Another Sunny Day: the Vampire's Daughter Strikes Back!: Fifty Percent Vampire #2

  ANOTHER SUNNY DAY

  ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5.

  CHAPTER 1

  (Astrid)

  Astrid in not-so-Wonderland

  I sprang awake, acutely alert. Something in our house didn’t feel right. I held my breath and listened, but there was no sound, not even the usual wind whistling through the pines. A stray sunbeam had already penetrated the chink between the drapes and was creeping menacingly over the foot of my bed. I cringed away from it, muttering because I’d overslept. Mom would be out cold by now, so there was no use me running to her for reassurance. Whatever had caused my uneasiness I would have to deal with alone. I swiped away a newly-dangling cobweb, swung my legs out of bed onto the cold floor, and reached hastily for my shoes. The water in the ewer was icy too, but, splashed on my face, it soon had my eyes wide open.

  I dressed hurriedly and tiptoed from my room, then stood motionless in the tiny attic hallway to listen again. No sound, no creak of a board to betray an intruder’s presence. My heart hammering, I crept down the stairs like a scared little girl, terrified that one of my stepfather’s sidekicks might be coiled ready to spring from a hiding place and rip out my traitorous throat. But daylight was streaming through the bedroom door I’d left open, so, logically, it wasn’t possible. It would be certain destruction for any of those monsters to try it. They would burn to a crisp before they reached me.

  “Mom?” I called softly. “Angus?”

  On the second floor landing I stopped short. Mom’s door stood ajar, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign for once absent from the brass doorknob. “Mom?” I called again, gripping the dusty handrail hard. “Are you awake?”

  No answer. This was unusual. Normally Mom kept her bedroom door locked at all times. My heart pumping adrenaline, I pushed open the door and, my skin tingling with curiosity, ventured inside Mom’s room, the first time I’d set foot in this most taboo of territories in all of my eighteen years.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting to find inside: the chill of the tomb, the scent of incense, arched gothic windows, creepy funereal urns and a mahogany coffin on a raised black marble slab, maybe; but the room appeared almost normal—well, what passed for normal in our little house that stood in the middle of a creepy forest: Mom’s favorite rosewater perfume, a sink-into carpet, pale wallpaper, a queen-size bed covered in red satin, a small Quaker style chest of drawers standing to the left of it. Wax from the candle we’d lit yesterday evening in the nightroom had dripped onto the carpet, and to the right of the bed there was even a full-length freestanding mirror that had seen better days, though heaven knows what use Mom made of it. Mirrors aren’t really our thing.

  Next to the remains of the candle stood a framed photo of my red-haired aunt and cousin, from a few years back though, Aunt Jean smiling in that saintly way she has, Emma still a gap-toothed, freckle-faced kid. Thick wooden shutters blocked all light from outside, and heavy velvet drapes framed the window, presumably to make doubly sure none of the deadly rays could penetrate, but this morning they weren’t drawn firmly shut, which was another worrying sign of something amiss.

  I stood motionless with fear. Mom hadn’t come home this morning. Maybe the clan had taken her at last. As dusk fell last night I’d begged her not to leave the relative safety of our house, but she’d just laughed and stroked my hair. “Astrid, there’s a full moon,” she’d said. “Nothing can keep me at home tonight. Not even you.”

  I slumped down on the bed and wished Mike were by my side. Instead, my protector was more than a hundred miles away beyond the river, going about his policemanly duties, ten-four, oblivious to my perilous state, unless since I’d left he’d miraculously developed telepathic skills and had tuned in to the desperate messages I was now firing his way. Trying to phone him was out of the question, as cell signals were nonexistent this far from civilization, blocked out by the high mountains that towered over our isolated village.

  The nightroom! Maybe Mom had fallen asleep in the nightroom, forgetting—not for the first time— that day followed night. My heart pounding, I rushed out of her room and descended to the first floor. But the nightroom yawned empty, last night’s cozy log fire a heap of gray ashes spilling over the grate, Mom’s armchair vacant, my late stepfather’s high-backed wingchair ominous in its empty dominating presence. I shivered and went to check in the kitchen.

  Nothing there either.

  My hope now mostly lost, I unbolted and unlocked the front door and peered cautiously outside. The neighboring houses were silent, their windows shuttered against the light. “Mom!” I yelled, in the forlorn hope she was out there, and the sound of my voice echoed off the walls.

  There was a flutter of wings. I jumped in fright, but then relaxed. I’d startled a raven on the roof, that was all. It swooped low along the street and vanished into the early morning mist between the trees. I closed and locked the door. Where could Mom be? It was beginning to look as though they really had taken her during the night. I stood in the empty hallway, feeling totally alone, desperate for someone to share my unease. I even wished for snide Angus to materialize and lie to me that everything was okay. Maybe Mom was with him, she would be safe with him, he wouldn’t let her come to any harm.

  I jogged back upstairs to Mom’s room and half-opened one of the shutters. Light streamed in and illuminated the empty bed. In one of the corners of the room stood a cabinet that I hadn’t noticed previously in the darkness, a lacquered cabinet painted with Japanese motifs, the drawers mostly locked. But not all of them.

  The top left-hand drawer slid open when I pulled at its handle, and my heart leaped in exultation. Inside lay a pile of letters. I picked them out and scanned through them, hoping for some personal message from Mom, but the papers were too old, yellow with age, the ink faded. To my surprise the letters were signed by Greg. She’d kept them all these years, the seventeen years and more he’d been gone. Wow, the beautiful handwriting on these pages belonged to the person who until last week I had understood to have been my father. Until Mom’s latest revelation, that was. All the same, I didn’t care to read their private communications, as finding out where Mom had disappeared to was more important to me right then, so I replaced the pile of letters in the drawer and shut it.

  Next, I tried the top right-hand drawer, its little golden key still in the lock. Another piece of paper lay inside the drawer, this time the ink hardly dry. I snatched up the note, as surely it had to be for me!

  ‘Dearest daughter,’ I read. ‘Why are you sneaking around in my holiest of holies?’

  Grrrr. I forced myself to smile. Truly, my mother was capable of cracking a joke at the most inappropriate of times.

  ‘Seriously, now you’re reading this, you must be wondering where I am. The truth is, after all that’s happened to us recently, I’ve decided I need to take a short break. Get away from it all, go somewhere nobody knows me, work things through. Home’s too full of memories that are getting the upper hand. Being away will be better. Being away will help me rid myself of some ghosts, and learn what I’ve become after all these years together with your stepfather. And besides, I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.’

  That’s right, she’d often told me that before. Although she’d been born in the Mid-West, she’d never even set eyes on Lake Michigan, let alone the Pacific.

  Nor, for that matter, had I. A pang of jealousy shot through me. She could have taken me with her. br />
  ‘And you’ll be much safer without me. Return to my sister’s house. The humans there won’t harm you. You have my blessing to shack up with Mike, if you feel so inclined. The only thing I don’t want you to do is come looking for me, okay? I’ll be fine. If I get lonesome I’ll look up an old friend or two.’

  An old friend? I didn’t know she had any old friends.

  ‘There are many things you don’t know about me. Maybe someday I’ll try to explain, but for now just let me keep the rest of my secrets.’

  Fine by me. The secret Mom had revealed to me about my ancestry just a couple of days ago had shaken my world to the very core. She could keep as many of her other secrets as she liked.

  ‘And that’s all I have to say to you, except please don’t worry about me. I’ll get in touch when I’ve had my fill of the ocean. I might even send you a postcard. Bye. Lots of love, Ophelia Sonnschein, aka Mom.’

  I forced myself to breathe slowly and deep, working desperately to stay calm. Wow, there’s nothing like being thrown out of the nest and abandoned to fend for yourself. I came back home to be with you after you lost your husband and this is how you reward me?

  Thanks, Mom, thanks a bunch.

  ‘PS I’ve left a supply of flasks in the basement. Enough to keep you going till you reach Jean’s.’

  That reminded me I hadn’t drunk yet that morning. On cue, my stomach began to rumble. I descended to the basement, all the time looking and listening out for anything abnormal, and reluctantly picked up one of the flasks. I unscrewed it, licked my dry lips and threw back my head, grimacing as the still-warm red liquid slithered down my throat.

  For as long as I can remember, my main source of nourishment has been blood. That must mean something, and the only logical explanation is that I have more than a hint of something non-human in me. Angus liked to mock me, laughing at me for my disgust of a necessity. He kept telling me it was no different to eating a rare steak, the way many humans do, and nor should I forget the semi-nomadic Maasai people from the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania, who live on fresh blood and milk from their cattle. I tried to convince myself he was right. Occasionally it made drinking blood easier. But most times I just wanted to throw up.

  Mom was right. I couldn’t survive here on my own. Not against beings who saw me as a threat. Somebody who knew where to find them, who with a stray word, or a deliberate one, could have a mob swarm the place and wipe them off the face of the planet. Somebody better off dead. For that reason, I’d never intended to stay at home for long. All the same, I’d hoped Mom and I could have found time to have a civilized discussion about where we should take refuge, instead of her just running out on me. But maybe she was right to decide for us both. There was no longer a future for us here, not since my stepfather had been killed. Though George Sonnschein had turned out to have been worse than evil, with him around we’d still had a measure of protection, but now he was dust on the wind, and the clan had declared hunting season open on Mom and me.

  For a long time, I stared at the note again. She wanted me to go back to her sister’s and be safe. And to do that she expected me to undertake an ultra-hazardous journey through the forest all by myself. But how else could I reach the haven of Aunt Jean’s holier-than-thou house? When I’d looked outside, I’d noticed the BMW had gone. That selfish woman expected me to walk. Or run. Sixty miles through hostile territory. Forest she’d always told me never to venture into alone. But now I had no choice if I wanted to stay alive. If by some miracle I made it as far as the bridge I could hope to hitch a ride for the remaining forty miles. Or call Mike and beg him to come fetch me.

  I scrunched the note into a ball and threw it hard at the nearest wall. A very human part of me wanted to shout and scream, but I held myself in check, knowing such a waste of emotion wasn’t worth the effort. I needed to stay cold-blooded and go upstairs to pack for my journey, instead of letting my anger at Mom overcome me. But I was angry, furiously angry. Surely she’d understood why I’d left Mike behind and come home to stay with her?

  But maybe I’d come back here for a selfish reason also. Experience told me I was hardly safer out there among humans. George had been against me leaving home, but Mom had insisted I was ready to make my own choice. But after all that had happened in the year since I had left, I wasn't so sure I’d made a good decision. George may have been right all along.

  In a rage, I pounded up the stairs to my attic, changed into clean running gear, and stuffed a change of clothes into my backpack. There was no time to lose. I needed to make use of all the midsummer daylight hours on offer and the clock was ticking. As I packed, I prayed for rain too, or at least a buildup of clouds to block out the sun’s rays. Jogging the forest paths instead of the road I could take advantage of any shade, but there were many treeless areas I would have to sprint across, and for such obstacles maximum cloud cover was essential.

  Next stop was my stepbrother’s room. I wanted the big killing knife that hung on his wall with his other trophies. As I weighed it in my hand, I didn’t doubt for a moment Angus would be as mad as the biggest hornet in history at me for ‘borrowing’ his most prized possession, but I had the feeling I might need it.

  To be honest, I could hardly blame Angus for hating me. If I’d been like him, doomed to be frozen in time, aged twenty-two for eternity, I could easily see it becoming too much to deal with. I’d been tormented enough being sixteen for just one year. As a little kid I hadn’t understood my stepbrother’s problem, couldn’t accept it, and I kept trying to get him to like me. I really wanted him to like me. I thought it would help. Instead I just made him despise me more, and in the end, I came to hate him right back. And I feared him too. As did Mom, with good reason. If that psycho so decided, he would easily be able to kill me. While George was around he never would have dared, but now things were different, and one of my greatest enemies sometimes lurked in the room below mine. But not recently. Which was good because I had enough problems already without adding Angus to the list.

  Sighing, I dragged myself out of my own head and went back to Mom’s room, where I sat on her bed, wiped away a tear, and smoothed out her note. After reading it through once more, I folded it carefully and slid it into an inside pocket of my jacket. I figured I’d need to show the note to Aunt Jean, who doubtlessly would be just as mad at her baby sister as I was, and then we would have to work out our next move. But first I needed to make it to the far side of the forest without dying.

  After a final look round the house, I sat on the stoop to lace up my red running shoes, with a lump growing in my throat. I’d never be coming back here. This was it, my final farewell to this village and good riddance to its sleeping occupants. I hoped to be far enough ahead of the pack by nightfall, at which time I planned to climb a tree, cross all my fingers and toes, and hope for the best. Thank God summer nights were short. The moon had just started to wane too. Given the tough terrain between here and the bridge I reckoned I would need to sleep rough two nights. After the bridge I’d be safe from the monsters that stalked the darkness this side of it. I shook my head in self-disgust. Monsters? Why didn’t I call them by their real name? Vampires.

  A harsh gust of wind blew my hair over my face. I was ready to go. I slung my pack over my left shoulder and set off at a steady jog into the haunted forest, not looking back for an instant. Okay, humanity, here I come.

  CHAPTER 2

  (Mike)

  Drive

  “Mikey! C’mon, we need to leave,” called my partner Lydia Tafani impatiently from the driver’s seat of our cruiser. She was always impatient. I, on the other hand, had learned from experience to be careful not to run into situations I wasn’t prepared for. Mostly.

  “Just a minute.” I was leaning against the police house wall, checking the messages on my cell. Still no reply from Astrid. I wondered when she’d be returning to town. Okay, I realized she and her mom needed some girl-time after recent events, but I wished I knew for how long. Perhaps she’
d be home today. Maybe I’d make an official visit to her aunt’s house in Wicket Lane this evening and enquire how young Emma was coping after her ordeal.

  Lydia hit the horn sharply. “Officer Hanson, move your sweet ass or the chief will have you back on feline recovery duty.”

  I made my way over to the cruiser at a leisurely pace and dropped into the passenger seat. “If he does, I’ll plead a sudden attack of vertigo.” Lately I’d had enough of retrieving Mrs. Roosevelt’s cat from high branches.

  Lydia swung us out of the parking lot and hit the gas, slamming me against the backrest. “Plead what you like, superhero, he won’t believe you.”

  “So what’s the hurry?”

  “Another sighting of the guy you shot at the mall.”

  I sighed. “Again?” It wasn’t possible. My victim had ended up a small heap of dust on the floor of the mall basement, though hardly anyone outside the station house—Astrid excepted—knew the truth. Nobody was ever going to see George Sonnschein again, but that didn’t change the fact people were phoning in sightings of him almost every day. “The whole town’s gone crazy.”

  “You noticed, huh? I thought things would have calmed down a tad now your little girlfriend’s left town.”

  It seemed Lydia hadn’t calmed down since Astrid had left town either. She was still showing signs of jealousy. I should never have let her take that photo of me. I bet she guessed right away who I intended to send it to.

  “Why does it always have to be about Astrid? Give the girl a break. Recently she’s been to hell and back.”

  “Give her a break? She’s trouble, Mike, and you’re going to regret—"

  “Drop it, Tafani.”

  “Okay, Hanson, I’ll drop it. For now. But we both have enough experience to know apples don’t fall far from the tree. Especially the rotten ones. Your sweetheart lived with those two weirdos all of her childhood.” She switched on the blue light and the siren, and we proceeded to the place of the reported sighting in grumpy silence.