Chapter 15

Arthur rose from the couch with a troubled look of his own. He had known that the police, and the rest of the city, would eventually accept what it was that they faced; that was, after all, the entire point of this exercise. He had not, however, expected that this would occur quite so quickly. In his experience, mortals were extremely reluctant to acknowledge the existence of vampires in their midst.

Arthur recalled that he had one more errand to run before his rapidly approaching dormancy, an errand that he'd had to postpone while he had the ferals in tow and Alicia over his shoulder. Moving to the front door, he extended his senses to make certain there were no witnesses and slipped outside.

Arthur gazed along the row of neat, well maintained homes. Any of the occupants would do for what he had in mind, but, in the common vernacular of this age, you don't shit where you eat. Another disappearance could well focus attention on this place and he was already pressing his luck. It had been less than three full nights since he had so rudely intruded on the Bollingers and already neighbors were coming around, wondering why Jimmy's wife had missed the weekly meeting of her card club or why she wasn't returning calls. That was the problem with fairly affluent areas, Arthur decided, too much of a sense of community.

He began to run to the east, passing like a fleeting shadow among the darkened homes. He had hated being forced to hold back while guiding the ferals to this place; the sluggish pace that they could maintain had made him feel vulnerable and weak. To make up for it, he pushed himself to his limit now, quickly passing through the outskirts of Pleasant Hills and skirting swiftly around the edge of a large mall.

As he ran, Arthur mulled over the events of the evening. It suddenly occurred to him that while the police had been armed with wooden weapons, weapons that could hurt him, they had not been encumbered by the usual impotent trappings of self-styled vampire hunters. There had been no crosses, no sun lamps, no fool with a squirt gun filled with holy water. As he considered this, Arthur realized something else: after resonating with utterly disgusting emotions for hours, Mia's bond had suddenly flashed with fear, and not for herself, shortly before the police had made their entrance. That fear had remained until a short time after the dangerously armed force had left the bar, at which point the bond had flooded with feelings of relief.

While Arthur had learned centuries before that correlation is not the same as causation, the possibilities raised by this particular correlation were far too dangerous to ignore. The bond had made it obvious that Mia had taken up with a mortal lover, but it had not occurred to Arthur that her lover might not only be with the police but a part of the team hunting him. This changed everything. With Mia's assistance, the police could locate his lair; perhaps they already had. He would need to abandon the Bollinger home as soon as possible. It was fortunate, he thought, that he had prepared his sheet anchor within a week of his arrival in the city, purchasing several homes in disparate parts of the city and renting a number of storage units and basement apartments. He did not believe that Mia was aware of any of them.