3
“So what kind of car is this?”
“Sixty-six Mercury Comet.”
“She’s a beaut.”
I nodded, foot pressing harder on the accelerator. The motor responded with a growl. We were on the edge of town where the suburbs start to give way to country and property got bigger. Houses became fewer, set back farther from the road. More trees, less side roads, less traffic. We had been driving about forty minutes to get here.
I reached over and turned down the music. My finger hesitated, tempted to let the song finish before I did. Janiva Magness was tearing her heart out on a rendition of “You Were Never Mine.” Delbert McClinton
never
did his song the justice that Janiva did. I don’t know Janiva’s history, but somewhere in her past that song happened to her. Someone had broken that lady’s heart and broken it badly. It was a song full of loss and regret and sorrow.
I could relate.
I pushed the button, emptying the car of music and leaving us with just the rumble of the engine.
“Aw, man. I quite liked that. It’s better than what I thought you’d be playing when we got in.”
“And what’s that?”
“You know, metal, screamo, some such shite as that.”
“Sometimes. I have to be in a mood.”
“I’d hate to see that mood, man.”
“Yes, you would.”
I let that sit between us for a second.
“What were you doing driving on this road?”
“Going out for the night. There’s a pub the next town over that has pretty good food and good prices on pints. Sure, they can’t tell their Irish from their English or their Scottish, but around here I’ll take what I can get.”
“You’re from Ireland, then?”
“Born there but raised here. Me ma and pa made sure that didn’t hold me back though.” His hand pointed at the rosary swinging from the rearview mirror. “I was raised on the rosary and a belt used by lovin’ hands.”
“Sounds familiar.”
He pointed out the windshield. “Just ahead there, where the road dips. You can see the skid marks where I had to stand on my brakes.”
The headlights of the Comet showed two sets of long, wavy, black marks on the gray asphalt. I pulled over to the side of the road. The car listed to the side as we left asphalt to go on the shoulder. There wasn’t much room on the side of the narrow two-lane road and the embankment was sharp. Slipping the car into park, I hit the hazard flashers, leaving the headlights on.
Reaching under the seat, I found the Maglite I kept there. It was the big one, heavy with the weight of six D-cell batteries. The bulb had been replaced with a UV bulb that pumped out near four thousand lumen, and the whole thing had been silver plated. It would light up a section of night like day or put something’s lights out.
“Careful getting out, that slope looks like a bitch.”
I pushed open my door, holding it open as I hauled myself out of the car. Once out, I let go; gravity slammed the door, making the car rock on its axles. Sully managed to get out and shut the door; holding on to the Comet, he made his way up the slope. I should have known he wouldn’t slip. He was a lycanthrope after all; almost all of them have a grace that humanity can’t touch.
I let loose the hold I had on my power, rolling it out into the night. It washed over Sully as he came around the front of the car. Impressions swept my senses. The crunch of small bones in my mouth, warm oily fur, the scent of rich, earthy heather, the feel of my belly on the ground.
“What kind of lycanthrope are you?”
“I’m a stoat.”
“I have no idea what the hell that is.”
“You’ve never heard of the mighty Irish stoat?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Ah, man, they’re fearsome creatures. Brave and crafty. Pound for pound the most vicious creature to ever terrorize the Emerald Isle.”
“Sounds like something I should have heard of.” I started walking down the road. He followed. “So why do you feel like a rat in my head?”
“A rat? Oh, now you’re just being insulting, man. The mighty Irish stoat is cousin to the American weasel.”
“Weasel?” I shrugged. “That’ll work.”
He looked surprised. “Most people judge.”
“I don’t care enough to judge. Besides, you seem okay with it.”
“You play the hand you’re dealt, man.”
“And if you have to, you cheat.”
My thumb clicked on the flashlight, scouring the asphalt with ultraviolet light. I turned the head of the flashlight to widen the beam, toning it down slightly, diffusing the light.
The air pressed in, heat and humidity laying on me like soggy, sodden blankets. It was still as a corpse, well, a normal corpse anyway, no night breeze to stir. Cicadas buzzed in the tall grass on the side of the road. Without the air whipping through the Comet to wick away sweat, I was instantly drenched. My skin felt slick, clothes sticky. Walking, I swung the light back and forth across the lane. Sully trotted to catch up after stopping to light a cigarette.
He was breathing hard when he got next to me. “You know what I think, man?”
“I’m sure I will in a second.”
Ignoring me like I knew he would, he said, “I think all these stories about you being a bloodthirsty, stone-cold killer of Weres are a bunch of bollocks.”
I stopped short. “You what?”
“It’s all bullshit. You’re big and you
are
scary, what with the tattoos and the guns, but c’mon, man. You’re out here to
help
one of us. You’ve been a perfect gentleman to me.” He pushed his hat back on his head. “And you listen to the blues, man. It’s good music. Nobody who does that could be a vicious killer.”
Shows he didn’t know jack shit about the history of blues. Born in roadhouses and juke joints running free with whiskey and shine and spilled blood in the sawdust floors the blues is good time music but always with the dark edge of humanity hiding underneath. Robert Johnson died in agony, his guts full of poison for singing his way into the panties of a jealous man’s woman. Sonny Boy Williamson was robbed and murdered on his way home from a performance.
The blues is murder music.
Sully blew out a stream of smoke. “I think you’re a big teddy bear.”
The words weren’t out of his mouth before I had the Colt pointed at his face. The red dot of the laser sight spilled out from the bridge of his nose and across his eyes. His mouth gaped open, cigarette hanging off his lip. I stood there, pointing the gun at his head, letting him
feel
the fact that he was one twitch of the trigger away from having his brains splattered across the asphalt.
I pushed my voice through clenched teeth.
“You can ride in my car. You can listen to my music. We can even trade smart-ass comments with each other. But never,
ever
forget that if you cross that line, if you become a threat to any human,
this
will be the last thing you see.”
“Jaysis . . .”
“Shut up. You
need
to understand this. I don’t
want
to kill any of your kind. But y’all are too dangerous to go unchecked. You are too fast and too strong to be left to your own devices. Humans are no match against you. I am the death sentence passed on any of you who can’t control yourselves.” The gun whipped back into the holster under my arm. “Tell everybody you know.”
Turning my back on him, I started walking again. He didn’t follow. I hoped he was thinking over what just happened. I couldn’t afford to let him start telling people that I was nice or soft or, God forbid, a fucking teddy bear.
Once word leaks out that an occult bounty hunter has gone soft, lycanthropes begin to go rogue and then it’s nothing but work, work, work all the time.
Looking back, Sully was stubbing out his cancerstick. I whistled, sharp and loud. He looked up and I motioned him over with the flashlight.
He ambled over.
“This is where you found her?”
He looked up the road. “Yeah, about here. I could see mile marker nineteen when she hit the ground.” He looked over. “How’d you know?”
I flicked the light over the gray asphalt. The middle of the lane had a large, dark stain stretching from the edge to over the yellow center line. Where it crossed the painted stripe it showed a dull red, drying but taking hours longer than normal with the humidity.
“What did you see when it happened?”
“Her hitting the ground in front of my headlights.”
“Nothing else? No sign of where she came from?”
“The sky, man. I was a little freaked out to be looking for anything, to be honest.”
I knelt down. I rolled my power out, letting it unfurl from inside me. It ruffled inside my stomach like the pages of a flip book. Spilling out of me, it slipped across the bloodstain. A tingle pulsed through me. My mouth tasted funny, a wet, mulchy grass taste. Every sound grew sharper, more distinct. I could hear Sully breathing and his clothes rustling, and the change in his pocket rubbing together as he moved ever so slightly. My eyes pulsed, changing the way they saw things. Everything that moved slowly seemed locked in crystal while everything that moved—quickly a moth drawn to the circle of light I held, a small swarm of delicious mosquitoes, four june bugs bumping through the night—all had light trails, making their motion easy for tracking.
Shaking my head and standing up I pulled my power back, breaking the sensory influx. Now I had an inkling of what it was like to be a Were-bat. Awesome. That’s helpful.
Sometimes my power just pisses me off.
Swinging the flashlight around, it cut the trees overhead in images of starkness. There’s one thing about Georgia pine trees: They grow tall and straight unless something interferes with them. The trees overhead were all pine, all jutting up into the air, untouched since the road had been cut through them fifty years ago. The pine tree is a soft wood with high, thin branches. None of them were strong enough to hold someone carrying an unconscious lycanthrope, waiting for the chance to throw her onto the road.
Yep, flyers. I hate flyers. Some vamps can fly metaphysically, some actually sprout wings. Nosferatu just have built-in wings. Come to think of it, they actually are a lot like a Were-bat. I would think this might be a fucked-up mating thing except there were forty-two punctures. Twenty-one bites. There was no way in hell I was dealing with a pack of twenty-one Nosferatu. That many of the animalistic bloodsuckers couldn’t hide.
And somebody had dropped Fallene here on purpose. They put her in front of a moving vehicle to finish her off. The crash would have hidden what they had done to her. It was just Fallene’s luck that the driver was another lycanthrope with the reaction speed to stop in time. He also knew to take her to Larson, the only one in the area who could give her proper medical care.
It was a lucky break.
Wait.
What the hell am I saying?
I don’t believe in luck. When you start dealing with the supernatural, luck goes out the damn window. Things that look random never are. Coincidence gets killed when shit gets metaphysical.
So what was the game?
My pocket vibrated. Pulling the buzzing phone out of my pocket, I flipped it open.
“Go for Deacon.”
“I hate the way you answer your phone.” Larson.
“Get the fuck over it. What do you need?”
“Fallene is coming around. She’s more out than in, but you said to let you know. I have Father Mulcahy on the way over to sit with her so I can get to some other patients.”
“I’m on my way.”
Time to get some answers.
4
“Be easy on her. She’s still a long way from recovery.”
“I’m just asking some questions.”
Larson looked at me, then spun and rolled out of the room, leaving me alone with a battered young girl. I stepped over to the bed, pulling up a stool.
Fallene was propped up, a thick blanket over her. Small tremors chased along her skin like she was cold. Her uncovered eye was closed, swollen, and puffy. Her hands kept moving, restless against the blanket covering her, making the tubes from her IV bang softly against the railing of the hospital bed.
The bruises that traced over her arms and neck had spread, joining together and turning large patches of her skin dark purple. She lay there making a strange noise low in her throat. It took me a second to realize she was struggling to swallow.
As gently as I could, I touched the bed.
Her eye snapped open. It was a dark, dark brown, the pupil large. She twitched away from me.
“Easy, easy,” I soothed. “Do you need some water?”
She nodded, a tiny movement of her head. Picking up the cup by the bed, I filled it from the pitcher that sat next to it. Carefully I put the straw between her lips, trying to not hit one of the splits that were there.
She drank, losing more water than she managed to swallow. It spilled out, running down her chin and soaking into the bandages on her face and throat.
“Maybe that wasn’t a good idea.” I smiled for lack of anything else to do. Tension was drawing my shoulders up. I felt like I was on the edge of moving wrong and hurting her. This wasn’t what I was good at.
I sat down next to the bed.
“Do you know who I am, Fallene?”
She nodded.
“I need to know some things so I can find whoever did this to you and make them pay.”
Another tiny nod.
“This was vampires, wasn’t it?”
Nod.
“How many were there?”
She leaned up, trying to swallow. It looked like it hurt. Her voice was thin, wispy. “I don’t know. A lot.”
“How long did they have you?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“Can you tell me anything about them or where they had you?”
A tear rolled down her face. “It hurt. God, it hurt so bad.” The tremors got worse, her body shaking under the blanket. “I smelled . . . peanuts.”
Peanuts?
“Anything else?”
A convulsion wracked her frail body. Her legs drew up to her chest and she folded up like someone had punched her in the stomach. Her head flew back as the cords of her neck became steel cables.
“Larson!”
Fur sprouted in lines, running up her skin. Muscles bunching, her skeleton began to break and reform, skin tearing and mending. A shrill screech ripped out of her hollow chest, splitting the air and my head.
My eardrums closed, sealing in a headache that cut me from crown to chin.
“Larson! Get your ass in here!”
Her skull shifted, face rearranging with a wet, grinding sound. Her jaw shrank as her cheeks spread. The bandages on her face fell away, medical tape slipping off short brown fur as they were pushed away by ears displaced and grown large.
My back hit the door. The hospital bed flipped over and Fallene dropped out of sight behind it. Something bumped the door behind me, Larson trying to get in. I pressed back, holding the door closed.
“Deacon! What’s happening in there?”
“Change of plans! Get everybody the hell out of here!”
The screeching had stopped, the room eerily quiet, the only noise left a raspy, wet breathing, the sound of Larson on the other side of the door, and my heartbeat.
A claw came over the edge of the bed, short, sharp talon curling into the mattress. Dread dropped into my gut like a cement block. A transformed Fallene hauled herself up, climbing over the bed frame and perching on it. Elongated feet clamped, claws biting deep. Her legs were bowed, thick with muscle, and covered in short fur. They disappeared under a short, pink hospital gown. It had split on the sides as her arms had become massive wings, a membrane of skin stretching from her upper thigh to the end of her mutated arm. The slender fingers she’d had were now pulled long, stretched to form the ribs of the batwing. Her thumb was a twisted, taloned claw on the upper edge.
The gashes and cuts still showed pink under the fur, glaring out. She squatted, staring at me with beady, black eyes. The cute button nose had pushed up and back on her skull, forming a snout that sat below a ridge of skull bone between overformed ears. Sharp little teeth jutted through a mass of foam that spilled out of her jaw, dripping down a pushed-back chin and spattering on the floor.
I had just enough time to think,
Oh shit
, before she launched herself at me.