Twenty-five
Michael Morpheus opened his eyes, yawned, and tried to stretch, only then noticing the cold, dead body lying across his good right arm. With a grimace of distaste, he rolled the stiffened body off the other side of the bed where it landed with a heavy thump.
He sat up in the bed and surveyed his naked body. Almost all of the charred, blackened flesh had peeled off and was lying on the sheets next to him. The remainder of his skin was as pink and fresh as a newborn babe’s, and the searing pain he’d experienced since the conflagration at the Silvers’ house was no longer present. The girl’s blood had worked its miracle and he felt as good as he had in months.
Getting out of bed, he opened the windows in the room to let the stench of his old, dead flesh waft away on the morning breeze while he got dressed. It was the first time since his mate and her friend had doused him with gasoline and set him on fire that he could stand the touch of clothes on his body.
Feeling quite chipper, he made his way down the stairs and found Peter Vardalack still asleep in the bedroom, his pudgy arms wrapped around the corpse of his “date” from the previous night.
Morpheus shook his shoulder until he was awake. “Get your lazy ass up, Pete,” he said, not unkindly, “we’re burning daylight and it’s time to work the phones and see what our friends have found out for us.”
Peter rubbed his eyes and yawned. “My, you’re in an unusually good mood for such an ungodly hour of the morning,” he moaned, and then he noticed Morpheus’s appearance. “Jesus, you look pretty good, Mike . . . uh, Michael,” he said, remembering just in time that Morpheus abhorred being called Mike.
Morpheus smiled evilly. “Yeah, it’s amazing what a good meal will do, isn’t it?”
Peter stood up, pushing the dead girl away from him as if she were nothing more than a pillow, and began to put on the clothes he’d scattered around the room the night before. “Then I take it the lady we got you was satisfactory?”
“That was no lady,” Morpheus said, laughing, “but she was very good, Peter—a fine vintage you might say. And how about yours?”
Peter shrugged and walked out of the bedroom toward the kitchen to make some coffee. “Oh, not too bad, except the bitch fainted when she saw me change, so her adrenaline level didn’t get as high as I would’ve liked.”
Morpheus shook his head as he moved toward the other downstairs bedroom to wake Jean Horla up. “Ain’t life a bitch,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s nothing worse than blood without a little adrenaline to give it spice.”
“Nothing, except no blood at all,” Peter answered as he scooped coffee into the machine.
* * *
Later, as the three men sat at the breakfast table eating donuts and drinking coffee, Jean asked, “What do you want us to do with the remains of our feast last night?”
Morpheus shrugged. “There’s a bayou that runs just off the back of this place. I suppose we could just dump the bodies in there and let the turtles and fish enjoy our leftovers.”
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Peter asked. “What if the authorities find them close to your house?”
“Not to worry. I rented it under a false name, and I hope we’re going to be on the road to finding the traitors in the next day or two.”
“Speaking of that,” Jean said, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll make a few calls and see if anyone’s found anything out yet.”
He hit pay dirt on his second call. Grinning, he said into the phone, “Excellent. Check it out and I’ll get back in touch with you in an hour.”
He broke the connection and smiled. “That was good news. One of Gerald Enyo’s contacts in the phone company traced a call on Samantha Scott’s cell phone. She made a call from the Austin area last night.”
“Austin, huh?” Morpheus said, a speculative look in his eyes.
“Yeah. They couldn’t narrow it down any more than that. She wasn’t on long enough for a detailed locator trace.”
“Why don’t you call Christina and see if they might’ve booked a flight out of the Austin airport?”
“We can try,” Jean answered, “but odds are they won’t be using their real names.”
Morpheus sighed. Why did he have to do everyone’s thinking for them? “Jean, tell her to check for two men and two women who booked a flight last night and paid in cash. If they’re using fake names, they can’t use their credit cards.”
Jean nodded. “Good thought. I’ll call her right now.”
While he made the call, Peter bundled the shrunken bodies up into old sheets Morpheus gave him and lugged them one at a time out the back door and through the wooded area at the back of the house to the edges of the muddy stream Morpheus had called a bayou. As he dumped the first body, he shook his head. “Hell, this is no bayou, at least not like we have in Baton Rouge. There ain’t even any gators or snakes to speak of to give it character.”
By the time he finished with the last corpse, he came back into the kitchen and found Jean and Morpheus excitedly discussing their plans.
“I guess you found something out,” he observed, grabbing another donut from the platter on the table and stuffing it whole into his mouth.
Jean glanced up. “Yeah. Christina found out that two couples made reservations to fly to Spokane, Washington, just after the phone call on Scott’s cell phone. It’s got to be our pigeons.”
Morpheus watched Peter chomping on his mouthful of pastry with distaste, thinking it was no wonder the man weighed in excess of two-hundred pounds. “Jean made a few more calls and we found an ally who lives in the area. He’s agreed to watch the airport for their arrival and to follow them until we can make arrangements to travel up there.”
Peter smiled, sleeving powdered sugar off his lips with his arm. “Then, it’ll all be over soon,” he said.
Morpheus’s eyes glittered with hatred. “Oh, we’ll catch them soon enough,” he said, “but it won’t be over for them for a long time. I intend to make them suffer as no one has suffered for a thousand years.”