kidnapped.
When I could no longer bear the heat and the interior walls began to crash down with massive booms, I got the hell out of there.
I kneeled upwind in the wet grass, blistered, stunned and grieving.
Where was my daughter? We didn’t have the kind of casual lifestyle where she would go to a friend’s house to play. My wife was always with our child. She even home-schooled her. The absence of Kristen was shocking, overwhelming.
I could not fathom that anyone would kidnap her, except for... vampires.
I closed my eyes and leaned my face into the sky to wash my tear-streaked cheeks, when I got sudden Hollywood-like flashes of final moments of a life existence. However, it wasn’t my life that unrolled in slow motion like a poignant film trailer...it was my wife’s.
Being there with skin from her burned corpse stuck to my own hands, Megan’s life rolled by in my mind in a mental movie reel of significant dates, and ordinary days. Birthdays, Christmas, pancake suppers, lovemaking, building things, and the birth of our daughter. More events—a lifetime of them. I tried to visualize my daughter’s life unrolling and could not. If I could not see the life of my daughter flash before my eyes, did that mean that Kristen was still alive? I knew that I had seen Rudolph’s life flash before my eyes, too—I had held him when he had taken his last breath in Griffith Park.
I sank to my knees, holding my wife’s charred hand, her wedding ring fused to the finger bones. I slowly came back to myself and saw that it had stopped raining. I tried to think of what to do.
Vampires had killed my parents, my brother, and now my wife—and had, apparently, kidnapped my child.
Vampires.
I needed help to find Kristen, but I also realized that I only knew one person in the world who I could tell, who would believe me, and who would help me.
Not even knowing if she was off the cruise ship, or even if she was in Hawaii or Los Angeles, I pulled out the new prepaid phone I had just bought in the airport. I texted Ambra at the phone number engraved on the silver business card that she had given me: 187, 278.5, 451
The grouped numbers were standard American police codes for: homicide, child abduction and arson.
Within thirty seconds, I received a text back from her: 10-31? She was asking if the crime was still in progress. Good, she was up to speed. Smart girl.
I texted back: 10-74, or ‘negative.’
Her response was nearly instant. 10-20. She wanted the location.
I texted the street address and added: 10-10 (home).
She texted: 10-77 45
She’d be here in 45 minutes.
I texted: 10-0 for caution.
Next, I wondered why she was in Los Angeles, so soon after docking in Hawaii.
Chapter Thirteen
Know thine enemy.
The words had been burned into my brain by my parents’ death, and then by my brother’s. Now, with the death of my wife—the burning death—and the abduction of our daughter, the Sebastian family had been absolutely shattered by vampires.
I stood on the cliff overlooking the rough, wild Pacific Ocean. But for Kristen’s unknown fate, I would’ve leaped from that cliff. I stood on the cliff edge, shaking, the misty drizzle billowing around me like cold, gray arms that beckoned me to step out to my death.
But I didn’t. My daughter needed me. I screamed my rage until I tasted blood from broken blood vessels in my throat. I had to get my little girl back. I hoped to God she was still alive. And... human.
I backed away from the cliff and sat on the wrought-iron garden bench in my mother’s overgrown perfume garden that overlooked the Pacific near the burned-out, blackened ruins of our once-beautiful hacienda in a remote area of Malaga Cove on the Ranchos Palos Verdes peninsula, the part that was often rocked by earthquakes and the occasional landslide. Sobs wracked my body.
I heard a car approach and looked up through blurry vision.
A slender, blonde figure got out of a black Equus and walked
When I could no longer bear the heat and the interior walls began to crash down with massive booms, I got the hell out of there.
I kneeled upwind in the wet grass, blistered, stunned and grieving.
Where was my daughter? We didn’t have the kind of casual lifestyle where she would go to a friend’s house to play. My wife was always with our child. She even home-schooled her. The absence of Kristen was shocking, overwhelming.
I could not fathom that anyone would kidnap her, except for... vampires.
I closed my eyes and leaned my face into the sky to wash my tear-streaked cheeks, when I got sudden Hollywood-like flashes of final moments of a life existence. However, it wasn’t my life that unrolled in slow motion like a poignant film trailer...it was my wife’s.
Being there with skin from her burned corpse stuck to my own hands, Megan’s life rolled by in my mind in a mental movie reel of significant dates, and ordinary days. Birthdays, Christmas, pancake suppers, lovemaking, building things, and the birth of our daughter. More events—a lifetime of them. I tried to visualize my daughter’s life unrolling and could not. If I could not see the life of my daughter flash before my eyes, did that mean that Kristen was still alive? I knew that I had seen Rudolph’s life flash before my eyes, too—I had held him when he had taken his last breath in Griffith Park.
I sank to my knees, holding my wife’s charred hand, her wedding ring fused to the finger bones. I slowly came back to myself and saw that it had stopped raining. I tried to think of what to do.
Vampires had killed my parents, my brother, and now my wife—and had, apparently, kidnapped my child.
Vampires.
I needed help to find Kristen, but I also realized that I only knew one person in the world who I could tell, who would believe me, and who would help me.
Not even knowing if she was off the cruise ship, or even if she was in Hawaii or Los Angeles, I pulled out the new prepaid phone I had just bought in the airport. I texted Ambra at the phone number engraved on the silver business card that she had given me: 187, 278.5, 451
The grouped numbers were standard American police codes for: homicide, child abduction and arson.
Within thirty seconds, I received a text back from her: 10-31? She was asking if the crime was still in progress. Good, she was up to speed. Smart girl.
I texted back: 10-74, or ‘negative.’
Her response was nearly instant. 10-20. She wanted the location.
I texted the street address and added: 10-10 (home).
She texted: 10-77 45
She’d be here in 45 minutes.
I texted: 10-0 for caution.
Next, I wondered why she was in Los Angeles, so soon after docking in Hawaii.
Chapter Thirteen
Know thine enemy.
The words had been burned into my brain by my parents’ death, and then by my brother’s. Now, with the death of my wife—the burning death—and the abduction of our daughter, the Sebastian family had been absolutely shattered by vampires.
I stood on the cliff overlooking the rough, wild Pacific Ocean. But for Kristen’s unknown fate, I would’ve leaped from that cliff. I stood on the cliff edge, shaking, the misty drizzle billowing around me like cold, gray arms that beckoned me to step out to my death.
But I didn’t. My daughter needed me. I screamed my rage until I tasted blood from broken blood vessels in my throat. I had to get my little girl back. I hoped to God she was still alive. And... human.
I backed away from the cliff and sat on the wrought-iron garden bench in my mother’s overgrown perfume garden that overlooked the Pacific near the burned-out, blackened ruins of our once-beautiful hacienda in a remote area of Malaga Cove on the Ranchos Palos Verdes peninsula, the part that was often rocked by earthquakes and the occasional landslide. Sobs wracked my body.
I heard a car approach and looked up through blurry vision.
A slender, blonde figure got out of a black Equus and walked
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