Free Web NovelChapter 144: Out With It I
I lurched, nearly falling to the floor in shock. This was simply too much for my eyes to comprehend. I simply couldn’t believe it― I had just seen him alive a few days ago, talking about what Blaise was like as a child, and now he was... dead. Or possibly very close to it. I could not tell if his heart was still beating.
"Doctor Thomas! Damon, we need to get a doctor!"
"He is — was — the doctor," Damon corrected himself, "and there’s no point crying out for him," Damon said simply, wrinkling his nose as he continued to observe the rest of the room while pulling me up from the floor with one arm."He’s deader than a doornail."
"But how?" I hastily changed my question, since the cause of death was blatantly visible to anyone who had a working pair of eyes. "I mean, who could have done such a thing?"
Everhaven didn’t seem to have a problem with violent crime, but then I suppose money could easily motivate anyone to murder if they were desperate enough. Doctor Thomas must have had sizable savings stored up for his old age.
But I had a niggling feeling in my gut that it was not something so innocent. Whoever got rid of Doctor Thomas wasn’t out for something as trivial as money. Besides, even if someone was trying to rob Doctor Thomas, surely they didn’t have to go to such extremes to get him out of the way. He was an old man who could barely put up a fight. They could simply have waited until he went out for work before robbing him.
Damon stalked closer to Doctor Thomas’s body. To my surprise, he leaned closer and sniffed not only the body but his chair as well. Finally, he spoke.
"A vampire must have done this," Damon growled out, his eyes flashing in anger. "This is their declaration of war against us."
"What?" My mouth fell open at his pronouncement. "How do you even know this?"
"There’s not enough blood in the surrounding area," Damon said simply, easily moving Doctor Thomas’s limp unmoving corpse away from his chair to prove his point. There was only one faint line of dark brown on the fabric of his plush armchair. "Usually, neck wounds tend to bleed a lot and cause a huge mess. A vampire would never want such a thing to happen, not when they can feed on their victims before killing them."
"Oh," I said quietly. Poor Doctor Thomas. He must have had the fright of his life. Even if he had known of creatures such as werewolves, he might not have known about vampires.
"Of course, there is still a minuscule chance that a human killed him elsewhere and simply dumped him back in his own house, but I can’t think of any reasons why a human would waste so much time on him," Damon added.
"More importantly, the entire house smells disgusting." Damon pulled a face, his features scrunching up in distaste. "I noticed it from the moment we entered, and this simply confirms it― he had a visitor recently, and they definitely weren’t human."
"There are two cups on the table," I added, "I think... the vampire was someone he knew."
And it most likely was someone I knew as well. I closed my eyes and sighed, wondering how I was going to tell Damon the truth.
"Out with it, Harper," Damon ordered. "You know something, and we don’t have all day." He paused as if thinking over his words, before saying, "Well, we don’t, but Doctor Thomas does. He can’t get any deader. If you want his killer to escape successfully, by all means, take your own sweet time." fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
"Don’t speak ill of him," I scolded reflexively. That man had been nothing but kind and hospitable towards me, and knowing that he helped Blaise back when Blaise had no one, raising him like his own flesh and blood, raised his esteem in my eyes.
"Then tell me what you know," Damon said. "I’m guessing it’s something that will make me angry, which is why you’re so hesitant to speak. Normally, nothing stops your mouth from moving."
"Hopping mad, more like it," I said, nodding in tacit agreement with his words. "I told Blaise this when I first returned to Fangborne while you were off fetching the parts. I think I met the vampire in question― it was Doctor Thomas who introduced him to me."
"He did?" Damon cast his accusing eyes on Doctor Thomas’s corpse. "He was working with them all this while?"
"No, I doubt it," I said quickly. "He introduced him as a handyman who had been working in Everhaven for years. He was supposed to be in charge of fixing the machines."
"What made you suspicious of him?" Damon asked with narrowed eyes. "Your sense of smell is nowhere near developed to sense the differences between us and the living dead."
Well. This was the moment of truth. It was now or never, and I sucked in a breath, readying myself to pull off this painful bandaid.
"Because I’ve seen him before. He was on Fangborne’s grounds, back when I made my first escape attempt."
"And you didn’t think something this important was worth telling me about?" Damon demanded hotly, nearly screaming in my face. The last bits of composure he had were long gone, and his eyes were bulging maniacally as a muscle twitched in his jaw. He took one step closer to me, before thinking better of it and turning away, howling into his hands.
The mate bond telegraphed his anger and dismay in crystal clear definition. I needed to make things right, or Damon and I would be back to being enemies― or more accurately, Damon would hate me with every fiber of his being.
"I didn’t know he was a vampire then, he told me he was a rogue and I believed him," I said quickly. "We were planning to escape together when you tracked me down. He escaped and told me to meet him in Everhaven in the future."
"So you accompanied me on this trip to see him?" Damon seethed, his hands clenched into fists. "All this time, you were fooling both Blaise and I?"
