“No, it isn’t. Just get it the hell away from me. I don’t want know where this thing came from, I don’t want know what’s inside it…”
“It’s empty. The woman who it belongs to said that it was used to hold a talisman of some kind.”
She holds up her hands. “I said I don’t want to know,” she snaps. “You asked me my opinion, and this is it. This was made with evil intention, or at least whatever was in it was. This woman, whoever she is, isn’t who you think she is.”
“Okay, that makes her just like every woman I’ve ever met.”
“I’m serious, Ian,” she says, all traces of anger vanished. “I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. This isn’t my kind of magic, and you know that. You’d be smart to just throw that thing in the garbage and go home.”
“I didn’t know you cared, Claire. You know I can’t do that. Two people are dead already because of that thing. If I don’t find it and get it the hell out of town a lot more people are going to get hurt. You know I can’t let that happen.”
Her face tightens. “Then I’ll sing for you at your funeral,” she spits.
I put the box back in my pocket. “Claire, I’m sorry, but I need more help.”
“How many times do I have to say it? I’ve done all I can for you.”
I press my palm against my head, wishing the Advil would hurry up and kick in. My headache is about to get worse. “There’s actually still one more thing you can do.”
A look of rage mixed with fear comes over her as she finally understands what I’m asking for. She slams the ambulance door, narrowly missing my head. “You bastard,” she hisses. “You know I can’t go back there.”
“Claire, she’s one of the two most powerful practitioners in this whole region. She may be able to point me towards this thing, which would help me save lives. If there was any other way…”
“What about your friend?” she asks with panicked sarcasm. “He’s the other one. Why not go to him?”
“He’s not my friend. He’s just… not an enemy. I doubt he’d help me either way. I’ll go to him if I have to, but only as a last resort. Now I can find Moira on my own, but it might take all night. With your help I’ll be there in minutes. You don’t have to talk to her. You don’t even have to get out of the car.”
“She’ll know I’m there.” She groans. “You have no idea what you’re asking. You got me out of there. How can you ask me to go back there?”
“Claire,” I say, placing a hand on her shoulder. She jerks away from me. “I promise I won’t let you get hurt.”
Her head bows low even as her shoulders pull together. Her hands become tight fists by her thighs. She’s shaking, but I can’t tell whether it’s from fear, anger, or both. I hate myself for forcing her to make this choice, but as I watch the medical examiner’s people crouching over Peter’s ruined body with digging tools I realize that I’ve hated myself for less.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she finally says. She throws the ambulance keys to her partner, a short chubby man I only know as Mike, with more force than is really necessary. “Let’s get this over with,” she says, stomping her way to my car without checking to see if I’m following her.
The first raindrops begin to fall.
Five
“She’s at Shellbreak Park,” Claire says as she clicks her seatbelt.
“Hmph. Never figured that to be her kind of hangout.”
“It’s secluded, close to nature. It’s all she really wants. Tell me about what’s supposed to be in the box.”
The road curls out away from us, soaked in darkness as we pull out of the neighborhood and down the tree lined road that led inland, leaving the town and the streetlights behind. Shellbreak is a short drive away, a small national park that at night becomes a haven for horny teens and those looking for a safe place to binge drink cheap beer.
“It’s apparently called the Cleave,” I explain as I drive. “An old mystical straight razor. That’s literally all I know about it. A woman named Madeline claims she bought it at auction, but the couriers ran off instead and ended up here. You just saw two of the three of them being scraped up. The third is in the wind, with the Cleave.”
“And whatever it was that killed them is still after him.”
“From what she told me now that the Cleave isn’t in its box it’ll draw attention from far and wide. This town has enough problems as it is without having to deal with a flood of out-of-town monsters wreaking havoc.” I rub my eyes. I’d been fast asleep when I’d gotten the call to come down to the Hole, and getting my lights turned out the way I did isn’t helping me feel any more energetic.
The radio clicks on. Bad Moon Rising by CCR. Claire clicks it off with annoyance.
“Buzz off, Simon. Ian, you really should get a CAT scan,” she says.
“I’ll be fine. I’ve got some good medicine at home.”
“Yeah, I bet you do.” She looks in the passenger side mirror. “You’ve got company.”
Even as I check the rear view I see the attention-getters come on, the sleek light bar strobing red and blue. “Shit.”
“Were you speeding?”
“No. I’ll bet my taillights are fine, too.” Thanks to the late hour I haven’t seen another car since we left the house. We’ve left anything resembling civilization behind. No coincidence, that. I pull over and reach into the glove compartment, drawing out a special item I keep in there for emergencies like the one I suspect is upon me. I slip it into my pocket and slowly get out, immediately finding myself pelted with fat, warm rain drops. “Stay here.”
She looks sullen but actually stays in her seat. I close the door and walk toward the back of the Jeep with more patience than I actually feel.
Walking back, I’m very conscious of the woods around us, pines and oaks and the occasional cedar. The darkness has reinforced them, made them look thick and impenetrable, and the heavy, earthy smell of trees and peat is thick in my nose. I can hear the brief yip of a coyote much closer than I like, and I know that there are snakes close by whose bite would send me straight to the ER. You’d think that someone who has spent most of the last decade fighting magical creatures wouldn’t be so paranoid about normal ones, but you’d be wrong.
When I pass the rear bumper of the Jeep I can see the police car clearly for the first time and know that I’m right about who pulled me over. The door of the SBPD cruiser opens and he steps out, seemingly uncaring of the intermittent rain. He comes forward and rests his hip nonchalantly against the grill, arms folded across his chest.
“Officer Gault,” I say cordially.
“Mister DeLong,” Gault replies with practiced formality.
Officer Erich Gault is my height but thicker with muscle, with a trim waist and broad shoulders, his uniform clean but rough. It matches his personality. With shaggy brown hair that far exceeded regulations until it lay on his shoulders and a rough, angular face, he looks like he might have stepped whole and breathing from the pages of a male fashion mag.
Until he opens his mouth and his fangs show.
“I take it this isn’t a chance meeting,” I say. I clasp my hands casually behind my back, where they are within inches of my holster.
“We have some business to discuss,” he says, rising from the bumper. His voice is a little too rough for human, but he carries himself with such cocksure authority that it almost seems natural. He’s been a member of the SBPD for years, twice making Sergeant before being busted back down for various offenses. Still, he’s very well regarded and carries a hell of a lot of weight in both the human and nonhuman worlds, a rarity in and of itself.
Erich Gault is the head of the local werewolf pack. Gault’s pack numbers more than twenty, more than most packs can hold with any stability. It makes him a heavyweight in the local supernatural scene, and his very public standing and stellar reputation as a fiercely dedicated cop make him very, very difficult to handle.
“You smell like puke,” he laughs fr
om twenty feet away. “Rough night?”
“Getting rougher. All right, you want to discuss. Let’s discuss.”
“There was something in that house tonight,” he says. “Not the monster. I don’t really care about that. No, it’s what the monster was after that interests me. I could smell it, taste its power in the air. I’ve never felt anything like that. You were there looking for it, am I right? Tell me what it is.”
When in doubt, play dumb. “Sorry, Erich. I don’t know myself.”
He spits off into the trees. “You didn’t see me at the house, did you? I heard you talking to that sexy little witch you’ve got with you. You called it the Cleave. Sounds interesting. Also sounds like a whole lot of people who ain’t as nice as us are going to try to grab it. So, this is the deal now. If you get it, give it to us. We get the Cleave, they stay away, nobody gets hurt. Works for everyone.”
“You know what? I think I’ll just take care of it myself. Thanks, though. Good to know we’ve got fine, upstanding citizens like yourselves lending your hands.”
His gaze changes, losing its amiable veneer. He’s looking at me the way a wolf would, and I flat-out don’t like it. Lucky for me, though, I know a little bit about wolves. I glance to the sides, flicking my eyes through the tree line. Sure enough, there they are. Two of them. When they see me spot them they melt noiselessly out of the woods and flank him, low and powerful against the pavement. They move with preternatural silence, dense slabs of darkness with eyes that glitter when the in a sudden, silent flash of heat lightning. Gault had planned on pulling me over here and had hidden his backup in the woods to wait. Cunning, but not surprising. Gault’s a pack animal, he never travels alone.
“Don’t look so nervous Ian,” Gault says, his fangs making him slur his words slightly. “You don’t think we’d pick a fight, do you?”
“Here? Alone, in the dark, with no witnesses? That’d be so out of character for you.”
Behind me I hear the Jeep door open and close, quickly. In a second Claire is next to me, looking back the way she’d come.
“Ian,” she whispers.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’re…discussing things.”
“Behind us,” she says.
I smell them before I even turn. A cool scent, like moldy cemetery dirt, almost extrasensory in its subtlety. It’s a unique odor, only associated with a very singular brand of death.
Real vampires aren’t like the movies would have you believe. Take that notion of the romantic but tragic sex symbol, feasting on the life essence drawn from the luscious throats of sultry women and flush it. The tragedy of immortality, the glistening fangs, the piercing gaze, the dark lure of forbidden pleasures? All crap. Real vampires are far, far worse.
They drift on the night, clouds of thin mist devoid of physical shape. They need no permission to enter your house, they just flow in through open windows, ooze in through cracks in the weather stripping. Formless, bodiless, they drift over their victims and leech their blood through their skins without leaving a single mark. Holy water just passes through them, crosses would only make them laugh if they had lungs. There are ways to kill them, sunlight being the most reliable, but they’re much harder to pull off than a simple stake through the heart (which they don’t have).
I make out two of them, seeping around the car from both sides, but there might easily be more of them deeper out in the darkness beyond the limits of my vision. In anything but direct light they’re next to impossible to see. I feel Claire draw closer to me until we’re shoulder to shoulder, facing both directions at once.
I’m not sure how to react, and I know that my reaction could well be the difference between Claire and myself leaving or vanishing forever into the night. Are they working together? Vampires and werewolves aren’t always rivals, like the movies depict, but they rarely cooperate. The vamps think the weres waste too much blood when they feed, the weres think the vamps take the tastiest part and leave them the dried-out leftovers.
“Vamps, Gault?” I ask. “Is this what you’ve sunk to?”
“Strictly business. Mutually beneficial. Can’t hold something if you’re incorporeal. Sure you don’t want to rethink helping us? Looks to me like it’d be the smart thing to do.”
“Can’t do it,” I say, subtly moving my hand to my gun. “It’s got an owner, and I’m going to return it.”
“Too bad. Guess your night’s going to end badly.”
“Weres can’t hurt me. You know that.”
“We can’t infect you,” Gault gloats. “But we don’t need to, do we?”
“I know that wasn’t a threat, was it?” I ask. Gault smiles.
“Don’t worry yourself, Ian. You know I ain’t the threatening type.” He cocks his smile half an inch to the left. “Threats ruin the surprise. Now take your hand off that gun or this discussion is over.”
A white flash of lightning and an instant peal of thunder makes us all jump. Electricity singes the air, lifting the hair on my forearms. The wolves, riding the adrenaline surge into a rush of aggression, take a lunging step forward with unearthly growls, and a sudden backwards step from Claire tells me that the vampires have begun to move closer. I take my hand off my gun and slip it into my pocket, feeling the warm metallic shape in there. I keep my eyes forward, waiting for the lightning, but Claire isn’t waiting for my cue.
Still facing the vampires, she plants her feet, taking a wide, stable stance, then takes a massive breath. Her mouth opens, and a low melody begins to purl from her throat, a curling note that starts deep in her vocal cords and twists through her teeth before seeping out into the night. I wince as the realization sinks in that the already tenuous situation is now well and truly beyond salvation. As if active conflict with a pack of vampires and werewolves isn’t bad enough.
She’s about to start singing.
As the melody builds tiny flecks of light begin to dance spectrally around her lips and hover around the curve of her throat like maddened fireflies, flicking around with growing intensity. As the intensity grows so do their number until an ethereal glow radiates around her mouth like a miniature sun, casting shadows in a wide arc around us all. The vampires react to it as if it was sunlight, drifting back from the glow as far as they’re able, and the wolves blink in confusion.
Claire is only technically a witch. Specifically, she’s a siren.
The difference is small, but vital. All witches harness the magic of nature, it’s just part of their heritage, but Claire is a special breed. Her magic is inherent, not dependent on charms or potions or rituals. It’s derived from her voice, and she can do some pretty amazing things with it. I turn away from her, facing Gault and the wolves with a new sense of desperation.
“Walk away,” I say in a growl worthy of the wolves.
“No,” Gault says. His face has shed its cheerful air, and he now looks distinctly predatory.
I slide my hand around the metal shape in my pocket and grip it tight. “Do it, then.”
“Take him,” Gault shouts.
A long, jagged fork of light splits the sky, searing the eyes, as Gault springs towards us with a vicious snarl. I whip my hand out of my pocket and swing for the fences, the silver knuckle-duster a glittery streak ending with a brutal crack against the werewolf’s jaw.
The wolves leap in as Gault stumbles and falls into his car, snarling, savage dervishes of fang and fur and claw. I’ve already gauged which way they were going to charge and meet one with a stiff kick to its sensitive nose, eliciting a startled, whining yip. The second throws itself at me like a linebacker, front paws slashing like swords. I throw my left hand out and clamped it on the wolf’s throat, angling my torso away from the razor claws.
In the heartbeat that the wolves take to launch themselves I hear Claire’s song burst forth behind me. It’s a strong, clear tune, high and powerful and warm. Along with the melody comes a brilliant wash of pure light, flooding the area with solar brilliance. The vampires recoil, unable to keep thems
elves from fleeing like scalded animals.
The light also sears the wolves’ eyes, temporarily blinding them, but though it lights up the surroundings like a flare the light doesn’t bother me at all. I shove the wolf in my hand half an inch farther away and swing my right hand in a hard curve, cracking the top of its sensitive muzzle with the silver knuckles. I hit it a second time then stiff-arm the beast. It sprawls and stumbles over its own legs, instinctively retreating to join its pack mate behind their alpha.
Working from muscle memory I quickly draw my gun. It’s awkward holding it with the silver knuckles still wrapped around my hand, but I’m not about to let go of any weapon. With a flick of a button I drop the magazine of ordinary bullets in the mud and slam home the silver mag. In the precious seconds that takes Gault has recovered enough of his vision to see where his enemies are. Still leaning against the car, he draws his service Glock, and I see the red dot of his laser sight warble on Claire’s chest.
“No!” I shout, springing forward. I shove the barrel of the Springfield against his forehead.
We freeze that way. Gault’s gun remains trained on Claire’s left breast. Mine is pressing into his temple. Gault’s wolves snarl behind his crumpled body but don’t dare advance, and the power of Claire’s song keeps the spectral vampires back beyond the edge of the light.
It’s Gault who breaks first, “Beat it,” he growls over his shoulder, and as I watch the cowed wolves fade from sight.
“You too,” he barks through his cramped throat, not a request but a command, and the vampires dissipate. I relieve him of his Glock and step back, letting him rise. He breathes hard through his nose as he does, his eyes tearing my heart out.
“Tell them, Gault,” I pant. My chest is heaving from the sudden exertion, and the jump in blood pressure isn’t helping my headache any. “Tell them the Cleave is off limits. Anyone who does anything to hurt anyone in its name will answer to me. Tell them. Tell them all.” I turn and whip the Glock as hard as I can into the trees.
Swim Like Hell: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 6
