Mike stopped outside the closed door of the next room and gripped the handle. The rotten knob broke off in his hand. He tossed it aside and slid his fingers into the hole the missing knob created. The old, swollen wood groaned before a crack zigzagged down the middle of the door and it splintered apart.
Gripping the edges, Mike tore the pieces away with an ease that left her gawking. When he succeeded in clearing the wood, he froze before turning toward her.
“Mollie, stay there.”
His hand shot out to stop her from stepping forward, but she’d already seen what he was trying to keep from her. Resting her hand on his arm, she pushed it down as she gazed at the bodies within.
In the corner of the room, four corpses sat against the wall. Their eyes had rotted away, but their gray skin was strangely mummified as none of their bones showed through it. A knot formed in her stomach as something niggled at the back of her mind. There was something sowrongabout this, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what.
The corpse wearing a necklace and a golden wedding band had its arms draped across the shoulders of two smaller bodies. While the other, larger corpse had its hand over the leg of one of the smaller bodies and resting on the thigh of the one with the necklace.
Mollie realized she was gazing at a family. She suspected they were the same family who fled their kitchen in the middle of a meal, but what had they attempted to run from?
She didn’t know the answer, but the more she inspected them, the more they seemed entirely out of place. They’d fled here and, what, died sitting together like that? Why hadn’t they left through one of the windows or continued on to the lighthouse to send out a distress signal?
She bit her lip as she shuddered. The furniture in this place was nearly a hundred years old, andallof it was rotting, yet these people appeared…
“Desiccated,” she whispered.
Mike gazed at the corpses while Mollie’s word reverberated in his mind. These people certainly hadn’t progressed through the stages of decay normally, but only a vampire could have drained them so completely of blood.
“There were four plates at the table,” Mollie said. “The chairs were turned over as if they were fleeing something, and they should be nothing but bones if they lived here in the thirties or forties, which is the time period everything in this home appears to be from.”
“These might not be the corpses of the family who originally lived here. If the Savages have brought other humans and vampires here, this could be an entirely different family, and they might not have died all that long ago.”
“Their clothing, or what little remains of it, looks pretty old to me.”
“Isn’t vintage a thing with humans now?”
“Maybe for some, but…” But none of the bodies had enough rotting clothing left on them to make much of a distinction about it. Maybe it was new vintage, but then wouldn’t there be more of it left? All that remained were tatters except for the set of shoes on the other bigger corpse, which she assumed was a man because of those shoes. “Something’s not right here.”
Mike wanted to tell her it was fine, they had enough to deal with without adding the mystery of the desiccated corpses to it, but she was right. Somethingwaswrong here. He stepped into the room with the family and knelt beside them.
Leaning forward, he inspected the woman’s corpse. He guessed it was a woman only because of the oval-shaped, faded gold necklace she wore. Other than that, she barely looked different from the other, nearly naked, adult corpse.
Grasping the necklace, he pulled it toward him and examined the squiggly etching on the outside. Pushing the button on the side, he was surprised when the old lock clicked and the locket opened. Mike realized the engravings on the outside were ivy leaves only because of the inscription inside the locket:ToIvy. With love, Harry.5/1/38.
“They’re not recent corpses,” Mike murmured as he looked at the woman’s wedding ring.
“How do you know that?” Mollie asked.
Mike read the inscription to her before settling the necklace against the woman’s chest.
“Did vampires do this?” she demanded.
Mike leaned closer to inspect the woman’s neck but didn’t see anything there. He did find marks on the man’s neck and one of the children’s wrists. The other two corpses were bitten in a place hidden by their decomposition, and he wasn’t going to search for the marks.
“Yes,” he said.
Mollie glanced nervously behind her. She had the unsettling feeling of eyes staring at her from the shadows, but these weren’t the eyes of the living. No, these were the burning red eyes of the irate ghost family haunting this place. The hair on her arms stood on end as she cursed her overactive imagination, but once the image weaseled its way into her mind, it remained lodged there.
“You said,‘Lately, there has been a growing movement to turn more vamps and humans Savage.’I realize you’re immortal and your concept of time is probably different than mine, but I took lately to mean within the past few months, maybe a year. Hell, I’ll give youtwoyears. However, these people have been lying here for about eighty years. If there were vampires here then…” Mollie’s voice trailed off as she looked helplessly toward the bodies. “They just killed them; they didn’t try to turn them into something else.”
Mike rested his hands on his knees before rising. “No, they didn’t try to turn them.”
“What is going on here?”
“I don’t know. The vampires could have come in and killed this family so they could take over this piece of land. Those vamps could have been here all this time and only recently decided to start turning others into Savages, or they could be doing something else here.”
