Out front, there was just the usual heaps of apples, gourds, some mealy-looking corn, lopsided pumpkins, dried bundles of Indian corn, quart bottles of cider, and plastic jugs of maple syrup, presided over by a couple of swamp Yankees who gave off a serious Harvest Home/Wicker Man vibe. You just knew these two sacrificed sheep and virginal maidens to Shub-Niggurath or some corn king or who the fuck ever. I asked about the sign, and one of the swamp Yankees—a woman with a hairy mole the size of a hairy Junior Mint above her left eye—jabbed a thumb at a listing wooden shed behind the fruit stand, half hidden behind a couple of huge red oaks.
“Ten dollars,” she said.
“Yup. Ten dollars,” said the other swamp Yankee, a fellow in overalls and a John Deere cap.
I didn’t haggle with Mr. and Ms. Creepsome Backwoods. Ten bucks for Fiends of Hell. Sounded like a bargain to me. Speaking as a fiend myself. I paid her, and I headed for the shed. Neither of them followed me. That was sorta a relief. Little unnerving when plain old human types can unnerve me. Oh, and I bought an apple, just to keep up appearances.
There was a narrow dirt path between the trees and the weeds. The shack wasn’t locked, though there was an elaborate assortment of chains, hasps, Yale padlocks, and a thick wooden plank that could be lowered to bar the door. A big pentagram and one of the hex signs you see on barns in Pennsylvania Dutch country had been neatly painted on the door with the same shade of red paint used for that sign out front. Clearly whatever was inside, the swamp Yankees wanted to stay inside. Which raises the question of why they’d left the door unlocked. But that’s not a mystery germane to my weird little anecdote.
Inside, it was dark, and the air was close and almost chilly, dank; it smelled like straw and animal shit and dust. At first, I had no idea how anyone who wasn’t a nasty with dark-adapted eyes could have seen their way around in there. Then I noticed a milking stool with three flashlights. Of course, I didn’t need one, but there you go. As for what was inside the shed, mostly it was just rows of big jars filled with formalin or alcohol. They made up what is referred to in carnie slang as a “pickled punk show.” They were all bleached a cheesy white, and it was pretty much impossible to make out what those dozen or so misshapen stillbirths and genetic mishaps might have been. Except the three-headed corn snake. There were a couple of shelves crammed with a random assortment of bones—including a couple of human skulls—and some examples of creative taxidermy: a pair of jackalopes, a gopher with duck feet, the shriveled marriage of monkey and fish sometimes known as a Jenny Haniver, Siamese chickens, etc., etc., etc. All of them were moth-eaten, and some had split seams leaking sawdust. And I’m thinking, Yeah. Sure. Ten dollars for this nonsense. I ought’a go back and eat the both of them. Or I was thinking something of the sort.
Then, past a yellowed, swaybacked moose skeleton, there was this big cage. Iron bars spaced so close together I couldn’t have gotten an arm in between them. And inside the cage, crouched in a filthy scatter of straw, was a monster. Now, usually, when I use that word, I do so without much in the way of sympathy. As the years go by, my capacity for sympathy and empathy has dwindled. That’s just the way it goes on this side of the fence. You can’t fucking cry over every unfortunate soul you eat. But what I saw locked inside that cage, it hurt to look at. It made my stomach lurch, and it hurt to see. For a moment, I actually turned away. Unlike everything else in the shack, the occupant of that iron cage was alive and breathing, and whatever pain I felt at the sight of it, the agony that racked its body—and that had for fuck only knows how long—made my discomfort seem . . . well, I might just as well have complained about a mosquito bite.
It ain’t easy to freeze a loup midway between one shape and another. Takes some big-time finesse with the black arts, and a willingness to sink to the very asshole of sadism and depravity.
But that’s what was inside that cage. She had been frozen either partway to her wolfish form or partway back to a naked twenty-something girl. Hardly mattered which. She crouched there, blazing amber eyes peering hatefully out at me, eyes burning with spite and pain. The black mane along her spine bristled, and she curled mottled lips back to expose canines long and sharp as paring knives. She titled her head to one side and dug her long, clawed fingers into the straw. She uttered a low warning growl, and I took a step backwards. She rose up on her knees then, and I could see the six teats and bulging rib cage.
“You,” she said, and she made a sound that was maybe supposed to be a laugh. “I know what you are, sister.”
“How did they—?” I began, and then stopped myself, because I’d been about to ask the most idiotic question imaginable then and there. I gagged, if you can believe it.
“Ever seen a low red moon?” she asked. “Ever seen the moon fall down and bleed? Ever run wild and free beneath the wide carnivorous sky?”
The thing in the cage was insane, and she’d probably been that way since the second or third day the inbred fucks out there at the fruit stand had turned their wizard’s trick against her.
“Ever talked to the night’s cunt and heard it talk right back?” she asked.
Which is when I snapped the padlock. It was sort of like grabbing hold of a live electrical cable, the bright sizzle that surged up my arm as I shattered the spell preventing the loup woman from breaking free. For a moment or two, the bitch didn’t move. She looked confused and frightened, as if she had no idea what she was supposed to do next, as if she’d been in there so long the thought of stepping out of her prison was inconceivable.
“You tear them apart,” I said, “or I’ll do it myself.”
She went down on all fours and crawled past me and out of the shed. There was no gratitude in her eyes, and I hadn’t expected any. Less than a minute later I heard Wilbur and Lavinia Whateley begin to scream. There was a gunshot, and then more screams. I smiled at the sound, then took out my Zippo and set fire to the shack. While the loup took her pound of flesh, I sat beneath one of the oaks, smoked a couple of cigarettes, waiting for the sirens, and watched that hellhole burn to the ground.
• • •
So, there you go. After the face-off with Drusneth’s pair of se’irim thugs, I oh so very slowly rose up and up and up from the merciful blackout that comes when the Beast comes. Midnight became false dawn. False dawn became the violet-gray smudge of dawn. And I felt as if there was ground glass in every joint of my body, hydrochloric acid searing muscles and flesh, salt in my eyes. Bit by bit, I came back to myself. The waking from loup oblivion had never been slow before; it had never been any different from jolting suddenly wide awake after the deepest sleep. As consciousness returned to me by these slow degrees, I only wanted to crawl back down to that place where there was nothing at all. Because, Jesus, anything would have been better. I was a diver come to the surface much too fast, and the bends were wrapping round me like an iron fist. I would have screamed but couldn’t remember how. Dawn became the goddamn scalding fire of daylight, and it should have blinded me, but it didn’t. It only seared into my skull.
There were voices.
“. . . that it came to this, truly am . . .”
Okay, that was Mean Mr. B. I realized I was lying on my side, my left side. I tried to sit up, tried hard, but the ground glass in my arms and legs and between every vertebra cackled and held me down.
“It wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.”
And that was Drusneth. Fucking Drusneth, and without being entirely sure why, I wanted to rip the whore peddler’s throat out, then and there.
“. . . that we’d have brought it to you, and straightaway. Surely, you never suspected any . . .”
Now, here was an unfamiliar voice, but I guessed through the pain that it was almost certainly the mutterer from B’s last phone call, who had to be Boston’s Harry’s bogle brother.
My mouth tasted like I’d eaten roadkill. Wouldn’t have surprised me. The loup is hardly picky. I tried to spit, but my mouth was dry as desert sand.
“. . . coming
to.”
A fourth voice, which I had no trouble recognizing as one of the se’irim douche waffles. I’d left at least one of them alive.
I forced my eyes open, did my best to force them to focus. Mostly just shapes and colors. Shapes that were distorted and colors that weren’t right. Wherever I was, despite the searing light scalding my brain, I could see the place was dark. I smelled mildew, mushrooms, standing water, rotting masonry. A cellar, almost certainly a cellar. Or a subcellar. Someone was squatting a couple of yards in front of me, safe on the other side of cold iron bars.
“Wake up, kitten,” said Mean Mr. B.
“Have you done?” I grunted, and it was a wonder I was able to string even those three words together.
“It’s only a precaution,” he replied. “One that we shall dispense with as soon as possible.”
And then I understood. I was in a cage somewhere, beneath a house or a street, maybe below Drusneth’s sporting house in the Armory. I was in a cage. And I wasn’t entirely loup, and I wasn’t entirely the bloodsucker that could pass for human when she tried. They’d found a way to trap me in the space between.
“Kill you all,” I snarled; then the pain crashed into me like a ton of bricks and all I could do was lie curled fetal. I pissed myself, and the air stank of urine.
“Now, now, precious. You will do no such thing.”
Drusneth said, “Don’t coddle the little gooch. The clock’s ticking. If I lose the unicorn—”
“Madam,” the bogle simpered, “haven’t we assured you no such circumstance will transpire?”
She ignored him. “If Harpootlian’s getting close, she’s the one who knows, Belmont. Stop wasting my time and get her talking.”
Silence. It could have been a hundred years of silence, a hundred years of torture.
Then B, apparently Belmont for the day, said, “I think she’s hardly in any shape to tell us much of anything. If you removed the execration, we’d have somewhat better luck.”
“Dying,” I heard myself moan, though I don’t think I’d meant to say anything at all.
“No, kitten,” Belmont cooed, all mock sympathy and comfort. “You’re not dying. But I’m bloody certain you wish that were the case.”
A spasm rolled through my body, and my legs kicked, striking the bars of the cage. Only, those weren’t my legs. Not my feet. Everything below my waist was still loup.
“Tear you all to ribbons,” I all but howled. Five whole words in a row. I was making progress.
“Now, that’s exactly the sort of talk will prolong your suffering,” said Mean Mr. B. “Bad puppy.”
Then, to Drusneth, he said, much more sternly, “You know, it actually is a truism that if you hurt someone enough, he or she or it will eventually tell you anything you want to hear.”
Jesus. The motherfucker was actually taking up for me. Or, more likely, protecting his investment. Now that Shaker Lashly was gone, I was his one and only pit bull.
“Please,” he said.
“You’re in no position to ask for a boon,” Drusneth replied.
He raised his voice. There was anger creeping in around the edges, sort of like sunshine peeking out around the edges of a solar eclipse. In my delirium, it was almost beautiful to hear.
“I know, my dear, that old habits do die hard, but fuck all, this is not your river Phlegethon. We don’t even know what this is doing to her.”
“I believe it’s causing her unbearable pain,” said Drusneth. “Do you not agree, Samuel?”
Who the fuck was Samuel?
Then I heard the bogle make a hemming and hawing noise, and I knew he was Samuel. “Most of a certain, madam,” the little rat-bastard creep told the succubus.
“The curse has served its purpose,” B said. “End it, or soon she’ll be too far gone to ever tell you shite.”
Drusneth sighed like a hurricane. She sighed like a dying man’s goddamn last breath. You get the picture.
The agony dissolved quick as butter in a hot skillet, and I was left gasping, shivering, disoriented, lying naked on the metal floor of the cage. The world swam sharply into focus. Yeah, I was in a basement. Brick walls probably stacked and mortared before the Revolutionary War. A packed dirt floor. The only light a flickering orange glow from an oil lantern the bogle clutched in one ratty paw.
“There, there, now,” B said to me.
Drusneth said, “You’ll cooperate, girl, or I can put you right back where you were with the flick of a wrist.”
Right then, I wanted to murder the whole world, resurrect it, and murder it all over again. You know the feeling.
• • •
Twenty or thirty minutes later, I was dressed, pretty much my old fucked-up vamp self again, and sitting on a hideously upholstered divan in Drusneth’s office. The damn thing had enough throw cushions on it to smother half of China. I was sitting there, nursing a hangover that probably only comes with having been pounded flatter than hammered dog shit by a couple of demons, then trapped half in and half out of your wolfdom. The parts of me that didn’t hurt were too few to mention. Okay, it wasn’t half as bad as the pain I’d felt in the cage, but it made me miss the dear old days of smack.
“No hard feelings?” B asked. I’d heard Drusneth refer to him as Belmont, which sounded like a hotel chain.
“Fuck you,” I told him.
“Play nice,” he said. “Drusneth meant what she said about rescinding her spot of mercy. You know that.”
I looked from B to Dru. She was sitting behind that huge desk of hers, watching me with someone else’s intense, dark eyes. That day, she was wearing the skin of a young Indian woman, some unfortunate chick from maybe Bangalore or Delhi who’d strayed too near the spider’s web. She was wearing a white silk suit with an oddly iridescent tie the green-brown shades of a Japanese beetle.
“In a New York minute,” she assured me.
“You know me,” I said. “I’m all sunshine and daisies. I shit sunshine and daisies.”
“Oh, I know you,” Belmont sighed, reclining in his own hideously upholstered chair.
Standing to his left was a totally horrid beast, like something that had tumbled out of the ugly tree and hit every limb on the way down. Twice. The bogle, of course. The dear, departed Boston Harry’s bro. They could have been twins, except this one’s hair was Play-Doh blue. Otherwise, he might have doubled for Boston Harry. Same sewer-rat-trying-to-pass-for-human good looks. Same twitchy snout and pointy teeth. Same snide demeanor. Knee high to a Doberman. It was hate at first sight. Harry, he’d been a sort of transplanar fence, a Target or Walmart for nasties in the market for occult contraband. He’d been, as I said last time out, the go-to guy. Well, until I’d eaten him. Let me tell you, that was not the best meal of my unlife. Anyway, as far as Harry’s brother was concerned, I had no idea what his deal was.
“What’s his deal?” I asked, and pointed at the blue rat man.
“Think of him as a silent partner, precious,” Belmont replied. “A consultant brought aboard this enterprise for his not inconsiderable business acumen.”
“That so?” And then I spoke directly to the bogle. “Your brother took one of my fingers and one of my toes.” I held up my four-fingered left hand as a visual aid.
“As I understand it,” the bogle said, “it was a fair exchange for sensitive intel.” Jesus, what an annoying voice. Kind of like Papa Smurf on helium. Or maybe I only thought so ’cause he was blue and all.
I didn’t offer him an opinion on whether or not the deal had been fair. I blinked, squinting about the dimly lit office. I’d been given my clothing, but not my Glock. I spotted it on Drusneth’s desk.
“At least your gorillas were kind enough not to lose that,” I said, and nodded to the weapon. By “lose” I meant “steal,” but B had said play nice, and I figured I’d give that a try for three or four minutes.
“They know better,” Drusneth said.
“Mind if I have it back? Sort of tends to keep me outta tight spots.
Though wasn’t much help against the demon Bobbsey Twins, I’ll grant you that. You get props for your choice in hired muscle, I gotta give you that.”
She thanked me, considered the gun a moment—still in its holster—then picked it up and tossed it to me.
“Now, as I was saying, Belmont. What exactly is the Blue Meanie’s part in this folly?”
B didn’t answer. The bogle did.
“I have taken over my brother’s organization. He spent so long building it up, seemed a shame to let such a profitable undertaking wither.”
“That would have been a shame,” I said. I was surprised to find the clip had been left in the pistol. I popped it out and was even more surprised to find no one had removed the bullets. “So, now you’re the one with my missing digits?” I popped the clip back into the gun.
“Actually . . . ” The bogle paused to scratch his left ear. “Actually, those were traded—for a handsome sum—to a Santa Muerte cult in Tucson. A bevy of transsexuals, to be precise.”
“No chance of getting them back?”
“Alas, no,” he said, pretending to sound apologetic. “Would that I could.” He stopped scratching at his ear.
“Wrong answer,” I said, pulled back the slide on the Glock, and shot the son of a bitch in the face, twice. Trapped in Drusneth’s office, the gunfire was loud as a Brontosaurus falling into a truckload of cymbals. He just sort of toppled over, his corpse doing a weird sort of gory tarantella on one of Drusneth’s Turkish rugs. His brains and bits of skull and fur were spattered across a nearby wall. Neither B nor Drusneth said anything for almost a full minute. And me, I was briefly rendered all but deaf, thanks to my bloodsucker supereardrums.
“Damn,” I said. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”
“She goes back into the cage,” Drusneth snarled at last. The succubus lifted a hand, preparing to return me to my half loup purgatory.
“No, no,” said B, also holding up a hand. “Stop and think. Though her intentions were no doubt malicious, she’s just done us a favor. Now . . . we get the unicorn, and you don’t have to give that piker a bloody cent. More for you, perhaps a few dollars more for me.”
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