??I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Sure. What good would burning his house down do for us if he’s buried on the other side of town?”
Newton frowned. “Well…we told you what happened to us. The bugs and all. Something’s there. Crow saw that the doors were all locked from the inside. He figures Boyd was using it as a hideout. Maybe Griswold’s buried in the cellar or bricked up in a wall or something. ”
“That would be very convenient, and if this was an Edgar Allan Poe story I’d even say likely…but something tells me it’s not going to be that easy. ”
He gave her a tired smile. “This is Pine Deep…nothing here is ever easy. ”
3
He wanted to do one thousand cuts and then go back inside and work the store, but he lost count somewhere in the three hundreds and that was forty minutes ago. The sword handle was starting to slip in his sweaty palms and Mike’s shoulders ached as he raised the wooden blade over his head and brought it down, over and over again. He strived for the rhythm that Crow always had when he used the bokken, the hardwood training sword, but knew that his blows were clumsier, rougher, driven more by rage than art. Each time the dull edge whacked the leather wrapping of the striking post the shock through his wrists and up his arms; the ache that had started early on had blossomed into burning bands of pain that tore across his chest with each blow. Lactic acid coursed through him; his blood was a hellish cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, and pure hate.
His eyes had long ago turned from blue to red and black flowers seemed to bloom in his vision as he hit and hit and hit.
One blow was for Vic.
The next was for his father.
The next for Vic; the one after that for his father. Over and over again, as the minutes shattered into fragments under the blows, Mike’s face twitched and snarled as he struck. A hundred blows back his nose had started to bleed, and although Mike was aware of that on some level, he just didn’t give a shit. The rage felt good. The violence—however much a sham—felt good.
The burn in his muscles felt good. Felt great. Hate felt wonderful.
The sword rose and then slammed down, first on the right side of the post, then up and down on the left side. The leather was beaten black and then pale and finally it split. Threads of it jumped into the air with each blow.
His cuts had started sloppy, had been a child’s attempt to do a man’s cut. That was two or three thousand cuts ago. Now the sword rose and struck, rose, changed angle and struck; the wood was a blur, the rhythm far better than Mike thought it was. The timing and angle and efficiency of each cut was better than it should have been.
Far, far better.
If Crow had been there, if he could have seen the unrelenting frenzy of Mike’s attack on the forging post. If he had seen the demonic fury in Mike’s eyes and the sneering brutality on his face, he would have done anything he could to stop him. He would have seen the dhampyr crouching inside the boy, and the nameless other crouching inside the dhampyr. Had Crow seen that he would have been more than just terrified for Mike…he would have been terrified of him.
4
It wasn’t until they pulled into the parking lot of the hospital that Val broke the long silence that had endured while they’d gone to her house to get the weapons and ammunition that once belonged to Henry Guthrie. She rubbed her palms over her face, careful of her battered eye socket, then looked at her hands for a moment as if she expected to see something there.
“Where the hell are we?” she asked as Crow turned off the engine. “I mean…I don’t know about you but I’m ready to go on a bear hunt here, but how do you hunt a ghost?”
“Damn if I know, baby. This is new territory for me. I went down to Griswold’s place and got run off by cockroaches. That’s as much as I know about what he is and what he can do. ”
“As frightening as that must have been, Griswold doesn’t seem to have had that much actual power. He dropped the porch and sent the bugs, but you and Newton escaped. ”
“Seemed like a pretty big deal at the time. But I see your point. If he was all that strong, wouldn’t he have just snuffed me out like that?” He snapped his fingers. “The whole bug thing didn’t really do me that much harm. Mind you, I’ll have a case of the butt-rattling shivers forever, but it’s not like I lost a leg or anything. ”
“When this is all over I’ll buy you some shares in Raid. ”
“I’m a Black Flag man myself, ma’am. ”
She gave him a spoonful of a smile, which was a larger portion than he’d seen since Mark’s death. “My point is, honey,” she said, “that I don’t know how much of a real threat Griswold is. ”
“He made Boyd and Ruger into vampires. Jonatha said that psychic vampires can make ordinary humans into vampires. ”
“True, but she didn’t know how that was done,” she said. “Maybe it involves actually going to that house or those woods. Maybe when Ruger was on the run after the fight at the farm he somehow found—or was drawn to—that place. Jonatha said that all it takes is for a person to die evil and unrepentant. Well if you wounded Ruger badly enough and he died there, then maybe that’s how it happened. If so…it’s the first time in what, thirty years?”
“But then Ruger probably bit Boyd and Boyd bit Cowan and Castle. It just takes one Typhoid Mary to start a plague. ”
“Okay, so where are you going with this? Do we put up signs: No Trespassing—Danger of Vampire Infection—all over the Hollow?”
She shot him a look. “No, I’m saying that maybe what needs to happen is that we find some way to sterilize that place. Some kind of ritual, or something. Maybe find a way to bring a couple of pieces of heavy equipment and tear that house down, maybe a backhoe to dig up the swamp. Till the soil and plant garlic everywhere. Something like that. ”