A Vampyre's Daughter, Jeff Schanz [read books for money .txt] 📗

Everything in his body still ached, but he was getting used to it. He tried the knob and was rewarded with an easy turn. The door opened.

Brandt was down the hallway to the stairwell much quicker than the last time. He was no longer concerned with being absolutely quiet. He wasn’t trying to trip an alarm either, but if anyone confronted him now, they would all have a frank chat.

He descended the stairs, wincing with each foot plant. His ankles were most definitely sprained. If he could find some tape lying around, maybe he could wrap them for better mobility, though he didn’t expect to see some just laying around. Brandt got to the bottom floor and lowered himself into a crouch, ready to run if needed. He still saw nobody around. He slowly stood back up and looked around a little more closely. The dust on the table was still undisturbed. Cobwebs still hung from the sofas. The fire was still unlit. The kitchen still had no dishes or pots out. What do these people do all day? Whatever they did, wherever they went, they didn’t seem to hang around here much, and certainly weren’t here now.

Brandt wasn’t a detective, although he had a mind like one sometimes. He could see details and make deductions from them. This house defied traditional logic, and it was hard to interpret signs of human interaction when there were no signs of human interaction. But that in itself was significant.

The two people here (he was trusting Lia’s admission that there were only two of them) didn’t really live in this house. At least, not in the normal way. This house was more like a museum than a home. So, it was possible that there was some other cabin, or shack, or underground dwelling, that was their daily residence. That, or Lia was simply lying. She did hedge when he asked her about living here. She simply said “always.” And that was odd in every possible way. If she had answered “sometimes,” that wouldn’t have raised any suspicions in his mind. So, why lie about something that just didn’t make any sense, and didn’t even help the perception? The reality was that Lia was deceiving him in some way, and neither she nor her father spent much time in this house, or at least not in the common ways that would be expected.

Brandt saw nothing in the house that would help his own situation. Definitely no phones, and no weapons, unless he wanted to steal a kitchen knife. He considered that, but wasn't feeling physically threatened. Brandt wasn't quite fearless, but he had confidence in his ability to fight with or without a weapon. Formal combat training and battlefield experience taught him his strengths and limits. He didn't see a fight necessarily coming, but he would be fine if it did. The knife was skipped for now. He was going to look for options to leave and no one needed to get hurt. It would just be best for all parties if he could find a way off this rock quietly.

Brandt moved to the front doors. At the threshold, he looked down. His sneakers were laid out on the family crest rug. Probably water-logged from his swim in the Pacific and Lia had probably put them there to dry. They had been carefully placed next to each other with symmetric precision, with laces spread out ready to be pulled and tied, like they awaited a first-grader on his way to school. Brandt reached down and picked up the sneakers. Slightly crusty, yet more or less dry. He slipped them on and went out the doors.

 

 

The ocean stretched for miles into a misty horizon. The waves roiled and danced, larger than they appeared, popping little white sprays of foam on their peaks. The gleam of the morning sun struck the wave tops, resembling little flashbulbs. A speck on the horizon might be a cargo ship or a fishing boat. The distance was too great to distinguish. As beautiful as it was, the sea offered no respite for someone who wished to travel across it in a small craft. The next landmass would be another remote island with likely no residents, and also no other transportation anywhere else.

The island didn’t seem very large, difficult to determine because the area that the house stood on was the only visibly flat area. The house itself was primarily a bland, box shape with a stone lower floor, a white painted upper floor, and a high-angled roof. It looked taller than the two floors Brandt was aware of. The rear of the left side resembled a church facade the way it was styled with a tall flat front that might have a stained glass window if it was a church. Brandt couldn’t see that side from where he was standing, and he didn’t really care.

To the left of the house were craggy mountains. Dark and foreboding, they angled up like a monument to an ancient god. Scores of seabirds flocked around the apexes, decorating sections with years of white guano. Patches of hearty trees and bushes didn't seem to mind the hard, angled ground. The rock slabs and earth that comprised the mountain were varied and looked like a collection of smaller mountains rather than one solid piece, having been pushed together billions of years ago and turned into one unforgiving, impassible mass. There was no telling how far to the unseen side of the island those mountains extended. The habitable area below was maybe the size of a couple of aircraft carriers. On the edge of the mountains were several wood structures that might be barns or sheds, which were ringed by some simple wooden fencing. He saw a few goats and one sheep wandering inside the fence. The fenced area was pretty vast, so Brandt assumed there were a lot more goats and sheep somewhere, just not currently within view. Nobody was in sight attending to the animals at the moment. They could possibly be inside one of the barns or sheds.

Brandt gingerly jogged over to the island’s nearest edge hoping there was some kind of climbable section of rock he could descend. At the precipice, he stopped and looked down. It was a sheer rock face, almost completely vertical. He looked right and left and saw the same view extending the full length of the island. A harsh, nearly ninety-degree slope with no footholds or hand grips to climb up or down. And at the bottom were jagged rocks and crushing waves. Even if he lowered himself down to the waterline, the surf would batter him into bloody pulp. And at least on this visible side, there wasn't anything constructed like a ramp or stairs to allow a human to get down to the water.

There simply had to be a place somewhere that was traversable down to a beach, or a dock, where some kind of boat could be moored. There was room for a helicopter to land if Lia lied about that too, but Brandt was betting against it. Helicopters and planes cost money to keep up, and gas to fly, and the impression of this place was self-sufficiency and isolation. Brandt would wager they had a sailboat if he had to bet. Maybe a dock or beach was at the far end of the island.

It took maybe ten or fifteen minutes for Brandt to get to the north end of the island. It didn't look that far, but took longer than he had assumed, probably from the sluggishness and stiffness of his body and the uneven terrain. The ground was mostly flat, strewn with tilted rock slabs that were covered in moss and surrounded by grass. He kept his focus on the ground to keep from tripping. Twice he slowed to look around and see if he had been spotted, but no one was visible. He saw a firewood-chopping area and something that looked like a freshwater reservoir built on a wooden platform. Otherwise, there were no other manmade structures between him and the far edge. His ankles screamed at him to stop moving. They were both numb and red hot. Though his ribs ached from the jostling, at least they weren't shooting sharp pains through him. He could definitely make it to the north end. But once he got there, if he stopped for any length of time, he was going to stiffen up and be a solid lump of aching, swollen muscles. Whatever. He could deal with that later.

He reached the far edge and saw it was a concave shape like it had been eroded or collapsed. On either side, the rock face was jagged and uninviting, however, the concave section was sandier and a gentler slope, not at all easy to traverse, but possibly doable. There was a small patch of pebbly ground below that passed for a tiny beach, and an inlet next to it that led into what might be a cave. Brandt couldn’t see too far into it from his vantage point.

There wasn’t a dock. There was no boat pulled into the cove, or anything to signify that this was any kind of usable port, or place to launch or beach a boat. But it was the closest thing he had seen so far. Maybe Lia and her dad were out in the boat right now and they might come back to this spot. And maybe Brandt was pressing for something that wasn’t realistic.

Someone who lived out here would need a substantial boat to get around. Those waves would toss around anything less than a twenty-foot craft. Something like a sloop would be the smallest thing one could even consider, and even then it could be dangerous in these waters. And a good-sized sloop would be hard to beach on that little rocky shore. It would need to be docked somewhere. Nothing made sense.

Far off to Brandt’s right was nothing but mountainous terrain. Giant rocks and harsh vertical ground that shot straight up from the water’s edge. There was absolutely nowhere in sight to gain entrance to this place by an approaching boat. This little cove was the only thing Brandt had seen that had a chance. Maybe on the other side of the island, hidden behind the mountains, there was some kind of beach or dock. But how would the traveler get to this side? There was no road or obvious path through the mountains that he could see. Below, and to the right, the inlet that led to what looked like the mouth of a cave was the most promising thing he had seen so far. It was a ridiculous whim, but he imagined an underground tunnel that traversed the island leading from that cave. Then he reconsidered that it wasn’t entirely ridiculous. He knew that several of the islands had caverns that went a considerable distance under the surface. Whale watching tours would sometimes visit them to impress the passengers when the whales weren’t cooperating, and the captains wanted to give the passengers their money’s worth. An island-long underground cavern was about as likely as anything else in this place, and he didn’t have any other good ideas. He either needed to investigate this cave, or give up and go back. If he stood here any longer he’d stiffen up and be a useless invalid. While his muscles were still warm and not locked up yet, he needed to keep moving.

He paced near the edge, which had precarious drop-offs in many places, and several spots where rain or wind had bitten into it and made a trough wide enough to step. Brandt shuffled and sidestepped, trying to keep his balance in one of the ruts. The slope was mild at the top, but bent into a steep decline within six feet. It was layered with shells and smaller rocks that didn’t offer much stability, and his feet slid immediately when he pressed down. The cascade of