Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  The waitress slapped a glass of wine on a cocktail napkin directly under my chin, then vanished. I picked it up and lifted it in a half-assed toast in Horace’s direction. He gave a weird half bow and a wave back, then grimaced as he realized the crowd he was going to have to wade through in order to join me. He immediately assumed the position of a tightrope walker shimmying above a pit of alligators and began to squeeze his way across the room, doing everything short of removing a hankie from a pocket to cover his mouth and nose—mostly, I suspect, because he didn’t have a hankie.

  With a laser frown and a flip of his double-jointed wrist, he whipped out the unoccupied chair across from me and said, “Honestly?” as if I’d just told him I’d bought a pair of pasties and planned to take up table dancing.

  I smiled at him despite myself and said, “I swear to God, if I’d known about the busker, I would’ve picked someplace else.” Which was perfectly true. I’m petty, but I have my limits.

  “So you say,” he accused, snapping his fingers and—like magic—summoning the waitress, whom I probably couldn’t have flagged down again with a boomerang. He put in an order for a Manhattan, neat, and took a deep breath … then appeared to think better of it. He exhaled swiftly and, with a shake that might’ve been a shudder, he said, “Ray-baby!”

  “Don’t call me that,” I told him, but not with any weight behind it. I don’t really mind, usually. I especially don’t mind when I can barely hear it. The busker was leaning on the lyrics of “Yellow” like each word was a hook he was pulling out of his eye. “And it’s good to see you, you irascible bastard.”

  “Back at you, princess,” he said with a grin, which squinched at the busker’s manhandling of the chorus. “But really. Here?”

  I shrugged, like this was no big deal. “Well, you said you wanted to talk business, and it really doesn’t get much more private than a dump like this, now does it?”

  “I guess not,” he said, dubiousness written all over his forehead. I watched him work up to some feeble enthusiasm about slumming in utter security, and either he’s better at psyching himself up than I am, or his news was good enough to overrule any environmental discomfort. “Your taste in hangouts, Christ. Dracula’s castle may have been dank and filled with homicidal hookers, but at least it was quiet. I assume.”

  Horace knows I’m a vampire. He figured it out years ago, which isn’t such a strange thing considering his line of work. The most valuable and most wanted items in the world are those traded by immortals, after all.

  “I don’t have a castle. If I did, I would totally put you up and give you one of the hookers. And maybe a stake. But in lieu of a castle, this will have to suffice. You’re the one who was dying for a powwow, so go on. Scoop. What’s so important that it’s worth sitting here, listening to this?”

  “Almost nothing,” he purred, but he leaned forward—or started to, then saw the crimson splash from where my wine had arrived and retreated, keeping his prissy, pristine elbows dry. The waitress picked this moment to deliver his Manhattan with the same messy verve she’d used to give me mine, then disappeared back into the fray. He sampled the beverage, gave a head-tossing shrug that pronounced it surprisingly drinkable, and gave in to a full swig.

  “Almost nothing?” I prompted.

  “Almost.” And then he said what people always say, when they’ve got a whopper to share. “You’re not going to believe this shit.”

  “Try me!” I said, with a mixture of both real and fake enthusiasm. Horace has been known to embellish, in order to get me on board with an uncertain gig or two, but he’d gone to real effort this time. I was curious.

  Using two fingers and his cocktail napkin, he swabbed the little deck between us. “Okay, get this. Last month I was doing a gig with this assessment show.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I said, “Can you be more specific?”

  “Oh, you know,” he waved his hand. “Attic Treasures. That PBS production where people dig out their old junk and hope it’s worth money.”

  I tried to picture it, wee and fabulous Horace, being shown Hummel figurines by octogenarians. “Seriously? Why the hell would you take a gig like that?”

  “Because sometimes”—he was purring again, which meant trouble, but maybe the good kind—“we find great stuff that way. All the big auction houses send people along on those things, you know, because usually the first thing Grandpa wants to do with his newfound Renoir is sell it. God knows most people can’t afford to insure their treasures, even if they’re sitting on family heirlooms—and they usually aren’t. They’re usually pieces of shit found in abandoned houses, or in dead people’s basements, or estate sales, or whatever. But yeah, all the big guys, including my employers, send people along.”

  “And you drew the short straw?”

  “Oh, shut up. It isn’t that bad,” he insisted. “Don’t get me wrong—I bailed on the Bible Belt tours because, fuck me, I can’t stand that folksy shit. I did an East Coast leg and a West Coast leg, figuring I might find some colonial loot or maybe some Indian stuff out this way.”

  “Native American,” I corrected him, not because I care but because I’m contrary.

  “Oh, fuck you. Those Eskimo toys go for a mint, and I have a buyer in Spain, of all places, who’d pay me in blood if he thought I’d take it.” He gave me a meaningful look, but I waved it away.

  “No way. I’m never that desperate. It’s cold hard cash with me, darling, and you damn well know it.”

  With a harrumph he said, “It’s just an expression. Anyway, when was the last time anyone gave you cash?” He pronounced the word with disdain. “Wire transfers are so much cleaner and easier.”

  “And easier to get through customs,” I admitted. “So correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re about to tell me something that will involve a very fat wire transfer in my immediate future. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. And”—I bobbed my head toward the busker—“you’d have never set foot in this joint. So come on. Out with it. Where’s the carrot at the end of this stick?”

  “Don’t let me savor it or anything.” He took another full drink, swallowing half the cocktail and beaming a Cheshire smile that should’ve been mine. “It’s like this: I’m in Portland, you know. Just last week.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re filming, and we’re filming, and we’re filming … you know, tedious shit. One asshole after another with a broken pot or a third-grade painting, blah-blah-blah. And then this guy—he’s one of the producers, named Gary—Gary comes up to me and he’s like, ‘We’ve got something weird at the exotics table.’ ”

  “And naturally, they call you.” I used present tense because that’s what Horace uses when he’s telling stories about himself. Always the hero of his own ongoing show, that guy.

  “The weird stuff is my specialty.”

  “Wait. What’s the ‘exotics’ table?”

  “It’s where they sort out all the tricky stuff. Ivory, pelts from endangered species—or pelts that might be from an endangered species—anything an appraiser suspects is stolen, human remains, or the like.”

  “Human remains? Does that really happen?”

  “All the fucking time. Usually teeth and shit, but sometimes you get Great-Great-Uncle Casper’s scalp, and then we all get to have a good freak-out about it. But we never put those on the show,” he said with sudden earnestness. “We don’t want to encourage the freaks.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Anyway. Over at the exotics table, Gary hands me over to Phil, who’s holding a cigar box about this big.” He made the motions for an object the size of a big dictionary. “And I’m getting all excited, because—”

  “Because you’re one of the freaks,” I interjected.

  “Precisely,” he agreed. “I mean, you just never know with those events—they’re like war. Long periods of boredom punctuated by high excitement, nay terror.”

  “You were afraid of the cigar box?”<
br />
  “I was not afraid of the cigar box,” he responded crossly. “I was excited about it. Now you’ve thrown me off. Let’s see, okay—”

  “What was in the cigar box?” I cued him. “I think that’s probably where the point of this story lies.”

  “Goddamn, you’re a bitch. Yes, fine. All right—so I take a look in this cigar box and it’s filled with …” He reached for an interior jacket pocket and produced an old-fashioned Polaroid. He slid it across the slightly damp tabletop, and I picked it up.

  The square picture showed the box’s interior, illuminated by an overenthusiastic flash. The contents were oblong, more or less—and very white, or maybe that was just an effect of the lighting. It looked like perhaps a dozen of the objects were scattered therein, dropped like Pixy Stix.

  “Definitely not cigars,” I observed.

  Which prompted him to muse, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar …” very softly. And then he concluded, “But sometimes it’s a big fat cock.”

  “I’m aware,” I said.

  “No, no. I’m being funny. You don’t get it? Don’t you see what these are?”

  I squinted at the photo and gave it the ol’ college try. “I … hmm. I don’t know. There’s not enough zoom. Not enough detail for me to guess. You’re going to have to tell me.”

  He scrunched his hands into fists, and his whole body began that low-frequency hum of outrageous, joyful greed. “They’re bacula!”

  “Bacula? Like … Count Bacula?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, you ignorant cunt—bacula,” he pronounced carefully. “Plural of baculum.”

  “Well, that clears it right up.”

  With a sigh that almost ruffled the curtains, he said, “Raylene, they’re penis bones.”

  Aaaaand … he’d finally done it. The little bastard had rendered me completely speechless. I sat there with my hand on my wineglass and my mouth hanging ever-so-slightly open, waiting for the rest of it.

  He waved his hands in circles, like he was trying to diffuse a fart. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Apparently not,” I all but stuttered.

  “Honey, these aren’t ordinary penis bones.”

  “Not the kind you pick up at Walgreens, with a bottle of aspirin and a scented candle?”

  “Oh for the love of …” But he couldn’t find anything holy enough to insert, so he said, “You do realize that some creatures have penis bones, yes?”

  “Sure,” I said, even though it would’ve been more honest of me to admit that I’d never once, in any level of seriousness, even considered the interior workings of animal sexual plumbing.

  He could tell I was lying. If we’d been on the phone, I might’ve been able to fool him, which is why my usual preferred method of communication with Horace is phone. He said, “Okay, Biology 101: Lots of mammals have penis bones, because they lack the advanced hydraulics that keep human boners bone-free.”

  “Okay …”

  “These penis bones are called bacula, or baculum in the singular.”

  I then asked what I thought was the most obvious question ever. “But why would anybody want them? Much less collect a whole cigar box full of them?”

  He raised one finger. “Ah. The reasons are many and varied,” he said, which I found extremely hard to believe. “Biological supply houses sell them for classrooms and whatnot, but only ordinary bacula—from dogs, raccoons, you know—and they aren’t worth much.”

  “So we’re talking about a box full of them because …?”

  “These aren’t dog bones. Or raccoon bones. Or any other bones that any catalog would carry for the giggling satisfaction of high school science students. They’re …” He lowered his voice. “From other creatures.”

  Now he had my attention. “Other creatures? Like what, like … like …?”

  He whispered, “At least one from a gryphon, and one from—I shit thee not—a unicorn. At least two werewolf bones—and I don’t even want to know what went into acquiring those!”

  “Bullshit,” I argued. “Even if you knew what the schlongs of those creatures looked like … I mean … Let me try that again. Even if those were real things and not mostly fictional things, I am unprepared to believe that you knew, magically, what they once belonged to! For all you know they came from a horse and a wolf, and a … a …” I tried to figure out the nearest corollary to a gryphon and settled on “lion.”

  His pointy finger of “but wait, there’s more!” was aloft again, so I knew I’d accidentally said something useful. He told me, “But that’s exactly how I knew. Magic!”

  “Get out of here. You don’t know any magic.”

  Horace recoiled very slightly, feigning offense. “No, but I know about magic. And I know how to read. Someone had been so kind as to tag them with those—” He took the picture out of my hand and pointed at something I could barely see. “Those little tags, tied onto them like toe-tags.”

  “Except they’re dick-tags.”

  “Are you finished?” he asked, sitting back and folding his arms. “Are we done with the dick jokes, just for now? Can we move along to what’s important, here?”

  “Most guys think their—”

  “Stop it,” he ordered.

  “Fine, fine. No more dick jokes. For the next, I don’t know. Five minutes. That’s all I can promise.”

  “You didn’t check your watch,” he pointed out. He knows me well. I really am that precise and punctual, pretty much always.

  “Let me ask you this—and in order to humor you, I will ask this in all seriousness, I swear to God. Even if they are … accurately labeled,” I said, settling on a descriptor. “Who cares? Biologists, maybe; cryptozoologists, certainly; but it’s my understanding you can’t yank DNA from bones.” I’ve heard you can get it from teeth, but I had a feeling that erection scaffolding fell outside the appropriate parameters. “Even if it’s true, no one would ever believe it. Hell, I’m undead with a werewolf ex-boyfriend and I don’t believe it.” The wine must’ve been making me chatty; I said it loudly, and with a gesture of the glass. I made a mental note to cut myself off before I did anything truly embarrassing. My system doesn’t process alcohol very well, so a little goes a long way, dammit.

  “Most people wouldn’t believe it,” Horace agreed. “But that’s fine. I’m not interested in reselling them to most people.”

  “Then who?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Rich weirdos. The kind who are ‘in’ to ceremonial magic. Penis bones have their own ritual uses and whatnot, but, oh boy howdy—you give somebody one of these penis bones? I’m not saying the sky’s the limit, but you’d be talking about some serious spell-slinging.”

  I said, “Huh,” because he’d answered my question, but I still couldn’t picture it. “People will pay money … lots of money? For these things?”

  He leaned across the table as far as he dared, and flashed me one of his most avaricious, toothy smiles. “Millions. Millions each,” he amended. “The werewolf ones alone—and they’re probably the bottom end of the cost spectrum—I could probably unload for eight or nine hundred thousand.”

  “Why are werewolf bones so cheap? Relatively speaking?”

  “Because werewolves aren’t quite so hard to come by as unicorns or gryphons. I’m not saying they’re a dime a dozen, but if I desperately needed to track one down, I could probably do it in a few hours. Only because I have connections, though,” he said with a lift of one golden eyebrow. “And I don’t just mean you.”

  “I would assume so,” I retorted, even though I suspected he was lying. He didn’t need any underworld contacts other than me, and he probably didn’t want any. Vampires are very quietly very well organized, and very dangerous that way. They don’t tend to pay for the things they want; they tend to take them. I’m only so easy to deal with because I don’t have any House or family affiliates, but that’s a story for another time.

  I continued, “But if you honestly believed you could get me to steal you a werewolf�
�s penis bone, it’d cost you more than eight or nine hundred. Those guys are seriously hardcore, and they are seriously attached to their body parts. Especially that one, I bet.”

  “Unless—” He tapped thoughtfully at the edge of his glass. “Unless you can find out where some are buried. Talk about your profitable grave robbing!”

  “Maybe that’s why they don’t bury their dead,” I mused.

  “What do you mean they don’t bury their dead? Everyone buries their dead!”

  “Incorrect, dude. Lots of people cremate, via big stoves or pyres or whatever. Weres are big on cremation. And now, I suppose, I know why. I mean, if my penis bone was worth almost seven figures, and I wanted to keep it in my personal possession—even after I’m too far gone to use it—I suppose I’d put in a request for a little fire and brimstone, too.”

  “If you had a penis bone, I would be very confused,” he said, chugging the last of his Manhattan and glancing around for the waitress, who failed to appear at his second finger-snapping summons. “Oh,” he said with a sudden frown. “Well then. I was going to be a big tipper, but fuck her if—oh hi there!” He changed his tune as she swanned up to the table. “One more of these, please.”

  She nodded and took off. “You’re so quick to judge,” I teased.

  “She’d better not spit in that,” he complained.

  “I doubt she heard you,” I tried to assure him. We weren’t listening to the tortured strains of “Yellow” anymore, but so help me God the bastard had moved on to Creed.

  “That changes nothing. People spit into drinks for spite,” he assured me, eyeing the glass she’d given him the first time, because she hadn’t whisked it away when she’d done her drive-by.

  “Stick to wine. It’s easier to see gobs. I’m just sayin’.”

  “You’re revolting.”

  “You have no idea. Now, let me ask you something else.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Why didn’t you just buy the bones off the owner on the spot, if they’re so goddamn valuable?”

  “An excellent question,” he said. “I picked a number out of my ass. I picked a thousand dollars because I thought it would sound like a lot of money to a poor person.”