* * *
Hunger. Hunger! Vengeance.
The lame Beast stopped running. It turned and cast a baleful gaze at the moon, now behind the tree line, on its steady course downward. The scents of the Ones Lost were growing stronger. Already hindered by this inferior host that should have been a kill -this dismal vessel it had been forced to abide within- it was weakened all the more by the silver dart still embedded and a feedless First Night. The Beast knew it couldn't outrun the Ones Lost before moonset, before remission. And if the Ones Lost found the unconscious host after remission, the Beast knew it would never see another First Night in this place.
Once, it had plotted to endure this crippled casing until it had gained enough power and strength for a proper transference. It had been biding its time, waiting for a true Chosen, one that was suitably witless and torpid, one filled with the conceit of ignorance and denial. But, now, that plan was gone. And, in its place, this one:
The Beast would stand. Weak as it was, it would affect to be weaker still. Tempt the Ones Lost closer, for it knew they hoped to add to their number, hoped to yank from the Beast its own. But, instead, one of them would return to the lineage, return to his role as host; to be used up, then discarded. One of them would receive before the moon set. Bitten once again.
* * *
Max stopped, clutching a fistful of David's sleeve to pull him up short. David checked his palm while Max listened and strained his eyesight. Something snapped somewhere. There was no other sound except the song and chirp of forest insects.
The Beast had led them deep into the interior, a haphazard of mahogany, palm and other trees muscling against each other. There was no trail. There never had been, other than the blood trail that had meandered through the hardwood maze to Sister Veronica. Now they didn't even have that to go on. They were left with old fashioned tracking, the wane and wax of the pentagrams in their palms, and the clench and relax in their bellies.
What had stopped Max short was one of those clenches, so fierce and sudden it put tears in his eyes. But he stood his ground and sensed David struggling against a wrenching of his own. When Max felt a quick tap against his hand, that meant David was taking up the watch so Max could glance at his palm. The pentagram there was as dark as it would ever get on a former host.
The Luperón lineage had to know they were there. Or, if not exactly where they stood, that they were only paces away. The Beast didn't have the mixed blessing of the stomach knots to warn it, but it did have supernormal hearing and smell. At these close quarters, no amount of smell-masking powder would fool the Beast, and the air was too still now for their scent to be carried away.
Another snap. Off to the right, past David. Then a flash on Max's left, like silver passing through a moonlit patch.
"Ten o'clock," Max hissed, and tracked the glow as it floated off some fifty feet or so, continuing left, and then vanished. It was trying to get behind them ... no ... another silver ripple, under a triplet of moonbeams filtered through the canopy. It was moving away from them.
Moving away?
Close to Max's ear, David whispered, "It's giving up."
Max nodded. It was trying for an escape. So close to moonset, it just wanted to lose them now, to conceal itself before remission. Once that happened, their chances of tracking the Beast would be nearly impossible. The pentagrams in their palms would go dormant, barely noticeable unless they had the unbelievable luck of stumbling right over the re-emerged, unconscious Papo Salvador. And who could say if they would ever find Papo again, if they lost their chance this First Night? There wasn't much Max and David could do but follow. They began a slow weave through the trees, using the pain in their bellies as a compass.
The mahogany was so dense they could barely glimpse between the trunks, and as the moon slipped lower, visibility -already poor- became poorer still. Trying to pick their way through was costing them precious time. Max grabbed David's sleeve again as soon as they rounded a tree. He pointed to himself, then ahead, and then made a walking motion with two fingers: he'd move on ahead, sacrificing quiet for a little more speed.
That meant certain death, if the Beast got to him before he could sense its presence. But David might have enough time to finish off the son-of-a-bitch while it was ripping at Max. David shook his head sternly and pointed to himself instead: he wanted to take the lead. But when David started forward Max blocked his way and began walking, forcing David to follow.
The pace picked up, and they made better time. But not good enough. The knots in his gut loosened. Doubt crept in. The Beast knew these woods better than any single being. It had emerged here and faded since humankind first set foot on the Dominican shoreline, just as it had on every point of the globe. Wounded or not -lame or not- trying to track the Beast, now that it had gotten so far ahead, would be like trying to track a snake under the forest's carpet. The moon was too close to setting. Max and David had run out of time.
They heard the sound of water and came upon an interruption in the trees. One of the many small creeks and brooks that carved through the foothills. Disheartened, Max stood on the mossy bank and turned his palm up to look forlornly at his hand.
In the moon-pale dimness of the creek's swath, the pentagram was deepening again.
He hitched his shotgun under his arm and rubbed a thumb into his palm to make sure it wasn't dirt settling into the creases. The pentagram remained. He heard rustling behind him and startled, but it was only David coming up to his side. This was incredible luck. Unbelievable, even.
Really unbelievable. Like a trick. His gut seized up. He looked at David, then across the creek to the jumble of mahogany and scrub.
The Beast sprang.
Max and David raised their guns, stepped back, never got a chance to fire, both weapons sent flying by a brutal side sweep of force hurtling up the creek bed. The Beast was knocked out of the air, hit broadside in a cacophony of bone cracks, wails and ear-splitting bellows, knocked clean out of the air, and sent crashing into the rocky creek.
Max and David lay sprawled, defenseless, in shock at the sight of the colossus ripping open the chest of the Luperón Beast. Puny and dull against the other, the lame beast's eyes bulged, terror-filled, locked onto the face of its killer even as its head slapped lifelessly into the water. Silver-tinged gore scattered in all directions, hot flecks arcing, smacking Max's face.
"Guns!" David shouted, shocking them both into action, leaping up, desperately searching for the shotguns. Too late, they saw them beneath the creek's blood-clouded water.
The Great Beast yanked away from its kill, the lame one's heart crushed in its jaws, and fixed its glare on Max and David. They jerked out their side arms and started blasting.
Plumes of silvery blood darkened against the brilliance of the pelt. An ear point shattered, a shoulder was pierced, a massive foot punctured. It backed up, shaking its great, misshapen skull. But nothing hit the vital areas of underbelly, chest or head.
They were dead. Max and David were both dead. But goddamn it, they'd go out like Lloyd Stonehill! They ran straight toward the Great Beast, guns thrust forward.
Bullets flew, but the only things they connected with were empty air and the gaping carcass of the Luperón Beast. This giant among hell hounds, this Great Incarnation, moved so fast it was as if it had become the forest instead of rushing into the depths. Max and David were left panting as the cold, blood-stained water swirled around their shins.
David lifted his gun hand, as if its weight was almost unbearable, and pointed east. Where a few lateral beams of the setting moon stole through, silver-tinged blood glowed against the tree trunks.
They waded out of the tainted water, and the hunt began again.
* * *
Only once before had dread been this absolute in Max. Only once had he felt this level of terror. He had been chained hand and foot to a metal cot, sobbing like a war orphan, while Doris Tebbe and David clung to each other behind an upturned table banded with silver. They h
ad been trying to comfort each other as the three of them waited on the moon, not knowing if any of them would live to see the dawn.
Tramping alongside David now, Max's arms and legs shook so badly it felt as if his bones were rattling. He didn't know how he was standing upright, let alone walking. Yet he was, yet David was, stumbling and plodding and making enough noise to call down on them not just that thing that had knocked the Luperón Beast out of the air, but all the ghouls of Hell along with it.
He kept thinking, This is the night I die. This is it. And he wanted to weep again, he wanted to sob as hard as he had, chained on that cot in that shack all those years ago. Sob because he was going to die failing everyone he and David had come to help.
He could still see it in his head, that Great Beast. A normal incarnation had an awful beauty to it. The sight of one could freeze a victim in his tracks, the way the approach of a sudden, massive storm could disorient and bewilder. But this monster was a hulking, mutated mass barely encased by the host's stolen frame; the flesh around the eyes and snout fissured, tortured and bald.
The sheer mass of it! It had cracked open the Luperón Beast like a jackal tearing into a rabbit, its jaws ripping through the rib cage and into the beating heart while the weaker Beast howled in agony.
But why? Why go after its own kind, its own self? And why didn't it finish off him and David while it was at it? How long could it have taken such an Great Incarnation to bite them both in half, moonset or no moonset? Why had it stopped?
"Stop," David said.
With a start, Max realized the moon had set. First Night was over. Neither he nor David would be dying tonight after all. The thought didn't hold much comfort. They leaned against the trees and tried to muster a little more strength.
First Night was over, but the hunt wasn't. The blood trail was still fresh, though the smears they followed no longer had a silver sheen. Without moon glow to fire it, the Great Beast's blood was as dark in the night as any human's. Dark it might be, but there was a chance it might still lead them to the host.
They followed as long as the smears held out, their pace slower now because they had to search harder for them, resort to standard tracking again. Perhaps a quarter mile more and the blood dried up altogether. The Great Beast was so immense, Max and David's thirty-eight caliber silver wasn't much more wounding to it than the darts had been to the Luperón Beast; at least, not without hitting a vital area. The bleeding had stopped and, no doubt, the healing already begun.
The densest part of the mahogany gave way abruptly to scrub and spindly palms. Max could see signs of settlement just ahead. He and David stepped out of the forest and, after a minute or so, recognized where they were. They had emerged some thirty or forty yards behind the silhouette of a ratty little structure beside the road to Luperón . Tracking the Great Beast had led them in a kind of arc that ended less than a mile from town. This was Luperón's meager little brothel. Like most of the settlement, it had been abandoned.
Max and David gave the area a cursory scan, then knelt, hoping to find some sign of the Great Beast's direction ... maybe a depression or two from massive forefeet. Even better if the foot struck by a bullet was still seeping blood to mark a print more clearly. But the dark of a now moonless night made it impossible. The ground was too packed, the tough, weedy growth over it too hardy to stay trampled. They'd have to wait for daylight and hope something would show.
Max rose and looked more critically around him, exploring by starlight. He saw curious, dark blotches scattered around what looked like a rectangular hole in the ground behind the brothel. He stood motionless, wondering. David walked up to him and they stared together.
"Couldn't be," Max said, meaning the Great Beast's safe haven, the lair it would have fled to for the remission.
David shook his head. "Much too small for any lineage, let alone this one. And, so close to town, I wouldn't think so, but .. do those dark areas look like blood to you?"
Max nodded. "Could we have wounded it worse that we thought?"
"Then why so much blood here and so little on the trail?"
They stood a moment more, thinking things through. Then David said, "Your turn to cover," and started forward. Even with the moon long set, his approach was cautious. He kept his gun trained on the rectangular hole. At its edge, he peered inside but apparently couldn't see anything in the dark. Keeping one eye on the hole, he glanced around and prodded one of the dark patches with a boot toe. Max began edging up.
"Looks like a root cellar," David told him. "Most of this is blood all right." He kept his gun aimed at the hole. "Along with shredded clothing, a couple of boots."
Shredded clothes could be signs of a lair, but this place just didn't fit the picture. It was much too public. David knelt to pick up something cylindrical with his free hand and wiped it on his trousers. "Flashlight," he said and fired it up, training the beam into the hole.
He dropped it, fell to his knees, and buried his face in his hands.
Max knelt to his side. "Jesus, David. What is it?"
David couldn't answer, racked with sobs so deep he was mute, his fingers digging hard into his scalp. Max grabbed the flashlight and aimed it into the cellar.
* * *
They couldn't bear leaving Mezz the way they had found him. So Max climbed into the cellar while David closed his eyes and sang a funeral chant, his voice low, just loud enough for Max and, maybe, Mezz to hear. He motioned in the air and sang as Max cut away the ropes at Mezz's ankles, and pulled each leg back into position. He found Mezz's hands and arms, freeing them, too, and placed his head just above where the shoulders should have been. He tied Mezz's jaw closed with the cleanest scrap of cloth he could find, and fit the beret back on his scalp. Then Max and David slid the hatch shut, to protect him from scavengers.
How long they sat at the cellar's edge afterward, watching over Mezz, Max couldn't say; other than neither of them moved a muscle until dawn glowed pinkish in the east. Then, with his voice as hoarse as if he had been wailing for hours, David said, "We've got to get out of here."
So they fled, gore-smeared and bone cold with grief, leaving everything behind. Mezz. Sister Veronica. Everything.
Chapter Seventeen
Miami, Florida
Spring, 1950
Half Past Noon. Last Quarter Moon.
The first thing he did when his feet hit U.S. soil was find a good, all-American greasy spoon. He didn't have to walk far from the industrial docks of Government Cut. He ate his fill of a hamburger, Coke and fries, and then asked the waitress about a pay phone. She pointed him down the hall outside the pay toilets and he placed the call collect.
"I'm okay," he said as soon as the operator left the line, knowing what the first question would be.
"Damn it! I've been worried sick!"
"I know, I know, I'm sorry. I couldn't call before now. I had to lay low 'til I was sure Max and David were out of the area. Then I had to travel fast. I'm sorry it took so long, but I'm okay."
He didn't mention that he ransacked what Max and David had left behind, grabbing what was most useful for bartering his way out of the country. Taking any of the abandoned silver was out of the question, of course; even a single, small bar would be excruciating to his touch. Except for one thing ... a particular souvenir, too irresistible to abandon, in spite of how difficult it was for him to carry. Since he had been unable to collect one of his regular trophies during the hunt, he'd make a trophy of this.
A deep sigh came across the line, a familiar habit. They had been a pair for so many years, he understood the language of those sighs. This one said thank God, you're all right. I could throttle you. Then came the question, always pensive, "How'd it go?"
"Good. It went good." He fished out a Lucky without pulling the pack from his shirt pocket.
Another sigh: relief that had been held in reserve. "Did you see Max and David?"
The concern behind the question bothered him, but he tried to ignore it. He lit u
p and pulled the smoke in deep. "Yeah. But they didn't see me ."
"So you got to it before they did ..."
"Just barely." He touched his right ear. Perfectly healed, but tender. The silence on the other end irked him. It hinted of disappointment, so he said, "They shot me."
" What? "
That was better. "They shot me."
"With silver?"
"Yeah, with silver, what the hell else do you think they'd use?"
"But you're all right?"
"They didn't really shoot me . I was ... it was emergent. When I came to, there were a couple of bullets next to me. Worked loose when things receded, got back to normal. Nicked my ear. My shoulder's stiff. My foot's a little sore."
"Oh, God ... did the Beast do anything to them ... are they ..?"
"What. Are they alive? Hell, they're fine, they're just fine. They tried to kill me , but don't worry, they're both still alive."
"Stop it. Did you think I wouldn't care?"
"Since when did you switch sides?"
His question was met with yet another silence, this one stunned and offended. Finally: "Since when did we have sides to be on?"
It was his turn to sigh. "Okay ... look, this was a close one, all right? My nerves are raw. A lot of things went wrong, but ... the end result is what I wanted. One more lineage gone. And ... we're all okay. Me, Max, David ... nobody's hurt." He knew he sounded petulant, even as the next words left his lips, but he couldn't help it. " I'm the reason they're alive, you know. It took every ounce of will I had to turn the Beast. You've got no idea how hard it is to fight my way back to the surface."
He omitted how large a role the impending moonset played in Max and David's salvation, too.
Worry crackled though the telephone line. "Are you sure you're all right?"
He tried to lighten things up. "Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm just not used to the competition, is all."
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