Forever Fearless

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

“Babe, we can’t keep her,” Colt said, somewhat reprovingly.

“Why not?” Robbie sat on the ground in the forest, leaning against a tree. He cradled the defenseless fawn in his lap, rocking her back and forth. “She’ll die on her own. Colt, we killed her mother!”

Colt sighed then turned away. He paced back and forth for a few moments in the clearing a few feet away. Robbie could see how frustrated he was, but he didn’t care.

They couldn’t just leave the little baby there like that. Had he known about her, he would’ve never allowed Colt to slaughter her mother.

“The merciful thing will be to just—”

“We’re not killing her!” Robbie pulled the trembling baby deer against his chest.

“She’s just a little girl. A baby.”

“Robbie, please.”

“I’ll take care of her, I promise.”

Colt shook his head furiously. “Robbie, we’re f*****g vampires. We can’t take in pets.”

“Why not? Humans are carnivores too and they have pets.” Colt’s reasoning made no sense. It was, well, unreasonable. “If a baby cow had no mother, don’t you think humans would take care of it? They wouldn’t leave it to die.”

“That’d be a calf, and yeah, they’d take care of it, but only till it got big enough to eat! Or they’d use it for veal.”

Robbie’s mouth dropped open as if Colt had just said a curse word. “We’re not eating her and we’re not leaving her here to starve. That’s final!”

Colt stepped toward him, holding out his arms. “Give her to me,” he said. “I promise, I’ll do it quickly. She won’t suffer.”

“No!” Robbie screamed, the anger within him mounting. He looked directly into his lover’s eyes. “I said no!” Robbie extended one arm, palm outward, as if to fend off Colt’s encroachment, and as he did so, something surged through Robbie’s core. A jolt of something—electricity, perhaps—traveled down his arm at lightning speed and blasted from his palm. The bolt of electricity, or whatever it was, was so forceful, it nearly knocked Robbie backward.

And it did strike Colt in the center of his chest. Arms flailing he flew backward in the air, some twenty feet, and landed flat on his back.

Robbie gasped and jumped up. “Colt! Oh my God! What have I done?”

~~~~~

“Now that’s what I call a piece ’o meat.” Wayne looked down at his own plate and assessed the gigantic rib eye as the waitress slid Deborah’s plate in front of her.

“Wow,” she said, somewhat embarrassed. “I’d have never ordered something like this, but—”

“It’s okay, ma’am,” the thirty-something waitress said. She wore a pair of skin tight jeans and a checkered shirt, then topped off the get-up with a cowgirl hat and a pair of boots. “This here’s the only thing on the menu Friday nights. Come back next Thursday, and it’s all you can eat catfish. Just eat what ya can, dear.”

Deborah smiled obligingly. “Thank you. The sweet tea is amazing.”

“Fresh brewed daily,” she said and winked. “Can I get y’all anything else?”

“No thank you, but can you tell us where the nearest motel might be?”

“Ain’t no motels here in Leona, but about nine miles up the road in Centerville, there’s a couple.”

“Oh, perfect. Thank you very much.”

“Why, you’re quite welcome. Enjoy.”

Deborah looked down at her plate after the waitress had left, unsure where to begin. She pushed the entire thing aside and began dressing her baked potato, which, by necessity, had been served on its own plate. When she glanced across the table to her ex-husband, she saw his steak was already partially devoured. “You ought to pace yourself, Wayne. You just inhaled about two pounds of meat in sixty seconds.”

“Mm, good stuff,” he said, then finished chewing his bite and washed it down with a swig of tea.

“I wonder how far the camp is from here.”

“The camp?” The man was so obtuse. “I thought we was stayin’ at a hotel.”

“A motel, Wayne, yes. The waitress just told us there’s one about nine miles from here. But I’m talking about the Bible camp where Robbie…was last seen.”

“Oh, right.”

“I want to find out where it’s at and maybe go out there, take a look around after we get checked into the motel.”

Wayne knit his brow. “Why don’t we wait till morning? It’s already startin’ to get dark.”

“I don’t want to wait, Wayne. I’ve waited long enough, and if Robbie’s injured like April said, he could die before we get to him.”

“Well, you say the boy paid you a visit three days ago. She says he’d been shot with a crossbow arrow. I don’t see how both can be true.”

He had a point, but she knew for a fact it was Robbie who’d given her the money.

“Just what do you think you’re gonna find down here? The police already did their investigation.”

“It’s supposedly ongoing.”

“Still, don’t you think they’re more likely to find Robbie than we are? And if he really did bring you that money, where’d he get it? And where’d he head off to after he left your house?”

She shook her head. All good questions. “I don’t know, Wayne. But I’ve just got this feeling…like this is where I should be right now.”

He rolled his eyes, obviously disgusted. “Feelings ain’t gonna help us find Robbie.

If ya ask me, I’d say this whole trip was a waste of your money.”

She glared at him angrily, then pushed the plate of dead cow away from her. “I didn’t ask you.”

He shrugged. “Fine, but if you ain’t gonna eat that, I’ll take it.”

~~~~~

“Nothing on the video,” Ray said to the other councilmembers. They’d gathered in a conference room to discuss the situation, in lieu of the ritual they now could not perform. “The hearts had to have been stolen from the tubs before they were stored in the vault.”

“Impossible,” Kris said. “Taylor is one of our best slayers. He knows the protocol.

He knows to check the buckets again before locking them in the vault.”

“Maybe he followed protocol, and the hearts were taken later,” Ibrahim suggested.

“If so, someone could’ve snuck in.”

“No,” Ray said. “We’d have seen on the video.”

“Unless…” Ray turned to youngest member of the council, Ronan. “Unless they used magic.”

“Magic?” Kris asked. “This isn’t Harry Potter!”

“But there are spells, spells that confuse, that make things appear different than they really are.” Ronan, who rarely spoke at the meetings, had only acquired the seat on the council because of his family history. Both his father and grandfather had served, and Ronan, being Harvard educated with a genius level IQ, usually presented the most reasonable insight. He’d gone off the rail this time, though.

“We have no evidence or history of any such ‘magic’ ever being authenticated,”

Ibrahim said. “Practitioners of witchcraft are pretty much religious nuts.” Ibrahim spoke with unwavering confidence.

“Sir,” Ronan responded, “with all due respect—”

Ibrahim’s stern glare shut the boy up. He didn’t even attempt to finish his sentence.

Ray scrubbed a hand across his face and ran his fingers through his hair, then released a sigh. “It wouldn’t hurt to at least listen to the kid’s hypothesis,” he said to Ibrahim.

“Unless you have a better theory.”

Ibrahim tightened his jaw and nodded.

Ronan, though in his mid-twenties, appeared even younger. His slender frame and boyish face gave him a look that reminded Ray of the teenage cadets who’d just inhabited the campground a week prior. Blond highlights streaked the boy’s light brown hair, and his eyes, deep brown, seemed bigger than they should be behind his oversized wire-framed glasses.

“Well, if the perpetrators—presumably vampires—had somehow gotten their hands on the pails when no one was looking, they could have removed the vampire hearts and replaced them with the cow hearts. And had they been assisted by a witch, they could have bewitched the hearts, perhaps temporarily, so they appeared to be drying up.”

“And a fresh human heart looks almost like a cow’s heart,” Kris added.

“Why? What good would these hearts do the vampires if they had no bodies?”

“If they were able to get the hearts into their possession right under our noses, why wouldn’t they have been able to do the same with the bodies?” Ronan asked.

“No!” Ibrahim shouted. “It can’t be!”

“Look, I hope I’m wrong.” Ronan raised both hands in the air, palms out. “But they also could have used a time trance.”

“A what?” Ray asked.

“Certain witches can cast time trances, spells that seem to make time stand still—at least for the person who’s been bewitched. Had they been able to entrance the entire assembly of Matarians, they could have removed the bodies.”

“And no one present would have any memory of this?” Ibrahim asked skeptically.

“No, sir, they wouldn’t.”

“So what you’re saying,” Ray asked, “is that a group of vampires, assisted by witches, may have retrieved the burning bodies and hearts while all the rest of us were in a trance?”

Ronan gulped then looked down at the table in front of him. “I’m sorry, sir, but…yeah. I think that’s the only possible explanation.”

“f**k!” Ray slammed his fist on the table. “Who? Who are these vampires, and how’d they form an alliance with these witches, or whoever the f**k they are?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan said, “but we also don’t yet know why they were accompanied by wolves. There’s something going on, something in the supernatural realm that we don’t know about. And I’m afraid it can mean only one thing.”

Each of council members glanced around the table, then collectively they spoke in a voice of unison: “War!”