White Fangs

by Christopher Golden

  Together they had captured the monster. Now it was time for the next part of their plan.

  "Will it talk?" the Reverend said, standing back and looking down at the pained thing.

  "Oh, it'll talk," Callie said. Her certainty was chilling.

  "And the woman?" Jack said, nodding up at the doorway now leading onto a barely supported landing.

  "Ill. Bound. She's not our concern right now." Callie grabbed the end of a rope and started pulling. "So you gonna help me?"

  Jack glanced at the second floor windows, then everyone grasped a rope and pulled. Together they dragged the screaming vampire across Dawson's fear-filled streets to the jail.

  "So it's . . . what? Burnin' to death?" Sheriff Killebrew stood back from the bars, hands on hips to prevent himself from shaking, and his huge mustache twitched slightly as he chewed over what had come into his world.

  "Shot some fingers off with silver bullets," Callie said. "I was careful not to leave any inside it. If I had, then yeah, it'd burn. And good riddance."

  "Poison," Kikono said. He was still in the neighboring cell, pressed back as far as he could into the corner, but standing upright and remaining dignified in the face of this horror. Jack had a huge respect for the old Tlingit, and wanted to ask the sheriff to release him. Right now though, they had other concerns.

  The bound vampire had worked herself into a sitting position against the wooden cot. Smoke rose from both hands, filling the gaol with an acrid stench that turned Jack's stomach. She shook, but her cries of pain had ceased, and between strands of long, hanging hair Jack could see a grotesque smile on the Indian woman's face. Her lips quivered. Her teeth were deformed, enlarged, and had slashed her lips to ribbons. No blood seemed to flow, and the damage wrought by the shotgun blast seemed already to have started healing.

  The ropes were tied tight, though, and Callie had slipped a noose around her neck that contained a thin silver chain. She said it would prevent the vampire from changing into anything else — like a polar bear. Dragging her across town, they had all hoped that were true.

  "So it's dyin'," Callie said. "Yeah, good. But we got things to ask it first. An' you're gonna help us."

  "Me?" Kikono asked. Then he nodded, answering his own question. "Me. Of course. She is . . . old." He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "One of the old ones first touched by the blood spirits. If she still bore any humanity, perhaps she and I would be related. But she has long since ceased being human."

  "Human, animal, damned vegetable, can you speak to it?" Callie asked.

  Kikono muttered something under his breath and the vampire's head twitched sideways. She sneered, and spoke. Jack tried not to back away at the sound of her voice, but the Sheriff gasped and stood a shuffling step back against his desk. She sounds like nothing that should be, Jack thought. It was as if her voice was made of sharp shadows.

  Kikono nodded once, slowly. Then he spoke some more in his own language, firmer and harsher, drawing shapes in the air before him with both hands.

  The vampire hissed a single word, then spat. Smoke rose from her hands and curled around her head, like ghost snakes.

  "She is very old," Kikono said. "Her language is basic, but has roots in my own. I understand. And she tells you to . . ."

  "To what?" Jack asked.

  Kikono glanced at Sabine. "I hesitate to translate with the lady present."

  "We can trade insults all night," Callie said. "Ask the thing where its camp is? How far do they travel? How many of them are there?"

  "I am not sure it will be willing to listen to —" Kikono said, but Callie silenced him, and made everyone's blood run cold, when she pulled her gun and shot the vampire through the thigh. The vampire shrieked as a haze of flesh and smoke splashed across the dusty cell floor before her. She leaned back against the cot, writhing as the touch of silver coursed through her body.

  "Callie," Jack said. He took no comfort from seeing this monster tortured, felt no pleasure at her pain. The others remained silent, the wolves and Ghost guarding the two doors, Sabine close to Jack's side.

  "Ask it," Callie said.

  Kikono asked. The vampire seemed not to hear, hissing in pain. Then she spoke, and Jack watched Kikono's reaction, the proud Tlingit listening to words spoken by a travesty of what an ancestor had become.

  "It begs to be killed quickly," Kikono said.

  "An' I'll do that if it tells what we want to know," Callie said, aiming her revolver again.

  Kikono spoke once more, his voice level and surprisingly calm, the vampire shivering, her head down and hair hanging across her damaged face. She held one hand over the wound in her thigh, and smoke rose from them both.

  The vampire looked up, hair swinging away from her face to expose the shotgun wounds. They had already healed over, raw flesh now dry and covered with knotted, ridged skin. Her eyes were wide — pain or surprise, Jack did not know. She started talking. Her voice was as dreadful as before, a song of decay that might melt the flesh of those listening.

  "Their camp is thirty miles away, in a limestone cave to the north of a place they call the Spirited Trees," Kikono said. "I believe I know where she means. She mentions something about the Wendigo, and haunting its domain. She says they are legion. She says they are as many as people in the world, because they will eventually take everyone."

  "I like her ambition," Ghost said dryly. "But I think Mister London might be right, vampire hunter. I think perhaps — "

  The vampire's talking, her hissing, her shrieking in pain, her writhing, her moaning, all merged into a final, terrible chuckle.

  Then she moved.

  For Jack, everything changed between one blink and the next, impossibly quickly, each instant loaded with the potential disaster to come. His first instinct as the vampire moved was to shove Sabine behind him. As he did so, the cursed Tlingit tensed, ropes snapping from around her limbs and body, smoking hand reaching up and tearing the silver-wired noose from around her neck.

  On one side, Jack saw Callie lifting her revolver. To his left, Ghost crouched down and began to growl.

  The vampire changed. The sound accompanying the transformation was hideous — cracking, groaning, crunching, wetness, a roar from her distending mouth and an awful scratching from the huge claws bursting from her feet and injured hands and scoring the floor. She grew, and the sudden change was disorienting. Jack fell back against Sabine, both of them leaning against the wall, and then someone was shooting.

  The Sheriff had his gun drawn and was firing even before Callie was ready to shoot. Bullets impacted across the polar bear's side, and then it thrashed around in the confined cell, smashing the cot against the bars.

  The cot shattered, showering them with splinters and shards of wood. Callie's gun discharged and then she fell before Jack and Sabine, hands going up to her face where blood was already blooming around several thick splinters protruding around her eyes.

  "Silver!" Jack shouted, but his voice was drowned by another gunshot from Killebrew.

  The three wolves spread across the room, keeping their distance from the cell.

  Jack looked for Callie's dropped gun, but it had skittered away somewhere, or was hidden beneath pieces of the shattered cot that had powered between the bars.

  The polar bear roared, impossibly loud in the confined space, and planted its paws on the cell bars. They're still smoking, Jack had time to think, and then the bear heaved itself forward, bars creaking and bending, one of them cracking with a sound louder than a gunshot.

  "Out!" Jack shouted, but there was no time to move.

  With a glance at Sabine, Ghost was at the bars, half-changed, fur bristling along his shoulders and down his thickening arms, claws slashing. But the bear simply reached out between bent bars and dragged Ghost through, into the cell with it where no one else could reach.

  Ghost shouted in surprise as his head clanged from a bar, and his shout ended in a fading groan.

  I'm going to see Ghost die, Jack tho
ught, and the idea was amazing and impossible, and terrible. In that moment Jack would have risked his own life to save Ghost, and he had no idea why.

  But there was no need. Another three gunshots rang out and the Polar bear flipped back against the cell's rear wall, its mouth going wide for one final roar that it never uttered. As it slid slowly down to the floor it changed, shifting back to the Tlingit woman with more terrible cracks and creaks of bones changing shape, flesh transforming. She was dead before the change was complete, and smoke rose from the new wounds across her chest and throat.

  "Damn," Sheriff Killebrew said. He was kneeling beside Callie, one hand on her shoulder to steady himself, the other bearing her dropped gun. He kept it aimed at the woman. The stillness felt loaded with a threat of more violence, and it was several moments before Ghost stood up in the cell and started brushing himself down.

  Killebrew's aim shifted to Ghost. The Sheriff stood as well and backed away from Callie, from them all, until his back was against the wall beside Kikono's cell.

  "Just . . ." Killebrew said.

  "Thank you," Ghost said calmly. "If you hadn't done that, I would be dead."

  "You would be dead," Killebrew said, staring at Ghost in confusion, blinking quickly as if to remove a memory from his eyes.

  "Good shooting," Jack said, trying to calm Killebrew's nerves.

  "Yes, mon ami," Louis said from by the side door. "Excellent, Sheriff."

  Sheriff Killebrew stared at Ghost, and when Callie gently took her gun from his hand, he did not resist.

  Ghost climbed through the cell's bent bars, slipping through easier this time than he had going in. Going in, he was almost as monstrous as that thing, Jack thought, and he knew that the Sheriff was not a foolish man. He had lived a life, seen things, and now he had seen so much more.

  "We're truly in your debt, Sheriff," Jack said. Kikono started talking in his own language.

  "Speaking to the memory of his ancestor," the Sheriff said, perhaps glad for the distraction.

  "Then we should leave him in peace," Jack said. "There's no more danger here."

  "No more," Killebrew said.

  Ghost nodded his thanks to the Sheriff once again and then left the cells, followed closely by the other wolves. Jack and Sabine helped Callie pick the splinters from her face and went to leave, supporting the brave woman between them.

  "Jack London," the Sheriff said suddenly. "I think I remember that name now. While back, before I was Sheriff. There was talk of a London taking on one of those bastard slave drivers in a saloon."

  Jack shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing.

  "Seems trouble draws itself to you," Killebrew said.

  Jack offered a gentle smile, and looked through the bent bars at the dead Tlingit. "Seems you might be right," he said. And it's far from over, he thought. He had no wish to enter into conversation with the Sheriff. Their immediate plans, and their destination, had to remain secret. The Sheriff had seen incredible, ghastly things that night, but there were still some things that could never be explained away.

  The Sheriff touched his hat, and Jack nodded and left the cells. In the older man's eyes he had seen respect, but also something else. He thought he was looking at a damned man, Jack thought. Disturbed by the idea, he left the jailhouse to join the others standing under a twilit sky, listening to a silence that had fallen over Dawson.

  Dawn was coming. Their time to move was here.

  Horses were skittish around the wolves, Jack had learned, so everyone would have to carry their own packs. Hal had arranged as much as he could given the time constraints, and Jack was more than impressed with what his friend had managed to procure. Packs, food, water canteens, sleeping rolls, blankets, tools, some new boots and clothing — much of what was needed for a long hike into the wild.

  As they met up with Hal in the storage huts behind their hotel, and quietly sorted through their new equipment in readiness for their dawn departure, Jack was more and more troubled by the vampire's revelation. If the monsters had their camp so close to Lesya's forest, then what of Lesya? Had she gone to ground in the face of their unnatural curse? Or had she fled?

  Jack wasn't sure she could flee, as he had assumed the forest to be her prison as well as her home. Her father — so much older than her, and so much more connected to the soul of the land — had been keeping her confined there. But there was no saying what might have happened since the vampires had come so close, drawn by the Wendigo's death to start preying on the settlements they had previously feared approaching. No saying what they had done to the tree spirits.

  Jack only hoped they could find her, otherwise their trip here might have been wasted.

  Ghost sat to one side, sharpening a new knife that Hal had handed him. Vukovich, the Reverend, and Louis were examining the kit, loading their packs with what they thought they might need and discarding everything else. Jack knew they would travel light. He and Sabine remained close, saying little but aware of each other's presence.

  Callie stood outside, leaning on the rifle that Hal had managed to procure for her, looking past the hotel and into the wild hillsides beyond the small, ramshackle town. Her head was tilted slightly, but Jack had seen her eyes. She was seeing something and somewhere else. Soon, if she did not tell them what and where, he would have to ask.

  "Jack," Hal said, before turning and walking around the side of the hotel without saying more, and without looking back.

  Jack smiled as he followed the young man, remembering the first time he had seen Hal. Then, the young man and his mutt had been threatened by William and Archie, the cruel and spiteful slavers who had preyed on the weak and defeated of Dawson to steal them away, and force their captives to pan for gold. Jack and his friends had rescued Hal and gained his confidence, but the man he followed now seemed so different. It saddened Jack that Hal had been forced to grow up so quickly, finding adulthood in a shadow of monsters' influence over Dawson.

  Hal paused by the main street. It was coming alive now that dawn lit the wooded hillsides to the east, Dawson's residents animated and relieved at surviving another night.

  "What is it, Hal?" Jack asked.

  "You can't go." Hal's voice was flat, almost empty.

  "We have to," Jack said. "We didn't come here to — "

  "But you're leaving us to this!" Hal said. "You've seen what we're against here, and you and your friends can handle yourselves. I know I helped you kit up, but I was hopin' you'd decide to stay. I'm learning things I never thought I would, Jack, and discovering truths I thought were your domain. You can all help us. You have to help us. 'Cos I don't know how much longer Dawson can survive."

  "Hal, we didn't come here for this," Jack said again. It felt harsh, but the truth carried weight. Sabine was Jack prime concern.

  "Yet you've walked into it," Hal said, nodding across at the jailhouse. "So what do you know?"

  Jack was sure none of the others had mentioned what had happened. "The Sheriff?"

  "Walrus and I are friends," Hal said. "I'm sorta . . . a deputy. 'Cept he doesn't have a badge for me to wear, and says I'd be too young anyway."

  "What we learned doesn't matter," Jack said, but even as he spoke he realized that it did matter, more than he had acknowledged until now. Because though his aim was always Lesya, he traveled with powerful werewolves and a vampire killer. The vampires' camp was so close to where he was leading the others.

  "I hate that you're going," Hal said simply. "I ain't gonna ask to go with you. Not because I know you'll say no, but because I belong here. I won't abandon Dawson to its fate."

  "And neither will I," Jack promised. "I'm leaving, yes. But I left before. And that time I destroyed something that was hunting prospectors and made the wilds a safer . . ." He trailed off, because he knew that was not true. Guilt pressed in again.

  Hal did not reply, but sighed and leaned against the hotel's side. "I thought for a while I wanted to go with you," Hal said. "Thought we could hook up an' go into th
e wild together, hunt these things, find their camp an destroy them there, during the day, while they're asleep or hidden away, or whatever it is they do when the sun's up." He turned to stare at Jack then, eyes blazing. "But you're traveling with . . ." He frowned, searching for words and truths that eluded him. "You're human, aren't you Jack? Just tell me you are, at least?"

  Jack could have tried explaining, telling Hal about the pack and Ghost, and his love for Sabine, and why he had promised to bring her here to find her answers. Instead he only nodded. He grasped Hal's shoulders and squeezed.

  "I am, Hal. I'll be back, and when I do I'll tell you everything. I promise."

  "You can't promise that," Hal said. "Not now. Everything's changed, and nothin's real anymore." Hal shrugged Jack's arms from his shoulders and walked away. Without turning back he said, "I hope I see you again, Jack." Then he was gone, walking along Dawson's main street toward whatever fate awaited him.

  Jack felt wretched. Weak dawn light warmed his skin, but he was cold inside. I will be back, he thought, but he knew also that Hal was right. A promise like that was one he had no right making.

  In the wild, anything could happen.

  As Jack approached his traveling companions, he only said, "We're ready to leave." Sabine nodded and smiled, clearly enthused at the idea that they were moving closer to her destiny. The wolves were expressionless, but Jack recognized their desire to leave this place and taste the wild again. Ghost did not even look up, but carried on sharpening his blade.

  "Not quite yet," Callie said. "There's unfinished business."

  "What do you mean?" Sabine asked.

  "Friend who called me here's dead," Callie said. "An' his wife . . ."

  "His wife," Jack said, voice flat, "bitten, and used."

  "Dyin'," Callie corrected. "And then she'll rise again as one of them an' add to the town's curse."

  "So what do you propose?" Jack asked

  Ghost chuckled. "She wishes to murder the woman."

  "Ain't murder," Callie said. "Not when she's already dead."