Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  “Thanks,” I mutter. Guess a pire calling in sick would kind of spill the beans. The rest of the shift is spent trying to track down Silverado—but he’s vanished, too. He’s dropped off his prisoner, but no one’s heard from him since. I don’t know if that’s just the bounty hunter being careful, or if we have another victim on our hands. I try calling Gretch. No answer. I look in on Eisfanger in his lab, hoping he’ll have something for me. He doesn’t. About all he can tell me is that whoever took the armor is a lot stronger than most pires or thropes, which could be the result of either drugs or magic. Wonderful. I finally give up and call it a day. Charlie drops me off at my apartment and I take Galahad for another quick walk before crawling into bed at around 4:00 PM.

  I wake from a deep sleep into a deep groggy. My door buzzer is buzzing in that insistent kind of way that lets me know there’s a teenager who wants to be let in. I stagger to the door, mutter something into the speaker, and let them in. Then I throw on a robe and head for the kitchen to brew some coffee.

  To find it’s already been made—by the large, naked man in my kitchen.

  “Coffee?” he says, in a voice that sounds more like he isn’t sure it is coffee and is requesting confirmation. “Coffee,” I agree. My brain is refusing to properly process what’s going on, so I pour myself some coffee and try it. It’s strong enough to etch concrete, which is just about right. “Good boy, Galahad,” I say. “My God, I may just have to keep you.” He grins proudly and waggles his butt. “But you’re still going to have to wear pants.” He gives me that over-innocent look that dogs do so well, that What? Huh? I don’t know that word look. “Pants,” I say firmly, and he hangs his head and slinks into the living room. There’s a knock at the door. My brain starts functioning again. I check the peephole and see that it’s Xandra—I vaguely remember her identifying herself, back in the Precaffeinic Era. I let her in. She’s doing her corpsing thing today, half her face rotted away and one eyeball dangling down onto her cheek. Her left hand is completely skeletonized, and she’s wearing a peek-a-boo top that shows off her ribs—literally. Torn jeans and army boots finish off the outfit.

  “Hey, Jace,” she says. “Hi, Gally.”

  “Xandra! Xandra!”

  I shake my head. “You’ve got him saying it already?”

  “Sure. He was my test case. He’s actually pretty smart.”

  “So I’ve discovered. He made coffee.” She grins—well, the half of her mouth that isn’t already exposed does. “Yeah, Uncle Pete taught him that. He said it was all about teaching him manual dexterity and simple tasks, but I think he had ulterior motives.”

  “Have you heard from him?” She throws herself down on the sofa, and Galahad promptly tries to sit on her lap—at least he’s wearing pants now. She pushes him off good-naturedly. “No. It’s kind of weird, but I guess he could have gone back to visit his old friends or something.”

  I frown, and drink more coffee. “His old friends? From where?”

  “I don’t know—wherever he came from. We’re not supposed to ask him about it. I think there was some big family tragedy, though; pretty sure he’s an orphan.” I blink. “Wait. He’s not really your uncle?”

  “Sure he is. Oh, you mean by blood. I guess not, but he’s a member of our pack—that’s the important thing.” So Dr. Pete has a past, after all. “How long has he been a member?”

  “I don’t know—as long as I can remember. You’d have to ask my parents—but I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You probably don’t know this, but it’s kinda rude to ask about someone’s former pack. You could maybe get away with it because you’re not a thrope, but they probably wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “Ah. Thanks for the tip.”

  “No problem.” She gets up from the couch and heads for the kitchen. “How are you fixed for food? I’m starving.” One problem thropes and pires don’t seem to have is an obsession with their weight—maybe because one only drinks blood and the other has a really fast metabolism. In any case, the only thing that consumes more calories than a thrope is a teenage thrope. “Yuck!” she says, her head in my fridge. “You’ve got all these vegetables in here. Some of them I don’t even recognize.” She stalks back into the living room, holding something at arm’s length. “I mean, what is this?”

  “That’s a zucchini. It’s really good in stir-fries.” She makes a face. “It looks obscene. These things grow in dirt, you know.” I consider telling her about fertilizer and where it comes from, and decide against it. “I know. Look, I’m going to have to go out and get you some supplies, all right?”

  “Sure. We can both go, take Gally with us.” Galahad is looking hard from Xandra to me and back again. He’s not entirely sure what’s going on, but he seems to know it has something to do with a walk. “You sure? No way I’m putting a leash on him.”

  “Don’t worry—he sticks pretty close. And he listens to me.” I tell her to give me a minute to get dressed. I haven’t had enough sleep, but I’m wide awake—might as well do something useful. We stroll down to a supermarket a few blocks away, one of those huge glass boxes that sell everything from lawn furniture to children’s shoes. I’m a little nervous about taking Galahad in there, but he behaves himself—only once do I catch him trying to tear open a package of hamburger, and he drops it with an ashamed expression when I bust him. I let Xandra load up on pretty much whatever she wants—which includes lamb chops, smoked oysters, a two-liter bottle of something carbonated called Beefy Fizz, and prime-rib-flavored potato chips. We’re in the checkout line when I glance down the nearest aisle and see him. Dr. Pete. It’s only a glimpse, but I know it’s him. He’s unshaven, wearing a black peacoat over a black turtleneck and jeans. He ducks out of sight as soon as I spot him.

  “Hey!” I say. I sprint down the aisle without thinking. Galahad joins me, doing his best to keep up on only two feet. I reach the end of the aisle and skid to a halt, looking around wildly. No Dr. Pete in sight. Galahad narrowly avoids slamming into me a second later. He casts about with his head up, breathing heavily through his nose, and I realize he may actually be able to smell Dr. Pete. “Where is he?” I ask. “Where’s Dr. Pete?” Galahad sprints for the produce section, me right behind him. There’s a loud crash before we get there, cans hitting the floor and glass breaking. We round a corner and see pineapples and grapefruits all over the floor, amid spilled salad dressing and a variety of canned goods that have been jolted off a shelf. Standing in the midst of the mess is Tair.

  He looks different under the blank glare of fluorescents, but it’s definitely him. There’s a gray stripe down the center of his head I hadn’t noticed before. He looks angry—ears flattened back, fangs bared. There’s no sign of Dr. Pete.

  Where is he? Tair signs. I know he’s here—I can smell him.

  Galahad stops by my side and makes a sound that’s definitely a growl. “Easy, Gally. Lose something, Tair?” He’s afraid to face me. Maybe the doctor needs a little incentive. The supermarket is relatively deserted, but there’s a few shoppers standing around and gawking at the spectacle; Tair reaches out and casually grabs one, a skinny woman with straggly white hair and a flowered sundress. Before she can do much more than yelp, he’s snapped his jaws around her throat.

  In one quick yank, he’s ripped it out. I’ve seen my share of ugly violence, but there’s usually some warning. The woman flails and tries to scream as blood splashes everywhere. She must be a thrope, but the suddenness of the attack and the loss of blood has her in a state of shock; silver hair begins to sprout on her face and arms as she instinctively tries to transform.

  Tair shoves her away and gives me a wolfy smile, his teeth dripping red. “Galahad,” I say. “Go to Xandra. Now.” He whines, but obeys. I study Tair carefully as the old woman writhes and sputters on the floor.

  No Sunshine Man to save you now, bitch. Maybe your precious Dr. Pete will show up to stitch you back together instead.

  He takes a step toward
me, flexing his fingers with their inch-long black claws as he signs. He isn’t moving slowly out of caution—he wants me to scream, to draw Dr. Pete out of hiding.

  He obviously doesn’t know me very well.

  ELEVEN

  I don’t have my gun with me. That’s too bad for Tair.

  What I do have is my scythes, tucked into their specially sewn pockets in the lining of my coat on either side. I’ve practiced cross-drawing them and flicking the blades open, and I have more than enough time to do so as Tair approaches.

  And stops.

  My old sensei Duane Dunn was a big believer in psychological warfare. “Best fight is the one that never happens,” he used to say. “Nothing wrong with running away, but if your opponent can run faster than you, you’re still in trouble. Better to make him run.”

  The scythes’ blades are around a foot long. Most pires or thropes will hesitate when facing that much razor-sharp silver, but I find it’s even more effective with a little demonstration. And here I am in a produce department…

  There’s a pyramid of cantaloupes right next to me. I snap a strike at the topmost one and bisect it along the equator, cleanly enough that the top half doesn’t slide off. I do it without my taking my eyes off Tair.

  His claws dance in the air in front of me as he signs. My, what big teeth you have, Grandma.

  “All the better to disembowel you with, asshole. Only one needing stitches is going to be you.”

  He glances at the old woman on the floor, who’s managed to shift into half-were form and is twitching weakly while clutching her throat. How about her?

  “She’ll be fine.” He’s trying to distract me.

  And your arm? How’s that?

  It’s actually throbbing like a son-of-a-bitch at the moment, but not enough to make me lose focus. “Thanks for reminding me. Where are your bandage buddies, anyway? There a sale on down at the Yarn Barn?”

  He takes a step backward. I apologize for their impulsiveness. A general cannot always control his soldiers.

  “A general that can’t might find himself losing his privates,” I say, making a suggestive but not serious swipe at him. Unlike the last time we met, Tair’s gone completely commando; he’s not wearing anything but fur and fangs. The fur hides most of it, but not all. “Especially if he parades them around in public.”

  We don’t really need to do this, Jace. I’m not your enemy.

  “No? Funny, the Blood Cross I pulled out of my arm says otherwise. And then there was that bitchneeding-stitches remark someone made… oh, wait. That was you.”

  I was hoping to draw out Dr. Adams. Apparently he doesn’t care about your welfare all that much.

  “Or maybe he just knows I can take care of myself.” Which sounds good but is pure crap—before he vanished, I would have bet anything Dr. Pete would risk his life to help me if I was in trouble. He’s done it before.

  But not now.

  As I said before, my business is with Adams, not with you. Since he’s obviously fled, so have my reasons for staying. And with that, he turns and bounds away.

  I don’t bother chasing him. I kneel down and ask the old woman if she’s okay. She growls at me, struggles out of her sundress, and runs off down the aisle on all fours. Guess she’ll be all right.

  I sheathe the scythes and return to the checkout, trailed by a small group of curious shoppers. Xandra, unfazed, waves me over impatiently. “Come on,” she says. “You have to pay for all this stuff, remember?”

  I notice she’s listening to an iPod—she probably missed the whole thing. Galahad looks at me with a worried expression and whines. I reach up, pat him on the head and say, “Good dog. Let’s get you home and off the streets, okay?”

  The cashier is looking at me strangely as she rings up my items, but nobody tries to stop me from leaving the store—I wasn’t the one that busted it up, after all.

  “Hey, look at this,” Xandra says as she helps bag our groceries. “This cantaloupe’s already sliced.”

  I don’t tell Xandra about what happened or seeing Dr. Pete. She’ll have a million questions, and I have no answers. It’s starting to look like Dr. Pete was mixed up with some very bad people, and I just don’t know how to explain that—I don’t have enough information, I don’t know what is or isn’t true. Dr. Pete is the one with the answers, and he’s the one who’ll have to decide how much to tell his niece. In the meantime, she’ll have to settle for blissful ignorance.

  I do tell her one thing: to watch out for a thrope with a gray stripe running down the middle of his head.

  We go back to the apartment and I get ready to go in to work—looks like I’m working the sundown-tosunup shift for a while. I decide not to call Charlie; I don’t want to screw up his schedule just because he’s stuck with being my partner. He’ll either show up at the office or call me, anyway.

  There’s a message waiting for me when I get in. Eisfanger wants me to see him in the lab. I head up there, wondering why he didn’t just call my cell.

  The lab is its usual combination of stainless steel and industrial tile, brightly lit by halogen spots that every now and then illuminate something that doesn’t seem to belong: a broom that looks like it was put together in the 1700s, or an African tribal mask made from aluminum and high-impact plastic. Eisfanger’s there, but no other techs are around—odd for this time of night. He’s pacing when I arrive.

  “Jace,” he says, managing to look both relieved and worried at the same time. “Good, good. I have to talk to you.”

  “So I gathered. What’s up?”

  “I’ve managed to locate some—uh, resources for you,” he says carefully. “In relation to that case I was helping you on.”

  “Which one?”

  “The unofficial one.”

  Ah. Now I get it. “Okay. What do you have?”

  He actually glances furtively around, as if espionage agents are lurking beneath his workstation. “Comics,” he whispers.

  “All right. Which ones?”

  He hands me a bulky manila envelope, sealed with several layers of tape and a metal tab. “Here. Don’t ask me how I got them, don’t read them while there’s a full moon, and get them back to me within twenty-four hours.”

  I take the envelope and frown. “Come on. Are they really that dangerous? Dr. Pete had a bunch in his basement.”

  “Not like this. These are from the Seduction of the Innocent murders. They’re the only copies left in existence, and I’m not cleared to even be in the same room with them.”

  “Wait. You said this was pertinent to the unofficial investigation—”

  “It is. The storage unit itself was completely devoid of mystical activity, but I did a wide sweep of the area around the building hoping that maybe the thief left something behind when they arrived or left. I found this.” He pulls a glass vial out of his pocket that at first glance seems empty. Then I see it holds a minuscule, jaggededged black rock. “This was stuck in a crack at the loading dock. I wouldn’t have spotted it at all, except the energy it was giving off was so powerful. I ran a Spectergraphic analysis on it and came up with a match.”

  I study the black mineral. “What is it?”

  “Volcanic rock,” he says. “Produced by an eruption in 1956.”

  I close and lock the door to my office, and then I open the envelope.

  There are five comics inside: the three issues of Seduction of the Innocent, and two others. I slip on a pair of surgical gloves, then look at the SOTI comics first.

  The cover of the first depicts a man holding a severed wolf’s head in one hand, and a bloody silver ax in the other. The eyes of the head are staring down at its own decapitated half-were body.

  The second cover shows a blindfolded child with a smile on her face being led into a darkened room by a shadowy figure. The floor is covered with spring-loaded bear traps, the kind with big jagged metal teeth that lock shut on a leg when stepped on. For some reason, the drain set into the floor is the detail that disturbs
me the most.

  The last one depicts a thrope in full wolf form in a cage. The cage is suspended over a blazing bonfire, and is being lowered by a figure in a hooded robe.

  I’m surprised by how much the images bother me. The subject matter is grisly, but it’s only ink on paper; I’ve seen far worse in person. It’s more than that, and it takes me a second to place my reaction. It’s smell—I’m having the same kind of visceral, slightly nauseous sensation produced by a really horrifying odor, like the smell left in a car that someone’s died in. But there isn’t any smell—just the sensation.

  The paper has a slightly greasy feel to it, too, even through the gloves, and it’s just as illusory—my fingers don’t slide any easier against the paper when I try rubbing it. It’s as if my mind knows that the comics are coated with some sort of foul, slippery substance that my senses can’t detect.

  The other two comics, though, don’t produce that reaction. The first one is a copy of The Bravo Brigade, but the cover is different from the one Dr. Pete lent me: This one has no date or price listed, and the art depicts the Bravos facing off against a single man in a robe with his hood thrown back. I don’t recognize him—he has a high widow’s peak of jet-black hair, a hawk-like face with a sharp goatee and thin mustache. The banner beneath the art reads AGAINST THE DARK!

  The fifth book is titled Western Wonders. The cover shows a very familiar-looking lem battling what seem to be Apache thropes—five lie dead or dying at his feet, the hilt of a knife sticking out of chest or throat, while another in half-were form leaps at him, tomahawk in hand; the lem’s already got his arm cocked for another throw. The banner just below the title reads, THE LAST STAND OF THE QUICKSILVER KID!

  I wonder why it’s there. None of the other Bravos seem to have their own comic—there’s no Sword of Midnight or Doctor Transe title. I leaf through it, but it’s a pretty standard tale of cowboys versus Indians, with the Indians getting the short end of the coup stick.