In Truth and Claw (A Mick Oberon Job #4)

by Ari Marmell

  Okay, that actually made sense. And even if he had seen which building, Varujan might not’ve been able to follow. If these other vampires were workin’ with a human warlock… Well, he’d been able to enter my office because it is an office, and maybe because I ain’t human. I’m not real sure how that works. But a mortal’s place? Invite only.

  “All right. Where was this?”

  “Is on or near 114th. Near lake.”

  That’d be Lake Calumet, then. And 114th…

  “That’s still a lot of doors to knock on,” Ramona grumbled.

  “I may have another option,” I said.

  This wasn’t gonna be fun for a whole lotta reasons, and it might not pay off at all. Depended on whether my suspect was who I thought she was.

  I left the succubus and the vampire in the alley, dug a nickel from my pocket, and went in search of another one of your goddamn torture devices.

  Took a few rings before anyone picked up. Since it was well after midnight, that was hardly surprising.

  “’Lo?”

  “Evening, Bianca. It’s Mick.”

  “Mick.” She was instantly awake, alert. I heard hope in her voice, if maybe less affection than I once had. “Have you found him?”

  “Not yet. I need some information from you. I’m sorry to be callin’ at this hour, but it’s important.”

  “This damn well better be part of your search for Fino!”

  “It’s connected,” I hedged.

  Probably. Maybe. Possibly in multiple ways.

  She sighed, and I heard her scrabblin’ for pencil and paper. “All right. What do you need?”

  “Those properties Fino mentioned? The ones that ain’t in his name, can’t be traced back to him?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He got any in or near Pullman?”

  She told me she’d hafta make some calls and I should get back to her. I let her go, so she could wake up people who’d be a lot less thrilled to hear from her this late than she’d been to hear from me. But when I dialed back in thirty minutes, she had what I needed.

  A house, older’n a lot smaller than the one they lived in. Hadn’t been used in years, so far as she knew. Wasn’t even sure what Fino’d meant to use it for.

  Just at the edge of Pullman proper. South of 114th. I knew where to go.

  And I knew who to expect to find waiting.

  * * *

  It’s funny. I don’t remember much about the house itself.

  I can tell you where it was. I know it wasn’t big, wasn’t ostentatious, just pretty nice. But anything else, anything specific? Color, shape, how many floors, how many windows? Just a blur.

  Maybe it’s ’cause I had so much else on my mind, so much else to deal with. Maybe it was a side effect of the wards I’d suspected—and then learned for sure—were there.

  But after everything that happened at that house, how it’s the exact spot, the exact minute, that so much started to go wrong… you’d think I’d remember.

  There were three of us walkin’ abreast down the street toward that house, a couple hours after midnight. Me. Ramona Webb. And Pete Staten.

  I’d been real hesitant about involving Pete any further. Even if he didn’t wind up in a wooden kimono over it, this whole shindig could land him in serious hot water. I wasn’t too eager to risk that. Plus, last time he’d dealt with a succubus, he’d been enslaved and nearly killed. It hadn’t been Ramona, or even her fault—well, not mostly—but I still didn’t feel great askin’ this of him.

  But I needed someone I could trust absolutely, and that someone hadda be human. Given who I figured we were up against, there was a decent chance of wards or other magics that could take me’n Ramona both outta the fight. Not for long, probably, but not long was still too long.

  So I’d sucked it up and asked him, and it says somethin’ about Pete’s loyalty—or maybe just his sanity—that he didn’t balk.

  Varujan? He was around somewhere, a bat or a patch of mist, the gore-mouthed bastard. But he’d announced, right around Kensington Station, that runnin’ down his fellow vampire for us was as much as he was willin’ to contribute. Sure, if this turned out to actually be the source of his “summons,” he’d happily jump back in, but until and unless we learned that for certain, “Is not my fight.”

  Fucker.

  We were maybe a couple blocks away, soaked to the skin, when Pete stumbled over a curb, picked himself up, and kept walkin’ like nothing happened. He wasn’t watching where he was goin’; he was watching Ramona.

  Come to think, my focus was startin’ to wander some, too.

  “You’re doin’ it again.”

  “What?”

  “That thing. With the emotions and the, uh, blood flow.”

  She stopped, ran a hand over her skirt to smooth out the wrinkles and brush off some of the rain that’d gotten in under her coat, which didn’t exactly help the problem any. “You do understand that it comes naturally, right?”

  “Still need you to do somethin’ about it, doll. Makes it hard enough for me to concentrate, let alone a certain someone else who’s had his conk fiddled with enough for one lifetime.”

  “I don’t hear Pete complaining.”

  “Me, neither,” Pete insisted dreamily.

  “Ramona, please.”

  “Oh, fine.”

  I felt the emotional pressure ease up. Pete started blinking.

  “Tell me, Mick,” she said, “were you ever any fun?”

  “Me? I’m fun!”

  “Yeah, that’s our Mick,” Pete said. “More fun than a barrel of junkies.”

  I got his version of “cherubic innocent face” in trade for my glower. Not his best look.

  “I’m plenty fun, when it’s the right occasion! I’m chock fulla laughs!”

  “Oh?” Ramona smirked. “Is that what you’re full of?”

  Pete snickered.

  “Can we please get back to huntin’ vampires now?” I almost begged.

  Her rain-soaked hair flopped around her neck as she shook her head. “You see? There’s the problem. If that’s your idea of fun…”

  “More than this conversation, anyway.”

  We went on, the both of ’em chuckling.

  Lookin’ back, I’m glad they had that chance to laugh.

  The rain stopped right as we reached the house, a curtain parting on the next act. It still dripped from bare branches and a hundred eaves, the puddles sloshed with every step, and the wind occasionally rustled like the pages of a program, but otherwise the audience fell silent.

  “Still wish we’d waited until dawn,” Pete muttered, hand on his heater.

  I couldn’t really blame him, but we’d decided it was better to do this while Varujan could still chip in, if he deigned to bother, and while we wouldn’t have to deal with a street full of witnesses.

  Then again, a sudden screech from above as the shorter vampire appeared above the rooftops, bat-like membrane stretched under its arms, kinda felt like an additional argument for the “wait for daylight” contingent.

  “Ramona? Can you—?”

  “Eggs in the coffee.” Her voice twisted, her body changed, and with a sharp whoomp of air she lurched from the ground and soared upward to meet the creature, her own great wings no longer cramped and confined by alley walls.

  “Holy Christ,” Pete whispered.

  “This from the guy who turns into a wolf at the full moon.”

  “Go climb your thumb.”

  He stayed where he was, which was part of the plan. He’d come in squirtin’ lead if he had to, but until then we didn’t need a bull barging into a private house uninvited.

  Me? I sauntered up, poked the lock with the L&G until it didn’t have even a shred of luck remaining and completely fell apart inside, and pushed it open.

  A worm of mild nausea coiled itself through my guts. Yep, warded. Surprisingly light wards, though—they weren’t much fun, but I could push through ’em easy enough. Either she’d lost her tou
ch, was supremely overconfident, or she had a reason for holdin’ back.

  I really didn’t care for that last option. I tossed my wand to my left hand, drew my bronze-bladed sword with the right, and crept inside.

  The door opened into a long hallway, closed doors to both sides, and lit by a single bulb, old and yellow and dim. For a human in off the street, place woulda been only a couple steps better’n pitch black.

  Me, I could see okay. Well enough to know that the hall took a sharp right after this array of doors. Since I didn’t hear anything through the thin wood, I decided on movin’ ahead for now. I’d backtrack and start poking my schnozzle into the rooms if I didn’t find anything.

  No way Pete could see me from outside, even before I took that corner. I wondered how long he’d stand there, nervous and fretting, before he decided to play cavalry.

  So I took that corner—and there, in another short hallway as poorly lit as the first, I saw him.

  “Fino!” He started toward me, and I lowered the wand and the blade both, though not by a lot. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He didn’t say a word. Just kept coming.

  “Fino?”

  Step. By slow. Methodical. Step. No changes. No swaying. His arms didn’t swing. It was almost a lurch, like a brat just learning to walk, except he never came near to losing his balance.

  “Talk to me, pal.” But it was said entirely outta denial, outta my need to be wrong. Because I already knew full well there was nobody in there to talk to.

  He stopped a couple paces away, and I could see it now. His eyes, already goin’ milky, had rolled all the way to the left and stuck there. His jaw hung open, but also a little bit left. That musta been the side he’d landed on, and lain on for a good while, after…

  After he’d died.

  “Aw, goddamn it, Fino…”

  “You will not blaspheme here, creature!”

  The wards flared, high and hot, and everything was agony.

  Familiar agony.

  I recognized it even as it hammered me to the filthy carpet, as my gut roiled and every nerve screamed. If I hadn’t expected her, if she hadn’t announced herself with that bitter, furious, self-righteous screech, I still woulda known who was behind ’em.

  Quivering on my hands’n knees, refusing to take that last tiny sprawl to lie flat, I watched her drift into the feeble light, the axles of the old wheelchair squeaking like the ghosts of a thousand rats.

  Orsola Maldera.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She shoulda been dead.

  Whatever witchcraft had saved her wretched life from Fino’s Chicago typewriter that day, almost two years ago, in the unholy ruins of a holy place, it hadn’t come anywhere close to protecting her completely. She hunched in the chair, curled against it. Her head lay heavily to one side on a neck too shriveled and damaged to hold it upright. One arm hung limp, resting on the arm of the wheelchair. The other she held folded tight against a chest that, even obscured by layers of heavy blouse, showed concave pits where it had been shattered by flyin’ lead. Her legs were hidden under a thick quilt, but I couldn’t imagine they were in any better shape. A couple gallons of stale Le Jade tried and failed to cover the stench of unwashed flesh and piss-stained cushions.

  Her jaw sat just a touch crooked. Spittle flecked her parchment chin, dangled in strings from one corner of cracked lips.

  Doubt I sounded near as rugged, or even steady, as I wished I had, but I still managed to grunt out, “You’ve looked better, Orsola.”

  She cast a withering sneer down at me as I quivered on the floor near her feet. “You have not.”

  Ain’t sure what I woulda said next, done next, if Fino—or what’d been Fino—hadn’t stepped back into view, movin’ past momma and tromping off into the darkness on some errand or other.

  “Your own fucking son…” I think it came out a hiss.

  “Yes.”

  “He has a family, you—”

  “And he was mine!” Spit flew, and the witch spent a moment choking before she could continue.

  “He did this to me,” she went on, hoarse and near inaudible. “If it was deliberate, his soul burns now, as it should! If it was not, if you forced him or tricked him into it… then he is safe with Christ, beyond your reach, demon!”

  “I see you’re just sane as ever.”

  Woulda been so easy to let her disappear behind the pain, but I struggled to speak same as I struggled to gather my strength and push through the wards. I hadda get her to spill as much as I could, however much torture came with waiting for those answers.

  Plus, the longer I kept her jawin’, the better the odds Ramona or Pete’d come bustin’ in before she did somethin’ I’d hafta react to, no matter how bad off I was.

  “So you—what?—summoned…” The hallway swam. These were even stronger’n the wards she’d had on the house, way back when. I wondered how long it’d taken her, in her condition, to inscribe ’em. “Summoned a flock of vampires to Chicago to take your revenge? So much for all your protests about God and black magic and—”

  “Do not dare accuse me of such foulness!”Again she choked, and for a minute it was just the two of us sufferin’ together. There’s probably a moral in there. Neither of us gave a hoot.

  “I am devout,” she croaked, when her throat worked again.

  Devoutly nuts.

  Problem was, I believed her. And that was a problem because it meant, after alla this, I still had no notion of what was actually goin’ down in my city, who the bad guy I was gunnin’ for actually was.

  Well, the other bad guy. It ain’t as if Orsola didn’t still qualify, with honors.

  I wonder, if she’d had a chance to think on it, if she’da lied to me. If she’da realized the advantages of givin’ me a bum steer. But she was so incensed at the idea that anyone might think she’d resort to such profane magics—yeah, I know—that I never doubted every word she said was square.

  “I did not bring these abominations here, creature. I merely sensed their arrival and… borrowed one of them before its summoner could leash it. It serves me, now.”

  “You just happened to have the mojo to command a vampiric spirit? Somethin’ I didn’t even know was possible until a few days ago? Right. Pull the other one, sister.”

  I didn’t really doubt her, like I just said. I was proddin’. And it worked.

  “It was similar enough to what I already studied to wreak my revenge on you! It didn’t prove difficult to adapt.”

  Oh, great. So what had she been studying, exactly?

  “So that’s why it was attackin’ my pals? To draw me out?”

  She spat. “I know where to find you when I wish to. It attacked those foolish enough to stand by you for the same reason I cursed you with misfortune. To make you suffer, before the end!” Wasn’t just spit, now. A bubble of snot popped in her left nostril and hung, wobbling.

  Charming.

  “Too bad for you,” I groaned, almost standin’ and then collapsing again, “it ain’t gonna be around long enough to do me or mine any more hurt.”

  “Oh, yes, your demon harlot.” Again she spat. “Let her destroy it.” She smiled, showin’ a jagged yellow landscape not any more attractive than Varujan’s kisser. “It will be back.”

  “That’s not how… What’d you do?”

  “Do? I fed it, Oberon! Not blood, but hate, sacred and pure! I shared with it my own loathing for you, bonded it to you as I did my righteous hex! Let it die. It will find a new form and come for you, again and again! It, like my hate, is eternal!”

  Son of a barghest…

  Somethin’ else occurred to me right about then, somethin’ I’da wondered about minutes ago if I wasn’t half-blinded by pain, wasn’t puttin’ every bit of strength I had into focusing through it and learning everything I could from the whacky broad.

  Mainly, that she hadn’t tried to rub me out, or do anythin’ to me, while I was caught in her wards. That she seemed as eager to talk as I
was to keep her talkin’.

  That I wasn’t the only one stallin’.

  And I realized that for all her bravado and contempt, all the power she had—and maybe even the extra power I’d given her, in my head—she was just a badly injured little old lady in a wheelchair. Her wards, the ones that’d taken God-knows-how-long, were all she had; even if her mind was up to tossin’ around magics the way she used to, her body wasn’t.

  She hadn’t been ready for me to find her.

  Pretty sure I screamed out loud, not with pain—though there was plenty of it—but sheer effort. I squeezed the L&G until I thought my fingers’d snap, forced myself to concentrate. Shards of glass tore my thoughts to shreds, jabbed at the inside of my head, but slowly, real slowly, a trickle of fortune began to seep from the magic of the glyphs, through the wand, and into me.

  Drop by drop, the witch’s protections got weaker, and I got stronger.

  And she saw it. For everything else that went wrong that day, I’ll treasure the look on her mug when she felt the magics start to shift as much as I treasure any of the trophies and knickknacks in my special drawer.

  If I’d had the time, just a few more minutes, I’da had her.

  But I guess she’d shouted (mentally, not aloud), and same as he’d done nearly his whole life, her boy Fino came running.

  I heard a crash and a shatter—found out later he’d been packin’ her most important supplies in the back of his V-16 Caddy while she’n I had our little chinwag; she’d been preparing to vamoose since I’d first barged in—and then he appeared at a quick shuffle. Her chair was already driftin’ back, seemingly on its own, but slow. Soon as he had his dead mitts on the handlebars, though, he spun it around and they were gone.

  I wanted to follow so bad it almost drowned me, a need so deep and thick it had weight, it had taste. Even against the pain and the pressure of the wards, I crawled forward a yard or so without even realizing I’d done it. And again, if I’d had time…

  But the pain wasn’t subsiding fast enough, and even if I coulda climbed to my feet I’da gotten maybe two steps before I fell a third time. And already I heard, felt, the engine cranking from a garage that might as well’ve been leagues away.