated, thinking that I could lose her like I’d lost everything else. I had no idea if The Source’s power could be transferred at all, much less to a less-intelligent species, but then I realized how much of my healing energy came from her, her presence, that I thought…maybe. It had been reckless, but I thought perhaps it would just lead to nothing.
Year after year, she continued to live a healthy life. I took her to the vet when she would have been fifteen and fibbed. I told them she was a rescue, and I didn’t know how old she was. They figured her to be between seven and nine, which was how old she was when I first gave her my blood.
It may have been cruel, but she was my one weakness. I didn’t hurt people. I gave everything I had to heal the people I cared for through my work…that was how I justified it. I didn’t even know if it would work, to be honest. And whenever I moved, I had her examined at a vet. Never did they say there was anything wrong with her than was normal for a middle-aged dog.
“So you’re saying that if I stop, I’ll die.”And so will Rhonda.
“Yeah, man. And it’s not a nice way to go, to be honest,” Mark said with a shudder.
I sighed. “Fine. So what’s the plan?”
“Next sighting, we follow them. We find them, we end them. The end.”
I’d told myself all along that’s what I would do, but the idea of killing another being went against everything I’d been taught, everything my life meant.
“It’s really the only way, isn’t it?” I asked rhetorically.
“Unless you lock them in a room with no access to energy exchanges or blood, yeah. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t got them kind of resources. Contrary to popular belief, bar bands don’t bring in a lot of dough these days.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “And our internet streams are down. Money is tight, man.”
