2 Blood Trail

by Tanya Huff

  He would have to deal with the dog another time. Grabbing a handful of tunic and another of trouser, he lifted the corpse up into the crotch of a tree and wedged it there, well above eye level. With one last apprehensive look into the shadows, he continued his journey to the village.

  It wasn’t difficult to find.

  Harsh white light from a half dozen truck-mounted searchlights illuminated the village square. A small group of villagers stood huddled on one side, guarded by a squad of SS. A man who appeared to be the local commander strode up and down between the two, slapping a swagger stick against his leg in the best Nazi approved manner. Except for the slap of the stick against the leather boot top, the scene was surreally silent.

  Henry moved closer. He let the sentry live. Until he knew what was going on, another unexplained death could potentially do more harm than good. At the edge of the square he slid into a recessed doorway, waiting in its cover for what would happen next.

  The tiny village held probably no more than two hundred people at the very best of times, which these certainly weren’t. Its position, near both the border and the rail lines the invaders needed to continue their push north, made it a focal point for the Dutch Resistance. The Resistance had brought Henry, but unfortunately it had also brought the SS.

  There were seventy-one villagers in the square, mostly the old, the young, and the infirm. Pulled from their beds, they wore a wide variety of nightclothes and almost identical wary expressions. As Henry watched, two heavily armed men brought in five more.

  “These are the last?” the officer asked. On receiving an affirmative, he marched forward.

  “We know where the missing members of your families are,” he said curtly, his Dutch accented but perfectly understandable. “The train they were to have stopped is not coming. It was a trap to draw them out.” He paused for a reaction but received only the same wary stares. Although those of an age to understand were very afraid, they hid it well; Henry’s sensitive nose picked up the scent, but the commander had no way of knowing his news had had any effect. The apparent lack of response added an edge to his next words.

  “By now they are dead. All of them.” A young boy smothered a cry and the commander almost smiled. “But it is not enough,” he continued in softer tones, “to merely wipe out resistance. We must wipe out any further thought of resistance. You will all be executed and every building in this place will be burned to the ground as both an example of what happens to those civilians who dare support the Resistance and to those inferiors who dare oppose the Master Race.”

  “Germans,” snorted an old woman, clutching at her faded bathrobe with arthritic fingers. “Talk you to death before they shoot you.”

  Henry was inclined to agree—the commander definitely sounded like he’d been watching too many propaganda films. This did not lessen the danger. Regardless of what else Hitler had done in his “economic reforms,” he’d at least managed to find jobs for every sadistic son-of-a-bitch in the country.

  “You.” The swagger stick indicated the old woman. “Come here.”

  Shaking off the restraining hands of friends and relatives and muttering under her breath, she stomped out of the crowd. The top of her head, with its sparse gray hair twisted tightly into an unforgiving bun, came barely up to the commander’s collarbone.

  “You,” he told her, “have volunteered to be first.”

  With rheumy eyes squinted almost shut in the glare of the searchlights, she raised her head and said something so rude, not to mention biologically impossible, that it drew a shocked, “Mother!” from an elderly man in the clutter of villagers. Just to be sure the commander got the idea, she repeated herself in German.

  The swagger stick rose to strike. Henry moved, recognizing as he did so that it was a stupid, impulsive thing to do but unable to stop himself.

  He caught the commander’s wrist at the apex of the swing, continued the movement and, exerting his full strength, ripped the arm from the socket. Dropping the body, he turned to charge the rest of the squad, swinging his grisly, bleeding trophy like a club, lips drawn back from his teeth so that the elongated canines gleamed.

  The entire attack had taken just under seven seconds.

  The Nazis were not the first to use terror as a weapon; Henry’s kind had learned its value centuries before. It gave him time to reach the first of the guards before any of them remembered they held weapons.

  By the time they gathered their wits enough to shoot, he had another body to use as a shield. He heard shouting in Dutch, slippered feet running on packed earth, and then suddenly, thankfully, the searchlights went off.

  For the first time since he entered the square, Henry could see perfectly. The Germans could see nothing at all. Completely unnerved, they broke and tried to run, only to find their way blocked by the snarling attack of the largest dog any of them had ever seen.

  It was a slaughter after that.

  Moments later, standing over his final kill, bloodscent singing along every nerve, Henry watched as the dog that had followed him all night approached stifflegged, the damp stain on its muzzle more black than red in the darkness. It looked completely feral, like a wolf from the Brothers Grimm.

  They were still some feet apart when the sound of boots on cobbles drew both their heads around. Henry moved, but the dog was faster. It dove forward, rolled, and came up clutching a submachine gun in two very human hands. As the storm troopers came into sight, he opened fire. No one survived.

  Slinging the gun over one bare shoulder, he turned back to face Henry, scrubbing at the blood around his mouth with the back of one grimy hand. His hair, the exact russet brown of the wolf’s pelt, fell in a matted tangle over his forehead and the eyes it partially hid were the eyes that had watched Henry emerge from the earth and later feed.

  “I am Perkin Heerkens,” he said, his English heavily accented. “If you are Henry Fitzroy, I am your contact.”

  After four hundred years, Henry had thought that nothing could ever surprise him again. He found himself having to rethink that conclusion.

  “They didn’t tell me you were a werewolf,” he said in Dutch.

  Perkin grinned, looking much younger but no less dangerous. “They didn’t tell me you were a vampire,” he pointed out. “I think that makes us even.”

  “That is not a perfectly normal way to meet someone,” Vicki muttered, wishing just for an instant that she was back at home having a nice, normal, argument with Mike Celluci. “I mean, you’re talking about a vampire in the Secret Service meeting a werewolf in the Dutch Resistance.”

  “What’s so unusual about that?” Henry passed an RV with American license plates and a small orange cat sleeping in the rear window. “Werewolves are very territorial.”

  “If they were living as part of normal. . . .” She thought for a second and began again. “If they were living as part of human communities, how did they avoid the draft?”

  “Conscription was a British-North American phenomenon,” Henry reminded her. “Europe was scrambling for survival and it happened so quickly that a few men and women in a few isolated areas were easy to miss. If necessary, they abandoned ‘civilization’ for the duration of the war and lived off the land.”

  “All right, what about British and North American werewolves then?”

  “There are no British werewolves. . . .”

  “Why not?” Vicki interrupted.

  “It’s an island. Given the human propensity for killing what it doesn’t understand, there’s not enough space for both humans and wer.” He paused for a moment then added, “There may have been wer in Britain once. . . .”

  Vicki slumped lower in the seat and fiddled with the vents. I don’t want to die, Ms. Nelson. “So the wer aren’t worldwide?”

  “No. Europe as far south as northern Italy, most of Russia, and the more northwestern parts of China and Tibet. As far as I know there are no native North American wer, but I could be wrong. There’s been a fair bit of immigration, ho
wever.”

  “All post World War II?”

  “Not all.”

  “So my original question stands. How did they avoid the draft?”

  Vicki heard him shrug, shoulders whispering against the thick tweed seatback. “I have no idea but, as most of the wer are completely color-blind, I’d guess they flunked the physical. I do know that the allies used color-blind observers in aerial reconnaissance; because they had to perceive everything by shape they were able to see right through most camouflage. Maybe some of that lot were wer.”

  “Well, what about you, then? How does a vampire convince the government he should be allowed to do his bit for liberty?” Then she remembered just how convincing Henry could be. “Uh, never mind.”

  “Actually, I didn’t even approach the Canadian government. I stowed away on a troop ship and returned to England where an old friend of mine had risen to a very powerful position. He arranged everything.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t ask who the old friend was. She didn’t want to know—her imagination was already flashing her scenes of Henry and certain prominent figures in compromising positions. “What happened to the villagers?”

  “What?”

  “The villagers. Where you met Perkin. Did they all die?”

  “No, of course not!”

  Vicki couldn’t see any of course not about it. After all, they’d wiped out an entire squad of SS and the Nazis had disapproved of things like that.

  “Perkin and I set it up so that it looked as though they’d been killed in an allied air strike taking out the railway line.”

  “You called in an air strike?”

  She could hear the grin in his voice as he answered.

  “Didn’t I mention this old friend had risen to a very powerful position?”

  “So.” One thing still bothered her. “The villagers knew there was a pack of werewolves living amongst them?”

  “Not until the war started, no.”

  “And after the war started?”

  “During the war, any enemy of the Nazis was a welcome ally. The British and the Americans even managed to get along.”

  She supposed that made a certain amount of sense. “And what about after the war?”

  “Perkin emigrated. I don’t know.”

  They drove in silence for a while, one of only a few vehicles on the highway now that Toronto had been left behind. Vicki closed her eyes and thought of Henry’s story. In some ways the war, for all its complications, had been a simple problem. At least the enemies had been well defined.

  “Henry,” she asked suddenly, “do you honestly think that a pack of werewolves can live as a part of human society without their neighbors knowing?”

  “You’re thinking city, Vicki; the Heerkens’ nearest neighbors live three miles away. They see people outside the pack when they choose to. Besides, if you didn’t know me, and you hadn’t met that demon last spring, would you believe in werewolves? Would anyone in North America in this century?”

  “Someone obviously does,” she reminded him dryly. “Although I’d have expected blackmail over murder.”

  “It would make more sense,” Henry agreed.

  She sighed and opened her eyes. Here she was, trying to solve the case armed only with a magnifying glass and a vampire, cut off from the resources of the Metro Police. Not that those resources had been any help so far. Ballistics had called just before she left to tell her that the slug had most likely been a standard 7.62mm NATO round; which narrowed her possible suspects down to the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as almost everyone who owned a hunting rifle. She wasn’t looking forward to arriving at the Heerkens farm.

  This was the first time she’d ever really gone it alone. What if she wasn’t as good as she thought?

  “There’s a map in the glove compartment.” Henry maneuvered the BMW off Highway 2. “Could you get it out for me?”

  She found both glove compartment and map by touch and shoved the latter toward her companion.

  He returned it. “Multitalented though I may be, I’d rather not try to read a map while driving on strange roads. You’ll have to do it.”

  Fingers tight around the folded paper, Vicki pushed it back at him. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “We’re on Airport Road about to turn onto Oxford Street. Tell me how long we stay on Oxford before we hit Clarke Side Road.”

  The streetlights provided barely enough illumination to define the windshield. If she strained, Vicki could see the outline of the map. She certainly couldn’t find two little lines on it.

  “There’s a map light under the sun visor,” Henry offered.

  The map light would be next to useless.

  “I can’t find it.”

  “You haven’t even looked. . . .”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t.” She’d realized from the moment she’d agreed to leave the safe, known parameters of Toronto that she’d have to tell him the truth about her eyes and couldn’t understand how she’d gotten herself backed into that kind of a corner. Tension brought her shoulders up and tied her stomach in knots. Medical explanation or not, it always sounded like an excuse to her, like she was asking for help or understanding. And he’d think of her differently once the “disabled” label had been applied, everyone did. “I have no night sight, little peripheral vision, and am becoming more myopic every time I talk to the damn doctor.” Her tone dared him to make something of it.

  Henry merely asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s a degenerative eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. . . .”

  “RP,” he interrupted. So that was her secret. “I know of it.” He kept his feelings from his voice, kept it matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t seem to have progressed very far.”

  Great, just what I need, another expert. Celluci wasn’t enough? “You weren’t listening,” she snarled, twisting the map into an unreadable mess. “I have no night sight. It drove me off the force. I am piss useless after dark. You might as well just turn the car around right now if I have to solve this case at night.” Although she hid it behind the anger, she was half afraid he’d do just that. And half afraid he’d pat her on the head and say everything was going to be all right—because it wasn’t, and never would be again—and she’d try to rip his face off in a moving car and kill them both.

  Henry shrugged. He had no intention of playing into what he perceived as self pity. “I turn into a smoldering pile of carbon compounds in direct sunlight; sounds like you’ve got a better deal.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I haven’t seen the sun in four hundred and fifty years. I think I do.”

  Vicki shoved her glasses up her nose and turned to glare out the window at a view she couldn’t see, unsure of how to react with no outlet for her anger. After a moment she said, “All right, so you understand. So I have a comparatively mild case. So I can still function. I haven’t gone blind. I haven’t gone deaf. I haven’t gone insane. It still sucks.”

  “Granted.” He read disappointment at his response and wondered if she realized that she expected a certain amount of effusive sympathy from the people she told. Rejecting that sympathy made her feel strong, compensating for what she perceived as her weakness. He suspected that the disease was the first time she hadn’t been able to make everything come out all right through the sheer determination that it would be. “Have you ever thought about taking on a partner? Someone to do the night work?”

  Vicki snorted, anger giving way to amusement. “You mean you helping me out as a regular sort of a job? You write romance novels, Henry; you have no experience in this type of thing.”

  He drew himself up behind the wheel. He was Vampire. King of the Night. The romance novels were just the way he paid the rent. “I wouldn’t say. . . .”

  “And besides,” she interrupted, “I’m barely making enough to keep myself going. They don’t call the place Toronto the Good for nothing you know.”

 
; “You’d get more jobs if you could work nights.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. It was true.

  His voice deepened and Vicki felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Just think about it.”

  Don’t use your vampiric wiles on me, you son-of-a-bitch. But her mouth agreed before the thought had finished forming.

  They drove the rest of the way to the farm in silence.

  When they pulled off the dirt road they’d been following for the last few miles, Vicki could see only a vague fan of light in front of the car. When Henry switched off the headlights, she could see nothing at all. In the sudden silence, the scrabble of claws against the glass beside her head sounded very loud. She didn’t quite manage to hold back the startled yell.

  “It’s Storm,” Henry explained—she could hear the smile in his voice. “Stay put until I come around to guide you.”

  “Fuck you,” she told him sweetly, found the release, and opened the car door.

  “Yeah I’m glad to see you, too,” she muttered, trying to push the huge head away. His breath was marginally better that of most dogs—thanks, no doubt, to his other form being able to use a toothbrush—but only marginally. Finally realizing that without better leverage the odds of moving Storm were slim to none, she sat back and endured the enthusiastic welcome. Her fingers itched to dig through the deep ruff, but the memory of Peter’s naked young body held them in check.

  “Storm, that’s enough.”

  With one last vigorous sniff, the wer backed out of the way and Vicki felt Henry’s hand touch her arm. She shook it off and swung out of the car. Although she could see the waning moon, a hanging, three-quarter circle of silver-white in the darkness, it shed a light too diffuse to do her any good. The blurry rectangles of yellow off to the right were probably the lights of the house and she considered striding off toward them just to prove she wasn’t as helpless as Henry might think.