Blood Red

Boyd woke up from his nap at six fifteen. When neither of them could keep their eyes open anymore, they crashed. Just to save time, and because his place was nicer, they both passed out at Danny’s place. Danny had a comfortable couch.

He woke his partner by throwing a sofa cushion at him and telling him to get his lazy ass out of bed. Danny was good enough not to shoot him with the pistol Boyd knew good and damned well he kept under his pillow. It was nice to have a partner he could trust.

Danny forgot about the shower he normally liked to take and got dressed.

They were on the road by six twenty-five.

VII

At six-eighteen in the evening, the last rays of the sun were completely gone from the sky.

At six twenty-three, Jason Soulis looked around the vast cavern under his home and smiled.

“Go,” he said softly. “Go and feed.”

In two weeks’ time, he had brought his experiment to the end of its first stage. Now he would see how well the second progressed.

They rustled in their new clothes, a sarcastic gift presented by him to his children. Black costumes that trailed dark streamers and shredded capes.

The sounds were crushed by the weight of the ocean as they found the entrance to the cave and swam deep into the bay.

Black Stone Bay was awake and the night was young. On street corners and in bars, down long stretches of roads littered with homes, the people who loved to celebrate Halloween walked and played and partied.

At the edge of the Cliff Walk, the waters seethed against the thrusting black teeth that ate the waves as they came in.

One old couple was walking along the side of the Cliff Walk when the vampires made their way out of the cave.

Lionel Woodruff and his wife Cecelia were not fond of Halloween. They’d enjoyed it when they were younger and when their children were still living at home, but that had been a long time ago.

These days they only wanted to be left alone to enjoy their remaining years in relative comfort. Between his arthritis and her angina, it was always a challenge to stay happy, but they managed well enough. The night was young but it was dark, and the fog that seemed to spring from the very edge of the cliffs made it darker still. They were the first to see the black shapes that came out of the water and crawled up the side of the cliff as effortlessly as smoke.

The wet, pale faces and dead eyes of the vampires were the last things either of them saw.

Chapter 20

I

The fog came first, in a thick wet wave that swept over the shore of the bay and into the town proper at a maddening speed. There was nothing subtle about the stuff; it was overwhelming.

The houses along the Cliff Walk were works of art, every one of them an architectural accomplishment that had cost preposterous amounts of money even when they had been built, and were now so expensive that the taxes alone would have ruined a lot of lower-income families. The fog buried them completely as it rose and moved ashore.

Kelli lost track of her friends almost immediately. She was taking care of a little girl named Jayce Thornton. Jayce had planned to dress as a witch for the event and had lost her hat when the wind picked up. So the two of them stayed behind to look for it, and by the time they discovered the black, pointy affair, it had wedged itself in a tree. Kelli did her thing and climbed up the elm while the little girl watched her. The air had been misty when she started up, but the fog had struck and done its damage by the time she finally climbed down with the hat’s brim caught between her teeth.

In thirty seconds the visibility was down to nothing.

In a minute, she and Jayce couldn’t even see the sidewalk under their feet and all the damned flashlights did nothing but make the air glow brightly.

“Where are we?” Jayce was laughing, but she sounded a little nervous. Kelli couldn’t blame her. It was crazy dark out.

“Hey, perfect weather for Halloween. Let’s go find some goblins.”

She took the little girl’s hand in her own and they started walking, listening for the sounds of the others. Happily, the noises were still there, because it didn’t take them too long to find the rest of the group.

Erika was just about completely gone in the fog, and she used it to her advantage to scare the shit out of Kelli. One second, everything was just dandy and the next, the whiteness came alive and shot a flashlight beam in her face. The little ghost next to Erika did the exact same thing to Jayce. It could have gone south fast, but she managed to stop the witch from beating the bejesus out of the little ghost. If she’d been a little slower on recovering, she would have never stopped the fist Jayce swung at the ghost kid in time and there would have been a lot more boohooing and a bloody nose.

A minute later both of the kids seemed fine again and all was well, give or take the fog. They finished with the last house on the seaside of the street and were getting ready to head for the other side when things really did go wrong.