Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Vampire Summer ❯ It's in the Blood ( Chapter 9 )

 

 

Sam called me around mid-morning and wanted to know why I hadn't brought Crystal home last weekend like we had arranged. I didn't even argue with him that, since he had driven off in a huff without her, I had assumed there was no reason for me to go `get' her, and technically he should have come here. He told me he would pick her up this Friday instead.

 

“How are Mary and the kids?” I asked. Sam told me they were all feeling much better but wouldn't be coming back out to the lake. I was relieved. At least they would be safe.

 

Crystal and I took a walk to the beach and spent the day splashing in the water. Now that summer was in full swing, the beach was filled with familiar faces as other families took their vacations. We were all casual friends, summer friends. While Crystal played with kids she hadn't seen since last year, I fielded questions from the parents, and in some cases, grandparents, who wanted to know where Sam was.

 

It was hard to believe that all these people were in such close proximity to a vampire, that we had all been exposed to him for as long as our families summered here. Why hadn't anyone noticed anything until now? I couldn't believe Johnny would have abstained from taking human blood for all these years—unless he hadn't been around until lately? If that was the case, where had he been?

 

I knew his routine now. When the sun got low in the sky, we packed up our things and headed back up to the cottage. Johnny was an early riser. Sure enough, he was sitting on the couch watching TV when we got back. We were full of sand and I brushed past him so I could rinse off before supper. I took Crystal with me.

 

Johnny had supper waiting for us when we got out of the shower. He had even poured me a glass of wine. I could get used to this. Sam never cooked me supper.

 

“You stay here,” he told me while we ate. “I'm going back to visit Aunt Beth.”

 

It was cute, if a little creepy, that he called her `Aunt Beth,' but then again, what else would he call her? “Don't hurt her,” I said. He would do what he wanted to do, but I wanted to make my opinion known. Crystal was listening, and Johnny knew it.

 

He patted the top of Crystal's head. “I'll be back later,” he told her, completely ignoring me and my comment. “Before you go to sleep.”

 

Crystal nodded. “Don't drink Aunt Beth's blood,” she ordered him in her no-nonsense Mommy voice. She hadn't missed my comment.

 

Johnny grinned. “Ok,” he replied. “I'll be very good.”

 

“Can you bring me back some of those cookies with the chocolate on the bottom?” Crystal asked.

 

“Crystal!” I said, but Johnny told her he would. He was spoiling that child.

 

At loose ends after Johnny left, I pulled out all my notes from the library and the Town Hall and went over them again. The name Jonathan Price came up at three distinct intervals—the end of the 17th century when he supposedly drowned, then again in the beginning of the 19th century, where there was just a brief mention of the name, and finally around the time of the Civil War, when he was supposedly lost in the woods. I wondered where he was all the rest of the time, although possibly he used different names.

 

I tried to match up the mentions of Jonathan Price with deaths in the area, and there was definitely a correlation. After Elizabeth Smythe died in 1693, many other Smythes started dying off over the next couple of years. In fact, the death rate for the town in general soared in those few years. The same thing happened at the turn of the century, but not as noticeably. In the early 1800's, a rash of deaths occurred within two or three prominent town families—the Smythes, the Jameson's, and the Coopers. All common enough names. In my own family, my great-grandmother was a Cooper. I didn't think she came from around here, though. I didn't have any family in the area, thank goodness.

 

I hadn't found a death record for the Jonathan Price who was mentioned in a journal in 1803. Maybe he just left town that time. In the 1860's, specifically in 1861 and 1862, it was the Crew family who was hit with a wave of deaths due to disease, although again, other town families were affected also. I guessed that was during Johnny's grieving period for his lost Emily. Come to think of it, the deaths in the late 1600's came after Elizabeth Smythe had died. Was Johnny reacting to her death as well? Then who was he mourning in the early 1800's?

 

I put my notes back in their hiding place under the mattress, spreading them out so they didn't make a visible bulge. “Come on, pumpkin,” I called out. “Time for bed.”

 

“Mom!” Crystal whined. “Johnny's not back yet. He said he would be back before I went to bed.”

 

“You can see Johnny tomorrow,” I said. “You can hardly keep your eyes open. I'll send him in to say good-night when he gets back, all right?” Crystal yawned, and nodded. She got up and shuffled off to bed. I put on the kettle and made myself a cup of tea and settled myself in front of the TV to wait for Johhny's return. It wasn't like him to go back on his word to Crystal.

 

Finally, around one a.m. I went to bed. Johnny had never come back. I hoped Aunt Beth was all right. I didn't consider that something might have happened to Johnny. He was a vampire.

 

In the morning, we took a quick ride up to Aunt Beth's house to check on her. She met us at the door, cheery and none the worse for her encounter with the vampire, apparently.

 

“Did Johnny come to see you last night?” I asked, as we sat down to a second breakfast of tea and toast.

 

“Oh, yes, and he had lots of questions. For someone his age, he knew a lot about this town's history already. I asked him what his last name was as we were looking through the genealogy charts again. I thought he might have been related, but he told me no, he was from out of state.”

 

“Did he tell you his last name?” I asked, curious. Would he have said `Price' again?

 

Aunt Beth looked puzzled. “You know, he never did say,” she replied. I was not surprised.

 

Crystal asked for the cookies with the chocolate bottoms, and Aunt Beth rummaged around in her cabinets until she found some. “Johnny was supposed to bring me some of these back,” Crystal said as she put a cookie in her mouth. “These are so good.”

 

I was vaguely embarrassed that Crystal had asked for the cookies, but I was more concerned about what had affected Johnny so much that he hadn't bothered to return to us last night. I wandered into the genealogy room. There was Elizabeth Smythe. Her tree ended abruptly, and of course there was no mention of Jonathan Price because they hadn't been married yet. I remembered that I had wanted to go back to the cemetery and try to find her gravestone among the Smythe plots. Her brother Robert's tree was next, and it branched out all the way to the present time. There was another brother, Daniel, and then a sister, Mary, who had died in 1694. The parents had also died in 1694, but the two brothers survived to continue the family line. I traced Robert's tree. He had five children, all born in the early 1700's, and his youngest daughter, Sarah, married a Cooper in 1733. That explained the Cooper connection. I couldn't see anything that would have set Johnny off. He hadn't seemed upset the first night we had visited this room. I wandered back out.

 

“Did Johnny say where he was going after he left here?” I asked. Crystal was still enjoying her cookies along with her cup of real tea.

 

“He prob'ly had to go to sleep,” Crystal mumbled, and I hoped she would refrain from bringing up the vampire thing again.

 

Aunt Beth chuckled. “He said he had to see a friend,” she replied. “We had been looking at some of my old photo albums. He was very interested in the pictures from the early 1900's, then after we had gone through two albums, he said he had to leave. I was sorry to see him go. He's good company for an old lady.” Her eyes twinkled.

 

He should be—he was older than Aunt Beth by at least a couple of centuries. I wondered what he had seen in those old photo albums. “Do you think we could see the pictures too?” I asked.

 

Aunt Beth was happy to oblige. There were old wedding pictures in there that reminded me of my grandmother, and photos of soldiers in uniform from the First World War. Lots of the pictures showed views of the lake, and of some of the other places around town. There was another big old house that I remembered from my visits into town. It was now a garish purple, and although it was hard to tell in the old black-and-white photo, it looked like it might have been white at one time. “Whose house is this?” I asked.

 

“That belonged to my cousin, Charles Smythe. Betty's mother lives there now. Johnny asked me about it, too. He said he had been there.”

 

“Recently?” I asked, before I realized what I was saying.

 

“I would suppose so,” Aunt Beth replied. “He said he had been to my house before, too, but I don't remember him. I must have hired him at one time or another to shovel my driveway or mow the lawn,” she said.

 

I doubted that. Johnny had probably been in this house before Aunt Beth was ever born. “Did you and your husband buy this house or was it already in the family?” I asked.

 

“No, this house belonged to my family. I inherited it after my parents passed away.”

 

That explained why Johnny had been here before. He must have been in the purple house, too.

 

“Are any of the people in these pictures still living?” I asked. I was trying to figure out if one of them could have been the `friend' Johnny had told Aunt Beth he was going to see.

 

“Let's see . . . no, he's gone, and he's gone. Old Mr. Jameson might still be alive. He's always been something of a loner. If he's alive, he would be extremely old by now.” She pointed to another photo, which showed a family at our beach. The father wore a one-piece striped swimsuit-tanktop contraption, and the mother wore a dress-like thing that went down to her knees, followed by tights of some sort, and a bathing cap. Only the little child, a boy, had on shorts that looked fairly normal. They sat on a blanket and squinted into the sun. “This picure is from 1929. That's my cousin, another Jackson, Jackson Smythe, and his parents were Charles and Elizabeth, the ones who owned the purple house. He died about ten years ago.”

 

I gave up. I had no idea what `friend' Johnny could have gone to visit. “Well, if you see Johnny again, tell him we were looking for him,” I said as we were leaving.

 

I stopped at the cemetery on my way back and searched for the first Elizabeth's grave. I found it, among the other Smythe graves. Crystal picked flowers from where they grew wild near the stone fence, and we put them on Elizabeth's grave. I sorted through some of the broken pieces of slate that had writing on them as I found them on the stone wall, but there were too many of them and they were too fragmented. If Jonathan Price had other grave markers, I wasn't going to find them.

 

We waited for Johnny that night, but he didn't come. I hoped nothing had happened to him. Was that wrong of me? Shouldn't I have hoped that something had happened to him? I hadn't had a chance to tell him that Sam was coming to take Crystal for the weekend. As long as he was going to stay away, it would be better if he stayed away all weekend. That way I could avoid the whole problem.

 

“Come on, Crystal!” I said, exasperated. It was Friday afternoon and her father would be here soon. “You want your hair to be even, don't you?” I was trying to give her a trim, and she wasn't making it easy. “There, finished,” I said at last. “Let's go rinse you off and you'll be ready to go.”

 

Instead of taking a shower, I had her kneel on a chair so I could wash her hair in the kitchen sink.

 

“Ow, ow, ow!” she cried, pulling her head away from me. Fine, we'd do this the easy way.

 

“Get undressed,” I said, wrapping her sudsy hair in a towel. “You can rinse off in the shower.”

 

That was easier said than done with the big towel wrapped around her head. I helped her shrug out of her shirt. For some reason, she didn't mind getting her head wet in the shower, but she hated the sink. I slid her arm out of the sleeve and the arm stretched out momentarily as the piece of cloth snagged on the towel. In the crook of her elbow were two tiny raised freckles—at least they looked like freckles, little brown specks on her fair skin. I pulled off the other sleeve and checked that arm. No freckles, raised or otherwise. “What's this?” I asked her, once the shirt was off. “When did you get these?”

 

Crystal looked, then shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. She stepped into the shower and vigorously scrubbed her hair while my mind raced. It wasn't a rash. Just because she had two evenly spaced freckles on the inside of her arm where none had been there before didn't mean Johnny had bitten her, did it? No, Johnny's bites appeared the next day as a rash. I relaxed a little. I was reading too much into it. She probably got them from being in the sun.

 

As she was getting dressed after her shower, Crystal looked thoughtfully at the small marks on her left arm. “I think those are from Johnny's teeth,” she said, and my blood ran cold.

 

“What do you mean?” I asked. Johnny had promised me he would not drink her blood.

 

“I told him he could drink my blood,” Crystal said, almost as if she had heard my thoughts. “It was fun. It didn't hurt at all.”

 

I couldn't believe my ears. All this time, I had believed Crystal to be safe from Johnny's depredations. To think that he had been preying upon her all along . . . I was suddenly glad that he was gone! I grabbed Crystal's arm and prodded the two marks. “Does it hurt now?” I asked anxiously.

 

“No. I forgot all about it until you showed me,” she replied.

 

“Honey, please don't let Johnny drink your blood,” I begged her, hugging her close to me. “You're too little. You need all your blood yourself.”

 

Crystal nodded earnestly. “I know, Johnny said so too.”

 

And yet he had done it. He had taken her blood. I wanted to kill him.

 

A horn beeped. “Daddy's here,” I said, as I gathered up Crystal's stuff. “Be a good girl and I'll see you Sunday.” I kissed her good-bye, then whispered in her ear. “Don't talk about Johnny or vampires to Daddy, ok? He doesn't understand.” Crystal nodded again, and climbed into Sam's car for the long ride home.

 

For once, I wanted Johnny to appear. I wanted to confront him about Crystal. If he was slowly killing her anyway, what was I waiting for? What was the worst he could do to me? Kill me? He was going to do that sooner or later; I might as well give him a good reason for it.

 

When he didn't show up again Friday night, I decided to go looking for him. I walked up the hill in the dark to the cemetery, my flashlight the only thing that kept me on the right path. It didn't light up very much. I moved back and forth through the gravestones and hoped Johnny would appear like he had that first time, but he didn't. Eventually, I ended up at Jonathan Price's grave, and I sank down on the ground. I hadn't even thought to bring a shovel. If he was in there, I couldn't get to him. “Johnny,” I said out loud, “if you're in there, know this: I will find you and I will stop you from hurting my Crystal. She's mine, not yours. You can't have her. Not now, not ever.”

 

Eventually, I left the cemetery and walked back down the paved road to the cottage. I avoided the dirt road that led around the back of the lake because I was still afraid of those dogs, but I didn't want to go inside the empty cottage yet. I continued past, and went down to the beach. I wasn't dressed for a swim but I waded knee-deep into the calm water and let it soothe me. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. I felt so helpless.

 

It was late when I finally made it back to the cottage. I fumbled in the dark for my key, when suddenly the front door opened. Johnny stood in the dark living room, staring at me, and he didn't look happy. Well, that made two of us.

 

I pushed his chest and he took a step back into the room. “You drank Crystal's blood!” I screamed at him, still pounding on his chest. “You promised me you wouldn't!”

 

I saw real surprise in Johnny's eyes before they clouded over with annoyance. He gripped my arms to stop me from pummeling him. “Stop it,” he said. “Before I get angry.”

 

“I don't care if you get angry!” I yelled. “You promised! You broke your promise!”

 

Johnny dragged me over to the couch and flicked on the light so that I blinked. His eyes took on that dangerous darkness that usually preceded something violent, and I watched him grit his teeth together and grimace, as if trying to keep himself under control. “I never promised that,” he said quietly.

 

“You did!” I yelled. I couldn't do much else. He held my arms in a vise-like grip and stared into my face.

 

“I promised I would not hurt her, and I did not,” he said, striving for a reasonable tone of voice, but I could hear the strain in it.

 

“Why? Why did you do it?” I asked, not yelling anymore.

 

Johnny took a breath to reply, hesitated, then tried again. He seemed uncomfortable. “I had to know,” he said softly. “I had to taste to know.”

“Know what?” I asked, frustrated.

 

“It's in the blood,” he said. “I won't take from her again, now that I know. You can rest easy. I won't take from her until she's ready to come to me.”

 

“What's that supposed to mean?” I muttered angrily. My arms were sore from where I kept trying to pull away from Johnny. I could tell he didn't like that, because his eyes darkened dangerously again.

 

“No more talking,” Johnny said. “Where's Crystal now?”

 

“It's her father's weekend,” I said sullenly. “She'll be back Sunday night. So you'll have to make do with just me for the next couple of days.”

 

Johnny let go of my arms so suddenly that I fell backwards on the couch. “I'll do that,” he said viciously. But he made no attempt to do it right then. He flipped on the TV and sat back. “Go to bed,” he said to me.

 

I went. It looked like my resident vampire was back for the time being. Nothing had changed, except that now I knew there was something in Crystal's blood that was not in mine, and that's why Crystal was his life, while I was just food.

 

“Where did you go?” I asked from the door of my room. I couldn't see him past the kitchen, but I knew he could hear me.

 

“Out of state,” was his clipped reply. I went to sleep, not knowing when he would come, or if I would wake up.