White Fangs

by Christopher Golden

  "We'll always be so different," he said.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Jack climbed from the bath and wrapped himself in a towel. "Who is it?"

  "Me." Sabine's voice was low and urgent, and Jack moved to the door to let her in.

  She stood in the hall, the vision of every good thing in his life, her smile filled with love and her eyes reflecting his own sadness.

  "Ghost told you," Jack said.

  Sabine nodded. "I know you're too strong to believe any of this is your fault."

  "Really?" Jack asked.

  Sabine stared at him, eyes unwavering. "Are you going to ask me in?"

  Jack stood back and held the door open, and Sabine entered. She had already bathed — her hair was lose and shimmering in sunlight shining through the window, and he caught a hint of perfumed fragrances.

  "I do feel guilt, Sabine," he said, sitting on the bed beside her. "I was a younger man then, in experience more than years. I fought and killed the thing without any thought as to — "

  "Don't for a second talk of consequences!" Sabine said sharply. "Vying with Fate is a fool's game, and I won't let you enter into it now, Jack. Not after everything we've been through together, and knowing now what you went through on your own beforehand. The present makes up its own mind, and if you'd known then what you know now, would you have done any different?"

  "Of course!"

  "Really? Would you? With the beast coming at you, craving the taste of your flesh and bones? And with Lesya chasing behind?"

  Lesya. The mention of her name gave Jack pause, and the solidity of their cause gave him something to hold on to.

  "I can't say," Jack finally admitted. "What ifs and maybes are as nebulous as dealing with Fate."

  "Sweet Jack," Sabine said, and she leaned forward and held one of his hands in both of hers. "Sometimes I see such weight on your shoulders."

  "I manage," he said, smiling.

  "You can only do your best," she said. "Your friend Hal knows the truth, yes? Yet I didn't hear any blame in his voice, or see it in the way he treated you. He looks up to you, not down at you. He sees the truth."

  Jack nodded.

  "You can't fight every monster," Sabine said. s she leaned in close and planted a soft kiss against Jack's cheek, he sat up straighter, eyes wide.

  "Not every one, perhaps," he said. He stood and paced to the window, looking out along one of Dawson's rough streets and the rougher people inhabiting it. At the edge of the town he could see several people bustling around one of the watchtowers, and even though it was barely past midday there was already an air of frantic anxiety pervading the place. People rushed instead of strolled. Even the drinkers sitting on a large porch outside a tavern seemed to be drinking quickly, afraid that things would change before they saw the bottoms of their glasses.

  "Jack?" Sabine asked.

  "What's happening here is linked with my crossing paths with Lesya in the past," Jack said. "Who's to say that won't be the same in the future?"

  "I'm not sure I understand."

  Jack was energized now, and he dressed quickly, still wet from his bath.

  "We're heading back out into the wild to find Lesya," Jack said. "To do that with any degree of safety, and any hope of success, we have to know everything we can about the vampires. I've got a plan." As he strapped on his knife, it crossed his mind that he should try to procure a silver blade before they left Dawson again. "They're a part of what happens next, like it or not. If I get even the slightest of chances, I'll do what I can to kill them all."

  "Everything we've done is pointless!" Hal said. "All the defenses I've helped build, the towers and fences and pits. The look-outs in the trees. All of it pointless if they can just . . ." He shook his head and took another drink. Last time Jack had seen Hal, he'd been a young boy not used to liquor. Another mark of his adulthood, Jack thought grimly, brought on too soon.

  "Not pointless at all," Callie insisted.

  "How the hell d'you figure that?" Hal asked.

  Jack could sense a panic rising in Hal. "Callie knows what she's talking about," Jack said.

  "One of those things got into Dawson last night!" Hal said. "Past all our best defenses, got in to kill Truman and bite his wife and now she's . . . she's what?"

  "She's someone to be visited again," Jack said. He looked around the table at the others, glancing from face to face looking for understanding. In the bustle of the tavern, where dozens of people drank and ate and sang with a barely concealed desperation, their large table stood out as an oasis of calm and contemplation. Sabine was watching him with concern. Louis, Vukovich, and the Reverend nursed their drinks, faces unreadable. Callie was nodding slowly, one hand holding her glass on the table, the other splayed on her thigh. She rarely had both hands far away from her guns or her knife.

  Whether or not some of the others understood, it was Ghost who voiced it.

  "She's bait," he said. "Bitten, and infected with whatever curse the vampires have. I smelled it on her just as surely as I smelled death on her husband. Now she's waiting to be visited again. Drunk from."

  "And tonight, we'll be there waiting to catch the beast and question it," Jack said.

  "Jack . . ." Sabine said warily.

  "We need to know," Louis said, nodding sagely. "How many there are, their intentions, their strengths and weaknesses . . . ."

  "Weaknesses?" Vukovich asked.

  "Every living thing has a weakness, man or monster," Jack said. Ghost chuckled, but no one acknowledged him.

  "More than that," The Reverend said, "we need to know where they camp. Where they spend the daylight hours."

  "Yes," Jack said. "If everything we've seen, everything we've heard from Dawson, is true, then they only come out at night."

  "We've never seen one moving in the sunlight," Hal confirmed. "But the way you're talking here, Jack, sounds like you're planning a war."

  "Not at all," Jack said, but he glanced aside, tapping his fingers on the table and realizing that was exactly what it sounded like.

  "Know your enemy, eh, Jack?" Ghost said.

  "Know your enemy," Jack said, nodding, not looking at Ghost. He could feel the big man's infuriating smile. "Our aim remains what it was the moment we started on this journey — Lesya, her secrets, and her possible links to Sabine. The other aims that have come about during the course of the journey . . ." He nodded to Vukovich and the Reverend, smiled at Louis. "Well, that's going well, and I'm pleased to say I've found new friends. But we've lost enough already. So the fewer surprises between us and Lesya, the better."

  "It's inhuman," Hal muttered. "Using her as bait. She's lost her husband already, and now you're going to lay in wait for a monster to come and feed from her."

  "It ain't inhuman," Callie said.

  "Then what is it?" Sabine asked quietly.

  "Survival. She ain't human no more, honey." She smiled at Sabine, but it did not touch her eyes. With everything she had likely seen, Jack wondered whether she could ever smile for real anymore. "She ain't as much a monster as them, but gettin' there. Truth be told . . . after we catch the beast, we'd do her a favor to end her own sufferin'."

  "You'd murder her?" Hal was aghast.

  Callie shrugged. She had no answer for him, because none was needed. Jack could see Hal gradually acknowledge the truth of things, and his respect for the young man grew by the moment.

  "So that's it," Jack said. "We'll meet here again in six hours, get ready. Meantime, we've got a journey into the wild to prepare for. We lost everything when the steamer went down, so Hal, I'd sure appreciate it if you could help us restock."

  "Dawson's an expensive place nowadays," Hal said, evidently pleased to have something else to discuss. "You got the money?"

  "No problem there," Louis said.

  "Good," Jack said. He was feeling an urge to move away, retreat to a place where he and Sabine could be alone. He was also sensing that this might be their last chance to do so for qu
ite some time. There were things they had to discuss, and he was concerned for her. Though they were still close to the river, she seemed more strained than ever, her expression one of forced well-being rather than tiredness. He had to ask her how she really was, because the answer might affect their onward journey just as much as whatever they might learn tonight.

  Hal stood to leave, glancing back at their table as he stood in the doorway. "So who's with me?" he asked. "I like to spend as much time in the daylight as I can."

  The three Wolves went with Hal to restock equipment and supplies for their imminent journey onward. Callie went her own way. Ghost too drifted off, and Jack was pleased to see him go. Hand in hand, he and Sabine walked out into the sunlight and headed along the street, down toward the river. The docks were quieter than he had expected. Few vessels had made it along the river.

  "Sabine —" Jack began, but she cut in immediately, squeezing his hand tighter as she spoke.

  "Jack, I'm fine," she said. "I'm very tired, and my soul aches because I've never been this far from water. There's the river, yes, but that feels . . . tainted. And a river can't be compared to the sea. That's my real home. I'm afraid, too. Scared that I've come so close to perhaps discovering more about myself than I've ever known, and that we might be stopped at the last minute by those things. Stopped . . . or killed."

  "We won't be killed," Jack said, but Sabine waved the comment away as if it had little importance.

  "Don't you see what a tragedy that would be?" she asked. "To come so far, and potentially know so much. My history is a storm. I want to see through it, so that everything is clear. To discover that these things are in the way . . ." She sighed heavily, and her fears made Jack realize yet again how different she was from him. Death did not scare her, but losing the chance to discover herself did. That made her somehow purer than him. Whatever she might be — wherever she had come from — truth was more important to her than anything right now.

  "I swear they won't stop us," Jack promised. "Look at us! See what we've done! Nothing can get in our way."

  "You're so sweet," Sabine said, smiling and pulling him along beside her again. But even as they started walking again, Jack recognized the doubt in her voice. For the first time ever, she had sounded like a wise old woman talking to a child.

  In a way, she was.

  Jack silently vowed, yet again, that he would do anything for Sabine. She was his life now. Whatever they might face, he would be her truth.

  In the end, they agreed upon the simplest plan.

  Ghost had wanted to use guns and nets, Vukovich and the others suggested they use their own powers to partially change and attack the vampire at its own level, and Jack and Sabine had contrived a series of signals and diversions that would edge the vampire into a trap. But it was Callie who had silenced them all and settled the final plan.

  "It'll be in its human form," she had said. "To get into Dawson unseen, it'll have to be. Fast, quiet, it'll move like a shadow. Bullets might slow it, but more likely they'll only piss it off. And it'll smell danger. Simpler we go, further we are from it, more likely it'll be we catch it."

  "So what are you suggesting?" Jack had asked.

  Callie had told them.

  Now they waited, as the sun skimmed the horizon across the river and darkness settled itself over this dark land once again. Jack, Sabine, and Louis were in an abandoned house thirty feet from the two-story store. Vukovich, the Reverend, and Ghost were hiding in a wood shed behind the house, their view of the external staircase leading up to the sick woman's home just as clear. In both hiding places, the end of a strong rope was knotted and looped, ready to be grabbed and pulled when the moment was right.

  Callie was out on her own, and she had told no one where she would be. She had simply slipped away from the others like a shadow herself.

  They waited silently, and none of them passed comment as night descended across Dawson. Taverns remained open, and the sounds of merriment were even more desperate and frantic than they had been during the day. It seemed that those who chose to defy the mortal danger visited upon them — and there was no point trying to remain silent and unseen from these beasts — were living every moment as if it were their last. Jack had a healthy appreciation for their intentions, because he had always believed that the purpose of life was to live, not simply to exist. But drinking, singing, and gambling were not ways to live your last. What he and the others were doing was the way. Striving to go forward, to survive; not simply to give in and go out with a bang.

  There were far fewer people on the streets. They walked in small groups, and faint starlight glimmered from gun metal on most of them.

  There was a half moon. That was good. Jack knew that the wolves could change at will, but anywhere near a full moon would make them much more skittish.

  "Did you hear that?" Louis asked.

  "What?" Jack held his breath, and sensed Sabine doing the same beside him. She had been probing out toward the river, in case an attack came from there, but she reported that the waters flowed dark, cold, and empty.

  "Gunshot," Louis said. "Very distant."

  They fell quiet and listened again, and from way out beyond the edge of town came a more sustained volley of gunfire.

  "It's begun," Jack said. He thought of the men and women up in those clumsily constructed watchtowers, nursing guns that would only prick the vampire polar bears and annoy them even more. Dawson survived, and that was testament to their resilience, and perhaps effectiveness. But there was also Truman's horrible death, and the shadow of a woman that was all that remained of his wife.

  Callie had suggested that she would not be the only vampire amongst them.

  "I can't tell how many there are," Sabine said.

  "Only one that concerns us this night," Jack said. They watched the store, looking for shadows where there should be none and movement that betrayed their target. What if they don't leave shadows? Jack wondered. Nature doesn't rule them, so perhaps they in turn can bend it? He closed his eyes and tried to ride the currents of nature in his own way, sensing out into the darkness to connect with any creatures out there. But it seemed that at night, even the wildlife of Dawson sought sanctuary in deep holes or pits.

  Louis sniffed. Froze. Sniffed again, a longer, deeper inhalation.

  "What?" Sabine whispered.

  "Something dead," Louis breathed. "Yet . . . undead."

  They watched the shape emerge from a darkness none of them had noticed before. It drifted, its movement sickeningly graceful. Jack caught a hint of long flowing hair, bulky shoulders, long limbs that on a normal person might have meant a fast runner or an athlete.

  "A woman," Sabine said.

  "A woman monster," Jack corrected her. "It changes nothing. Louis?"

  "Nothing is changed," Louis agreed.

  "Well, then," Jack said, taking up the end of the rope that snaked out of the door. They had taken care to hide it carefully where it crossed the muddy road. "Hold on with me. And now it's all down to Callie."

  Chapter Nine - Caging the Dark

  'Ware my signal, Callie had said. So the three of them sat there holding the rope, and Jack knew that in the woodshed Ghost, the Reverend, and Vukovich would be doing the same with theirs. Whatever signal Callie had planned would start a fight that could well end with one or all of them dead.

  The Tlingit vampire woman reached the base of the staircase and paused.

  No! Jack thought. He closed his mind and glanced away, afraid that she could hear his thoughts, sense the nervous tension in the air. To his relief she started climbing toward the landing and door at the top, and the hot red meal promised her within.

  The door opened. The vampire paused halfway up the staircase.

  Callie stepped out onto the landing, a shotgun nursed in her hands.

  The vampire crouched and hissed, such an animal sound, and Callie gave her both barrels in the face.

  "Pull!" Jack shouted. He, Sabine and Louis tugged at the ro
pe and it sprung up from the street, flicking mud into the night as it tensed around one of the staircase's supporting legs. The other rope did the same as the others pulled, and two legs gave way almost instantaneously. Where they had sawn through the supports earlier, the wood cracked and splintered, parting to spill the vampire down into the mud.

  Callie leapt from the landing into the mess of broken wood, landing astride the thrashing vampire's chest.

  "It'll tear her to pieces!" Louis shouted. Jack thought so too, and he was watching for the woman changing shape, becoming one of the beasts they had fought the night before. But Callie was quick, and knew what she was doing. Pistol already in her hand when she jumped, she fired three times down at the struggling shape.

  The vampire's hissing changed to a high-pitched shriek of pain.

  "To me!" Callie shouted.

  "Come on!" Jack said. They dashed from the house and across the street, carrying wound ropes for binding the fallen thing.

  The vampire was waving her arms and legs amidst the splintered remains of the staircase, knocking wood aside, her face a mess of raw flesh and buckshot, and steam seemed to be rising from both hands.

  "You've killed it?" Louis asked, looking at its hands.

  "Silver?" Jack asked.

  "Shot off some fingers," Callie said. "Silver's not left inside, so it'll be a slow enough death for us to get what we want."

  The vampire shrieked and hissed, her eyes rolling up in the ruins of her face.

  Jack's heart beat fast as he and the others helped bind the beast, a mixture of shock and excitement giving him a clarity he had only experienced a few times before — fighting the Wendigo, fleeing Lesya, tackling a werewolf. Ghost was grinning as they went about their task, and Jack glanced at the others quickly, pleased to see that the wolves were maintaining their human forms. Vukovich's hands looked larger . . . his shoulders perhaps even broader . . . but he looked at Jack and nodded, and Jack gave him a smile.