“Your partner?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We have the same employer. That’s all.”
It made Richard stop.
“Damn it, Turpin.”
At the same time, Joanne looked up at him, questioning without saying anything.
Blanchard prodded him with a sharp finger. “Move, damn it.”
Richard remained where he was. “Jo, I was wrong.”
The applause and cheers began to trail off behind them.
“Your friends,” was all she said.
“Yeah. I was wrong. They’re not involved at all.”
Blanchard shoved him; he didn’t move.
The woman straightened, keeping her hand at her side.
“I swear to Christ,” Blanchard said tightly, “I’ll do it right here, right now.”
Richard faced him, and Blanchard took an involuntary step back.
“You work for the men who would destroy the Veil, don’t you.” He didn’t expect an answer; he didn’t need one. “Fay found out about you, didn’t she.” She hadn’t been warning him about one of the Warders; she had been trying to warn him about this man, here.
Blanchard managed a sneer, but Richard knew it was only a cloak for his fear.
“Did you kill her?” Richard asked. His chest was tight, his breathing slow and deep. Specks of light coasted at the corners of his vision. “Did you?”
Blanchard blinked his confusion. “Who?” Then he shook himself, and pushed his gunhand against the topcoat fabric. “You’re out of time, Turpin.”
The lobby went silent.
Richard released Joanne’s arm, leaned over and kissed her cheek. As he did, he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She kissed him back. “I’m not.”
Blanchard’s gun was free.
Richard heard the hammer cock as he turned back again.
He heard a collective gasp from the crowd, heard the Garou begin to snarl.
“Goddamn freak,” Blanchard said, the gun aimed at Richard’s heart. Richard had no choice. He used the only weapon he had. He lost his temper. And he shifted.
Light and shadows.
… green fire …
Richard’s right hand shoved Joanne out of the way. Too hard. She stumbled, then fell as she tried to scramble her weapon from its holster.
Richard’s left hand snared Blanchard’s wrist, wrenching it up and away just as the gun fired.
Blanchard screamed.
Richard snarled.
Blanchard tried to backpedal, but Richard grabbed him between the legs and around the throat, and lifted him over his head, hearing nothing but the bloodlust storming in his ears, feeling the man squirming frantically in his grasp, inhaling the scent of the man’s fear as if it were ambrosia.
He turned sharply, growling, and threw him down the hall, arms and legs flailing, skidding on his shoulder toward the exit, and the snow beyond.
He loped after him in the near dark, seeing nothing else but the man trying to get to his hands and knees, left arm useless, head hanging. He didn’t care now if the contest spectators saw him, didn’t care what they would say. He stood over Blanchard and waited.
Just waited.
Counting the seconds as the man finally tipped back on his heels and looked up and over his shoulder.
“No,” Blanchard whispered. “Fucking freak, no.”
“Turpin,” he answered, voice guttural and harsh. “Remember me. I’m Richard Turpin.”
His right arm lifted, claws flared, and swung down in an arc that seemed to move too slowly.
Blanchard couldn’t move.
A flash, and the flesh of his face and throat grew thin dark lines; a flash, and the lines began to release smears of red; a flash, and his eyes were filled with swimming color; a flash, and he toppled forward, landing on his forehead. Kneeling as if in prayer.
Richard stared, not sated but satisfied.
A step back, a partial turn, and sudden fire stripped along his side.
He whirled, right leg buckling, and faced the woman, who smiled up at him over the tip of her silver blade.
“That was my party, you bastard,” she said, nodding toward Blanchard’s body.
He barely heard her.
The fire had taken root, and he could feel his own blood slipping through the ragged gash in his pelt. Beyond them, beyond the thunder of his pain, there was pandemonium. Screams and running feet and a high, hysterical howling.
Distracted, he missed the tension in Wanda’s legs as she set herself to lunge.
And when she did, he realized he wouldn’t be able to deflect the blade from taking root in his chest.
He didn’t have to.
It was only a single gunshot, but it was enough.
Wanda gasped and arched her back, and a black-red rose blossomed on the front of her coat. She looked confused, then disappointed, before she fell against the wall and slid in stages to the floor.
“He’s gone!” Joanne shouted at him, pointing with her gun toward the lobby. “He’s out!”
They looked at each other for only a moment before he clamped an arm against his side and stumbled through the exit, into the storm and the quiet city.
The cold revived him somewhat as he swung around the corner of the building. It was difficult, but not impossible, to heal as he ran; he only hoped it would be enough when he came across the other Garou.
And this time he would.
Whatever this strange Garou’s true intentions had been, they had resulted in Fay’s death, and the near-killing of Joanne Minster. They had threatened everything he had sworn himself to protect.
Rogue or not, this Garou wouldn’t last the night.
At the next corner he stepped into a howling wind, the snow blowing horizontally, directly into his eyes. But he saw a fleeing shadow far ahead, heading north toward the river, and he followed. Not racing. Using the time to let his body try to stitch the silver wound.
He slipped on ice.
The wind slammed him backward.
Snow clung to his fur in tiny balls of ice.
The street was dark, and made darker by the lonely islands of white cast by the streetlamps. At least the storm kept people inside, and as he shivered against the biting cold, he supposed he ought to be grateful for that.
He ran on.
Crosswinds at the intersections gave him excuses to pause, to catch his breath and check the healing—slow, too damn slow.
The Garou ahead could have plunged into any one of the side streets, but he didn’t. He stayed just far enough ahead to keep himself indistinct, but not so far that Richard couldn’t see him through the whirling flakes.
The cold.
Always the cold.
Always the mocking voice of the wind.
Across the street now, the bus station huddled in the dark, parking lot streaked with white and gray.
The Garou turned the next corner.
Richard followed, now just thirty yards behind, trying not to breathe ice into his lungs, concentrating on his footing and on the fire that finally began to dampen in his side.
The aquarium was just ahead.
The Garou darted across the road and ran beneath the entrance arch, turning abruptly as if he had suddenly forgotten his destination. He slid, waved one arm, and went down on both knees, sliding again until he slammed into the back of one of the benches, the impact stunning him and knocking him over onto his side.
Richard smiled.
There was no humor.
By the time the Garou had climbed to his feet, Richard was there.
Waiting.
The Garou braced himself against the bench, panting heavily, head almost bowed.
He’s old, Richard thought in amazement; damn, he’s old.
Here in the open, the storm pummeled them, stealing part of their attention, just enough to keep them both reasonably steady on their feet.
The snow matted in the Garou’s fur added to Richard’s belief.
“Y
ou’re Spiro,” he said, letting the wind spin his words.
Marcus Spiro lifted a weary arm in greeting.
“Why?”
Spiro’s eyes, crimson fire, narrowed. “You think I’m a rogue?”
Richard shook his head. “No. But why?”
The Garou laughed, fangs not as long, not as sharp. “I was bored, you stupid boy. I was bored.”
And before Richard could even begun to understand, Spiro sprang, claws at the ready, jaws snapping for Richard’s throat.
For a second Richard couldn’t fight, but the first stab of claw against the wound in his side changed that, and they grappled, snarling, snapping mostly at air, wrestling across the icy paving stones until the corner of the bench caught the Garou’s hip, and he slipped.
Just enough.
Richard slammed an elbow into his temple, bringing him to his knees.
“No need,” he said. “Come on, Spiro, there’s no need anymore.”
With surprising strength, Spiro launched himself from the ground, fangs scraping across the base of Richard’s throat, burying a claw into the meat of his shoulder. The pain reignited the bloodlust, and Richard instinctively wrapped his arms around him, eventually spinning them both clumsily across the park while his teeth fought through the thick pelt to lay open the Garou’s back.
A large shrub took them, and they fell, rolling down the slope.
Spiro opened a gash on Richard’s chest.
Richard shoved him away and staggered to his feet, half blinded by the snow, deafened by the wind, arms hang loose at his side.
When Spiro charged again, howling his rage, the Strider caught him in the stomach with the claws of his right hand, pulled and turned, and let his jaws close around the back of Spiro’s neck.
It didn’t take very long.
He tasted the blood, felt the vertebrae snap, and shook his head violently, just to be sure.
Spiro didn’t drop until Richard removed his claws.
And opened his jaws.
The twisted body slid toward the black water river.
Shifting.
Bleeding.
But Richard simply watched until the water took him away. Only then did he let his legs collapse; only then did he fall, onto his back to watch the snow spin in circles into his eyes.
The desert warmth soothed him, and made him shiver as he remembered the storm’s needle cold.
The table was empty.
The chameleon tree was gone.
He didn’t mind.
it was his place again, the place of sweet retreat.
Still… there was the voice.
He smiled, and stood, and walked among the ruins until he found a gate, took a breath, and stepped through.
“This is getting to be a habit, Turpin,” Joanne said. She sat on the bed beside him, his shirt in her hands. “You do this often?”
There was still a faint burning in his side from Strand’s silver blade, but the rest of his wounds had healed. No scars. Except inside.
She told him the hotel had been overrun by police shortly after Blanchard had died. When she told Lt. Millson the killer had been there—Blanchard’s body the proof—and that it had most likely been Wanda.
Strand—knife in hand, plus other assassin’s weapons found in her car—it had been fairly easy to convince him that with the lights gone and all the shooting, it wasn’t hard to understand that a few hundred hysterics thought a monster was on the loose.
A werewolf, if you can believe it.
A goddamn werewolf in Chattanooga.
“You’re amazing,” he said truthfully. “Absolutely amazing.”
She straightened, and grinned. “Damn right. He bought every word.” A hand brushed down his arm. “I can see why those two wanted you dead. That much I get. But I don’t get Spiro. What did he mean, he was bored?”
Richard still wasn’t sure he understood it himself. He had thought about it the entire time he had dragged himself back to the hotel and managed, with more than simple luck, to get back to his room. He had thought about in his desert place. And he thought about it now.
“He was old.”
“So?”
“So when a Garou gets to a certain age, and it’s never the same for us all, we decide how we’re going to spend our last days. Human, or wolf. Whatever will make the last times easier.” He stared into the sitting room; there were no lights but the glow from outside. “I think … I guess he must have been a fighter when he was young. I don’t know. I do know, from what he said to me the few times we talked, that he wasn’t entirely happy. That he was just going through the motions.”
“Until he died.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”
“So … what? He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory or something?”
Richard thought a moment before smiling. “You know, you may be right. He was never a major writer. Never made the millions or had the fame other writers have.” A shrug. “Maybe this was his way.”
Joanne scratched a hand back through her hair. “Well, at least the Veil is okay, right?”
“Right.” He hugged her with one arm. “You did fine, Detective. You did real fine.”
She preened, she kissed him lightly, she slid off the bed before he could grab her and announced that she was starving. “I have reports, you know. But I’m not going to do them on an empty stomach. You owe me a meal.” She started for the door, stopped, and turned around. “Cooked, Turpin. Cooked.”
He dressed slowly, favoring the stiffness in his side, saying nothing when she told him she had taken a call from a man named John Chesney, who wanted to know if he was all right.
“I told him you were busy,” she said. “I don’t think he liked that.”
Richard didn’t care.
Changes were going to be made, and they were going to be made soon. He didn’t appreciate how the Warders had apparently deserted him this time; he wanted answers, and he wouldn’t leave them alone until he got them. Neither was he going to take another assignment until he himself was positive a rogue was on the loose.
What, he wondered, if there were others out there? Others like Marcus Spiro, who weren’t content to take the usual path to dying? What if Gaia, whatever Her reasons, had caused an alteration in the way the Garou were supposed to protect her?
Changes.
There would be changes.
And there would be some answers.
“Are you away again?” Joanne demanded.
“No. Not really.”
He joined her at the door, and she slipped an arm around his waist.
“Are you leaving town?”
“Soon. It’s my job, remember?”
“How soon?”
Gently he pulled her arm from his waist and took her hand as he opened the door. “Not that soon, I don’t think.”
She grinned. “Good answer, Turpin.”
At the elevators, she said, “Will you come back?”
“It might take time. But yes, I’ll come back.”
“Another good answer.”
The doors opened; the car was empty.
She stepped in quickly, leaving him in the alcove. Joanne stood at the back of the elevator, lay a finger against her cheek, and said, “You ever make it with a cop?”
Richard felt his mouth open.
The doors began to close, and she made no move to stop them. “Wrong answer,” she said with a slow shake of her head. And the doors shut as she added, “Take the stairs, it’ll clear your mind.”
He didn’t move for a long second, and after that he shook his head.
Count to five before you jump off the damn cliff, Fay had told him; and remember the damn parachute.
He laughed.
“One,” he said, and ran for the stairs.
The hell with the parachute; this was more fun.
Table of Contents
Start
Title page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Watcher: Based on the Apocalypse (World of Darkness : Werewolf) Page 20
