Chapter 9

    The story that Katrina was telling Jeremy almost caught up to where they had met on the street. Katrina had been in town for two months and spent a lot of that time holed up in a house they rented under a false name. They didn't really know what they were doing, just given stacks of cash and told the safest place that they could go was to a specific small town in the middle of BC. Somehow, it was protected from vampires. So they had to go alone. The last night they were in Alberta, they were rushed so they took Katrina's car.

    “Katrina, he knows about us. You have to hide.” The vampire still had strands of grey in his hair and the lines on his face. He wasn't far gone enough from humanity, yet, to treat the scared Kin like a commodity.
    The one who turned him was across town at an abandoned school. He was at a party warning the other vampires that they had to leave. To hide, if they could. Telling the people there that the party was over. Telling the Kin that if they wanted to survive, they had to hide.
    “Who?” Katrina was already pulling her phone out of her pocket to find Dee, Miki, and Bev.
    “The grey man.” The vampire looked at his feet and shook his head.
    The stories that everybody on the inside heard sounded like scare stories. Only meant to keep everybody in line, they said they believed them because they knew about another story that concerned them directly. The way the vampires spoke in hushed tones, it seemed like an act. So there was Katrina, speaking face to face with a vampire, having to believe an even more outlandish thing.
    The vampires could only piece together parts of it, never the whole story. They knew, but ignored, the fact that the oldest vampire they knew about was born some time in the fifties. The stories about Angstrym were fear inducing enough. Stronger than every vampire since, his clan spread north over the decades. To the Kin, they didn't know much about him. They knew that he had a close circle of four vampires that he'd personally turned. Each one of those only mentored one more vampire. However, in the last few years, one of those started his own clan, which brought the attention of the grey man.
    Katrina was on the phone as Ryn slowly pushed the door closed behind her. She knew him as a kindly old man who always spoke in a soft voice. An immigrant from Korea who always doted on Katrina and her friends. She knew that vampires would reverse their ageing, so she flirted with him sometimes. Never to lead him on, or to curry favour because that just didn't work. She did it just because she liked the hear him laugh. Always teasing him that she would have to take him out to get 'new threads' for when he was a young man again. Dee and Miki would always be teasing her about it.
    Ryn tapped on her window and she rolled it down. “Open your truck, I have something for you.”
    Katrina only rarely seen the things that vampires could do, but there it was. Ryn was holding up a large suitcase that he hadn't been holding while she dug around for her keys and thumbed the screen on her phone.
    “No, no, I got it.” Ryn gently pushed Katrina back down into her seat when she tried to get out of the car.
    “What? What's that?” Katrina got out as soon as he was putting it in the trunk.
    “Ah, silly girl, it's a present.” Ryn chuckled. “Fine, come, I'll show you.”
    Katrina stood beside him, her eyes sprung open when he showed her.  A large suitcase full of crisp stacks of money. She knew that vampires always had caches of money around, they always needed it for times they might need to become someone new.
    “This is for you and the girls. You take it and split it up between you, we don't know how long before we come to find you.” He reached down and snapped the catches closed. “You need to stay safe.”
    The money was probably nowhere near what he had his disposal, but bills, that was always a tricky one to gather. To just give it away like Ryn was doing made Katrina worry. Fear was finally sinking its hands into her. He knew something that she didn't.
    “You too.” Katrina tried to pull Ryn to her, he felt bolted to the ground. So she stepped into him and hugged him as hard as she could. She didn't need to bend to kiss his forehead.
    “Go, you need to go.” Ryn lead her to the car door and pushed it closed behind her.
    She put the car in gear and pulled up to the curb, she looked in the mirror and saw him standing there watching her leave.
    “Seatbelt!” Ryn called out.
    When she looked back up from buckling belt, he was gone.

    There wasn't a lot left to say anyway. It was her lot in life, for the new family in her life, even if she didn't agree, she would do it. Ryn and Mimyr, they would be saving as many of the Kin as they could if they were still around. Mimyr, not anywhere near as nice as Ryn. Always very cold and calculated, a good man, dependable. It made Katrina wonder how he would just let Ryn out around town on his own, but she already knew. That sweet old man, she hoped that whoever he killed didn't see him as a monster. Weird thought, but Katrina only knew the life as Kin, there wasn't anything else to say about it all. It's just the way it was.
    She pulled into the driveway of their house, Dee was already standing there with a suitcase, Miki was closing the door and wrestling a gym bag through. At least they knew what was happening and believed her. All she could get when she tried to get a hold of Bev was voicemail and voicemail. She knew not to leave any messages, if they were supposed to hide, there couldn't be any clues. No matter how small the risk.
    “Where's Bev?” Katrina asked Miki as they tried to make room for Bev when they found her.
    “Don't know. She didn't tell us where she went.”
    “Dee?” Katrina closed the trunk and looked at Dee.
    Dee was standing beside the passenger's side door, phone. She snapped it closed, shrugged and shook her head. “No.”
    They climbed into the car in silence. It was one of many times they could just leave Bev. They were even instructed that if they were ever told to run and hide, it would be at the very last minute. Leave and don't look back. However, the story went that it was how they were last seen as Kin, as human. It was different though, one at a time, and rarely at that, were people turned. They were all supposed to run and Katrina told them about what was in the trunk. They looked at each other, uncomfortable because they had no choice. They had to leave.
    An old truck skidded around the corner up the block. It was the rusty old heap that Earl kept from breaking down. From the orange light that bathed the street, they could see two people in the cab. The truck came to a skidding stop, the front tire up on the curb. Bev leapt out and slammed the door closed behind and ran around to the other side. She reached in and took Earl's hair in her hand and pulled him in for a kiss. Before Katrina could open her window, Earl was already speeding away down the street. Bev ran across and swung open the door. She shoved Dee forward and piled into the back.
    Bev crossed her arms and looked down at the floor. Katrina put the car into drive and they pulled out onto the road. Whatever it was that Bev saw was enough to keep her quiet until they were on the freeway and headed north so they could cut east to cut across the Rockies.
    “Bev, you alright?” Katrina finally asked.
    Up to that point, they were travelling in silence. Unusual for Bev, to call her a chatterbox would've been kind. She would always have some gossip about people that everybody else didn't know or really care about. During the drive, until Katrina asked, Bev just sat and stared at the floor or the seat in front of her.
    “Do you guys really believe in vampires?” Bev finally spoke up.
    Katrina and Dee looked at each other. “Yeah. You didn't?”
    “I thought I did. I wanted to. Now I really do.” Bev didn't make any sense.
    “What?” Dee turned in her seat to look at her.
    “Ryn.” It was all that Bev said.
    “What? I saw him tonight. He was alright, he made sure we would be alright.” Katrina glared at Bev, between looking at the road and over her shoulder.
    “Not like I did. You didn't see him that way.” Bev said to the floor.
    “What the f**k are you talking about?” Katrina started to lose her temper.
    “Me and Earl were at a party up on the north side of town. All of a sudden a bunch of phones started to go off, people started leaving in a hurry. Before we could leave, Mimyr showed up and told me that he had to send Ryn to see you.” Bev was looking up at Katrina, like she expected Katrina to already know all of it.
    “Yeah, he was fine.”
    “Well, we were mostly all gone, half the people there were expecting a raid or something. Some a*****e, probably looking to score something, started to shove people around. Telling them that they f*****g set him up. Mimyr was outside talking to Jerry and Shawna, tell them what he told me. The guy pulled a knife and started to try and cut people trying to get by him to get out. Ryn showed up and was trying to calm him down.” Bev stopped and looked down at the floor.
    “What? You f*****g tell the rest of it!” Katrina was shouting over her shoulder.
    Miki yelled and pointed at the road. Dee reached over and straightened the car out before it went down into the ditch. Katrina only noticed what was happening when Dee was yelling at her to take her foot off the gas peddle. Katrina pushed it to the floor to try and reach back to start trying to hit Bev.
    “F**k you! You weren't there!” Bev's fist shot out from the back and missed Katrina's face by the width of a hair.
    Miki dove over and took hold of Bev's arm and pinned her to her seat. Dee was doing her best to keep the car on the road. Katrina was trying to find the button to her seatbelt so she could climb into the back of the car to get at Bev.
    “Cops!” Dee screamed.
    “S**t!” Katrina sat down and took the wheel, head on a swivel. “F**k, where?”
    “No f*****g where, you two want to do this, we're not doing it when you can get me and Miki killed. Pull the f**k over!” Dee never swore. They were all looking at her, shocked.
    Katrina pulled into a rest stop, there were a few trucks parked idling while the truckers got a few winks in. She shot a look at Bev in the rearview mirror. Miki was laughing into her sleeve, Dee was covering her mouth, eyes wide open. Bev was just staring at the back of the seat.
    “The guy must have been a tweaker. It was just me and Earl, and that guy who was probably Kin, and Ryn. I don't know. The guy stabbed the other guy in the belly. Ryn got mad and the next thing, I mean intantly, Ryn's fist was in the guys head. I seen it, right up to his wrist and he was holding the guy up like that. Ryn stood there shivering. I thought he was scared at what he did, but he was looking at the other guy with the knife in his belly. He fell on his knees and the stabbed guy must have thought he was going to help because Ryn was lifting his shirt with his other hand. He shook the dead guy off his hand and you could hear bones cracking. Ryn pulled the knife out and it looked like he was going to look close at the place that guy got stabbed, but he bit him.” Bev reached into her pocket and pulled her phone out.
    “Ryn bit him?” Miki was sitting back into her chair.
    “Yeah. The guy started to scream and this f*****g thing started to ring.” Bev threw the phone at Katrina, she ducked and it hit the windshield. “I turned it off, but Ryn must have heard it ringing. He looked over his shoulder and he grinned at me. Then he looked back at the screaming guy and I didn't see it, but Ryn must've put his fingers in the hole and tore him open. That's when Mimyr came in and he told us it was time to go. I never seen Mimyr like that, he's always stiff, but he couldn't stop looking at the blood. He told me to run, that if he found me, that I'd be next.”
    “What about Earl?” Miki would be the one to ask, she didn't like Earl or Bev too much, but she always wanted everybody to be alright.
    “I told him to get out of town, we stopped at a ATM and got all the money I could and gave it to him. Then we saw you guys.”
    The ride from there went on in silence for hours. Katrina and Dee would look at each other once in a while. They both knew exactly what they were getting in to. Miki was the one who explained it in a way that made sense. At the time it did because they didn't really think too much about dying. If they had to die, they would. There was nothing else to pay for the life they already lead. If they were lucky enough to live the other life, if they could give their life with no thought, they could probably take a life with only one thought. It was the way it was. The silence they drove with always came back to that point. For three of them anyway.
    Bev though. She knew, she even said she did, but she really didn't. She was the one who most thought of it all as some kind of game that she could quit. She had the same mark as the rest of them. Yet, it was her that was the first to experience what the life of a vampire must really be like. A lot of blood and screaming.

Author's Note

I normally leave out notes I have written in the story when I'm uploading these, but I have to tell you I have a major thing to fix in this chapter. If you can't see it, oh well, but if you do... no worries, I fix.