A Wolf at the Door: A Jesse James Dawson Novel

by K. A. Stewart

  A huge mirror surrounded by lights crowned a low table on one side, and curiosity made me go check out the pictures tucked around the frame. Gretchen and friends, mostly, Dante appearing in more than half of them, the only sign of the passage of time being the changes in his hairstyle and color. Tai and Bobby were there too, though usually standing sternly in the background, only caught on film by accident. Other people, some famous, some not, all with plastic smiles for their best friend of the moment.

  One picture, down toward the bottom, was a school photo of a young blond girl. At first, I thought it was an old one of Gretchen, but looking at the year on it, I realized it had to be the sister. The one who was getting married. Because I’m pushy at heart, I moved the picture up higher on the frame, letting it set at eye level. Maybe seeing that would change Gretchen’s mind about her sister’s nuptials.

  On the low table, practically hidden in all the tiny pots and cakes of makeup and hair frillies, I found a small box of safety pins. That’d do nicely. And in her private bathroom, I found a box of bandages and some antiseptic. Perfect. First Aid Man, that’s me.

  Gretchen was sitting up when I returned to the living room. “What are you doing?”

  “Little test. Just to make sure we’re all who we say we are.” I fished a safety pin out of the box, opening it. “Who wants to go first?” No one was gonna volunteer, but Gretchen and Dante watched closely as I crouched at Tai’s side and jabbed the big Maori in the pad of his thumb. He twitched, grumbled, but didn’t wake up.

  A drop of dark red blood welled at the pinprick, and I swabbed it and bandaged it like a good little nurse. “Me next.” Grabbing another pin, I gave myself the same treatment, showing off my bleeding finger to Gretchen and Dante for verification. “See? All human here.”

  “Why exactly are we doing this?” Gretchen offered her hand, and I stabbed her with a fresh pin.

  “Because I think I know what that thing is that’s been attacking us, and if I’m right, it shouldn’t bleed. Shouldn’t be able to bleed.” A droplet of blood welled up on her finger, and she stuck it in her mouth in lieu of a bandage. We both turned to look expectantly at Dante.

  “Really?” When we just kept looking at him, he grumbled and held out his hand. “Why is the black man always the suspect?”

  Gretchen chuckled, resting her head on his shoulder, and I jabbed him in the finger. For a heartbeat, nothing happened, but just when my adrenaline was about to kick in, a tiny bit of blood seeped to the surface. “Congrats, Dante. You pass.” I blotted it away with a tissue, then handed him a bandage.

  A knock sounded at the door, which brought Tai immediately awake. “Oh good, room service is here.”

  I blinked at him. “I stab you in the hand, you don’t wake up. But one hint of food, and you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” He just grinned and shrugged at me as I got up to answer the door. “Hey, Dante? Burn those tissues, okay?” Blood wasn’t something I wanted just lying around for any old demon or spell caster to pick up. Even I knew that much.

  “Yessir.”

  Spencer was waiting at the door when I opened it, and he grinned as he pushed the cart in. “Hey, Jesse Dawson! How’s it going?”

  “Not bad, man, yourself?” I stuck my hand out to him, and when he reached to shake mine, I stabbed him in the back of the hand with the safety pin I’d palmed.

  “Ow!” I held him until I saw blood, then let go. “What was that for?”

  “Amusement.” I could be nice, though. I handed him a bandage.

  Instead of being pissed off—and if someone stabbed me with a safety pin, that’s exactly what I’d be—he got that look again, like he’d just seen a glimpse of the real Santa Claus. “You’re testing for something, aren’t you? Taking DNA maybe? Ooh! Implanting me with a microchip! No, wait, vaccinating me against an alien virus! Man, I gotta write this down…” He patted down his pockets until he found a pen, then scribbled some notes on our ticket. “I can totally use this, this is good stuff.”

  There are so many kinds of crazy in the world. Spencer was his own unique brand. “Just park the cart over there, man.” I pointed generally in the direction of the dining table.

  There was a tiny whoosh from the fireplace as Dante incinerated the bloody tissues, and Tai barely let Spencer get the cart stopped before he started pawing through the plates.

  “We weren’t sure what you’d want, but I figured bacon was a safe bet.” He handed me a plate heaped with it, and my stomach gave a loud growl. It had been a long time since the mushroomy things at the party last night.

  “Bacon is perfect.” I stuffed several pieces in my mouth, then realized that Spencer was still standing there, staring at all of us. “I’m still not tipping you. Get the hell out.”

  With a sigh, he departed.

  “You know that guy?” Tai asked, and I just mumbled something around my mouth full of bacon. I wasn’t claiming responsibility for Spencer, no how.

  Before I could gorge myself completely on my breakfast, something buzzed in my jeans pocket. I hadn’t thought about my phone in so long, I’d forgotten I even had it. I’d also forgotten to call my wife for like two days. Oops.

  Taking the bacon with me, I retreated to the spare bedroom. “Hey, baby!”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line, and then Mira sighed. “I’m guessing from the sound of your voice that you’re perfectly fine. So now I don’t know if I should be relieved, or furious.”

  “I vote both. I deserve it.” I flopped on the bed, munching on my breakfast. “I am so sorry, baby. Things got a little nuts out here and I completely lost track of time.” Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure what day it was. Not good, when we had a mysterious New Year’s Eve deadline breathing down our necks.

  “Yeah, we saw.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been all over the tabloid shows this week. Beating up paparazzi, going in and out of hospitals and dance clubs…. That was a nice silk shirt she bought you, by the way.”

  Inwardly, I cringed. I could only imagine how those pictures looked. “Would you believe I’ve destroyed that shirt already?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me any.” She hesitated a moment. “You are okay, right?”

  “Fine and dandy. The hospital trip wasn’t mine.”

  “Oh. That’s good, I guess.”

  There was something important I was supposed to ask her, but it took me a few minutes to remember what it was. “Oh! Hey, do you know any more about…y’know.”

  “No. Test is still negative. I’m still late.”

  “Maybe you should go see Bridget. I mean, what if something’s wrong?” That thought chilled me clear down to my core. What if something was wrong with Mira? What if it was something really bad?

  “She knows. We’ve talked about it. If it goes on much longer, we’ll do something. Right now, it still falls into the realm of stress or just plain getting older.”

  “You’re not getting older. You’re what, like twenty-two?” That at least earned me a chuckle from my thirty-something wife. “Hey, you know I love you, right?”

  “Yeah, Jess. I know. I love you too.”

  We spent a few minutes catching up on Annabelle’s antics and Estéban’s high school drama. I hadn’t realized until that moment how homesick I was. God, I wanted to see my family, smell my little girl’s hair, kiss my wife. I didn’t want to be out here in La La Land anymore.

  My phone started giving me the sad little chirp to remind me that I hadn’t charged it in forever. “Baby, I gotta go, my phone’s dying.”

  “Okay. Jess, please be careful out there. It’s making me nervous.”

  “Hey, you know me. I’m always careful.” I’m not sure she heard me, though, as that was the moment my phone gave up the ghost. Dammit. I didn’t get to tell her good-bye. At least I’d snuck an “I love you” in there before it croaked.

  Not saying good-bye felt like bad juju, and I couldn’t shake the feeling as I returned to the
living room.

  “So what do we do now?” Gretchen looked at me expectantly.

  “We do nothing. I am going to go wander through the hotel and stab more people with pins.”

  Tai raised a brow. “Seriously? You think they’ll let you do that?”

  “It’s Hollywood, right? And I’m with Gretchen Keene, right?” I nodded toward the movie star in question. “According to her, that means I can do anything I want and no one will say anything.”

  And apparently, I could. You’d think someone would object to a random guy strolling through the hotel kitchens, poking people with safety pins, but I got surprisingly little resistance. Well, until I got to the head of hotel security. I guess poking him with a pin was probably not high on my list of smart acts.

  The nice security men delivered me back to the suite, and Tai, who answered the door, promised them I would be on my very best behavior from then on. Before I could come in and take my lumps like a good boy, Gretchen came out the door, obviously dressed for a trip out.

  “Um…where are you going?”

  “Your friend Ivan gave you the address, right? For the translator?”

  Tai gave me a look that said he’d been trying to talk her out of it for some time now, obviously with zero success.

  “You realize that there is a big mud man out there who seems to know your every move, right? You’re safer here.”

  Her jaw firmed obstinately. “Look, whoever sent this golem thing, it’s because of my contract. If I’m going to defend myself against whatever this is, I have to know first and foremost why it’s here and what it wants.”

  Dammit. When the girl’s right, she’s right.

  “Okay, but we’re all running on fumes right now. Let us get some rest and we’ll go this afternoon. Fair?”

  I think she still would have balked if Dante hadn’t backed me up. “He’s right, Boo. You look like death warmed over. A few hours of peaceful sleep in a safe place…you’ll thank me later.”

  Finally, Gretchen relented, allowing Dante to slip her purse off her shoulder. “Okay. But I’m setting an alarm. Four hours, then we go.”

  That, I could live with. Hell, I’d lived on a lot less for a lot longer.

  Dante left, mumbling something about appointments or something, and everyone else fell into a coma. I didn’t even mind that I was once again plastered to the leather sofa.

  My dreams, though…I hadn’t had too many bad ones since I banished the Yeti last fall. And this one wasn’t bad, per se. Just…odd.

  It was night, that much was certain, and as I took long strides out of a tunnel, the stars seemed unusually bright. Almost like they were fake, or like there were too many of them in the night sky for reality.

  Semi-conscious-me noted the oddity, but dream-me didn’t seem to care. I stepped out of the tunnel, feeling concrete give way to hard-packed dirt beneath my boots. The air still smelled of the heat of the day, of sweat and breath of people only recently absent. Dream-me was glad they were gone.

  I stepped from the tunnel (again, like I was on a perpetual loop) into an enormous open space. The dirt field spread out before me, silent and waiting. I was waiting too, I realized. Waiting for someone, or something. Deep down, I knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t coming.

  I stepped from the tunnel, and I could feel palpable fear beating at my back. Weariness, pain, anger…whatever was behind me had given all it could, and there was simply nothing left to wring out of it. It was finished.

  I stepped from the tunnel, and across the great open area, someone stood. Even with the unnatural starlight, it was too far away to see who it was. It was tall and slender, a black shadow against the blacker night (and I had to wonder, how could such a brightly lit night be black?). The next time I came out of the tunnel, the hard-packed dirt was empty again.

  I think I must have stepped from the mysterious tunnel a hundred times. A thousand, maybe. Over and over again in that endlessly looping dream, out onto an open field of dirt, beaten solid under thousands of tramping feet. I never figured out what I was waiting for, or if the distant shadowy figure was it. I never figured out what was waiting in the tunnel behind me, or if it was enemy or friend.

  I do know that when Tai’s hand grabbed my shoulder, jolting me awake, I came up swinging. My fist slapped into his hand with a resounding smack, and we both just blinked at each other for long moments.

  “Bad dream?”

  I played it over in my head again, then just shrugged. “I honestly have no idea.” My dreams had come true before. Well, just one dream, but it was enough to set a precedent. What the hell did this one mean? I had the last one for four years before it finally happened. I had to wonder if and when this one would pop out of my brain and into reality. Somehow, this one scared me more than the Yeti dream ever had, and I didn’t even know why.

  17

  I didn’t even know L.A. had a Chinatown, but sure enough there was one, and that’s where Ivan’s horribly scrawled directions sent us. We had to park the car and walk, and as we threaded our way down the crowded street, I felt like a tourist, gawking around at the ornately decorated buildings. Oddly, instead of it marking me as an outsider, I fit right in with the rest of the sightseers, everyone around us craning necks and snapping pictures in front of local landmarks. Like most things out here, Chinatown was geared toward the almighty tourist dollar, with flashy colors and music, gold leaf and neon. Twice, we had to dodge frantically dancing Chinese dragons, their puppeteers’ feet moving in sync beneath the thick fringed edges, and there didn’t even seem to be any special occasion warranting the display.

  I had a hard time picturing Ivan walking down this street, all severe in his black trench coat, a black mark on the carefully choreographed gaiety. Of course, I was rapidly coming to realize that I knew very little about the man himself. It was impossible to say what had drawn him down here to find this person he’d now sent us to locate.

  “Here. I think we turn here.” Gretchen led the way as we left the clamoring street behind. Tai and I spread out some, flanking her protectively as the voices behind us dwindled to nothing within a few yards. Now this, this was somewhere I could picture Ivan frequenting.

  I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a street or an alley. It was narrow, and clogged with Dumpsters and discarded paraphernalia from the surrounding businesses. No one would ever be able to get a vehicle down it. A thin trickle of water (we’ll hope it was water) ran from a gutter, down the middle of the uneven paving stones, and vanished into a sewer grate with a sad little tinkle of sound.

  No one was here, I realized. No employees sneaking out back for a cigarette break, no homeless people scrounging in the trash. No lost tourists, except for us. Goose bumps whispered along my shoulders, and I rubbed my thumb over the disk hanging from my belt loop. Around the edges, it was faintly purple.

  The doors along the walls were mostly padlocked shut, blank and anonymous, until we reached one that was not. A sign hung on the wall, written in Asian characters I didn’t recognize. It was a rather utilitarian sign, generic in its plainness. No hint of “welcome” about it, but no sense of “fuck off” either.

  The metal door itself was ajar a few inches, allowing the thick aroma of incense to escape into the dank alley. There was a light on inside, dim and flickering. Candles, maybe?

  “Do we knock?” Gretchen looked at me questioningly.

  “Oh, hell yes.” I didn’t know what kind of person might specialize in reading demonic script, but I was willing to wager that barging in on such a person unannounced would be hazardous to everyone’s health.

  Reaching past her, I rapped my knuckles on the metal sharply, and was rewarded with the faint tingle of a ward flaring. I had to smirk a little. The heady incense almost drowned out the distinctive scent of cloves, and I had to wonder if that had been done on purpose.

  Within, a voice answered in a language I didn’t speak, but the sound of “coming!” is pretty universal. Within moments, an elderly As
ian woman opened the door, smiling when she saw us. Her head barely reached my bicep, even petite Gretchen towering over her. Her graying hair was nearly white, pulled back into its tight bun, and her clothes were some kind of traditional garb, a small jacket and long skirt in simple fabrics. Not Japanese, I knew that much, but it didn’t look like Chinese either.

  “Um…hi. Ivan Zelenko sent us?” The old woman gave no indication that she recognized his name, or that she even spoke English. The deep wrinkles around her eyes only served to make them glitter merrily as she gestured us inside, and babbled something at us in her native language. I don’t think she cared that we couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Or, maybe she wanted it that way. For all I knew, she could be saying “Come inside, we’ll feed you to the monster in the back room.”

  Inside the small shop—at least, I assumed it was a shop; either that, or a junk heap—we picked our way gingerly through the narrow aisles, trying not to knock things off overburdened shelves that seemed to take up every spare inch of space. I saw greasy car parts on those shelves, mingled in with half-woven baskets, ancient, cloudy bottles of indeterminate contents, and several old rotary telephones. There were busted-up video games from years gone by thrown in with old canned foods that bulged ominously. The shelves were stacked to the ceiling, and I eyed several precariously balanced fans on the top as we made our way through. That’d be a helluva booby trap, for the unwary.

  Tai, as broad-shouldered as he was, was reduced to edging his way along sideways, and even I was having problems. The path had obviously been designed for someone much shorter than either of us. Glancing back over my shoulder, I told him, “If anyone offers to sell you a mogwai in this place, don’t buy it.” He laughed.