Blood Exposed Read online

  “I might join you,” the Rev said. “I was fighting to stay awake in the last workshop.”

  “Okay,” Severn agreed. “Riley, we can go upstairs and make ourselves comfortable in the committee room. They’ve got decent chairs up there.”

  We detoured past the coffee urns and stocked up on two cups each, along with a couple of oversized muffins that must have been left over from morning tea. Upstairs we found only Anita and Caleb, huddled side by side on the couch, peering at the screen of Caleb’s laptop. He shut it as we entered than looked guilty as he tried to look innocent.

  “What are you guys hiding?” I asked. “You watching porn?”

  “No, no,” Caleb stammered, a blush spreading up his neck. “We’re just ... um ... oh, okay, I’ll tell you. I’m working on a spreadsheet, trying to figure out who might have taken the society’s money. Look,” He opened the laptop again and turned it towards us. “I’ve made a list of all the people who were there the day the money went missing. Along the top I’ve made a column for every half hour of the day. What I’m trying to do is place everybody and work out who had access to Dad’s bag and when. I don’t know if it will help but I’ve got to do something. Someone has stolen a lot of our money. If it was just a few dollars I wouldn’t care so much, but it’s ten thousand!”

  Severn perched on the arm of the couch and scanned the spreadsheet. “You also want a list of possible motives. Who needs the money most?”

  “Apart from me – unemployed student with baby on the way?” Caleb scanned the list of names on his screen. “I know I’m biased and I’d make a dreadful cop but I’m ruling out Mum and Dad. They’re too invested in the society and they are both too honest for their own good. I’m sure that’s why the money was so easy to steal – Dad’s so honest he wouldn’t think anything could happen to it.”

  “So that leaves the rest of the committee and anyone else who was at the meeting where it was stolen.” Severn sounded sceptical. “How many does that make?”

  “Only the committee, I think. There were a lot of other people there but Dad put the bag in the back room and I’m pretty sure only the committee ever went in there.”

  “Only the committee would know Gerald had a bag full of money,” Anita pointed out.

  “Unless they didn’t know until they opened the bag,” I said. “What if the thief was doing a random bag search for, I don’t know, laptops or something, and found ten thousand dollars. That would be a bonus too good to ignore. Did anyone leave hurriedly?”

  “Only Abigail. She left in a hurry half way through because she’d forgotten something, but she came back. That’s normal behaviour for her, though. She does that all the time.”

  I looked over at Severn who looked back at me over the top of his glasses. He was putting her in the suspect pile too.

  “What’s her financial position?” he asked. “Does she need ten thousand dollars?”

  “Even if she didn’t need it, she could buy a new car, or an overseas holiday,” Anita said. “Or jewellery. She loves bling.”

  “What does she do for a job? Is she well paid?”

  “”I don’t know about well paid – she works in a dress shop.”

  “In the Palms,” I interjected. “I thought she looked familiar. Mum shops there all the time.”

  “She lives somewhere near there,” Caleb said. “Petrie Street or Stapletons Road. Dad dropped her home from meetings a couple of times but it was dark and I can’t remember exactly which street we were in. I do remember that it was an old-style villa, painted white and she said she rented it with three other girls. So she might be in need of ten thousand dollars if she wanted to get her own place.”

  “All good motivation to put her high up the list,” Severn said. “Anyone else?”

  “What about Rhys,” I suggested.

  “No.” Caleb was quick to disagree. “He’s Mister Helpful. If you need something done that takes muscle, he’s the one to do it.”

  “He wasn’t being very helpful to Rachel last night. Or this morning. He could have carried her sewing machine into the hotel but he dumped it in the foyer. Rachel had to ask for help to get it through to the conference room.”

  Caleb held his hand up to halt my comment. “Sorry, I’m on his side here. I feel sorry for Rachel breaking her leg and I know she can’t carry her machine when she’s on crutches but she shouldn’t have dumped that on Rhys. He’s practically in charge of everything happening over in the park and he can’t be expected to be running over here to be her slave.”

  “He didn’t have to be rude about it though.”

  “He didn’t start that. You only saw the end of it. At the beginning, when she first realised she needed help, Rachel should have asked nicely. But she didn’t. She demanded. No please or thank you, just an order. Rhys, you will carry my sewing machine. He said no, he was going to be too busy and she’s the one who got angry. Rachel can get bossy. I’m glad I’m not the one dealing with her and her workshops.”

  “Sounds like it’s just as well she’s got the Rev,” Severn said. “Aiden and I have short fuses with bossy people but the Rev goes into calm, reassuring priest mode and they end up eating out of his hands.”

  “I still don’t get how he can be a priest when he’s still so young.” Seriously, Caleb, stop going down that path.

  “He grew up in the monastery. He started studying for the priesthood when he was a small child.” Severn trotted out the usual cover story that was actually true but just left out the intervening centuries between then and now.

  “Didn’t he have a family?”

  “They died.” Again Severn went for the short answer and left out the “of the plague a few hundred years ago” bit.

  “Back to Rhys.” I needed to change the subject before it got difficult. “His wife didn’t seem too happy with him earlier. She was bitching to Ngaire about how he’s never at home and how she has to do everything with the kids. Ngaire says they’ve got four of them, all young, so that must be hard. I can see why she gets annoyed with him. It sounds like the Mister Helpful you see is just another persona like Madoc the Smith, that he turns off at home.”

  “I guess she hasn’t seen much of him over the last couple of months,” Caleb agreed. “He has spent a lot of time at our place working out the details for this event with Mum and Dad, and he’s been talking about some big commissions he’s had for his dragon statues so I know he’s on a deadline to get them finished. He said something to Dad about practically living in the factory. Some nights he’s not going home at all.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t make Donna happy. Especially if he’s not alone.”

  “What?”

  “Okay, I could be wrong and just way too suspicious. The woman he was kissing behind his tent might have been his sister.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You might not go on stage but you’ve inherited you mother’s flair for the dramatic.” Severn grinned at me as we descended the stairs. “Poor Anita looked like you’d told her the Easter Bunny wasn’t real.”

  “It gave her something to do this afternoon, though. Hunting out the mysterious female will stop her getting bored.”

  “What? Did you make it up just to entertain her?”

  “No. I really did see him kissing someone. Or her kissing him to be more precise. And yesterday I saw someone go into his tent but I only got a glimpse of their jacket. All I know for sure is that it wasn’t Donna, either time.”

  “Hey look, the Goth Ks are awake. I figured they’d be at the talk on vampires. Do you want to go out to the van and wake the others. I’ll get the mics set up. Make sure you bang on the outside of the van before you open the door. Aiden wasn’t kidding about waking in attack mode.”

  I approached the van as if it was a bomb about to explode, knocking heavily on the side and calling out before I opened the sliding door. Inside, the Rev was sitting up in the rear passenger seat, stretching and yawning.

  “Wakey, wakey,” I said. “Break’
s over.”

  Aiden’s face reared over the back of the van’s front seats, baring his fangs at me.

  “Thanks,” he said, his pleasant tone a complete contrast to the look in his eyes. He shook his head, his fangs retracted and his eyes cleared, the hunting gleam fading as I watched. But it didn’t fade away completely. I could tell he was still in hunting mode as we walked across the carpark – like Severn in that mode, his head jerked continuously as he scanned his surroundings. I had a horrible feeling he was staying in vampire state especially for the panel discussion. I looked back at the Rev to see if he had noticed and was dismayed to see him pull his top lip back to show his fangs descended as well.

  “Guys,” I stopped and made them look at me. “Cut it out. Put your vampire away and put your professional on. We’re here to do a job. Don’t you dare stuff it up.”

  “She doesn’t trust us.” Aiden tried to put on an innocent pout and failed.

  “She’s right, though,” the Rev said. “Job first, play later.”

  I stood my ground, glaring at them both until, with matching virtuous smiles, they showed me their retracted fangs, but as they put their arms around my waist so I was sandwiched between them, and led me inexorably forwards into the hotel, I knew I had been played.

  “There you are.” Severn made a show of looking at his watch, his stern expression implying we had wasted valuable time and left him to do all the work. “Rev, help me with a sound check. Aiden, set up the projector and screen. Riley, straighten the chairs and move that extra table out of the way.”

  That killed their vampire mode. But not for long. Once we were ready and the audience started to filter in, the Rev rummaged in the box under the desk and handed out our monks’ robes.

  “We are the vampire monks of Angel Mountain. We need to maintain our air of mystery,” he said with a grin that showed his fangs were back. I sighed in defeat as they tugged on their robes, pulled the cowls over their heads and smiled back, even Severn’s fangs extended in response.

  “Wow! Those fangs look so real,” a voice behind me exclaimed. “Where did you find ones that don’t make your lips stick out?”

  All three vampires turned on Kyle and pulled their lips back to show the full extent of their pointed canines.

  “We grew them,” Severn said. “They’re real.”

  “Wow! You must know a great dentist. Kristi and I found one who was willing to shape ours a bit, but not as much as yours.”

  None of the three vampires replied, they just folded their arms and smiled out from under their cowls, the Rev and Aiden keeping their fangs fully extended while Severn, in the middle, retracted his then extended them again.

  “How the...!” Kyle gasped, his eager grin changing to a moue of confusion.

  “Take a seat. They’re about to start.” Severn’s command, quiet and gentle with a hint of menace, had Kyle nodding agreement and backing away. Aiden flashed him another toothy grin as Kyle hurried Kristi down the aisle to a seat near the front.

  I waggled my finger at the men like a frustrated school teacher. “Stop scaring the natives!” Then I pulled my cowl over my head, sat down and pretended to ignore them.

  Severn settled himself behind the tiny sound desk, his hands on the sliders, his eyes on the panel as the MC began his introductions. He set the mic to a comfortable level, surveyed the audience and leant over to me.

  “I didn’t realise we were such a popular topic. Full house. And they’re still coming in.”

  Severn sat back but didn’t stay relaxed for long as the first speaker, one of the authors, leant forwards, cleared her throat loudly and committed a sin that, in Severn’s view was heinous enough to send her straight to hell with him slamming the door behind her – she tapped on her microphone. Severn stiffened, growling like a dog.

  “Can you hear me?” the author shouted, tapping the mic again. Seething with an anger I could feel, but keeping it dialled back to the cold, determined rage that made him an expert hunter, Severn stood up, projecting his quiet, stern voice over the many replies of “yes,” coming from the audience.

  “Please ... do not ... tap ... or blow ... into my microphones.”

  The room fell silent as all eyes turned to take in the figure in the monk’s robe, no longer the insignificant person they had all ignored when they entered. Severn, angry, appeared taller, his face more chiselled. He had changed a lot from the slightly stooped, meek but cute technician I had met in a backstage alley a few months ago. Severn let the silence continue for another beat before he spoke again, very politely but with ice dripping off the edges of his words.

  “Trust us to know our job. The microphones will be on when you need them. Speak normally, we will do the rest.”

  He stood, arms folded, glaring at the author until she dropped her gaze and muttered an apology. I remembered a similar argument with a musical director – Severn had won that one too. Anger, delivered quiet, low and cold was much scarier than shouting. I should practise that. The woman began to speak. Severn gave me a wink, pulled his cowl further over his forehead and sank back in his chair.

  I glanced along our row of seats, studying the expressions on the faces of the three men and almost started to laugh. All three were fighting with their inner demons – like the monk version of the three wise monkeys. A silly poem popped into my head – angry vampire, hungry vampire – but I shook the rhyme away before I could think of any more lines and forced myself to concentrate on what the author was saying.

  Once she got started, she was interesting, opening the panel with a talk on the history of vampires in fiction, beginning with Bram Stoker and illustrated on the screen with slides of book covers. The film-maker followed, showing clips from old movies that had even the vampires laughing at some of the melodramatic portrayals. After one particularly bad bite scene, Severn reached over to pull my cowl back so he could whisper in my ear.

  “Stake me if I ever dress that badly.”

  “I wore a cape like that to the opera once,” the Rev whispered back. “I got it caught in every door I walked through.”

  On the screen, the movie clips had turned to vampires in modern clothes, including a few of my favourite tv and movie characters. I couldn’t help glancing from the screen to Severn’s profile as he watched from under his cowl, a small smile the only sign that he was amused by the talk. Was I attracted to him because he had cheekbones like the on-screen vampires Anita and I had lusted after? Was my diet of Buffy and Lost Boys the reason why the vampires didn’t scare me? Should they have scared me? When I first saw them flying in the theatre, would I have run away if I hadn’t been a fan of Spike?

  Before the audience could come to blows over whether or not vampires should sparkle, the third speaker rose to his feet to talk about vampires in real life. Was there such a thing or were they all just people with delusions? From the front, Kristi’s explosive condemnation left us in no doubt how she felt.

  The psychologist, who was supposedly an expert in personality disorders, looked her in the eyes for the next few sentences, nodding frequently as if Kristi’s well-being really mattered to him, before sweeping his attention back to include the whole room as he launched into an explanation of Renfield Syndrome. Kristi’s interjections were becoming more frequent.

  By the time the psychologist got to some genetic disease with a long, unpronounceable name, Kristi was squirming in her seat, held in place only by Kyle’s firm grip on her arm. Beside the Rev, Aiden stiffened in his chair, pulled his cowl tighter and sucked in a long breath with an audible hiss as he fought against Kristi’s rising blood beat, that he could hear, even from the back of the room. The Rev gave Aiden a reassuring pat on his shoulder, but his drawn-back lip showed me he, too, felt the change. Severn seemed unmoved. Were Aiden’s senses more attuned or did Severn have better control of his? Then Severn looked my way and I could see that his eyes were overly bright. They were all in hunting mode again.

  The psychologist finished and the floor was throw
n open to discussion. Or what should have been a discussion if Kristi hadn’t leapt to her feet and launched into an angry rebuttal of everything the psychologist had said, until she ran out of breath, burst into tears and sank, sobbing, into Kyle’s arms, gasping how being a vampire stuck in a human body was torture and how nobody understood. Kyle held Kristi close, glaring at the audience as her mascara ran in rivulets down his white shirt. Aiden caught his attention, provocatively flashed one canine and licked his lips, forcing Kyle to look away and hug Kristi tighter.

  Kristi’s collapse put a dramatic end to the discussion. A few people made valiant attempts to get it back onto fictional vampires but, somehow, the talk kept returning to Kristi and her determined crusade that vampires were real, with the audience divided into distinct camps. Some argued on Kristi’s side for real vampires, some argued against, and others were unsure but hoped they were real. The speakers on the dais gave up as the discussion heated up and the different sides slid from speaking to shouting. Kristi wasn’t the only one in the room whose blood pressure was rising and, if I could feel it, how were the vampires coping? I put my arms out to touch Severn and the Rev – a gentle reminder to stay calm and stay out of it. But, of course, Kyle had to throw them in.

  “What about the technical crew? They’re real vampires. They’ve got fangs. I’ve seen them.”

  And everyone in the room turned to stare at us.

  Severn reacted first, pulling back his cowl to show his ultra-short, number two haircut and adjusting his geeky tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. Every inch the compute nerd.

  “Sorry, what? Who? Us?” All innocence and confusion, he flashed a radiant smile with not a hint of extraneous fang and shrugged his shoulders. “Vampires? I thought we were monks. But, I suppose if we can be monks, we can be vampires. Is it possible to be both or is that a religious contradiction?”

  Before Kyle could sputter an answer, or Kristi could leap to Kyle’s defence, the MC grabbed his microphone, babbled about time being up, thanked everyone for coming and quickly closed the panel. Severn pulled the sliders down to turn off the microphones and waited as the audience filed out, some of them taking a good look at us as they passed. We kept out cowls over our heads and ignored them. As we all expected, the Goth Ks hung back, Kristi trying to pick an argument with the psychologist who waved her away and sped from the room, Kyle waiting for the room to empty before he pounced on Severn who was bent over his programme, checking our next set-up.