The Iron in Blood by Jenny Doe (primary phonics .txt) 📕

I looked across at Angus. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, his face looked like it had been carved from marble, or some sort of more angular stone.

I had questions, but I also had doubts. Angus looked like he was about to snap something in half, and I didn’t want that something to be me.

I stared out of the windscreen at the greys and browns of the wintry English countryside blurring past. We were heading north on the M6 motorway, averaging about eighty to one hundred miles per hour. Why north? My sister was missing and Angus was heading north? I didn’t get it.

“Why are we going north?” My voice sounded tentative and nervous in my own ears. Angus looked across at me and smiled tightly again.

“I was waiting for the questions.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

I waited a few seconds and the asked my question again. “Why north?”

“Two reasons. Firstly it’s a lot less heavily populated. Secondly vampires like the cold. They function best in a temperature range of between minus five and ten degrees. Celsius. That’s why my brothers live in Russia.”

“How do you know it’s a vampire that’s got her?”

“I smelled him. And two other guys. Probably military background. They both reeked of gun oil, and one smokes a lot.”

“How did you get all that from sniffing the air for a few seconds?” I was impressed. And not quite believing it all.

“I have an excellent sense of smell. If Fergus can get me within five miles of them, I’ll be able to track them down using smell alone.”

“Cool.”

Angus smiled again. “Yeah.”

“And you know the vampire drinks blood only. What does that mean?”

“He’ll be weaker than one of us. He’s feeding his addiction to iron, and not his body. So he won’t have much in the way of muscle left, but he’ll still be stronger than you humans. Especially after a big dose of blood. And I know that he drinks blood only because I can smell it on him. That and the stink of his slowly atrophying tissues.”

“Yuk.”

“Yes. But it’s a very distinctive smell. Easy tracking.”

I waited for a minute or so before asking the question that had been bothering me for a while.

“Why did they take Rebecca?”

The knuckles whitened even more, but his voice was controlled when he spoke. “I don’t know. There are a couple of possibilities.”

He paused, and took a few deep breaths.

“Firstly, they might not know that she’s a vampire. Young female abduction; she’d be raped or murdered or both.”

I felt sick. Angus spoke again, managing to keep his tone level.

“Or they do know that she’s a vampire. That is the most likely scenario, and that means a whole different set of options. They might want her to join them, as a part of their community,” he spat the word. “As a breeding female.”

I shook my head vehemently. “She’d never stand for that.”

“She might not have a choice. She has a major vulnerability that they can exploit. She needs iron, high doses on a daily basis. If they withhold that from her, she could become weak, and almost die. She wouldn’t have a choice, Mark. They would force her.” His voice had become gravelly, as if he was having trouble controlling his emotions. I knew how he felt.

Rebecca

I forced myself to concentrate on breathing deeply and swaying with the van again. It took me a while, but I eventually calmed the acute panic down. The van must have moved onto a motorway, because the swaying all but stopped, and the speed increased. Fast but not too fast. It made sense that they wouldn’t go faster than the speed limit. They wouldn’t want to run the risk of being pulled over.

I leaned back against the nearest surface and adjusted my position slightly. My limbs were starting to ache slightly with the forced inactivity, and unnatural positions that they had been tied in. I felt a fleeting irritation with these people. I wanted to make them pay. Eventually.

I started thinking about escaping. I was no expert on kidnapping, but these guys appeared to be careful. Taking a number plate off for doing the deed and then putting it back on afterwards. Cunning. They were unlikely to take any unnecessary risks. Crap.

Then it occurred to me. I had a bit of an advantage over these people. I could metabolise iron, and if Angus was right, a big dose of iron would make me tremendously and invincibly strong. I smiled under my smelly pillowcase, imagining tearing these idiots apart, and escaping back to my family. And to Angus.

All that was missing in my plan was a massive dose of iron. As I started wondering how to get hold of it, I realised that all my fear had evaporated, and I felt slightly triumphant. Score one for the girl.

Angus

Mark was a welcome distraction, except that he asked the wrong questions. Why had they taken Rebecca? I didn’t even like to think for a split second about what they would do to her.

But something else had crossed my mind as I was speaking to him. If there was a group of iron metabolisers out there somewhere who lived on blood, they would look strange. I had built up a mental picture of the vampire from his smell – thin, maybe even emaciated. Parchment-like skin. Tired looking face, dark rings around the eyes. Like any junkie with an all-consuming addiction.

Someone who looked like that would need to hide, and stay hidden. And if there were a group of them, they would need a cover story to explain their reluctance to be seen in public. And they would need servants who would have to be fed that cover story, and who would swallow it. The servants would be in daily contact with them, and would eventually have to see them as they were. What kind of cover story could render the horror of a collection of crumbling vampires normal? Well, maybe not normal, but believable. And maybe even pitiable, so it would be frowned upon to talk about them too much. Hmmm.

“Phone.”

Mark grabbed it off the dash, and handed it to me. I dialled Fergus again, switched on the speakerphone function, and handed the phone to Mark. He held it obediently.

Two rings and Fergus answered. “Got your arsenal, brother. It’s on its way as we speak.”

“Thanks.”

“Estate’s yours too. Housekeepers’ sorting it out now. I think she’s even going to make you supper. She’ll leave it in the fridge, of course. You’ll have the place to yourself when you get there. We’re diverting to Glasgow airport. Well be arriving at the estate sometime around midnight.”

“Fergus, we need to consider the possibility that these vampires aren’t living in complete isolation. They could be blending in under some kind of believable cover story. I want you to locate private hospices, especially those dealing with rare diseases.”

“Right.”

“And look for unexplained violent or animal related deaths around one hundred plus years ago. Transport wouldn’t have been as good, so that kind of search will probably reveal more of their whereabouts than a more recent one.”

“Tricky.”

“Yeah, but you’re good at tricky.”

“Thanks, brother. Later.”

Rebecca

Iron, hmmm. I’d left the iron tablets behind that Angus had given me. Even if I had them, say, in a pocket, there was no way I could open that tub and take some out and swallow them with my hands tied behind my back. And even if these guys untied me, they’d never sit by and let me swallow a bunch of tablets. They would want me alive and conscious for what they were planning, I bet. Whatever that was. I tried not to think of it, but concentrated on my plan.

There was no help for it. I would have to bite the neck of one of these guys. And drink their blood. The decision didn’t repulse me as much as it probably should have.

I would wait for the opportunity. There’s a lot of iron in blood.

And these guys had it coming.

Mark

Something had been bothering me since Angus’ first conversation with his brother Fergus. Well, something else. There were too many things on my mind for me to really notice this one until I’d had some time to think it through. Once a question occurred to me, I just had to know.

“So how does someone like you know so much about guns and stuff?”

Angus chuckled. “Guns and stuff,” he mused. “It’s a long story.”

I said nothing. I was learning from an expert.

“I’ve been in the armed forces for quite a large proportion of my fifty-nine years,” he said eventually. Every time I heard how old he really was, my mind started lurching around like a drunk. He really didn’t look more than twenty. Twenty five if you really pushed it.

“I couldn’t stay in any one place for more than, say, five years. People start noticing that you’re not getting older. I started off in the British military, the SAS, and worked my way across Europe. I spent a few years in Africa too. I ended up working for the FBI in the states until I retired about four years ago.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Because it wasn’t what I had expected when I started. I realised fairly soon after my father died that I needed an outlet for my, er, violent tendencies. I joined the armed forces, thinking that I’d be able to hurt deserving people in a disciplined, controlled way. It didn’t work like that, though. You didn’t get to hurt anyone. You learned about guns and knives and unarmed combat, but you couldn’t hurt anyone until you were actually in the battlefield. Those were quiet years, and I spent five and a half years learning to curb my frustration. It taught me that much at least, I suppose.”

“But surely you liked the unarmed combat bit?”

Angus laughed humourlessly. “Rolling around on the floor with some idiot, pretending to fight him off? No.” He paused, and then he turned to look at me, his expression grim. “I can crush your neck with one hand, Mark, without even lifting the other off the steering wheel here. I can break that massive bone in your thigh by just squeezing it. I could thrust my hand through your ribs and into your thoracic cavity and rip your beating heart out.” Expressionless, like he was reading the weather.

I shuddered. I wasn’t much liking the direction this conversation had taken.

“So, you see, I spent all that time in unarmed combat training sessions fighting myself. Trying not to hurt those men. It wasn’t fun.”

“Why the FBI?” Change the subject.

“The idea of the bad guy going after the bad guy appealed to me.” He waited a few minutes before continuing.

“I killed a man when I was seventeen. He was setting traps out in the countryside where we grew up, and when I confronted him, he laughed at me. He was a big man, see, and he thought that he would easily be able to fight a teenager off. That laugh, and the derision and contempt behind it; that enraged me. I’d killed him before I even realised what I was doing.”

His face hardened. “Afterwards, when I was standing over his broken body, I waited for the shame and remorse to wash over me. It never came. The only thing I felt was satisfaction. I realised then that there was something profoundly wrong with me.”

I said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

“Marcus explained that my reaction had a biological basis, that it would make sense for those of us who had to survive on blood to not feel remorse when we killed. It made no difference to me. Biological basis or not,