Kyle inhaled. He whispered, “I want to write my will.”
She joked, “It’ll hardly hold up in court if you write it now. You’re already dead.”
“I don’t want these thoughts! Help me write my will and then cut my head off!”
Laylea gagged at the thought and then ignored him. She scrubbed, letting him writhe and moan on the squishy mattress. She was a kid. He was the adult. But she was the wyrdo and he was human. Or had been until fifteen hours ago. He was a good man. How could one bite, a little blood drinking, and a self-defensive murder make him evil? Did a vampire have to be evil? Were all demons evil? Captain Morioka didn’t seem evil. She was a highly decorated cop. Which fact could really sway the vote in either direction depending on your relationship to cops or at least which cops you had a relationship with.
Kyle heard no pause in Lee’s scrubbing.
“You’re good, Kyle. You’re a good man. Can’t you be a good vampire?”
The idea calmed him. He noticed Laylea’s breath came easier after heard he remembered to inhale harshly and exhale. He breathed a few times before he asked, “Is there such a thing?”
“I don’t know.” She actually threw up her hands, spraying water over the quietly yowling cat. Apparently the idea hadn’t calmed her. “I don’t know anything about vampires.”
“Neither do I.”
Laylea leaped on his weakness. “Let me call Seb. He might know some—”
“No! Dee can’t know.”
“Why not? Do you think she’s going to love you any less? Blame you? Tell Jeannie and KJ?” Thinking of his wife and daughter whom Dee had had to inform last night of Kyle’s death in the line of duty, Laylea scrubbed viciously at the last long arm of the rune. “What is it, Kyle? Why won’t you let me tell anyone who might be able to help us?”
Kyle’s answer was a howl as his body bowed in the throes of another seizure. Laylea threw her brush at the dead tree painting. It clanged.
The cat hissed.
“Shh,” Laylea hissed back. “Nobody wants to hear your problems, Methuselah.”
She stared at the painting. A thud, sure. A thunk, understandable. But a clang?
Kyle whispered a confession. “I liked that kiss, Irina’s kiss. I was jealous that she got to live forever and travel the world. She was offering me her power and independence in that kiss.”
“But you turned her down. You told her to go.”
“I took a vow to protect the city,” he said.
Laylea walked to the painting, one hand outstretched. A dead tree standing with a skirt of snow melting all around its gnarled roots. Water, water everywhere.
Methuselah howled. She yowled and clawed at the mesh side of the crate.
“What?” Laylea spun to face the cat. “What do you want? He’s promised not to eat you. He’s chained up. He’s too weak to lift his arms. What are you screaming about?”
The cat hissed and spit and raked the inner walls of the soft-sided crate.
“Shut up! We are talking things through to figure out a way I don’t have to cut his head off. We are trying to figure out why you and your human have been feeling funky and frankly who killed your human’s landlady. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
Laylea hoisted the crate to show the cat the chain around Kyle’s chest. Then she grabbed the mesh front of the crate to bring it around to face her. Methuselah saw her chance and dug her claws into Laylea’s fingers.
The stone hanging from the cat’s collar swung forward to hit Laylea’s bloody fingers. It started to glow. Laylea had sucked in a breath to swear, but no words came out. She didn’t have time to think them. She didn’t even have time to turn her head at the sound of rattling chains before Kyle had grabbed her hand and pulled it to his mouth. He sucked at the wounds, gnawing uselessly with his dull human teeth.
Breath frozen in her lungs, Laylea dropped the cat. She yanked the silver cross from her collar and held it in Kyle’s face even as she kicked him in the chest. He dropped back, panting. She fell to the floor, gasping for breath and scrambling backwards, dragging the glowing crate with her.
Kyle’s horrified face filled in as she stared at him. His skin lost its ashen quality. His lips plumped up. His eyes brightened with life though their brown stayed pale.
Laylea gripped her humanity with all the active magic she possessed. She couldn’t drop the crucifix and if she went dog now, she couldn’t hold it. She snarled back at the growing bite of pain in her core as watched Kyle’s eyes drift down to the cat yowling in the crate. Its fur stood on end straight back to the double line of white on her tail.
Kyle glanced from the cat to his chest. His flannel shirt was ripped where the chain had shoved down to his waist. He felt the ribs Laylea had cracked with her kick knit back together, healing themselves. The incessant sweating slowed even as his thirst ratcheted up. He looked again at the trembling meals in front of him. Laylea couldn’t catch her breath. Tears streamed down her face though she didn’t seem aware of them. The cat huddled frozen inside the crate, the glow from her collar stone fading.
Kyle lay down and wrestled the chain back up his chest, resting when it laid tucked under his armpits.
“That’s the best I can do myself.”
Laylea shuddered at his voice. She blinked.
He forced his eyes away from the droplets of blood welling on her fingers. “Can you quick change?”
“Huh?” she asked.
“If you change, your hand will heal, won’t it? Negate any venom I injected?”
“You didn’t bite me,” she said. “You don’t have teeth yet.”
His chest filled out. His hair regained its curl.
“Lee?” Kyle repeated himself.
“Hm?”
“The blood makes it hard to see you,” he said, “as a friend.”
8
Dead women, Dead Cat, Dead Kyle.
Laylea looked into his eyes. She looked at his pale knuckles gripping the chain. She looked at her own white knuckles squeezing the imprint of the fancy cross into her fist. She tried to relax her grip. “This is pretty.”
“It’s a rosary. Sister Sue gave it to me as she died this morning.”
“Quite the day for you and gifts of jewelry from dead women.” She slipped the rosary into a collar pocket, not quite controlling the shaking of her hand. “I have nothing to give you.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” he promised. “I didn’t kill Sister Sue.”
Laylea righted the tumbled crate and set it a little farther from the mattress. Pulling her arms inside her t-shirt, she let go. She changed. She wriggled quickly out of her clothes, keeping her eyes on Kyle. His muscles relaxed. A certain tension in his neck eased.
She barked a question.
“She fell.” He kept his voice calm, soothing. “Dee and I were heading to a meeting with Sister Sue when she tumbled down a flight of stairs right in front of us. In her last moments, Sister Sue tried to speak. She didn’t have the breath.” He inhaled deeply himself. “But she slipped me her rosary beads. Then Dee began keening and her phone rang. It was Seb calling us to The Office. I slipped the crucifix and beads into my pocket and forgot about them until Irina brought me back to life.” He smirked at Lee. “To a kind of life.”
Laylea’s tail twitched in sympathy.
Kyle growled. “You know Irina set us up. She told us that Captain Morioka is a demon and she must never have the key to distract us. But she really only gave me the key so she could find me later, where there were no witnesses.” He looked away from the dog’s still frightened eyes. “The curse tied her to that key. She couldn’t give it up. Irina tracked me to our stakeout. She turned me and she had planned to turn you if she could. She thought it would be sweet to have a little vampire puppy for company.”
Laylea’s eyes flashed to the door.
“Irina’s dead.” Kyle reassured her. “For good. I gave her what she wanted all those centuries.”
He laid his head back down on the
squishy pillow and wondered if he could walk into the sunlight like she did so many times. He wondered if he should, now, before he had the strength of a full vampire. He reminded himself to breathe.
Laylea glanced at the meager remains of the rune and mulled it all over. She focused on the mystery instead of her fear. That always helped when Bailey lost control.
Mrs. Cull had been messing with dark magic she had no natural control over. Then Mrs. Cull got herself blown up yesterday. Laylea’s gaze shifted to Kyle pretending to breathe under the useless chain. Mrs. Cull got herself blown up by some idiot who didn’t even finish tying her up.
Irina, pretty easily, rid herself of the cursed key she’d been carrying for centuries, tracked it down again, and got herself dusted by a dead nun’s crucifix.
Sister Sue fell down a flight of steps just in time to give Kyle the only weapon that could have saved him. But it didn’t save him.
Kyle died yesterday.
Yesterday was a bad day. Even Jukebox Beth had died yesterday. She died because the key got back to the bar.
How had the key gotten back to the bar?
Laylea trotted over and traced a paw through the cold water soaking the rune. She gathered her humanity about her and changed.
Kyle smiled, tapping a hand on his thigh in applause. “Hey, you’re getting better at that.”
Laylea flashed him a fifteen-year-old’s look.
She asked, “How did Dee get the key?”
“I gave it to her.”
Laylea tilted her head.
“I thought I was dying,” he explained, looking away as Laylea pulled her clothes back on. “Dee and I were alone. Her banshee powers kicked in. I saw her.” His eyes misted over with pink. “Looking at me. She was devastated.”
“Because she saw that you were going to die.”
He nodded. “I made her take the key, told her to keep it from Morioka. Then some girl shot me and Dee went after her. That’s when Irina bit me. I lay there in the mud beside my car, paralyzed while she sucked me cold. The bullet in my chest didn’t bother me. Everything felt good and easy,” he shivered deliciously, “and cold. I floated for a while. Then Irina started sucking blood from her own arm. She fed it to me like a baby bird.” A smile ghosted his face. “KJ calls them worm loogies. She says, ‘Momma, give me worm loogies!’
“I heard my little girl in my head and I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be Irina’s pet. She was still feeding me, caressing my forehead with her ice blue nails. I grabbed her head and pulled myself up to rip out her throat, but found I didn’t have the teeth. So I drank. She loved it, until she understood I wasn’t going to stop. When she started to pull away, I remembered Sister Sue’s rosary.” His knuckles whitened where they gripped the silly chain. “I pulled it from my pocket and stabbed her in the heart.”
His hands fell back as he fought the influx of that memory from Irina’s point of view.
Laylea watched him. Sweat dripped down his face again as the spark in his eye faded. She gathered her scrub brush and took it back to the rune. She dunked it in the now cold water and scrubbed at the last of the paint and blood.
It didn’t make sense to her. “Morioka didn’t want the key any more than Kelly wanted Mrs. Cull’s tea or those awful brownies. Captain Morioka turned three shades of purple when I pulled the key out of my collar at The Office.”
Kyle tried to sit up but the chain pushed him back down. “You got the key from Bailey but how did he get the key?”
“Dee was heading to a meeting with Morioka when she detoured to bail Bailey out of jail. So she gave it to Bailey for safe keeping. He gave it to me to keep in my collar.”
Kyle reminded himself to breathe and asked, “Bailey, in jail?”
Laylea swiped the brush one last time over the floor. “Kelly gave the brownies to the daycare next door. After the explosion that killed Mrs. Cull, Bailey saw the kids lying around the playground like Dali clocks. He waded in to help them and a teacher misunderstood. Kelly was unconscious and I was a dog so we couldn’t explain.
Kyle’s eyes followed Laylea as she carried the bucket to the kitchen. “So the herbs Mrs. Cull gave Kelly were poison.”
“No. Well, not like kill-you poison.” Laylea looked over at the cat in her crate. “At least I don’t think so. I mean the brownies couldn’t clean this place if Mrs. Cull was a killer. That’s bad karma.”
“Unless you kill someone who deserves to die.”
“Yeah, not so much. The fates don’t like having that choice taken from them. And the brownies say death is too good for anyone who deserves to die.”
“Upshot, Mrs. Cull wasn’t trying to hurt Kelly.”
Laylea shrugged. She sprinkled baking soda down the drain and followed it with more of the dirty rune cleaning solution. “Or she didn’t really live here.”
Kyle sluiced the sweat from his face. “So after Irina left us at the bar, Seb sent you to the Psychic Eye Bookshop.”
“He said it was the best place for info on runes and herbs. I kinda got stuck in dog form so I couldn’t find out a whole lot, but the shiny happy wannabe doorwitch owner opened the door for me and let me wander around. She even pulled down one of the herbs for me to smell and told me about them. I’m sure she knows I’m not an ordinary dog.”
“And you’re sure her friends know she’s a kook and won’t believe a word she says about you.”
Laylea tapped her nose. “The three herbs I identified are all used for relaxation, hypnosis, and, so Celia informed me, astral projection.”
“Celia’s the doorwitch?”
“Yes.”
Kyle curled up against the pain returning to his joints and the memories crowding his brain. Laylea turned away from her work to watch him. A mix of fear and sadness haunted her eyes.
When he could speak, Kyle said, “A doorwitch is like a Martha Stewart witch?”
“You need me to distract you again, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Please.”
“Whatever healing my blood gave you is already wearing off?”
“In a way.” He didn’t want to tell her the whole truth.
“The mystery of Mrs. Cull is enough?”
“No. But what’s a doorwitch?”
Laylea wanted to ask what was going on with him. She wanted to call for help. Instead, she turned back to the sink and kept talking.
“A doorwitch is a natural whose magic is limited to household uses. She or he does basic, helpful magics like encouraging bread to rise or clearing weeds. Though there aren’t many growing things a doorwitch would call a weed.”
Kyle’s vision had tunneled to the point that whenever she stopped talking, it felt to him like she disappeared and he was alone with all the new pictures in his head. He did not want to be alone. He did not want to shut his eyes and smell blood, dream of drinking, suffer the memories Irina had bequeathed him with her blood. It was better, not good, but better to let Lee’s memories in as she talked. He had to keep her talking. Had to remember she was a friend. “If Mrs. Cull didn’t drink her own tea, why she, why was she unconscious when you found her?”
“Maybe she did drink it. But there was no teacup on the table. And I wasn’t likely to smell anything in here other than gas at that point.
“Kelly definitely drank the tea. Even Bailey could smell it all over her when we found her downstairs on the floor of her kitchen. Bailey sent me sniffing for, what was it?” She carried the bucket, filled with clean water, back to the mattress. “Epsom salts and eucalyptus. But I smelled gas when I got to the bathroom. The smell led me to a hole in the wall behind the toilet where I found Methuselah laying just a few feet inside the opening. I dragged it out by the scruff of the neck.”
“And she didn’t object because she wasn’t breathing.”
Laylea paused in her final rinse of the wooden floor to look over at the living cat in question. She was no longer huddled in the shadows at the back of the crate. Her nose poked through the mesh of the front
panel. “There was nothing I could do for her. I left her to follow the smell of gas through the passageway in the wall.”
“Because you have the curiosity of a cat.”
“Really?” Lee reacted exactly as he’d hoped she would. “I’m protecting you here. You bit me and I still haven’t called anyone, and you’re gonna just compare me to a cat?”
“The phone died when you dropped it.”
“What?”
“You dropped it and drowned it when you changed. You can’t call anyone.”
Laylea looked over at the cracked remains of the phone laying in a puddle of glass and water. “Shit”
“Did it occur to you the cat was dead because of the gas?”
“Yes. That’s why I held my breath. I thought I could find the gas leak.”
“Instead you found Mrs. Cull.”
Laylea nodded. “The shock helped me change. With thumbs I could shut off the burners and open the windows. I went to get her out of the apartment—” She stopped.
“She was duct taped to the chair,” Kyle prompted, not wanting the conversation to return to vampires and demons.
“Except for her left arm.” Laylea pictured it all in her head again, unaware that Kyle was doing the same.
The wasted old lady sat taped upright in a blue fiddleback chair with a rune cut into the headrest. The same rune Laylea had just scrubbed from the floor. The woman’s left arm hung at her side, free but lifeless. The chair sat beside a two-man table set with a lace doily and the bastardized alarm clock with flint where its bell ears should be, waiting for the set time when the hammer would strike sparks into the gas-filled air.
Both doors were locked when Laylea opened them. The windows were all shut. Someone could have taken a key and locked the door behind them when they left, but why would they leave her left arm free? If they were counting on her being unconscious, why tape her up at all?
Laylea: A Wyrdos Tale Page 5
