Page 23 of The Elementalist
I told her about the too-small-for-a-cougar bite marks on the neck, the tree branch covered in blood that had been up far too high for any cat to carry its prey.
“What are you suggesting? That a vampire dragged my sister up the tree and fed on her from up there?”
“I’m not sure what I’m suggesting,” I said, “but it’s damn strange nonetheless.”
“How did you come across this tree branch, if I might ask?”
“The tree branch had broken free.” I looked away. “Probably in a windstorm.”
“And you happened to arrive to witness this branch falling free?”
“I did. It fell at my feet.”
“How fortuitous.”
“My best guess is that the branch had been compromised by the combined weight.”
“Is that your very best guess, Mr. Long?”
I swallowed at her penetrating look. Geez, did she know about me? Duh, I just demonstrated the wind for her. Of course she knew about me. I recovered and put on my most confident expression. “Yes, of course. What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting nothing. All I know is that Dana is dead and the man I hired to find her just stumbled upon some very unlikely evidence.”
I raised my hands. “Sometimes an investigator gets lucky.”
“Fine. If it was a vampire, then where does that get us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you still have some explaining to do. How do you know about the vampires here in Shadow Pines? And why did you say ‘I said too much’?”
Crystal gave me another penetrating look. Then she nodded and stood. “Good questions, surely. But ones that I am not at liberty to discuss. Thank you for the coffee. I’ll be back in a few days for another update.”
She paused with one foot out the door. “Please be careful out there, detective.”
Her voice carried real concern, but I couldn’t come up with a response before she gave me a sad smile and left.
Chapter Thirteen
Of Life and Death
“You’re not my first elemental, Max.”
That’s how Michael had begun our discussion on vampires last night. After we’d left Pedro’s and torched the shack, we’d been sitting in a clearing with the waxing moon high overhead. Apparently, I wasn’t the first to seek him out, nor would I be the last. Because he was in the know, he had been given sensitive information. In particular, information about the undead among us. I found myself believing him, trusting my gut about the guy.
Much of what I assumed about vampires was true, though a surprising amount of stuff I thought would be true wound up being false. Like crosses—or holy symbols in general. Michael didn’t want to get into a long, belabored discussion of theology and told me that if any sort of god or higher power existed, vampires as well as other supernatural beings had to be part of that creation. One could not, for example, use a crucifix to ward off an angry bear. Some people regarded vampires as minions of Satan, but as Michael said, people of antiquity often blamed everything they didn’t like or didn’t understand on the Devil.
Aside from whether or not God had any opinion on vampires, Nature sure did. Michael told me that the undead—and slipped in a comment like ‘of any type, not just vampires’ without explaining—were basically ‘anti-nature.’ Everything had its opposite. That old adage about mountains not being mountains without flat ground and valleys to compare them to applied here. Also, vampires tended to be more powerful than humans due to numbers.
The way Michael described it… the Earth had a finite amount of life force, and an equal—but opposite—dark energy. Said life force was spread out among everything from microbes to plants to animals to humans. Same applied with the darkenergy and vampires (or undead in general), only they existed in vastly inferior numbers, resulting in the opposite energy not being spread as thin. Since each vampire had more dark energy than a human had light energy, it made them more powerful. Kind of like they’re the guys who drank ten cups of espresso each morning compared to a normal person’s one.
Anyway, something was going on here in Shadow Pines that threw off that balance, hence Nature giving me an extra helping of mojo. So, back to vampires. Sunlight, much to my surprise, did not destroy them. It did, however, seriously dampen their supernatural powers. Michael said it ‘nerfed’ them. Fire, however, worked wonders. He didn’t fully understand the why of it, but the more powerful (or more evil) a vampire was, the more easily they caught fire. A sick bastard like the one who killed Dana would probably burn like a kerosene-soaked rag. Bullets, swords, and so on didn’t do anything they couldn’t recover from with the exception of wooden bullets.
Naturally, I laughed at the idea, but he showed me a YouTube video. Apparently, wooden bulletscouldwork, but as 12-gauge shotgun slugs. The projectiles didn’t have much stopping power in the real world, but since wood had such a devastating effect on vampires, the slugs basically behaved like a normal lead slug on a human. That is... death.
Anyway, a wooden stake in the heart would destroy them up to a certain age. On vampires much more than a century old, a stake only paralyzed them. Beheading could also kill them regardless of age. Garlic didn’t do anything, and I already knew about the no reflection in mirrors thing and not showing up on video or cameras. However, that deal with having to invite them in was true. That threw me for a loop trying to figure out how the universe knew who could invite someone in… and did it apply only to a ‘home,’ or would offices be protected too? What would stop a vampire from dragging a pet human around, tossing themthrough a door and having their pet invite them in?
Thankfully, vampires did not have to kill to feed. The smarter ones who wished to avoid detection as much as possible would leave their victim alive but make them forget the feeding. With each bite, a person became more and more like a vampire. Someone who suffered three attacks too close together from the same vampire would turn. And it took something like four months for the negative energy of a bite to dissipate and reset the proverbial counter.
Among my many questions, I had asked how I would recognize a vampire... other than their lack of hands on my security camera, of course. His answer had been... interesting to say the least.
