BloodWise

BloodWise Chapter 4

this is BloodWise Chapter 4. If you want to start at the beginning or read another chapter, use the navbar above.***

The last thing Winston needed was a case of the nerves now, because his next visit was to the House of Preston, and that was a place where no one wanted to go. So he did his best to push Max’s threats out of his mind. Then he drove just outside of Baltimore limits to row of abandoned grain mills. Behind the mills were several acres of scrubby woods, around the permiter was all sorts of trash, but the woods themselves looked rather pristine. because people didn’t like to go into those woods. Not even teenagers looking to get drunk. Not even the lowlifes or losers who sometimes chose to hide in town woods. That’s because they all felt it. They felt the old, decaying presence of House Preston back there.

Without really meaning to, Winston made sure his pistol was loaded. He grabbed a flashlight from his glovebox and started in past the trees. It was hard going. the space was crowded with hedges, and small branches grabbed at his clothes. It didn’t help that he’d never been there before, although he had been told that the woods themselves didn’t go very far, and that they formed a rough circle around the Preston’s manor. After several minutes of rambling, he heard a human voice. He moved towards it cautiously. it was a woman. She was crying, almost moaning, and he walked quicker now.

“Oh God!” the woman cried out. “Oh God!”

He finally caught a glimpse of her. She was in some kind of steel cage. Some rusty old kennel for keeping animals. Her face was covered in dirt. She looked young. Maybe in her twenties.

“Please. Please help,” she said. “They ate my arm!”

Now he moved in closer, and he could see that she was missing her left arm. All she had there was just knobby shoulders. And beneath her, a whole pile of human bones. For a moment, a cold feelings feeling passed straight through his body, starting in his belly and up to his lips. If he weren’t a vampire, he would have vomited. He’d heard rumors of course, of cannibalism. He even seen it once, in Cuba, but that Cuban vampire had been a loner. Here was a whole house practicing the eating of flesh. It was a surprise that the Advocacy- the elite group dedicated to hiding the existence of vampires- would even allow them to exist.

He started toward the woman, but as he got closer, she lost her look of fear and her face fell flat. “Well, damn! A black vampire? I didn’t see that coming.”

Winston stopped. In the chaos of the moment, he’d missed the obvious. The woman in the cage was a vampire too.

She laughed and then kicked her feet out to open the cage. Then she executed a graceful role and got onto her feet without much effort. She might have been pretending to be a victim, but she had not been faking her lack of an arm. She smiled at him. “I’d get that damn light out of my face, boy.”

The woman’s calling him “boy”, with her honeyed Southern twang felt like a slap in the face. Nevertheless, he was here to negotiate and not fight, so he lowered the light from her face. Winston had also been warned that the Prestons were racist. An old house with roots going back to the days of slavery, not only were they prejudiced against blacks and other minorities, they were even against most other whites including Eastern Europeans, Italians, the Irish and Greeks. Thus disposed, the Prestons followed the same path as so many families who traded in power and hate, they were inbred. Inbred enough to produce children without limbs.

“You know you could get in a lot of trouble if those brothers of mine found you here, boy. They’d be on you like bears. Who are you and what is your business?”

“My name is Winston Solomon. I work for-”

“For Neal Fitzpatrick,” she said, finishing his sentence. “I heard of you, only I figured with a name like Solomon you’d be one of those Israelites with a long beard- like Solomon of the Bible- not some blacky.”

“I want to see your lord.”

She cackled at that. “I think you ain’t gonna be seeing too much. My brothers are coming, and they won’t be happy to see a blacky speaking to their beloved Bunny.”

A moment later, Winston heard them. At least three or four men approaching with speed. Bootsteps crackling through the brush. They emerged looking like farmers from another century. They were bearded and pink skinned. They wore flannels shirts and overalls despite the warm night air. One had an eye patch. Another one was missing his left hand. There was one woman as well, her face hidden behind some kind of webbed veil. Each held a machette, and one had a double-barrelled shotgun.

“Bunny,” the one with the shotgun said. “Did he hurt you?”

“Nah, Mel” Bunny said. “He come over at the behest of Lord Fitzy.”

“A black vamp?” Mel asked. “Who would have thought that Fitzpatrick would sink so low. I heard he already had Greeks and Jews in his employee, but... a black vampire?”

Winston closed his eyes in disgust. Coming from the Caribbean where nine out ten vamps were black or mixed race, it was clear that the Prestons didn’t leave their little patch of the woods often. “I have a simple question for your lord” Winston said. “And then I’ll leave.”

“I don’t think so,” Mel said. “I think you’re going to leave right now before something bad happens.”

“I have rights,” Winston said. “There are agreements in Baltimore, and I serve as Fitzpatrick’s proxy.”

“Man, man, man,” said the one with the eyepatch. “We got a live one here. Maybe we should take him to see the Old Skinner.”

“Well you just have the best ideas, Robert,” Bunny said sarcastically.

“What we should do is kill him,” Mel noted.

“Then you have war with Fitzpatrick. Especially in light of the truck bomb.”

There was a moment of silence that registered loudly with Winston, and this time the Prestons gave him no back talk. They knew about the bomb.

Bunny scoffed, breaking the silence. “Let’s take him to see Old Skinner. Skinner will set him straight.”