Blood Drive

I am.

And I’m not. How am I going to tell her about her mother?

Frey has already started down the sidewalk, so I rush to catch up with him. The park is full of people, families, students, artists with their easels set to catch the play of sun and shadow on buildings that shouldn’t exist. Balboa Park was a temporary shell built to accommodate the Panama-California Exposition held in 1915. But the beauty of the place was far from temporary and restoration followed restoration until now, the park houses an impressive array of galleries, museums, restaurants and a world-class zoo.

Frey doesn’t explain where we are going. He simply leads me down the El Prado toward the fountain in front of the Space Theater. On the right are the railroad museum and the various gallery exhibits and visitor centers. On this side, doors open to administrative offices, some open, some closed to the public. When we reach the end, across from the huge Natural History Museum, he veers off the sidewalk, following a path that snakes back through shrubbery.

“Won’t someone see us?” I ask, suddenly conscious of how easily I had been tailed today, not just by the Feds, but also by that idiot Darryl.

Frey motions for me to stop. “Watch,” he says.

He takes another step toward the building and-

Vanishes.

I actually jump. “Frey?”

No answer and no Frey.

I take a timid step forward myself, then another. There’s a rippling, like silk being moved by the wind, and a feeling of stepping through a heavy mist, and suddenly, I’m standing beside Frey.

His expression is the impatient scowl of one a

I ignore him and look back at the sidewalk, at the people passing back and forth, and feel a tingle of excitement. The one or two who actually appear to be looking right at us, act like they see nothing. I touch my hand to my face.

“Are we invisible?”

He shakes his head. “No. This place is protected.”

“Protected? How?”

He’s moving toward a door I hadn’t seen from the sidewalk. “A spell, of course. Only those invited can enter.”

A spell? Like Beso de la Muerte? I don’t remember any kind of portal there, though. And here, there are hundreds of people who pass by everyday. “But what if someone decided to take a walk back here? Wouldn’t they pass through the portal or spell or whatever the hell it is?”

“What part of needing to be invited didn’t you understand?”

“Well, what would happen?”

He blows out an irritated breath. “Nothing would happen. They’d find grass and shrubs and a maintenance man asking them to get back on the sidewalk.”

Frey’s attitude has certainly cooled since I bit him. I guess I should have expected it, but I felt I had no choice at the time and I’m not going to apologize.

He’s turned his back on me to face the door. He’s withdrawn a long, slender key, the old-fashioned brass kind, from his jacket pocket and is inserting it into the lock.

I swallow back the rest of my questions. And carefully neutralize my thoughts. I don’t know what I’m going to see inside or who.

The door is heavy metal and actually groans when Frey thrusts it open. His body blocks my view and I push past him, anxious to see what’s inside and get to Trish.

At first, it looks just like the reception area in a hundred other business offices. The walls are white stucco, striped with the patterns of sun and shadow cast by trees outside and fu

Wait for what?

Frey has gone around the desk. He punches something onto the computer keyboard. There is a whir, a flash of light, and then the screen goes dark again.

He returns to stand beside me.

I’m suddenly aware of something else-except the one we came in through, there are no other doors in this room.

I glance up at Frey, uneasiness causing a chilly edge to creep into my voice. “Where are we?”

He keeps his eyes straight ahead. “Don’t worry. You’ll see Trish soon enough.”

“But what is this place? How do we get-”

A rumbling beneath my feet chokes off the words. At first, I don’t trust, don’t believe, the sensation. The floor is vibrating, falling away. The feeling is like being on a high-speed express elevator. I touch a hand to the desk to steady myself, though the descent doesn’t seem to faze Frey. He eyes my hand on the desk and looks down at it with a tight little smile. I snatch my hand back and straighten up.

It seems as if we fall for a long time. I get a flash back to when I was a kid and Steve and my parents and I went to Disneyland for the first time. The entrance to the Haunted House. That delicious, scary plunge that had me gripping Steve’s hand so hard he finally yelped in complaint.

In the time it takes for the memory to ebb and fade, we’ve come to a stop. Frey turns around and faces the door we came in through. With a hand on the knob, he glances back at me. “Are you ready?” he says, not unkindly this time.

I nod, though I’m not sure whether it’s true.

But Trish is here. And that means I must be here, too.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I’m not sure what I expect the underground headquarters of all things that go bump in the night to look like, but as I pass inside I do know it’s not what I see in front of me now.

It’s a big square room, lit from above by high intensity lights so bright it’s hard to believe we’re underground. Whitewashed stucco, windowless walls stretch ten feet to the ceiling. There are people. Lots of people who look and “feel” normal. They’re milling about, sitting at desks, talking into telephones with headsets as their fingers bang away at computer keyboards.

It looks for all the world like a telemarketing center.

I shake my head. “What are they doing? Selling pe

Frey shakes his head, too, but in a way that indicates he thinks I’m an idiot. He ignores the question, and with a hand at my elbow, steers me to the back of the room.

In this room, there are other doors. Substantial looking wooden doors with no windows or peepholes. He leads me to one, knocks quietly. Then waits.

“Come in, Daniel,” says a cheery voice.

I glance up at him and start to ask how anyone could possibly know who was out here, then stop myself. After all I’ve seen today, why would I question this?

Once inside, two impressions hit me immediately. One is that there is a feeling of tranquility in this room unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. The second is that it emanates from a woman who is one of the most exotic creatures I’ve ever seen.

She reminds me of a fairy-tale princess, tall, graceful, slender of form and fair of face. She’s dressed in a long rose-colored smock of some silky fabric that molds to her body and moves like mist around her. Her hair is golden in color, framing her face with tendrils that reach to her shoulders. I couldn’t begin to guess at her age. Her face is the perfect oval, seamless, set off by Wedgwood blue eyes, elegant cheekbones and lush lips. I’m staring at those eyes, unable to pull my own away, when she begins to laugh softly.

“You’re staring at me, A

That pulls me back. “You know my name? Has Frey told you about me?”

“No,” she crosses to stand in front of me. One hand reaches toward my face, but she stops herself. “Do you mind?” she asks.

“Mind?”

“If I touch your face?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’d like to get an idea of what you look like.”

It takes an instant for me to comprehend. “You’re blind?”