OC_BigBang Fanfic- Blackwood Creek 10/12
Title- Blackwood Creek 10/12
Fandom- Supernatural, focusing on OCs
Ship- Logan(OMC)/Jake(OMC)
Rating- PG-13
Genre- slash, action, drama, romance, plotty
Warnings- violence, m/m kissing
Wordcount- 4,000
Summary- Logan and Jake reach Blue Ridge and prepare for their hunt.
A/N- written for 2011 oc_bigbang
Disclaimer- I did not come up with this world, but the idea of a hunters’ summer camp is mine. I did not create the Winchesters or Elkins, but all the rest of the characters mentioned in here are mine.
Beta- skylar_matthews
*** Previous Chapter *** Master Post *** Next Chapter ***
Just as Logan had estimated, they reached Blue Ridge, Montana at the end of their fifth day out from Ross’ Roadhouse. It was late, well past dark, and both of them were tired from five long days on the road. They booked a hotel room for two nights, because Logan estimated the hunt would take at least the better part of the next day, and probably leave them in no shape for traveling.
Jake could tell that Logan wanted to start looking for his father immediately, but he also knew that Logan realized he was too tired to do anything that night and would be better off starting his search in the morning, when he was sharper. The atmosphere in their room that night was solemn and tense. Logan couldn’t concentrate on what was on TV, and he kept getting up to pace the length of the room. Finally Jake called Logan to bed and forced him to lie down and rest. Logan wasn’t in the mood to be affectionate, but he allowed Jake to cuddle up against him and it seemed to help him calm down, to some extent. Eventually, with Jake’s help, he was able to relax enough to fall asleep.
Their search for Logan’s father began the moment Logan woke up. While they ate breakfast at the restaurant next to their hotel, Logan skimmed through a phone book, looking for any bars in the vicinity with “roadhouse” in their name. He found two, one nearby and the other across town and a little ways outside city limits. As soon as they paid for their breakfast they set out for the closer one.
When they arrived at Joe and Miriam’s Roadhouse, they found that there were no cars in the parking lot. Logan was not discouraged by this. Bars, he said, usually opened shortly after lunch and stayed open until late into the night. Although no one was around, Logan got out to have a look. Jake went with him, carrying a shotgun full of salt cartridges just in case.
Logan circled around the back of the bar, surveying the building. It seemed that, like Ross, the owners of this place also lived in the back of their bar. The door was locked, and no one answered when Logan knocked on it. Not to be dissuaded, he picked the lock on the door while Jake stood guard, and they went in.
“Hello?” Jake called as he stepped into the house. They were in the living room, it seemed, for there were couches and chairs centered around a large fireplace. He walked through the living room, looking around the house, while Logan headed towards the bar itself. Jake found a door that seemed to be a bedroom, and knocked on it. When there was no response, he carefully pushed it open. “Is anyone here?”
“Don’t bother,” Logan’s voice said from behind him, making Jake jump and whirl around, shotgun raised. “There’s no one here.” Logan’s voice was bitter, and his shoulders were slumped in resignation. “The fridge and cabinets in the kitchen are empty, and there aren’t any tables in the bar. This place is closed down.”
“Oh,” Jake whispered. Logan said no more, but turned and left. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him, so Jake did it and hurried to catch up with Logan, who had already started back towards the car. He scrambled into the passenger seat just before Logan started it up. His expression was grim, and he didn’t say a word to Jake as he pulled out of the parking lot and started back into town.
Rather than going across town to the second roadhouse, as Jake had expected Logan to do, he followed the signs to the local library and stopped there. “We’re not going to the roadhouse?” Jake asked as he followed Logan inside.
“There’s no point,” Logan muttered. “It’s probably closed.”
“You think that one closed down too?”
“No, I mean it’s not open at this hour,” Logan said as he slid into a chair before a large machine that looked like some kind of ancient computer. “We can go and ask there later tonight. For now we need to try to find the different articles that my dad brought to Holly. This is research. If we can find out where these things hunt and where they dump their bodies, we may be able to figure out where their nest is.”
“What is this thing?” Jake asked as Logan started it up and began a search.
“Newspaper archive. People scan the pages and load them onto these things, and you can search through them. If you only want news, it’s a lot better than the Internet, and you can limit it to local or national newspapers.” Logan looked up at Jake as he sat down at the machine next to Logan’s. “These news archives are invaluable to hunters, especially if you want to look for a pattern of attacks in a certain town going back for several years. But,” he added as he adjusted his search parameters, “Holly said my dad’s articles only went back three years, so that’s as far as we’ll look on the first search.”
“Now,” Logan said, scrolling through his search results, “Holly said there were seven missing persons and five murders. I’ll handle the missings; you take the murders.”
“How do I know it’s the right ones?” Jake asked.
“Search for something about blood, or bite marks. Holly said they all disappeared from the same road, but she didn’t say which. When you find an article that sounds right, tell me where they disappeared from, and I’ll use that to find the other victims.”
“She said there was a cattle mutilation too,” Jake murmured as he typed in his search and began looking through the results.
“That’ll be useful too. It’ll give us a third location besides the hunting ground and dumping ground, and that’ll help us pinpoint their nest. That will probably be their first kill, before they wised up and figured out a good way of hunting and disposing of the bodies. It should be the closest to their nest of all three. The road they hunt on is probably on one side of the nest, and the dumping ground on the other. Aside from the cow, they’ll be careful not to do anything too close to where they’re staying.”
“It’s like those criminal profiling shows,” Jake noted. “They can find exactly the street a serial killer lives on, based on where they take their victims and where they dump them.” Logan shrugged.
“Vampires used to be people,” he said. “So I guess they are a lot like serial killers. It makes sense that the methods would be the same.”
They fell silent after that, both working on their own research. When Jake found the street the victims had all disappeared on, Briar Road, he gave the name to Logan and let him put that into his search. After a few hours of research, they managed to find articles on all five murders and all but one of the seven missing people, as well as the cattle mutilation, which had proven very hard to pin down because there were three that looked promising. One turned out to be a wolf attack, the other the work of a local kid who seemed to have snapped one day.
They took print-outs of the articles and a map of the city to a restaurant, and plotted out the different disappearances and body recoveries on the map. When it was done, Logan circled a spot of countryside that he though the nest would most likely be in. Then Logan told Jake he was going to go to the coroner’s office, to try to get more information on the state of the victims’ bodies. He was hoping for pictures of the bite marks because, he said grimly, they had nothing but his father’s word to go on that it was vampires, and that was before his father had arrived in Blue Ridge and been able to look around.
Jake didn’t have the clothes needed to pass for an FBI agent, or the necessary credentials, so he was forced to stay behind at the library and try to track down the one missing person they hadn’t found yet. Jake didn’t like splitting up. Since the beginning of their hunt, he’d rarely been more than a few feet away from Logan. The only time they’d been separated by any significant distance was when Jake ran for the shotgun while Logan fought the ghost, and considering what had happened to Logan during that time, Jake was reluctant to let the other teen out of his sight again.
Jake had to admit, though, that aside from strange bite marks and an apparent sentience, they knew nothing about what they were hunting aside from what Logan’s father had suspected it was, before he’d even gotten a chance to see the bodies. Although they’d already gotten the dead man’s blood in preparation for fighting vampires, they still weren’t certain what they were facing. In order to be positive, they would need to see the bite marks, and the only way to do that was for Logan to pretend to be FBI. Without a badge, Jake couldn’t accompany him. As much as Jake hated letting Logan out of his sight in a town where they knew something was lurking, he had to admit that it was necessary for their hunt. There was no other option, so Jake busied himself with his research and tried not to worry.
It was early afternoon when Logan returned, with photos of the bite marks and full autopsy reports from the five known victims. Jake had finally managed to track down the seventh missing person, a foster child trying to run away, who hadn’t made more than a blip on the news radar. Although she had tried to leave town walking along the road the others had been taken from, most people seemed to believe she had simply run away, and no one had made much of an effort to investigate.
The two boys went to a private room in the library and spread the autopsy photos and news articles out over a table. Logan was fairly certain from what he’d been told at the coroner’s office that they were indeed dealing with vampires. The victims’ blood had been drained, but the hearts hadn’t been taken, and other than the bite marks there hadn’t been any wounds. The bite marks were two hemispheres, like the shape of a human mouth, although the edges of the bite were ragged and it seemed that the person had had a mouth full of crooked canine teeth. Although he had never seen one before, Logan was confidant identifying it as a vampire bite from what he’d heard.
“We have two choices now,” Logan said as he scooped up the papers. “We can go to the roadhouse and ask about my dad, since it should be opening around now. Or, we can go straight to the place the nest might be, and start looking. Personally, I’d like to get a little more information before we go poking around, and we might be able to get it at the roadhouse. But, if we go to the roadhouse first, it might be starting to get dark by the time we get to looking for the nest. We definitely don’t want to be scoping it out while they’re just waking up and getting ready to find their next victim. No matter what we find in either place, there’s not enough daylight left for a full-scale attack. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow. So, what should we do?”
Jake frowned at the table as he considered it. Finally he shook his head. “Whatever we get from the bar, it won’t be much help to us if they’re awake by the time we find the nest. Better to look for them now and then come back to the bar. Whatever we find, we can see how to use it tomorrow, not tonight.”
Logan nodded. “Alright. We’ll go out now. But first we need to go back to the hotel and get some weapons ready. We might not be planning on attacking them now but we don’t know what might happen, and I don’t want a repeat of the last time we went in unarmed.” He gave Jake a wry smile, and Jake nodded in agreement. They drove back to the motel and brought out their knives. Logan had his machete, but they had never gotten one for Jake. He would have to make due with Logan’s Bowie knife, if the fighting started too soon.
Logan took the bottle of dead man’s blood from his duffle bag and opened it up. He wrinkled his nose at the smell and held it away from his face. “I hope this is still good,” Logan muttered as he dipped the corner of a washcloth into the bottle and carefully swabbed the brown sludge onto the blade of his machete.
“Logan,” Jake said softly as the older teen prepared their weapons. “You know… I mean, you have to realize, it has been eleven days since your father went missing. I don’t know much about vampires, but most of these bodies were recovered within a week of disappearing.”
Logan stopped wiping the blood across his knife. Without speaking he stared down at the cloth and blade in his hands, refusing to meet Jake’s eyes.
“Logan,” Jake said as he reached out to lay a hand on the other boys’ shoulder. Logan flinched at his touch but didn’t try to shake him off. “I don’t want to have to say it, I really don’t. And I hope to God I’m wrong. But you have to be prepared for what might have happened. This may be a revenge hunt, not a rescue.”
“I know,” Logan whispered. “I’ve known that ever since I couldn’t reach him. There’s always that risk, in this life, Jake. But I have to at least try. I can’t just give up.” He took a deep breath and let it out shakily, then lifted the bloody knife to stare at it against the light outside the window. “And if it is a revenge hunt, I’ll still finish it. I can’t leave here without killing these things.”
Jake nodded. “I understand,” he whispered, and leaned closer to Logan. He rested his head on Logan’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around his body. After a moment Logan’s free arm snaked around Jake’s body, and he lowered the knife to his lap. They sat together in silence for several minutes, both offering and taking comfort from the other.
At last Logan pulled away from Jake and stood up. “Enough of this,” he said as he passed Jake the Bowie knife and took up his machete. “We have a vampire nest to find.”
They took the car and left the city limits to drive through the lattice of country roads within the area Logan had circled on the map. The landscape they drove through reminded Jake of the countryside around Blackwood Grove: gently rolling hills split into a patchwork of fields, with the occasional strip of trees standing out dark against the light grasses. There were many side roads turning off from the main path, and the boys made certain to drive down each one. Every time they came to any building that might have sheltered a vampire from the sun, they stopped a safe distance away and watched it. In most places they would see someone come out or go in within a few minutes of surveillance, at which point they deemed that building safe and moved on to the next. Sometimes, though, they would wait several minutes without seeing anyone enter or exit. When they felt they had been waiting too long at a particular spot they would carefully ease themselves from the car and sneak forward on foot, until they were able to peek through the windows and take a look around. The first few buildings like this that they came to proved to be abandoned, not inhabited by humans or vampires. The fifth building, however, was different.
“The other roadhouse,” Jake observed as they stopped a good distance away. “Didn’t you say it should be open by now? There’s no one around.”
“I guess this one closed down too,” Logan murmured. “From the looks of it, it’s been empty for a while.”
“Yeah…” Jake said thoughtfully. Logan glanced over at him, silently asking what was wrong. “Do you hear something?” Jake asked. Logan shifted in his seat and leaned out the open window, listening.
“Yeah…. Music.” Logan’s eyes flash as he sat back in his seat, a grim expression on his face. “This is the place.”
“Are you sure?” Jake asked. “I mean, it could just be a bunch of local kids hanging out in an abandoned bar looking for booze.”
Logan shook his head. “This is it,” he said, breathless with anticipation. “I’m sure it is.” Jake nodded slowly and drew the knife from his belt. Although he’d cautioned Logan, he had to admit that something about this place felt different from the others they’d stopped at. It put the hairs on the back of his neck up, but he couldn’t explain why.
They both got out of the car as soundlessly as they could. In silent agreement they left the doors open, not wanting to make noise by slamming them. The keys remained in the ignition, so they would be able to drive away quickly if they needed to.
“Do you think they’re awake?” Jake whispered to Logan as they crept forward.
“I don’t know,” Logan all but mouthed back. “They could be. I don’t know if they actually need to sleep.”
“The music’s playing,” Jake whispered, and Logan nodded. Music might mean someone was awake inside. The two of them moved slowly and silently, taking great care with every step not to kick any of the loose rocks that had fallen onto the road.
“Son of a bitch,” Logan muttered as they drew closer and the building came into clearer focus. “This was a hunters’ bar.” He pointed to the cracked and faded sign, which read Lucky Star Roadhouse. Between the words “lucky” and “star” there was a pentagram, a hunters’ protective symbol.
Jake nodded solemnly, thinking of what might have happened to the previous inhabitants of the bar. He had not, in any of his research, found something that suggested any of the victims had been connected to the bar but he had to admit that, with monsters living in a place that had once belonged to hunters, it seemed all too clear what had become of them.
As they came closer, the music became distinct as classic rock. From the commercials every so often, it must have been played on a radio. They reached the edge of the parking lot and moved forward together, not wanting to split up when in such a dangerous position. They circled around the bar, trying to get a feel for the layout. It seemed that there had been a living area off to the left side, but this was now almost completely crushed. The roof had caved in, and the stone blocks of the walls were falling down. The kitchens in the back were the same. Only the main room, the area of the bar where customers were served, was still standing. There was only one door, now that the two back doors had been blocked by rubble, and three windows that weren’t also blocked, one on the same side as the door and two on an adjacent side.
When they had circled the entire bar, Logan motioned to Jake. They crept towards the window nearest where they’d parked the car, so the distance would be at least a few steps shorter if they needed to run. The glass of the window had been broken out, and slatted plastic blinds were drawn over the hole. Logan knelt next to the window, and Jake followed his lead.
Logan tapped Jake’s shoulder and pointed out towards the parking lot. Jake understood that this meant for him to keep watch, and he nodded. While Jake looked out towards the empty road, Logan slowly rose from his crouching position, peeking carefully between the slats of the blinds. He turned back to Jake and mouthed, “Sleeping.”
“How many?” Jake mouthed back, and Logan shrugged. He turned back to the window to look again.
Suddenly a breeze blew, rustling the blinds and pulling them away from the house. Jake started then froze, biting his tongue to keep from gasping in surprise. Beside him he heard Logan draw in a slow, deep breath.
Logan stood abruptly and turned back towards the car. Jake looked between Logan and the window in confusion, then rose and followed as Logan made his way quickly but silently back to the car. He noticed that Logan’s fists were clenched as he walked, and his jaw was set.
“What happened?” Jake asked in a whisper when they’d reached the relative safety of the car. Logan started it and began to back down the road, not wanting to drive any nearer. After the rundown bar was out of sight, Logan turned the car around and sped down the road. Jake saw that his hands were trembling on the wheel.
Logan only got about half-way back to town before pulling over on the side of the road. The shaking in his hands and arms had become too violent to control the car. Logan leaned forward and rested his forehead against the top of the steering wheel, his shoulders trembling as though he were crying.
“Your dad?” Jake asked in a horrified whisper. It was the only thing he could think of that might get this kind of reaction from Logan. Logan didn’t respond, and Jake reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder. The trembling lessened under Jake’s touch and within a few moments it had ceased. Logan lifted his head and Jake saw to his surprise that the other teen’s cheeks were dry.
“Eleven,” Logan said, and Jake looked at him curiously. “Eleven vampires, all asleep in the main room of the bar. And my dad, Jake. My dad’s in there. He’s tied up and covered in blood, but I think I saw him move, Jake; I think he’s still alive. But I don’t know how long they’ll keep him that way, and maybe tonight while we’re asleep they’ll decide they’ve had enough fun torturing the hunter, and just kill him. I had to get out of there, because I knew if I didn’t I’d do something stupid.”
Logan started to shake again, and this time tears did fall down his cheeks. Jake instinctively reached out and wrapped his arms around Logan, offering comfort in the only way he could. Without hesitation Logan buried his face in Jake’s shoulder and clung to him as sobs wracked his body.
Logan only allowed himself a few minutes of tears, however, before he pulled back and rubbed a hand across his eyes. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and set his jaw, his expression determined. “Alright,” he said, his voice rough but strong. “No more time to waste with that. We’ve got weapons to prepare. We’ll watch the clouds tomorrow, and strike when there’s the most sun.”
Logan went on, drawing out their plan of attack right there in the car. Jake just let him go, nodding every now and then in agreement. He knew there was no stopping Logan once he’d started planning. As Logan fell silent, thinking over his plan to find any holes, Jake looked back in the direction of the bar and breathed out a shaky sigh. He, too, was filled with apprehension and excitement at what the next day would bring.
Logan nodded to himself as he finished checking and rechecking his plan. Then he turned to Jake, his eyes bright. “We’ll make those bastards pay for everything they’ve done.”
*** Previous Chapter *** Master Post *** Next Chapter ***
Fandom- Supernatural, focusing on OCs
Ship- Logan(OMC)/Jake(OMC)
Rating- PG-13
Genre- slash, action, drama, romance, plotty
Warnings- violence, m/m kissing
Wordcount- 4,000
Summary- Logan and Jake reach Blue Ridge and prepare for their hunt.
A/N- written for 2011 oc_bigbang
Disclaimer- I did not come up with this world, but the idea of a hunters’ summer camp is mine. I did not create the Winchesters or Elkins, but all the rest of the characters mentioned in here are mine.
Beta- skylar_matthews
*** Previous Chapter *** Master Post *** Next Chapter ***
Just as Logan had estimated, they reached Blue Ridge, Montana at the end of their fifth day out from Ross’ Roadhouse. It was late, well past dark, and both of them were tired from five long days on the road. They booked a hotel room for two nights, because Logan estimated the hunt would take at least the better part of the next day, and probably leave them in no shape for traveling.
Jake could tell that Logan wanted to start looking for his father immediately, but he also knew that Logan realized he was too tired to do anything that night and would be better off starting his search in the morning, when he was sharper. The atmosphere in their room that night was solemn and tense. Logan couldn’t concentrate on what was on TV, and he kept getting up to pace the length of the room. Finally Jake called Logan to bed and forced him to lie down and rest. Logan wasn’t in the mood to be affectionate, but he allowed Jake to cuddle up against him and it seemed to help him calm down, to some extent. Eventually, with Jake’s help, he was able to relax enough to fall asleep.
Their search for Logan’s father began the moment Logan woke up. While they ate breakfast at the restaurant next to their hotel, Logan skimmed through a phone book, looking for any bars in the vicinity with “roadhouse” in their name. He found two, one nearby and the other across town and a little ways outside city limits. As soon as they paid for their breakfast they set out for the closer one.
When they arrived at Joe and Miriam’s Roadhouse, they found that there were no cars in the parking lot. Logan was not discouraged by this. Bars, he said, usually opened shortly after lunch and stayed open until late into the night. Although no one was around, Logan got out to have a look. Jake went with him, carrying a shotgun full of salt cartridges just in case.
Logan circled around the back of the bar, surveying the building. It seemed that, like Ross, the owners of this place also lived in the back of their bar. The door was locked, and no one answered when Logan knocked on it. Not to be dissuaded, he picked the lock on the door while Jake stood guard, and they went in.
“Hello?” Jake called as he stepped into the house. They were in the living room, it seemed, for there were couches and chairs centered around a large fireplace. He walked through the living room, looking around the house, while Logan headed towards the bar itself. Jake found a door that seemed to be a bedroom, and knocked on it. When there was no response, he carefully pushed it open. “Is anyone here?”
“Don’t bother,” Logan’s voice said from behind him, making Jake jump and whirl around, shotgun raised. “There’s no one here.” Logan’s voice was bitter, and his shoulders were slumped in resignation. “The fridge and cabinets in the kitchen are empty, and there aren’t any tables in the bar. This place is closed down.”
“Oh,” Jake whispered. Logan said no more, but turned and left. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him, so Jake did it and hurried to catch up with Logan, who had already started back towards the car. He scrambled into the passenger seat just before Logan started it up. His expression was grim, and he didn’t say a word to Jake as he pulled out of the parking lot and started back into town.
Rather than going across town to the second roadhouse, as Jake had expected Logan to do, he followed the signs to the local library and stopped there. “We’re not going to the roadhouse?” Jake asked as he followed Logan inside.
“There’s no point,” Logan muttered. “It’s probably closed.”
“You think that one closed down too?”
“No, I mean it’s not open at this hour,” Logan said as he slid into a chair before a large machine that looked like some kind of ancient computer. “We can go and ask there later tonight. For now we need to try to find the different articles that my dad brought to Holly. This is research. If we can find out where these things hunt and where they dump their bodies, we may be able to figure out where their nest is.”
“What is this thing?” Jake asked as Logan started it up and began a search.
“Newspaper archive. People scan the pages and load them onto these things, and you can search through them. If you only want news, it’s a lot better than the Internet, and you can limit it to local or national newspapers.” Logan looked up at Jake as he sat down at the machine next to Logan’s. “These news archives are invaluable to hunters, especially if you want to look for a pattern of attacks in a certain town going back for several years. But,” he added as he adjusted his search parameters, “Holly said my dad’s articles only went back three years, so that’s as far as we’ll look on the first search.”
“Now,” Logan said, scrolling through his search results, “Holly said there were seven missing persons and five murders. I’ll handle the missings; you take the murders.”
“How do I know it’s the right ones?” Jake asked.
“Search for something about blood, or bite marks. Holly said they all disappeared from the same road, but she didn’t say which. When you find an article that sounds right, tell me where they disappeared from, and I’ll use that to find the other victims.”
“She said there was a cattle mutilation too,” Jake murmured as he typed in his search and began looking through the results.
“That’ll be useful too. It’ll give us a third location besides the hunting ground and dumping ground, and that’ll help us pinpoint their nest. That will probably be their first kill, before they wised up and figured out a good way of hunting and disposing of the bodies. It should be the closest to their nest of all three. The road they hunt on is probably on one side of the nest, and the dumping ground on the other. Aside from the cow, they’ll be careful not to do anything too close to where they’re staying.”
“It’s like those criminal profiling shows,” Jake noted. “They can find exactly the street a serial killer lives on, based on where they take their victims and where they dump them.” Logan shrugged.
“Vampires used to be people,” he said. “So I guess they are a lot like serial killers. It makes sense that the methods would be the same.”
They fell silent after that, both working on their own research. When Jake found the street the victims had all disappeared on, Briar Road, he gave the name to Logan and let him put that into his search. After a few hours of research, they managed to find articles on all five murders and all but one of the seven missing people, as well as the cattle mutilation, which had proven very hard to pin down because there were three that looked promising. One turned out to be a wolf attack, the other the work of a local kid who seemed to have snapped one day.
They took print-outs of the articles and a map of the city to a restaurant, and plotted out the different disappearances and body recoveries on the map. When it was done, Logan circled a spot of countryside that he though the nest would most likely be in. Then Logan told Jake he was going to go to the coroner’s office, to try to get more information on the state of the victims’ bodies. He was hoping for pictures of the bite marks because, he said grimly, they had nothing but his father’s word to go on that it was vampires, and that was before his father had arrived in Blue Ridge and been able to look around.
Jake didn’t have the clothes needed to pass for an FBI agent, or the necessary credentials, so he was forced to stay behind at the library and try to track down the one missing person they hadn’t found yet. Jake didn’t like splitting up. Since the beginning of their hunt, he’d rarely been more than a few feet away from Logan. The only time they’d been separated by any significant distance was when Jake ran for the shotgun while Logan fought the ghost, and considering what had happened to Logan during that time, Jake was reluctant to let the other teen out of his sight again.
Jake had to admit, though, that aside from strange bite marks and an apparent sentience, they knew nothing about what they were hunting aside from what Logan’s father had suspected it was, before he’d even gotten a chance to see the bodies. Although they’d already gotten the dead man’s blood in preparation for fighting vampires, they still weren’t certain what they were facing. In order to be positive, they would need to see the bite marks, and the only way to do that was for Logan to pretend to be FBI. Without a badge, Jake couldn’t accompany him. As much as Jake hated letting Logan out of his sight in a town where they knew something was lurking, he had to admit that it was necessary for their hunt. There was no other option, so Jake busied himself with his research and tried not to worry.
It was early afternoon when Logan returned, with photos of the bite marks and full autopsy reports from the five known victims. Jake had finally managed to track down the seventh missing person, a foster child trying to run away, who hadn’t made more than a blip on the news radar. Although she had tried to leave town walking along the road the others had been taken from, most people seemed to believe she had simply run away, and no one had made much of an effort to investigate.
The two boys went to a private room in the library and spread the autopsy photos and news articles out over a table. Logan was fairly certain from what he’d been told at the coroner’s office that they were indeed dealing with vampires. The victims’ blood had been drained, but the hearts hadn’t been taken, and other than the bite marks there hadn’t been any wounds. The bite marks were two hemispheres, like the shape of a human mouth, although the edges of the bite were ragged and it seemed that the person had had a mouth full of crooked canine teeth. Although he had never seen one before, Logan was confidant identifying it as a vampire bite from what he’d heard.
“We have two choices now,” Logan said as he scooped up the papers. “We can go to the roadhouse and ask about my dad, since it should be opening around now. Or, we can go straight to the place the nest might be, and start looking. Personally, I’d like to get a little more information before we go poking around, and we might be able to get it at the roadhouse. But, if we go to the roadhouse first, it might be starting to get dark by the time we get to looking for the nest. We definitely don’t want to be scoping it out while they’re just waking up and getting ready to find their next victim. No matter what we find in either place, there’s not enough daylight left for a full-scale attack. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow. So, what should we do?”
Jake frowned at the table as he considered it. Finally he shook his head. “Whatever we get from the bar, it won’t be much help to us if they’re awake by the time we find the nest. Better to look for them now and then come back to the bar. Whatever we find, we can see how to use it tomorrow, not tonight.”
Logan nodded. “Alright. We’ll go out now. But first we need to go back to the hotel and get some weapons ready. We might not be planning on attacking them now but we don’t know what might happen, and I don’t want a repeat of the last time we went in unarmed.” He gave Jake a wry smile, and Jake nodded in agreement. They drove back to the motel and brought out their knives. Logan had his machete, but they had never gotten one for Jake. He would have to make due with Logan’s Bowie knife, if the fighting started too soon.
Logan took the bottle of dead man’s blood from his duffle bag and opened it up. He wrinkled his nose at the smell and held it away from his face. “I hope this is still good,” Logan muttered as he dipped the corner of a washcloth into the bottle and carefully swabbed the brown sludge onto the blade of his machete.
“Logan,” Jake said softly as the older teen prepared their weapons. “You know… I mean, you have to realize, it has been eleven days since your father went missing. I don’t know much about vampires, but most of these bodies were recovered within a week of disappearing.”
Logan stopped wiping the blood across his knife. Without speaking he stared down at the cloth and blade in his hands, refusing to meet Jake’s eyes.
“Logan,” Jake said as he reached out to lay a hand on the other boys’ shoulder. Logan flinched at his touch but didn’t try to shake him off. “I don’t want to have to say it, I really don’t. And I hope to God I’m wrong. But you have to be prepared for what might have happened. This may be a revenge hunt, not a rescue.”
“I know,” Logan whispered. “I’ve known that ever since I couldn’t reach him. There’s always that risk, in this life, Jake. But I have to at least try. I can’t just give up.” He took a deep breath and let it out shakily, then lifted the bloody knife to stare at it against the light outside the window. “And if it is a revenge hunt, I’ll still finish it. I can’t leave here without killing these things.”
Jake nodded. “I understand,” he whispered, and leaned closer to Logan. He rested his head on Logan’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around his body. After a moment Logan’s free arm snaked around Jake’s body, and he lowered the knife to his lap. They sat together in silence for several minutes, both offering and taking comfort from the other.
At last Logan pulled away from Jake and stood up. “Enough of this,” he said as he passed Jake the Bowie knife and took up his machete. “We have a vampire nest to find.”
They took the car and left the city limits to drive through the lattice of country roads within the area Logan had circled on the map. The landscape they drove through reminded Jake of the countryside around Blackwood Grove: gently rolling hills split into a patchwork of fields, with the occasional strip of trees standing out dark against the light grasses. There were many side roads turning off from the main path, and the boys made certain to drive down each one. Every time they came to any building that might have sheltered a vampire from the sun, they stopped a safe distance away and watched it. In most places they would see someone come out or go in within a few minutes of surveillance, at which point they deemed that building safe and moved on to the next. Sometimes, though, they would wait several minutes without seeing anyone enter or exit. When they felt they had been waiting too long at a particular spot they would carefully ease themselves from the car and sneak forward on foot, until they were able to peek through the windows and take a look around. The first few buildings like this that they came to proved to be abandoned, not inhabited by humans or vampires. The fifth building, however, was different.
“The other roadhouse,” Jake observed as they stopped a good distance away. “Didn’t you say it should be open by now? There’s no one around.”
“I guess this one closed down too,” Logan murmured. “From the looks of it, it’s been empty for a while.”
“Yeah…” Jake said thoughtfully. Logan glanced over at him, silently asking what was wrong. “Do you hear something?” Jake asked. Logan shifted in his seat and leaned out the open window, listening.
“Yeah…. Music.” Logan’s eyes flash as he sat back in his seat, a grim expression on his face. “This is the place.”
“Are you sure?” Jake asked. “I mean, it could just be a bunch of local kids hanging out in an abandoned bar looking for booze.”
Logan shook his head. “This is it,” he said, breathless with anticipation. “I’m sure it is.” Jake nodded slowly and drew the knife from his belt. Although he’d cautioned Logan, he had to admit that something about this place felt different from the others they’d stopped at. It put the hairs on the back of his neck up, but he couldn’t explain why.
They both got out of the car as soundlessly as they could. In silent agreement they left the doors open, not wanting to make noise by slamming them. The keys remained in the ignition, so they would be able to drive away quickly if they needed to.
“Do you think they’re awake?” Jake whispered to Logan as they crept forward.
“I don’t know,” Logan all but mouthed back. “They could be. I don’t know if they actually need to sleep.”
“The music’s playing,” Jake whispered, and Logan nodded. Music might mean someone was awake inside. The two of them moved slowly and silently, taking great care with every step not to kick any of the loose rocks that had fallen onto the road.
“Son of a bitch,” Logan muttered as they drew closer and the building came into clearer focus. “This was a hunters’ bar.” He pointed to the cracked and faded sign, which read Lucky Star Roadhouse. Between the words “lucky” and “star” there was a pentagram, a hunters’ protective symbol.
Jake nodded solemnly, thinking of what might have happened to the previous inhabitants of the bar. He had not, in any of his research, found something that suggested any of the victims had been connected to the bar but he had to admit that, with monsters living in a place that had once belonged to hunters, it seemed all too clear what had become of them.
As they came closer, the music became distinct as classic rock. From the commercials every so often, it must have been played on a radio. They reached the edge of the parking lot and moved forward together, not wanting to split up when in such a dangerous position. They circled around the bar, trying to get a feel for the layout. It seemed that there had been a living area off to the left side, but this was now almost completely crushed. The roof had caved in, and the stone blocks of the walls were falling down. The kitchens in the back were the same. Only the main room, the area of the bar where customers were served, was still standing. There was only one door, now that the two back doors had been blocked by rubble, and three windows that weren’t also blocked, one on the same side as the door and two on an adjacent side.
When they had circled the entire bar, Logan motioned to Jake. They crept towards the window nearest where they’d parked the car, so the distance would be at least a few steps shorter if they needed to run. The glass of the window had been broken out, and slatted plastic blinds were drawn over the hole. Logan knelt next to the window, and Jake followed his lead.
Logan tapped Jake’s shoulder and pointed out towards the parking lot. Jake understood that this meant for him to keep watch, and he nodded. While Jake looked out towards the empty road, Logan slowly rose from his crouching position, peeking carefully between the slats of the blinds. He turned back to Jake and mouthed, “Sleeping.”
“How many?” Jake mouthed back, and Logan shrugged. He turned back to the window to look again.
Suddenly a breeze blew, rustling the blinds and pulling them away from the house. Jake started then froze, biting his tongue to keep from gasping in surprise. Beside him he heard Logan draw in a slow, deep breath.
Logan stood abruptly and turned back towards the car. Jake looked between Logan and the window in confusion, then rose and followed as Logan made his way quickly but silently back to the car. He noticed that Logan’s fists were clenched as he walked, and his jaw was set.
“What happened?” Jake asked in a whisper when they’d reached the relative safety of the car. Logan started it and began to back down the road, not wanting to drive any nearer. After the rundown bar was out of sight, Logan turned the car around and sped down the road. Jake saw that his hands were trembling on the wheel.
Logan only got about half-way back to town before pulling over on the side of the road. The shaking in his hands and arms had become too violent to control the car. Logan leaned forward and rested his forehead against the top of the steering wheel, his shoulders trembling as though he were crying.
“Your dad?” Jake asked in a horrified whisper. It was the only thing he could think of that might get this kind of reaction from Logan. Logan didn’t respond, and Jake reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder. The trembling lessened under Jake’s touch and within a few moments it had ceased. Logan lifted his head and Jake saw to his surprise that the other teen’s cheeks were dry.
“Eleven,” Logan said, and Jake looked at him curiously. “Eleven vampires, all asleep in the main room of the bar. And my dad, Jake. My dad’s in there. He’s tied up and covered in blood, but I think I saw him move, Jake; I think he’s still alive. But I don’t know how long they’ll keep him that way, and maybe tonight while we’re asleep they’ll decide they’ve had enough fun torturing the hunter, and just kill him. I had to get out of there, because I knew if I didn’t I’d do something stupid.”
Logan started to shake again, and this time tears did fall down his cheeks. Jake instinctively reached out and wrapped his arms around Logan, offering comfort in the only way he could. Without hesitation Logan buried his face in Jake’s shoulder and clung to him as sobs wracked his body.
Logan only allowed himself a few minutes of tears, however, before he pulled back and rubbed a hand across his eyes. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and set his jaw, his expression determined. “Alright,” he said, his voice rough but strong. “No more time to waste with that. We’ve got weapons to prepare. We’ll watch the clouds tomorrow, and strike when there’s the most sun.”
Logan went on, drawing out their plan of attack right there in the car. Jake just let him go, nodding every now and then in agreement. He knew there was no stopping Logan once he’d started planning. As Logan fell silent, thinking over his plan to find any holes, Jake looked back in the direction of the bar and breathed out a shaky sigh. He, too, was filled with apprehension and excitement at what the next day would bring.
Logan nodded to himself as he finished checking and rechecking his plan. Then he turned to Jake, his eyes bright. “We’ll make those bastards pay for everything they’ve done.”
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