Authors: A.J. Aalto
Declan grabbed my arm and shoved my sleeve up, drawing the fabric over a wound that was starting to bleed copiously. I hissed a complaint as he turned it under the aim of his headlamp. Declan said, “Mellified man is supposed to be a powerful elixir.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Dr. B., it’s a full moon. You’ve been bit by a werefox! You’ve got lycanthropy coursing through your veins right this second.”
“Fuckanut!” I swore, grinding my teeth.
“Marnie, eat the mellified man.”
“Uhhhhh,” I said, “That’s a big
no
, crazy person.”
“Marnie, if we were in a hospital, we could pump you full of antivirals and hope, but we’re way out here in the desert, and this might be your best shot to fight the disease trying to take hold in you.” He gave me his most serious look. “Do it.”
“Dude, don’t make me panic-puke on your shoes.”
Declan grabbed my go-bag from my shoulder. I held onto it, fighting him for the strap, but between his being half-immortal, a dude, and my arm hurting like hell where I'd been bitten, I totally let him win. He unzipped it and wrestled out the jar, tossing the lid aside. There was an unidentifiable chunk of sweetened meat floating in the dark yellow goo. My stomach did a slow roll.
“I can’t eat candied dead person,” I said. “I can’t!”
“Lycanthropy is fatal in forty-five percent of cases. Those odds aren’t fabulous. The surviving fifty-five percent carry the virus their whole lives and turn into hopeless monsters, succumbing to irreversible, permanent psychosis after thirty years or so. Would you rather die, or end up a furry lunatic once a month?”
“Declan!”
He used his fingers to snag a chunk, and then tore off a strip. It melted into a stringy, crispy chunk, dripping goo. He pushed it closer to my face. “Marnie, quickly.”
I squeezed my lips together tightly and barely squeaked out, “It may not even be reversible
now.
”
“But if it
is
, it would only be so if you catch it early.” He put the human mummy confection right under my nose. “Probably the honey makes it taste okay…”
“Who buys this? Who eats this shit?” I whined, shaking. “I don’t think I can…”
“Do it, Dr. B. Please. For me.”
“Will you call me Glenda Hasenpfeffer for the rest of the trip?” Tears filled my eyes and even the Baranuik defense, humor, wasn’t going to make this easier.
“I’ll call you DJ Jazzy G-Pfeff for the rest of your damn, un-furry life, woman, just eat it!”
I muttered a quick, “Mighty Hecate, this I ask; Guide me in my gruesome task!”
Declan answered under his breath, “By the power of the Three; An’ it harm none, so mote it be.”
Whimpering, I opened my mouth, slamming my eyes shut. Declan slid the human mummy nugget onto my tongue, and I gagged. It was the consistency of beef jerky covered in sticky slime, and the flavor of honey did precisely nothing to hide the stench of dried, dead flesh. It should have been okay. After all, it was just meat, and it had apparently been smoked or dried before Pia or her accomplices placed it in the honey bath. That’s what I tried to tell myself.
It’s like candied bacon, Marnie. You’ve tried that. It was mmm-mmm yummy. This is just caaaaaaandied bacon.
Unfortunately, I am not easily duped, and the knowledge of what it actually was ruined the entire experience for me. I chewed only as much as I needed to and swallowed hard. One more gag almost undid all my hard work, but I managed to get it down.
“Now what?” I asked. I watched him dab a little of the honey on my fox bite and fish around in vain for a bandage in our go-bags.
“Now we get the fuck out of here with the rest of it, and hope like hell it works.”
We stood, and crept to the door. No sounds, now. The tomb guardian had chased Folkenflik down a corridor far into the depths. My guts rebelled right away, rolling threateningly. “Mercy of Isis, I’m going to barf.”
“Keep it down as long as you can,” Declan advised on a whisper. “Let’s go. Super quiet.”
We slinked back the way we’d come, listening for any motion. Moving was difficult; my guts wanted to escape whatever I’d shoved in them. One way or another, something had to give. My upper lip began to sweat. We crept past the tomb, past the sticky, abandoned shovel. I averted my eyes. We made it as far as Pia’s bucket before hearing the quick shuffle of paws ahead of us, and a yip, followed by another howl ending in
roop roop!
I drew my dog whistle out of my shirt and gave it a sharp blast. Folkenflik was in the process of turning when he came into view around the corner, throwing himself like a furry missile between us and the lump that was chasing him.
The protector of the tomb finally appeared and every follicle on my scalp prickled with terror. What I’d expected to be Babi the Bull of the Baboons was actually a being closer in appearance to a fat-bellied jackal up on two legs; long canine snout, pointed ears, human-like eyes that reminded me of Folkenflik. This creature was ten times the werefox’s size and ran like a man. My brain offered up: Duamutef?
Declan grabbed my uninjured arm and gave it an insistent tug.
The tomb guardian roared as the werefox pounced on his chest and then launched away. Duamutef swung a massive fist and hit Folkenflik in the head; the werefox shrugged it off, then latched onto Duamutef’s extended forearm the way he had with me and Sayomi. The guardian didn’t even flinch. This battle was going to take forever, and Declan and I didn’t stand around to watch. Sparing one final glance over my shoulder at the dusty doomscape that was Huxtahotep’s tomb, I pelted after Declan and out into the cool, Egyptian night.
“CASH, THROW CASH
at the driver, go!” I yelled, shoving Declan ahead of me.
“He’s busy!” As we ran, it became apparent that the driver was indeed busy, head thrown back against the headrest, eyes closed, mouth open; Pia’s head was in his lap.
“He can drive with his dick out, can’t he?” I scrambled onward, my heels skidding in a soft, unpacked spot of sand.
The driver didn’t flinch as we ran up to the taxi, and Pia’s head remained stationary. Declan threw cash in the driver’s open window and it fluttered around and settled.
We both stopped dead. Dividing our attention between the taxi and the tomb to make sure nothing was coming out of either, we took in the stillness of the bodies.
“Dr. B?” Declan whispered.
I passed him my go-bag slowly, not making any sudden movements, keeping one eye on the flat, dark desert. I sniffed the air for underscents and caught the distinct whiff of urine, followed by a very slight smell of spilled blood. Very slight, because there wasn’t much left. The driver’s flung-back face was pale. Drained. I didn’t need to search for the fang marks. If I hadn’t already been panicking about the mellified man and the werefox and the tomb god and the fact that Sayomi and Folkenflik usually traveled together, my nemesis was likely out here somewhere, I’d have been afraid. My eyes cut across the desert, searching for the danger.
“Those poor people,” Declan said softly. “This is bad, Dr. B. I’m part revenant. The Egyptian government does not like monsters like me. I will absolutely get blamed for this.”
Any other time, I’d have had a good cry and then called for police; I’m a firm believer in the law and the enforcement thereof. In this case, I did not have much faith that we’d get out of here if the cops showed up, and this was not the time to mourn my friend. The mellified man in my go-bag assured that there’d be trouble if we were caught here, next to the bodies, next to the tomb.
“He’s still here,” I said.
“Hrm?”
“There’s a vampire here,” I told the
dhampir
.
“Revenant, Dr. B,” he corrected.
“No,” I said, summoning the Blue Sense. “No, this fuckhead’s not a revenant. There’s a goddamn vampire here. And you’d better get your ass ready. Because he’s not done feeding.”
There would be no making rowan wood stakes here in the desert. There would be no purchasing holy water. There would be no cross to repel him. There would be no silver dagger. It was full dark, and he had so many advantages here that I figured this was it: I was about to die.
I wasn’t going to go down without a fucking fight, though. My Cougar mini was in my hand and I trained it on the sand dunes. Bullets wouldn’t kill a revenant, but the flesh wound would hurt and might slow him down. Declan eased to a crouch and started going through both bags, rummaging. Keyed up, tension singing through the hot wires that were now my nerves, I didn’t know why the revenant was giving us time to prepare. Maybe he found it amusing to toy with us, to watch us freeze and twitch like rabbits. Maybe he wanted to watch me cry. Behind us in the tomb, I could still hear Folkenflik yipping and barking, and the pounding thud of Duamutef. I didn’t know if the god could exit the tomb, but I hoped I wouldn’t find out right this second, because I had two dead bodies on my hands and I was being hunted in the dark.
“I got nothing, Dr. B.,” Declan whispered frantically, which was sort of hilarious; preternatural hearing would pick up a whisper. Old habits. It also wasn’t strictly true. He’d removed a pair of clean tighty-whities; he tore off a strip of cotton to wrap around the open wound on my right forearm. “I didn’t pack for revenant attacks. I figured they’d stay frozen at Skulesdottir.”
“Not all of them were frozen.”
Not all of them showed up
, I thought, pulling my sleeve down over the bandage and backing toward the taxi. I put out my left hand to take the driver’s side door handle and gave it a jiggle. It popped open. The driver’s hand flopped out; his fingernails were already cyanotic.
“I hate to admit this, and maybe I’m just in shock and snockered on candied man,” I continued, not taking my sweeping gaze off the desert around us while checking the driver’s wrist for a pulse, “but I’m kind of missing Sayomi, that sexy latex-coated bitch.”
“Me too, Dr. B.,” he said, swallowing hard. “She only shot at us and tried to set you on fire.”
I put my gun in its holster and grasped the driver’s arm to gently pull him from his seat. He was a lot heavier than he looked, but his dead weight had been overbalanced against the door, so he tumbled out, sending up a puff of sand. Released from his lap, Pia’s curly-haired head banged into the stick shift and turned sideways, her cheek smooshed against the plastic. I grimaced. Her tongue peeked out between her lips, and her eyes bulged, shot through with bright red petechial hemorrhage.
She hadn’t been drained. While a revenant had sucked the driver dry, someone had wrapped a thin wire around Pia’s neck and garroted her; her throat was marked with a deep line where the wire had dug in. A revenant and his DaySitter, both murderers.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” I said, realizing I’d dropped my voice to an absurdly pointless whisper, too, “but we’re probably gonna die any second.”
“Why would that alarm me?” he said with a soft
heh heh
.
“We need to consider how to spend our last moments on Earth.”
“I’m not going to make love to you, Dr. B.”
I straightened, making an insulted gurgle-
pfft
. “That’s not where I was going.”
“Yes you were,” he accused.
“My friend is dead and our lives are coming to an end, and you think I’m thinking about penis?”
Declan gave me a
come-on-this-is-you
look.
I said defensively, “There’s nothing wrong with liking dicks.”
“Is that the title of your autobiography?” Declan scooted around to the other side of the taxi, keeping an eye out for movement all around us, and opened the passenger door; he made quick but gentle work of removing Pia from the seat and laying her in the sand a little distance from the car. Then he stood to rest one hand on his tight little pot belly. “You saw Mark Batten naked, for Hecate’s Sake. I am
never
taking my clothes off for you.”
It seemed a funny moment for body image issues, but I understood where he was coming from; I always doubted myself when I wondered who Batten had seen naked before me. I knew I was no hot piece of ass, and I knew Batten could get sexier women than me. To this day, I had no idea why Kill-Notch had ever bothered with me. Though I had no intention of actually bedding Declan Edgar, I joked, “I’ll keep my eyes closed?”
“Nice try,” he said, coming back around to peer at me. “Dr. B, are you feeling okay? Your pupils are huge.”
I was wired and shaking, chilled by fear, sick about Pia, but there was definitely heat running through my veins, too, and a fresh, electric jolt of energy. I felt dynamic, vigorous. “I think the mellified man is starting to work.”
“What does it feel like?” he asked, but when I shook my head, he shifted to, “Do we run? Do we steal the car and drive away?”
“Run off to the airport and pretend we were never here? How can we leave them here like this?” I looked down at the bodies. The mellified man was Pia’s fault, and I supposed we might never find out whose dried up corpse she used to fake the mummy to make the confection, or who she was planning on selling it to. The murders were the revenant’s fault. But leaving without reporting any of it? That’d be squarely on my shoulders and it felt like the wrong thing to do. “We can’t leave without explaining what happened to the authorities.”
“Right.” Declan nodded, but he didn’t look happy. “So we stay?”
“How can we stay? If we don’t get killed by a werefox or a vampire or an Egyptian god, we’ll get detained by Cairo police or arrested; nobody got time for that shit! I need to bring a three-headed demon this oh-so-important seed pod, and this oh-so-disgusting candied man, and an oh-so-purposeless yeti toenail, so I can put your cranky mom on the throne and save the world from Trollpocalypse 2016. Priorities, Irish.”
“Okay. Do we fetch Folkenflik?”
I spluttered, “Why would we fetch
him
?”
“You have the whistle to sway his loyalty to you. He’s still alive, fighting off an Egyptian protection god. He’s kind of incredible, Dr. B. More powerful, or faster, maybe, than any lycanthrope I’ve ever met. I figure he can probably go toe-to-toe against a revenant for you?”