FICTION

Psalm of Vampires Chapter Five

Lake Michigan

Image of man in suit licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by author

This is the chapter where you get to know Detective Owens, a key player in the novel. This is the final free chapter on Medium.

Trigger warnings: Language, descriptions of violence; note: paragraph structure is simplified for Medium (fewer sentences per paragraph compared to book version).

When I stepped out of the rideshare, I noticed something peculiar about the estate. Nobody was milling about.

To give you an idea of how weird that was, think about an empty backstage area immediately after a rock concert performance. Or a Taylor Swift concert where no Swifties show up. That’s an exaggeration, but it was still weird. The estate was usually teeming with influencers twenty-four hours a day.

I walked up the long, curving driveway to the square portico. The doors were closed and locked. Technically, there are two sets of locks for the home. One is a keyless entry system that requires my fingerprints. I had disabled that more than a year ago because of all the people coming and going. The other is a lock opened by a large skeleton key.

No real reason for this, other than skeleton keys are cool. Somebody had locked the skeleton key lock, so I reached into my pocket for my key and slipped it into its…