The Calm Before the Storm Read online

  Good thing the road was empty, and rarely used considering the scarceness of houses leading up to the small body of water that was Mantua Lake.

  The road followed the river until branching off onto the highway, and there was a dead someone in that river. Ben put the gear in park and stepped out of the black Jeep, leaving the door open as he stepped off the smooth pavement and onto the crunching rocks that sharply sloped down into the weeds and softly flowing water. Whoever it was was stuck along the larger rocks and branches that reached out along the bank, like skeletal hands.

  Definitely a body. More than that, this guy, or woman, whoever, was murdered.

  There could be no mistaking it. Someone set the poor bastard on fire and must’ve thrown him into the river. He—because Ben was going to assume from this point on that it was a he—must’ve travelled along the stronger currents until, for whatever reason, his body went down the softer path and had come here instead of riding right into Raritan Bay.

  It was a goddamn miracle no one had noticed him up until this point.

  They must’ve doused him in something to keep the fires burning all throughout the river ride and recent rain showers, but also not strong enough to overpower those elements entirely. The body was charred. The flesh was black, pruned, and stank of burning meat.

  Christ, there were even still tiny wisps of smoke snaking from the ruined clothing and flesh. It was a stunner that the clothes were still hanging on to the body. They’d probably merged with the flesh itself at this point. Ben couldn’t even tell what they’d been before the fires, a uniform, white collar suit, Sunday clothes. Who the hell knew.

  He scrunched his nose and looked away. Ugh, that smell was going bring up his lunch.

  Ben thumbed the iPhone in his pocket. Should he call the cops?

  There’d be a lot of press about something like this. The town of Veturious wasn’t exactly small, but neither was it large, and murder wasn’t really common here, or in the wooded areas surrounding it, and because the lake this stream led into was privately owned, cops and reporters would want to be talking to Silus and Cedric.

  That was a no-go. The last thing either of them needed was for anyone in their respective families to turn on the TV and see their dead sons alive and well, hiding from both the sun sprite and vampire clans. Even if they wanted to remain anonymous, who was to say some reporter out to be the next big thing in investigative reporting wouldn’t slink around, snapping some pictures they shouldn’t, or even drop their names in the paper or on TV. It had been known to happen.

  It wasn’t a risk Ben would take.

  Fuck. He might actually have to take the body away himself and put it somewhere else to be found.

  Rains, even the little they had lately, would cause a body to float into odd areas. He could take it, drive further upstream to a more secluded area and redeposit the body back in the water. The key was to make sure the spot he picked was inhabited by enough people to find the body as they walked their dogs, or whatever, and he’d have to make sure the body wouldn’t go anywhere from there.

  Keeping any obvious signs of himself, boot prints, tire tracks on the road or gravel, out of the way of any cops would be the tricky bit.

  Especially with the hard stop he just pulled. Ben looked over his shoulder and, fuck, yes, he’d left thick-ass, black skid marks over the faded gray pavement.

  Worry about it later.

  He took one step down the bank before he stopped then nearly slipped on a wet rock. His heart lurched as he caught himself before he could fall in with the body. “Goddamnit!” He did not want to land on whoever it was down there.

  Breathing hard, he eyed the corpse and cursed it, as though it were somehow the poor bastard’s fault that Ben was having a bad day.

  Meanwhile, this was the guy who was set on fire and dumped into a river.

  Now he kind of felt like a dick.

  He pulled the phone out of the pocket of his leather jacket, scrolled through the numbers, and put it to his ear.

  First ring and there was an answer. He didn’t have time to play around.

  “You’re never going to frigging believe this. I found a body a couple miles from your house.”

  There was silence on Cedric’s end. Ben could visualize the grin melting from his face. “A—? Should I call the cops?”

  Even though Ben was no longer his bodyguard, no longer being paid to see to Cedric’s safety, the other man still occasionally asked for his opinion on certain things, and this was definitely not going to be an exception.

  “No. You still have those plastic sheets from when you painted your room?”

  “What for?”

  “I need to move the body. Get it out of here so no one asks you or Silus any questions when it’s found.

  There was a muttered curse on the other end of the line that Ben could barely make out. Cedric would have the phone away from his ear by now, maybe pacing the length of his room once or twice before coming back to him.

  Ben had always been good at knowing what the other man was doing.

  “Yeah, I still got it.”

  “It hasn’t been in the trash or anything, right?”

  “Not yet. We just rolled it up and threw it into the corner of the garage. You sure this is necessary?”

  Was there anything in Silus’s garage that could be traced back to them? Ben rubbed his palm over his face. He could hardly think with that godforsaken smell in the air. “I don’t want any press or police poking around your place. Hose down the plastic real quick. I’ll be there to pick it up in a couple of seconds.”

  With Ben’s teleportation trick, he meant that literally.

  “Why do I need to hose it down?”

  “You don’t want anything on it that can be traced back to you. I’ll be right there.”

  Ben hit the end button on the phone and put it away before Cedric could say anything else. He eyed the body below him and sighed sympathetically.

  Such a shitty way to die.

  Ben closed his eyes, he needed to get the image of burnt flesh out of his brain, but it followed him anyway. Coupled that with the rancid smell, and he could hardly concentrate on where he needed to go.

  He put all his efforts into thinking about the house on the lake, his best friend living inside, with someone else...

  He vanished from the side of the road, his entire body splitting into billions of tiny pieces, traveling along the air, faster than the wind, than even the fastest of cars, and careful to not reform where something already was, like a tree or a lamppost. Ouch.

  When he opened his eyes he was whole again, the house he’d been picturing right in front of his face. He stood on the vast lawn, and there was Cedric not ten feet away from him.

  He had the hose in his hand, and the plastic sheet he’d used to protect the carpet was laid out flat on the grass. He had his thumb in the nozzle to get the water pressure up, frantically spraying it all over.

  Cedric had worked fast to be able to get everything set up before Ben could so much as teleport to him.

  A body was hardly anything to drag one’s feet about, though.

  Cedric caught sight of him immediately, all business on his face.

  “A dead body? What’re the odds of that?”

  “Pretty damn good, apparently. Let me help you.” Ben came to him and lifted the one side of the wet plastic sheeting so Cedric could spray down every angle, every side.

  “What about fingerprints?” he asked.

  “I’m not leaving this with the body. I just want to make sure none of your, or Silus’s”—he said the last bit with a rock in his throat—

  “hairs or fibers are on it. We don’t want anything that can be traced back to you.” Even the few blades of grass that were beginning to stick were worrying Ben. Could the cut grass of a healthy lawn be brought back to this house? Best to not risk it. Ben shook them off.

  No telling what cops could do with that CSI shit he saw on TV sometimes.

  �
��Right.” Cedric nodded, resuming his task.

  Ben allowed them to keep at it for another two seconds before he decided enough time had been used up. His Jeep was still in the middle of the road, and just because the chances of someone driving by were slim, didn’t mean it couldn’t still happen. He had found a dead body, after all.

  Cedric helped him to roll the sheet, and Ben tucked it under his arm. The water dripping from it soaked his armpit and side, but since he was probably going to get a little wet getting the body out of the stream, he wasn’t too concerned with it.

  “I’ll call you when I drop the body,” he said. “Where’s Silus?” He wanted to know why the asshole wasn’t out here helping with this. He was able to handle some sunlight, thanks to drinking enough of Cedric’s blood.

  His jaw clenched at the thought.

  “It’s the middle of the day. He’s sleeping,” Cedric said.

  Oh. Right. Vampire, and all that. Ben had wondered why the vampire had been absent during his earlier visit.

  “Go wake him up and tell him what happened. Just in case this shit goes south, we should all get our stories straight.”

  “Right.”

  That was the last word Ben caught before he teleported himself off of Cedric’s front lawn, putting the image of his Jeep in mind, and traveling there, back to the body.

  Cedric was a sun sprite, and even though they had similar teleportation abilities as Ben had, without direct sunlight to travel along the UV rays, Cedric couldn’t go with him. It was still cloudy as hell from the earlier rains, and it looked like it could start pouring again any minute.

  Ben didn’t want Cedric coming along anyway. Too many people equaled too many possibilities to screw up, forget something, hell, even dropping hair or skin cells or anything with DNA that could be used to hunt them all down.

  It was definitely better if Ben worked alone.

  He reappeared beside his Jeep and unrolled the plastic sheet, laying it flat on the pavement. There was nothing he could do about the tire tracks on the road. He’d just have to hope that no one who saw them would put anything together.

  Ben wrinkled his nose at the smell. Ugh, Jesus, he’d forgotten about it. His stomach did a backflip-twist, threatening to evacuate the lunch he’d just eaten in Cedric’s kitchen not a half hour ago.

  He took a deep breath and decided to get it over with. Ben removed his boots first, leaving himself in just his socks as he made his way down the bank. The last thing he needed was his boot prints down here, and these socks were getting thrown in the trash the second he got home. Then he rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. The body was still waiting for him, patient as the dead.

  It was easier to get to than Ben had realized. He just walked down to it and sloshed his feet in the water, mud squishing through his socks and between his toes, before he was right next to it. He didn’t even get his pants wet.

  Ben knelt down, but he didn’t touch the man yet, for now he knew it was a man, being so close, he could better make out the form that was beneath the melted clothes. Narrow waist, no breasts to speak of, and sharp, angular shoulders and arms.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he said. For all his training to handle situations of this nature, to handle dead bodies, and for his help in the battle against the vampires, this was the first time he’d ever had to look at a corpse up close, to study it, and now he was expected to pick it up, roll it in a long sheet of plastic, and carry it away to someplace where it would more convenient to find.

  Ben could only pray something that horrible never happened to him.

  He reached out to it. He didn’t want to touch the charred flesh, just in case any was to get shredded away in his grip should he not be gentle enough, so he opted to only handle what remained of the clothes.

  He reached around the neck to the shoulders, gripped the charred shirt—

  The head came alive, jerked to the side, and teeth crunched down on his hand, right in the space of his palm between his thumb and index finger bones. Fangs lengthened and pierced the skin before locking on.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Ben tried to yank away, but the fangs in his flesh held on and they held on tight.

  His feet struggled for balance, to push himself off and away from whatever the fuck this thing was, but he sloshed into the water instead, splashing mud all over his clothes and face and soaking him in rancid-ass water.

  It got into his mouth and he nearly puked, only managing to hold that back by the idea of anyone finding anything of himself near this thing, whatever the hell it was.

  It creeped him the fuck out was what it was. He punched it in the side of the head then pressed his palm down on the black forehead to try and push it off, but its teeth clung to his hand, even when the charred skin began to tear, like Christmas paper, under the pressure of Ben’s hand. Total lock-on.

  “Get the fuck off me!” he yelled.

  The zombie thing didn’t listen, and he felt the distinctive wet lick of a swollen tongue, warmer, much more different than the cool water, lapping up the blood Ben spilled, and he saw the throat working in a desperate swallow.

  Oh, God. It was drinking his blood!

  Ben clenched his fist and, with a roar, delivered another hard knock to the side of its head. The fangs came loose, freeing Ben, and he scrambled backward, splashing more filthy, brown, and slimy water all over himself, until the hard bank and the prick of branches halted him.

  He stared long and hard at the body, which wasn’t a body, for a good minute. It—he—was breathing now, the chest rising and falling, the mouth exhaling deathly wheezes, as though struggling to do just that.

  The fucker was alive.

  Ben looked at his hand. Judging by the two very distinctive bleeding holes that were alongside the indents of softer teeth in his palm, he was also a vampire.

  Ben cradled his hand to his chest, he didn’t dare wash it out in this gross water, and he used his other hand to pull his phone out of his jacket pocket. The leather had kept it dry, but now he was fucked and had to throw away his favorite jacket.

  Once again, like the loyal friend he was, Cedric picked up on the first ring.

  “We got a bigger problem than I thought,” Ben said.

  Chapter Three

  The plastic sheeting that was supposed to be used to keep the body intact during the transportation phase suddenly became the main support for keeping whatever dwindling sunlight that wormed its way through the gray clouds above from frying the vampire in the water.

  Even more so than he already was, that is.

  It was a frosted plastic, so when Ben got it around the man and pulled him out of the shade of the shrubs and the relative safety of the water, his body didn’t smoke like before. After that it was just a matter of getting the guy into the backseat of Ben’s Jeep and back to Cedric’s cabin. Being gentle was hardly something he could think about whilst carrying around a half-dead vampire.

  It would’ve probably been more comfortable for the guy if Ben had some blankets to be doing this with instead of this thick plastic carpet protector, but then again, what were the odds this guy was even in any frame of mind where he could still feel any hardcore pain?

  He could have just teleported back to the cabin with him instead of just hauling the crispy vampire into his Jeep, but Ben didn’t want to drop a dying stranger in his friend’s lap, only to leave to go back for his Jeep, which he needed to get off the road, pronto.

  Besides, apart from the bite on his hand, Ben felt no alarm, and no reason to panic or hurry. This guy would be lucky to survive the next ten minutes regardless of what Ben did. He might as well already be dead. Ben’s only concern was making that death…well, not comfortable. They were way past that stage, but at the very least, he didn’t want the guy’s death to be some alone, anonymous thing that happened in a river.

  At least Silus had finally installed tinted windows, so the second he was indoors and the door shut behind him, Ben remembered to pull back the heavy plas
tic from the vamp’s face just in case there were breathing problems.

  Still alive. The guy was a trooper.

  It was the least of his worries considering how the blackened flesh was partially pulled away by the plastic covering that was meant to protect him from the sun. The oozing black skin, which had become a sticky slop as his vampire genetics raced against the sunlight to heal itself, had acted as an adhesive to the plastic, and Ben gagged as he unwrapped the strange vampire in a guest bed of Cedric and Silus’s cottage.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cedric muttered, grabbing at his nose. The rotting smell invaded the whole room. Good thing the door was closed, otherwise it would’ve gotten into the pores of the rest of the house and probably never come out.

  “Wherefore did you bring him hence?” Silus demanded. The emergency being what it was, Cedric ran to his vampire lover’s shared room and shook him awake before he was ready.

  His pissy, bed-headed self had quickly come to full alert when the problem was presented to him.

  “It’s not like there’s a vampire hospital I could’ve taken him to,”

  Ben snapped. “Besides, I figured you could…” He motioned vaguely with his hand from Silus to the mysterious vampire struggling for breath in bed.

  All the comforters and pillows had been snatched away, leaving only smooth, crisp white sheets for him to lay on. It was the only way to ensure that the rougher fabrics of the quilts wouldn’t cause any more damage to what remained of the man’s peeling skin. It left the blackened body highlighted by white, which somehow only made the smell that much worse.

  Silus narrowed his eyes. “You assume that because I am a vampire, that I am also knowledgeable in vampire medicine?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Of course not. I no more have any knowledge of such things than Cedric does.” Silus scanned his eyes over the blackened, corpse-like figure on the bed, and just as quickly, looked away. “It’s a miracle he lives.”