Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

  “Honey,” I said, taking a grateful sip of my coffee, “you’ve got some kind of gunk on your … no, not that side, yes, right there.”

  Red flicked at his overalls, and something flaked off into the sink, making me wish I hadn’t said anything. “That better?”

  “Actually, there’s another patch of blood or something. Would you mind changing out of that?”

  Red hesitated, then turned his back and unzipped the coveralls. At first, I took the stiffness of his movements to be annoyance at my request, but then I caught the way Malachy was watching Red. “Simple puncture wound, or was there some laceration as well?”

  Red gave a noncommittal shrug. “It’s just a little love bite. Some of the blood’s dried, is all. I was just going to leave this for later.”

  Now I really felt like the world’s worst girlfriend. “Oh, God, why didn’t you say something?”

  “’Cause it’s not a big deal, Doc.”

  “Let me see.”

  With obvious reluctance, Red peeled off the coveralls, wincing a little as he extracted his right arm from its sleeve, revealing a series of small, reddened puncture wounds.

  I sucked in my breath when I examined his arm, which was swollen and clearly sore. “Jesus, Red. You’re going to need rabies shots.” I realized that wasn’t the most professional tone to take, but I was a little shocked. In all the time I’d known him, Red had never once been bitten by any of the wild animals he removed from their lairs. Something must have gone very wrong.

  “The critter that got me didn’t have rabies.” As if on cue, there was a high-pitched squeal of distress and then a flash as something dark plummeted from the ceiling to the floor. For one startled moment, I thought it was a bat, then I remembered that Red had locked her in the bedroom.

  “Jesus,” said Malachy, “what the hell is that?”

  “It’s Rocky,” I said in surprise, kneeling down beside the adolescent raccoon. Red had rescued Rocky last summer, when he had been cute and small and badly injured by a car. At nearly a year old and almost twenty-five pounds, our raccoon was now hale and hearty and more than old enough to be living on his own, but the call of the wild had been trumped by the call of our kitchen. Rocky was a raccoon who liked his carbohydrates complex.

  At the moment, he was lying on the floor, clearly stunned, looking almost comical as he touched his little black paws to his face. I glanced up to see where he’d fallen from and realized that he must have been hanging on to the chain that holds the largest lamp over the center of the living room. I had no idea how he’d gotten there without us spotting him, but I wasn’t entirely surprised. Raccoons may look adorable, but that bandit mask is no costume. They are wild things, and second to none in making a rumpus.

  I ran my hands over Rocky’s dense salt and pepper fur, checking for injuries. Luckily, he was well padded with fat, the result of constant thieving. “What were you doing up there, you idiot?”

  Rising up on his hind legs, Rocky looked straight at Red and gave a series of low grunts, for all the world as if he were giving his foster father a lecture. This wasn’t unusual; unlike Ladyhawke, Rocky didn’t actively dislike me, but like all the forest creatures Red rescued, the raccoon displayed a marked preference for Red. I suppose the animals tended to associate me with shots and stitches, while Red fed them and soothed them.

  Red said something, a soft, long, liquid string of sounds that might have been a sentence or a word, and seemed to calm the raccoon down. Red reached out one hand and scratched the side of Rocky’s masked face, as he might have done a cat, and said something else that meant nothing to me but evidently had an almost magical effect on Rocky. With a soft churring noise, the raccoon shuffled over to the bureau, climbed up to a partially opened drawer, and hopped in.

  “You’ve trained him well,” said Malachy, watching as Rocky settled himself among Red’s woolen winter socks. Red’s socks all had holes now, thanks to the raccoon’s sharp little claws, but I think Rocky knew what I would do to him if he tried to get into my underwear drawer.

  “I haven’t trained him at all,” Red corrected him. “We just have an understanding.” Rocky settled himself in the drawer, snout just hanging over the side so he could watch us, bright black eyes glittering. Red watched him, unthinkingly flexing his injured arm as if it were hurting him.

  In all the excitement, I’d momentarily forgotten about Red’s injury. “Come sit over here,” I told him, “and let me see what you’ve done to yourself.”

  Red didn’t protest when I took his arm and inspected the bite. Whatever had sunk its teeth into him hadn’t crushed down or shaken its head, like a dog, so the puncture wounds were small and neat and already showing signs of inflammation and infection. “So, tell me what kind of animal does this and isn’t a potential carrier of rabies.” Shapeshifters, like lycanthropes, are rapid healers, but I figured some viruses and bacteria could overtax even the best immunological defense system.

  Red tensed almost imperceptibly as I pressed around the site of the wound. “Manitou.”

  From his drawer, Rocky snarled softly, but this time, Red just ignored him.

  “Don’t those things live in Florida swamps, chewing on seaweed and getting scarred by motorboats?” I paused. “Hang on, I need my supplies.”

  I went into the bathroom and gathered my little first-aid kit, which contained sterile saline solution, iodine, antibiotic ointment, a roll of gauze and medical tape, and some other odds and ends that came in handy when your man liked to bring home injured wildlife on a regular basis. When I came back to the living room, I heard Malachy say something that made Red laugh, then stop abruptly.

  “What did I miss?” I guided Red to the bench while Malachy readjusted the lamp.

  “Red, manfully trying not to moan with pain.”

  “Mal was just saying that you’re thinking of manatees,” said Red. “Not manitou.”

  I wondered if that was the entire truth. When the moon was nearly full, I did find some enhancement in my sense of smell and hearing, but nothing like what they showed in the movies. It would have been nice to have canid hearing while in human form, but as long as my ears were situated on the sides of my head, there was a limit to my capabilities.

  As I irrigated Red’s wound, I asked, “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Few hours.”

  “And you’re sure that in addition to not getting rabies, these manitous don’t have nematode worms and won’t give you trichinosis? Because from where I’m sitting, this looks like your garden variety small mammal bite.” Having finished with the iodine, I applied a layer of antibiotic ointment and began wrapping Red’s arm in gauze.

  Red chuckled. “I’m sure. It’s not some fancy new word for a possum, Doc. These days, people translate ‘manitou’ as a spirit, the force that flows through all things. But my grandfather used to say that was the tourist version. He said that in the old legends, when they say Raven went to Beaver’s house, and they half acted like animals and half like folks, those were the manitou.”

  “I believe the word’s Algonquian in origin,” said Malachy. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t you say that your grandfather was of the Mohawk tribe, Red? I believe they were part of the Iroquois nation.”

  I secured the gauze with a piece of medical tape and looked over my shoulder at Malachy. “You know, Boss, you’re being even more pedantic than usual.”

  Malachy caught my eye and raised one sardonic eyebrow. “Am I? Well, forgive me. I’m always intrigued by the origin of words.”

  “Well, first off, the name Iroquois is a kind of insult. And as for manitous, that was the word my grandfather used,” Red said mildly. “I never asked him where he picked it up.” For a moment I thought Red had finished speaking, but then he added, “I only ever saw one once before, when I fasted for a week and went out into the desert.”

  “Here,” I told Red, “try to elevate that as much as possible.” I took another sip of coffee and discovered it had gone
cold. Setting the cup down, I added, “A week of fasting, huh? I imagine you can see a lot of things in that state.”

  “Some things exist on the borders between sleeping and waking, between this world and the next,” said Red, very evenly. I wasn’t sure if he knew I’d been teasing him. “You see them better out of the corners of your eyes than you do straight on.”

  I wondered how Malachy was taking all this. To my surprise, Mal indicated Red’s bandaged arm. “That looks pretty bloody straight on to me.”

  I must have given Malachy a strange look, because he raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “I was expecting a different response. More along the lines of, harrumph, Indian legends, balderdash.” Northsiders might be blasé about the supernatural, but my boss was a recent transplant.

  Malachy gave me his exasperated professor look. “My dear girl, do you have any idea how many supposedly mythic and extinct animals have subsequently been discovered by scientists?”

  “Are you talking about people finding dinosaur bones and thinking they’re dragons?” Reflexively, I inflected my question with the faintest hint of impatience. Malachy and I tended to spice our conversations with a bit of conflict.

  Malachy made a little tsk of annoyance. “No, no, I’m not talking about fossils. There are living examples, like the tuatara of New Zealand, with a vestigial third eye on the top of its head.”

  “I saw one of those, once,” said Red, reminding us that he was in the room. “The Maori tohunga I knew told me they were damn smart—lived in packs, not like lizards or iguanas. Breed even when they’re a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been to New Zealand.” I knew that Red had been raised in foster homes in Texas before learning that he had a grandfather in Canada, but I’d had no idea that he’d traveled to the other side of the world.

  Red gave me a wry smile. “Hell, you can’t learn all about me in one year. I have hidden depths, darlin’.”

  “So tell us about this meeting with the manitou, already.”

  There was a scrabbling sound as Rocky rearranged himself in Red’s sock drawer, and I could have sworn that the young raccoon flashed his foster father a look of warning as he settled back down.

  Red stood up. “You know what? I think we could all use a change of scene.” Gesturing down at his half undone coveralls, he said, “What do you say I get cleaned up and we all go out for a bite to eat?”

  Rocky and Ladyhawke watched us leave, and I had the bizarre impression that the two disapproving teenagers would be discussing us when we were gone.

  FIVE

  Northside didn’t offer much choice when it came to dining out. There was the Belle Savage Cafe, named for a local Pocahontas and run by the three ancient Grey sisters, Dana, Enid, and Penny. The sisters served up delicious pastries, soups, and coffee. Unfortunately, they didn’t do dinners—the cafe shut up shop the moment the first streaks of sunset crossed the sky.

  If you wanted an evening meal, our town boasted only two options. The more upscale establishment was called the Stagecoach Tavern and Inn. The Stagecoach had been around since the seventeen hundreds, when the stagecoach had brought customers in from Albany and New York City. These days, the chef was a recent graduate of the Culinary Academy, and I really hoped he would last. The odds, however, were against him. There had been a succession of different owners and chefs at the Stagecoach, none of whom had lasted more than a year. Supposedly the place was haunted by an ever-increasing number of ghosts, from the two-hundred-year-old spirit of a scullery wench who’d perished in a kitchen fire, to the revenant of Pascal Lecroix, the famed Manhattan chef who had ended his career and his life two years earlier, after a customer had complained about his veal.

  Red, however, preferred Moondoggie’s, which was the restaurant the locals tended to frequent. Moondoggie’s was the place to hear local bands while chewing on large hunks of meat or massive heaps of lasagna. It had two sections, one for people with small children, the other for people who rode in flatbed trucks or roared in on Harleys. Moondoggie’s was nothing if not tolerant of a little noise and high spirits. If, on occasion, one of the Calder children held his breath and floated up to the ceiling, the waitresses knew how to bring him down. And if one of the bikers became a little too vocal in his appreciation of a band, a plate of hot salsa and chips would magically appear, and the biker would find himself compelled to eat chip after chip until the entire musical set was over. I had nothing against the place, other than the fact that Hunter had sampled the pretty blond barmaid, Kayla. My only consolation was that she now disliked Hunter as much as I did, and she worked on the other side of the restaurant.

  Naturally, we all wound up going to Moondoggie’s.

  “What I don’t understand,” Malachy was saying as he frowned down at his chilled mug of Guinness, “is why Americans want to treat beer as though it were soda.”

  Red looked around for the busboy who had brought us our drinks. The place was packed, and there was a lot of wandering back and forth as people spotted friends across the room and went over to join them. The waitstaff looked exhausted and a little unnerved, and I suspected that one of the cooks had gone off for a smoke.

  “If it’s Kayla tending bar, you’re lucky she didn’t send it over with a straw,” I told Mal.

  “Aren’t you being a bit hard on her?” Red leaned back in his chair, visibly more relaxed now that he’d gotten out of our cabin. The bandage on his right arm was covered by a dark navy sweater and he had taken the time to put on a subtle, woodsy aftershave.

  I was about to make a biting comment, when I inhaled another lungful of his fragrance. He’d never worn a scent before, but I liked this, whatever it was, it made me want to stick my nose into the bare skin of his neck and inhale.

  “What’s wrong now?” Red asked, a touch of impatience in his voice. “You’re looking at me funny. I got more blood on me somewhere?”

  “Not at all. I’m thinking that I like that new aftershave you have on.”

  Red gave me a quizzical look. “Darlin’, you know I don’t wear chemicals.”

  “But there’s definitely something different. Mal, can you smell it?”

  Malachy raised one eyebrow a fraction. “Surely you are not suggesting that I sniff Red to ascertain if his aroma has changed? No, I thought not. Red, do carry on with the story of your manitou encounter.”

  Red hooked his arm across the back of my chair. “Well, I went to this fellow’s house to remove whatever was skittering around in his walls. City fellow, late forties, big-shot executive, bought himself a bit of forest around Old Scolder Mountain.”

  He injected a fair dose of venom into that last sentence. Back in the summer, the developer J. B. Malveaux had convinced the town that a few dozen McMansions planted around the town’s tallest mountain wouldn’t spoil its natural beauty. At the time, Red had been extremely vocal in his disapproval, showing up at town meetings and talking about the possible impact on local wildlife.

  But the town mayor had decided that he didn’t need no stinking environmental impact statement; as he put it, “We got more than enough trees in Northside.” So the deal had gone through, and Red had packed up a small rucksack and spent a week on the top of the mountain. He’d come back home with Rocky, who had been hit by Malveaux’s Land Rover on the site of one of the first houses.

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to work for anyone who moved into the Old Scolder development.”

  “You mean Mountain View Lanes,” Red said, giving me an ironic toast with his Budweiser bottle. “And, yeah, I know what I said, but if I don’t help those rich assholes, they’ll go hire someone to spread a load of rat poison around.”

  Opal, our usual waitress, sailed by our table with a platter of trays, and I tried to catch her eye. “Sorry, guys, you’re not my station tonight. Your waitress should be by to take your order in a minute,” she said.

  “We should have gone to the Stagecoach,” muttered Malachy.


  “Yeah, well, if you don’t mind your steak stinking of specters and ectoplasm,” replied Red facetiously. At least, I thought he was being facetious. “So anyway, this city guy built himself some big Architectural Digest house. Naturally, the weather gets colder, and various critters move into the house.”

  It never ceased to amaze me how intelligent people didn’t understand that wilderness and pertinacious vermin were a package deal.

  “Okay, guys, I’m here,” said Kayla, dressed in tight black jeans and a white buttoned-down shirt that barely closed over her generous bosom.

  “Hey, you’re waitressing now,” said Red approvingly.

  “I wanted to get away from the roughnecks. Hi, Abra.”

  I nodded and busied myself with the menu, as if I hadn’t memorized it. With her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail, Kayla looked older and heavier than she had last year. Then, I’d thought she had the bright, hard prettiness of a beauty contestant. Now, she’d gained at least twenty pounds, and although she was still pretty, it was in a softer, more matronly fashion, and her sparkly green eyes were shadowed with experience. My creep of an ex-husband had been the one to add those shadows, so I supposed I ought to feel a certain kinship with her.

  I didn’t. Last year she’d confronted me in the street, glaring at me as though I’d done her some injury and telling me that Hunter was stalking her. She’d let me know that some guy named Dan—a boyfriend or a husband, I didn’t know or care—had left her because of it. Call me hard-hearted, but this did not evoke any feelings of compassion. For her, that is. I felt plenty sorry for Dan, whoever he was.