Dark and Stormy Knights

by P. N. Elord

  Do it quick, just in case.

  The stake was hissing, the wood twitching as what was left of the one who had bitten him jerked slightly. There might have been some life left in the disintegration, but the hawthorn immobilized it. Hate rose bright and sweet in Rookwood’s throat.

  The kukri sang free of its sheath. The thing twitched.

  “You bit the wrong cop, Chisholm.” His voice sounded strange even to himself. The soccer field was a long, flat dance floor, rain flinging itself down in needle streaks. He lined up the kukri. It flashed down in an arc of silver, and the head was hacked free. More twitching as nerve death took the body, and Rookwood tilted up his face to the rain.

  It was over. Finally over.

  Except it wasn’t. He wiped the water out of his eyes. Hot trickles had threaded his cheeks. They were different from the scorching trails of blood down his ribs, soaking into his jeans. They vanished under the intensifying rain, curtains of it suddenly pounding the field and his shoulders, slicking his hair down.

  Amelia. I promised to go back.

  He owed the widow an explanation, at least. And to tell her she was free.

  But what if Fann’s bitten her, too?

  He told himself not to worry about that just yet.

  Rookwood cleaned off his kukri. The hawthorn stake slid free of the sludge of corruption, the slurry no longer even recognizably humanoid. The veil over the night retreated. And he felt like himself again for the first time in six goddamn years, since Chisholm had first handed him an envelope of cash and the whole dirty seduction had begun.

  Yes, he owed her an explanation. And maybe something more.

  The sob caught him by surprise. He bent over, his arms wrapped tight over his belly, the claw marks stinging as they slowly closed. Rookwood locked the sounds behind his tight-clenched teeth, hunched like an old man over the smear of rotting tissue killing the grass underneath it, open eyes staring sightlessly at the crystal gilding of rainwater on every surface.

  It wasn’t crying, he told himself. It was relief. There was no weakness in relief.

  But he did not believe it.

  The widow’s house blazed with light in every window. As soon as he stepped through the ruin of the French doors again, he knew something was awry.

  His boots crushed the carpeting in the master bedroom upstairs. Clothing was pulled out and scattered, a smudge of faintly tainted blood on a white coverlet. Her window faced south, blinds yanked up and scratch marks on the sash outside.

  It must have been the very window her husband had bobbed outside, pleading to be let in. His wet skin chilled at the thought.

  She wasn’t upstairs, or down, or even in the cellar, where the aroma of corruption lingered. The silver SUV was gone, and a mug lay shattered on the kitchen floor. It was a blue-glazed coffee cup, in pieces.

  Shit. I told her to stay here! He checked the rooms again, but she was completely, utterly gone.

  Any chance he had of breaking the office building downtown had vanished with her, too. Goddamn it. Her husband must have had a security pass and key codes, but his desk was open and she’d left paper scattered on the floor. There went his chance to get the last of the bloodsuckers. Six months of work and an almost botched operation.

  Well, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have time.

  Before he left, then, he turned off the lights. He stood for a few moments in her dark kitchen, looking at the imprint of her body on the broken wall. She was damn lucky to still be alive.

  I was bait for you, too.

  He hoped this wasn’t her last surprise.

  He’d known Molstein was gone. There was nothing in the papers, but Rookwood still had a few contacts left on the force. His old partner had disappeared, last seen at midnight outside a deli on Thirty-fourth.

  Two blocks away from Briggs, Fann, and Chisholm’s offices.

  Rookwood went home and eyed the Scotch on his desk, put it away.

  The Thirst retreated. It didn’t go away, but with Chisholm gone it didn’t taunt his every waking moment. He actually felt halfway decent and could hold down cooked steak and cheese again.

  He needed a jolt of the red stuff once a week instead of every day. He prowled his office, and some of the widow’s money went for rent. He was in the clear.

  Cases trickled in. A poltergeist on Seventh Street, a collection of dry cleaners being extorted by a gang of werewolves, a man looking for his vanished lover. The last case had nothing weird about it, straight-up breakup work. The lover didn’t want to be found, but Rookwood kept the money anyway.

  He kept hearing her in the back of his head. I was bait for you. . . . You don’t understand, Mr. Rookwood. . . . Do they always scream like that? That glossy hair, and the way her lips pulled back from her teeth when she shot Briggs in the head.

  It took another rainy night, cars shushing by outside his window and the bottle of Scotch singing from the drawer he’d hid it in, before he realized what her last surprise might be. The newspaper lay open on his desk, the local section barely glanced at before something caught his attention and he froze, staring at the black-and-white print:

  “. . . since the closure of Briggs, Fann, and Chisholm early last month, after a fire that gutted their offices.”

  The article was about a sudden dearth of criminal defense lawyers and a rash of arson involving their offices. It didn’t take a genius to figure out most of them weren’t on vacation or visiting Aunt Mabel. Of course, the real story wouldn’t be in the papers, but there was enough between the lines to sit him bolt upright in his chair, the taste of copper in his mouth and his pulse racing like a stock car.

  Holy shit. His hands turned into fists. She learns quick.

  Five minutes later he was out the door, sliding through the wet neon light. He hailed a cab at the corner, sat in a fug of cigarette smoke and fogged windows, and tipped the driver too much as he climbed out on Twenty-third.

  The office building was a shell of itself, yellow crime scene tape fluttering. Rookwood stood across the street with his heart in his mouth, staring at the wreckage.

  Yes, a quick learner. He wondered how she’d taken care of Fann—the old boy was tricky, and even without his legs he was a formidable opponent.

  So formidable Rookwood had been working the best way to get at him inside his fortress-building. The same building that was a charred shell right now.

  Goddamn, girl. What did you do?

  Of course the widow would have visited the offices during the day. Of course she would know the layout and have her husband’s access to the keypads, the magnetic keys, the state-of-the-art systems. Of course she’d be allowed in as the wife of an almost partner, and she’d get past the daytime bodyguards because of her scent of burning.

  She’d probably come back and taken care of Fann early. He wouldn’t put it past her.

  There was nothing to do here, but he poked around anyway. The reek of corruption had faded, and the Thirst didn’t tingle, warning him of danger.

  He caught another cab back home. Dawn was coming up as he put his key in the lock and paused.

  The door was unlocked.

  Had she been waiting for him to go downtown? He hadn’t even felt someone watching.

  His office held a ghost of perfume. Rich, brunette, with a tang of ash. On his desk, placed precisely in the pool of yellow light from the lamp, was a fat white envelope. He peeked in—five thousand in crisp hundred-dollar bills. And a note, on paper that smelled like her. The same clear schoolgirl hand she’d used to label the map to her husband’s grave.

  Mr. Rookwood,

  Enclosed please find the remainder of your fee. I hope things are even between us now. I have learned a lot since we last spoke. I think I will be continuing the work.

  Sincerely,

  Amelia King

  P.S.Thank you.

  “Goddamn,” Rookwood whispered to his empty office. “Goddamn.”

  There was no reply except the rain.

  Lilith Saintc
row was born in New Mexico, bounced around the world as an Air Force brat, and fell in love with writing when she was ten years old. She currently lives in Vancouver, Washington, with two small children and a houseful of cats. Her Web site is www.lilithsaintcrow.com.

  GOD’S CREATURES

  by CARRIE VAUGHN

  Cormac waited in the cab of his Jeep, watching each car that pulled into the rest area on I-25 north of Monument. So far, none of them looked like the one he was waiting for. A lot of truckers stopped here, with a few road trippers thrown in, all shapes and sizes. McNeill would stand out, when he made his appearance.

  Forty-five minutes after he was due, the aggressively souped-up pickup truck veered off the freeway and came up the lane. It had oversize tires, lights on the rollbar, a gun rack—empty for now—in the back window, and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. McNeill was that kind of asshole.

  Cormac stepped out of the Jeep; McNeill saw him and swerved to park a couple of spots down. The guy climbed out of his truck and dropped to the ground. He was tall and stocky, wearing worn jeans and a flannel shirt over a white tee. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t cold in the winter air, but he was shrugging and tense, trying to keep warm. Cormac waited for him.

  “You’re supposed to be keeping your head down,” Cormac said flatly, prodding on purpose, knowing it would piss McNeill off.

  “What? My head’s down.” He looked around, frowning, appearing smug because there weren’t any cops in sight. “What’s your problem?”

  “Registration sticker on your plate’s expired. That’s like waving a flag at the cops,” Cormac said, nodding toward the back end of the truck.

  “And I don’t give a fucking cent to an illegal government.” He pulled himself straighter, as if he were daring Cormac to make a big deal out of it.

  Yeah, McNeill was one of those. Didn’t seem to care that the cops wouldn’t get you on the weapons stockpiles or the conspiracy charges. They nailed you on back taxes and traffic violations. You covered your ass on the little things as the price of doing business. But that was why McNeill was a go-between and Cormac did the heavy lifting.

  “What’s the job?” Cormac said.

  He’d gotten a call two days ago. A rancher he’d worked with before had some trouble—Cormac’s kind of trouble. They both knew McNeill, who spent a lot of time traveling around the state, so he sent McNeill with the details you didn’t talk about over the phone and the down payment. McNeill didn’t know what exactly Cormac did. He probably assumed he was some kind of hit man.

  Which was mostly true.

  McNeill went back to his truck and returned with a manila envelope, which he handed to Cormac. He took only a brief look inside, finding a page of description and a business-sized envelope, thick with cash. There’d be ten hundred-dollar bills. He wasn’t going to count it out in the open, but he did pull out a bill and hand it to McNeill for payment.

  “Thanks,” McNeill said, shoving the hundred in his pocket. “Good luck, man.”

  Cormac had already turned back to the Jeep.

  He arrived at Joe Harrison’s ranch in Lamar early the next morning. The old man was waiting for him on the front porch of the ramshackle house. The two-story building was probably close to a hundred years old. It needed a new roof and a coat of paint at the very least. But with a place like this, any extra money the family earned went right back into the ranch. The barns and fencing would get repairs before the house did.

  “Thanks for coming,” Harrison said as Cormac left the Jeep and walked down to shake his hand. The rancher was in his sixties, his face furrowed and weathered, tough as leather from spending his life raising cattle out here. The kind of guy who was more at home with barbed wire and baling twine than a comfortable chair and a TV set.

  “Let’s take a look,” Cormac said.

  Harrison opened a gate in the fence, and they rode in Cormac’s Jeep, straight across the prairie for about three miles. Harrison navigated by landmarks, pointing to show Cormac the way.

  “There, it’s right there,” Harrison said finally, and Cormac stopped the Jeep.

  Harrison led him to a spot where stands of scrub oak followed the contour of the hills, bordering the open plains. A carcass lay here, partly sheltered by the wind, flattening the grass. About a week old, Cormac guessed. The steer, a typical rust-and-cream-colored Hereford, had been savaged, its gut ripped open from sternum to tail, its face and tongue torn out, its throat flayed. Scavengers had been through since then—scraps of hair and bone radiated out from the remains. Most of what was left was leathery skin and hair over a rib cage and a leering, ragged skull.

  “The second one’s about a mile that way,” Harrison said, pointing again. “And we had another one just last night.”

  They returned to the Jeep and drove east a mile or so. Cormac didn’t need directions this time; he spotted the vultures circling overhead. When he pulled up near the spot, a pair of coyotes ran off, then hunkered down in the long grass, waiting to return to their meal in peace.

  The other carcass had been dried out and picked over; it hadn’t smelled like anything. The rotten, bloody stink of this one hit Cormac as soon as he left the Jeep.

  “The others looked just like this one?” Cormac asked Harrison, who nodded. The rancher winced, turning his face away from the stench.

  This one had been gutted like the other. Savaged, but not eaten. Guts and organs spilled out, pink flesh glistened on bones. The scavengers had had a meal handed to them. The weather was too cold for flies, which would have been swarming.

  This was why Harrison had called him. They weren’t dealing with a predator that killed because it needed to eat. This was a pure killer, and it was only a matter of time before it attacked someone. Cormac had seen this pattern before. A beast like this might start out with the best of intentions. It might flee to a distant wilderness, where it would kill a few rabbits or maybe a deer with no harm done. But then it would start to slide. It couldn’t stay away from civilization forever. It would still have the bloodlust, but it wouldn’t bother fleeing. Inhibitions would fail; it would struggle to keep from hurting anyone, but someday it would slip. It would attack livestock. Then it would finally give in to instinct and kill the human beings it hated because it was no longer one of them.

  Cormac had to find the thing before that happened. Full moon was still a week off, but that didn’t matter when one of them went bad. They could change anytime they wanted and did mostly when they lost control.

  “You have any idea who’s doing this? Anybody notice any strangers around here? Someone who might be camping out? Or has someone in town started acting funny?”

  “If I had any idea who it was, I wouldn’t need to call you,” Harrison said, frowning.

  Cormac stepped around the kill, looking for tracks, for the pattern of wolf pads as big as a man’s face, with the matching puncture marks of claws. The winter had been dry so far, and the ground was rock hard. He might not have seen anything among the carpet of dead grasses, but werewolf claws were sharp, and he found the little holes in the ground, as far apart as his spread hand. He threw his keys to Harrison. He’d left his rifles in the vehicle but had a semiautomatic handgun in a shoulder holster, hidden under his leather jacket. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Give me the afternoon, I’ll let you know.”

  Harrison drove off in the Jeep, and Cormac followed the tracks.

  The wolf could have run for miles. Cormac might be hiking all day—or at least as long as he could keep following his quarry. But for the first couple of miles the trail was clear; he found prints from one stride to the next, and on. The thing was headed in a straight line. Straight for home.

  He reached the edge of the property, where Harrison was waiting at the Jeep. Cormac waved at him and kept going. The immense wolf tracks followed the ranch’s dirt driveway, then paralleled the highway, back toward town.

&nb
sp; So it was someone from town, not some recluse cut off from civilization. That made it worse. This was civilization gone amuck. A werewolf could only follow instinct, which would drive it back home, wherever that might be. A monster might kill its own family and not even know what it did. Cormac had to find it first.

  Brick-dry prairie along the highway gave way to empty, weed-grown lots, dirt roads, then cracked pavement, then sidewalks. Weeds gave way to lawns and welcoming rows of houses with porches, screen doors, and family cars outside. This all gave Cormac a sense of foreboding, because he was still following the same tracks, sparse now but sure in their direction: the puncture marks of claws in garden soil, torn-up tufts of grass. He’d lose the trail on pavement but find it again after hunting along the margins of lawns. The trail was straight enough that he wondered if he’d find a man at the end of it, staring back at him with a wolf behind his eyes.

  What he found, when the prints and claw marks ended, was an oblong of pressed earth against an old brick building—the kind of shape a person might have made if he’d curled up and gone to sleep right here. The building was big, three stories, probably built around the turn of the last century. It might have been a schoolhouse. Why had the wolf come here?

  There were no human footprints to follow; the distinctive claw marks had disappeared. Finally, he lost the trail.

  He expanded his search, took in the area. The tall brick building seemed to be the center of a complex. One of the other buildings was definitely a school, like the kind built in the 1960s—low, one story, a flat roof, a grid of windows. Construction paper artwork was hung on the windows in one classroom.

  Across a lawn stood another antique building, this one with a high, peaked roof—a steeple with a cross on top. He went around to the front and read the stone marker there: Saint Catherine’s.