by Tammy Turner
“Get in!” Krystal shrieked. Her half-naked bottom was already planted on the black leather driver’s seat. “Hurry up, crip,” she hounded Taylor, as the teen struggled to lift herself and her crutches into the passenger seat.
The red tank jarred forward as Krystal released the emergency brake and punched the gearshift into drive. As the Hummer lurched, Taylor scrambled her legs inside the truck and slammed the door.
Punching the gas pedal, Krystal ignored the blinking seatbelt light on the dash and simply peeled out of the parking lot without one. Taylor struggled to secure her own seatbelt around her chest.
“I don’t get it,” Taylor mumbled. “You can’t stand up straight most of the time. What makes you think you should drive?” she asked, leaning her aching head back and closing her eyes.
“Practice,” Krystal answered. Her fingernails tapped the steering wheel as she guided the Hummer through the congested Buckhead side streets toward the interstate.
“I’m not going to apologize to you when we get home,” Taylor told her stepmother.
The Hummer’s twenty-inch chrome wheels slammed into a cavernous pothole.
“You’re right, you’re not,” Krystal agreed emphatically.
The jolt of the pothole had jarred open Taylor’s drowsy eyes. Outside the tinted window, she saw a blur of blue and white as they sped by a metal signpost: Interstate 75/85 South.
“This is the way to your weird little friend’s place,” Krystal said, popping a stick of mango-banana mint gum into her smiling mouth.
“Yes,” Taylor spat back at her, her stomach turning at the smell of the gum.
“It wasn’t a question,” Krystal said calmly as her tongue smacked against the roof of her mouth. She merged onto the interstate. When a rock-laden dump truck sped up to pass the Hummer, Krystal rolled down her window and flipped off the driver. She slammed the gas pedal to the floorboard.
Giggling to herself, she wove the Hummer into the far left lane of traffic. She jerked her thumb past Taylor’s nose to the back seat. A Burberry-print suitcase rested on the floorboard. “You’re going to be staying with Alice for a while.”
“Her name is Alexandra,” Taylor said, rolling her eyes.
“Whatever,” Krystal snapped. “I will tell your father that you ran away and you will not come back until I say you can.”
“What if I come home anyway?” Taylor said, clasping her palms in her lap to keep from strangling the driver.
By way of an answer, Krystal shifted her right arm off the top of the center console. Krystal popped the lid open. Her stepdaughter’s eyes locked on the gleaming barrel of an automatic pistol. “An old friend said I could borrow it,” Krystal said, slamming down the console lid, “for as long as I need it.”
“You are beyond crazy,” Taylor observed with caution. “I’ll call my dad and tell him everything.”
“You need to tell me where to go when we get off the interstate. I don’t get to this part of town much,” Krystal said, jerking the steering wheel to the right as the Hummer cut over to the exit lane.
She will regret this, Taylor silently vowed and pointed a finger straight at the windshield. “Take a right on Peachtree Street. Alexandra’s apartment building is a couple of miles straight down the road here.”
Krystal smiled, a delicious grin spreading wide across her puffy, Restylane-injected lips. “Your father is not taking calls in Miami. His secretary is handling all correspondence while he is out of town.”
“But I’m his daughter,” Taylor said, as Park View Tower loomed closer.
“And I am his wife,” Krystal countered, easing to the curb across from the apartment building.
Just then a light breeze rustled the trees in the park, as if disturbed by the wings of a flailing bird. The wind felt warm and erratic against Taylor’s moist cheeks. She slunk from the passenger seat to the sidewalk while Krystal unloaded the packed suitcase from the back of the Hummer. Chucking the bag on the cement, Krystal blew her stepdaughter a kiss.
“Ciao, bella,” she called aloud and climbed up into the behemoth. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
When the Hummer pulled away from the curb, Taylor raised the crutch beneath her right arm into the air and heaved it with every morsel of strength in her body at the rear window.
“Poor thing,” Krystal said, spying the missile flying futilely toward her truck.
When the crutch pinged off the window and landed bent in the gutter, Taylor fumed, her good leg stomping the ground.
“Ouch!” she yelped, holding back her fury.
“Let me help with you that,” a familiar voice said. It was the raven-haired cowboy, gliding past her into the street. As Kraven bent to retrieve the crutch, Taylor admired the arch of his back and the bulging of his biceps.
“Kraven,” she cooed with somewhat suspicious relief. “My hero.” She slid the crutch beneath her right arm.
Wistfully, Kraven brushed her golden locks back from her face until Taylor remembered her shabby appearance. She shyly said thanks and asked where Alexandra was. But what she really was hoping was that she’d look better to him with makeup.
Taylor stared into his deep azure eyes, waiting for his answer. The longer she gazed, the less she was concerned with her best friend’s whereabouts.
Kraven hitched his thumb to the sky. “Up there,” he said, hanging his chin to his chest.
“The parking garage?” Taylor asked, glancing across the street.
Shielding his ears with his palms, Kraven winced as Alexandra’s voice echoed in his mind. He could block out the thoughts of the hordes that had passed his gaze in the last thousand years, but he could not do so with her. Her smell, her voice—they lingered, no matter how far apart they stood.
“Something has happened,” he told Taylor while retrieving her suitcase from the sidewalk.
“Need some company for a while?” Taylor asked, only half-kidding, and blushed at the stranger holding her suitcase to his chest. “Where do you live anyway?” A thousand probing questions flooded her brain. She giggled. “Do you sleep? What do you eat? Do you eat? How old are you?”
He stared back at her in complete silence, his face as implacable as a stone statue’s.
“Sorry,” she stuttered. She had already embarrassed herself enough for the moment and did not dare ask the question foremost in her thoughts: Why Alex?
Kraven smiled to himself, her thoughts as transparent as the strategically positioned holes in her fashionable tank top.
“Alexandra,” Kraven stated firmly and sincerely, meaning to remind Taylor why they were both standing on the sidewalk together—the only reason they were together.
“Oh, yeah,” Taylor remembered, grudgingly.
“Hold on,” Kraven warned as he scooped up her, the suitcase, and the crutches securely into his arms.
The teen relaxed in the stranger’s comforting grasp, despite every single one of her internal organs (even the bitty ones that did not matter, such as her appendix) melting into a warm, sticky goo. She was sure she could get used to this. Kraven carried her safely across the street to the mirrored-glass entrance door of Park View Tower.
Kraven smiled to himself. Flattered, he set the pretty blonde girl down on the sidewalk.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you,” he told her solemnly. “Alexandra is your friend, and so you are mine, now, also.”
Taylor let the word “mine” cause a tingle in her toes. She replied, “What are we waiting for, cowboy? Let’s go see her.”
17 Locked and Loaded
“Still beats the daylights out of my big old butt hustling for cheap tips at Waffle House,” Rhonda Gorman muttered to herself. She propped open the glass door of the Gas ’n’ Go with a case of soda. Then she hauled two body bag-sized sacks of trash onto her sturdy shoulders.
What hair she had left after her home perm and pale-blonde dye job had been growing out for six months. Wisps of fried, white split ends tickled her chin as she scurried to the
dumpster.
“Got to go feed Bertha,” she said.
The rusting, green dumpster known as Bertha was anchored behind a security fence topped with barbed wire. It had not been emptied in months, but Big Bertha sat far enough behind the convenience store that most of the customers did not notice her stench until a gust of wind tickled their noses while they pumped gas.
Rhonda sucked in a last gasp of fresh air as she stalked across the parking lot. “At least you keep them raggedy beggar types from sticking around and harassing my paying customers,” she commended the reeking dumpster. She jiggled a key in the padlock. It kept the swinging gate closed to freeloaders who liked to toss their trash into Bertha instead of paying the city for trash removal.
“Good girl,” Rhonda said, patting the side of the dumpster when she threw her bags over Bertha’s brimming lip. Bertha did not spit them back at her.
“If it comes down to you or my six and a half bucks an hour, then I reckon I’ll just have to buy me one of them gas masks like the army boys get from the surplus shop down the street.”
She hitched one thumb northward while she plugged her flaring nostrils with her other hand.
“Might have to stop on by there when my shift is over,” she said, scooting back across the parking lot toward the store. “I don’t think Mr. Deepak is much worried about you, Bertha.”
The bill from the trash company came in the mail in the middle of every month. Last month, the postal carrier made her sign for the envelope. Nevertheless, the owner of this Gas ’n’ Go, Deepak Windlass, ripped up the paper in front of Rhonda and tossed the scraps into the toilet.
Fortunately, Mr. Deepak always paid Rhonda on time, and he threw in some chocolate bars.
She stood outside the propped-open door of the convenience store. She retrieved a pack of cigarettes from a pleated front pocket of her gray polyester pants. A black Ford Taurus sedan— an Atlanta City Police cruiser—idled at one of the pumps. She lit her Marlboro and poised the cigarette between her lips.
This Gas ’n’ Go had a prime location. It sat on the corner of Rosewood Avenue and Tangle Wood Lane, so there was steady traffic from young couples renovating houses in the reviving neighborhood. There were also customers from Collinsworth Academy. The continual business made Mr. Deepak happy and Rhonda busy most of the day.
Her regular customers knew her name and told her “good morning” when they stopped for coffee. On Fridays, some of the older Collinsworth boys bribed her to sell them a case of Budweiser for their weekend parties. The extra money she saved meant a new pair of dentures in a few months. Mr. Deepak did not care who bought his beer, as long as they bought a lot of it.
A puff of smoke blew over Rhonda’s dry, puckered lips.
“Punks,” she mumbled as two boys in baggy blue jeans cruised past the gas station slowly on their skateboards. “Keep riding, or Bobby will take care of you,” she said softly. Rhonda kept the Louisville slugger, which she’d nicknamed Bobby, under the counter inside the store.
Sucking a last drag from her cigarette, she tossed the butt on the asphalt and stamped the smoldering Marlboro out with the rubber toe of her orthopedic sneakers.
Officer Marion Scott was inside his police cruiser, idling at pump two. The officer nodded his close-shaven, blond head at Rhonda as she retreated into the convenience store. He was slumped down in the driver’s seat. He felt a twinge of guilt for being thankful that Rhonda did not approach him to chat. A swarm of bees had built a nest in his head and his ringing ears and aching brain could not take the pressure of one of her long conversations about how her kids never called her. He imagined that with just one word, his head would split right down the middle, as if he had been whacked by a psycho killer in a horror movie.
He cupped a handful of baby aspirin in his palm. Raising a bottle of water to his parched lips, he swallowed. He considered that Rhonda was nice enough, just ugly. He regretted the thought immediately and closed his eyes. The static from his police radio scratched his ears. The toll of double shifts ached in his weary bones, but he kept a cure in the locked glove box. In the middle of the night, a sip of moonshine from his flask helped him to pass the time. He never drank enough to make him howl at the moon, only enough to ease the tension, and he desperately needed the overtime money.
His fiancée had announced their first baby would be arriving in February. How was he supposed to support a family on his salary? He had already trashed the FBI application that had taken him months to complete.
The stiff vertebrae in his neck cracked when he raised his head from the seat and stretched his arms and chest. In the corner of his eye, he saw Rhonda waddling toward the car.
Be nice, he reminded himself crankily and rolled down the window.
A pair of doll-sized, buttercup-yellow socks fell into the passenger seat. “Booties for the baby,” Rhonda said with a toothless smile. “I knit them myself,” she said proudly.
Officer Scott fumbled with the tiny pair of socks, smaller than his palms. “Thanks,” he said flatly.
“Coffee?” Rhonda asked, her face shoved inside the patrol car and her arms resting on the window sill. “You look like you could use some.”
“You shouldn’t have,” the officer told Rhonda and dropped the baby socks back down on the passenger seat. He did not want to touch them, because he knew he was not ready to be a father. Sometimes he forgot to feed his dog.
Rhonda grinned at him, her body pressed against the passenger door. “You’re welcome,” she said, beaming. “Now how about that coffee?”
Officer Scott shook his head no and reached for a notebook lying on his dashboard. He pretended to read the scribbled writing.
“You should have stopped by here last night,” Rhonda said, slapping her palms against the window sill.
“Last night?” he asked, quietly staring at his handwriting in the ticket log. He had tried all morning to remember last night, but his twenty-five-year-old memory failed him. The freckled-faced, auburn-haired girl and the man in the cape were the last people he remembered pulling over before he blacked out and woke up in his patrol car behind the Gas ’n’ Go dumpster at sunrise.
“That storm really walloped us,” Rhonda said. “First, it got real dark. Second, the wind started to shake all the windows,” she explained.
A loud yawn escaped the police officer’s tightening throat.
“Third, the power went out.”
With her focus on rehashing the thunderstorm, Rhonda failed to notice the white, boxy truck that approached behind her. When the screech of soft brakes pierced the air, she whipped her head around toward the dumpster.
Thumpety-bump. Bumpety-thump. The truck rattled to a stop in the back of the parking lot by Big Bertha.
When the driver’s door swung open, a brown, barefoot old man jumped to the ground. Thin and wiry, the white-haired man had hips that barely kept up a worn pair of baggy, mud-stained jeans. His ragged t-shirt had once been white and it was ten sizes too big for his hollow chest.
Peeking from behind Rhonda’s back, Officer Scott spied a gun tucked into the driver’s waistband.
The man scrambled around to the back of the truck. When he swung open the cargo door, the raucous rattle of sliding metal tore through the silence. His stunned audience stared in confusion.
Cyrus gauged the height of the truck bed with his black eyes and leaped straight up on the bumper with the accuracy and strength of a pouncing lion.
“No way,” Officer Scott marveled quietly. “Maybe you’d better go inside, Rhonda,” he said, his thumb poised over the siren switch on the dash.
On the dusty plywood floor of the truck, an unconscious body lay limp at Cyrus’s gnarled, bare feet. Crouching on his hands and knees, the shapeshifter sniffed the trickle of blood oozing from the man’s nose. A soft whimper of feral excitement eased from his throat.
Cyrus lifted his ragged fingernails to the man’s throat and ripped the cheap plastic poncho from his chest. His claws caught on the thin,
sweat-soaked undershirt that was stained muddy brown. He shook the shredded garment free from his grasp. Cyrus knew the birthmark must be somewhere, and he rolled the body over so that the man lay flat on his stomach.
Pushing away the scraggly, salt-and-pepper hair that dangled to the man’s shoulders, Cyrus howled, his human voice cracking as the heinous sound tore from his throat.
From the nape of the unconscious man’s neck, an eye socket, black rimmed and slanted like the eye of a slithering serpent, stared back at his face.
“Dat da sign!” Cyrus panted happily and wagged his hind end as if his tail could follow. His skin itched. The wolf wanted out.
“Nah,” he calmed the beast inside him.
Crates of rope and chain link strands littered the floor of the hardware delivery truck. Cyrus swaddled his prize securely in binds from which he was certain the injured man could not escape even when (or if) he woke up.
Inside the convenience store, Rhonda cowered under the counter as howls shook the glass windows. She kept Bobby close to her chest and hoped Officer Scott had called for back-up.
The officer climbed from his patrol car with his pistol locked and loaded. Carefully he approached the truck by the dumpster, his tread as light and sure as that of a stalking ninja. He peeked around the corner of the truck.
The sweaty stench of the nervous cop had already warned Cyrus that someone approached—someone familiar. He recognized the scent from the attic. The man had been in the attic before him. Cyrus waited patiently.
With the tip of his nose breaching the bumper, Officer Scott braced himself and counted silently to three. When the officer swung around into whatever waited at the mouth of the truck, Cyrus lunged and hit the officer in a blur of mottled flesh and whiskers. Officer Scott lay stunned on the ground, staring at the cloudless, blue sky, the wind knocked out of him. He roused only when diesel smoke stung his nostrils and he heard the rumble of the truck.
