The Blood Born Tales (Book 1): Blood Collector Read online

  The woman jumped up and her body came down on his with great power. She was fast and swift. He threw up his arms in an attempt to catch her by the shoulders and turn her attack around on her. The woman came down with her right leg, knocking him backwards so that he was thrown yards across the street, slamming him into a wall.

  The great sheet of glass that he hit vibrated, but refused to shatter. He scrambled to his feet in a feeble attempt to gain footing but instantly she pulled him back down to the ground. In a flash, she was on him, pinning him to the soaked sidewalk, and her teeth went instinctively into the largest pounding artery in his neck. Blood spilled into her mouth as she held this younger vampire close to her. Her lips pushed harder and harder against the immortal’s body, his power and strength passing to her. She loved it.

  “Who are you, vampire?” he managed to ask. Then she released his lifeless body to the drenched pavement and spoke one name to him.

  “Fabiana.”

  With that, a cool, calming breeze blew across the streets and the sounds of violence that had filled the air only moments ago were now a soft hum of rain.

  Fabiana, a beautiful vampire of old Hispania, had moved with amazing speed in and out of the crowd of people that flooded Pine Street Avenue that evening, never once being spotted by the passersby. She was fast leaving her latest kill. Fabiana did not feed on humans like most vampires. No, Fabiana fed only on immortal blood. In fact, she feasted exclusively on vampire blood, and the city of Seattle was definitely a ripe feeding ground.

  Chapter 3

  8:01 a.m., November 23

  Special FBI Agent Jack Mitchell sat alone at his desk in the Violent Crimes division of the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington D.C. He worked at a long wooden desk, a flat monitor computer screen glowing in front of him as crime scene photos cluttered the top of his desk. He clicked away on his keyboard searching the Violent Crime database where he read up on the six killings in Washington State. Special Agent Mitchell was on the trail of a serial killer making her way up the coast. The Seattle Detectives were only aware of the six murders in Washington State. However, things were not as simple as they had appeared to be. Suddenly his private line began to ring, and he snatched up the receiver to answer it.

  “Mitchell.”

  “You have email, Agent Mitchell,” a scrambled computer voice told him.

  “What? Who is this?” Jack asked, and his thoughts were suddenly racing over possibilities of who the voice might be.

  “I say again, you have email.” Keeping the mystery caller on the line, Jack pulled up a waiting message and a moment later it filled the screen of his computer. He was looking at photos of a crime scene that he knew was in Oregon.

  “There was some sloppiness in Oregon when they found the body. Local PD got involved; these were taken at the scene by a crime scene reporter.”

  “These were run in the press?” Jack asked.

  “I trumped up a story about a crazy dog on the loose. Never underestimate the public’s willingness to blame rabid dogs. Too many Cujo fantasies,” the unknown voice told him.

  “Who are you?”

  “Someone like you. Someone who believes. A friend.”

  “But what am I..?” Jack was talking to a dial tone, the voice was gone. Jack then leaned in close to his computer screen and look at the header on the email.

  “User319,” he whispered.

  His conversation with the strange voice unnerved Jack. He had no inkling who the man could be and that was unsettling to him. Over the last few days, Jack had been getting steadily uneasy at work. He felt like he was being monitored and that would not be a stretch of the imagination, working for the government. As an FBI agent, it had always just been part of life and expected that, with this job, someone was always tracking your movements and activities. An agent might never be totally aware of the constant surveillance, but it had always just been understood that it was there, in the background of the FBI.

  But this was different. Jack had a sense someone was not only watching his movements, but his wife’s as well. She had called him about a strange car parked in front of the house just yesterday.

  It was a panicked phone call. She had seen an odd car, a Lincoln Town Car, most likely. New too, from the look of it. The car had blacked-out windows and a dark paint job—black or maybe even a dark blue. But it was the license plates that had given Jack the biggest clue. His wife had said the car was sporting government plates.

  At the time, her words were merely peculiar, and the car had driven away as soon as she had called him. He assumed she was just nervous or looking for attention and that they would never see the car again. But now, on some instinctual level, Jack was sure they still watched his home.

  Jack returned to his work and opened a file on his desk. The body count had risen to 11. All bodies had been drained of blood, just like in Washington State. Trace evidence at all the crime scenes had been confusing to everyone involved so far. Files scattered over his desk featured metal report evidence all dating to different time periods, some even going as far back as the Roman Empire. Many of the victims’ bodies showed signs of physical damage from years prior that no one could have walked away from—stab wounds from blades measuring eight inches and more, for example. Some had even been shot. Most of the fingerprint analyses came up negative. All but one.

  A body found in California came back with a hit off of the ten print card records. When the male victim showed up six months ago, his ten print card was run through the FBI database and they had found a match.

  His name was Daniel Elis of Sacramento, California. He was born in 1945 in California. At the age of twenty, he joined the Army and was sent to the Vietnam War in 1965. He died in South Vietnam a month later and his body was never found. His dog tags had been recovered in the Battle of Bình Giã. He was thought to have been dead, but his body turned up almost fifty years later. His photograph had been taken and compared to the military photo of him in Vietnam. They were one and the same, there was no doubt. He looked the same age as when he died almost fifty years ago in Vietnam.

  Jack had decided to do something that he had never done before. He had enlisted the aid of a reader of psychic energy. Even though he was very open-minded, Jack did not truly believe in the abilities of psychic energy. But his grandmother had tried to teach him many things in his youth. One of which was that everyone has an energy, an aura, and if you can tap that aura, find that energy, much could be revealed. Now all these years later Jack was curious if those things that he had seen as a child could mean something in his adult life.

  The psychic had been employed on several other cases, but this was the first time Jack had been involved with her. Jack was filled with a feeling of great apprehension.

  Jack had an interesting upbringing. He spent most of his life living with his grandparents in the foothills of Beynac in the Dordogne region of France. He was born in The States, but just after he was born, his mother had lost her life. She had suffered a severe head trauma when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver. His mother had passed away without him ever knowing very much about her.

  So he went to France with his father to be raised by his grandparents. His father’s family believed in such things as monsters and told Jack all the tales of the old folklore that many people in their town still believe in to this day. As a small child living in that little hidden-away town in the hills of France, Jack saw things. He saw things that he would never tell another living soul about, not even his beloved wife.

  Vampires did exist. He knew that because he relived his memories of them every night in his dreams. He relived that fateful evening in that beautiful French town. But on that night, the wondrous mystery of those high walls, the lush, tall green trees, and those pastel-colored homes of stone and brick had bled red for him.

  * * *

  There was no skyline on the day he went to see the reader, not so much as a single convenience store or roadside diner in sight. The fog that morning was
thick and seemed impassable. Jack had traveled some distance past roadsides lined by dense trees and the blue haze in the distance by Joan York’s home sat like an intrusive wall. The homes were poor and spread so far apart a gunshot could have gone off and no one would have heard.

  Joan York, psychic to the FBI and oracle to the powers that be, lived in a tiny yard overcome by wildflowers and weeds. Dead cornstalks of a failed garden told their tales of disappointment as a rusting classic Ford Fairlane with flat tires sat in the drive.

  Just as Jack walked up to her tiny porch, the front screen door screeched open and a woman squinted at him in the dull, cold morning.

  “Good morning,” Jack said to her, his feet heavy on the front wooden steps.

  “It’s a fine morning, Agent Mitchell,” Joan York greeted him.

  She was at least seventy and looked as motherly as homemade apple pie. Grey polyester pants were stretched over her wide hips and a wool sweater was buttoned up to her neck. She wore thick slippers and her eyes were light green and covered by thin rimmed glasses. Her hair was pulled up in a neat bun and she directed him to a seat at a small, round wooden table just past the door.

  The room was cluttered with bookshelves filled with a variety of obviously loved and well-read volumes of books ranging from religion and psychology to biographies and history. Jack was very surprised by how many fiction novels he spied on the shelves as well. Much of the creative literature which he himself had enjoyed from time to time graced her collection. There were many spiritual emblems and New Age items around the house that pointed to her occupation, but Jack paid them no mind. He took his seat and opened a file folder for Ms. York to see.

  “I hope it wasn’t much trouble to come to see me here. I am sorry about that, but I have no way to come and see you—I haven’t driven in years. My eyes, you know…” Joan trailed off.

  “I really don’t mind at all.”

  A telephone rang in another part of the house but was immediately cut off by an ancient-sounding answering machine. Several clicks and beeps preceded the pre-recorded voice, but then only silence followed.

  “Here is the file I called you about,” Jack said, gently pushing it to her across the table. “I brought photos as well. You asked for those, as I recall.” She regarded him for a moment and then spoke.

  “I can see right off, Agent Mitchell, that you are not like others from the FBI that I have met. You have experience in these types of cases, but not through the FBI… Yes, I can read it in you…”

  Jack cut her off, “I’m not here to talk about me, Ms. York. Please tell me what you see.”

  She studied the photo for a short while and then spoke again, but this time her demeanor had changed slightly. She was nervous and suddenly seemed hesitant to reveal her insights to Jack.

  “What is it?”

  “This man was found dead?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, waiting for her impressions.

  “But… I sense that this man died a great many years ago, somewhere far from here.”

  “Yes, he was in a war. It was Vietnam,” Jack told her.

  “I feel it was there that he died, but that was not the end of his journey. The man in the photograph was no longer the man he was before. He was dead, but not dead,” she told him. “The man’s soul had been taken from him long before the death of the man’s body had caught up to it. He had been the walking dead.”

  Her eyes fixed onto Jack and the two were very silent. Jack was not utterly surprised by this, he had heard the stories his whole life, from his father. His father was obsessed with monsters and the mystery of old ghost stories. Jack knew them all, more than he cared to admit.

  But Jack did not wish to discuss those details of his life with anyone, especially not an FBI psychic. No matter what her qualifications might be, Jack did not care to hear anything she might have to reveal to him—no great insights about his life and especially not about his wife. Jack knew his destiny already.

  * * *

  That conversation had been many days ago and from that moment on, the evidence had begun to come in and nothing made sense to him, or anyone else for that matter. Jack knew this was a career killer of a case, and it either meant the end of his career in the FBI or the beginning.

  Jack lifted his left hand to his burning eyes and tried to rub away the fatigue that he had begun to feel. He hadn’t slept in days; his wife had left dozens of calls on his voicemail and with the FBI switch board. She knew what kind of man Jack was—that he needed to see this case through to the end—but she wanted him home. Deep down, Jack knew he couldn’t keep this kind of work schedule up for long. Otherwise he would be waking up in a lonely hotel room instead of his home in Georgetown.

  Jack looked down to a picture nestled in a thin oak frame standing upright on his desk. In it, his wife and six-month-old son were smiling back at him. He missed them. He wanted to go home. He knew that he should at least call home, but his mind was stuck on this case. Like most cops, Jack could not concentrate on any other task until this was done. His wife would have to wait; his life, such as it was, would have to wait. Soon his spouse would question whether or not there was another woman in his life. His answer, if he was honest, would have to be, “Yes, but she’s a killer and I intend to find her.”

  Jack was a relatively new agent of the FBI. He was hired right out of the U.S. Army Rangers two years ago. His skills in the 101 almost guaranteed him a spot in Violent Crime and the fact that he held a psychology degree from George Washington University sealed the deal. Even though Jack had proven himself several times already in the FBI, he felt that he had been given a chance with this case to do something great. If he could bring this case to a good conclusion, he would be recognized highly in the FBI and his career would be set.

  Jack directed his attention away from the comforting portrait of his family, picked up the phone and hit speed dial. After a moment, a young woman answered.

  “Yes, this is Special Agent Mitchell. I’m going to need one ticket to Oregon. What…? Yes, this morning, thank you.”

  Jack pinned the phone under his chin as he disconnected the line and then dialed home. He closed his eyes and took a cleansing breath as he did not want to do this.

  “Hello?” A worried voice sounded over the earpiece of the phone.

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Jack, I miss you. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, baby. I’m fine.”

  “Come home.”

  “I can’t, honey. I have to go out of town to Oregon. It’s important.” He closed his eyes as he said the words to his wife.

  “Can’t you even come home first? I haven’t seen you in days.”

  “I wish I could, baby, I really do, but this is important.”

  “So is your marriage,” she stated flatly.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll see you in a couple of days. I love you.”

  “Yeah, I love you too,” she said, sounding disappointed and distant.

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Kiss the little man for me…”

  Then she hung up and the end of the conversation hit him very hard. He hung his head low and closed his eyes, wishing he could take it all back. Jack feared his obsession with his job and that his cases would one day leave him alone and unfulfilled. But he couldn’t stop now.

  Jack got up, grabbed his H&K USP compact handgun and secured it in his holster. He grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and, turning off the overhead fluorescent lights, walked out of his office.

  252

  Chapter 4

  8:45 a.m., November 23

  The Seattle Police Department was a long building of glass and brick that sat on the edge of 5 Avenue in downtown. Large flowing fountains and carefully sculpted trees sat along the walkway as the morning sun was just beginning to peak over the tall office buildings of the city. Seattle had tried very hard to give the police headquarters an inviting look to the people of the city. It was not convincing.

  I pulled my car
up to the security doors at the back of the station and flashed my badge to Sam, the watchman, as he came out of his booth to greet me. He gave me a nod and waved me through the check point. A tall metal gate lurched into action, rattling and shaking as it moved up and I drove my car in. The inside parking garage was more or less empty. The screech of my tires echoed as I turned into my parking spot and came to a quick stop. As I stepped out of my truck, I was assaulted by the smells of dirty water and mildew, a result of the unrelenting wet weather that had plagued the city for weeks. Every break in the downpour is thought of as a gift from God—moods lighten and smiles come out a little easier. But lately it seemed the rain would never stop.

  A ship’s horn moaned mournfully out at sea. Its call pierced the overcast of the fog and a ferry bound for Bainbridge Island made its way into port. A cluster of morning traffic began the daily routine of horn honking and profanity as the city pushed its way to a busy work day and I made my way inside. I strode up to the gate of the depressing and faded concrete rear of the building and it looked remarkably dull compared to the street side of the police department.

  After passing through several security doors and taking the north elevator up, I made my way down the long impersonal hallway of grey painted walls and drab linoleum floors that eventually led to my desk in the homicide department.

  The room was bursting with activity. Detectives and officers talked and ran about to work their leads and the angles of their investigations. Prostitute and informant pictures were tacked to a corkboard around dozens of mug shots of the known and wanted criminals of the city of Seattle. The sunrise bled through the white blinds of the window like fairy dust refusing to land. Coffee makers churned and brewed the morning aroma of your typical police station and my stomach yearned for a cup of the black liquid that I had come to know and love since I was fifteen.