Family Matters: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (Mortality Bites Book 2) Read online

  Family Matters

  Ramy Vance

  Keep Evolving Studios

  Contents

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  1. A Beginning of Sorts

  2. Family Matters … Matter

  3. In Case You Haven’t Heard—The Gods Are Gone

  4. Danger, Lost Gods and Boyfriends

  5. Dorm Rooms, Changelings and Calculus

  6. The Past and All That Jazz

  7. Din, Din Time

  8. Part 2—Prologue

  9. When an Angel Shatters a Window, Use the Door

  10. Mustangs, Confused Boyfriends and Laughing Hyenas

  11. Goodbyes, Amulets and Avatars of Truth

  12. No Signals for the Past

  13. Truth You Can’t Eat

  14. Sometimes All It Takes is a Phone Call

  15. Changelings, Baby Rats, Broadswords and Bad-Assary

  16. Wanna Dance, My Little Angel?

  17. Part 3—Prologue

  18. Boots, Pups and Butterflies

  19. Phone Calls, Broken Chests and a New Respect

  20. Killers Unsung and Modesty Lost

  21. Codeine, Killers Now Sung and Blessed Sleep

  22. Twins, Amulets, Alchemy and “What Did You Say …?”

  23. Who’s Your Decorator?

  24. No Staring Contest, No Questions, No Future

  25. Goodbyes, Car Rides and Crashes

  26. Part 4—Prologue

  27. Car Parks, Airbags and Super Humans

  28. Confessions of Love and Confessions of … Well, Let’s Just Say Confessions

  29. Selfish Questions, Selfish Boys

  30. The Lesser of Two Rights

  31. One Last Confession

  32. An Ending of Sorts

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  About the Author

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  Mortality Bites Series © Copyright > R. E. Vance

  Example Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

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  A Beginning of Sorts

  The government, it seems, screwed her, and now she’s going to die.

  She did her duty, registered for the amnesty program, scrubbed her slate clean. At least, that’s what she was told she was doing. But that’s just the man sticking it to her again.

  She struggles against the duct tape and rope that bind her to the chair, but she’s been around long enough—bound enough of her own victims—to know that she can’t break free. Not without a miracle … and those are in short supply these days.

  The largest of her three captors stands up and casually walks over to her like he has all the time in the world. And given that they’re in the middle of the woods, she knows he is right.

  “Please,” she says, “I’m just a secretary working at a small real-estate firm. You have the wrong person. You have the—”

  “ ‘Just a secretary,’ she says. ‘The wrong person,’ she says. I will tell you exactly who you are—a vampire, a killer … and now my prey.” As he speaks he adjusts his mask, then saunters over to a table that displays several instruments of torture—fishhooks, hammers, files, saws, nails and, to add insult to injury, a bag of salt. And not the fine-grade stuff. Rock salt.

  She knows there’s a reason for the expression “salt the wound.” It came from sickos like this guy.

  And her. But no—that was before.

  “I … I’m not a vampire.”

  “No … lies!” he screams, his voice echoing off the walls of the abandoned warehouse.

  “I’m not lying. I’m not a vampire. I was … but then the gods … they left—you know. I became human again.”

  He pretends he doesn’t hear her, and with dramatized movements picks up three fishhooks and a hammer.

  “I’m human!” she screams, panic finally rising above the surface, submerging her. She tries to break free, but there is no hope. Her bonds are too tight, a true Boy Scout’s knot; the chair too stable, cold steel to the touch.

  “You know,” the man says, his low voice muffled beneath his mask. “When the gods left and all the Others showed up, there was a lot of confusion as to how to deal with the sudden influx of mythical creatures. There were so many problems—fear, violence, racism … well, Other-ism … the list goes on.

  “No one knew what to do about most of the problems. But the one issue that seemed most manageable was the GoneGodDamn amnesty program. I suppose they thought it was the simplest solution. Stupid little people with their stupid little solutions. Like signing a paper will clean all the blood on your hands.”

  “Please … please …”

  But she knows that her words won’t elicit mercy. She is dead. More than dead, because she’ll suffer long before she breathes her last. And as that thought races in her head, she spits at him, “You bastard. You goddamn bastard!”

  He pauses, hooks in hand. “Don’t you mean ‘GoneGodDamn bastard’?” Then he leans in, the fishhooks hovering near her eyes.

  Oh god, she thinks. He means to pierce my eyelids … he means to …

  But the man doesn’t pierce her eyelids; instead he leans back and says, “You know, I have a thought. A win-win, if you will. I will end you quickly. Well … quicker than I had planned, at least. But only if you answer a few questions first.”

  She doesn’t say anything. Tears and snot roll down her face.

  “Charlotte. Do you know where she is?”

  She blinks. “Charlotte? Who are you talking about?”

  Faster than she thought a human could possibly move, he slaps her—fortunately narrowly avoiding her cheek with the pointy ends of the fishhooks. “No, no, no … for our bargain to work, you have to be honest. You know who I am talking about. Your sire … Charlotte Darling. Surely you know where she is?”

  So is this what he wants—Charlotte Darling?

  “I … I don’t know where she—”

  “Too bad,” he says, and he leans in once again with the fishhooks.

  “But—but … I know where she is going!”

  The fishhooks hover mere inches from her vision. “Where?”

  “She’s gone to visit her daughter. Katrina Darling. She’s a university student at McGill. She’s a—”

  But her words are wrenched from her throat when the man removes his cherub mask and reveals the face beneath. It’s twisted, deformed in such a way that means he once suffered for a very long and painful time, every scar earned thrice over.

  “Katrina is still alive? Interesting …” His voice trails off as if he’s contemplating some long-distant memory, then his attention returns to her. “Oh dear Elizabeth, first sire of Charlotte Darling. I apologize. My mind does wander these days. Shall we commence to the business at hand?” At the mention of the word hand, the fishhooks glint, so close now that she goes cross-eyed trying to keep them in sight.

  He leans in. “Don’t worry. This will be over soon. You could say I’m somewhat of an expert at this. Well, ‘expert’ may be inflating my skills a bit too much. I’m relatively inexperienced when it comes to inflicting pain—I was often the one the pain was inflicted upon, if you’ll allow the honesty … but I have thought about all the ways to hurt a person for a long time. A very, very long time, indeed.”

  The hooks glint again.

  And she screams.

  Family Matters … Matter

  EARLIER—

  I was turned into a vampire on my fifteenth birthday. Happy birthday, Kat Darling—or rather, Happy undead-day. At the time—so long ago—I was young enough to still need my parents, but old enough to find them embarrassing.

  Now, three hundred years later—give or take a decade—I’m nineteen (well, three hundred and nineteen), human again and still embarrassed of my mom.

  I guess some things never change.

  To be fair, even if I weren’t a few centuries old (a few centuries undead?), I think I’d be embarrassed of her. I mean, who wouldn’t? Enter a woman in he
r early forties, wearing a nearly fluorescent purple skirt and matching blazer, with a scarf that must have been purchased from Harrods in the 1930s, oversized sunglasses that would have suited a young Audrey Hepburn, round, chipmunk cheeks of a woman past her heyday and long, clearly dyed blond hair tied in a bun so tight I keep expecting her hairline to disappear when the roots snap free from her scalp.

  Can you imagine? Being seen next to someone like that?

  Alas. Can’t choose your family, I suppose. All that could be forgiven, too, if she weren’t standing right here, right now, in the foyer of the Other Studies Library, yelling my name at the top of her smoked-out lungs.

  “KATRINA!”

  I smelled Obsession for Women and menthol cigarettes a full three seconds before she ran over and hugged me, wiping away a tear.

  “Darling, darling. How is my Katrina Darling?” She laughed at her own joke. I don’t know why—it wasn’t as if she hadn’t said it, oh I don’t know, a million times before. When I didn’t laugh—and no one else did—she summoned every ounce of her motherly melodrama, looked around the room at the students trying to study and said, “It’s funny because her name is Katrina Darling. Get it? Darling, darling?”

  A few students gave her a sympathy chuckle before—embarrassed for the stranger with the unfortunate name and even more unfortunate mother—shoving their noses back into their books.

  “Mommm,” I said, shocked that after all these centuries I still used the same wary tone that was one part begging, two parts death-inviting embarrassment. Was that how I sounded on my fifteenth birthday so long ago? “Stop it, please. You’re making a scene.”

  “Pish, posh,” she said, a fake upper-class British accent punctuating the words like faux crystal. “Come here and give your old Mama another hug!” And before I could protest, she wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in. Tight. I gagged on the smell.

  And I mean really tight. I tried to break free, but she wasn’t letting go. For a moment I thought that she really missed me—that this embrace was a long-overdue connection after years of being enemies and then decades of being estranged. Should have known better. “Older and wiser” doesn’t apply to the undead, even if they do come back to life.

  Can you blame me? I began to lean into the embrace, remembering what it was like to be a pre-teen and needing Mom to chase away the bad dreams or fix up a scraped knee. Remembering how she could make everything OK when we were human—

  And then she destroyed it all by whispering in my ear, “I fear, darling, that you and I are in danger.” She pulled away and gave me that serious look of hers, the one she’d given whenever she “meant business,” and added, “Both of us are in danger, darling.”

  Good ol’ Mom. Well, at least good ol’ pre- and now post-vampire Mom. When she was turned, she became the Queen Bitch. Heartless, ruthless, selfish. And even though her own daughter was a vampire, too, and the two of us could have had an eternity together, she didn’t seem to care. I was a drag on her new undead life. So she walked away from me the second she could.

  And now that she was back? It was because she was in danger and needed my help—or so she claimed.

  But that was Mom. Always looking out for herself. So why was I so surprised?

  Mom pulled away and leveled a heavy gaze at me. “Excuse me, darling?”

  Damn it—talking out loud again. Nasty habit, that. It came from centuries of haunting an old Scottish castle up in the highlands. When you spent 99% of your time alone, you tended to keep yourself company—which usually meant talking to yourself. Old habits died hard, just like me.

  “Nothing, Mother,” I said, trying to throw in as much disappointment as I could. I wanted her to hear my eyeroll. I was becoming—or rather reverting—to a right stroppy teenager. Good. She missed those years anyway, so why not give her a dose now?

  “I’m serious, darling. We are in grave danger. And given that neither you nor I have our old”—she looked around to see if anyone was listening and then leaned in to whisper—“abilities, I think we best find a place to speak.”

  I nodded. She was serious. There was a danger—to her, at least. I doubted I was in danger. If history were anything to judge by—and we had plenty of it to judge—she was the only one truly in danger and was about to use me to save herself. In fact, she probably put me in danger by coming here.

  Not that she cared that her daughter was in harm’s way. She never was the kind of person to say, “Go on without me,” or “Stay away, I’ll only bring you harm.” She was more of a, “Get me out of here! Carry me if you have to!” kind of gal.

  Still … she was my mom. Blood thicker than water, or whatever (that expression kind of lost its meaning when I started drinking blood as a snack). Plus, I owed her for—

  “Darling, you’re doing that thing you always do.”

  Pulled out of my own thoughts, I shook my head and, clamping my jaws tight so I wouldn’t speak even the body language out loud, shrugged a What are you talking about?

  “That thousand-mile stare of yours as you contemplate some random thought. You know—that you’re pretending to listen even though anyone with half a brain knows you’re not.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear as she spoke and then adjusted my collar. I knew it was all a show.

  I pulled away, pretending not to like her touch, when really, if I were honest with myself (and that’s something I’m really trying to do lately, promise), I enjoyed it and longed for more.

  “OK, fine. I’ll listen. Let’s find somewhere quiet to talk,” I said, and led her away from the main study area to the little museum that was in the back of the library.

  Great start to a family reunion.

  ↔

  Once we were in the back area, I lifted a hand to my ear and pushed it toward her. “OK, I’m listening.”

  She shook her head and gave me a tisk of the tongue as she walked to the back display. “You don’t have to be so snarky, darling.”

  “I don’t?” I said, imbuing the words with as much snark as I could muster.

  “No, you don’t. I know that we’ve had our differences, but—”

  “You tried to kill me. Not once, not twice—but more times than I have nails to paint.”

  “When we were vampires, darling. Not as a human. Never as a human. Besides, you have to admit that I was only trying to … you know …” She let the words hang in the air for a moment before waving a hand like she was waving away some smoke. “But that’s all history now. History, and water under the bridge. Let’s let bygones be bygones and all that good stuff,” she said as she continued to the back of the display area.

  I knew where she was going, but I followed anyway. It really was like riding a bike, this mother-daughter thing—not that I knew much about riding a bike; it had been decades since I’d tried, and that expression never really cut it for me. But still. It was almost good to have my mother back.

  Once at the back she pointed at a large framed costume—a kilt complete with fur sporran and Brogue shoes—before stopping. “They put it up for display for all to see,” she said in a voice dripping with accusation, then, pulling out a tissue from her gaudy, golden purse, raised her sunglasses so she could dab the corners of her eyes.

  I genuinely couldn’t tell if she was actually wiping away tears, or if this were some melodrama to elicit sympathy from me.

  “Do you know how many times I had to sew that kilt for your father?” she said. “He was always snagging it on some branch or fence or whatever while doing his chores. So clumsy, that father of yours. I wonder who fixed it after I was …” Her voice trailed off to nothing again, and dab-dab came the tissue.