by J. F. Lewis
“Explain.”
“The last time I had to find El Alma Perdida, Eric had been framed for murdering some werewolves. He found one of the bullets, and a mage named Magbidion told us the bullets and the gun were linked to each other. Talbot and I used the bullet to find the gun.”
“Talbot is one of your sire’s thralls?”
“No!” The thought of Talbot as anyone’s thrall repulsed me. “He’s just a friend of . . . the family.” The memory, not of his touch but the scent of his blood, rushed over me. “He’s a Mouser.”
“Mousers.” Aarika spat on the ground. “They have no respect for societal rules.”
“Well, no offense, but your rules suck.”
“Our rules are the only reasons your kind still exists.” Her shoulders snapped back, a rigid line, and though she’d let her hair down a little over the last few nights where Eric and I were concerned, I was reminded of the brusque businesslike militant who’d wanted us deported at first sight. “And our rules and la Bête’s insistence upon our providing you our assistance are the only reason I tell you this: La Bête had some other werewolves return bullets from Eric’s gun to him while you were daystruck. If he still has them and if they are linked, as you say, then—”
Her words cut off. “Then I can find them. Now where’d he leave the stupid gun?”
Did he leave it on the plane or take it with him in the bags? I hadn’t been paying attention. Beatrice would know.
“Aarika, can you take me back to Beatrice? I need to ask her where Eric left El Alma Perdida.”
No response. The air was warm, but not warm enough. Creatures moved in the night. Some were bloodless little insects, but many contained precious samples of exactly what I craved.
I tapped my foot. “Aarika? Hellooo?”
She blinked.
“Ji has formally objected to being confronted before a supplicant,” Aarika said.
“A supplicant? What? Me?” I asked. Isn’t that what they called me when I agreed to the tests?
Aarika nodded. “Luc, James, and I are to appear before the Council immediately.” Another pause. “As a sign of our trust, you are released on your own recognizance to search for your sire. If you manage not to feed until midnight, your petition will be granted.” And then she vanished.
“But what about Beatrice?” I shouted after her. She didn’t answer, but I’m pretty sure someone heard me, because someone shouted something in French and I ran for the donjon. It was different than in the remembered world of the Vale of Scrythax, but the moat was still there, and for a vampire, it was very leapable. “Eric,” I said to myself as I landed on the other side, “you’d better have left your gun on the plane.”
41
TABITHA:
GHOST ON A PLANE
I couldn’t find the gun anywhere on the plane. I sat there with Lord Phillip’s employees hovering over me like frazzled parents who can’t make things better. What do you do for a vampire who can’t feed? A faint buzz clicked under my seat as the warmers kicked on, but I cried anyway, not that there was any blood to come out. Red crept into the edges of my vision as my hunger grew. I could still discern the facial features of the flight crew, but hints of the veins beneath the surface of the skin became increasingly prominent, tattoos increasing in definition as some phantom inker worked her magic.
“If there wuz anything I could do to help, I’d shore as shootin’ do it.” A voice, southern in the way that grits and crawfish and clubs of little old ladies honoring the dear departed Confederacy are southern. One twang shy of a caricature. “Dern it. She cain’t hear me. If only she’d shot the dang gun once.”
“Hello?”
“Yes, Lady Bathory?” one of the stewards asked.
“I wasn’t talking to you!” I stood, looking for the speaker.
“Now she’s so hungry she’s hallucinatin’.” I saw him. In the back of the plane. A spectral cowboy in a red and white checkered shirt, bloodstained and bullet-riddled, with trails of smoke wisping up from the holes as he puffed on the stub of a cigar. “She’s already been tearing about some”—I assumed his next word was “foreign,” but he said it “fur in”—“country in her whorehouse clothes. With her woman parts all hanging out.”
“Whorehouse clothes?! Hey!” The family resemblance was unmistakable. I realized I’d seen this guy before, in a mystic image shown to me by Lord Phillip, back during the whole Orchard Lake thing. He’d been younger in that image. Seen as he was now, broken neck forcing his head to wobble slightly, you could tell he was related to Eric. “You do not get to call these whorehouse clothes. I look sexy in this!”
“I ain’t never said you didn’t look attractive, ma’am.” He dropped his cigar, stubbing it out on the ground even as it broke apart, little more than smoke. John Paul Courtney removed his hat and gave me a slight, but careful, nod. “I kin see how a getup like that might get a man’s pistol primed, but you ain’t never gone convince me that it don’t make you look more saloon hall night than Sunday morning church service.”
“Times change.”
“That they do, ma’am.” His smile was Eric’s smile, but where Eric’s smiles could often be hard to come by, John Paul Courtney seemed more practiced at doling them out. “But the Good Book don’t change, and I try not ta either.”
“Where’s Eric?” I leaned forward, and John Paul’s eyes dipped down toward my cleavage then up and away with a whistle.
“Put them young-uns to bed, missy,” he said, not looking at me. “Or cover ’em up. They’re out past their bedtime and getting inta places they have no business bein’.”
“Lady Bathory?”
I shooed the attendants away and they headed to the cabin. Looking back at the ghost, I pulled my coat tight around me and tied the sash. “Better?”
“It is at that, thank ya kindly.”
“Where’s Eric?”
“Fornicatin’.” He shook his head from side to side, then caught it before it could topple over. “But I ain’t convinced it’s all his fault this time. I appeared to him to ask what he thought he was doin’ when he had a pretty little filly at home waitin’ fer ’im, but he couldn’t even hear me.”
Crimson overcame my vision, washing away the other colors. If Rachel was screwing my husband again, I’d kill her. Sister or not. I’d kill her. Particularly if she’d cast some kind of spell on him again.
“But where?”
“I don’t rightly know, ma’am. Truth be told, I ain’t never been to France afore, not to mention Paris, so I shore didn’t recognize the sights outside the window.” His cigar appeared again, as if in absentmindedly reaching for it, he’d re-created it. He puffed on it once, a long deep draw, the smoke obscuring his face as it coursed up from his wounds. “It ain’t even clear how it is you came to be able to see me. Usually if someone fires El Alma Perdida I feel it. That desire to kill someone rings through clear as a dinner bell. And you ain’t a Courtney.”
“Shooting the gun means I can see you?”
“No, it means I kin appear to ya.”
“Well, that settles it then.”
“Settles what?” he asked. The perplexed expression on his weather-beaten features looked out of place.
“I dropped El Alma Perdida and it went off, the night I brought it back to Eric . . . on his birthday. Shot him in the butt. And yes”—I held up my hand, flashing him my wedding band and engagement ring—“I most certainly am a Courtney. We were married in a real church by a real priest, and Courtney is my real last name now.”
“Well I’ll be.” He smiled again, smoke curling around the edges of his mouth. “I guess you’re my great-great-granddaughter-in-law then . . . mehbe one more great. Welcome to the family, honey.” He held out his hand and I reached out to take it, but found my fingers wrapped around the silver cross–etched grip of El Alma Perdida instead. The crosses didn’t burn my hand.
“How?”
“I ain’t lettin’ nobody take my gun in amongst no dern demon
worshippers.” He pointed to his now empty holster. “Not unless Perdy’s bein’ shot at ’em. If no one’s got a holt of her, I kin always take her back.”
“I was talking about the crosses not burning me.” I examined my unburned palm, holding the gun by the barrel with my left hand. “But that’s good to know too.”
“The gun likes Courtneys. The bullets don’t pay no never mind. ’Course, they’re bullets, so I guess that’s all right.”
I spun the cylinder and only saw one bullet. “Does Eric still have the other bullets?”
“I reckon.” Courtney put his hat back on and drew deep on the cigar before breathing out a ring of smoke. “There’s a way to reload the gun even without the bullets, though. If’n you know the right words.”
“No!”
“No?”
“Don’t reload the gun.” I handed it back to him. “I can use it to find Eric.”
“Naw.” Courtney pursed his lips. “Most of the magic got drained out of ’em. They won’t build their power back up unless I reload ’em.” He drew the gun and snapped open the cylinder, removing the last bullet. “Hold tight.”
Smoke swirled around him and he was gone. Before the smoke had dissipated, he’d returned.
“Lord knows I didn’t need to see that.” He held out the gun, cylinder clicking as he showed me the five bullets and the empty slot. “Shouldn’t be running around with all six chambers loaded anyhow,” he explained. “That’s how accidents happen. Keep an empty chamber and ya ain’t likely to shoot when you don’t mean ta shoot.”
“He didn’t notice the swap?”
“Nope. The bullets was in his pants pocket.”
“And?”
“Well, ma’am.” He puffed on his cigar and waved the smoke away with his Stetson. “I thought I made it clear. He ain’t exactly wearin’ his pants raht now.”
Images of Eric on top of Rachel, Rachel astride Eric, and some nebulous second bitch feeding on both of them ran through my head. A cry of equal parts rage and frustration escaped my throat, and I wanted to hit something, anything. I clenched and unclenched my fists, ignoring the pain as my claws cut my palms.
“How fast can you move?” I asked the ghost.
“Speed ain’t exactly a problem, missy.” He floated to one end of the passenger compartment and back at a clip roughly equivalent to top human running speed. “It’s the range that does me in. Except for special circumstances, I can’t move too far from El Alma Perdida or my kinfolk. It’s that or the In-between and that ain’t mah idear of a home away from home.”
“Can you drive?”
JPC shook his head, shouting an annoyed, “Dadburnit,” when his head toppled over to one side. “I figgered up a way I think I could do it, but I ain’t never had no one to let me practice.”
“Then we do this on foot. I can see magic, but only when I’m a cat.” I turned into a cat, screeching at the emptiness that yawned in my belly as I made the shift. Normally, as a cat, I feel alive, but hungry as I was, my body wouldn’t give up the special effects. My feline heart lay still and dead in my diminutive chest. “You lead the way,” I meowed.
“I don’t speak critter, miss,” John Paul Courtney told me. “But I reckon you want me to head on out.”
It took a few minutes to get the attendants to open the door and let me out, largely because I didn’t want to risk transforming again and also because my vision had gone completely red except for my ghostly in-law. The skin and hair of the humans on the plane had become translucent, the features hard to discern. Instead, all I saw was the blood.
Outside the plane, I ran, a few paces ahead of JPC, my head cocked at the slight angle required to make out the thin blue line of magic linking El Alma Perdida to the single round in Eric’s pocket. Shin high and at a dizzying slant was not how I wanted to see Paris at night. If I stopped to take in the sights, I lost the thread. If I didn’t stop, the rapid movement, combined with the angle of my head, made the world spin as if I were riding a roller coaster. Farther into Paris, the other shoe dropped. Webs of energy, close to the same as the line of magic I was following, crisscrossed the landscape, a lattice of magic. . . . I ran into the wheel of a parked car and sat still, waiting for the world to stop moving. “This,” I meowed, “is going to be a pain in the ass.”
42
ERIC:
WHAT HAPPENS IN PARIS . . .
Eating the same woman every night is weird,” I said to no one in particular. Rachel, the freaky chick with all the piercings and the butterfly tattoo on her cheek, ran her fingers through my hair as I lifted my mouth from her femoral artery. I kissed the fang marks, watching as they faded, and moved my ministrations up and to the right.
“A little faster,” she said, shifting me to the right spot and grinding against my mouth, rhythmically in time to some internal pleasure pulse.
Behind me, Irene chuckled. “There are so many ways a lady could interpret that statement.” Fangs out, she stalked to where I knelt at the edge of the bed upon which Rachel was sprawled, her body flickering as she moved there and back again in rapid succession. “Is there room for the bride to cut in or do I have to take a number?”
Freshly showered ladies have always been a turn-on for me. I stood up, watching as Irene surveyed her options. She placed a proprietary hand on Rachel’s thigh and Rachel winced. “Too sore for seconds?”
“Not if you give me a few minutes,” Rachel said, a little short of breath. “I can’t—” Her words vanished, cut off by a cry of surprise as Irene went from standing to kneeling, fangs embedding deep in Rachel’s thigh.
“Fuck,” Rachel managed, her eyes squinting against the pain. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and let Irene finish. When Irene pulled away, a line of crimson trailed from her chin across Rachel’s sex.
“I want what I want,” Irene said, eyes locked with Rachel’s. “But I’ll make it up to you.” She lowered her head to the same task I’d been performing, and my mind was blown yet again. It seemed wrong to me, to see two girls like that, but to be married to one of them and have permission to sleep with both of them . . . I won’t say that made it right, but it was new enough that right wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities.
I want what I want.
I heard the words again in my head, and they sounded familiar. I’d heard them before, but in another place. I remembered being angry. Was it in California? Damn it, Irene, I recalled shouting, you can’t act like this. I won’t stand for it.
“Babe?” Irene stared up at me from between Rachel’s spread legs. She waggled her behind at me, reaching back and running her fingernails along the wetness of her sex. “You going to join us or are you having fun watching the show?”
“Both.” I blinked away the memory, momentarily overcome by the scent of cinnamon. I don’t think cinnamon was as popular the last time I was here. Either that or the German occupation had put a crimp on the supply. I succumbed to Irene’s beckoning and she resumed her “apology to Rachel” while I mounted Irene from behind.
Warm from the shower and sustained by the feeding, Irene felt hot and welcoming, like a living woman, lacking only the heartbeat. As I moved to completion, so did Rachel, her grunts echoing mine. Even separated as we were, a connection was there, deep and primal, as if she were responding to my thrusts more than Irene.
I came in a series of rapid thrusts, gasping for breath, heart roaring to life in my chest, beating faster than I remembered, a runaway pounding of long-dead circulatory muscle. Sagging against Irene, I frowned when she pushed me away.
“And you say that always happens now?” I asked. “The heartbeat?”
“Uh-huh. My turn,” she said, tugging Rachel from the bed and flopping down in the still-warm spot where Rachel had lain.
“I may be done,” I said.
Rachel smiled at me. “Oh, I think you’ve got a little more to give.”
Surprised to find that she was right, I waited
for my heartbeat to fade, then took up my same role, but with Rachel in the middle. If Irene had felt good, Rachel felt like coming home after a long day to all your favorite things, scalding my skin with the heat of her flesh and gripping me tight, craving me even though her hands and attention seemed to be elsewhere.
When Irene climaxed, Rachel and I kept going, falling to the floor with me still on top as she turned her head back and I leaned down to kiss her. She tasted like cinnamon, really tasted, and as we came again together, I heard her voice in my head, or maybe it was a whisper.
We don’t need her, the voice said, she’s cold and dead and I’m alive and yours.
I bit down on Rachel’s neck, and her body was warm and hot—spicy hot, not just heat. My heart pounded to life again and I clutched at her breasts, pulling her up with me as I stood, taking her against the wall, where I continued to thrust.
I just had time to catch my breath as it faded away. Lowering Rachel to the ground, holding her lest she fall, she responded by spinning around, throwing her arms around me and kissing me deep and hard, her tongue noticeably warmer than my already cooling one.
“I sooo love belonging to you,” she said. “What do you want me to eat for dinner?”
“We’ll order room service at the next hotel,” Irene said. “Not to be a party pooper, but you”—she indicated me with an outstretched finger—“promised me a different hotel every night.”
“But I like this one,” I complained. In all honesty, I didn’t even remember the name of the hotel, but it smelled like sex with a live woman and I wanted to bask in the scent, in the warmth, in the moment. “And aren’t we already going to have to pay for tonight?”
“I want what I want,” she said. “And . . . you promised.”
“Well . . .” I looked at Rachel for confirmation. “If I promised.”
I showered while the girls packed, and in half an hour we were on our way to a different hotel in some part of Paris I barely noticed. I watched out the window as we drove through the city. The Eiffel Tower looked cool with the lights on it and I wondered when they’d put them up.
