Wicked Moon: A Paranormal Mystery Novel (Vampire for Hire Book 23) by J.R. Rain & Matthew S. Cox

Author:J.R. Rain & Matthew S. Cox [Rain, J.R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Rain Press
Published: 2021-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

Close Call

Speaking of giant crap boulders falling on the unsuspecting…

My phone rings while I’m sitting in line waiting for the proverbial anthill explosion of children to burst forth from the doors of Paxton’s school. I check the caller ID to see if it’s something I can ignore for now—good grief I get a lot of telemarketing junk—but upon seeing Mary Lou’s name, I flick the slide on the screen.

“Hey, Mare. What’s up?”

“Sam,” says my older sister, half frantic, half crying. “It’s Rick…”

Oh, shit. Whatever she says next can’t possibly be good, merely varying degrees of bad. I cross my fingers (and toes) hoping it’s on the lighter side of awful. “What’s going on?”

She lets out a slow sigh. “He collapsed at work. Mike told me he complained of chest pains before he passed out. I think he had a heart attack but the doctors aren’t saying anything yet.”

“You’re at the hospital?”

“Yes. Anaheim Regional,” says Mary Lou in half a sob. “Just me and Billy at the moment.”

This is perhaps the first time in our lives where it feels like my big sis needs me to take care of her. I’m not sure she’s even aware she needs me on a level conscious enough to ask for help, but she doesn’t have to. Her sixteen-year-old, Ruby Grace, is still living at home despite splitting her time evenly between high school and early college courses. The kid’s a literal genius. How she came from our genes, I have no idea. Her son, Billy Joe, works with his dad as an apprentice electrician. The oldest, Ellie Mae, is in Virginia now, halfway through college. She’s even got a serious boyfriend and talks of marrying him once she graduates.

I can’t even process that one of my sister’s kids is fully grown up.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Pax is about to walk out the door of her school.”

Mary Lou sniffs. “Yes, of course.”

We talk about the situation for about three minutes before the bell goes off in the school building. My sister doesn’t know much yet. Rick was at work when he clutched his chest without warning and dropped where he stood. Fortunately, they’d been working at a site in Anaheim less than a mile from the hospital. Mary Lou is getting herself worked up in preparation for bad news. There’s an unspoken subtext hanging between us where I think she’s hoping I ‘do something’ to make Rick into an immortal if he should die. Unfortunately… my ability to pass this thing on might have died when Elizabeth and I separated. I changed from being a relatively standard blood-feeding vampire to a mental-energy consuming vampire who really doesn’t care about sunlight at all. The typical way to pass vampirism along involves blood transfer, and I don’t think my vampirism has anything to do with blood.

There may be an equivalent process involving mental energy, but as far as I know, I’m the only one of my kind and I haven’t tried to turn anyone else into whatever I am.

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