Page 50 of Silent Stalker
TWELVE
Did you just call him a lizard?
I neededto do something physical before I went insane, and to keep the penthouse intact, Emerick armed me with a collection of his black oak stakes and a canteen loaded up with Wagyu blood before setting me loose in Central Park. He suggested I might better contain my temper if I had new stakes to carve.
As he was likely right, I went along with the temporary eviction. Hissing at him earned me a laugh from my husband, who promised he’d wrangle information while I hunted for some good wood.
I understood he also meant for me to hunt vampires should I find any. I hoped for a respite from dealing with victims, longing for a relaxing evening at a peaceful beach.
Maybe one day I would be able to lounge out beneath the sun again, but I would do my best to embrace what I could do rather than regret what I couldn’t.
Instead of branches on the verge of breaking off, I found a starving vampire.
I estimated the boy to be no older than the age of five or six, and as far as I could tell, he’d crawled out of a shallow grave dug in one of the wilder sections of the park. The tattered ruins of clothes clung to him, so encrusted with dirt I wondered just how long he’d been left in the ground before rising. More like animal than child, he hissed at me, cowering against a tree trunk. The tiny fangs he displayed wouldn’t do much harm to anyone, even if they sat still while he gnawed on them.
I would need to thank Emerick for sending me off with blood later.
“Hey,” I whispered, loud enough for the boy to hear me, hoping I wouldn’t draw unwanted attention until I managed to contain him without doing injury to either one of us. I opened my mouth and concentrated as Emerick had taught me, displaying my fangs. “I have a set of those, too. See?” To draw his attention to my teeth, I pointed at my mouth.
The child’s eyes widened, and he lifted a dirty hand to his mouth. He poked and prodded at his incisors. “Teef?”
I couldn’t tell if the child was younger than I’d expected or if he struggled to pronounce ‘teeth’ with his fangs. “Yes, they’re your teeth. What’s your name?”
“Edgar.” The child frowned, gave his teeth another prod, and eased away from the tree, watching me with wide eyes. His lip trembled, and I struggled to imagine the terror of being so young and waking in a shallow grave, crawling out of the ground to discover a dark world and a relentless thirst.
I could fix the thirst problem, assuming I could lure him over to me. “Do you have a last name, Edgar?”
“Cartwright.” The child swallowed, and he eased closer. “I thirst.”
“I can help you with that. Are you hungry?”
He shook his head. “Thirsty.”
While he had an accent, I understood his English readily enough, although something bothered me about how he pronounced his words. After taking a closer look at his apparel, I realized what bothered me.
The child wore clothes long out of style. “Do you remember what year it is?”
“The year?”
“Yes. The year,” I asked. To cover why I asked, I said, “It’s to help you focus on something other than being thirsty for a moment.”
“Oh. 1832.”
I blinked. If what I knew about vampires was correct, then Edgar had been returned to the ground already turned and healing from something or in a long sleep. But how? I knew one person who might know: Emerick. “Would you like a drink? I can help you with your thirst.”
“Not allowed to have it,” the child whispered. The heavy accent remained, but the more the child seemed to listen to me, the more he adapted his tone to match mine.
I assumed some magic was at play. “You’re not allowed to have what?”
“Blood. It is bad. I should not have it. But I want.”
I shook my head. “It isn’t bad to have blood.” I gave the canteen a shake. “I have some here, and you’re allowed to have it like this. Or from a bottle. We only take blood from living things with their consent.”
“Consent?”
“They allow it,” I explained.
“Oh! So if you allow me, I can bite you and have a drink? Thirsty.”
