“It just is,” Tabitha said. “You can’t forget who you really are.” But she already had. She didn’t realize it, but she had. The Tabitha I knew would have screamed at me when she walked in on the birthday sex at the Pollux, or fled the room in tears.
“Are you hunting werewolves?” I asked, exasperated. “Because Greta and I are hunting werewolves.”
“Yes, but—”
“Good,” I interrupted. “Everyone who’s hunting werewolves is walking this way.” I pointed at the rough paved road that ran up the hill and down the other side to the marina.
Tabitha moved to my right side and walked with us in silence. The night was quiet, any sound absorbed by the stands of oak and pine that flanked the road. A half mile from the intersection, the road turned twice. I stopped next to the yellow sign warning drivers of the sharp curve and looked down the hill at the creek forty feet below.
“You okay?” Tabitha asked.
“No,” I answered. I’d been thinking about Brian, the vampire I’d decapitated, wondering why we’d both been in the alleyway. If Roger was behind this, then it meant he’d talked Brian into it. Or had he scammed Brian too, knowing that we couldn’t get along, that my losing my temper in a fatal way was inevitable? “But it doesn’t matter.”
We walked about another mile, the road continuing up a steep climb and then angling down at an equally steep incline toward the parking lot.
We walked carefully along the downward slope and stopped about fifty yards from the parking lot, where the pavement turned into an uncertain mixture of gravel and dirt. A large blue Dumpster hulked in the corner of the lot, obscuring the sight of us from the small brick utility building that housed the restrooms. The werewolves had posted a guard outside the building. I smelled him on the wind as it blew both his scent and that of the Dumpster our way.
Trucks, RVs, and all manner of off-road vehicles filled the parking lot, many more than when I’d last been here. The werewolves had regrouped.
I setEl Alma Perdida on the lid of the Dumpster for safekeeping and turned into a white cat, then picked my way along the gravel quietly until I got a better look at the guard. He was sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk that ran across the water side of the parking lot, near the steps that led down to the long bridge connecting the marina’s floating docks to the shore. His back was to the utility building, his eyes gazing out over the parking lot to the hillside where Froggy had left the bodies of the werewolves she’d killed. Hard rock classics played on a small portable radio, Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” suggesting ironically that the guard not give up without a fight.
A small gray cat settled next to me. “What do we do?” Tabitha meowed.
I looked back to where Greta crouched low and ready next to the Dumpster and gave her a nod. She darted across the parking lot, little more than a blur. The werewolf barely had time to blink before Greta picked him up by the feet and slammed his head against the wall of the utility building.
She was back at my side before he hit the ground, blood and brain matter splattering. Tabitha and I morphed back to our human bodies and I stepped out onto the concrete, looking down the long set of steps to the boat slips below. I couldn’t smell or sense anyone down there. If anyone else was keeping watch, they were doing it from one of the lake houses.
“We’re not allowed to eat until we find the werewolves,” said Greta. She looked pointedly at Tabitha when she said it. “Then we can eat anyone we want. Dad just doesn’t want us getting carried away.”
“Oh, God.” Tabitha sounded like she might be ill. I guess she’d never seen brains on brick before.
“Do you need to wait in the car?” I asked quietly.
“No,” she forced out past clenched teeth.
“Try to remember what it feels like when you’re hungry,” I advised. “Think of them as food, just blood sources, not people.”
“That makes it worse.” Huh. Maybe there was more Tabitha still in there than I wanted to believe. What if I didn’twant her to be Tabitha, wanted her to be a monster like me, because that made it easier not to feel guilty about being with Rachel?
“Then go back to the car,” I said sharply. The Tabitha I knew was squeamish about killing a mouse in a trap. She’d killed Veruca, yes, but that had been self-defense more than anything else. A straightforward werewolf slaughter was another matter.
“It’ll be all right, Mom.” Greta tried to put her arm around Tabitha, but Tabitha pulled away. “Dad and I can handle it. We don’t need you.”
“I can do this,” Tabitha insisted.
“Then stop acting like a prissy little bitch,” I said as I walked back to the Dumpster and retrievedEl Alma Perdida . I hadn’t meant to say that, it just jumped out there.
“I said I can do it!”
“Fine.”If you can, then you really aren’t my Tabitha anymore, I thought. I tucked the gun into the back of my pants and tried to turn into a bat, but nothing happened except an angry hum fromEl Alma Perdida . The Lost Soul didn’t seem to like vampire games. I couldn’t leave it behind; I was going to need it if I had to kill William. Only in my hands was the gun blessed, magical, silver, and inherited. As a bonus, I liked the idea of trapping William’s soul inside one of the bullets. For all I knew, death didn’t hold anything scary for him and I certainly didn’t wish him a happy afterlife.
“You want to be helpful?” I asked Tabitha.
“Yes. I said I could do this and I—”
“Can you turn into a bat or a bird, mist, maybe?”
“Yes.”
“Which?” I asked with a slightly impatient sigh.
“I can do a bird. I can probably do a bat.”
“Good, then turn into a bat and go find the werewolves,” I said. “Don’t fight them, just find them and come back.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Just do it,” I said.
She shifted into a bat just fine, but fluttered to the ground and flapped weakly. Greta giggled, but I kept a straight face. It isn’t easy to fly the first time out. Tabitha got the hang of it after the radio played through two more songs and finally took off over the gentle waves of Orchard Lake, three bars into “Magic Carpet Ride.”
I waited until I knew she was out of earshot, but still spoke quietly. “There are some kids with the werewolves.”
“Kids or puppies?” Greta asked.
“They’re werewolves, too.”
She kissed me fondly on the cheek. “You old softy. Don’t worry, Daddy; I’ll kill them for you.” I let the music from the portable radio fill in the silence. I told you that there are other reasons Greta makes me uncomfortable.
I don’t like hurting children. Hell, even though this whole outing had been my idea, I would have preferred not to have to killany werewolves. I much preferred just beating them up enough so that they knew they couldn’t take me and then letting them go. Unless I went into a rage blackout, of course.
Even the werewolf I had killed in the alley when all this crap started might have survived if I hadn’t been trapped by the sun. Killing werewolves tended to be more trouble than it was worth. As the last few days had shown, once you start killing werewolves, your wolf problems multiply. The pack gets angry. The pack comes after you. There’s more killing. The pack calls in reinforcements, maybe from the Lycan Diocese, maybe from one of the other freaky-ass skinchanger cults out there, but either way there’s even more killing. If you leave the cubs alive, then all you’ve done is buy yourself a brief respite, because cubs grow up and when they do, they remember the vampire who slaughtered their pack and the process starts all over again.
I picked up the guard’s lawn chair that lay half-folded on its side. Underneath it on the concrete was a sheet of paper, a list of names, all checked off. The lake houses didn’t have addresses per se. Mail was delivered in a drop box at the utility building. The local paper got left in an old vending machine with a note on it that said “For Subscribers Only.”
On the sheet, each wer
ewolf residence was recorded by family name and dock number. It looked like the guard had tracked who had come and gone and the license plates of the vehicles that had been driven in or out of the lot. For some of them, he’d listed their driver’s license number too.
William’s name wasn’t on the list, but I was pretty sure that if I started killing whole families of werewolves, he was bound to show up sooner or later.
31
TABITHA:
BAT GIRL
Prissy little bitch,huh? Well excuse me for not being used to seeing some guy’s brains splattered on the wall! I should have told him about Talbot and me. I should have turned on the bodyworks and shown him what I could do, that I could have body heat, a heartbeat, even a reflection. I bet that would have wiped the smile off of his face.Prissy little bitch would turn intohoney, baby, sweetie pie pretty damn quick then. At this point I didn’t know why I’d been so excited to come out to Orchard Lake in the first place.
Most of the houses I saw looked run-down or cobbled together, built along the slanted lakeside with boat docks sticking out into the lake, and irregular steps leading from the docks to the houses. I flew a quick loop around the inlet closest to the marina. There were three houses there, one on the same side of the water as the marina, the other two staring at it across the inlet.
There were no numbers on the docks and I wondered how they got their mail. I saw power lines but no phone lines, and the only air conditioners were window units. At the far side of the lake, where it narrowed, continuing in a wide ribbon upstream, two fishermen sat on an old wooden dock, kept afloat by what looked like white plastic barrels under the water. They each dangled their feet off the edge of the dock, beer and fishing poles close at hand.
One of them let a flashlight shine out over the lake. It cut a blue-green swath through the water and the fish went crazy, striking at the light. The two guys thought that was hilarious; then one of them sniffed the air. “You smell something?”
The one with the light turned it off. “No.”
An old wooden ramp rose from the dock to cinder-block steps leading up a steep incline to an even older house. The smell of coffee carried on the breeze. Two older women and two teenagers sat on the porch playing some game with lots of little multicolored plastic pyramids.
One of the women got up and walked halfway down the steps. “We’re about to turn in, Lucas,” said the woman. “How long are you boys going to sit out there playing with that flashlight?”
“William said to keep an extra eye out tonight just in case,” one of the men, evidently Lucas, replied.
“And then I suppose you’ll sleep all day?”
“No,” said Lucas. “No, then I’m going to drive into town and work first shift. One sleepless night isn’t going to kill me.”
These were the werewolves? They were just like normal people. Okay, normal hicks, but normal just the same. I’d expected monsters who went crazy under the light of the full moon…not real people. I flew farther down the lake, finding similar scenes. At one house, a couple lay asleep on a futon set out on the middle of their screened porch. A mother sat in a rocking chair in a different house nursing a baby who kept restlessly shifting from puppy to human. “Bert,” she called over her shoulder. “Did you find that teething medicine?”
“No, I must have left it in the truck,” Bert’s voice replied. “Let me get some clothes on and I’ll take the boat back and get it.”
I flew back to the marina. Eric and Greta were out on the pier untying a canoe. I landed in the center and resumed my human shape, the canoe wobbling as I did. “Are you sure these are the right people?” I whispered.
“Yes,” said Eric, climbing into the canoe.
“But they seem…normal.”
“They are normal.” They each took a paddle and we began moving quietly toward the shore. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t werewolves. Look, I’ll try talking to them, but they’re not going to listen. We’ll have to fight them sooner or later…and the only way to keep you and Greta safe is to opt for sooner.”
“And we have to kill all of them?”
“No, Mom,” Greta said. “You can go home. Dad and I will handle it.”
Again with the “Mom” thing. “No, I can deal, but some of them are only teenagers.”
“And some of them are younger,” said Eric. “But I didn’t start this; they did. I tried to make peace. It didn’t work.”
“Do I need to take care of the teenagers, too, Dad?” Greta asked.
“Not exclusively, just the little guys.”
“Little guys?” I asked, a chill running up my spine.
“The children.” Eric shipped his paddle and bowed his head, letting us drift upstream on his momentum. He looked defeated and annoyed. “We can’t just kill their parents and leave them. They don’t stay small and cute, you know. They grow up into big bad werewolves who want revenge for what happened to their pack. If you don’t like it, go home.”
“I’m just trying to understand.” I didn’t buy the whole we’ll-try-talking-first thing, and killing, not for food, but just flat-out murdering these people, werewolves or not…there was no difference between that and…I don’t know. It seemed monstrous.
“Well, stop trying!” Eric threw down his paddle. “Just stop. It’s harder if you think about it. God, you make everything so damned difficult. Part of being a vampire is turning off the piece of you that gives a damn. You do whatever it takes to feed and care for yourself or you go crazy. Tonight it means that I have to murder a whole bunch of people who might just have more right than I do to be walking the planet in the first place, but I can’t worry about that. It’s you or them. Who would you pick?”
I wanted to say “them” to disagree, but the words lodged in my throat. Deep inside, the same part of my brain that was offended by Drones, that became angry when lesser vampires spoke to me without permission, reared its ugly head. It would kill any of them if survival required it. The vampire within twitched inside my head and peeked out from behind my eyes. “Me,” I said quietly. “I’d pick me.”
“That’s what I thought,” Eric said. “Don’t try to pretend otherwise. It just makes things…shit!”
A mini spotlight hit Eric, lighting him up bright enough for anyone to see. Greta rolled noiselessly over the side into the water the instant before the light would have given her away. She didn’t even make a splash. I turned into a cat. Eric pulled his sunglasses off of his T-shirt collar and slid them on. The light came from the same two men I’d seen on the dock. Now Lucas held a crossbow and the other guy held the flashlight.
Eric picked up his paddle and began to row toward the dock. “Either of you rednecks know a guy named William?” he asked as the canoe came closer to their little wooden dock.
“Who wants to know?” asked Lucas.
Eric smiled, his fangs preternaturally white against the darkness. “I’m Roger Malcolm.” He spoke with easy confidence, though he was easing the magic gun out of his pants with his right hand. Eric slid it onto the bottom of the canoe. “I just wanted to stop by one more time and talk to William.”
“William already told you that we aren’t selling,” said Flashlight Man.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I meowed.
Greta’s head broke the surface in the water beneath their dock, her eyes watching them predatorily through the gaps in the boards.
“You just get on out of here, mister.” The man gestured back to the marina with his light. “William will be here soon enough if you don’t. We’re not selling, to you or anyone else.”
“So that’s what this is about.” Eric nodded to Greta. “Now!”
I ducked back under the lip of the canoe.
“Hi.” Greta sounded perky and upbeat when she grabbed their dangling legs. “Whatcha doing?”
They vanished from the dock, the flashlight clattering momentarily on the wood before falling into the water. Shadows moved frantically beneath the surface of the lake
and Eric paddled to the dock as quickly as he could, stepping out of the canoe withEl Alma Perdida in his hand.
“Lucas? Henry?” On the porch, one of the old women gripped the porch rail. “Vampire!”
Darkness came over the canoe. I poked my head back out. Eric leveled the gun at the old woman. “Get William,” he said evenly.
“Jimmy, Lisa, run for help!” someone shouted from the porch. The teen wolves charged off howling into the night.
A large black werewolf broke the water behind Eric, as if he’d been fired from an underwater cannon.
“Lucas!” the old woman yelled triumphantly as she too began to change. Eric spun and caught Lucas, slamming him against the dock and latching onto his back.El Alma Perdida skidded out of Eric’s hand toward the water, but I leapt out of the canoe and onto the dock, trapping it by the barrel with my paws.
Lucas struggled with Eric on his back biting into his shoulder. “How do you like it?” Eric yelled between bites. “How do you like it when I sink my teeth into your fucking shoulder?”
“Better’n a stick in the eye.” Lucas shrugged him off and leapt from the dock. I couldn’t see the churning underwater battle between Greta and her opponent, but Lucas must have thought his friend needed help. Eric caught him in midleap and smashed him back first onto the wooden dock. Boards cracked, but the dock held.
Greta bobbed up out of the water, clinging to the body of a large brown werewolf who floated facedown. She swam for the dock and pulled herself up out of the water with one hand.
Eric delivered a double-fisted blow to Lucas’s temple and the werewolf went still.
Both women from the porch charged down the hill, but only one of them had transformed into a wolf. The other woman was human. I could smell it. Greta met the werewolf halfway and they rolled around together on the hillside. Greta’s laughter echoed out over the water. She was having too much fun.
Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires Page 62