“I suppose you could say I represent those who think you’re precious. I told you, I’m your new guardian angel. Aren’t you glad?” A wide, sunny smile broke out over his face. It would have been attractive if it hadn’t been so downright freakish. Like a Halloween mask.
Some angel. Yeah, I’m just warm all the way through. “Precious? For what?”
“Djamphir are always male. If they breed with human women, they rarely have female offspring. When they do, those females are svetocha. The svetocha are fertile sometimes; their sons are strong, but their daughters—doubly rare as they are—are stronger. They always breed true when they throw a female.” He paused, cocked his head, and took a good deep sniff. I wondered if he could smell pies too. “I’m good, yes. I’m strong by virtue of my blood. But with the proper training, Dru, you can become toxic to nosferat. You can become capable of killing them just by breathing in their vicinity. Once you bloom.”
Yeah, and I’ll put on a cape and spandex, and fly to the moon, too. “Wait. Hold on just one cotton-pickin’ minute. You’re telling me I’m part sucker?” I shook my head hard, my hair actually flying. “Sure. Tell me another fairy tale.” My mom was my mom. She wasn’t a sucker, goddamn you. I know she wasn’t.
“You know better than most how true some fairy tales are.” He scanned the kitchen slowly. His eyes were so blue, and they roved over every surface like he owned the place. “Can I have a glass of water? Rolling in the snow with a new loup-garou is thirsty work.”
Yeah, it’s water you want? I saw your fangs, buddy boy. I pointed with my free hand, kept the gun trained on him. “Glasses are up there. How do I know you’re what you say you are?” Or that anything you’re telling me is anything close to the truth?
See, that was the thing. None of this could be true.
So why was I still listening to him?
He half-shrugged, a single graceful lift of one shoulder. “I’m out during the day. You shot me the other night—that hurt, by the way—and I bleed red, as you verified not ten minutes ago. I can smell the difference on you and on your pet upstairs—and I saved your life. Aren’t those enough reasons, or do you need more?” He got a glass down, moving silently except for the squeak of the cupboard. “I could have killed you both, you know. You’re laughably untrained.”
I’ve been doing this all my life. Still, it might be worth it to find out how he did a few things. Like standing on snow without leaving footprints. That would be a good skill to have.
What if his spiel about djamphir was true? I strained my memory, but couldn’t drag up anything. Nothing but the movies, and while they might be better training than you’d think, they’re also not as specific or thorough as a good book.
But what really happened to Mom?—I shut that thought down in a hurry. I didn’t want to think it.
I didn’t want to think about it at all. There was too much else to get out of the way before I could even begin.
It sounded like this Christophe knew more about the Real World than I did. His number had been in Dad’s book—but without the mark that meant he was safe. He was still a contact, and—here was the magic thing—he might actually be useful.
I hated thinking about it that way. Just like I hated thinking about how useless Graves was, though to give him credit, he’d tried.
What did I want? Was it worth keeping this guy around?
Did I even have a choice? I had the gun now, but I had the sneaking suspicion Christophe was letting me keep it. I had another suspicion, too—if he could smell something on Graves, or something on me, he could probably smell the zombie stain in the living room. Why wasn’t he saying anything about that, friends and neighbors?
The rushing in my head was really bad. It covered up other sounds I didn’t want to hear—tapping on a window, the soft wump! of flames sprouting along a broad hairy back, or the terrible howls of a streak-headed werwulf. This was getting to be too much for me.
I was pretty much at the mercy of whatever this guy decided to do anyway. Wasn’t it just this morning I’d been resigning myself to him killing me?
“So what’s it going to be?” Christophe asked, as if he could read my mind. The spaces between his words were odd, as if he had some sort of weird American accent. I’ve heard just about everything on the continent, but I couldn’t place it. “You’re going to have to trust someone, Dru.”
I’m thinking I trust Graves, even if he is seriously wigging me out with this growling and leaping around thing. I’m thinking you’re lying about my mother.
Why bring her up at all, though? Dad didn’t talk about her, even to August. He just never mentioned it. How could this guy know anything about her?
I had other things to worry about. I’m thinking I don’t trust you until I know why you want to be so helpful.
But it was, I had to admit it, comforting. He was a professional. He’d taken care of the streak-headed werwulf and chased it off, and could obviously handle himself. Having someone else in my corner, someone more experienced who knew more than I did, wasn’t something to be sneezed at.
Wasn’t that what I’d been wishing for? And now here he was in my kitchen. Smelling like apple pies and looking at me with a direct seriousness that made him even cuter. The bruising spreading up the side of his face had halted, and under it he was very pretty. Not jock-pretty, or the hurtful kind of pretty that tells you a guy is too busy taking care of his royal self to think about you.
No, his face just worked. Everything in proportion, the artist in me noted. Except the sharpness of his chin and that shadow in his eyes. Like he knew more than he was telling.
Way to judge him on his looks, Dru. Come on. The rushing noise in my head drained away. I swallowed drily. “All right.” I clicked the safety on and set the gun aside. “What do you suggest?”
“That’s a good girl.” He grinned. It wasn’t the feral grimace he’d used before, but a genuine smile that lit up his cold eyes. There was blood drying in his hair, and he was dripping on the kitchen floor, but that smile more than made up for it. “First, Miss Dru, we take stock of your weapons and I bring some of my own. Then, before dark, we ward your house again. We may well have visitors tonight.”
* * *
“I don’t like it,” Graves whispered. All in all, he was taking this pretty calmly. He touched the cookie jar, running his finger over the cow’s belly, and took his hand back when I gave him a raised-eyebrow Look.
I closed the dishwasher, twisted the knob to turn it on. My hair was drying into frizz, but I felt a lot more human after a hot shower and some honest-to-God lunch. “I don’t either. But he knows things. Like about you.” I caught myself whispering too, as if Christophe hadn’t left to go “pick up a few things, be back before dark.”
“I thought you knew things.” Graves picked up an empty pizza box—I’d sprung for delivery, since the road was clear and we’d pretty much eaten the house clean. Groceries were in order. If there was no more snow tomorrow I’d go to the store.
It was like having Dad in the house again. Only not really. Dad would have been watching cable or quizzing me on tactics. Graves was just following me around and half-jumping nervously every time something creaked.
“I do know things. He knows more things.” I eyed the stack of plates left over and popped the drain stopper in, reached for the dish soap. “You’re taking this awfully calmly.”
His face twisted up wryly. “It was amazing. It was like I could smell everything. Like the world was slow but I was moving at regular speed.” He set the empty box aside, opened up one that still held two pieces of pepperoni with extra cheese. “God. I never thought I could be this hungry.”
“There’s cereal, too, when you’re finished with that.” I stared at the bubbles rising in the sink, white froth. Stole a sideways glance at him from under my lashes, looked hurriedly back at the soap foam. “Graves? Thank you.”
He hastily swallowed. “For what?” Took another ginormous bite. His hair was a mess and h
is eyes glowed feverishly. The brighter green looked really nice on him.
“For everything. I mean . . . you didn’t have to.” You didn’t have to get me a cheeseburger. You didn’t have to hide me. You didn’t have to stick around or get me out of school today. You didn’t have to be . . . trustworthy.
“Hey.” He shrugged and grinned, cheese hanging from the corner of his mouth before he hooked it in with his tongue. “It’s not like I have anyone else, Dru. I figure we’re both in the same boat.”
Yeah. And it’s sinking fast. I paddled my fingers in the water. “So what happened to your parents?”
He tossed the half-eaten slice back into the box. “They didn’t want me. I bounced around in foster homes for a while, had some bad times. Almost got stuck in juvie because they didn’t know what to do with me. Then I figured, I’m smart enough to take care of myself. So I did some lying and some moving around, and made myself a plan for getting all grown up and never being helpless again. Ever.” His eyes narrowed and he shrugged, as if there wasn’t a world of pain hiding behind the words. “I’ve done pretty good, too. Mostly it’s arranging things so people just assume someone’s responsible for me.”
“Yeah.” I knew all about that.
There’s a fifty on the counter, Dru. And do your katas. But Dad loved me, and there was never any question that he wanted me. He would never have just dropped me off somewhere and abandoned me, would he? He’d always come back.
But I’d always worried. Always. And this time he hadn’t come back at all, had he?
“So what are we going to do before he comes back?” Graves eyed me, and I put the first three plates in the soapy water. Flipped the water off.
We. It sounded so simple when he said it like that. “We do the dishes. Then I show you how to ward the house—” I caught his wide-eyed almost-panic, and an unwilling laugh bubbled up in my throat. “Don’t worry. All it takes is imagining—it’s simple. We’ll go over it before Christophe comes back. He helped close up the house before he left, but it doesn’t hurt to do it again—and it doesn’t hurt to have you know how to. My grandmother said you should do it every couple of days anyway to keep it fresh.” It hurt a little to talk about Gran. Not nearly as much as it hurt to think about Dad, but close.
My brain returned to Mom, playing with the idea like a cat pawing a mouse. It couldn’t be true. Mom wasn’t a sucker, and neither was I. It was impossible. I went out in the sun like everyone else.
Including Christophe. He was out by day, too. Jesus.
“And then?” Graves asked, picking up a towel. I rinsed off the first plate and handed it to him. It was nice having him around; Dad couldn’t be bothered to dry dishes.
“Then we look in a few books and figure out if everything Christophe told me before he left is true.” Especially about loup-garou.
“Okay.” He stared at the plate, polished it in circles with the towel. “Dru?” He opened up the right cabinet, set the plate gently away.
“Hm?” I swirled my fingers in slippery soap-water. The patterns almost made sense if I unfocused my eyes. The touch was getting stronger. Gran had told me it might happen, but she hadn’t been too specific, and I hadn’t really thought much about what that might mean.
The lump in my throat wasn’t quite disgust and it wasn’t quite fear. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Svetocha. Part nosferat. Is he serious?
Well, we were going to find out. Funny how having something solid to work on gave me the sense of things being on track again. Not right—it wouldn’t be right again, not ever. But on track. Better.
Right enough.
“Am I still human?” Graves took the next plate after I rinsed it off, swiped at it with the towel. Scrubbed at it a little harder as color mounted in his golden cheeks.
Am I? “Yeah, sure. Of course you are.”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I felt like I wanted to kill him.”
You’re not the only one. I suppressed a shudder. “I’m not surprised. If he is what he says he is, you guys are pretty much enemies. Wulfen don’t like suckers. Or even anything that smells like suckers.”
That managed to prick his interest. “Is it like a big war between them?”
“Not exactly. They’re just . . . well, they’re like jocks and nerds. Or hyenas and lions. They coexist, right, but they’re different breeds and they don’t mix. And they’re always on the lookout for each other.” I paused. “A group of wulfen might help another group of wulfen or something else they don’t like against a sucker, and suckers sometimes kill stray wulfen, of whatever type. There are lots of types, like tribes, and the suckers are organized into tribes, too. Their allegiances shift, but the suckers never band together to take out wulfen, and the wulfen don’t really go after suckers unless it’s to avenge one of their own. So they have this kind of agreement: Each group doesn’t really hang out with the other.” I handed him a dripping glass and was kind of surprised. Guess I knew a little more than I thought. That’s a relief.
“Okay.” He nodded, dried the glass with finicky care, and put it up. “So. Warding the house. That some sort of witchcraft?”
What do you know about witchcraft? “More like folk magic. My Gran was a tooth-curer and hex-lifter out in the sticks back East. A wisewoman. You start throwing the W-word around and people get a little tense.” They still burn people in some places. Even here in the good ol’ US of A. There was that one town—
“I guess so. So what’s involved in this?” He looked far more interested than I’d ever seen him in school, and it did wonders for him. His face looked leaner, more defined and less babyish. Maybe it was the light through the kitchen window, since Christophe had looked pretty nice under it, too.
God help me, I’d just dumbed down everything Gran taught me into folk cures. She would have just said, A little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that, and never you mind what I call it if’n it works, while fixing him with that beady-eyed stare that had made more than one grown adult quail.
They hadn’t called Gran a witch, but nobody wanted to cross her. And they would come to her door at dusk or in the middle of the night, for cures or other things. Payment was in eggs or salt pork, or herbs, or a bolt of material Gran would make dresses or quilts from. Those quilts sold for a good price, too, since rumor had it that Gran Anderson’s quilts would keep lightning from the house or help make for an easy pregnancy.
I’d thought that was normal until she sent me down to the schoolhouse in the valley. And then later, after she died and Dad came to collect me, I’d found out other people didn’t take spitting in someone’s shadow as a deadly insult, didn’t wash their floors with yarrow, and had no idea how dark and inimical the night could be.
“Dru?” Graves looked a little worried. I came back to myself with a jolt and finished washing the spaghetti pot from a couple nights ago. All shiny-clean. “Some salt water. I’ve got my Gran’s rowan wand, too. And we’ve got a bunch of white candles. One of those should do fine.”
CHAPTER 22
They smell like dust, paper, old leather, and each one of them costs a pretty penny. There’s Aberforth’s Creatures of Shadow, Belt-Norsen’s Demoniaca, Pretton’s Encyclopedia of the Darkness, and Coilfer’s weird but totally readable Collection of True Folktales. Which I’ve scared myself with a number of times, because Patton Coilfer could write. Dad told me that he came to a bad end, something involving an African curse and a bunch of masks, one of which had belonged to the semi-famous Sir Edwin Colin Wilson.
That’s enough to give anyone who’s read True Folktales nightmares, let me tell you.
We had other books, but those were the first I pulled out. After a few seconds of thought, I pulled out another prize possession—Haly Yolden’s Ars Lupica, with its tooled leather cover and worn gilt-edged pages. Graves was making coffee—probably too weak, of course—while I spread them out in the living room and started flipping through indexes.
It’s funny, a lot of books that would be otherwise usefu
l don’t have indexes. You have to kind of shoot by guess, and that’s never fun. Especially when you start sneezing uncontrollably at the dust, or when you have to find something in a hurry. The only thing more annoying is having to go through microfiche. Real microfiche, not just the electronic captures of ’fiche they’ve been doing whenever they have funding lately. Nothing like scanning ancient newspapers on a ’fiche reader to make you feel old and dry. And give you a headache like a mule kicking in your skull.
I had to go through a couple of different spellings (dhampire, dhamphir, dhampyr) before I found djamphir and figured out they were all basically the same thing, and when I did, I settled down for some scanning. True to form, Coilfer was the best written and most useful of the four.
The djamphir—he spelled it the way Christophe had pronounced it—was a half-human vampire killer. Some had a thirst for blood; most were rumored to have bone problems. Lots of them were twins, but girl twins were never mentioned. Just boys, like a lot of other things in the books about the Real World. It’s like girls are invisible.
Anyway, they were supposed to be often born without bones, and most of the legends were from the Balkans. If djamphir survived to adolescence or adulthood, they hunted wampyr or upir—suckers. Suckers had the hots for human women in a big way, and often bred with them. The result of those unions were djamphir, and once there was a taint of sucker in the bloodline, there were always djamphir, no matter how many generations passed.
The half or quarter or whatever bit of wampyr in them made djamphir good vampire hunters. They were always paid whatever they asked for, in cattle, clothes, or “even women.”
Yeah. The Real World isn’t big on feminism.
Djamphir were long-lived, possibly immortal—if the suckers didn’t hunt back. But a lot of the suckers did. A lot of them killed their own part-human progeny, too. With a vengeance.
I had to sit back and think about that for a moment. Ugh. That’s awful.
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