Bite Marks

by Jennifer Rardin

  “Do I need to get you a shovel?”

  His eyes widened. That choked sound that passed for laughter gurgled out of his throat. He nodded slowly. “Perhaps.”

  I allowed myself a moment of pure delight despite the mass of emotions that still clawed at me. Even though I’d regained control of my mind, I’d lost Pete forever. Who knew what would happen after the department reopened? And what the hell was I becoming?

  Heavy sigh. Oh well, everybody’s got their shit to deal with. At least I have Vayl at the same time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  With Vayl’s hand wrapped securely around mine, I ran up the trail beside him, the wind of our sprint making droplets of moisture fly from my hair. Cole met us at a spot where the trail rose abruptly, the steepness of its ascent made user friendly by a set of wooden stairs.

  “I figured you’d seen what I saw, but I was coming back to get you just in case,” he whispered as we huddled beside the first step.

  “I can’t make out much,” I told him. “Astral is just inching forward, so she must be pretty sure they’ll catch her if she moves any faster.”

  Cole responded to Vayl’s puzzled look. “Ruvin and the software guys aren’t inside the rock shelter like we thought they would be. They’re on top of it.”

  “How did they get up there?” asked Vayl.

  “Not sure. I didn’t see a ladder and the boulders are too smooth to make it a quick climb even if you know what you’re doing.”

  “Another illusionary door?” I suggested.

  Vayl squeezed my hand. “Brilliant. Let us find it.”

  We ran up the stairs, the breeze of our movement chilling me as it plastered my wet clothes to my body. I put my discomfort aside as we came to another wooden bridge that spanned a shallow ravine and led us to the shelter, a simple arrangement of one massive boulder leaning on another that left a triangular space clear underneath for wanderers who needed shelter from the rain. On top of this monolith our quarry had lit a fire. The angle didn’t allow me to pick out any faces other than Ruvin’s.

  “I’m not hearing anything from his bug. Are you on a different frequency again?” I asked.

  “No,” said Cole. “Do you think it could’ve fallen off while they were shoving him around?”

  “Search for a door,” Vayl ordered.

  Cole slipped inside the white fence that kept tourists from touching the ancient paintings I could see adorning the bottom of the bigger boulder. He began combing the outer edges of it as I moved to go inside the shelter.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Vayl asked. When I raised my eyebrows at him he added tactfully, “I realize it probably would not bother you much that tons of rock were hovering over your head, waiting for just the right earth tremor to shake it to the ground. But if I went in you would not have to be disturbed at all.”

  I waved him off. “Naw, I feel great!” And I ducked inside, realizing I did feel awesome. Better than I should considering my circumstances.

  It’s Vayl’s bite, said Teen Me. She’d found herself a beanbag chair and thrown it on Granny May’s front porch, where she’d also, somehow, installed an Xbox 360. You’ve got a megahigh going on.

  I am not high, I snapped. I’ve never done drugs in my life.

  Okay, fine, she agreed without looking away from the flatscreen she’d bolted to the porch rail. What would you compare it to?

  I pressed my lips together, only now feeling the soreness from where Vayl’s fangs had sunk in. I felt oddly uncomfortable discussing the aftereffects of tremendous sex with my adolescent self. But I did have that same grin-and-click-your-heels feeling that the world was singing a special tune only I could hear. Even though I’d experienced similar reactions after Vayl’s two previous bites, I still wasn’t prepared to relax and go with the flow. Because later on I’d crashed. The first time, pretty hard. The second had been shorter, but just as debilitating. I needed to wrap up this case before my body demanded a milk shake and hammock time.

  So, while I hummed that soaring song under my breath, I ducked into the shelter and conducted a quick search that netted nothing.

  Maybe it’s on the other side. I went through, noting that the path, however far it meandered beyond the shelter, eventually came around to the back of it. And right up next to the formation, nearly buried behind a pile of dead branches, was a Jaz-sized boulder whose face looked like granite but felt like Silly Putty.

  I went back for the guys. “Found it,” I whispered, motioning for them to follow me.

  “I’ll go first,” Cole volunteered. “After all, if I’d picked a better spot to snipe from, Ruvin wouldn’t be in this mess.” Before we could argue he’d stuck his head through the door. And just as quickly pulled it out.

  “Duck!”

  He pushed me back, falling on top of me as a deep rumble from inside the boulder made me wonder if we were all about to be crushed. Vayl covered us both as a hail of pebbles shot from the door, followed by a spurt of dust and then a door-sealing rock lodged half in and half out of the opening.

  We stared at it for five long seconds. I said, “I hear something.”

  “Another boulder?” Cole asked as the guys rolled to their feet. He looked up fearfully.

  “No,” said Vayl, lifting his eyes to the star-filled sky. “Something unnatural.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Vayl was the first to leap on the door-blocking boulder, using it as a launching pad for his climb. While I waited for him to clear it so I could start up, Cole slung his rifle over his shoulder and said, “I’m going up the other side.”

  “This is stupid,” I said. “They’re just going to throw us off the second they see our hands reaching over the rim.”

  “Which is why I’m letting Vayl get a head start. Hopefully he’ll keep them occupied until I can make it up.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, grabbing Cole’s sleeve before he could move away. “What about that weird noise?”

  He cocked his head. “You know what it is, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Jack’s tired of the kangaroo. Now he’s found a herd of platypi and he’s stampeding them right toward us.”

  “Platypi?”

  “That clacking is their bills snapping together. They do that when they’re enraged. You should go for higher ground, Jaz. They’ve been known to chew women’s legs off.”

  “With beaks?”

  “Well… it takes a while. And you kinda have to stand in one place—”

  “When you two are quite done,” came Vayl’s voice over the party line. We looked up. He was already halfway to them. Above him, only visible because it had begun to sway, I saw the outline of a wire. The type that lodge owners connect to lifts so skiers can chug up the mountain from dawn to dusk.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “What?” Cole shaded his eyes, like we were standing in the noonday sun instead of the blackness that blankets a mountain’s apron at three in the morning.

  “Vayl, they’ve got transportation. I’m thinking some kind of open-air, no, check that. I see it now. Sky car, black, roomy. It’s coming in quick! And it’s got passengers—I count five!”

  Cole pointed into the air. He said, “Hey, Jaz! The car looks like a big nose!”

  Go Ufran. We watched the air trolley descend to the boulder. A couple of Ufranites scrambled out to help the humans and one struggling Ruvin inside. “This is bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because suddenly I feel like I’ve been transported into an Austin Powers movie, which means any second now the kittybot will probably turn on us and start shooting torpedoes out her tail. I wouldn’t have objected if we’d been able to rescue Ruvin. Had the Odeam guys called our bluff and brought in their ‘A’ team? Or had Ruvin given up on us and decided to save his wife the only way he knew how? Either way we were pretty—”

  I gasped as the sky car hummed away and, at the same time, Vayl launched himself from the boulder, barely managing
to grab hold of the axle for the maintenance wheels that jutted beneath the nose like blackened teeth. The car rocked at his impact, causing Ufranites to crowd the windows, but nobody saw him raise his legs to slide them over the second axle.

  “Vayl!” I called. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine! I believe I can reverse the car’s course from here. If my calculations are correct, it should fly back to its source. Since the warren is under Wirdilling’s primary school, this car must be stored somewhere in the same town. Meet us there!”

  “What if you’re wrong?” asked Cole.

  “I cannot be,” Vayl replied. “We have no time to spare.”

  “Let’s get our asses back to the Wheezer. That means you too, Astral.” I turned to run back down the path, whistling for Jack as Cole called Kyphas on his phone and asked her to join us.

  “Jaz isn’t going to wait long,” he told her after a pause.

  “Put her on speaker,” I snapped.

  He pushed the required button.

  “—not quite finished here,” Kyphas was saying.

  “If you’re not down the hill when I start that car, I’m leaving you!” I said flatly. “We’ve got to get back to town before everything blows up in Vayl’s face!”

  “You sure can pick the rental cars.”

  I ground my teeth together and glared at the demon in my backseat. “Shut up,” I said.

  Kyphas peered at me over the top of Jack’s furry head. “I was just—”

  “I could happily kill somebody right now. And since you’re immortal in this realm, I’m gonna be real tempted to take a few stabs at you if you don’t—just—chill!”

  For the hundredth time I ignored her smirk and glanced in the rearview mirror. My eyes skipped past Astral, who’d taken her regular window seat. She had an even better view of Cole as he leaned over the Wheezer’s trunk, pushing the car along the road that would eventually end in front of Crindertab’s. Of course, by the time we reached the restaurant, Ruvin would be little more than a skeleton, picked clean by infant gnomes who’d already have caused irreparable damage to NASA’s connection to the cosmos. And we’d never want to eat again. Not to mention the fact that Cole would be too tired to lift his weapon, and Vayl would probably be dead.

  “Jasmine?”

  I touched the reciever in my ear. “Cassandra! Are you back yet?”

  “No, I… was hoping for one last vision. Do you need help?”

  “I’m going to when I get back to Wirdilling. Can you shake out a few Resistance gnomes for me?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Kyphas opened her yap. “I was just going to say that I thought you people were better organized. I would’ve thought twice if I’d known I was tying myself to a bunch of hack—ow!” She stared down at the syringe waving from her arm and at my thumb, hovering over the plunger.

  “I did warn you.” My thumb jerked.

  “Okay! I’m sorry! Take it out!” I resheathed my supply of holy water while she rubbed at the spot. “It hurts! Did you squirt some?”

  I shrugged. “Could be. It’s pretty sensitive. Not your ordinary prescription-fill. Bergman designed it for me.”

  “Tell me about Bergman,” Kyphas invited.

  I glared at her. “You blew your chance. If you try to take his soul again, if you hurt him, if you even bump into him hard, I will kill you.”

  “Ooh, I’m so scared.”

  I held her eyes. “I didn’t say how long I was going to take to do it.”

  Kyphas lost her yen for conversation after that and decided to spend her time gazing out the passenger window.

  I didn’t realize Cole had stopped pushing until the Wheezer came to a stop in the middle of the road. I looked back. “Pop the trunk,” he instructed.

  I did as he asked and got out. Which was when I heard it. The roar of an oncoming vehicle. Cole grabbed a couple of flares, fired them up, and set them in a line behind the Wheezer. Just in case the driver coming up on us at what sounded like light speed didn’t get the message in time, I pulled the animals out of the car and took them a few steps past the shoulder. I was hoping Kyphas would stay inside. I’d get a kick out of a good demon-smooshing right now. But she emerged, making sure Cole got a load of her long legs before she moved to his side.

  As soon as he smiled at her I marched over and dumped Astral into her arms. “This is an extremely valuable tool. Don’t let it get broken.” Jack panted loudly in agreement.

  She shook her head in confusion “I don’t—”

  “Over there with the priceless robot,” I said, waving her to the shoulder. Once she’d left earshot I grabbed Cole’s arm and jerked him down so he could hear me better. “Stop being nice to the evil demon.”

  “She seems okay,” he said.

  “So did John Wilkes Booth. Then he killed the one guy who could’ve hammered away a big chunk of the bullshit prejudice that black Americans still have to piss with today.”

  “I think she’s got some good in her,” he insisted.

  “I think she’s got big boobs, and in your mind that’s the same thing.”

  Cole grinned. “You could be right. Although you know what else I was thinking?” As I shook my head he lit a third flare and waved it around. “I can write my name in the air with this!”

  Jack also thought it was cool. He kept biting at the dropping sparks, though he was at least smart enough not to go for the whole banana.

  “What are you gonna do when you singe your tongue?” I asked my dog. When he let it hang out of his mouth I said, “That might work. But don’t expect any pity when you can’t eat anything but gravy for the next month.”

  Jack grinned and wagged his tail, like he knew I’d never let it go that far.

  Cole set the last flare in place and we waited. Lights appeared in the distance, played hide-and-seek for a while, and then came barreling down on us so fast that we evacuated the road.

  But the driver stopped in time. With only a minimum of tire-screeching, she rolled her lemon-drop yellow Hyundai Accent to a stop an arm’s length from the first flare. By the time we’d reached her door, all three of her passengers had bailed, two guys and another girl, all of them giggling and staggering like they’d been partying since dawn.

  “Oh goody,” Cole murmured. “We are saved.”

  I snorted as I watched the driver try to herd her horde back into the vehicle.

  “Hello,” said Cole, pasting on his I’m-unforgettable smile. “I’m Thor Longfellow and this is Lucille Robinson. We’re from Holly—”

  “G’day, mate!” the driver sang. “Would you help me gather up this mob before they trot off into the never-never?”

  She asked so cheerfully despite the relative impossibility of the task, her black ponytail dancing along with the request, that he immediately said, “Oh, uh, sure!”

  The other girl, a double-chinned brunette wearing jeans so tight you could see the cottage cheese below her butt cheeks rippling through them, friendlied up to Cole right away. So he had no trouble escorting her back to the car.

  “Kyphas!” I called. “Get the big guy!” Leaving Astral to study her reflection in the Wheezer’s hubcaps, Kyphas went after the dude whose scars were either a sign that he kept running his face into people’s fists or that he thoroughly enjoyed his rugby. I tagged the smaller one.

  “You are one luscious lady,” he told me, his breath reeking of cheap beer as he dropped an arm around my shoulders.

  “And you are going to puke like a school full of flu-bitten kids. But hopefully not until your friend’s gotten you home. What’s your name?”

  “Lance.”

  “Lance-a-lot-o’-fun!” called out his buddy.

  “That’s Rory,” Lance said. “He cannot hold his liquor. But he is a ripper, Rory is. Rory’s a ripper!” Lance announced loudly.

  “Clearly. And the girls?” I pointed to the driver, who, Lance informed me in what he probably thought was a bedroom voice, was Dachelle.

 
“We’re just friends,” he said, trying to wink and succeeding only in squinching his face together like a constipated old man. “Me and Gabbie are also only just friends,” he went on, nodding at Cole’s newest fan. “We’re all friends here!” he shouted. Then he gave me a one-armed hug. “Can we be friends?”

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not Dachelle can give me and my colleagues a ride to Wirdilling. Fast.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I don’t know what it is about college kids. Maybe tuition also buys them the knowhow to squeeze large numbers of people into small spaces such as telephone booths and imported vehicles. Whatever the case, we all managed to find a tiny bit of butt room inside the Hyundai. Dachelle drove, while Gabbie shared the front with Cole and Jack, both of whom spent most of the ride hanging out the window, which provided some relief to their fellow sardines. That left Kyphas, Rory, Lance, and me to rub hips, thighs, and damn near everything else in our effort to catch up to the escaping Ufranites. Among us, only Astral seemed comfortable, lying in the back window like an Egyptian statue. Luckily she’d obeyed my demand to stay silent. So far.

  Since Kyphas kept adjusting her position on Rory’s knees without raising even a moan, I thought he’d passed out until he reared his head back, snorted, centered his eyes on me, and asked, “So what’re you doing at Wirdilling?”

  “We work for a movie company called Shoot-Yeah Productions. Our boss sent us out to scout locations for some night scenes, but we have to get back to town quick because he’s lined up a bunch of auditions that we’re supposed to tape.”

  “At 3:30 in the morning?” asked Dachelle.

  “We’re still working on American time,” Cole drawled.

  I rolled my eyes. If everyone but Dachelle hadn’t been so wasted they’d never have swallowed such a line of crap. But the designated driver had her hands so full trying to make her friend behave she had no room left in her bullshit net for our load.

  She yelled, “Gabbie! Quit rubbing Thor’s leg! I’m sure he doesn’t want a quickie with a drunken Biology major.”