The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  After a quick shower and a change into some slightly less grungy clothes, Cormac went to church.

  He hadn’t been to church—any kind of church—since he was in high school and living with his aunt and uncle. They were some flavor of born-again Christian, and services had involved sitting on hard metal folding chairs in a plain room—rented office space—listening to fire-and-brimstone lectures. He hadn’t been back since he went out on his own. He’d never been to a Catholic church at all. He used the tools, of course, holy water and crosses, when he had to. But they were just tools. Any God he believed in wasn’t like the one most preachers talked about.

  The service had already started when he arrived. He stepped softly and found a seat on the bench in back. No one seemed to pay any attention to him. The church smelled of old wood, melted wax, and incense. The architecture was maybe a hundred years old, lots of dark wood, aged and smooth. The benches—pews—might have been mahogany, but there were pale scuff marks around the edges, where generations of bodies had banged into them. Pale stained glass decorated the tall windows along the walls.

  He had a good view of the congregation: a hundred or so girls in front, identical in pressed uniforms; a bunch of plain folk from the town; the priest in a white cassock, standing in front, leading a prayer; and nuns, maybe a dozen, in prim black dresses, sitting in the rows with the girls. Their heads were bare—short and simple haircuts for the most part, no veils—which surprised him. He’d expected them to look the way they did in the movies, with the weird hats and veils.

  There were altar girls instead of altar boys. Probably students from the school. Cormac didn’t know there was such a thing as altar girls.

  During communion, everyone stood, filed down the central aisle, faced the priest with hands raised, accepted the host, and marched back to their seats. Cormac was able to look at nearly every person there. Sometimes he could spot a werewolf in human form just by looking. The way they moved, the body language—more canine than human, hunched over, glaring outward, walking as if they had a tail raised behind them. The gleam in their eyes, as if they’d kill you as soon as look at you. Ones who were losing control, like Harrison’s cattle killer, had a harder time hiding it.

  He didn’t spot anyone who made him suspicious.

  The service ended, and the priest and altar girls processed out as the congregation sang, accompanied by one of the nuns playing a piano that sounded tinny in the big space. The congregation followed, filtering down the central aisle and two aisles to the sides. Cormac made his escape as part of the crowd. He lingered at the corner of the church building, watching. He still wasn’t getting a sense off anyone. In his experience, werewolves didn’t do well in crowds. They sometimes lived in packs of their own kind but didn’t cope well around normal human beings. They saw people as prey. A werewolf wouldn’t go to church and be part of a crowd like this, unless his absence would be out of the ordinary and noted. He’d followed the tracks back to town—this wolf was trying to hang on to normal. Maybe he was here and hiding really well. Maybe Cormac would have to stir things up a bit to flush him.

  But not right here. Not right now.

  He was about to walk away, back to his Jeep and the next part of his plan, when he caught sight of someone coming toward him. One of the nuns. He felt a completely irrational moment of fear. Too many stories about nuns in the collective unconscious; he wasn’t even Catholic. It wasn’t a mistake—she’d broken from the lingering crowd and came toward him.

  Tall, solid, with short gray hair and soft features, jowly almost. She might have been as old as the priest and had the air of an aunt rather than a grandmother. Stern, maybe, rather than kind. Someone who had spent a lifetime bullying girls at a reform school, rulers smacking knuckles and all. But he was letting stereotypes get the better of him again.

  He supposed he could have just ignored her and walked away. What was she going to do, run after him? But the last thing he wanted to do was raise suspicions. It wouldn’t cost him anything to find out what she wanted.

  “Good morning,” she said when she stopped in front of him, hands folded before her, pressed to her skirt.

  “Hi,” he said, then waited for her to say what she wanted.

  “We like to welcome visitors who might be new to the parish,” she said. “I wondered if I could answer any questions for you, about the parish or the town.”

  He probably shouldn’t have been instantly suspicious of anyone who showed him the least bit of friendliness. Some people might accuse him of paranoia. But the woman wasn’t smiling.

  “I’m just passing through, ma’am,” he said.

  “Oh? Where are you headed?”

  He couldn’t blame her for looking a little confused there. Lamar wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else.

  “Denver, eventually,” he said.

  “Ah. Well then. I hope your travels are safe.”

  Cormac left. She continued to watch him; he could just about feel it.

  Back at his motel room, he slept for a few hours, getting ready for another long night. He dreamed; he always dreamed, vague images and feelings, a sense of some treasure just out of reach or some danger just within reach. That if he was just a little faster, just a little smarter, he could make everything—his life, his past—better. He usually woke feeling nervous. He’d gotten used to it.

  Later that afternoon, just before business closing time, he found a butcher shop in town and bought a few pounds of a low-grade cut of beef, bloody as he could get it. At an ancient Safeway, he picked up a five-pound bag of flour.

  Around ten P.M., well after sunset, when most folk were heading to bed—when someone else might be trying to sneak out—he returned to the school. At the edge of the campus, along the trail of claw prints he’d followed back from the ranch, he staked out the bait.

  A wind blew in from the prairie, almost constant in this part of the state, varying from a whisper of dry air to tornado-spawning storms. Tonight the breeze was occasional, average. Cormac marked it and moved across it, away from the meat he’d hung from a low branch on a cottonwood. The wind would carry only the meat’s scent, not his. The hunter scattered flour on the ground underneath the meat, forming a thin, subtle layer. If the wolf ran away, this would make it easy to track.

  He went across the street and found a place near a dusty, unused garage, a hundred yards or so away, to hunker down. He let his gaze go soft, taking in the whole scene, keeping a watch on the bait and the paths leading to it.

  Time passed. The moon rose, just a few days from full. However much the werewolf might resist the urge, might control itself until then, at the full moon it would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have it.

  Midnight came and went, and the wolf never showed up to take the bait. It must have satiated the bloodlust on the cattle. It was being careful, now.

  After a couple more hours of waiting with no results, he dismantled the trap—took down the meat and brushed his boot across the flour until it was scattered and ground into the dust and lawn. Covering his own tracks.

  The sky was black. It was that time of night when streetlights—and even this town had a few—seemed to dim, unable to hold back the dark. In just a couple of hours, the night would break, the sky would turn gray, and the sun would rise pink in the east. He’d stayed up and watched it happen enough nights that he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy. Three A.M. had a smell all its own.

  He switched off the headlights as he slipped into a parking space in front of his room. The motel was a one-story, rundown strip, a refugee from 1950s glory days, with peeling white paint and a politically incorrect sign out front, showing a faded screaming Indian holding a tomahawk: the Apache. All lights were out, the place was dark, not a soul awake and walking around. No witnesses.

  Cormac set foot on the asphalt and hesitated. He listened to instinct; when his gut poked him, he trusted it. Something wasn’t right.
Something was out there. Slowly, he pulled the rifle from under the Jeep’s front seat.

  There wasn’t anyplace to hide out here; the land around the motel was as flat as a skillet, with no trees, only a few buildings, and the motel itself. The two-lane highway stretched out in either direction straight and empty. Cormac didn’t hear footsteps, breathing, a humming engine, nothing. He didn’t see a flicker of movement except for grasses touched by a faint breeze. He had no sign that anything was out there, except for the tingling hairs on the back of his neck screaming at him that something inhuman was watching.

  It thumped onto the roof of the Jeep, slamming the vinyl, rocking the whole vehicle. Cormac ducked, hitting asphalt, as the oversize wolf skittered across the roof and leapt to the ground in front of him.

  The door to the Jeep was still open; Cormac jumped inside, scrambling backward, and slammed it shut as the wolf crashed into it on its next attack. Its front claws scraped against the window, digging against the slick surface, snapping at the glass with open jaws and spit-covered teeth.

  The damn werewolf had tracked him. No—it hadn’t even needed to track him. The Apache was the cheapest motel in town. It just had to lie in wait.

  It hadn’t made a sound, not a growl or a snarl. It had just pounced, ready to rip him apart. On its hind legs now, it was as tall as the Jeep, larger than a natural wild wolf, because it weighed as much as its human form—conservation of mass. A wild wolf might be around a hundred, hundred twenty pounds. A big werewolf would be close to two hundred. This one was maybe a hundred sixty, hundred eighty. However large it was, however shocking it was to see a wolf as tall as his Jeep, this wasn’t the largest he’d ever seen. Not a two hundred pounder. It was thin, rangy. It had speed rather than bulk. Its coat was mostly gray, edged with beige and black. Prairie colors.

  The werewolf backed off a moment, then sprang at the Jeep again, crashing full force into the window. The glass cracked.

  Cormac couldn’t stay in here forever. And he wasn’t going to get a better shot than this. He fired.

  The rifle thundered in the closed space of the Jeep, rattling Cormac’s ears to numbness. The glass of the driver’s-side window frosted with a million cracks radiating from a quarter-sized hole in the middle. The wolf had vanished.

  He couldn’t hear a damn thing, and he wasn’t willing to bet he’d blown the thing’s head off that easy; he couldn’t spot any blood. He looked around but couldn’t see much, lying back across the front seats, peering out the remaining windows, mostly into sky.

  After rolling to his knees, he broke out the driver’s-side window with the muzzle of his rifle, dropping a rain of glass outside, and looked out. Shards of glass glittered across the asphalt. He didn’t see the wolf. Definitely didn’t see blood. Which meant it had ducked and run. Making his life harder.

  He made a quick three sixty, looking out every window, hoping to see where it had fled. Werewolves were fast, but he should have seen something, a flash of movement, the low lupine form dashing madly to safety. Otherwise it was still here, hiding low and out of sight next to the Jeep. He wasn’t going to go outside until he knew.

  Even if he did manage to kill the thing in a head-to-head fight, facing it down meant risking getting bitten or scratched, which was as good as dead as far as Cormac was concerned. No sense in taking stupid risks; that was the trick.

  He started the engine and backed away. Right away he heard a thunk against the side and saw what he was hoping for—the wolf scrambling away from the vehicle, turning tail, and running across the parking lot.

  The other trick was realizing werewolves didn’t generally take stupid risks, either. Instinct told them to flee when a hunt stopped being easy.

  Cormac shoved open the door, stepped out, took aim with the rifle, and fired. The wolf disappeared around the side of the building.

  “Damn,” he murmured. He’d have known right away if he’d even clipped the wolf. All he had to do was clip it. The silver in the bullet only had to touch the monster’s blood to poison it, killing it in a matter of moments. That wolf hadn’t slowed down. Cormac had just plain missed. He could kick himself. He didn’t miss very often, even when his target was running.

  But he’d flushed the thing into the open. That was something. The game wasn’t over yet.

  The engine on the Jeep was still running, and Cormac got in and headed back toward the Catholic school. Maybe he could run the thing down. Not to mention he didn’t want to be around when the cops arrived to investigate the gunfire. Assuming they did. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and the motel was still dark. No lights had turned on. He had to smile—small town on the plains, random gunfire in the middle of the night, and nobody bats an eye. They probably thought it was some kid out shooting street signs. Good enough.

  He couldn’t hope to follow the wolf in the Jeep—the beast traveled overland, in a straight line. Cormac had to stick to streets. But that was okay. The sun had started to rise. Monday morning the school would be busy, just starting its day. Good. Easy for Cormac to tell who was missing then.

  He was too close to identifying the wolf to worry much about his low profile. Parked in his Jeep, he watched the campus come to life, girls in their uniforms spilling from the dorms in clumps—packs, almost—hanging around on the lawns, filing into the classrooms.

  Then came his turn. He kept the rifle under the seat, automatically felt for the handgun under his jacket, and headed toward the newer school building, where most of the activity was. He scanned the faces quickly, efficiently, recognizing many of them from the church service yesterday. His wolf was around a hundred and seventy pounds, and he searched his mental catalog for anyone he’d seen who fit that description. That ruled out most of the students. But a number of the adults were that size. It would all depend on who was missing, who was away, sleeping it off.

  He entered the school and made his way down the main corridor, knowing he was out of place here; his skin crawled as people looked at him, stared at him, identified him as a stranger. Wasn’t anything he could do about that, so he concentrated on the job at hand. He walked up and down the hallway once, glancing through the windows in classroom doors, marking faces, noting rooms that didn’t have a teacher in them, making a mental checklist of other staff members he ought to be looking for—administrators, even janitors. He hadn’t seen anything definitive, nothing that worked on his gut feeling. In a sense, he was trying to prove a negative here, trying to prove an identity by its absence. He had to make sure. He couldn’t be wrong when he pulled the trigger.

  The building had a lobby, and he waited there while the last of the morning crowd came in and made their way to their classes. A few of the nuns were also teachers—he noted them. Also noted that he didn’t see the nun who’d spoken to him yesterday. But maybe she wasn’t a teacher. He also hadn’t seen the priest. At least, not until he went back outside, where the man was waiting for him on the sidewalk out front.

  Out of his cassock now, the man wore plain black trousers and a black shirt with a clerical collar. As Cormac left the building, the priest caught his gaze and started toward him. Cormac could have avoided him, turned around or just walked away. But he’d just as soon hear what the guy had to say. He looked to weigh about a hundred and seventy.

  Cormac waited, and the priest stopped in front of him. “You must be the visitor Sister Hilda told me about. I’m Father Patrick.” He didn’t offer his hand. Neither did Cormac, who only nodded a greeting. The priest didn’t seem to mind that Cormac didn’t say his name. “You seem to be looking for something,” he said.

  Cormac kept it straightforward. “There’s a wild animal been killing cattle out east of here. I tracked it here. You see anything? Hear anything?”

  “And here I was, hoping you were looking for redemption.”

  In spite of himself, Cormac chuckled. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Maybe someday, then.”

  In fact, Cormac was pretty sure he wouldn’t make it that far.
It didn’t bear thinking on. “So I take it you haven’t seen anything? If the thing’s bedding down around here, you ought to be worried. All these kids around.”

  Father Patrick gave him a quizzical look. “It’s that dangerous?”

  “Yeah, it is. I think it’ll kill anything in front of it.”

  “You make it sound like a monster,” Father Patrick said.

  “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “And why is it up to you to hunt it? You aren’t with the Department of Wildlife, I suspect.”

  “No, sir. Look, I won’t take up any more of your time—”

  “Not at all.” The priest made a calming gesture with a hand. Like a saint in a religious painting. “But I would ask you to consider letting this go. I’d hate to have to call the police about a trespassing violation.”

  Cormac just smiled. He’d heard shit like this a hundred times before. “I’ll get out of your hair, then.” He started to turn away.

  “Also consider, that even a monster is a creature of God, and God does take care of His own,” the priest said.

  Cormac looked at him. “You believe in a God that creates monsters? Monsters who murder?”

  “We don’t get to choose God. We don’t get to make God. God makes us.”

  He knows, Cormac thought. Or maybe . . . But he couldn’t have been the werewolf; the timing was off. He wouldn’t have had enough time to shift back to human, to dress and appear so calm and put together. At least, Cormac was pretty sure he wouldn’t have had enough time.

  “You know who it is,” Cormac said. “You know what it is. Then you know it’s a devil, a demon—”

  “And we’re all God’s children,” Father Patrick said firmly. “I’m going to make that phone call now.”

  Cormac walked away.

  It could be the priest. If he’d been a werewolf a long time, if he had the experience, maybe he could shapeshift that quickly and appear so calm just an hour after attacking Cormac, after getting shot at. But Cormac wasn’t sure that made any sense.