Legend of Stygian Downs (Vampire DeAngeliuson Book 2) Read online

  Book ii – The Vampire DeAngeliuson

  by Kara Skye Smith

  Sequel to The Quill Pen Killer

  The Series of The Vampire DeAngeliuson

  The Quill Pen Killer, book i

  The Legend of Stygian Downs, book ii

  The Nebulizer Potion, book iii

  Written by the one and only Lonely Vampire Author, Kara Skye Smith

  c 2011

  Published 2011 Fae-talityPublishing

  I'd like to thank my dearest mums, moms, mummies, and mom.

  Dedicated to: the rats in the bellfry,

  the tide in the pools, and the Sam in I am.

  Prologue

  In the book before this – you may remember, dear readers – the Vampire DeAngeliuson and his darling daughter, Jessica, had just solved the mystery of the Saint of Nostramadeus by retuning it's statue to a manor in England and to the rather 'tempermental' ghost of the artist who'd originally created it right before she was brutally 'drained' of her lifeblood by the notoriously evil vampire – and quite ungrateful – Nostramadeus, himself. Returning the statue, the relic, was not so much an act of virtue and reverence as one might guess, at least after hearing the story told by the Vampire DeAngeliuson – who is never shy about 'talking up' any effort he's made, once he's made it. The truth of the matter be known, it was an act of self-preservation by the vampire and his daughter, who by the way, are quite close for a teen and her 'pop', although closeness and 'parenthood' remain quite unnatural for most vampires, especially a vampire of such celebrated 'evil', at least before his daughter came along, anyway.

  In fact, it was completely necessary that the statue be removed from any isle, town, or continent near Jessica, as it had cast a wicked spell upon her, causing her to feast upon the blood of nearly any old passerby once she was under its trance. This matter, although not unlike the stories from the days of yore her father once accrued, haunting a castle in his single days, such a lifestyle simply could not be tolerated for a young girl at school – vampire though she may be. A staff of teachers drained and 'zombied-out' does not make for a good education. A relic with such a wicked past and daunting power over the vampire's darling daughter had to be stopped, at once! And it was, when the DeAngeliuson's returned the idol to it's far off homeland and the spell was cast away.

  You may remember, if you've read the first book – and if you haven't, I'm trying, here, to catch you up – that Jessica had been asked, while in England, where she might consider attending college. Since it is now the proper time in Jessica's life for her to make such decisions, she has put England – Oxford College, actually – at number one on her list of possibilities. She has often thought back upon her visit to England as a milestone in her life because it was the first place Jessica learned to see ghosts and spirits as they appeared to her. A milestone in that, as her father tells her, she won't be bothered by such nonsense as a spell cast by a naughty apparition any longer.

  Chapter One

  Today, Jessica sits in the third row, among many rows of desks, second seat in from the window below a banner stretched above the chalkboard that reads: College Entrance Exams, Session I. A woman sits at a desk in the very front of the room facing all the other desks, just below the chalkboard with a timer on her desk. The timer is noisily ticking away and this noise makes Jessica fill the little circles of her test form in, with her number two pencil, all the more quickly, reading through the pages of questions and answers all the more quickly still. Jessica fills in the very last circle, then flips pages back to a circle she skipped - as all good test takers do, filling in those she knows as quick as she can, while skipping and returning to those that require some time and thought to figure out. She is reading the question of an empty circled number on the test form and scrunching up her brow in thought, just as her pencil fills in the last little bit of the last empty circle of the test form, the noisy ticking of the timer stops; it turns to zero - causing the simple piece of machinery to jolt and ‘ding’, quite loudly, or at least it seems loud in the stillness of the room full of test takers.

  “Time!” the woman at the front desk calls out.

  “Everyone, drop your pencils,” she says. Jessica sits back, setting down her pencil and laying to the side of her test form. She sighs with relief; the very last circle - just barely, but completely - filled in with a scribbled blob of pencil lead, just in the nick of time.

  The room grows noisy with “Aw, man!” and “Shoot!” remarks from some of the boys behind her.

  Twelve days later, Jessica sits in the drawing room of the DeAngeliuson mansion at exactly three o’clock, as she has done for the last five days, looking out the window and watching as the postman climbs the long line of steps to the mansion’s front door. Jessica jumps up quickly. She runs to the immense wooden doorway with its iron work curls and brackets of antiquity and blurts out her question before the postman can even catch a breath, “Anything for me?!” He flips through the stack of envelopes in his hand, past Friday mailers and issues of Economy and The Pessimist to the envelopes with Jessica’s name on the them. He hands them to her.

  “Maybe today,” he says with weary hopefulness looking forward to the minute’s break from the steepest hike of his route, up the long, winding hill and the many steps to the DeAngeliuson’s mansion. Until these five days, he’d hardly even had a rest at the top, at all, before having to hike it back down; so, he searches his parcel thoroughly and hands over the day’s mail. Jessica hardly stops to commiserate or share his hopeful sigh, as she grabs the stack and runs into the house, flipping quickly through envelopes, to see if her college entrance exam results have arrived, yet. Each rejected enevelope flops down onto the table near the family’s front door, until the last envelope, addressed to her, not from any school, not from the Board of College Entrance Examination Results, but from an unknown source with no return address, no name, just a finely penned, handwritten ‘Addressed To’ name filled carefully in as Jessica DeAngeliuson, herself.

  “What’s this?” Jessica wonders, trying to set aside her disappointment and growing worry that her scholarly scores might never arrive.l She opens the note and skims quickly while moving her lips and making a hmm-hm sound as she reads:

  Dearest Jessica,

  As an old friend of your father’s, I am requesting that you stay home from England and do not attend Oxford as you had planned. I hear you have taken the entrance exam; so please accept my apology in giving you this advice too late to have saved you that effort. Accept this compensation in lieu of your dreams.

  “What?! Why?…” is all Jessica can manage to repeat in a panicky voice as she fumbles the wretched note back into its envelope, discovering there a most insulting insult (as it really can only be called) - an insidious, handwritten check for a cash dollar amount.

  “Well!” she sniffs, hurt and feeling let down. It is not only a let down to Jessica that her college entrance scores have not arrived, but now this, this blasphemy, a slight on the tender soul of her hopes and dreams. One can only say she has just been blind-sided, in a way, wide open for joy, but hit with a rock - in the pit of her stomach that is - the sour taste of disappointment like a lump in her throat. She sits down and looks at the note for a moment - but only a moment - feeling as though she might cry, but she doesn’t. She re-reads the note and thinks about ‘who’. Who would have written such a thing knowing full good and well that Oxford was her plan? Jessica turns to the back of the note and looks in the envelope again for a name, a signature, any kind of clue as to what insidious creature might have just laid a black crow’s egg on her dream.

  That n
ight, Jessica’s father does not come down to dinner, but while Jessica sits at the counter, eating dessert, her father walks in, dressed in all his most exquisite vampirish attire.

  “Going out tonight?” he asks her.

  “No,” Jessica sulks, “But I see you are.”

  Her father goads her, “It’s Saturday night. You aren’t staying home -” She glares at him, “are you?”

  “Can I talk to you;” she asks him, “do you have time?”

  “I suppose,” he answers and looks at his watch.

  “How long will this take?” he adds to be glib.

  “Not long,” Jessica’s sulk has turned to a pout, “but if it’s that much of an imposition… I can… O never mind!”

  “No, no,” her father softens, “I have time. What’s up?”

  Jessica puts the note from the biggest postal disappointment of her life, so far, onto the countertop.

  “Read this note,” she instructs him, “it came to me, in the mail.” Her father reads the note.

  “Huh,” is all he has to say. Jessica is beginning to wonder if everyone is out to disappoint her today, and perhaps she could just go to be and hope for tomorrow to get her right away, but the weight of the words of the note are too heavy, too foreboding to simply ignore.

  So, Jessica asks him, “Who could have written this, Father?” Her father looks directly at her. He looks stressed for a moment, then he sighs, and says something so lame she wishes he had not answered her at all.

  “Look Jess, how important is this college thing to you, anyway? I mean… Come on! Studies? Books? How about you go out with me tonight. There will be some young people and maybe some other vampire daughters - although most of us don’t, well, I’ll introduce you. It’ll be fun. I can wait while you get changed. What do you say?”

  And Jessica, whose jaw has dropped so far open while listening to this sorry response that she literally pushes her chin back up with her hand, fixes to pitch a full snit, a real fuss, the beginning of which sounds something like this:

  “What?! It’s not just important to me… this college ‘thing’ - as you call it… it is essential! It’s…” and here it becomes more spit and eye glaring than actual words, “it’s… There… Isn’t… There isn’t any other… I can’t believe you… You just… It’s not important - it’s Everything! There isn’t anything else!!”

  Then something about thinking he was with her on this, when finally, and nearly exhausted, she yells, again, “What?!!” The bad news of the letter, and then her father’s suggestion that she just ‘forget it’ - do something lame - is nearly incomprehensible in its badness.

  Her father asks, “Could we talk about this tomorrow? I’ve really got to go.”

  But, Jessica slaps the envelope’s other contents on the table, with a spiteful scowl and says, “It came with this.”

  Her father glances down, then cautiously asks her, “To whom?”

  “Exactly!” Jessica snaps, “To me. The question is… who is it from?”

  She shrugs her shoulders up, her palms out, “A Name?”

  Her father looks directly at her once again, “Ummm, you’re a vampire, Jess.”

  “Not really. I mean, kind of.” Her father looks impatiently at his watch again.

  “He’s more of one,” he says. He flips the note back and forth in his hand.

  “This guy,” he hesitates to explain, “he’s, well, he did some things that caught some ‘bad press’, you know, some scorn, contempt - and then some people didn’t want any one of his ‘family’, although we’re not, in the public eye who is half… half vampire -”

  She interrupts him, “Half?”

  Her father adds, “A spawn.”

  Jessica’s hand reaches up to her collar bone aghast, “Spawn?!” She glares as if insulted by the mere existence of the word.

  “You know,” he nudges his head toward a window as if to say ‘out there’, but says, “your mum.” “She didn’t?” Jessica’s words trail off and looks at him, confused, helpless as to what to say.

  Her father shakes his head, “No.” Jessica becomes impatient with the lack of logic to the obstacle set in front of accomplishing her dream. “Why would that have anything to do with Oxford? Not like I’ll be wearing a vampire t-shirt to school. They won’t know,” she insists.

  “Maybe,” her father says, “but trust me,” he points to the note, “he will.”

  And then he asks, “Do you feel better?”

  “No!” Jessica pouts.

  “I’ll look into it,” he tells her.

  “He didn’t even sign his name. Why do we care? I don’t care what he thinks. Be nice for school clothes, though,” she says looking at the amount on the check. He smiles and she smiles back.

  “That’s the attitude?” he tells her.

  “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He pats her arm. “Thanks, I guess,” she says wondering if he actually helped her. He walks out of the room. The door to the house shuts behind him as he goes out into the night, as all good vampires - in his opinion - do. Jessica puts the note back into the envelope.

  “Spawn? Huh!” she mutters, “Blah!”

  During their customary Sunday morning brunch together (well, morning that is for an out-late vampire) Jessica does her best to ‘keep a positive attitude’ despite the hail storm of negativity form the night before and the empty seat where her father normally sits. She is in her pajamas. Her hair is a slept-in mess. She is spreading jam on her toast when she hears her father enter the kitchen, plopping fizzy tablets into a glass of water and asking Matressa, the house manager, for an extra large glass of tomato juice. She hands it to him and he joins Jessica at the dining room table where a stack of pancakes sit in the middle of the table, plus eggs and some kind of fruitish looking goo.

  “So much for that ‘talk’ we were going to have,” she says. Her father holds onto his forehead and tips back his head, swallowing the glass full of fizzy stuff. He makes a face, “Ahh! Uhh! Devil twitches and a the whole thing falls down!” he exclaims. “What?” she asks making sure the jam hit’s the corners of her toast, just so.

  “Just saying.”

  “You and your sayings. What’s this?” She lifts up a spoon in the fruitish goo and plops it back down. Her father looks up, “Compote,” he answers. “What’s compote?” Jessica asks.

  “Prunes. Stewed.” He takes a sip of tomato juice and makes another face.

  “Stewed prunes? Mmm. Huh. Prunes, tomato juice, fizzy tabs for breakfast? Some healthy lifestyle you’ve got going here. So, before you start to preach to me, ‘what it is I should be doing’, I’ll just tell you, I’m not chaning my mind. O, except on where I’m going,” she says flatly.

  “Not England?” he asks.

  “No,” Jessica answers, “I’m pressing on with England, it’s just I’ve found a quaint, little, private college -”

  Jessica and her father say the name of the college at exactly the same time, “Thaddeus Preference’s Alternative School of Superior Inferiorism…”

  Jessica looks at him inquisitively and continues telling him, “…in the Sanguinistic Valley of Stygian Downs near Sire Town in Heavonshire. Wait!” she asks, “How did you… know?”

  “Some things just amaze me,” her father says. “What things?” Jessica asks him.

  “O demons! I love it when you’re so talkative. What things just amaze you?” she asks again.

  “You know,” he reminds her, “I got u, special, just to have breakfast with you.” Jessica holds her tongue with her fingertips.

  He smiles and continues, “If you weren’t going to let this foolish notion of college go, it is the college I was going to suggest. And a college that happens to be reputable among the circles that I circulate… but, there, you’ve chosen it yourself, and it’s really quite amazing how time takes care of its own. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Be-cause…”

  “Because there happens to be more than just one prestigious al
umni with which I can concur at Thaddeus,” he says.

  “And by Prestigious, you mean Vampire?…” “You don’t have to be so condescending about it. Three of them are quite famous,” he says.

  “I’m sure they are,” Jessica snips, “but would I care to ask what they are famous about?”

  Her father pretends thinking, “Um, no.”

  “O wicked! Maybe I should change my mind,” she says.

  Her father frowns at her, “Why, because I like it? One of them invented printing. And books! One of them invented books. There you go!”

  “The college is that old?” she asks.

  “Well, something like that,” he says.

  “I don’t believe it. How was your, um, night?” she asks.

  “Swanky, lavish, feastly. You?”

  “I’ve been studying college programs, and the campus.”

  “Hmmm, fun,” he sneers.

  “It is,” she says, “Well, was… now I don’t know.”

  “O not to worry! Who else goes there? Went there?”

  “It’s not really that. It’s what they’re offering. I can major in Writing while taking Acting and maybe a language or three. I’d like to learn Arabic, and maybe Chinese… and continue on with French, of course.”

  “Brave,” he says, ‘actually, I’m very proud of you. I looked around at most of the girls at the event, last night, in their glittery gowns and just done hair and I thought, you know, my daughter is just as pretty, even this morning… like a fallen angel,” he says looking at her sleep-done hair. She is licking jam off the sleeve of her pajamas when she notices him looking at her.

  “Jammies!” she smiles and lets go of the sleeve. He continues as if she hasn’t spoken, “and really, for vampires, is there really any other type?” Jessica looks up at him, he is in mid-bite, he blinks, she cocks her head to the side just looking, trying to figure out if there’s more depth to him than just the surface structure.