Page 94 of Road Trip with a Vampire
Hopefully this would be the only sacrifice he’d be making for me today.
A traffic snarl on the northern outskirts of Indianapolis kept us from getting to Blossomtown until just after six in the evening. The sun was already setting when we finally reached the warehouse we’d been driving towards all this time. As Peter pulled into the parking lot, we saw a row of six identical neon-red station wagons parked in front of the building.
Icy pinpricks of terror and dread assaulted me. The only people with taste that bad, who drove cars that werethaton the nose with the red color, were vampires.
As Peter parked my much moremutedred car, I slid myjustin casebag of tricks from my suitcase into my coat pocket. Before I’d given up magic, I’d magicked the pockets of this old coat so they’d be like the TARDIS. Specifically: They were bigger on the inside. My daggers, the bags of powders, my ring—all of it was coming with us into that warehouse. Especially now that we had a sense of what might be waiting for us inside.
Peter was staring at the building, his jaw clenched tight.
“Ready?” I asked.
He closed his eyes. “If you want to wait here while I go in, I understand.”
“Peter,” I said, shaking my head, “we’ve been over this.” As much as it warmed some long-dead part of my heart to know he worried about my safety so much, he was being absurd.
“Zelda—”
“We’re not discussing this anymore,” I insisted.
Peter grabbed my hand and gave it a hard, possessive squeeze.
“If something happens to you because of me…” He trailed off, his voice thick.
“Hey,” I said with as much optimism as I could manage. “I’m Grizelda Watson, remember? Grizelda the Terrible, four-time Boston ladies’ bowling league champion, record-setting flagpole sitter. Nothing bad happens to me if I don’t want it to.”
I’d meant it to be tongue-in-cheek and to make Peter smile. It seemed to have the opposite effect.
“There’s a first time for everything,” he said. “I don’t want you to be wrong about your invincibility because of me.”
“I won’t be wrong,” I said. I nodded towards the double doors at the far end of the building, signaling that this discussion was over. “Park over there, away from all those cars. Just in case we have to beat a hasty retreat.”
Peter looked at me for another long moment before obligingand pulling the car into a spot about twenty yards away from everyone else.
“Does anything about this place ring any bells?” I asked.
He nodded. “The memories are murky, but…” He gestured vaguely to our surroundings. “This is not my first time here. I don’t remember anything specific, but sense memories are flooding me in waves. I don’t remember faces or any snippets of conversation, but…I was here. Whatever happened wasn’t pleasant.” He turned to face me, his mouth set in a grim line. “That’swhy I don’t want you coming in.”
I placed a hand on his arm. Gave it a reassuring squeeze. He closed his eyes, knowing this was an argument he couldn’t win.
“Iamgoing in with you, Peter,” I said. “Are you ready?”
His throat worked. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The large double doors on our side of the building were unlocked. When I opened them, the lights were off, so I conjured a small ball of light in the palm of my hand so we could see. Peter followed me inside, every line of his body on high alert, his eyes roving everywhere as though unspeakable dangers might be lurking in the dark. But the warehouse seemed vacant and empty, save for padded floors suggesting the place had once housed a gym, as well as a card table and a set of metal folding chairs dead in the center of the wide-open space.
No people—but the vamps who owned those bright red cars had to be here somewhere.
I crept closer to the table and chairs, since they were all that seemed to be in there. They looked cheap and rickety, the kind of furniture a college student might find at a secondhand store and bring back to their dorm. When I held up my light to get a better look, there was a puddle of discolored liquid in the table’s center.
With a quick look over my shoulder to confirm Peter was right behind me—he was—I moved closer to the table. And gasped in horror when I got there.
Slumped on the floor beside the table were three young men and an older woman whose throats had all been cut. Or at least I thought their throats had been cut; they were bleeding from so many different places, it was hard to tell. Either way, their wide, sightless eyes and the large puddle of blood in which they lay made clear that all four of them were very, very dead. Now that we were this close, the unmistakable rusty scent of blood filled my nostrils.
“Those motherfuckers,” I spat. Aside from newborn vampires, who were notorious for their poor self-control, it was only the most sadistic vampires who killed their victims. Most vampires subscribed to what seemed, to me, a reasonable enough philosophy. Which was: If the person they were feeding from died, mealtime was over.
On a hunch, I held up my light so I could see the top of the card table more clearly. Sure enough, that puddle I’d noticed earlier was a thick pool of congealing blood.
My stomach turned, even as I willed my lunch from earlier in the day to stay down.
