"I'll slow down."
"Non. It is you," he said over his shoulder as he hurried ahead to open the door.
The interior was a neat, clean, organized contrast to the train-wreck appearance of the exterior. I followed the little man, who hurried ahead to the kitchen. By the time I arrived he had hurriedly wiped down a Formica-topped table and put down towels as a makeshift surgery. Mama Samm appeared as I laid Lupé down on the towels. "I have your bag," she told the Cajun, hefting an old leather satchel onto the counter by the sink.
"More towels in the drawers," he told her. "If you will sterilize the instruments . . ."
I interrupted. "What can I do?"
"You can sit down."
"Uh, well, actually . . . I can't."
His moustache twitched. "Hmmm. Well, try to find a comfortable position and give me some room here, you."
I ended up hunched over the stove while I watched him probe Lupé's wound. Twice he exited the kitchen, returning with small bundles of dried herbs and ancient glass bottles containing amber liquids in a variety of shades and viscosity. He irrigated the entry and exit points with multiple potions and she seemed to breathe easier. Still, his brow furrowed and he finally selected a long, thin knife from the tray of freshly sterilized implements.
"I am afraid I must retrench the bullet's path," he told us. "I can give her something for the pain but I may need you both to hold her still."
Whatever he gave her worked but she still stirred and moaned in her sleep as he probed her side with the long blade. More than once I asked him if he knew what he was doing. He answered only once, saying: "I done this before, me." My other questions were met with grunts of vague acknowledgment.
Reopening the wound should have intensified the bleeding but, curiously, the blade—which he frequently rinsed with a milky liquid—seemed to be cauterizing the flesh without heat. When he was done, he packed the openings with an herbal poultice and bandaged her tightly about the middle. "Carry her to the bedroom, you," he said, "then come back and get up on the table."
"I can wait."
"No you can't," he insisted. "It may be too late, already."
I lugged Lupé into the back room of the shack and laid her out on the neatly made bed. She struggled in her sleep and cried out before I could make her comfortable. Reluctantly, I left her there and returned for my appointment with the knife.
I reclined on my side while he probed the wound in my thigh. It should have hurt a lot. He used a sterilized buck knife to reopen the wound and then moved it around, deeper and deeper, probing for the bullet. Thankfully I remained numb from groin to knee but I found myself starting to sweat as he got closer to the femur.
He stopped before touching the bone. "It's gone," he said. "Roll over on your stomach."
"What do you mean 'it's gone'? There's no exit wound! Where could it have gone?"
"Roll over, you," he insisted. "Hurry!"
I rolled but I wasn't done with the subject. I opened my mouth to speak but found myself speechless as he jabbed the knife into my gluteus maximus. He exhibited none of the care or gentleness that he had shown before. The blade dug deep and he worked with a feverish speed that abrogated any thoughts of tender concern.
"Sammathea!" he cried. "Champagne!"
"Great," I muttered, "what are we toasting?"
"Second cabinet, third shelf," he added as Mama Samm tried to maneuver around us. "I need a lavage." In short order a bottle of unchilled champagne was poured over my butt while a surgical probe and a pair of tweezers dug deeper toward the seat of my problem.
Mama Samm's cell phone rang.
"Talk to me, girl," she said, picking up. "Mmhm. Good. Good. What did they say? That's good. Does Miss Deirdre know what to say? Okay. Sure. You tell her that Mr. Chris is gonna be okay and Miss Lupé is startin' to look better. Not until after the sun goes down . . ."
"Ah! I have him!" he announced at length. The tweezers were held before my face, holding a small bloody pellet of metal.
"We suspected as much when she wouldn't stop bleeding," Mama Samm said.
"That's not a bullet," I said. "That's a frickin' beebee." I may not have actually used the word "frickin'" as I was weary and angry and frightened for Lupé and coasting along the borders of shock. "An Uzi fires a nine-millimeter slug."
"This is all that is left," the old Cajun answered.
"I'll tell him," Mama Samm continued. "This takes the play to a whole new level. You need any help at your end? If you do, you talk to that Detective Murray and tell him Mama Samm said for him to run interference. Okay. What? Well, tell her that Mister Chris will be calling her soon. I gots to go. Later."
"It's only a fragment," I insisted. "There's got to be more than that."
"Nothing big enough to pull out with tweezers," he said.
"It's not lead," Mama Samm chimed in as she folded her phone closed. "Olive say the police pried a slug out of the wall at the store. These bad boys, they be shootin' with silver bullets."
* * *
Lupé was very lucky. A head or heart shot—in fact any "killing shot" for a normal human being—would have been just as deadly to a lycanthrope where silver was involved. She had been doubly blessed in that the bullet had passed through her. Still, the wound had resisted healing until it was properly cleaned and the tainted tissue excised. A werewolf could sicken and die from a mere flesh wound if the bullet remained in the body long enough. Her poisoning was mild and her color already better by late afternoon. I pulled a chair up to her bedside and sat with her until her eyes fluttered open.
"How you feeling, babe?"
"Like Socrates after the hemlock." Her smile was wan but her warm, dark eyes were clearing. "How about you?"
"I'm embarrassed to say that I feel pretty damn good. Apparently vampires aren't allergic to silver."
Her brow furrowed. "Actually, they are." Her slight frown grew into a wide smile. "Which means that, whatever you are becoming, you are becoming something else."
I sat there, stunned. "Really? That's great . . . I think . . ."
She gazed up at me, her brow starting to wrinkle again. "You 'think'?"
"Well, it's good news—sure. But remember how everyone was hot to put me under the microscope when I first started changing? After we came up with an answer of sorts, things started to cool down . . ."
"You have," she said dryly, "a curious perspective on what 'cooling down' actually means."
"Look, I know this sounds a little like the glass is half empty in the face of good news—and maybe I am being a little jaundiced when this would appear to give me a little more of an edge—"
"Jaundiced. Now there's a nice turn of phrase."
"—as I head up to New York to face down the opposition. But if everyone starts thinking of me as a lab specimen instead of the new Doman of New York, there won't be a hole deep enough for me to hide in."
"Poor baby," she cooed. "You know, a private home ceremony with a justice of the peace would make things less complicated."
"What?"
"I'm just saying that, given this latest complication, it makes even more sense to go for a simple ceremony over some kind of social statement that's like to get both of us killed."
"Ah, the wedding," I grunted. "Look, you!" I grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly as she tried to pull away. "I love you and I'm not ashamed to stand up and declare it before the rest of the world! Or underworld, for that matter!"
"Ow. Let go!"
"What about you? Are you ashamed of me?"
"Let go of me! You're hurting me!"
"I'm not letting go until you tell me what's really bugging you." The more she tried to escape my grasp the tighter I held her hands. "Is it a public ceremony that you object to? Or maybe you just don't want to marry me at all?"
"Ow! Ow! Chris, please!"
"Tell me."
"My family!"
"Your family?" Her brother Luis, the only family member I had ever met, was dead. "What about you
r family?"
"They are opposed!" she gasped. "They are very angry about us!"
I released her hands and she shook and then cradled them as if I had done her some injury. "I see. So . . . what are they going to do? Make a scene? Disown you?"
She shook her head and there were tears in her eyes.
"Hey . . . maybe it's time to take me home to meet your parents. I could—"
"They will kill you!"
That shut me up.
"And me," she added softly. "I have told them that I serve you as adjutant. They suspect but cannot prove that we are intimate. As long as there is no evidence . . ." Her voice trailed off and she looked away.
"They'll let sleeping dogs lie?"
Her head snapped back and she glared up at me. "We serve the wampyr—but we do not do so willingly! We submit to their rule and authority in a carefully defined relationship and there are carefully drawn boundaries for all of us! Remember how Dracula threatened you when he thought you might taste lupin blood? Well, The Pack would tear us both apart—and I am not indulging in hyperbole here—if they discover that we have become lovers!"
I didn't know what to say. "That's ridiculous," I finally sputtered.
She gave me the same look Jenny used to use on me. Maybe a ceremony was overrated: it was like we were already married.
"Okay, okay," I said, "there's been a lot of ridiculous stuff this past year, why should werewolf mating rituals be any more logical. But lots of people already know we're—we're—"
"Lovers?" She shook her head. "We don't have that many close acquaintances. Who really knows about us outside of our own household? Stefan, Kurt, Dr. Mooncloud. Vampires and humans, no lycanthropes. The wampyr have a different attitude toward sexual subjugation than The Pack. And they make allowances for your unique status. You are one of them and you have authority as Doman, now. They will keep secrets for you."
"But if I drag you into a public place for a public ceremony," I mused, "all bets are off and your family will go all wolf pack on us."
"Yes, Chris," she reached out and touched my hand. Withdrew hers again. "When I say family, I mean clan and pack. The lupin will rise up as a whole to destroy us."
"Well." I stood up. "At least I can see one advantage if I was crazy enough to keep insisting on a public ceremony."
"What's that?"
"We won't have all those thank you notes to write." I bent down and pressed my lips to her brow.
She screamed like a frightened child.
I jumped back and stared down in horror as blisters began to bubble across her forehead where I had kissed her.
* * *
"It's not just that your body has dissolved the silver in the bullets and deposited the molecules in your epidermal surfaces," Dr. Mooncloud was saying as she made a preliminary diagnosis from a thousand miles away. "There must be something in your unique metabolism, your body chemistry that is intensifying the effect. Perhaps converting it into some kind of modified silver nitrate."
"What are you saying?" I hate cell phones: technology's never-ending quest to miniaturize everything had reduced this year's models into flimsy little trinkets that seemed too far from the mouth if held to the ear. "That I'm transmuting those forty-seven A-g electrons into some kind of preternatural kryptonite?"
"I'll need to do a complete lab workup on you both," she said, sounding far more intrigued than sympathetic. "It's possible that her own wounds have made her hypersensitive to silver in general. More so than before she was shot."
"Doc, I gotta know how long this is going to last!"
"I'll have a better idea once I can examine you both in person. Gerald is packing equipment even as we speak."
"At least tell me that it's not permanent!"
"Chris, I just don't know. Is Suki there, yet?"
"What? No. Why would she be h—?"
"Pagelovitch said you were having security problems. Sounds like an understatement to me."
I felt the floor move beneath my feet. No one else seemed to be looking for the exits so I had to assume it was me.
"Chris, honey; you be all right, you?" Mama Samm seemed to be reaching toward me in slow motion.
"I—I don't feel so good," I said. Blood loss? Stress? Delayed shock? I was light-headed of a sudden.
"Excuse," said the Gator-man as he took Mama Samm's cell phone from my clumsy hand.
"You come here and sit down," the fortune-teller said as she patted the divan cushion beside her. "You about the color of dirty silver."
Perhaps it was a delayed reaction to the silver buildup in my own tissues. Perhaps I was the one who was poisoned, now. Dimly I heard the old Cajun speaking into the phone.
"The bullet miss all the organs, Doctor," he was saying, "but the poison in her system give her some kind of shock. I don't know if she going to lose the baby or no . . ."
A moment before, the divan seemed a mile away across the room. Now the cushions were rushing up at my face like an express train running on full throttle.
We collided as I entered a long, dark tunnel.
* * *
The road from Cancun to Chichen Itza was a turnpike. The toll booths were manned by armed soldiers giving the impression that they had emerged from the dense jungle on either side and were posing as civil servants until the tourists moved down the road to the next checkpoint. It was more comforting than menacing: the presence of military vehicles and modern firearms made us feel that civilization had finally gotten a toehold and we might actually reach our destination before the jungle closed in again.
It was our honeymoon—mine and Jenny's. Kirsten wasn't born yet; her fate and Jenny's were yet to be writ at the intersection of 103 and US 69 outside of Weir, Kansas, some nine years in the future.
We spent the late morning touring Chichen Viejo, the original city, with the House of the Deer, the Caracol, the Temple of the Reliefs, the Church, Akabdzib, the Nunnery, and the Plaza of the Nuns. Through the growing heat of the day we worked our way into the northern site, Chichen Nuevo, its opulent grandeur reflecting the later Toltec influence.
As we climbed the steps of the great pyramid, called the Castillo by some, the Temple of Kukulcan by others, Jenny turned to me and began a discourse on the mathematical genius of the Mayans. There were ninety-one steps to each side, she pointed out, making a total of three hundred and sixty-five—if you counted the top platform—equaling the number of days in the year. Halfway up, I felt as though I had already climbed all of them. There was more moisture on my epidermis than could be accounted for by my half-empty water bottle.
Jenny appeared cool and dry as she described the mathematics that went into its architecture so that, twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadows would form a large serpent which would wind its way down the northern staircase.
I interrupted her as she enthused over the fact that this event had been going on for over twelve hundred years. "This is a dream," I asked, "isn't it?"
She stopped and looked at me as if seeing me for the very first time.
"You don't want to relive one of the happiest times in our lives?" Her smile was dazzling but her eyes were haunted.
"There were a lot of happy times, my love. Especially after Kirsten was born." I looked out over the grand vista that included the Ball Court Complex, the Platform of Venus, and the Plaza of the Columns. "But I assume that I've been brought back here for a reason. What am I supposed to see?"
"Can't a dream just be a dream?"
I shook my head. "Not mine. Not anymore."
She took my hand. "Come with me."
We drifted back down the stairs like ghosts in a dream. "Where are we going?" I asked as we almost—but didn't quite—touch down on the sacbé leading northwards.
"To the Well of Souls," she said. A cloud passed before the sun and I noticed that we were alone, now. The site was deserted; the tourists vanished like ghosts, themselves.
There were two cenotes, great water-filled sinkholes, on the Chic
hen Itza site. The Well of Sacrifice lay ahead of us, more than a hundred and ninety feet in diameter with a seventy-some-odd foot drop to the murky waters below. Behind us, the Cenote Xtoloc was smaller in size and lacked the lurid reputation of the larger well: it was the city's water supply, not the sacrificial pit where young girls were once sacrificed to Chac, Mayan Rain God and Cosmic Monster.
But Jenny's hand pulled me to the east and we drifted out of the ruins and into the jungle.
We floated through a sea of green. Time passed. Dreamtime minutes can be hours. Or hours, minutes. We stopped a short dreamtime later at a rough clearing where lush vegetation and ancient trees limned an opening barely fifty feet across. Any ruins accompanying it were well concealed by the jungle that crowded around the cenote's perimeter.
"Why are we here?" I asked slowly, the saliva in my mouth turning to molasses.
She took my hand and led me to the edge of the great hole and we stepped off into darkness.
The Ancient Americans believed that the Land of the Dead was accessed through these vertical portages into the earth. While some began their journey through the nine levels of the Mayan Underworld by leaping into the vast watery depths below, steps had been chiseled into the living limestone so that the priests might descend and then return to the sun-drenched lands above.
We picked our way down a curving staircase of narrow rock plaques, placing our feet carefully as the light dimmed and the stone surfaces became slick with moisture. The cenote opened out beneath the collapsed portion of the ceiling, a great subterranean vault spreading hundreds of feet to the south and the east. A series of fissures and tunnels in the northern and western walls channeled off into deeper, danker darknesses.
Where the cavern roof remained, scores of red limestone stalactites stabbed downward like rusty sacrificial knives. Here and there, great twisted ropes of wood dropped like an inverted forest from the great trees above: thirsty roots in search of secret waters. A dark lake spread below us. It glowed blue-green at its heart where beams of sunlight penetrated its mysterious surface from the opening above.
Down and down we went, passing petroglyphs of gods and skulls and monsters, pictographs of ancient sacrifices, and shards of broken pottery that predated Columbus. A path at the bottom led to an outcrop of rock that jutted up and over the water like the first half of a bridge that was never completed. Jenny led me up the slippery stone path until we stood near the lake's glowing heart.
Habeas Corpses Page 9
