Out for Blood by John Peyton Cooke

Author:John Peyton Cooke [Cooke, John Peyton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XVII

Giving Blood

Monday night, Chris left the apartment without saying a word to Temsik.

It was the warmest night of the year so far, and many of Madison’s college students were going about town in shorts and tank tops, even after the sun had gone down. Chris followed suit, donning a pair of Del’s baggy-legged khaki shorts and an extra-large salmon-colored tank top that hung low across his chest and that he barely tucked in, so that it would drape loosely over his waist. He also wore his glacier glasses and a pair of plastic flip-flops on his feet. The moon was beginning to wane but still shone brightly; now was as good a time as any for Chris to start on his tan.

After Sheridan had been stolen, Chris had wanted to go after Stadler, but he could never do it without Temsik’s help, which the old vampire refused to give.

They had searched the ground around Sheridan’s grave, looking for footprints, but found none except their own. Stadler must have erased his tracks with a tree branch. Even so, he had likely driven away in a car, and Chris and Temsik were unequipped to trace a vehicle’s tire tracks, even if they could find the proper treads along the much-traveled Arboretum Drive. Based on this lack of viable leads, Temsik had claimed that there was nothing they could do.

“I haven’t the faintest idea where his lair is,” he had said as they were driving back to the apartment. “After he got Laura, I tried to find it but failed. Stadler employs a small band of thugs for his protection. Any time I’ve gotten close to finding him, he’s been tipped off in advance by one of his guards. The same thing used to happen to Eliot Ness down in Chicago, during Prohibition. At first, whenever he tried to raid Al Capone’s warehouses, he found them empty of all liquor, because Capone had been tipped off. That’s what keeps happening with me and Stadler. Once, I managed to track down one of Stadler’s locations, but by the time I got there, it had already been abandoned. It was an old two-story building on the east side, and all of the windows in the back rooms had been freshly bricked over. I could also smell that vampires had recently been kept there. But it proved to be a dead end, and I was perhaps weeks off his trail. Since then, I’ve found no more clues, and that puts us back at the proverbial square one.”

Which, in a nutshell, meant that Temsik had given up and didn’t want to help Chris find Stadler and try to save Sheridan, or anyone else who might fall into Stadler’s clutches. Chris wondered if Temsik would bother to do anything if Chris himself were ever captured.

“If Stadler did take him,” Temsik had said, “then we’re too late already.”

Chris hadn’t liked Temsik’s fatalistic attitude and had asked, “What chance is there that it wasn’t Stadler?”

“Alas, none.” Temsik had sighed, but whether it had been a sigh of sorrow or of boredom, Chris couldn’t say.

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