Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) Page 2

  Almost immediately she began to swallow, and after a moment or so she opened her eyes. I pulled the cup away and stared down at the frown she was wearing with a raised eyebrow.

  “What is that awful stuff?” she asked.

  “Pig’s blood. From one of my own animals here on the farm,” I replied, holding the cup out to her as I stood.

  She waved it away. “No thank you, it’s disgusting.”

  I rolled my eyes as I picked up a limp arm and placed the cup in her hand. “Deal with it. Pig and cow is all I have, and you obviously need the nutrition. When was the last time you fed?”

  Drinking blood regularly instead of only when they needed to feed boosted a vampire’s resistance to the backward cycle of their melatonin production, a lot like a human taking caffeine pills to stay up at night. Evangeline knew this as well as I did.

  Though she continued to make a sour face, Vangie nevertheless put the mug back to her lips and drank as she slowly sat up. “How can you drink this muck?” she asked me after taking a swallow.

  I shrugged as I moved to sit on the other end of the couch. “You get used to it. Better to drink animal blood than be a murderer.”

  Vangie narrowed her eyes at me. “Humans murder animals to feed, Saphrona. You murder them to feed.”

  I sighed. I’d already had this discussion with her, and it looked like I was going to have to have it yet again. “First of all, certain animals were put on this planet by God specifically to be consumed—”

  “If I believed in God, I might say that humans were put here to feed us vampires.”

  “—and second,” I went on, ignoring her remark, “I don’t kill my animals. I draw their blood and store it. And you didn’t answer my question: When was the last time you fed? You should have had something before coming out here, at least.”

  “I was planning on going out tonight, Mom,” she said snidely. “Been thinking of acquiring myself a vessel.”

  Vessels were humans who were regularly used as donors. A vampire could bite a human without injecting draculin and making another vampire, but so few of us had the discipline to keep from killing even to do that. Once we tasted blood during feeding, especially human blood, we almost never stopped.

  I refrained from lecturing Vangie on why I thought making some poor human a vessel was wrong. If a vampire was actually strong enough to bite but not kill—and didn’t turn the human—then he or she created what was known as a blood bond with that human. The vampire was connected to the human by a form of extrasensory perception, through which he or she could then find their vessel anywhere the human was. The bond’s strength faded over time to the point of dissolving completely, so the vampire would have to feed from the human regularly to maintain it. To me, this was a practice that was much akin to slavery, and I hated it.

  Instead of the tirade I so wanted to fire at her, I swallowed my displeasure and asked her, “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Vangie had made it clear countless times that I was not on her list of favorite people, so despite my annoyance at her arrival, I was, of course, more than a little curious as to why she had shown up on my doorstep. Then again, her coming to see me when she disliked me so much meant that she hadn’t done so of her own accord. Diarmid had probably sent her.

  “Father wants to see you,” she said, and I could see the words sat as bitterly on her tongue as the pig’s blood.

  “Diarmid could have called,” I replied, even though Vangie probably knew that if he had, I’d have ignored the phone—thank goodness for caller I.D. I also had a cell phone like most people did nowadays, but he had yet to get hold of that number because it was unlisted.

  As if reading my thoughts, Vangie frowned. “Father knows you won’t answer if he calls,” she said. “So he asked me to come and plead his case for him.”

  And I bet you just loved being made his errand girl, I thought but managed to refrain from saying. “What does he want to see me for?” I asked instead.

  Vangie downed the last swallow of pig’s blood, grimaced, and set the mug down on the coffee table. She then gestured toward the copy of Vampire I’d been reading last night. “I believe he wants you to track down that Vivian Drake bitch.”

  It was a good thing I’d had more than two hundred years to practice my poker face, otherwise I’d have probably burst out laughing. “Vivian Drake? Why does he want me to find her, so he can kill her? No thank you. Diarmid ought to know damn well I’ll never do that.”

  Vangie groaned. “Saphrona, come on. She knows too much about us, which means that someone has been feeding her information. That person can only be a vampire. Now, while killing her would certainly satisfy any number of our people, including me, the problem with that is that no one can find her. She’s too carefully guarded.”

  My Vivian Drake identity was indeed a very carefully crafted secret. My manuscripts—I’d written three phenomenally successful vampire novels—and my articles in Vampire were all sent in via e-mail. No one connected with publishing my work, not even my literary agent, had ever seen my face. It was for their protection as well as my own, which was why it was so difficult for anyone to find Vivian—no one knew what she looked like or where she lived. Obviously someone had tried to find her, though, given what Evangeline had just told me.

  “Vangie, what good would killing her really do at this point? The damage has been done,” I said carefully.

  “Unfortunately, Father agrees with you,” my sister said. “But he still wants you to find her so that we can learn who her source is.”

  “And what good will that do?”

  “The bastard will be killed for betraying vampire kind,” she replied simply. “If not by one of us, certainly the Ancients will take care of him.”

  I suppressed a shudder. The Council of Ancients, generally referred to as the Ancients (all of them vampires who were a thousand or more years old), was the equivalent of a governing body in the vampire world. They made—and enforced—all the laws of our society. We weren’t supposed to kill conspicuously, make immortal children, or tell a human the truth about our kind. Anyone who learned vampires were real either had to be made a vampire or made vampire food. Ask a vampire and he’d probably deny it, but I knew my people feared the persecution that would likely follow being exposed, so I understood why some of them might be incensed by my books. My stories were fiction laced with a liberal dose of the truth, and the most recent article in Vampire, written specifically for the October edition because of Halloween on the 31, pretty much spelled it all out.

  “Again, I have to wonder what good it will do when the damage has already been done,” I said. “Besides, has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe this Vivian Drake person is simply really imaginative? I mean, for goodness’ sake, she’s a writer—coming up with incredible stories is part of her job description, and as far as humans are concerned, that’s all her books are. Just incredible stories.”

  Vangie scoffed. “Are you actually defending the traitor who is feeding her information?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I said, grabbing the coffee mug from the table as I stood. “I just don’t see the point of raising such a fuss. Going after Vivian Drake is sure to draw the kind of attention none of our people want.”

  “Which is precisely why we’re not going to kill her,” Vangie said. “But we do need her to tell us who she’s getting her information from, so the traitor can be dealt with.”

  “Fine, whatever,” I muttered, walking into the kitchen and over to the sink, where I rinsed out the mug. I noticed I had left the bottle of blood on the counter and grabbed it, putting it back in the fridge.

  Vangie had risen and followed me, so I turned to her and asked, “What does hunting down Vivian Drake have to do with me, anyway?”

  She rolled her eyes at me as she crossed her arms under her ample breasts. “Surely you can figure that one out for yourself, dear sister. You’re the only person we know of who is even remotely capable of moving around
during the daytime safely.”

  Actually, that was only partially true. While my human genetics had gifted me with a normal pineal gland, thus allowing me to follow a human sleep cycle, even a full vampire could be up during the day as long as he was well fed and kept blood on hand for when he felt tired. But a little known secret amongst vampires was that they were notorious procrastinators when it came to feeding; a vampire could go as many days as years he’d been turned without blood—not that anyone ever went to that extreme, because a vampire who’d gone even a month without feeding was as ravenous as a newborn. Going an extended period without blood weakened a vampire physically and mentally, so to purposely abstain for years was something I couldn’t even imagine—it would take incredible discipline. Most of the vampires I’d known in my time would never wait longer than two weeks between feedings, and it was foolish to wait even that long in my opinion. While I didn’t have to consume blood nearly as often as vamps did, I’d long ago made a practice of having at least one mug full every morning with breakfast because drinking a little blood every day gave me extra energy. Dhunphyr, of course, had escaped the crutch of backward melatonin production as completely as they had the thirst for blood. They got some of the benefits and none of the weaknesses of becoming a vampire.

  But we didn’t know any immortal humans.

  This, in turn, explained why Diarmid wanted me to be the one to try and locate Vivian Drake’s whereabouts—because there were so few of my kind, too.

  I sighed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but tell him I’ll think about it. That’s as much as I can give you right now. I’m not sure I really like the idea of leading him to her informant, either. I’d as much as be killing him or her myself.”

  Vangie emitted a disgusted noise as she turned back for the living room. “Please spare me your self-righteous bullshit, Saphrona. If you’d get over yourself and accept what you really are, you wouldn’t have that problem, now would you?”

  As she spoke, she picked up her jacket and put it on, wrapped the scarf around her head, and picked up her gloves and oversized sunglasses. Turning to where I now stood in the arched doorway to the kitchen, she queried, “Should I give Father and Lochlan your love? Or should I give them your usual sentiments and tell them you said go to hell?”

  Boy, my sister could be such a bitch, I mused silently. Another sign of my incredible self control was the evenness of my voice as I said, “Like I told you, you may tell Diarmid that I will take his request under consideration. As for our brother, if you speak to him before I do, you can tell him I’m looking forward to Friday night.”

  Vangie’s eyebrows winged up. “Oh? You’re actually going to spend time with a member of your family? Doing what, may I ask?”

  Lochlan—whom I affectionately called Loch or Loch Ness—was my older “sibling” (older by about a hundred years), and was the only member of the family I still spoke to with any regularity. He didn’t exactly get my lifestyle either (the only time he ever drank animal blood was when he visited me), but he tolerated it as just another of my eccentricities. He liked having a sister who marched to the beat of her own drum, and he understood my need to get away from Diarmid, who was controlling, and Vangie, who was just a bitch.

  “If you must know, we’re going to see a movie. Zombieland premieres Friday.”

  A love of zombie movies was something Loch and I shared; he didn’t really share any interests with Vangie, which only served as another reason for her hatred of me.

  I knew she wasn’t happy by the way she shoved her sunglasses onto her face and marched stiffly over to the front door. Oh well, she was just going to have to get over it.

  “Not that my name is Western Union or anything, but I’ll give them the message. Good day, Saphrona.”

  With that, Vangie yanked my front door open and walked through it, slamming it shut behind her. Moments later I heard her car start up and back down the driveway. Shaking my head, I turned back for the refrigerator. I might not like my younger sister, but I did hope she made it home before she passed out again—certainly the blood she had ingested would help her with that—because I so did not need Diarmid coming here pissed at me because she’d gotten injured. Not that it would be my fault. Evangeline was the fool who’d gone out during the day without feeding first. I knew our sire kept vessels, so certainly she could have called one of them and fed before leaving home.

  With a sigh, I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the bottle of pig’s blood, unscrewing the cap and taking three long swallows. I’d had some that morning and I really didn’t care for it cold, but Vangie’s visit had rattled my nerves more than I realized. I still had three horses’ hooves to trim and stalls to clean out, so I was going to need the extra energy to get through the rest of the day.

  Putting the cap back on, I returned the bottle to the fridge and started for the back door. Just as I was about to step outside again, my phone rang. I groaned and turned back around, heading for the cordless unit on the wall next to the refrigerator. The I.D. screen showed me a number I didn’t recognize, so I answered with a wary, “Hello?”

  “Is this the Caldwell Farm?” said a husky make voice.

  “It is,” I replied.

  The caller cleared his throat. “My name’s Mark Singleton, ma’am. May I speak with Saphrona Caldwell please?”

  “You are speaking with her, Mr. Singleton. How may I help you?”

  “Well, I just read an ad in the Dispatch that you’re looking to hire a hand for your place, Mrs. Caldwell. Ad says to call to schedule an interview,” Mark Singleton said.

  I face-palmed into my right hand. Truthfully, I’d forgotten about placing that ad because no one had responded to it. Despite the fact that I’d said salary was negotiable, apparently no one was looking to work on a farm that required him or her to actually live there. Plus, I’d only put it in the newspaper because my publisher was hot for me to write another book, and I thought having some help around the farm, at least for a little while, might free my mind enough to actually come up with another story idea.

  “It’s Ms. Caldwell, actually,” I corrected automatically. “When would be a good time for you, Mr. Singleton?”

  “Is it alright if I come by today?” he asked.

  I turned and looked at the antique clock on the wall, which had just turned to 2:30. Why the hell not? I mused, then said, “Sure,” and gave him the directions. “If I’m not out in the barn when you get here, knock on the back door of the house.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Mark replied.

  After each of us had said goodbye, I hung up the phone, then reached back into the fridge for the bottle of blood, taking another couple of chugs before heading back outside to reign in the three horses that still needed their hooves trimmed.

  First Vangie shows up with that ridiculous request, now I have to interview a potential employee, I thought. This day just keeps getting better and better.

  Back to Top

  Two

  When I finally walked out of the house, I made sure to go over to Moe and Cissy’s kennel and pet them through the chain link, allowing them to sniff me and reassure themselves that I was alright. Dogs were among the few animals that—while recognizing something dangerous—did not actually fear vampires, and what they say about Chihuahuas and their apparent inability to recognize a fight they can’t possibly win is true. I had not the slightest doubt that had they had an opportunity to attack Evangeline, Moe and Cissy would have done so with a rabid Rottweiler’s determination, and would have tried their utmost to tear my sister limb from limb in defense of their beloved mistress.

  After the dogs appeared satisfied no harm had come to me, they trotted off to their water bucket, and I took that as a sign that I could move on. Walking through the barn, I turned left and looked in on the chickens. They were clucking and moving around their pen same as always, so I about-faced to check on the pigs in their sty. They were all flopped over on their sides in the shade, so I left them be as well.


  I walked over to the split-rail fence that opened into a paddock, walked across the paddock and over to the gate that led to the main pasture. My six cows and four horses were all out grazing, so I had to whistle to get their attention. The cows, of course, barely looked up, but the horses raised their heads. I whistled again and they started trotting over. As I waited for them I couldn’t help but shake my head, my mind drifting back to Vangie’s visit. Vampires had been on Earth pretty much since the beginning of Man, though the term wasn’t actually used until the 18 century. Certainly my people had learned fairly early on in their existence that by drinking blood every day, they could stay awake longer during the daytime. For that matter, they didn’t have to sleep at all during the day if they didn’t really want to.

  I shooed Hasufeld away and allowed his brother and parents to pass into the paddock as my thoughts kept turning. Most vampires had taken to living the lifestyle myth and legend had painted for them because of the simple fact that they could walk around at night without the fear of falling asleep at an inopportune moment. Why should they put in the extra time and effort it would take to maintain a human sleep cycle? Why fight the nature of what they had become?

  Still, I had once wondered, why not at least try it—especially if you kept vessels or knew someone who did who was willing to share? Sure, you might have to drink a lot of blood, or at least consume regular quantities throughout the day same as humans had mealtimes, but wasn’t it worth it to see the beauty of sunlight? To smell flowers, or hear birds chirping in the trees? My people had no idea how much they were missing by giving in to their biology.

  After getting the three horses back into their stalls, I made quick work of trimming and filing the edges of their hooves before putting them back outside once more. I then had to tackle one of the most despised tasks of farming—mucking out stalls. I had ten that I had to clear, not including the pigs’ indoor habitat and the chicken coop, which also needed cleared out.