Vertigo Vampire: a Supernatural Thriller (The Specials Book 2) Read online

  I could have insisted that my grandmother be moved to another facility, but more people learning that she was a former freedom fighter increased the chances that the government would find out she was no longer under their care. Besides, though Endicott had made a mistake in hiding what he’d done, I believed that he was on my family’s side.

  “Just don’t let it happen again,” I told him. “Especially if Calia comes back. I need you to call me the moment she steps foot in here.”

  “Absolutely.”

  I asked the question I’d feared to ask since hearing Calia’s snide remark about hero blood. “Did she gain access to my grandmother?”

  Endicott’s eyebrows flew toward his hairline. “I would never have permitted that, Arrow. No matter what.”

  He swallowed hard after he said that, though, making me wonder what Calia had done while she was here. It couldn’t have been anything good. I was actually somewhat surprised that Endicott was still alive and apparently undamaged. Calia didn’t pull her punches when she wanted someone to obey her.

  I shifted uncertainly in the chair. “Do you think my grandmother is getting better or worse? I need you to be honest with me.”

  He dropped his gaze to the desk as he considered my question. That didn’t bode well.

  “We don’t know what was done to Elise,” he began. “Not exactly. From what you’ve told me, she was subjected to an aggressive pharmaceutical regimen intended to reverse or mitigate the DNA enhancement that she received during the war. Whether that’s true or she received another form of treatment, we can’t predict how long those effects were meant to last.”

  “They were dosing her with something at the government facility,” I told him. “It was this suppressant that we’re using now combined with something else.”

  He nodded. “That may explain what we’re seeing. Without the addition of that unknown medication, Elise’s powers may be exerting themselves.”

  “If I found out what they were using, would that help?”

  “It would.”

  I filed that for later. I wanted to have as little contact with the man I was bribing at the government facility as possible, just so he wouldn’t get any ideas about blackmailing me for more money.

  “In the meantime, do you think she might return to normal?” I mentally crossed my fingers and toes. The prospect of my grandmother recovering was enough to give me a head rush. “Do you think she might eventually become more aware and regain full control over her TP ability?”

  “Become more aware—there is certainly that possibility. Regain control of her powers? That, I couldn’t level an opinion on without knowing what was done to her in the first place. There may be neurological damage that prevents her from making a full recovery. The genetic manipulation may be degrading. I suspect that her natural healing factor may be playing a role in this new lucidity we’re seeing from her now. But I simply can’t say for certain. I’m not a medical doctor. The short answer, Arrow, is that unless you decide to send her for medical testing, we’ll have to wait and see.”

  “No,” I said immediately. “No testing. She’s been abused enough.”

  He nodded, his expression sad. “That she has.”

  “If she…if her projections occur again, please don’t kick her out.” I was willing to beg on my knees if that was what it took.

  “Of course not. This is a blip in her treatment.” He smiled kindly at me. “We’ll figure it out, Arrow. Don’t you worry.”

  Chapter 5

  The bad scientist. He made so many, and all were from our nightmares. Especially the small one.

  My grandmother’s words made me shiver despite the warm, sunny day. Though she often spoke nonsense, with her memories of events overlapping so that conversations from different times blended together confusingly, I didn’t think that was the case here. She feared a scientist with black eyes. That man had spoken to his creations, perhaps commanded them. I couldn’t dismiss this as rambling. This was truth.

  I pulled up the internet on my phone to see if I could find any clues, though I didn’t expect much. Online news services were required to run all their content past government vetters for a handful of reasons that I didn’t believe for a second were legitimate. Because of that censoring, the likelihood of discovering a bombshell that would hurt the oligarchy was zero.

  As expected, when I attempted a search of ‘war scientists’, I was taken to a page that stated: The information you are attempting to access has been removed by order of the War Misinformation Act. When I typed in Dr. Febrero’s name, I received the same message. There wasn’t a bio page nor a single photograph of the alleged instigator of the Drowning War and it boggled my mind that the public didn’t question this.

  With little choice, I visited an information agent.

  The one I’d used before to learn about the demon leap murders was gone. No physical trace of it existed. Feeling paranoid, I drove to where I remembered seeing another kiosk. This one was still in place, but as I parked and approached it, I realized I was heading into conflict.

  Two older women were shouting at the middle-aged woman who was running the kiosk. The older women carried shopping bags and didn’t fit my mental image of the type of person who used such a service.

  “Denier!” shouted one of the women as she pointed accusingly at the kiosk. “You’re spreading anarchy and lies! Someone should burn you to the ground!”

  The words shocked me and compelled me closer.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” the woman’s friend chimed in shrilly. “The government saved our lives and all you care about is telling filthy lies for money. Shame! Shame on you! You need to burn!”

  I’d heard this garbage before. It upset me. People who behaved this way left me feeling as though the world had gone crazy, as though the population had suffered brain damaged. Or were brain washed.

  “Deniers should burn in hell!” the first women yelled. She picked up a piece of trash and chucked it at the kiosk. “You’ll see!”

  The two women brandished vulgar hand motions before hurrying off, most likely to search for a cop to whom they could report the spread of harmful, anti-society propaganda. The irony would escape them.

  “Before you and I burn in hell,” I said lightly as I approached the kiosk, “can I buy a package?”

  The woman inside looked harried and furious. Maybe she’d been harassed for much of the morning. Her business was risky and, as evidenced by the shutdown of the other kiosk I’d attempted to visit, a dying breed.

  “Humanity deserves to end,” she muttered before taking a deep breath. She studied me suspiciously. “What do you want?”

  “Will a Bronze Package give me a photo?”

  Instead of answering my question, she looked over my shoulders in both directions before pulling out a laminated card.

  “Read this and verbally accept or reject the Terms of Service,” she told me in a cold voice while still scanning the area behind me. “You’re being recorded.”

  Words filled the entire page, which was a standard sized sheet. My Glyph Eye wasn’t playing nice so it was all gibberish to me. “I didn’t have to do this last time. What does it say?”

  “It boils down to you agreeing that you are not an agent or officer of any government agency and that whatever information you obtain here is inadmissible in a court of law.”

  Her words set me back on my heels. “You’ve been raided, haven’t you?”

  Her gaze was shrewd, as though she’d picked up the outrage of a kindred anti-establisher in my voice. “They’re trying to charge us with offenses of the War Misinformation Act, but it’s only the beginning. Nutty people like those women are growing bolder. They burned down my other location. But I’m not closing this one down. This is the last bastion of genuine information in the city.”

  “You should go mobile,” I told her, thinking of Wolfgang. “My friend runs an anti-propaganda museum. He parks in a new spot every day so they can’t pin him down
.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.” She pointed at the TOS. “So are you a cop or what?”

  “I agree to everything that’s written here. I need this place to stay open.”

  She relaxed finally, and a touch of grudging respect brought her to lean against the counter. “What do you need, then?”

  “I need a photo. At least one, but more would be better. Which packages will give me that?”

  “Only the Gold Package. Photos of the sensitive subjects—” she gave me a meaningful look, “—will get you jail time, so if we give it to you, we make sure it’s worth the risk. It’s high veracity—guaranteed to be real.”

  I winced with dismay. I had money now, but the Gold Package cost over half of my monthly rent at the Sinistera. I had to remind myself that if it yielded the information I needed, it would be worth any cost. Just like this woman, I had to be willing to put things on the line.

  “I’ll take that.”

  “Fill out the form with ten keywords and I’ll get you your photos.”

  I chose the broadest keywords I could think of that were associated with Dr. Febrero and government scientists during wartime. In a few minutes, the woman came back with an envelope.

  “Be careful,” she warned me. “They’ll return. And that net will catch everyone who’s near or who have used our services, even for subjects not related to the war. Burn this later if you’re smart.”

  In the shadow behind a grocery store, I opened the envelope containing my illicit information. Inside were articles about Febrero’s alleged crimes, including a promising-looking profile of a trio of scientists who had received commendations for their actions during the war. Were they Febrero’s partners? I was eager to read everything, but first I looked at the pair of color photographs that I’d paid so much for.

  The first was a photograph of Dr. Febrero making a presentation to a group of seated men in suits at what looked to be a luncheon or business meeting. The background consisted of floor to ceiling curtains and he stood at a podium. I perked when I noticed the familiar face seated in the second row of the audience: Nathaniel. The caption for the photo, which listed names for every visible face, didn’t mention Dr. Febrero’s son, making me question whether this was a rare moment for the two to be together in public. It appeared to be so rare, in fact, that the news agency covering the event didn’t know who Nathaniel was.

  How did one keep a secret like that? What of Nathaniel’s birth records? What of his mother? Had Dr. Febrero kept his son’s existence a secret from the beginning, or had he retroactively erased all evidence of Nathaniel’s existence once he began to suspect that the government was going to betray him?

  The second photograph made me breathe even faster. It was a close-up of Dr. Febrero and another man, both dressed in lab coats and smiling proudly at the camera as though they’d just made some scientific breakthrough.

  This second scientist was the same man Elliott and I had found dead last night in the Sinistera.

  Before his face had been torn open, he’d been a decent-looking man. According to the article, his name was Dr. Daniel Day. Nothing more was said in the article about what branch of science Dr. Day specialized in. Still, identifying him as a former colleague of Febrero was significant.

  What had he been doing in the hotel? And why had his death come at the fangs of the Count, with his face torn open for good measure? Sheer bad timing on Day’s part? I found it hard to swallow. Day had been targeted.

  With that mystery swirling in my mind, I glanced, as an afterthought, at the image of Dr. Febrero. His eyes were green, just like his son’s. I was caught off-guard by my relief, and I wasn’t sure if it was for me or on Nathaniel’s behalf. When my grandmother had cited a black-eyed scientist who talked to the ice demons, she hadn’t been referring to his father. Dr. Day, however, did appear to have dark eyes.

  Had he been the second scientist to blame for the demons? Had he created those creatures in a lab just as Dr. Febrero had created the demon leaper? If the two men had worked together, chances were good they were in the same field and were capable of similar work. It didn’t explain why the Count would kill him, though. What connection could the vampire have to the war scientists?

  With only my grandmother as a witness, and an unreliable one at that, I needed other sources who could confirm Dr. Day’s work. Hopefully, after fifteen years, those people hadn’t yet died of natural causes or met with an untimely and not-so-accidental death to hush them up.

  ~~~~~

  I tracked down the Center for Living Resistance at the edge of a park.

  The door of the RV was open as always, inviting wanna-be conspiracy theorists to learn more about the truth and not ‘what THEY want you to believe’, according to the sandwich board outside. I poked my head in.

  “Aliens aren’t real,” I said.

  “Then what’s powering airplanes?” retorted the large man inside. “Fairy dust?”

  “I thought it was gremlins,” I replied as I climbed inside. “I’ve got something for you, Wolfie. Put down that sandwich so you don’t choke on it when I tell you.”

  He was immediately all ears, dropping his half-eaten meal onto the paper wrapper spread over the small dining table. Wolfgang’s cherubic features lit up like a child’s at Christmas. “Don’t tease me. Close the door and tell me.”

  “A closed door might turn away believers, Wolfie.”

  “You and I are the only ones who fit that bill anymore,” he told me grimly, as though the world were ending. “The government’s winning, Arrow. The wheels of deception have ground up everyone else and are spinning freely in their blood.”

  “Now I can’t bear to look at your sandwich,” I complained. I leaned a shoulder against a wall between his conspiracy displays. “Hold onto your tin foil hat because I actually have two bombshells to drop.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty. Spit it out, Arrow.”

  Instead, I straightened up and walked down the length of the RV, passing Wolfgang, and came to a stop in front of one display that held the surveillance camera image that would get him thrown in jail for life. I thumbed at the photo of the ice demon standing perched on a car roof.

  “This has been confirmed as one hundred percent accurate,” I told him. “The so-called ice demons looked exactly like this.”

  “Meaning they couldn’t have come from the ice.” He rubbed his palms together. “How good is your source on this?”

  Like a true conspiracy theorist, he didn’t bother asking me to name my source. He was fully entrenched in the world of secret keeping.

  “My source is solid.” I smirked as his eyes glazed over. “The government lied, Wolfie. Just like we thought. The war demons came from somewhere else. And that ties into my next surprise: someone other than Dr. Febrero might have been the one to create them.”

  He slid to the edge of his chair. “Who?”

  “Dr. Daniel Day. But he’s dead, killed under mysterious circumstances inside my hotel.”

  “You work in a dangerous place,” he mumbled.

  “I don’t disagree. I need to know what Day was working on, and if there are others. The scientists probably worked in teams.”

  He cracked his meaty knuckles. “Tell me what you know. Sleep is for the weak-minded.”

  “Well,” I said a bit sheepishly, “you know what I know.”

  Wolfgang stilled. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  He slumped like a deflated balloon. “Then we’ve got nothing. Dozens of scientists worked with the government during the war, most of them in the effort to refreeze the water. Others were tasked with ensuring deadly microbes weren’t spread throughout the city by the ice demons.”

  I’d dutifully burned the photos and articles I’d purchased earlier after committing any pertinent facts to memory. Except for one. I unfolded the article featuring the three scientists who had received commendations for their unnamed contributions to the war.

  “How about we
start with these three? We have proof that they helped during the war. I don’t know what they look like, but at least we have their names. It’s a start.”

  Wolfgang perked up again, visibly salivating at the idea of digging deep into research. “Who are they?”

  “They’re all doctors, though it doesn’t say what their fields were. Dr. Darrow Whiner, Dr. Anders Blackmore, and Dr. Liam Rose. They were recognized for ‘scientific efforts during times of conflict,’ whatever that means.”

  “It means that even then, the newspapers were backing away from referencing the war because they were being pressured by the government.” Wolfgang scratched at one of his chins. He was dressed like a slob and looked like he hadn’t left the interior of the RV in months, but his mind was a wonder, filing away facts like a computer. He was also relentless, refusing to give up on a trail even when it seemed to be heading to a dead end. In that sense, he wasted a lot of time, but he was the staunchest opponent of the government that I knew, and so he was my go-to guy for things like this.

  “Dr. Liam Rose sounds familiar,” he told me. “I think his area of expertise involved magic genetic recombination. The other two I’ve never heard of. That’ll change soon.”

  I grinned at the terrier-like determination that firmed his face. “I’ll check back in tomorrow and see what you’ve found.”

  He nodded absently, his mind already working out a plan. “I’ll be around. Somewhere.”

  I paused in the doorway of the RV. “By the way, do you happen to know anyone who’s familiar with studying blood samples?”

  “Blood samples? Whose?”

  “I have a sample from Dr. Day’s body. Thought I’d have someone take a look at it just in case.”

  Wolfgang nodded, but he did so hesitantly.

  “You don’t have to—” I began.

  “No, it’s just that…he’s sort of a weirdo.”

  “Lots of people would say that about us.”

  That broke down his tension. He smirked. “And they’d be right. Alright. Check out my friend Juju. He works at a customs shop over in Windy Hook called IMT on Demand. He’s kind of unorthodox, but maybe he can help. Tell him, ‘The Wolf howls’. That’s our code phrase.”