by John Conroe
“Home? Where?”
“New York, Zayka,” she said. I didn’t know what Zayka meant, but it had an affectionate ring to it, an intimate implication, and I found I wanted that link with the voice. “May I speak to the doctor, Chris? The one I heard before?”
He reached for the phone, apparently hearing my conversation as well as I could. “Hello, this is Dr. Peterson,” he said, confident yet puzzled.
“Dr. Peterson, I am Tatiana Demidova. Chris is my Chosen. Can you tell me anything about his condition?”
The doctor’s face paled a little at her name, so apparently he’d heard of her. “As near as we can tell, a high-power rifle round grazed his neocortex. The wound has healed completely, so it’s difficult to be sure. He is responding normally but has lost approximately two years or so worth of memories. His motor functions and reflexes appear good, but I can’t tell what would be normal for him, as he is neither Were nor Darkken. I don’t know if he’ll get his memories back, but then again, I haven’t been able to complete a full exam without being interrupted,” he said the last as an obvious admonishment. Apparently my hearing is pretty good, too, because I had no problem hearing her while they spoke.
“My apologies, Doctor. He is more important to me than life itself. Please do whatever it takes; the Coven’s resources are at your beck and call. Also, if I may provide some background, as I have been researching my Chosen’s lineage. Christian’s maternal grandfather was exposed to both V-squared and LV viruses in a Nazi war camp. Neither virus was able to gain a foothold, but they appear to have changed his DNA and consequently Chris’s. When Chris was exposed to my blood, the V-squared took hold in new and different ways. Our physician, Raj Singh, is available for consultation as well.”
“Very well, Ms. Demidova. Here is your… associate,” he said, handing the phone to Katrina, who turned and walked out, ignoring the hostile stares of the surrounding people. Dr. Peterson began to examine me again.
“Her voice was familiar to you?” he asked, holding my right arm and manipulating the digits of my hand.
“Yeah, but I can’t picture her face. Yet I could feel something as she spoke.”
“You may be feeling the mate bond. Vampires form a very strong bond with their mates… their Chosen. Yours happens to be with arguably the most important vampire on this continent, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.
“I couldn’t tell you, Doc, ‘cause I don’t know what any of this means, werewolves and vampires. Wolves that change into gargantuan bears. I know demons, that’s about it. Not this other stuff. It makes my head hurt.”
“You are trying too hard. You need rest… and food. Healing takes energy,” he said, turning to the leader, Ned, who answered him before he could ask.
“We will put him in a guest room, and my wife is getting him some leftovers from dinner.”
A woman came in almost as he spoke, holding a tray that sent odors directly to my nose and made my stomach growl and my saliva glands kick in to overdrive. I smelled beef, rare and tender, as well as some type of chowder and potatoes and some type of vegetables, green beans maybe.
She smiled at me as she set it on my lap. I nodded my thanks, but that was it, as my focus on the three filets became all consuming. My hand shook as I struggled to cut off a piece and get it into my mouth as fast as possible. The room was quiet for a moment as they all watched me eat, but then side conversations sprang up around the room. The intense family man and Ned, the leader, began to talk, and I focused my ears on them. They were discussing Stacia, who was across the room talking with the EMT, Coreena. The men spoke very softly. I was only able to hear them because I was almost in the center of the room.
“No, Kral, she’s not a purebred. She was bitten two years ago,” Ned said.
“You are certain? Absolutely certain?” Kral asked. “Because I saw her Change, and it was one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. Then after running a few hundred meters, she Changed again! Like it was nothing!”
“Yeah, well, I saw her do a controlled paw Change too. I couldn’t do it as well as she could,” Ned replied.
“My Darina said she was fooled by her scent into thinking she was a born were. That has never happened. Ned, do you realize how this could help our people? I don’t know if it’s the purity of her LV strain or something else, but a bitten were that can fool my daughter’s nose and change faster than a purebred is nothing short of fantastic!”
There were a few other conversations about the beautiful blonde girl who appeared to be my friend, but those discussions had nothing to do with her werewolf attributes and everything to do with her human, female-type attributes. Those at least made sense. The leaders’ discussion didn’t.
I drummed my fingers of my left hand, trying to get my brain to work, but it wasn’t to be. I couldn’t stay focused. My attention shifted too rapidly. The taste of the beef was off, the red of that girl’s dress was wrong, the smells of food, cigars, blood (which was crusting in my hair), the growl of a deep voice, the slightly musty smell of vampires, the musky odor of werewolves, the fur of a giant bear under my fingers, it was all overwhelming. I focused on the last one and realized I was drumming my fingers on Awasos’s head. He didn’t seem to mind, but he was eyeing the last morsel of filet mignon on my plate. I popped it into his mouth without a second thought. Resting my arm on him and sharing food seemed automatic… natural. I went with it, as nothing else about me or around me made any sense at all.
The hostess came back, smiling as she took the tray of empty plates. “Malcolm, show Mr. Gordon to the Pine room, please,” she said to a young man who I had seen carrying out this or that order or command all evening. “You go rest, Chris. The doctor said you need some quiet and darkness.”
I won’t lie. It sounded blissful. The constant buzzing in my brain, the cobwebs, and the constant distraction of a thousand razor-sharp sensory inputs was making my head spin. I followed the young man upstairs, took a fast shower to wash off my own blood, and dressed in the sweats I found waiting for me on the bed. Then I fell back into the big puffy mattress, surrounded by pine paneled walls and the scent of balsam fir needles, and let the darkness take me.
Chapter 21
I awoke slowly, from strange, disjointed dreams that I immediately forgot. My lids were crusted with eye-boogers, and it took a while to get them fully open. Big plush bed, pine paneled room. For a full minute, I had no idea where I was. The window showed it was still dark outside. Then I remembered the big stone house, the party of people who could change into wolves, and a phone conversation with a voice straight from Heaven. The floor beside the bed rustled and a wall of fur rose up. I should have at least jumped at the sight of the big grizzly, but he felt like he was supposed to be there.
An open suitcase that hadn't been there last night was sitting on the floor. It didn’t look familiar, but a pair of jeans on the top of the clothes stacked inside it did. The case was a nylon duffle, vaguely military looking, the kind of bag that cops refer to as a go-bag. As in grab and go. I absently patted the big bear, Awasos, and made my way around his bulk to the suitcase. The jeans, two tee shirts, and a pair of shoes were definitely mine. Oh, and two pairs of the socks, along with a pair of gray cargo pants. The rest, I didn’t recognize. Clothing that not only wasn’t familiar but looked too fashionable to be mine.
I picked up a shoe to inspect its details and a knife fell out. It was a beat-up Emerson CQC 7 folder with a tanto-style blade, and I knew it like I knew… well, like I knew my name (but apparently not much else). Gramps had given it to me this past Christmas… no, it would be two Christmases ago, if the paper I saw was real. It was also the best thing I had seen since I found myself standing in the forest.
There was a soft knock on the door and at my, “Come in!” it opened to reveal the pretty blonde girl, Stacia, with a big tray of food.
“Hey, good morning. How do you feel?” she asked.
I hurried to take the tray from her, as it was difficult to maneuver around
the furry hulk on the floor who was suddenly just as interested in the food as I was. She laughed at his earnest focus and reached onto the tray to pull the cover of a big platter off, revealing a slab of beef the size of a city phone book. She set it on the floor while I set the suddenly lighter tray on the bed next to me.
“Somehow, I just knew the two of you would be starving,” she laughed. I was… starving that is. I hadn’t realized it till the smells hit me, but I was literally starving.
“Why am I so hungry?” I wondered out loud while uncovering eggs, toast, sausage, bacon, coffee, hash browns, and a really big bowl of oatmeal.
“You have a turbo-injected metabolism.”
“Why? Why am I like this? What the hell has gone on for the last however many years?”
“You eat, I’ll explain,” she said, leaning across my legs to snag a piece of bacon. She curled her legs underneath her by my other side.. She was wearing faded jeans and a white tee shirt that set off her tan and green eyes. Both the jeans and the shirt were form fitted, and I suddenly decided I had better focus my attention on the food and not her figure. I think she noticed.
She finished chewing and leaned over me again for more bacon. When she turned to look at me her lips were mere inches from my mouth. They glistened red and ripe. I realized I was staring and looked up at her emerald eyes. A different kind of hunger lingered there and she suddenly leaned into me and kissed me.
It was an incredible kiss, at least it seemed that way. I had nothing to compare it to. She pulled back abruptly, looking slightly flustered, maybe a little embarassed and very sexy. I could taste her lip gloss—cherry.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, but she finally shook her head a little, as if to answer an internal question that I couldn’t hear. “That was wrong of me Chris. I shouldn’t have done that. I will not use your memory to my advantage.”
“Are we… have we…?” I didn’t know how to finish.
“No, not yet. But I have wanted to kiss you for the longest time. You deserve to know what has happened over the last two years, so sit back, eat and I’ll explain.
Ignoring my discomfort, she launched into a detailed account of my life over the past two years while I worked my way through the mound of food, occasionally throwing a tidbit of sausage or bacon to the big beast on the floor who was decimating ten pounds of cow.
“So let me see if I got this right: I interrupted a Hellbourne who was killing a vampire princess. She sucked me near dry but gave me a dollop of her own blood to heal me. It did that, but a whole lot more on account of my grandfather on my mom’s side having spent time in an experimental Nazi war camp. Then she decided I was her boyfriend while the police found out I was an exorcist and assigned me to a secret unit after I helped a werewolf mom and her kid. We raided a drug lab and found a Hellbourne with a… Damnedthing? I freed it, and it was my new BFF. An Elder vampire kidnapped me and was all set to kill me, and the super spirit bear intervened. Then I caught my vampire girlfriend fooling around on me, only she wasn’t. It was actually mind control. I stormed off and ended up on some strange Homeland Security mission to Vermont where I stopped a rogue werewolf, only it managed to bite you before I killed it with my bare hands? Then I beat up three werewolves at the same time that were trying to haul you away to their gang or cult or something. The government decided to grab me for experiments, but the bear spirit stopped them, then the cultish weres got up in the face of my vampire princess and I went all badass on them. After that, I hunted the furry bastards down, working with the government, killing hundreds in some massive battle in Mexico, then Tanya and I worked as troubleshooters for the secret vampire organization that secretly runs the world, only we got caught up in politics and I had to flee down here with you ‘cause they’re a big bunch of haters. While we were here, we helped some children of the corn and closed a door to Hell, plus helped solve a serial crime. Oh, and I have a split personality that is like a cross between Hannibal Lector and Wolverine with a little bit of Chuck Norris mixed in. And you want to date me.”
“Yeah, sorta,” she agreed. “What do you think?”
“I think it sounds like a peyote-fueled comic book plot dreamed up by some author wannabe who couldn’t write bad B-grade movies for the Syfy channel!”
“Maybe a little,” she agreed.
“But it’s all true,” another voice said from the open doorway. Katrina was standing there, arms crossed, staring at Stacia, a frown on her face.
“There’s no way that’s all true,” I objected. Katrina pulled back from whatever mental evaluation she was giving Stacia and looked at me with an ever-so-slightly pitying smile. Instead of answering, she just wove around the furry hulk to my duffle bag. She glanced at both ends, then spun the bag to show me an emblem that was sewn on the far end. It showed a black robe-wearing reaper figure with a skeletal hand and a purple scythe. There were no letters, numbers, or words around it, but it definitely had a military unit look to it.
“This is the group emblem from your Loki hunting days. Only a couple dozen of these patches were ever made,” she said, as if some stupid patch was the trial-winning evidence of the century. If the patch fits, then you must acquit. It did shut me up as I studied it, though.
“We need to get going while it’s still dark,” Katrina said. “So get dressed. We’re heading out.”
“Where?” I asked.
“We,” she said, pointing to Stacia and then herself, “—came to an understanding last night. We retrieved all your stuff and today we’re taking that bad ass Volvo you drove down here back to the City. It’s either that or Tanya will fly down here and hunt your ass down. So go get dressed.”
That one was bossy, and I didn’t like her making decisions for me. But ultimately, I needed to get back to New York State and I needed answers, so their plan was as good as any. Whether I would stay in the City or head back to my family farm was another story.
I changed clothes quickly, putting on the familiar cargo pants and a black Glock tee shirt that I’d gotten from a factory rep years ago. As I pulled the tee over my head, I became aware of an odd necklace that I had been wearing without noticing. It was silver, shaped like a tear, and with an inky black gem bigger than a fifty-cent piece set in the center. I had no idea what it was or how I got it.
My borrowed sweats were folded and placed back on the bed that the two girls had made while I was changing. A little decorative pillow was lying on the floor, one of those useless ones that just sorta dress up a made bed. Stacia bent over to pick it up, which provided me with an amazing view.
She’d be better in the bed rather than making it, ran through my mind, the taste of her kiss still on my lips.
It was one of those instant sex thoughts that plague every guy under the sun. We get them all the time, and they don’t really mean anything. In fact, I think girls get them, too. But they are the sort of guess that is based on other experiences, so it made sense that the next thought was, How the hell can I know that unless I have had sex? Holy Shit! Am I not a virgin? Have I had sex? Which I can’t remember! Arghhhhh!
That, more than anything else, showed me just how much I’d lost to a split second and a .30 caliber piece of metal. I stared up at the ceiling and asked Him why for only the ten thousandth or so time in my life. Then I grabbed my bag in one hand and the empty tray in the other and strode out of the room.
“What the hell was that?” Stacia asked, still back in the room with the vampire.
“It looked like he stared at your ass and then maybe cursed God. Odd. I would think it would be another woman that might do that, not a guy?” Katrina wondered.
“That has happened,” Stacia admitted begrudgingly.
“Are you kidding? If I was put together like you, I'd crow about it night and day!” Katrina said.
“Maybe when I was thirteen. But then I realized I had simply won a genetic lottery but lost the luck battle in a whole lot of other ways. And once everyone starts treating you as just an object,
it’s hard to get them to stop. Besides, what are you talking about? You’re pretty as hell. You could maybe dress a little different, but that’s not big deal.”
“Really? You think?”
“Hell yeah! Just gotta move your wardrobe from high school to adult.”
“I’m not sure how to do that.”
“Oh, it’s not hard. I’ll show you,” the blonde werewolf offered the brunette vampire.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Chapter 22
We said our goodbyes to Ned and his wife, Rose, and their two daughters, who acted like I was their new favorite uncle or something. The big guy, Jep, got a little choked up as he almost crushed me in a man hug. I couldn’t remember saving his kid, but he definitely did.
We loaded our small amount of luggage into the Volvo, then the big wolf, and finally a five-gallon joint compound bucket that sloshed with water. “What’s that?” I asked.
