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

“I will need a sample of blood from all of you now, and some cells from the inside of your mouth.” He smiled avuncularly.

“Like on CSI?” Mark again. “Me too? Why? I’m not an iron metaboliser.”

“Indeed. But you could be carrying the recessive gene. I would like to try and isolate it.”

“OK,” he said and obligingly held his arm out. Marcus took his samples from all of us. Rebecca said nothing throughout, but stared fascinated as her blood flooded the tubes in Marcus’ hand. Eventually Marcus’ briefcase snapped shut, and he and Fergus loaded up the luxury hire car. Mark groaned when Marcus removed his samples from a shelf in the fridge.

“Oh, man, my bacon was in there with bits of dead vampire!”

Fergus grinned at him. “Welcome to my world,” he said dryly.

They were soon ready to go; Marcus was driving because Fergus tended to get distracted. “We will see you again in ten days time,” he said as they waved goodbye, and then they were gone.

Mark

What a weird morning. I have to say, I liked Angus’ brothers; Fergus with his nervous energy and quirky sense of humour, and Marcus with his out of date formality and burning curiosity. So when they told Angus and Rebecca that they had to get married in eleven days time, I was worried that Angus was going to attack them or something. But he just sat there and smiled, while Rebecca looked kinda shocked, but she didn’t say anything either. Nothing. Not even while we loaded up Angus’ car, or when we were driving away from the old stone house that Angus and his brothers had grown up in.

That was a bit of a nerve-racking ride for me. I kept thinking about the guns in the boot, and the bullet proof vest with a squished bullet in it that one of the kidnappers had managed to shoot at Angus. Every time I saw a police car I almost had a heart attack. I kept watching the speedometer, and reminding Angus when he went over seventy. You’d have thought that he would have been irritated, but he just laughed, and he even slowed down. Amazing.

Rebecca sat up front in the passenger seat and stared out of the window. After a while Angus reached out and put his hand over hers. She turned to him and smiled, but she still said nothing. I got fed up with all this silence after about an hour, and I asked Angus to put the radio on, which he did. I leaned back, closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Rebecca

When Marcus told us that we had to get married in eleven days time, and Angus made no objections, I was speechless. I felt an enormous guilt settle on my shoulders, that he should be forced to get married to save me from Jack’s evil intentions. But I was also secretly thrilled at the idea, and then I felt even more guilty for being so pleased about it. I was afraid to speak to him in case he told me that he’d changed his mind about it, and that he’d thought of an alternative plan to foil Jack. How dumb can you be.

When Angus put his big, warm hand over mine, I wanted to cry, but I smiled at him instead, grateful for the support. I had such a lot to be grateful to this beautiful man for.

When Mark finally fell asleep, Angus turned the radio down slightly so the snores from the back could be more clearly heard. Then he spoke without taking his eyes off the road.

“We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to.”

Oh, God, I thought. This is it. This is where he backs out of it. I was terrified and furious at the same time, mostly at myself for being such a coward. I kept quiet, and felt a tear stealing its way from the corner of one of my eyes.

He spoke again. “I don’t want you to be forced into doing something you don’t want to do.” He glanced at me. I tried to stare out of the window so he wouldn’t see me crying, but somehow he knew anyway, and he reached out and wiped the tear from my cheek.

“I didn’t object when Marcus suggested it,” his voice was husky now, “because there is nothing I want more than to be your husband, but if you…” His voice trailed off. It took me a few seconds to comprehend exactly what he was telling me.

“Really?” I looked at him, and he was smiling at me again, but there was a hint of sadness in his eyes, as if he was expecting me to back out.

“No,” I said, tears running down my cheeks in earnest now. So this was what it was like to cry with relief and happiness. Bizarre.

“What do you mean, no?” A puzzled frown creased his handsome brow.

“No, I don’t want to not marry you! I mean, I do want to marry you!” I was confusing myself now.

“Really?” he looked surprised and delighted. “So why are you crying?”

“Because I’m so happy!” Now I was really starting to sound like a halfwit. Angus didn’t seem to mind, though, and he reached out and gently cupped my cheek in one of his hands, and wiped away my tears with his thumb.

“Watch the road,” I said, smiling like an idiot now. Angus let out a bark of laughter, and the snoring in the back suddenly stopped.

“What?” said Mark sleepily.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Go back to sleep.”

“Well, I would if you would stop making so much noise,” he grumbled. “I can’t hear the radio.”

I shook my head disapprovingly, and Angus grinned and turned the radio up.

Angus

We arrived home just before six in the evening. Rebecca’s mother was already home and eagerly awaiting us. As soon as the car drew up outside her house, she was out of the front door and pulling the passenger door open. Rebecca climbed out stiffly and was immediately enveloped in a huge hug. Even Joe looked pleased to see her. He had followed his mother out of the house and stood waiting in the dim light cast by the open doorway. I wondered what he was thinking, but I didn’t reach into his mind. I had decided last night that the minds of this family would remain off limits to me, the same way that my brothers thoughts were. It was like being able to see people naked; just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Unless there was an emergency, of course. I thought about Jack, and wondered if he was out there right now, planning his revenge.

We were all ushered into the warm sitting room, and plied with coffee and tea. The white kitten appeared out of nowhere and launched itself onto Mark’s lap, purring like a Harley Davidson. I pretended to look disapproving.

“Little traitor. I think you’d better keep her, Mark. She’s obviously infatuated with you.”

Mark’s face lit up. “Brilliant! So I can name her what I want to now?”

“No!” interjected Rebecca. “He wanted to call her Quark, Mum.”

“What, like the noise a duck makes?” Joe looked puzzled.

“No!” Mark was impatient. “Subatomic particle, oh daft one.”

“Oh, physics,” Joe said dismissively. “Still sounds like a duck.”

“Yeah, I guess it does. What about Soft White?”

“Like the bread?” Joe was eyeing his younger brother with perplexity. “What’s wrong with you?”

This was clearly a conversation that was not going to reach any sort of satisfactory conclusion soon. I looked around the room at Rebecca and her mother cuddled together in one corner of the sofa, Mark and Joe sitting at the other end, and I smiled to myself. You’d never say that this family had been brutally ripped apart only yesterday. I knew that they would want to talk about the whole thing later, but for now they seemed satisfied just to be together.

I thought about all the firearms in the boot of my car, and stood up reluctantly to leave. I had a few things that needed sorting out tonight, starting with a gun safe. I wasn’t going to disarm myself now. Not when Rebecca and her family were so vulnerable. I would need Fergus to acquire some top of the range surveillance equipment, and a few dozen unobtrusive tracking devices. I wasn’t going to risk not being able to find my girl again. I smiled at her as she and her mother stood up to say goodnight. She was tired but radiant. I thought about eleven days time and my heart leapt.

“Thank you for rescuing my daughter,” Rebecca’s mother said.

I nodded. “No problem at all, Mrs Harding. Would you mind if I had a word with Rebecca before I left?”

“Of course.”

Rebecca blushed as I took her warm hand and led her outside. The feel of her hand in mine was so right, so real, that I was reluctant to let it go.

“I will fetch you tomorrow and take you to school.” I’d been thinking about this business of her staying to finish her A levels. We might need to rethink that decision at some stage. I would speak to Fergus and Marcus when they arrived for the wedding. I smiled. “I will also be fetching you and taking you until you finish your schooling. I will have a study set up in the spare bedroom of the house, and you can work there in the afternoons until your family are all home in the evenings.”

“OK.” She nodded.

“We will need to go shopping tomorrow afternoon.” She looked up at me, her eyebrows raised in surprise. “You need a ring,” I explained. She blushed a fiery red in the gloom.

“You will probably also have to invite me over for supper tomorrow night so we can tell your family about us getting married,” I continued.

“OK,” she said again, and then smiled shyly up at me. God, she was lovely. I wanted to stay there the whole night, her hand in mine, but I had to go. She needed to get back inside to her waiting family, and I needed to empty that boot, and go back to my empty house. I had been so used to being alone that I’d never realised what loneliness is. I would miss her for those few hours before the morning.

“Goodnight, my Rebecca.” I held her chin and kissed her all too briefly on the lips. Then I released that little hand, and turned and walked across the road.

Jack

The vampire called Jack surveyed the burnt out ruins of his home. One of his homes, he corrected himself, smiling grimly. His face was angular, with a cruel set to his features, and his smile did nothing to ameliorate the effect. He had arrived the night before, summoned by that idiot Oscar. The fact that Oscar was his son did nothing to change his disapproval of him. Most of the vampires here were his sons, one way or another.

He had found the bodies last night, lying scattered throughout the house, headless and lifeless. It was as if someone had known that this would be the only reliable way to kill vampires. And when he’d found Oscar’s headless corpse, and smelled the scent of the male vampire who had knelt there and ambushed his coven, he had a pretty good idea of what had happened. He had tracked the sole survivor of the massacre to another of his bases two hundred miles to the west, and had extracted the story from him. The pathetic creature had been remarkably reluctant to reveal what had happened, especially his own cowardly actions, so he’d had to torture him for a while, something which he always enjoyed doing. He smiled again at the thought, this time revealing sharp, yellowed teeth. Who knows, he might even survive. Unfortunately, when he’d finally got back, someone had set fire to the complex, destroying most of the evidence.