“Then there is nothing more I can do here.” Artemis faded and was gone.
I opened my mouth to cuss but Mags pulled on my arm,
“She can hear you, don’t invite trouble.” She pulled me so she could look me in the face. “There not anything we can do. Help from gods big cost, be careful what you ask.”
I looked with Dirt and followed Wanda’s path. It was hard to see but there, and they had stopped. It was the old metal building.
“They’re at the building we were at today. How do I change to a bird?” I pulled my arm away from her.
“Owl is best for night, I show you.” She sat and became hard to see for a moment and then a huge owl sat where she had been.
I looked inside the owl and got the memory set, gathered my will and triggered the change.
My point of view changed, I was close to the ground. The night was painfully bright, the light from the porch blinding, I turned my head away and it rotated strangely. Sounds thundered through my head, loud, far better than even the dog shape. Smell was dimmed. I wasn’t tied to earth, I was light, strong, I could bounce easily. I wondered if I could fly.
The thought became the action, I sprang up and was airborne. My wings were just there, I thought of going higher and it was so. I looked around to locate myself, the view was strange from up in the air. I could see individual blades of grass in the yard. It would have been easy to get lost in my sense of vision but I pulled my focus back on getting to the old metal building. I saw the path I needed to take and turned that way. Air had body. There were streams and pockets, hard places to move through and easier paths. My body sensed what it needed to do. I let it alone and rode. I gained altitude and glided, I could go for miles, catching warm air to rise, making little corrections to best use the cushion. Even with my incredible hearing I could barely hear the air brushing past me, something about my feathers made the air pass quietly.
The building showed up. The moon was a crescent low on the horizon and it gave way more than enough light to see by. I aimed at the building and stooped, the passage of air was still almost silent.
I noticed how fast the ground was coming up and I felt like I was falling. I could easily grab something smaller than me and lift it, but how to go from flying to standing on the ground escaped me.
My wings flared in panic and I came to a sudden halt about six feet off the ground. I fell like a rock and landed on my tail and it hurt, but nothing like it should have, I was light and put together strongly. I rolled and hit the side of the building lightly. Stealth was over.
I pictured myself as human and triggered the change and suddenly stood there naked but for the necklace. I felt a warm surge of gratitude for it, I hadn’t even thought about whether it would make the change or not or whether I could fly with the weight. Maybe it had shrunk.
I reached for it and it became a long, slim sword much sharper than a razor on both sides.
I extended my senses inside the opening, I wasn’t getting blindsided again. Mags landed and made her change as I checked. I couldn’t sense anything, I dove through it balled up and rolled.
Nothing happened. Mags came through the opening in a waddle clutching a clump of dried grass and weeds that burned without consuming. The light showed Wanda’s limp form hanging head down from a foot crammed in a split in a piece of tin. I assumed it was Wanda, I couldn’t tell. She’d been skinned.
Exposed muscles looked like a picture in an anatomy textbook, false, unbelievable, some sort of lie, this couldn’t be. Her breasts hung shapeless, lumps of fatty looking meat with no definition. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real, this didn’t, couldn’t happen. I couldn’t respond, I stood there imagining the pain and helplessness and what she had gone through.
I heard Mags retching and looked, she had a hand against the wall bracing herself, head down, emptying her stomach. The smell hit me and my stomach rebelled, I fell to my knees with my eyes still riveted on the hanging body. The idea of skinning the breasts hit me the worse, I couldn’t help but wonder about the nipples, I felt it and imagined how it must have felt coming off.
The room was spinning. I had failed. Thoughts ripped through my mind; explaining this to Carl and the kids, what to do with the body, getting her down, what was next. I couldn’t do it.
Her arm moved and the pitiful, horrible hairless skull head turned. Jesus Christ, she was alive?
“Mags, she’s moving, help me!” I jumped up and reached but anywhere I touched her was raw exposed and painful.
Mags came up beside me and looked at me helplessly, reaching out but hesitating, our eyes met and I could see my indecision and despair reflected in hers.
“Come on, we got to do this. We’ll be quick and get this done.” I took the worse part and grabbed her torso and lifted, Mags grabbed her lower leg and lifted her foot from the split in the tin.
She was light, warm and slippery. I held her tight against my naked body but she slipped down until her hipbones caught on my arms, her head was almost on the floor. She made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a scream, high pitched but not loud.
Mags caught her by the shoulders and we lowered her to the nasty concrete floor as gently as we could. She writhed as her back came in contact with it but we had to do it.
I hid in the back of my mind and made an internal gibbering noise so I wouldn’t think. This was more than I could take. The smell of blood and fecal matter, old rotting meat and dead things, the slimy warm feel of her, the blood covering the naked front of my body overwhelmed me, I couldn’t take it.
I watched me lay her gently down and put my hands to her chest, forcefully not thinking about her breasts. Her feet and hands still had skin on them, clean and out of place, looking somehow artificial. Her intestines sagged, held in place with fat and muscle and because he had hung her upside down. Thank God they hadn’t fallen out.
I scanned her. Other than the missing skin she wasn’t injured.
I looked at Mags “Can we fix her skin? Is this even somethin’ we can do?” My voice sounded strange to me, calm, businesslike, when I wanted to scream and ball up in a wad and not deal with this.
“Yes. We can do this. You start from hands and I start from feet, we grow it.” She kneeled down, then sat, hands on Wanda’s feet, and her eyes were distant.
Wanda was unconscious and she was moaning continuously and trying to get off the floor. The grit and filth must be excruciatingly painful and it was sucking the heat from her body.
I blocked the pain receptors first and she relaxed with a long exhale, I was scared for a moment it was a death rattle.
I scanned the edge of her wrists and pulled on Dirt for the necessary energy to get this started, I poured it in and could actually see the skin begin to recover her arm with my eyes closed. I immediately found tiny pieces of foreign matter, her body grew the skin under them.
I had no sense of time passing or my surroundings. I helped her body cover the other arm and her face. When I came to her lips I had trouble, the tissue was different and I didn’t know how to proceed. Her body did, it continued without noticing my confusion, and I didn’t even have to hesitate when I came to nose and eyelids. I was shocked when someone caught me by the shoulder and shook me.
Carl said “Here, drink this” and put a cup of something in my face.
The smell hit me like a solid swat in the body, I actually shook, coffee! I came out of the trance and took it. My hands were dry and tacky with dried blood and the cup was warm, steam wafted off it.
“Thank you, you are a lifesaver. How did you get here? Shouldn’t you still be healing, you were pretty messed up.” I leaned back, my back was cramped and sore, my legs had no feeling in them and the floor had sucked all the heat from me.
“I got up and came looking for y’all, thought about this place and came here. I found y’all, I got the coffee and sandwiches and came back.”
The thought of food made me realize I was ravenous, totally empty, even with the smell and the filth. I couldn’t ea
t with my hands, I couldn’t think how to manage it, and he held a sandwich to my mouth. I bit in, a tomato sandwich, salt and pepper, bacon, it was the best thing I ever tasted. I had trouble chewing, it was so good my body ignored me and wanted to just swallow, I almost choked.
“Hey, take it easy! You got time, Steph is feeding Mags and we got some blankets.” He gave me another bite, then removed his arm from around my shoulders, I hadn’t even noticed that. I looked around at him and saw Mags eating, I guess she didn’t care about the stuff on her hands; she was stuffing food in her face as fast as she could get it in her mouth and make room for more.
Stephanie covered Wanda with a blanket. Carl tried to help without looking, more because he couldn’t stand the sight of her skinless body than from modesty.
He handed me a sandwich in a paper towel, I could deal with that. I walked around as I ate to get some circulation back in my legs, my ass was a lump with no feelings at all in it, I staggered and swayed and my knees wanted to collapse. The pins and needles of returning circulation were excruciatingly painful and I felt guilty for caring while Wanda was so much worse off.
I held the pain block on her without touching her. I hadn’t known I could do that.
I asked “I figured you’d be out for a while, Carl. How come you’re up so quick, and how’d y’all find us?”
“It’s almost dark on the day after the night y’all left, today is Saturday.” He sat on the floor holding Wanda’s hand, trying not to look at her bald head. The hair would come, but I hadn’t wasted time speeding its growth. I told Carl and he looked relieved. I didn’t mention I used my hair as a template. Wanda slept or was unconscious, moaning a little in her sleep. I got some feeling back in me and sat back down on a blanket. I didn’t want to carry her home in this condition, we needed to get her healed. But…it was almost dark, the other the kids were alone, nobody to protect them.
“Let’s bundle her up and take her home. We can’t leave the other kids alone, we need to be there.”
Carl and Steph had Wanda in the car quicker than I would have believed it. The sun was lowering, shadows long, and time was short; Chen could and would be out when he wanted to, he could be at the house already.
We made it home with nothing else happening and worked on Wanda through the night, taking breaks when we had to. Mags, bless her heart, took some of the worse of the healing, I took it above the waist and she got everything below. We finished as the sky got gray and birds started chirping, the cool breeze of the early morning felt good when I stepped outside for a breath of air.
With everybody bedded down as well as possible I needed a few minutes to catch up with myself. I lowered myself into a chair; it had been a while since I sat on the porch. As I sat there enjoying the peace and quiet and letting the buzz caused by lack of sleep and overwork ease off, I heard a noise from the street. Something like humming, with a nasal tone, and almost silent slaps hitting the spaces in the humming.
Looking down the street, I saw movement across the road. Someone strolled casually from between two houses and walked into the middle of the street.
I wondered who was up walking around this early. The way the long hair hung marked it as a woman. She walked a little strangely. Probably a doper, high on something, there didn’t seem to be a problem or she wouldn’t be humming.
She was naked or wearing way too little, I could see nipples on her flaccid chest. Her eyes were wrong, something was off about them, I couldn’t see well enough to tell exactly what it was. Her ankles and wrists were marked with a dark line. She was old or starved or she had been sick; her skin hung strangely loose on parts of her, her neck, her thighs, belly and breasts. It was tight on her arms and legs and across her shoulders. She carried a sack, maybe a purse, in one hand, and swung it back and forth as she walked.
She stood facing me. I saw her mascara had run down her face making tracks down her cheeks.
“See me; see what I can do. I can show you how. I can help you. I fixed this.” She tossed the bag into the yard, it rolled up to the steps. Something about the voice was familiar, it was low pitched and quiet.
“Stop all this fussing. You do what I want like we agreed. I make sure nobody bother you.”
Everything came into focus. The bands on the wrists and ankles were the ends of Wanda’s skin, blood from the eyeholes ran down the face, it was Chen in Wanda’s skin. My hair stood up, one part of my mind almost burst out laughing, it was ridiculous, insane; most of me recoiled in horror and I felt my stomach heave. I leaned forward to stand up, this had to end.
“You not move now – listen! I leave. You don’t hunt me. You put the blood out for me, I get it tonight, I forget all this trouble and we partners. You not give me any more problem; we partners. You fix people, you not fix some things though.”
Suddenly he disappeared. I had afterimages of him turning and running away back between the houses, but I wasn’t accelerated and they were blurry. The bag lay in the yard, I looked at it, maybe it had something that would explode, or something to stick me. It was dark at the bottom, soaked with fluid. The top was rolled down to close it. It was a dog food bag, fifty pounds of dry food, some off the wall brand, I stood there and looked at the pictures on the bag. I picked it up by the top and it weighed about like a gallon of milk.
I unrolled the top and lay it down, caught the string on the bottom where it was sewn together, and dumped it out.
A dark hairy ball rolled out with an overpowering scent of blood. It rolled a little. I saw an ear, and a staring eye. It was a head. The mouth hung open and one eye was mashed shut, out of shape. I didn’t recognize it.
A car passed on the street. It was Sunday, dawn, there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic this early, but I needed to get this out of sight. I held the bag open and rolled the head back into it, as I touched the fine, short black hair I realized this was Andy.
I was in a place where I couldn’t feel anything. The last day was a nightmare. I could be tough as I needed to be, but this was just too much, someone else needed to deal with it.
This Chen Ling, this vampire, had beaten me at every turn. All I was doing was playing catch up. He destroyed and I tried to fix the damage. Somehow I needed to get the move on him, get him reacting to me instead of the way it had been.
But I saw no way to do it. I had people dependent on me. If I chased after him, I left them unprotected and he took them. If I protected them he would find one I missed and take that one.
I might have to give in and feed the bastard. The thought sickened me. The more I fed him the stronger he got and he was already way too strong.
Stories said he should stay away from holy water, silver, churches. I didn’t place much stock in any of that, he didn’t seem to care about the stories. He managed to get out in the daytime. He stayed active at night. The bastard was invincible. The witches admitted they couldn’t deal with him, they had already had a run in with him and lost and now they wouldn’t take a chance on pissing him off.
If I could react fast enough to bury him, stick him in the ground, I would have him. But he was fast and unpredictable, he always knew when I was near and he got away and attacked every time.
That was predictable. I wondered if there was any way I could use that information. He did seem to prefer the old building for skinning, but I couldn’t count on that.
If I placed blood out for him I could know where he would be at some point, he had to come get it. If I poisoned it he might be able to tell, and I didn’t know what poison might work on him.
I needed to be able to track him; I needed to be able to get close without him knowing I was there. I needed to be able to take him down, quickly and for sure. I would need to hold him somehow to be sure I could do whatever was necessary, which would probably require beheading, burning, staking, shooting, hell, I would hit him with a stick while I was at it. He was tough.
Traffic was picking up a little and I had a head in a bag to deal with. I’d have to tell the ghouls, if a
nd when they showed up. I hadn’t been real attached to Andy, but he had been a person, in spite of his affliction. I could have worked with him. I wandered into the back yard with the bag and had Dirt open a hole, I sat the bag in it and set down by the hole, remembering. It wasn’t much of a sendoff but it was all I had.
I asked that someone, somewhere, make allowances for him. He wasn’t bad; circumstances had forced him into a bad situation and he had handled it pretty well, taking responsibility and not harming anyone.
I closed the hole. I had to figure some way out of this but at the moment it looked pretty bad.
The rest of the day was a blur with moments of panic and intense sadness. We got Wanda finished and woke her up. She couldn’t get a grip on what had happened to her. She alternated between sitting and staring and crying uncontrollably. She felt herself, running her hands over her head, arms, patting like it didn’t fit right. Her new hair covered her head like the fuzz on a peach. I guess it would take a while to grow in. It caused her to go into spasms of grief every time she noticed it.
Pemmy ran up to her for reassurance, she grabbed her and hugged her ferociously, crying and wailing. The kids eventually avoided her, they had no idea what was wrong and it scared them. Hell, it scared me. I couldn’t get in her head to fix it. Carl got a fifth of whiskey and we had her drink till she got some color back and quit trembling. She finally passed out.
Now all I had to do was figure how to deal with Chen.
Six
I could fight him. I could get fast enough to cut him. He’d run away and get one of the kids, or Wanda, Mags, any of them. I didn’t know what would kill him or stop him. That was it. I just didn’t know enough.
“Mags. Tell me about vampires. What kills them?”
“If you can get it to be still, can do it. Go inside with healing, but unheal, take apart, break. Stake to heart will stun most, then take off head and burn it. Strong vampire hard to end. Not know how much to burn, so burn all of it.”
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