“Dieter?”
He grabbed his cart and started off again, trundling the thing along behind him like a shriveled husk of a homeless caricature. Once he had it out in the alley, he turned it so he could push it ahead, leaning into it like a walker. This assistance brought his speed back up to the new infant crawl. He still wheezed and coughed, yet seemed to be making a steady pace of it.
Kage checked a leather and steel wristwatch.
Zar gazed sadly after the little form, his arms around the bag of Max’s remains.
“He’s too defensive out here,” Isaac said quietly. “To talk to him again, he’s going to have to be home.”
“That’s … what I was beginning to be afraid of,” I said.
“And after all our trouble looking for the bugger,” Andrew muttered. “We might as well have sat around all night at his doorstep.”
Kage snorted. “No, we couldn’t. We didn’t mean to spend all night here.”
“Not all night—” I started.
“Look at the sod.” Kage threw out his arm. “It’ll take him until Tuesday to get home.”
“It can’t take him that long,” I said. “He has to be in before daylight, doesn’t he? Or is that another vampire myth?”
Zar shook his head. “No, they hate the light. It’s not that it will burn them up, but it exposes them. Even mundanes can see through their charms facing a vampire in daylight. They’re creatures of death and darkness. Being exposed to more than a candle or a dim street like this is intolerable to them.”
“Then he has to get back,” I said. “He’ll have timed it so he knows.”
“But when? Just before sunrise?” Kage asked.
“It can’t take him that long,” Andrew said. “He’d spend his whole death shuffling around out here.”
“Maybe he does?” I said. “Maybe we were lucky those two times we met him before and usually he is out pounding the pavement. He spends all night out, then sleeps in the day with his blood hoard?” I looked to Zar again.
“Lucky?” Kage asked. “That’s what we were, was it?”
Isaac had walked away and I turned my attention to him as he followed Dieter, stepping well off to the side so as not to crowd the vampire.
He pulled up something on his phone. “Anyone have the street name?”
“To map how far we are from his front door?” I asked. “Just put in the club.”
Isaac fiddled with the phone, then studied Dieter from the side, holding out his hands, measuring how long it was taking him to move one foot or one yard.
After a minute, he consulted the phone again.
Then, “At this pace, it should take him about … two and a half hours to reach the entrance. That’s not allowing for actually going below, going back to his room, or any disturbances along the way. So let’s round up to three hours.”
“Bloody hell,” Kage murmured.
“Moon, Sun, and stars,” Zar said. “I knew they wasted away the longer they’d been dead, but…”
“Anyone fancy a burger?” Andrew asked.
“Or should we go home?” Kage asked. “We could drive there and back in that time. And he’d still be settling in.”
“Too true,” Andrew said. “Go in for a kip, come back later once the old boy’s bedded down.”
“We can’t do that,” Zar said. “Can’t approach him during the day, I mean. They’re not active when the sun’s up. You think he won’t talk now? Try jabbing him awake in the middle of the day.”
“If we have to talk to him at night, and it’s going to take him three hours to get home, and we’re not certain that’s where he’s headed,” I said. “What about…?”
“Speeding him along?” Kage asked.
“Do you think he would sit on his bag and we could pull him?” I asked, sure it was a stupid question.
“Bugger that,” Kage said, starting forward. “No reasoning with them. The whole lot are mad, talking corpses.” He strode past Isaac and reached to pick up the little vampire.
Chapter 20
“Kage, don’t!” Zar shouted as he saw what was happening.
Isaac started forward to stop him. Jason and I also ran forward.
“Kage—”
Kage grabbed the vampire. Ready, apparently, to whisk him up in the air and run him home like a football.
With a wild, strangled hissing, Dieter spun in the baggy old coat and sank his fangs—the only four teeth he had left—into Kage’s wrist.
Kage yelled, jumped, and I think he would have torn the vampire’s fragile neck right off his hunched shoulders if Isaac hadn’t already been separating them. Dieter let go as fast as he bit, Kage being knocked sideways and the vampire crashing onto his hand trolley in a spitting, snarling heap.
“You little fucker!” Kage shouted, trying to get back to him.
“Rot and filth! Filth, filth! Böser Hund! Filth!” Dieter screamed, spitting and wiping his mouth, frantic to clean off his teeth on the ragged old coat that looked like it might have been washed sometime in the 1980s.
“You have some Moon-cursed nerve, you blood-sucking, gutter-crawling, rotten sack of carrion!”
Isaac turned Kage’s arm to see in the glow of his phone and Kage subsided to mutters. Jason was there at their sides, trying to lick his hand.
“You can’t catch it, right?” I was scared, though most of the others didn’t seem especially troubled.
“No, it’s all right.” Zar stepped up beside me. “Wolves are immune. Anyway, they have to get a major artery to spawn, among other rituals. They can’t just turn you into a vampire at a bite. Though their bite alone can kill humans, and still make him ill.”
“What he’s going to get is an infection if we don’t take care of it,” Isaac said.
“I can change,” Kage growled. “It’s nothing.”
“You can’t change here,” I said and blew out my cheeks. “Why did you do that?”
Dieter was back on his feet, starting to shuffle off again.
Three hours and ten minutes.
“Just trying to move the sod along. I didn’t know he could whip around like that. If he can move so fast, why the hell doesn’t he do it to get home?”
“Here.” I fished hand sanitizer from my purse. “Not much, but that should kill some bacteria. You’ve got to go home.”
“Not a bloody emergency.” Kage snatched it from me, pulling his arm free of Isaac to squeeze the liquid on himself. “It’ll be fine for a few hours without rotting away. Get off, Jay. I’m fine.” Jason had been spy-hopping, trying to see his wrist, and Kage shoved him with his knee.
“All right.” Andrew, who’d also walked up, opened his hands wide. “I’m not silver, but just going out there to say let’s nobody touch the vampire, right, mates?”
“I’ll second that motion,” I said. “But, since we can’t airlift Dieter, what are we going to do?”
“Just … wait,” Zar said.
“It’s two in the morning,” I said. “By the time he’s home, let’s assume it’s five. And we give him a little time to settle in? Then go down and … what? He’s obviously not in the mood for us. We know he’ll talk. He did before. We only have to catch him at the right time. And it’s going to have to be home.”
“He doesn’t go out every night or we wouldn’t have found him in the first place,” Zar said.
“Another good point,” I said.
“You’re right,” Isaac told me. “It’s no good following him. We can keep checking on him again for the next nights until we find him home and talking. It’s the weekend coming up and easier for most of us to be here then anyway. No worries about being out all night.”
“And Kage,” I started.
“I’m fine. Don’t have to rush home.”
“I wouldn’t want an infection from that thing and I don’t think you want to be sick from it either. Better to take precautions. Let’s head home, get some rest, and look forward to another adventure Friday night.”
“Moon
bless us,” Zar said under his breath.
“How’s Max?” I asked, casting Dieter a last look and turning away with the rest.
“He would have liked a warmer reception but, all in all, he’s the patient sort.”
I smiled, which made me feel a lot better. “Glad to hear it.” In an instinctive moment, I almost put my arm around him, wanting to lean my head on his shoulder. I caught myself and did no such thing as we all headed for the main road and sidewalk.
Kage was telling Jason we’d find him somewhere to change along the way.
Andrew stopped to watch the vampire before we turned a corner. I looked around as well.
Dieter was still twenty feet from the end of the alley, moving at a determined shuffle. His wheezing and coughing remained audible.
“Poor bastard,” Andrew murmured, shaking his head. “What a death. I’d so much rather just snuff it, you know? Even if I’m not singing with Moon. Anything’s better than that.”
“Don’t go feeling sorry for it.” Kage’s tone was testy. “Going to hand it a hunting rifle or something?”
“That’s enough,” I said calmly. “It was another Moon. Andrew didn’t know giving that one its cane back could be dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with being compassionate.”
“Until it gets your whole pack singing with Moon,” Kage said.
I sighed. “We’re fine. Drop it. Oh—” I turned at the corner. “And something else to drop.” I caught Andrew’s eye and jerked my head at a street-side rubbish bin. “You’re not taking that home.”
“Taking what home, darling?” A kind smile, much like Jason’s usual benevolence, sprang to Andrew’s face.
“Go on.” I waved my hand at the garbage.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Andrew.”
Everyone else had stopped, waiting for us.
His smile melted to sorrowful Bambi eyes. “Probably worth fifty or a hundred quid. Who’s to say? You wouldn’t take that from an unemployed wolf, would you?”
“You are not going to take that home to sell it on the street. Throw it away.”
He sniffed and scuffed the sidewalk with the toe of his motorcycle boot. “Don’t suppose you could use your magic to speed up the dead, do you?”
“What on earth does that have to do with—? No, I can’t do any such thing. But I can set that baggie in your pocket on fire.”
He looked up, eyes wavering. “You can?”
I shrugged.
Andrew extracted the bag with a little white powder from his pocket. “We can’t bin something like this when it’s worth—”
“Bin it.”
He binned it.
“Now go on,” I said.
“What?”
“Go on. Walk ahead of us.”
Andrew chuckled. “You don’t trust me?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Go.”
“Bloody Mayo around here,” he muttered as he walked past me, myself keeping an eye on him so he didn’t retrieve the bag.
Once Andrew was ahead and we were all walking again, I glanced questioningly to Zar beside me.
“It’s a bit of our history. Mythicized now,” he said, Max’s bag across his shoulder. “In ancient times there was a powerful Irish pack ruled with an iron jaw, closely controlled and militarized by their patriarch. What is now County Mayo, and thereabouts, was supposedly their territory. You’ll hear it referenced these days as a sort of cautionary tale or moral fable. There are certain stories attributed to the Mayo Pack that resemble the human’s Aesop’s Fables, in fact. Mostly, though, you’ll hear references like that one. To say something is Mayo is to say it’s rigid, inflexible, tyrannical.”
He shifted the duffel bag as we waited for a traffic light. “Mayo is a warning against male-dominated societies as well. If you get a few male silvers all in one pack you’re sure to hear some wolves shaking their heads and saying, ‘Remember Mayo,’ or, ‘Keep Moon’s light,’ or something of the sort. Moon is feminine, see. Feminine grows life. There’s balance in the pack: I don’t feel unfairly treated, or anything like that. It’s just … we all know. Remember Mayo and keep Moon’s light.”
“What happened to them?” I asked, watching the city lights of historic buildings alongside modern glass and steel.
“The Mayos? Gone hundreds of years. At least. There are no wolves in Ireland now. Not for many generations. The last wolves died or fled with the Great Famine in the 1840s. They never went back.”
“They have those bleeding foxes, though,” Kage said with a growl in his voice.
Ahead, Andrew snorted. “Moon-cursed sneaks.”
“Wait…” I slowed my step, looking around at them. “There are fox shifters in Ireland?”
“Sure,” Kage said. “Not that you’ll spot one. Lurking, scheming—”
“There are fox shifters? I thought there were only bears and wolves until you told me about dingoes.”
“Well…” Zar shrugged. “Hardly any. Most of the shifters have died out. But there are wolves, foxes, and others. Bears in Sweden and Norway. Lynx in the East. Still a few out there. Not like the Americas, of course. You have plenty there: South and North America. But I don’t know much about them. I’m not even sure what all they are these days.”
I had known there were supposedly still wolf and maybe bear shifters in remote areas of Canada, at least that’s what Nana said, that they had to move farther and farther from humans to be left alone.
Now, though, this made me wonder. I’d never thought there could be wolves in such a densely packed and tiny country as England. Yet here they were. Could there possibly be wolves in my own backyard? And bears and foxes?
“Why don’t you like foxes?” I asked.
“What’d I just say?” Kage asked. “Lurking, sneaking—”
“That sounds like prejudice to me.”
“It is,” Isaac said and I looked around to him at my right. Doing so made me realize that the pack was walking in a rough formation around me. Andrew ahead, Zar to my left, Isaac to my right, Kage and Jason behind. It felt … a bit over the top. I didn’t comment.
“Have you known any?” I asked Isaac.
“A few. They’re not like us, it’s true. They don’t think like us. But I knew some in Scotland and they were not lying, hustling criminals, either—which is what you’ll hear from most wolves.”
“And stinking,” Kage grumbled. “Don’t forget stinking.”
“They do have a … musky odor,” Isaac said. “But only in fur. You wouldn’t notice it when they’re in skin.”
“Have you known any bears?” I asked.
They shook their heads.
“Mum did,” Kage said. “She has distant family out in Finland, old kin that are generations removed now, but she spent some time there as a yearling. She’s never said much about it, but I know she met bears.” After a pause, “Bet they reek too…”
I sighed. “Why the bigotry? You’re all shifters.”
“We’re not like them,” Kage scoffed. “Wolves, bears, foxes—we don’t run in the same packs, we don’t follow the same Moon.”
“Shifters have never got on well,” Zar said.
“Well, you might want to try it one day. Considering the situation you’re in. Your people are fading away and you don’t even call each other up on the phone? I’d think you’d want to stick together and share resources.”
“Yeah…” Andrew said so slowly it sounded like several syllables. “Don’t go all Twilight Sparkle on us, darling.”
I stopped. Kage just about walked into me.
“You do not watch My Little Pony,” I said.
Andrew turned to face me, opening his hands, walking backward. “What do you think I do in that hotel all day?”
“No…”
“But the best TV? That old chat show, Oprah, from the States? Heard of her?”
“Have I heard of Oprah? Is that what you said?”
“She’s the best.” Andrew chuckled. At a le
ap, he took a dramatic pose and spun his arm, pointing at us in turn. “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Hell, yeah. Love her.”
He walked on, still chuckling, and I followed with my entourage, though my knees felt weak, brain slack.
I looked sharply at Zar. “Do you know who Oprah is?”
Zar shook his head.
“Andrew, you sit in people’s rooms and watch cartoons and talk shows all the time?”
“Of course not.” Laughing more. “Too many good movies and gameshows on BBC Four. That’s just now and then, and when I have a good connection there to stream on my phone. The signal at home’s rubbish.”
“No wonder they fired you. And you had me feeling guilty for keeping you away.”
“You can keep me away from work anytime, darling.”
Apropos of all this, we were nearly back to the bikes and walking through a nice area with hotels. It was outside one of these that Isaac looked around and I also turned.
Jason had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.
Kage faced him. “What’s wrong, princess?”
Jason stood motionless, rigid.
Andrew returned to us—him, Isaac, and Zar close around me. I felt their tension so strong it made me tense up as well.
Jason’s head moved to the left as if tugged by the nose. He followed it, sniffing to the hotel door. A doorman was in there, watching us, staring at the black wolf who, bunched up with us on the sidewalk in the streets at night hadn’t seemed noticeable. All of a sudden, he stood out, separate, collarless, sniffing the hotel door.
“Jason?” I said in a hushed tone. “Don’t stand there. Come on.”
He paced several steps, in and away, back again, sniffing the sidewalk, the air above, the glass door, the handle. As he did, fur rose on his back in a long strip from ears to the base of his tail.
“Jason. Kage, he can’t stay there.”
Kage walked over to tug the chain necklace hidden in his fur. “Let’s go.” He ignored the doorman through the glass and came on with us, pushing Jason ahead.
“There’s the park,” Kage said. “Step off.”
We hurried to get around a corner, onto a pathway beside a low wall and hedge. The bikes were also along this park, another block down.
Moonlight Heart: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 4) Page 13