Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

Her grip on my arm tightened painfully. “It is serious!”

  “I’m sure it feels like it but I’ve seen worse and—”

  “You don’t understand,” she growled. Her face began to stretch and elongate. “This isn’t the first time that I’ve been shot. I’ve taken bullets before! Worse than this!” She began to pant. “It never hurt like this though!” Her voice grew harsh as her vocal chords reconfigured with her changing anatomy. “I think I’m dying!” She began to choke and I watched helplessly as she convulsed in a growing pool of her own blood. It was time to think of the unthinkable.

  “Lupé, I’m going to give you some of my blood.”

  “No . . .”

  “It will heal you. If you’re dying, it can save you.”

  “No! It might change me . . .” She coughed again but seemed to master the spasms that wracked her body a moment before.

  I almost pointed out how ridiculous it was for a shapeshifter to worry about something changing them. “Change you how?”

  Her grin was tight and forced, almost like a death rictus. “That’s just the problem. We don’t know now, do we?”

  “It helped Deirdre.”

  “Deirdre . . .” A slight growl thrummed in her throat. “She was a vampire. Now we don’t know what she is. I’m a werewolf. We’re different.”

  “Were-different?” I echoed, trying to coax a smile out of her.

  She ignored the bait. “You shared your blood with her before you tasted demon’s blood. We don’t know how much more that has changed you since.”

  “It may not have changed me at all.”

  She gave me a look I could not interpret. “It changed you.” She reached out and gave my hand a little squeeze. “Ouch.” She released my fingers as if they had grown hot.

  More importantly, it might change her. Since my blood had defanged Deirdre, Lupé seemed concerned that her lycanthropy might be compromised. What did that mean? Did my beloved really want to remain a monster? Enough to chance death to do so?

  There was a break in the clouds as we came to a dirt road. I was unable to brace Lupé as we bounced between cavernous ruts: I was trying to dodge stray beams of sunlight that were piercing the windows on her side of the cargo area.

  “Talk to me,” she demanded, as the wagon bucked over twisted cypress roots and the smell of fetid water puffed through the moss-draped trees. “I need a little distraction right now!”

  “You talk to me,” I countered testily. Her color was better when she was riled. “Where did you go last night?”

  “Out,” she gasped. “For a run.” She didn’t mean jogging. “How could I sleep before the most important day of my life?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell if she was sincere or mocking me.

  “I thought the actual wedding ranked higher on the events list than the ritual ‘shopping for the rings.’”

  She shook her head and reached for my hand again. “The asking is the only thing that matters. You can bring the justice of the peace over to the house and we can say whatever words you want and have whatever rituals and symbols that please you.” She flinched and dropped my hand. “It is the asking that matters.”

  “Okay. But none of this justice of the peace/small, private ceremony in the backyard crap. We’re getting married in a church. With plenty of witnesses.”

  She shook her head. “I think I would prefer something private . . . intimate . . .”

  “You want intimate or safe? If we’re in a church, it grants us claims of Sanctuary and keeps the nasties away.”

  “Even if that were a hundred percent true—which it’s not,” she argued, “there’s no point in tempting fate.”

  “Actually, there is.” I had given this some thought. “If I am to be the Doman of New York, I cannot appear to be weak. I can’t skulk around and hide away in the name of security. I have to go out and face my enemies and show the undecided that I’m not afraid of the opposition—whether it’s political or homicidal.”

  “And look how well that turned out for an anonymous little shopping expedition,” Mama Samm interjected from the front seat.

  “It’s important that we have as many witnesses as possible,” I continued, ignoring her. “If I’m going to do any good in breaking this particular taboo, I have to do it right in their faces. A vampire marrying a werewolf! It can’t be a matter of rumor or hearsay. It’s important that I rub their faces in it!”

  I expected a debate over defining myself as a vampire. I wasn’t expecting the tide of anger that washed across her face. “What am I to you? Some sort of campaign stunt? A bureaucratic pawn?”

  “Aw, you know that’s not—”

  “You’re politicizing our wedding! My wedding! How dare you—”

  “Baby,” I pleaded, “I just want everyone to know that you’re going to be my wife, not my consort.”

  “Hold on!” Mama Samm bellowed. “We’re going off-road!”

  I grabbed Lupé and held her against me, trying to cushion her with my body as we began bouncing over uneven ground. She shrieked and stiffened in my arms. Blessedly she fell unconscious for the last ten minutes of our bone-jarring journey.

  * * *

  “Don’t tell me we’re going to find a doctor here.”

  It looked like someone had tried to back an old Airstream trailer into an ancient clapboard garage, angled it wrong, and ended up pushing both out onto a boat dock before the driver gave up and walked away. Circa 1964. Someone had then attempted to build on a couple of rooms and add windows. Maybe Bob Vila—if he had been extremely drunk.

  “Better than a doctor,” Mama Samm promised. “A traiteur.”

  I’d heard the word used before. It was Cajun for “treater” and meant a backwoods cross between a medicine man and a homeopath.

  A little, round man emerged from the shack as big, round Mama Samm emerged from the car. His tanned and weathered face split into a dazzling smile, his pearly teeth as white as his wavy hair and bristle-brush moustache. “Sammathea! What brings you out to see the Gator-man on the heels of such a big blow, eh?”

  “Trouble, mon ami,” she answered, her accent adopting a Cajun flavor as effortlessly as it had the Bryn Mawr tone just fifteen minutes earlier. “I got two in the back that be needing doctoring.”

  He followed her around to the tailgate and lost his smile as he looked from me to Lupé. “That one don’ seem so bad,” he said. “Strange—but not bad. But ma petite lupin, she in a very bad way, her! Let’s bring her inside.”

  The tailgate was lowered and I crawled out. Surprisingly, I could stand. More surprisingly, I could carry her into the shack unassisted. Lupé moaned and squirmed as I hefted her. “You be hurting her, you,” the little Cajun said as I hurried out onto the dock.

  “I’ll slow down.”

  “Non. It is you,” he said over his shoulder as he hurried ahead to open the door.

  The interior was a neat, clean, organized contrast to the train-wreck appearance of the exterior. I followed the little man, who hurried ahead to the kitchen. By the time I arrived he had hurriedly wiped down a Formica-topped table and put down towels as a makeshift surgery. Mama Samm appeared as I laid Lupé down on the towels. “I have your bag,” she told the Cajun, hefting an old leather satchel onto the counter by the sink.

  “More towels in the drawers,” he told her. “If you will sterilize the instruments . . .”

  I interrupted. “What can I do?”

  “You can sit down.”

  “Uh, well, actually . . . I can’t.”

  His moustache twitched. “Hmmm. Well, try to find a comfortable position and give me some room here, you.”

  I ended up hunched over the stove while I watched him probe Lupé’s wound. Twice he exited the kitchen, returning with small bundles of dried herbs and ancient glass bottles containing amber liquids in a variety of shades and viscosity. He irrigated the entry and exit points with multiple potions and she seemed to breathe easier. Still, his brow furrowed and he finally selected
a long, thin knife from the tray of freshly sterilized implements.

  “I am afraid I must retrench the bullet’s path,” he told us. “I can give her something for the pain but I may need you both to hold her still.”

  Whatever he gave her worked but she still stirred and moaned in her sleep as he probed her side with the long blade. More than once I asked him if he knew what he was doing. He answered only once, saying: “I done this before, me.” My other questions were met with grunts of vague acknowledgment.

  Reopening the wound should have intensified the bleeding but, curiously, the blade—which he frequently rinsed with a milky liquid—seemed to be cauterizing the flesh without heat. When he was done, he packed the openings with an herbal poultice and bandaged her tightly about the middle. “Carry her to the bedroom, you,” he said, “then come back and get up on the table.”

  “I can wait.”

  “No you can’t,” he insisted. “It may be too late, already.”

  I lugged Lupé into the back room of the shack and laid her out on the neatly made bed. She struggled in her sleep and cried out before I could make her comfortable. Reluctantly, I left her there and returned for my appointment with the knife.

  I reclined on my side while he probed the wound in my thigh. It should have hurt a lot. He used a sterilized buck knife to reopen the wound and then moved it around, deeper and deeper, probing for the bullet. Thankfully I remained numb from groin to knee but I found myself starting to sweat as he got closer to the femur.

  He stopped before touching the bone. “It’s gone,” he said. “Roll over on your stomach.”

  “What do you mean ‘it’s gone’? There’s no exit wound! Where could it have gone?”

  “Roll over, you,” he insisted. “Hurry!”

  I rolled but I wasn’t done with the subject. I opened my mouth to speak but found myself speechless as he jabbed the knife into my gluteus maximus. He exhibited none of the care or gentleness that he had shown before. The blade dug deep and he worked with a feverish speed that abrogated any thoughts of tender concern.

  “Sammathea!” he cried. “Champagne!”

  “Great,” I muttered, “what are we toasting?”

  “Second cabinet, third shelf,” he added as Mama Samm tried to maneuver around us. “I need a lavage.” In short order a bottle of unchilled champagne was poured over my butt while a surgical probe and a pair of tweezers dug deeper toward the seat of my problem.

  Mama Samm’s cell phone rang.

  “Talk to me, girl,” she said, picking up. “Mmhm. Good. Good. What did they say? That’s good. Does Miss Deirdre know what to say? Okay. Sure. You tell her that Mr. Chris is gonna be okay and Miss Lupé is startin’ to look better. Not until after the sun goes down . . .”

  “Ah! I have him!” he announced at length. The tweezers were held before my face, holding a small bloody pellet of metal.

  “We suspected as much when she wouldn’t stop bleeding,” Mama Samm said.

  “That’s not a bullet,” I said. “That’s a frickin’ beebee.” I may not have actually used the word “frickin’” as I was weary and angry and frightened for Lupé and coasting along the borders of shock. “An Uzi fires a nine-millimeter slug.”

  “This is all that is left,” the old Cajun answered.

  “I’ll tell him,” Mama Samm continued. “This takes the play to a whole new level. You need any help at your end? If you do, you talk to that Detective Murray and tell him Mama Samm said for him to run interference. Okay. What? Well, tell her that Mister Chris will be calling her soon. I gots to go. Later.”

  “It’s only a fragment,” I insisted. “There’s got to be more than that.”

  “Nothing big enough to pull out with tweezers,” he said.

  “It’s not lead,” Mama Samm chimed in as she folded her phone closed. “Olive say the police pried a slug out of the wall at the store. These bad boys, they be shootin’ with silver bullets.”

  * * *

  Lupé was very lucky. A head or heart shot—in fact any “killing shot” for a normal human being—would have been just as deadly to a lycanthrope where silver was involved. She had been doubly blessed in that the bullet had passed through her. Still, the wound had resisted healing until it was properly cleaned and the tainted tissue excised. A werewolf could sicken and die from a mere flesh wound if the bullet remained in the body long enough. Her poisoning was mild and her color already better by late afternoon. I pulled a chair up to her bedside and sat with her until her eyes fluttered open.

  “How you feeling, babe?”

  “Like Socrates after the hemlock.” Her smile was wan but her warm, dark eyes were clearing. “How about you?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say that I feel pretty damn good. Apparently vampires aren’t allergic to silver.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Actually, they are.” Her slight frown grew into a wide smile. “Which means that, whatever you are becoming, you are becoming something else.”

  I sat there, stunned. “Really? That’s great . . . I think . . .”

  She gazed up at me, her brow starting to wrinkle again. “You ‘think’?”

  “Well, it’s good news—sure. But remember how everyone was hot to put me under the microscope when I first started changing? After we came up with an answer of sorts, things started to cool down . . .”

  “You have,” she said dryly, “a curious perspective on what ‘cooling down’ actually means.”

  “Look, I know this sounds a little like the glass is half empty in the face of good news—and maybe I am being a little jaundiced when this would appear to give me a little more of an edge—”

  “Jaundiced. Now there’s a nice turn of phrase.”

  “—as I head up to New York to face down the opposition. But if everyone starts thinking of me as a lab specimen instead of the new Doman of New York, there won’t be a hole deep enough for me to hide in.”

  “Poor baby,” she cooed. “You know, a private home ceremony with a justice of the peace would make things less complicated.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying that, given this latest complication, it makes even more sense to go for a simple ceremony over some kind of social statement that’s like to get both of us killed.”

  “Ah, the wedding,” I grunted. “Look, you!” I grabbed her hands and squeezed them tightly as she tried to pull away. “I love you and I’m not ashamed to stand up and declare it before the rest of the world! Or underworld, for that matter!”

  “Ow. Let go!”

  “What about you? Are you ashamed of me?”

  “Let go of me! You’re hurting me!”

  “I’m not letting go until you tell me what’s really bugging you.” The more she tried to escape my grasp the tighter I held her hands. “Is it a public ceremony that you object to? Or maybe you just don’t want to marry me at all?”

  “Ow! Ow! Chris, please!”

  “Tell me.”

  “My family!”

  “Your family?” Her brother Luis, the only family member I had ever met, was dead. “What about your family?”

  “They are opposed!” she gasped. “They are very angry about us!”

  I released her hands and she shook and then cradled them as if I had done her some injury. “I see. So . . . what are they going to do? Make a scene? Disown you?”

  She shook her head and there were tears in her eyes.

  “Hey . . . maybe it’s time to take me home to meet your parents. I could—”

  “They will kill you!”

  That shut me up.

  “And me,” she added softly. “I have told them that I serve you as adjutant. They suspect but cannot prove that we are intimate. As long as there is no evidence . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked away.

  “They’ll let sleeping dogs lie?”

  Her head snapped back and she glared up at me. “We serve the wampyr—but we do not do so willingly! We submit to their rule and authority in a carefully defined re
lationship and there are carefully drawn boundaries for all of us! Remember how Dracula threatened you when he thought you might taste lupin blood? Well, The Pack would tear us both apart—and I am not indulging in hyperbole here—if they discover that we have become lovers!”

  I didn’t know what to say. “That’s ridiculous,” I finally sputtered.

  She gave me the same look Jenny used to use on me. Maybe a ceremony was overrated: it was like we were already married.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, “there’s been a lot of ridiculous stuff this past year, why should werewolf mating rituals be any more logical. But lots of people already know we’re—we’re—”

  “Lovers?” She shook her head. “We don’t have that many close acquaintances. Who really knows about us outside of our own household? Stefan, Kurt, Dr. Mooncloud. Vampires and humans, no lycanthropes. The wampyr have a different attitude toward sexual subjugation than The Pack. And they make allowances for your unique status. You are one of them and you have authority as Doman, now. They will keep secrets for you.”

  “But if I drag you into a public place for a public ceremony,” I mused, “all bets are off and your family will go all wolf pack on us.”

  “Yes, Chris,” she reached out and touched my hand. Withdrew hers again. “When I say family, I mean clan and pack. The lupin will rise up as a whole to destroy us.”

  “Well.” I stood up. “At least I can see one advantage if I was crazy enough to keep insisting on a public ceremony.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We won’t have all those thank you notes to write.” I bent down and pressed my lips to her brow.

  She screamed like a frightened child.

  I jumped back and stared down in horror as blisters began to bubble across her forehead where I had kissed her.

  * * *

  “It’s not just that your body has dissolved the silver in the bullets and deposited the molecules in your epidermal surfaces,” Dr. Mooncloud was saying as she made a preliminary diagnosis from a thousand miles away. “There must be something in your unique metabolism, your body chemistry that is intensifying the effect. Perhaps converting it into some kind of modified silver nitrate.”

  “What are you saying?” I hate cell phones: technology’s never-ending quest to miniaturize everything had reduced this year’s models into flimsy little trinkets that seemed too far from the mouth if held to the ear. “That I’m transmuting those forty-seven A-g electrons into some kind of preternatural kryptonite?”