In the Blood Read online

“Greg, deep breath. There’s no room in here,” Caroline said. She was surprised at how cold her voice sounded in her own ears.

  “Wh…What?” Mrs. Pelmet sputtered. Her fork slid from her fingers and splattering the red sauce all over the kitchen.

  “I am a federal agent, Mrs. Pelmet. You are under arrest on three counts of murder and the attempted murder of Special Agent Darien Barre. As Agent Barnett said, there are probably more charges coming.” Caroline stepped into the kitchen, taking the handcuffs off Greg’s belt and walking towards the woman at the stove who was simply standing there, stunned.

  Okay, technically she wasn’t an agent. Greg would go on the paperwork as the arresting officer, but right now he was busy keeping his magic under control and not accidentally shooting anyone.

  “What? Special Agent… Whatever else he was pretending to be, was a monster! He wasn’t even human! Those creatures who died weren’t even human, so it wasn’t murder! We’re fighting monsters, don’t you understand that?” Nicole finally found her own voice and now she wouldn’t stop shouting. “We can prove it! Those people aren’t people! We aren’t hurting any actual humans! We are protecting humans!”

  “Miss Pelmet, I assure you that we are fully aware of their status as paranormal beings,” Greg growled. Caroline heard the echo of panpipes and wondered how close to the edge he actually was.

  “They attacked people! They drank human blood, who’s looking for justice for their victims? Those poor victims of the vampire attacks that you’re apparently covering up?” Nicole shrieked. “Now we have to fight a conspiracy to cover up after them?”

  She looked wildly at Greg who was standing now behind the old woman and handcuffing her gently. He may be angry, Caroline thought, but his momma drilled those manners deep apparently. Also, Dorothy wasn’t fighting him. She looked shocked, but also confused, and more than a little surprised at Nicole’s outburst.

  Caroline’s glance towards them was enough of a distraction from what she was doing herself. Nicole snapped back into motion, grabbed the pan of simmering tomato sauce and flung it at Caroline.

  The scalding sauce burned down the skin on her face and she barely got her arm up in time to deflect the heavy pan it had been cooking in while Nicole dashed for the door into the hallway. Caroline’s foot slid through the sauce that now covered the floor when she spun to take off behind the fleeing woman. The hallway went directly from the kitchen in the back of the house straight to the front door, and that’s what it seemed that Nicole was heading for.

  Caroline reached out to grab Nicole’s arm when she whipped around out of her reach, using the newel post for the staircase that Caroline hadn’t even noticed. Skidding around to follow, Caroline dashed up the stairs. Her face and arm screamed at her where the skin still burned, and she smelled like a pizza shop, but like hell she’d let this woman get away.

  Nicole ran into a room at the end of the short hallway and slammed the door just as Caroline reached it. She heard voices downstairs, dimly recognizing one as Felix’. The backup was here.

  “Open this door, Nicole. The house is surrounded by FPAA agents. We know who you are. We know where you are. You’re not going to escape,” she shouted and pounded on the door.

  “I won’t let you stop me! I’m saving the world, don’t you see that? I’m protecting humanity from the monsters they don’t even know really exist! You have no idea what those creatures are! What they can do! We saved your life and you don’t even know it!” Nicole’s voice held an edge of hysteria that made Caroline shiver, but there were other things in it, too. Grief. Despair. Desperation and longing. “Those things are vampires! They feed on humans! They have to have fed on humans to get poisoned! There’s no other way for them to have gotten poisoned, except your boyfriend! They may have killed one last time but it was the last murder they could commit!”

  There was a thud, and then a scraping noise from inside the room. Caroline banged on the door again and tried rattling the knob, but it stayed firmly closed. Nobody had gone over breaking down doors with her, since she wasn’t supposed to be involved in these confrontations. It was definitely something she would be bringing up after this was all over.

  “You contaminated people that went to voluntarily donate blood at the clinic around the corner. Hannah bought a case of canned blood with the rest of her groceries, so no humans were even around when she died. The other victims were poisoned the same way. One of them died, in terrible pain, in the middle of the forest with no people around him for miles! Darien drank your aunt’s coffee and has been in the med suite ever since,” Caroline growled. She blinked away the image of Darien sliding out of his chair that morning, and forced her breathing to slow. She unclenched her jaw and glared at the door. “No humans have been attacked by a vampire in this area in almost a century, though a number of happily committed couples who very often live to a ripe old age do share a blood bond voluntarily. If you’d bothered to learn anything about your victims, you would know this. Unlock this door. This is your last warning.” She made eye contact with Greg who had appeared at the top of the stairs. Whatever internal lock this door had would be like paper to him.

  “No! You’re working with them! You must be brainwashed, or… or enslaved somehow! Vampires use humans like cattle! They monsters and murderers and they steal our loved ones without even a thought of the people left behind!” There was a thump and a crash in the room. Greg’s hand smashed through the doorknob and they rushed into the room. Nicole sprawled on the floor, the jagged remains of a lamp smashed on the floor next to her and a short bookshelf lay under her foot, books and knickknacks scattered on the floor where they fell. The window over where the shelf had stood was open over the roof of the small garage.

  Nicole struggled to get to her feet and keep a folder of papers clasped to her chest, but Greg was there, taking the folder and hauling her to her feet.

  “You better go get someone to look at you, C,” he nodded. “That burn looks painful.”

  Her burned skin throbbed painfully at the reminder and Caroline stood in the doorway, feeling slightly numb for a moment before she nodded and turned. Greg could arrest Nicole Pelmet. She was no longer a threat. Not to Darien or to anyone else.

  12

  “Good morning, Sunshine.”

  Caroline sat up and blinked in the dim hospital light. This chair was definitely not made for napping in. Everything ached.

  “Oh, man. Did I doze off? Sorry,” she said, rubbing her eyes gently then immediately regretting it when she caught the edge of her burn.

  “You look like you have a story to tell.” Darien’s voice was still thick with sleep, but was much stronger than she expected. Darien had been moved from the office medical suite to a local clinic that had facilities to treat paranormals while they were out tracking down the Pelmets, and they had managed to flush the rest of the toxins out of his system. Now his skin was a much healthier color again, though still a little pale, and looked like he could use a few decent meals still, but ‘relief’ wasn’t quite strong enough to describe her feelings at seeing him up and chatty.

  The clinic had fussed a little at Caroline’s presence in the visitor’s chair overnight, but when Point took the doctor aside and explained things they’d backed off and let her be even though she wasn’t technically family. Point could be very convincing. They had, at least, kept an eye on her burns while she was there. They were pretty bad, but would heal just fine.

  “It was an epic battle of Junior Agent versus hot tomato sauce. The tomato sauce didn’t win exactly, but…” She shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind but I put your mom and your aunt up with my parents. They’re all in the hotel together right now. I sent them off to get some sleep since I had to be here anyway.” She waved vaguely at the bandages covering her burns.

  “Thanks.” Darien smiled. “That’s sweet of them to keep them company.”

  “Are you kidding? I called home to check in when I was being treated and gave Mom a quick overview of wh
at was going on, and she damn near drove down here to force the issue. ‘No mother should have to stay alone at a sterile hotel at a time like this!’ she said. Dad was on his cell phone making hotel arrangements and booking their flights before I even got to hang up. Your mom almost broke down in tears of gratitude, I think. I’m almost afraid of what they’re going to get up to together. Last I saw them they were whispering like teenagers in the back of class. I don’t even know how to feel about it. You don’t even want to know what they had to say about my sauce burns. Greg’s ears might still be ringing after they lit into him for letting me get injured. Both our mothers laid into him, it was like watching a tag team match!” Caroline laughed, and was glad when Darien smiled again, the humor reaching his eyes this time. “And your mom brought a case of uncontaminated blood for you. Hungry?”

  “I am. Ravenous.” He struggled to sit up a bit while Caroline went to the small fridge that had been pulled into the room and opened up a can of ‘Tomato Juice Cocktail.’ She handed the can to Darien and sat back down while he drank the whole twelve ounces in one long pull.

  “I would offer another but I have been strictly warned not to. You can have more in about two hours.” Caroline took the empty can from him, rinsed it in the small sink, and tossed it into the wastebasket provided for precisely that purpose.

  “Maybe I can get a sandwich or something before then. It feels like I haven’t eaten anything in weeks.” Darien sank back into the pillows. “So fill me in.”

  “Well, first thing’s first. You’ll probably be in here for another few days, so that everyone is satisfied that there aren’t any weird after effects. There was enough poison in that coffee to kill a vampire elephant, apparently. You’re incredibly lucky that you only had a few sips,” Caroline said. She felt her throat start to close and swallowed hard. “I am so sorry, Darien. I know it’s not really my fault, but I still feel guilty.”

  “Don’t. I know it’s easy to tell you not to worry about it than it is for you to stop worrying, but I sure don’t think you have any reason to feel guilty,” he said. Caroline nodded and swallowed again.

  “There was a fair amount of that crap in my own coffee, too, so in the name of science Ollie is taking blood samples from me every few hours. I’m starting to feel like a pincushion.” She sniffled but carried on. “But you want the story, I bet. Turns out that Dorothy Pelmet, ex-chef at the Everyday Cup, was putting the poison in all the food at the cafe. Pretty much any human that ate there was contaminated, so I’ve been off your table for a while I guess. She was just hired a month ago, though, so it could have been so much worse.”

  “So…” Darien frowned, putting it together. “Some of the humans that ate there went on to donate blood, I’m guessing, and that’s how our food supply was contaminated?”

  “Exactly. The clinic is just around the corner from the cafe. It didn’t take many people, either. They blend all the donations chosen for the food supply into large batches— to even out the quality and make a more consistent product, they told Zanna and Felix. And, of course, to avoid any accidental attachments for you guys. So it only took a few contaminated humans to ruin the whole batch.”

  “That’s horrifyingly efficient,” Darien said. “And it means that there was less of the toxin in the first few donations. She’s been there for a month?”

  “Yeah. Just long enough for the first few batches to hit the shop shelves. We haven’t heard of any more victims, thank goodness. We got the tainted blood off the shelves immediately, so nobody else was affected once we found out. It ended with you. I’m sorry, D.”

  He reached out and hook her hand, nodding sadly.

  “We’ll grieve, and we’ll heal. And we’ll get justice for Hannah and the others. Do we know how this Pelmet woman found out about… well, any of it? And how did she know to target me, specifically?”

  “We did. In bits and pieces so far. Nicole was the ringleader it turned out, and she is a little bonkers, unfortunately. Actually diagnosable, it turns out, so it’s somewhat slow going. We showed Dorothy a photo of your mom sobbing over you asleep in the bed, and a photo of Hannah giving her valedictorian speech and celebrating her enrollment in pre-med. The guy who died while camping turned out to have been an army medic that was honorably discharged after getting blown up. He’d just gotten out of rehab. I told her about how you saved my life when I was kidnapped, and she just broke down. It apparently hadn’t occurred to her that vampires were actually really real people. She just thought that she was helping her niece with this project and if there was such a thing as vampires, well, that would be good for everyone, right? She didn’t know of any haunted castles nearby, you see.”

  “She’s a little nuts too, huh?” he asked.

  “Just a touch, yeah. It seems to run in the family, in fact. Dorothy’s sister is apparently in a home. Involuntarily.” Caroline sighed. “One interesting thing about Dorothy is that she’s got a friend that’s a low level mage. She and Nicole both had charm pendants that let them know when they were in the presence of vampires and anyone else who consumes human blood. It wasn’t the intention of the charms— we talked to the mage and Zanna said she felt terrible and wanted to be arrested for it. They were supposed to just be a general warning against danger, and she’s working with Mitch to figure out how the spell got off track like that.”

  “Interesting. From what I understand of magic, you have to deliberately set a ward sort of aspect to a charm like that, in order to warn of specific species,” Darien said with a small frown.

  “Mitch thinks that the deep intent of the Pelmets managed to affect the focus of the charm, but they’re looking into it much more closely than I could follow. Anyway. Nicole was the real driving force. She is very much in need of help, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. Apparently, what set this all off was that her father passed away about a year ago. Complications from a stroke, he died peacefully in his sleep, but he was in a hospital at the time. She couldn’t accept that her apparently healthy father had died so suddenly and when she was going through an old trunk in his things she latched onto the documents inside as the answer. Obviously, her father didn’t die of natural causes, he was attacked by vampires! That’s what she decided, anyway.”

  “Documents?” Darien frowned. “What, he kept a diary record of meeting a vampire?”

  “No. It was his grandfather’s papers. Journals, notes. Lab files.” Caroline let her voice trail off. Darien blinked at her, waiting for her to continue, then suddenly he frowned.

  “Wait… you mean…?”

  “Yeah. It was her grandfather’s trunk and had a lot of family records and stuff in it. When her great grandfather was a young man, he’d worked in the Nazi lab that did all that research. It seems like he saw the news or something and managed to clear out of the lab before the Allies raided it. We may never know why he took all the research notes with him like that, but… It’s pretty awful, D. I couldn’t keep reading, just left it all with Felix and Ollie to go through,” Caroline said.

  “They’re the right people to do it. Felix is a respected historian when he’s not catching bad guys and hitting on everything with a pulse,” Darien said.

  “Gee, thanks. Way to make me feel special.” Caroline stuck her tongue out at him and he laughed again. It was such a relief to hear it. “Anyway, at least one genuinely good thing came out of it. We now know the name of Subject One. Aniela Matykowski. Point is talking to some guy at the State Department to try to find any living family to let them know what we’ve learned before it goes public.”

  “Wow. One of paranormal history’s great mysteries finally solved,” Darien said. “So what you’re telling me, really, is that Nicole Pelmet was blind with grief, and in that state found a way to kill people that she blamed for her father’s completely natural death of old age, then justified the murders as revenge somehow?”

  “Pretty much. I have to say that I fully expected it to be some sort of pulp movie plot, not some nutty wom
an digging through history,” Caroline shrugged. “Nicole is entirely convinced that she’s some sort of humanity-defending, vampire hunting hero. She also doesn’t actually know anything about vampires, or any other paranormals. Just what she got from those notes, and at least half the stuff in her grandfather’s lab notes was total guesswork based almost exclusively on mythology. The fact that they hit on a successful formula seems to be as much of a fluke as Nicole actually killing vampires.”

  “Poor Aniela.” Darien shook his head. The silence settled over them, each wrapped in their own thoughts. After a few minutes, Darien sighed and looked up.

  “So, as far as we know, the only known record of the formula for this poison is now locked up in Ollie’s lab?” Darien asked. Caroline nodded and smiled sadly.

  “Yep. Safe and sound. Ollie about hit the roof when we handed it to him. I’m not sure he even wanted to look at it, but we convinced him that he couldn’t let his personal feelings on the subject stop him from being professional, and we all sort of feel like we need to have some sort of antidote or something. But I’ll bet we find he’s burned about half the notes anyway to keep the formula definitively safe from getting out again.”

  “I trust him. And thank you, Caroline.” He flicked his gaze up to the burns on her face. “You got hurt because of me.”

  “No. I got hurt because a lunatic serial poisoner got it into her head that she was saving the world somehow. And besides, how many girls get to say they rode a manticore through downtown while tailing a suspected vampire murderer? It wasn’t all hot spaghetti sauce all the time on this case.” Caroline grinned at him.

  “Woah. Greg ran his true form through downtown?” Darien’s eyes widened and he sat up a bit.

  Caroline nodded “Practically in broad daylight, too,” she said, grinning. “It was fun, once I got used to it. I’d never seen him like that before. He’s amazing!”

  “Wow.” Darien sat back again.