Jasper's POV:
Mariam's first son was born about a year after her marriage to Augustus. This surprised us all, because I always thought that my mother, a female child, was her first child. I had been hoping that she would be born right away, be followed by the boy who would be Kare's hosts, and then I would be able to go home. But not only was this first baby not my mother, but he was also not Kare's host.
Mariam named him Jedediah and he had blue eyes and just a little bit of brown hair coming in. He was born early and he died a few days after he was born. He was too little, got sick, and we just could not keep enough fluids in his tiny body to stave off the dehydration. I tried forcing water down his throat, but in the end, there was nothing I or the local doctor could do and my mother's oldest brother died, explaining why I never knew about him.
Mariam and Augustus were not quick to repeat the baby making process and judging by his level of sexual frustration, she was turning down his advances for quite some time after Jedediah's death. I knew they both wanted more children, but Mariam was not ready to go through that again and so time went on without any little Allen babies to show for the new marriage and life continued on as it was before.
Mariam continued to stop by my cabin on a regular basis and she continued to pull my girls out of wormholes. Mariel was still away in Arizona and our only communication was via the occasional letter. She and Wayne got pregnant even before Mariam and Augustus did and their first baby was born a happy and healthy little girl who she name Ariel, after the name she thought belonged to my Kair. Even Monroe and Bethany had another baby; another boy named Darrell.
Not even John Phillip's hatred for me changed and he continued to make his presence felt at some of the worst times. He was the only human outside of the Jackson and Allen families who ever bothered to stop by my little cabin and he was still accusing me of the most ridiculous things ever. Why just this afternoon he came over to tell me about a strange series of dead bodies found on the outskirts of town and accused me of keeping Augustus and Mariam apart. Now if he had accused me of being a murderer it would be another story, but I was not guilty in the least of keeping my grandparents apart. I wasn't guilty of this particular murder and John was only using it as an excuse to stop by, but murder was much more up my alley.
"Augie's one of my good friends, so I feel it's my business what's goin' on between you and Mariam," he said, not knowing what he was talking about, but saying it just the same. "Now it's one thin' to steal someone's girl away when they've just barely begun to date, but you can't go 'round takin' people's wives. It ain't right. I know that yall do that sort of thin' in Arizona, but just because it was done to you don't mean you can turn 'round and do the same to Augie."
"Let me get this straight: you're actually accusing me of trying to steal Mariam away from Augie? Why?" I asked exasperated.
"Because she spends all of her time here with you doin' Sam Houston knows what and she ain't sleepin' with Augie no more. She got to be sleepin' with someone and it's got to be you. You're the only bastard 'round these parts slick enough to try it."
I really wanted to drink him in that moment for saying such an outlandish thing and I almost did. The only thing that stopped me was that he might have told someone he was heading out to see me. Or someone might have seen him on the way out to my cabin. I did not want to be associated with his death and have to leave, so I kept my rage in check and replied, "I'm only going to say this one more time: I'm not sexually interested in Mariam or Mariel. I think of them as my sisters and my thoughts towards them have always been platonic in nature." I growled a few of the words through my clenched teeth, but I was trying not to.
"Why not? You're not related and they're very attractive young ladies. They're very easy to look at it you know what I'm sayin'. You do know what I'm sayin' right? Wait, are you one of those sissy boys who likes other boys?" he asked confused.
"No. They are not my type; they're too young, too tall, and their hair's too curly," I replied trying not to hurl at his objectifying of my grandmother.
"Talk about the pot callin' the kettle black: you're young, tall, and got curly hair too."
"Exactly, I don't want a woman who looks like me."
"You must be crazy to pass up a chance at Mariam just because she looks a bit like you. Why if Augie hadn't already married her and I wasn't married to my Melinda, I'd be chasin' her myself," he said letting off sexual vibes. He was clearly thinking about my grandmother in an inappropriate way.
"Please stop; you're making me ill," I replied, trying to lift the randy horniness and replace it with the calm desire to leave. But then I dared not hit him with a full blast, because I did not want him to know it was coming from me.
"Talkin' about a pretty woman is makin' you ill? Have you never had sex? Is that why your wife started seein' that other man? Because you weren't satisfyin' her? Is that why she made you leave?" he asked, not getting the hint. "If given the chance, I'd take Mariam to bed in a heartbeat." The emotions he was emitting were absolutely revolting. At first there was disbelief, distain, and repulsion while he was talking about me and my wife. And then there was desire, lust, and sexual tension, along with jealousy, distain, and anger, when speaking about my grandmother. The combination was unbearable.
And then I really did lose it. My stomach was in knots and I felt that queasy feeling that I had not experienced since Mariam, Mariel, and Monroe first pulled me out of that wormhole. Maybe there was something about being in para with twins that was making me more susceptible to it, because I vomited all over John's albino alligator skinned boots. I had drained a family of otters that morning, so my stomach had been full of otter blood, but now my stomach was empty and his boots were covered in blood.
"What in the world's goin' on Cullen!? These are my new boots. Is that blood? Is that your blood? How are you still standin' there if you're bleeding like that?" he asked and when I did not answer, he continued on. "How're you bleedin' like that? I've seen a man vomit blood, but that was after a good poundin' when he barely made it over to Doc's place. And at the time, he wasn't in no shape to just be standin' there like that."
I let John ramble on as I thought about what I should do. I would have to kill him, because he had seen too much, but had anyone seen him coming here? Did anyone know that he was headed out this way? I could not risk it. It would be better to let him go home, kill him there, and make it look like an accident.
"I told you not to talk about Mariam like that; that's what you get for disrespecting a woman. You're disgusting and I want you to leave now," I said firmly, not answering his questions.
"You can't just pretend that this is normal! I'll probably come back tomorrow and find you dead. Did someone at least punch you earlier or somethin'? How do you explain all of this blood?"
"Yes, Augie punched me this morning. He seemed to have the same ridiculous idea as yourself," I lied, trying to tell him what he wanted to hear so that he would drop it.
"Oh…Do you want me to give you a ride over to Doc's place on my horse?" he asked with the first hint of concern.
"No, I'll be fine. I just want to go inside and rest."
"Well I should at least come over to check on you later."
"No, Mariam's coming over soon to bring me dinner and she can check on me. You're not needed," I said and turned to go back into my house.
I closed the door firmly behind me and waited for him to leave. He was stubborn and strangely determined about something, but I wore down his emotions and replaced them with a sudden burning desire to go home. He left, but did not go straight home. I know, because I climbed out my rear window and followed him. He stopped at every homestead on the way to his house, which thankfully did not include the Allen or the Jackson residences, and mentioned to them some of the details of what had just happened.
"I was just over at Cullen's place and accused him of havin' relations with Mariam. He denied it at first, but he practically admitted it towards the end. He said Augie beat him up somethin' proper this mornin' for what he'd been doin' with her," he told Mr. Koch at the general store.
As the only clerk at the general store, Mr. Koch heard all of the town's gossip, so I was cringing when John stopped there and said that; now everyone in the entire town would think there was something going on between me and my grandmother. How was I going to face her and my grandfather after this? But I had a mission and John did not mention the blood to anyone and only made one more stop after the store, before he went home. I let him clean up his boots and change his clothes before I pounced.
I had not had human in a very long time and I could not pass up an opportunity like this one to do so, especially because I did not have any synthetic blood in my system. I did not even have animal blood in my system, thanks to my earlier accident, so I probably would not have been able to resist if I tried. As it was, I did not try to resist and greedily gulped down every last sweet delicious succulent drop. There was something about being in para that made indulging taste so much better, or maybe it was just that my stomach was empty and it had been so long since I tasted Classic. Either way, John was one of the tastiest humans I have ever had.
While the blood was going down, I was too caught up in the delicious taste to be affected too much by his desperate, horrified emotions. It was not until after he was empty and I wanted more, that the ramifications began to affect me. It was like a bitter aftertaste the way his anguish washed over me long after he was gone. Even the little bit of smugness from being proved correct regarding my weirdness was excruciating. It was worse because I was out of practice with drinking human and I wanted to curl up into a ball and die, but I knew I could not do that, as I had a murder to cover up and I had to get out of sight before anyone came by.
After a few moments, I regathered my composure and left his body the way he had described to me earlier when telling me about the other murders. He had told me these details to see my reaction, but he could not have known how I would use the information. He was found the same way as the bodies on the outskirts of town were found, with his clothes on, his throat cut, not a pool of blood anywhere, and propped up in a chair like nothing in the world was wrong. When I was done staging the scene, I stayed to watch, waiting for his body to be found.
It was already getting dark before I killed John and now it was so dark that no one could see that anything was out of the ordinary unless they were up close. His wife, Melinda, found him and thought at first that nothing was wrong and he was just napping in the chair on the porch, but when she went to wake him for supper, she had quite the shock. She screamed and then went out back until she found their one pair of slaves. They used to have more, but they had not been able to replace the ones that ran away. Now they just had one maid and one farmhand who were married.
Melinda sobbed into her maid's arms and sent the farmhand out front to see for himself what had happened. The male slave realized that his master was dead and went back to the women, before taking off to go get the sheriff. The sheriff did not come right away, despite being good friends with John, because he had been away at the other crime scenes in town. As it was, the shop keeper, Mr. Koch, came back to the estate with the slave at first.
At this point I decided to run by one of the other crime scenes and see for myself what was going on. They could have been human on human violence, but from what John had said earlier, they sounded more like vampire attacks to me. And as I ran towards one of the remote cabins, my suspicions were confirmed, because I picked up the scent of another vampire. By the time I made it to the property in question, I had picked up the scent of three vampires in total.
Judging by the mess they made of their victims, I would say that these were newborns. The victim here had a crushed leg, multiple broken bones, large gashes on his neck, and blood on the surrounding ground. This was not the blood pattern of a practiced vampire leaving some blood spatter to make the death look more realistic, but the high velocity spatter of ripping open the carotid and not having one's mouth correctly placed to capture it.
The scene was poorly staged, just as John had described. The victim was sitting in a chair on the porch with his eyes open, like he was watching the humans react to the carnage that was his body. There was no attempt made to leave animal tracks or broken tree limbs or make it look like an accident in any way. There was even a vampire footprint in the mud in front of the porch, although the sheriff had already done a good job at destroying it.
The sight made me glad that I had gone simple with John's death scene, because now the two would be clearly linked. I was with Mariam this morning when this man had been killed, so I had an alibi for it. The sheriff would falsely assume that both murders had the same murderer and since I could not have done this one, he would assume I had not done John's either, and I would be off the hook and in the clear. At least that is what I hoped would happen; I really wished I had Alice with me so that I could know for sure.
The sheriff was just finishing up being puzzled by this murder and botching the crime scene when one of John's friends road up and informed him of the similar scene over at the Phillip's homestead. And so the sheriff gathered up the three men who were there helping him, all of which had been part of John's posse that first day, and headed over to my crime scene. They went on horseback, but I ran ahead of them and made it back to my observation post before they arrived.
Melinda had cried herself to sleep out in the slave's quarters and her maid was still with her. Mr. Koch and the farmhand were still standing guard over the body on the porch and everything was just about where I had left it earlier. It was well into the night by the time the sheriff and his men arrived and they were equally puzzled by what they saw here as they had been at the last scene.
The men trampled the scene in search of clues, but they did not know what they were looking for. I was concerned for a moment that one of the men, whom I recognized as Paul, was onto an actual clue when he stopped to examine John's boots. I was fully prepared to insist that it was chicken or cow blood on those boots, if I was ever asked, but then instead of taking the evidence to the sheriff to look at, Paul snuck the boots out to his saddle bag on his horse.
Paul was extruding deceit and he clearly thought that he was being sneaky and that no one was watching, but I saw him steal the only real piece of evidence to be found here. The boots were valuable and even more so because they had been made from an albino alligator hide, as John had once again purchased his leather from me, because he wanted his boots to stand out. I had sold it to him to help pay for the lumber on my cabin. I had gotten quite a lot for it too, because albinos were rare.
The boots were worth so much money that Paul did not think twice about stealing them, especially because he shared the same size foot as John, but he was concerned about getting caught. He pulled out John's old pair of boots and went about making them look like they had been worn that day, hoping that no one would remember the white pair, but he failed to realize that the other pair were equally valuable, because of the unique pattern. He was too busy looking over his shoulder the entire time to notice and he did not even notice me. I was hidden in the brush and not even my tainted muddy brown eyes gave me away.
After a few hours of making sure that the humans were completely clueless, I went back to my cabin to pretend like nothing had happened. There were no new horse or human scent trails leading into my property, so I knew no one had come to visit me while I was out and that I would be in the clear to claim I was here the entire time. I did the work I was planning on doing before John had stopped by, to make it look like I had been there all yester evening.
And right on cue, Paul stopped by with the sunrise. He had been up all night helping the sheriff and now he was here to question me.
"Howdy Jasper," he greeted me. "Did you here John Phillips was murdered last night?"
"No. He was just here yesterday telling me about a couple of murders on the outskirts of town. Are you sure you got your facts straight?" I asked.
Paul went on to tell me about the crime scene, the murder, and just what the sheriff thought about it all, while I pretended to be shocked and dismayed. He even went into the facts of the other two crime scenes I had not been to, like that a family of four was found dead at one and another single male was found dead at the other. That was a total of six victims; seven if you count John, making it the largest string of murders this town had ever seen. And there was no obvious motive to link them, so the sheriff was still dumbfounded as to what happened.
Then Paul told me about the last known hours of John's life and how several people had confirmed that he had been out here to see me. He was to be questioning me for the sheriff to find out if I had any new information regarding what had happened. Of course I told Paul that I did not know anything and repeated the less incriminating moments from what had gone on when John visited me. And since half the town had already heard that John had come back saying I was having an affair with Mariam, I had to confirm that we had indeed discussed the topic. And I found myself once again wishing for Alice as I decided whether or not to cop to the pretend affair.
If I told the truth that I was not having an affair with Mariam, then it might look like I was in denial. If I was in denial, then I had something to hide. If I had something to hide, then I had a motive for murder and I could have killed him to shut him up. If I lied and said that we were having an affair, then my motive for murder vanishes, but I will be left with having the entire town think that we were actually having an affair, which would lead to long lasting consequences for both me and Mariam.
I was keeping my grandpa Augie in complete darkness regarding what was really going on, because I knew that he would live and know me as a child and I did not want him to have to keep my secret for a lifetime. But now I was faced with the choice of telling him that I am a vampire, killed John, and admitted to a fake affair with my grandmother to cover up the murder, or letting him think that I actually had an affair with Mariam. Either way, I was screwed.
If my grandfather thought that I was having an affair with his wife, then he would probably never let me see her, and by extension, my twins. I could not pull them out of a wormhole myself and Mariel was too far away in Arizona to help me. But if I did not get my alibi straight, then the humans might realize that I had committed the murder and I would have to leave town. And I could not leave town, because this is where one of my hosts was and the other would be born.
In the end I decided it was better to stay without contact with Mariam than to flee, so I admitted to the affair. Paul took another hour of talking to, but he eventually left to confirm that I was not involved in the murder and was only sleeping with a married woman. And of course that meant Augustus showed up on my doorstep with Mariam in hand that afternoon and wanted to know what was going on.
I could not tell Augustus the truth, but at the last minute I thought of another lie. I took my inspiration from something John had once said to me.
"Augie and Mary, I'm so sorry that I lied to John and Paul about the affair. But John was getting suspicious and I thought he was on to me; he even asked me if I liked boys. He thought that I was either having an affair or that I liked boys and since the answer is really the latter, I confirmed the former. Augie, believe me when I tell you I've never had a sexual thought towards your wife. Not ever."
Mariam knew enough about me to figure out what was really going on and that I had killed John. She was also on my side and did not care for the human, so she went along with my lie and told her husband that she had seen me kiss other men. She even said that I have had male guests over from out of town and that they were my boyfriends. She was surprisingly good at lying and I later learned that Kair and Kare had been to visit her and coached her on what to say.
And so I weaved a complicated web of lies and the humans bought it all. Now all I have to do is take care of those vampires in my territory, because I need these murders to stop and go away.
