Page 43 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Twenty-One

Three weeks earlier

The man opened his eyes to unfamiliar surroundings with a soul-crushing, splitting headache.

Where was he?

Why was he lying on his back in the middle of the floor?

He looked down at his right hand, which clutched a small piece of paper. He brought it up to his face so he could read it, but the words were gibberish.

There had to be a reason for him to be dressed all in black and sprawled on the floor of this unfamiliar place. For the life of him, he could not remember what it was.

Gods, his head hurt like hell. He rubbed at it and felt a large lump forming just above his right temple. He must have hit his head on the floor when he’d fallen.

Perhaps that was why he couldn’t remember…anything at all.

Including his name.

Was this amnesia?

Was amnesia even real ?

The man sat up, panic fully setting in. He fumbled through his coat pockets for some hint as to his identity. He found an identification card with a photograph of an unsmiling man, beneath which the name Peter Elliott was printed. The address on the card was in Chicago, Illinois.

Was he in Chicago now?

If he went to the address, would he find an explanation for why, among other confounding things, he so desperately wanted to drink human blood?

Neither of us had slept well, so we left Reggie’s apartment later than we’d planned. My phone said it would take about five hours to reach Blossomtown, so in theory we’d still get there before nightfall.

Peter drove, and it was his idea to listen to Chappell Roan once we hit the freeway. From the way he cringed all through Good Luck, Babe! when he thought I wasn’t looking , I now knew he’d only said he liked her to make me happy.

Hopefully this would be the only sacrifice he’d be making for me today.

A traffic snarl on the northern outskirts of Indianapolis kept us from getting to Blossomtown until just after six in the evening.

The sun was already setting when we finally reached the warehouse we’d been driving towards all this time.

As Peter pulled into the parking lot, we saw a row of six identical neon-red station wagons parked in front of the building.

Icy pinpricks of terror and dread assaulted me. The only people with taste that bad, who drove cars that were that on the nose with the red color, were vampires.

As Peter parked my much more muted red car, I slid my just in case bag of tricks from my suitcase into my coat pocket.

Before I’d given up magic, I’d magicked the pockets of this old coat so they’d be like the TARDIS.

Specifically: They were bigger on the inside.

My daggers, the bags of powders, my ring—all of it was coming with us into that warehouse.

Especially now that we had a sense of what might be waiting for us inside.

Peter was staring at the building, his jaw clenched tight.

“Ready?” I asked.

He closed his eyes. “If you want to wait here while I go in, I understand.”

“Peter,” I said, shaking my head, “we’ve been over this.” As much as it warmed some long-dead part of my heart to know he worried about my safety so much, he was being absurd.

“Zelda—”

“We’re not discussing this anymore,” I insisted.

Peter grabbed my hand and gave it a hard, possessive squeeze.

“If something happens to you because of me…” He trailed off, his voice thick.

“Hey,” I said with as much optimism as I could manage. “I’m Grizelda Watson, remember? Grizelda the Terrible, four-time Boston ladies’ bowling league champion, record-setting flagpole sitter. Nothing bad happens to me if I don’t want it to.”

I’d meant it to be tongue-in-cheek and to make Peter smile. It seemed to have the opposite effect.

“There’s a first time for everything,” he said. “I don’t want you to be wrong about your invincibility because of me.”

“I won’t be wrong,” I said. I nodded towards the double doors at the far end of the building, signaling that this discussion was over. “Park over there, away from all those cars. Just in case we have to beat a hasty retreat.”

Peter looked at me for another long moment before obliging and pulling the car into a spot about twenty yards away from everyone else.

“Does anything about this place ring any bells?” I asked.

He nodded. “The memories are murky, but…” He gestured vaguely to our surroundings.

“This is not my first time here. I don’t remember anything specific, but sense memories are flooding me in waves.

I don’t remember faces or any snippets of conversation, but…

I was here. Whatever happened wasn’t pleasant.

” He turned to face me, his mouth set in a grim line.

“ That’s why I don’t want you coming in. ”

I placed a hand on his arm. Gave it a reassuring squeeze. He closed his eyes, knowing this was an argument he couldn’t win.

“I am going in with you, Peter,” I said. “Are you ready?”

His throat worked. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The large double doors on our side of the building were unlocked.

When I opened them, the lights were off, so I conjured a small ball of light in the palm of my hand so we could see.

Peter followed me inside, every line of his body on high alert, his eyes roving everywhere as though unspeakable dangers might be lurking in the dark.

But the warehouse seemed vacant and empty, save for padded floors suggesting the place had once housed a gym, as well as a card table and a set of metal folding chairs dead in the center of the wide-open space.

No people—but the vamps who owned those bright red cars had to be here somewhere.

I crept closer to the table and chairs, since they were all that seemed to be in there.

They looked cheap and rickety, the kind of furniture a college student might find at a secondhand store and bring back to their dorm.

When I held up my light to get a better look, there was a puddle of discolored liquid in the table’s center.

With a quick look over my shoulder to confirm Peter was right behind me—he was—I moved closer to the table. And gasped in horror when I got there.

Slumped on the floor beside the table were three young men and an older woman whose throats had all been cut.

Or at least I thought their throats had been cut; they were bleeding from so many different places, it was hard to tell.

Either way, their wide, sightless eyes and the large puddle of blood in which they lay made clear that all four of them were very, very dead.

Now that we were this close, the unmistakable rusty scent of blood filled my nostrils.

“Those motherfuckers,” I spat. Aside from newborn vampires, who were notorious for their poor self-control, it was only the most sadistic vampires who killed their victims. Most vampires subscribed to what seemed, to me, a reasonable enough philosophy.

Which was: If the person they were feeding from died, mealtime was over.

On a hunch, I held up my light so I could see the top of the card table more clearly. Sure enough, that puddle I’d noticed earlier was a thick pool of congealing blood.

My stomach turned, even as I willed my lunch from earlier in the day to stay down.

“Wait,” Peter said. He stood so close I could feel his cool breath against the top of my head. “What is that on the table?”

“Blood,” I said, getting queasier by the second. “Human, most likely, based on context clues.”

“No, not that,” he said impatiently. “What is this ?”

I looked again and saw that beside the blood lay an old-fashioned red plaid pocket square. Half of it was soaking in the bloody pool, as if its owner had attempted to clean up the mess before abandoning the project as a lost cause.

Peter crept forward, approaching the table the way one might approach a wild and dangerous animal. He gingerly picked up the clean edge of the pocket square between two fingers, then held it up to the light I still held in my hand.

“What is it?” I asked, confused.

He didn’t reply or otherwise acknowledge he’d heard me. He simply stared at the pocket square as if it held the answers to all the secrets in the universe. My light cast him in long shadows, and I watched him as he examined the fabric, scrutinizing his face for some hint as to what was going on.

And then…

I gasped. “ Peter .”

Because I could see it, clear as day, the instant his lost memories returned. One moment, his dark, luminous eyes were as they had always been. The next, there was a clarity in them so acute I hadn’t even realized it had been missing.