by Dyan Chick
"I'm going to need something from you," she said.
I lifted an eyebrow in silent question. We never traded in favors. We knew each other too well for that. We were friends. We helped each other.
"My car is making this awful rattling noise and I can't figure it out. And I'm sure as hell not driving to Piker to pay that hack of an auto mechanic there."
I chuckled. "You got it."
"Still not sure why you shut down the shop," she said.
"Hey," I objected. "You told me it was the right decision."
She shrugged. "It was. For you. It just means that I have to nag you to fix my car without paying you."
"You know I'll always fix it for free," I said. "Or maybe I'll send Gage."
"No way, man!" Gage said.
"Offer accepted. One dead man anti-tracking spell coming up." She stood and walked over to where Gage was leaning against the wall. "And I'll see you tomorrow."
Ten
Jason
"Show me the goods," Jane said.
I stood and walked to the door, Jane at my heels. Things were comfortable with her. There had never been any attraction, just friendship. It was easy. Why couldn't things be like that with the one person I had a fucking mating bond with? Wasn't that bond supposed to help us understand each other? I pushed Angie from my mind. She wasn't going to be able to be with me until she worked out whatever it was that was distracting her.
I popped open the trunk then tapped the flashlight on my phone. The smell of death hung heavy in the air, spreading into the night from its contained space. I held back the urge to gag.
"Well, it's not super fresh, is it?" Jane asked.
"Apparently not," I said.
"Do you know the cause of death?" she asked.
"She didn't say," I said.
"You agreed to this on faith, then, did you?" Jane asked. "You have got to sort out your shit with Angie. You can't let her do this to you. I'm telling you, there's a dark cloud that rolled into town with her. We'll all be better off if she leaves again. And soon."
"Yeah, yeah, you don't like her, I get it," I said, moving the light onto the bundle of fabric. "Can we just get on with this?"
"Fine. Let's see what we got here." She pulled the fabric aside, tugging until it revealed a bluish-gray face with nearly black lips.
My upper lip curled in disgust.
Jane coughed a little and I got the sense she was stopping herself from throwing up.
"Is that normal?" I hadn't seen a ton of dead bodies in my life, but I'd seen enough. This wasn't even the first time I was disposing of one. But they didn't usually look like this.
"His lips shouldn't be black. That's not normal." Jane held her hands above his face and whispered a few words.
A moment later, she lowered her hands to her side and turned to me. "He was cursed. That doesn't make any sense. I thought you said this was Angie's doing? She shouldn't have that kind of magic."
"So she didn't kill him?" I asked, surprised that it didn't actually change the way I felt about her. I might be pissed at Angie for leaving me, but I never doubted her reasons for bringing a body. I figured she did what she had to for survival. We all did. Sometimes being a supernatural in a human world wasn't easy.
"Unless she's got magic she hasn't told you about," Jane said.
I frowned. I knew Angie had secrets, but I didn't think she'd keep something like that from me. Though, I didn't think she'd take off in the middle of the night, either. "What does it all mean?"
"In sort, I think he died of a curse. Sometimes they take a few hours, sometimes they can take days or weeks. We'll never know unless we wanted to track down the mage who did it."
I considered it for a minute. If whoever did this was after Angie, too, it might help her stay alive. But she hadn't mentioned it and I knew all magic came with a price. We were risking enough by just covering this guy's tracks. "No. Just make him untraceable."
Jane cracked her knuckles. "You got it, boss."
"Boss?" That was a new one.
"What? I figured with the vampires in the mix at the casino, you'll be bringing me in full time soon enough."
"There was one dead prostitute," Gage said.
"They don't know yet," Jane said.
"Nobody should know, yet," I said.
"Fuck," Jane said. "Sorry, really. Sometimes I can't tell when my visions are of the future."
"What's this about vamps?" Gage asked.
"Can we just get this body taken care of?" Miles asked. "Cody's probably waiting for us."
"Jane, do your thing," I said. "Gage, dial it down. I'll explain everything when this is done."
Gage didn't look happy, but he stopped talking, which was the best I could expect from him.
"Kill the light, Clayton," Jane said. "And give me some space."
I turned off the flashlight and walked over to where Miles and Gage were waiting near the front of the car.
"Vampires?" Gage said.
"They have an offer for us," I said. "I was going to tell you both tomorrow at our meeting."
"Don't you think vampires are worth an emergency meeting? Do we need to get the whole pack involved?" Gage asked.
"No," I said. "This isn't pack related. It's business."
"Don't tell me you're going soft on the blood suckers," Gage said.
"Jason would never take their side, you know that," Miles said.
He was right. I didn't even want to consider Draven's offer, but I did have a business to run. And while I hated to agree with anything Draven said, the future of my business was bleak.
"I'm done, fellas," Jane said. "You can do your thing now. Just don't burn the body or the spell won't hold."
"We know, Jane. It's not our first rodeo," Gage said.
"I thought those days were behind us," Miles grumbled, almost too quietly for anyone to hear.
"They are, man," I said. "This is just a favor."
"You didn't owe her shit," Gage said.
"No, I didn't," I agreed. "But now she owes me."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," Gage said. "Might not be so bad having a Siren on standby."
Jane lit a cigarette and blew smoke out into the cold, starry night. "I'm going back inside. You three have fun playing bury the bad guy."
"What makes you think he was the bad guy?" Gage asks.
"He was a member of the Shadow Club. The only people who will mourn him are the other gangsters, murderers, and thieves in that group," she said.
"Hey, some of my best friends are gangsters, murderers, and thieves," Gage said.
"Not like this, they aren't," she said. "Trust me. The Shadow Club makes you three look like a group of boy scouts."
"Well, then we better get rid of him and be done with this," Jason said.
Jane took another drag of her cigarette. "Leave me out of anything else that has to do with Angie."
"Yeah, yeah." Tonight wasn't the time to argue with Jane about Angie's merit. Especially when I struggled to find it myself. Besides, I didn't even know if she was going to stick around.
"I'll see you tomorrow about the car, Gage?" Jane asked.
"If I have to," he said, not quite convincingly.
"Let's do this, Cody's waiting," I said.
The three of us piled into the car and I backed out of Jane's driveway.
"You going to ask her for details?" Gage asked. "I mean, I don't think I'd be willing to do what we're doing for anyone. Especially when I didn't know the details. She could've led them here, you do realize that, right?"
"All that talk about a dark cloud," Miles said. "What do you think it means?"
"I already agreed to do this, can we leave it at that?" I said.
"You aren't yourself around that girl," Gage said. "She's not using magic on you, is she? I didn't think sirens worked on us but it would explain your obsession with her."
"Enough," I said. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You're going to have to figure out what y
ou're going to do about her when we get back," Miles said. "Gage is right, you aren't yourself around her."
"I'll deal with it," I said as I stopped the car. "We're here."
I pulled into a parking space next to a waiting car at an abandoned campground. The former parking lot was mostly overgrown, but some of the cement blocks were still visible. The place had been closed before I was born. It wasn't busy enough to justify the cost of keeping the port-a-potty and forest service around. For some reason, humans who came camping here never came back.
We all knew this part of the forest was filled with creatures that fed on human emotion, invisible beings that were more ancient than any of the supes who lived in town. We didn't have a name for them, but we could feel them.
It was the perfect place to bury a body. The creatures welcomed the decaying flesh, seeing it as an offering more than a burden. And we had a place where humans were afraid to go. If they had any sense of self preservation, they left before getting too far into the trees.
"What took you so long?" Cody asked.
"You know how Jane gets," Gage said.
"We're here now. You got the stuff?" I asked.
Cody held up a paper bucket of fried chicken and a two liter bottle of Coke. "Got it."
"We have got to stop making a habit of this," Miles said.
"It's been a year since we've been up here," Gage said. "If anything, we were due a visit."
I ignored the banter, not wanting to share my mixed feelings on the issue. We'd been forced to hide bodies from time to time and it wasn't something I was proud of. But there wasn't a single situation I would take back. Some days, I worried about what that said about me.
Miles, Gage, and I carried the body into the woods while Cody followed behind with the food.
We only had to walk about ten minutes before I felt the icy fingers of spirits trail down my bare arms.
"Feel that?" Gage asked.
"Yep."
We dropped the body unceremoniously on the pine needle covered ground.
"We brought you a present," Cody said, setting the bucket of chicken and the Coke on the ground next to the blanket wrapped dead dude.
Rustling sounds echoed through the silent woods, and the scent of death tinted the air. Vines twisted toward us, one of them brushing against my ankle. I stepped back, careful not to step on any of the encroaching vegetation.
The others did the same, cautiously moving away from the body and our offering of fried chicken.
Even though it was dark, the canopy of trees blotting out most of the sky, I could still see. It was as if this part of the forest was illuminated by something else. Something not of this world. I didn't question it, I just kept my breathing even and steady as we waited for her to arrive.
The vines worked their way around the body, comforter and all. A hissing sound filled the air and I did my best not to wince. The creatures who claimed the body had excellent night vision and the last thing I wanted to do was offend them.
A woman's voice echoed through the trees, sinister yet ethereal, accentuating every s, much like you would imagine a snake sounded if it gained the ability to speak. "What have you brought for me today? Is that magic I sense?"
"It's a mage," I said.
"Don't worry, nobody will come looking for him," Cody answered. Then he pointed to the bucket of fried chicken. "Still warm."
Another vine wrapped around the bucket of chicken and pulled it deeper into the woods, followed by a second vine that wrapped around a bottle of Coke, dragging it to join the chicken.
I heard the sound of snapping bones as the creature devoured our offering, bones and all. The unmistakable sound of carbonation being released from the bottle hissed as the creature opened the Coke.
We waited patiently for her to finish the appetizer. We had never seen the creature's face, we weren't even quite sure what she was, but she was just as old as the forest spirits. And we were damn lucky she was on our side. Well, we were damn lucky we figured out what it took to keep her in the woods. I didn't want to think about what might happen if she ever decided to leave and head for town.
The vines around the body tightened and slowly dragged the dead mage away from us. Then, they stopped.
"He's a few days old," snake lady hissed.
"We got here as fast as we could," I said. "The magic should make up for it." While I didn't know much about her, she did seem to be more excited about the dead supernaturals we brought than the humans. Though, I wasn't sure where mages ended up on the magic spectrum. They were so varied in their ability that some of them might be more like humans.
"You so rarely bring me any of your kind," she said. "I must have been a very good girl."
"This one was special, had a run-in with a friend of ours," I said.
The vines tightened around him again.
"He'll do," she hissed. "Hopefully the magic will make up for the taste of old flesh."
I tried not to imagine her ripping apart the body. I didn't know the mage we left for her, and I didn't have any qualms about the fact that he was dead. But even someone like me could feel squeamish at the thought of a monster ripping into flesh that was so similar to your own.
Maybe that was part of what I hated about vampires. I wasn't fond of supernatural beings using each other as food.
The vines dragged the body away, tugging it free from the fabric as if it were a wrapper. Another set of vines brushed against my toes. I could feel them through the thick leather, and clenched my jaw to keep from flinching. Having them that close was unnerving.
The body made a rustling sound, reminding me of animals fleeing in the woods, as the vines dragged it from view. Almost as soon as it was gone, the silence was once again punctuated by the sound of cracking bones, this time louder than a chicken bone snapping.
That was our cue to leave. Quickly, I grabbed the bundle by my feet. We’d have to burn it since she hadn't taken it with her. On occasion, she took whatever we wrapped the body in. Apparently a fluffy comforter wasn't to her liking. She had a nest out there somewhere, full of tarps, and trash bags, and human bones. I shook my head. I knew better than that. There were no bones there. She ate them all.
Eleven
Angie
Earl made good on his word about the drink. Holding a generous glass of whiskey, I joined him in the familiar living room, taking a seat on the plaid couch pressed up against the wall.
I knew Earl would settle into his favorite chair, a brown recliner that was duct taped in several places. At one point, when I'd been comfortable here, I offered to buy him a new one. He declined, and told me his chair was irreplaceable. Something about being molded to his butt perfectly.
I smiled at the memory, but the smile faded quickly as emptiness and the thoughts of what could have been swirled into a sadness cocktail that hung heavy inside me.
I made a mistake coming here. I probably could have found a mage willing to do the spell for me or dumped the body in the ocean after all. Perhaps I wouldn't have needed to spell if I just found some other sirens. I'd heard they took care of their own, but I'd met so few that I didn't know how they lived in community settings. Were they like the werewolf pack? No matter how much one of the members screwed up, the others helped. Sure, they might give the wolf who fucked up some shit about it, but they still helped.
It was too late to wonder about that now. Besides, how was I supposed to know if they'd even take me in? It wasn't normal for a siren to do nothing and end up with a dead body. Someone or something had to kill them. In the old stories, the sirens who lured men to their deaths were crazy, unstable bitches. They had to either kill the guys themselves or they watched them drown. It wasn't like their song, or their magic, had been responsible.
Earl's chair creaked as he adjusted in his seat, a familiar sound that mixed well with the calming din of the football game playing on the television screen. The TV was the only new thing in this house. Jason had told me that he bought it for his father as a gift
one year and installed it while he was sleeping. He took the old TV to the dump so his father couldn't refuse the present. Earl was set in his ways, not interested in change. I was sure most people saw him as dangerous, if they had known him since he was young. People who met him now would see a frail old man. He suffered an injury that made it difficult for him to walk without a cane. But I knew better. Even with the injury, he was a force who could still shift into a wolf on every full moon. He wasn't someone you should ever cross.
I took a sip of the whiskey, feeling the burn as it traveled down my esophagus. I could see why humans drank to stay warm. It wasn't something I had to worry about and neither did shifters. That was one of the few things we had in common. Both of us could tolerate cold temperatures due to the nature of our powers.
Jason’s temperature ran so hot he was like a walking furnace. I wasn't sure of the biological reason behind it for wolves, but I knew from experience how warm they got.
I missed cuddling up against him feeling that warmth. I took another drink, hoping that maybe some of the alcohol would go to my head soon. I wasn't prepared for the onslaught of memories, good and bad, even though I should have been.
"Are you staying?" Earl asked.
I turned and looked at him, but he was still staring at the television as if he had said nothing at all.
I wanted to tell him I was leaving as soon as my car came back, but I never could lie to Earl. "I'm not sure."
"You know, you can't break a mating bond, it's forever." Earl took a sip of his whiskey, his eyes still glued to the television screen.
My jaw dropped open. I hadn't told anyone. Jason must've said something about how he was feeling. I wanted to deny it, but I couldn't trust myself to follow through. Instead, I took another drink and settled into the silence.
I slowly drank the whiskey and avoided looking over at Earl. He was watching the football game as if he'd been sitting there alone all night.