by Celia Roman
“Black is de rigueur on a stakeout, darling. Even a city boy like me knows that.”
And he done it up in style with a sleek, form-fitting turtleneck and cargo pants under a serviceable black jacket.
“You bring a gun?” I asked.
“Even better. I brought a camera.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved the last of the snacks away. “What good is that gonna do when you got a critter breathing down your neck?”
“Distraction.” He crossed the room, wrapped his hands around my upper arms, and propped his chin on my shoulder. “I brought a gun.”
His voice was oddly sober, not like him a’tall.
“You know how to use it?” I asked.
“What’s the point of having a tool you don’t know how to use?”
“You got me there.” I nudged my elbow into his midriff and eased away from him. “Shake a leg there, Detective. We got a long night ahead of us.”
He snorted and grabbed his bag whilst I strapped on the 1911 and snagged some extra ammo. I done filled a satchel with the basics and topped off the critter’s water bottle, not that it ever seemed to use it. Still, it was in my care and care for it I would, leastwise ‘til I figured out what else to do with it.
A few minutes later, the trailer was shut tight and we was on our way, rolling along toward Miss Jenny’s house in the IROC. David fiddled with the radio station and landed on a classic rock station, and I grinned my approval at him.
It was like he said the first night we met. Me and him was gonna be the best of friends. We sure was working our way around to it, wasn’t we, and me, well. I was glad for his company. He mighta joked about the camera being a distraction, but really, he was just as big a one. With Riley off fighting fires, way too close to Snowbird for comfort, and the other worries on my plate, I sure did need a good distraction.
When we pulled into Miss Jenny’s driveway, Teus was standing on the front porch facing the road, one sculpted shoulder propped against a support post, not seeming the least concerned about any potential damage he was doing to the charcoal gray suit he wore. Danged if he didn’t look like he stepped outta the pages of GQ or something.
Soon as we piled outta the IROC and got close enough to converse, he said, “Really, Sunshine. What use is it to mark you when you insist on using the telephone to call on me?”
“Weren’t taking no chances on where I’d end up this time,” I retorted, and scowled at the slow, knowing smile easing its way across his mug. “’Preciate you dropping by.”
“You said it was urgent.” He shrugged his free shoulder, let it drop. “Aside from the ghastly stench of Suburbia, I fail to see what’s so important I had to interrupt my evening for you.”
Lordy, sometimes I forgot how snooty he could be. I shook it off and said, even as I could, “We’re getting to that.”
David coughed into a fist, not hiding a smile in the least. “You haven’t told him?”
“’Course not.” And I weren’t planning on spilling word one ‘til I absolutely had to. Maybe this little surprise would learn Teus not to meddle so much. I turned back to him and waved toward the woods surrounding Miss Jenny’s home. “You sense anything outta place around here?”
He tilted his regal head, them weird aqua eyes fixed on me. “Tit for tat, Sunshine. Why am I here?”
A purring engine growed loud enough to interrupt, and Miss Jenny’s car appeared ‘round the bend leading to her house, doing exactly the posted speed limit and not one bit more, I’d wager. I waggled a thumb over my shoulder at it. “That’s why.”
Teus arched an imperious eyebrow. “An automobile?”
“The driver,” I said with the last of my patience. Honestly, he knowed how to push my buttons. “Be good.”
“Aren’t I always?”
David hid a laugh behind his fist. I just shook my head and wandered over to where Miss Jenny was sliding outta her car, dressed exactly like I expected her to be, prim and proper and just so. Gone were the ragged sweatshirt and comfortable jeans. In their place, she wore a pink twinset paired with sharply pressed gray slacks and honest to god pearls at her neck.
She glanced at me over the roof of her Prius, then her gaze wandered to the two men standing in her front yard. “Who are they?”
“The blond headed feller is my friend David. He’s here to help with the stakeout. That other guy is the one with the room to spare.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You didn’t say the person I’d be staying with was a good looking man.”
Since I done that on purpose, I jogged around the side of the car and took her elbow, encouraging her gentle like to abandon her white knuckled grip on the driver’s side door.
“You’re gonna love him,” I said, a mite more forceful than I intended. “He knows more about the ancient Greeks than any two folks combined.”
Her arm relaxed under my hand. “Really?”
“Wouldn’t lie.”
By the time we got to the yard proper, Teus’d stepped down off the porch, his expression suave and smooth and charming. He held out a hand to Miss Jenny, clasped her limp, pale fingers in his, and danged if he didn’t bend over her hand like she was the Queen of England.
“Enchanté,” he said, and her cheeks flushed pinker’n her sweater.
Her free hand fluttered around her chest as she murmured a polite hello. David’s gaze met mine and he give me two thumbs up.
Like I didn’t already know I done good pairing Teus off with Miss Jenny. Them two was a match made in Heaven.
“Miss Jenny,” I said, “this is Abercio Okeanos.”
“Teus, please.” He held onto Miss Jenny’s hand as he stood. “Find a Wampus Cat, Sunshine.”
“Eh, what?” I asked.
“A Wampus Cat will know how to deal with the creature troubling Jena. You already have the means within your grasp to find one.” He tucked Miss Jenny’s hand into the crook of his arm and stared down at her like a cat eyeing a canary it was about to gobble up. “I have reservations at BoccaLupo in Atlanta. Would you care to join me?”
Miss Jenny fingered her pearls, her gray eyes wide as saucers. “I have class tomorrow.”
“We will return well before bedtime.”
I didn’t like the smarmy charm in his tone one bit. “Teus,” I said, a warning even a deaf man coulda heard.
“No fretting.” He leaned down and bussed my cheek, and murmured, “Her virtue is safe, until she chooses to forsake it.”
I relaxed as they walked away, why I don’t know. A man like Teus… No, a deity like Teus could have nigh on anything he wanted with the snap of his elegant fingers. That said, he always been good on his word before. No reason to suspect he’d be any different now.
Miss Jenny slipped her fingers into her pants pocket and pulled out a key. “My spare.”
“Thank ye kindly,” I said, then Teus led her away toward her car, and I was pretty sure she forgot all about me and the reason she was having to stay somewhere else for a while.
David stepped up beside me and draped a casual arm around my waist. “I’d love to take you to BoccaLupo’s some time.”
“Now, why’d I wanna go there when I got you to cook me all the fancy do-dads I can eat?”
It weren’t ‘til Miss Jenny and Teus drove away in her car, him driving, that I remembered she hadn’t packed extra clothes. I shrugged it off. Teus’d do for her. If he didn’t, he’d have me to answer to, and that’s all there was to it.
Soon as Miss Jenny’s car disappeared around the bend, me and David did a walk-through of the house and grounds, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Other’n what I already found, weren’t nothing suspicious what jumped out at me, and it shoulda, seeing as how it was still full-on daylight.
So I backed the IROC to the end of the drive, where me and him would have a clear view of the front of the house, and we settled in as the shadows snuck slow as molasses outta the mountains into night.
David dug out his cellph
one and went tapping away at it whilst I scanned the surrounding area. Tree line, porch, garage, neighbor’s house peeking through the forest, then the same in reverse, moving my gaze slow and cautious back and forth. Ever once in a while, I twisted ‘round and searched the road and what lay beyond it or glanced up at the sky, judging the time against the lengthening shadows.
About half an hour after we settled into the car, David grunted. “Found it.”
I slid my gaze across the rooftop and beyond. “Found what?”
“The Wampus Cat.”
Was that a shadow moving to the left of the house? I focused on it for a minute, trying to discern one object from another. A housecat sashayed around the corner and I refocused elsewhere, continuing my scan of the surrounding area.
“What about it?” I asked after a minute.
“Says here the Wampus Cat is a Cherokee woman who wore a booger mask to scare off an evil demon.”
I shifted around in the seat and eyed him. In the half-dark night, the light from his cellphone lit his face, casting shadows around the laugh lines bracketing his mouth. Made him look a little mischievous, truth be told, but seeing as how he already got a good dose of that, I ignored it and leaned toward the cellphone’s display, trying to get a good gander at the website he was browsing. “What’s a booger mask?”
He strummed a fingertip along the cellphone’s surface, shifting the view. “Hmm. The face of a mountain cat.”
“How in the devil am I supposed to get one of them?”
A sly grin stretched David’s mouth and he cut a side-eyed glance at me. “You wouldn’t happen to know any shamans, would you?”
I grimaced at him, then turned back to my surveillance. “No, I don’t, Mr. Smarty Pants.”
But I knowed somebody what might. Libby’d left in a good mood t’other day. Maybe she’d know where I could get a booger mask, or hire the services of somebody what wore one. I opened my mouth to say so when my cellphone buzzed, notifying me of a text message.
Riley.
I flinched against the automatic hope what popped into me.
“What?” David asked.
“Nothing,” I mumbled, and fished my cellphone outta my pocket. I thumbed it on and, sure enough, Riley’d texted me an all’s well. Relief washed over me, so quick it took my breath.
“You ok, Sunny?”
“Yeah. I’m ok.” I texted Riley back around unsteady fingers and a pattering heartbeat, then tucked my phone away again. “It was just Riley.”
“Just Riley?”
I stuck my eyes to the darkened tree line, too stubborn to give David the satisfaction of acknowledging the pointed humor behind his question. Let him think what he wanted. Folks always did, in my experience, and usually for the worse.
Good man that he was, David launched into a spirited description of his last trip abroad, effectively changing the subject. ‘Long and along, enjoyment got the better of me and I relaxed into my seat, and even went so far as to play along with his mild flirting.
The scamp.
‘Round about seven, give or take, David pulled out the feast he prepared for us and we et it right there in the car, still nattering away whilst the conversation wandered there and back again. Danged if the meal weren’t a good’un. Fried chicken tenders, potato salad, baked beans, and the best rolls I had in a long time. We topped it off with some good ol’ fashioned sweet tea, and decided between us to leave the chocolate cake he brung for dessert ‘til our bellies settled.
A four layer cake, each one a different kind of chocolate, held together with a fancy buttercream icing. My mouth watered just hearing the description. Man, that boy sure could cook.
After supper was eat and packed away, David said, “Is it safe enough for a trip to the little boy’s room?”
I clucked my tongue at him. “This is a stake out, not a picnic.”
“Everyone has to…” He sucked in a breath and wrapped a hand around my upper arm. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and tense, and barely more’n a whisper. “Don’t look to your left.”
I stilled my head against the reflex to do just that. “Why not?”
“Because unless I’m sadly mistaken, that giant beast over there is Ew’ah, the Spirit of Madness and the reason Teus suggested you find a Wampus Cat. One look could drive us both insane.”
I went rigid as a steel beam. ‘Course, it was. Only it’d showed up a mite earlier’n I’d expected it to. “Kindly need to know information, David.”
“I was getting to it.”
“Any reason you can look at it and I can’t?”
“I didn’t look, darling girl. Just caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. What do we do now?”
A high-pitched scream erupted from the direction of the garage, and my heart leapt into my throat. That’d sounded an awful like something big had spotted us and weren’t none too happy about two scrawny humans trespassing on its territory.
I risked a peek toward my left, careful to keep my gaze well along the ground, and near about sank through my seat. A shadow emerged from the woods and morphed into a monstrous critter, humanoid in shape, but otherwise not like anything I ever seen before. It stood upright on two obscenely muscled legs what ended in giant, clawed paws. The arms was the same, massive and muscled, and the hands was like the feet. The torso was hunched over and malformed, and its skin was an oily red-black, gleaming like a hot coal in the near black night.
That’s all I saw in my one glimpse of the critter, but it was enough for experience to do a little talking. A gun and a knife wasn’t gonna take that thing down without it doing enough harm for permanent damage, and them was the only weapons I had with me. We was sitting ducks out here, and David, sweet, naïve David what’d only ever seen one monster, and it from a distance? Well, I couldn’t risk him, could I?
I twisted the ignition on and backed outta the driveway quick like, squealing tires against the blacktop.
David’s hands shot out and grasped the edge of his seat and the door handle in white-knuckled grips. Soon as we cleared the driveway and was driving down the street, he twisted ‘round in his seat and stared out the rear window. “Hurry, Sunny. It’s right behind us.”
I glanced automatically into the rear view mirror and my heart leapt right into my throat. The Ew’ah was down on all fours, running hard straight toward us. I gunned the engine, and the IROC leapt forward. I focused on the winding road ahead, taking ever curve fast as I dared. A loud crunch came from the back of the car, and I winced. Please dear Lord, don’t let that be the Ew’ah jumping onto the car.
David hissed in a breath. “Shit. It’s right on us.”
Well, that weren’t comforting a’tall. I floored the gas pedal into the curve ahead of us. The IROC skidded sideways, fishtailing through the curve, and I gritted my teeth. We was almost back to Warwoman Road. If that thing chased us that far, what in the world was I gonna do? We was right on the outskirts of Clayton, and even on a Monday night, the streets wasn’t exactly empty, ‘specially around supper time.
“Ok.” The word sighed outta David. “It stopped.”
A sneak peek in the rearview mirror confirmed that. The Ew’ah was planted dead center of Polly Gap Road, staring after us like it meant business. I shuddered. Close call. Too close, really. What in the world was I thinking to bring David along like I done?
David turned back ‘round facing forward and sighed out a huge breath. “That looked nothing like the last monster I saw.”
I near about laughed as I slowed for the turn onto Warwoman Road. If I hadn’t knowed for a fact he was joking, I woulda schooled him on monster anatomy.
Me, Sunshine Walkingstick, teaching a muckity muck a thing or two about life. Never thought I’d see the day.
I cleared my throat and said, “That Ew’ah shouldn’ta showed up for another hour or two.”
“Clearly, it had other plans.”
I did laugh then, couldn’t help it. “How’d you like your first monster hunt?�
�
“Second, darling girl,” he corrected. “I’m just sorry I didn’t get a picture.”
“You reckon it woulda took?”
He grinned and his hands loosened on his seat. “We could always go back and try.”
The monster’s malignant form popped into my head and I shuddered. “Thank ye kindly, David, but I reckon we best get that Wampus Cat before we tackle the Ew’ah again.”
We drove in silence for a while, winding our way through the late supper traffic toward Hwy. 76 and home, me mulling over the Ew’ah. Its paws was about the same size as them I found out at Jazz and BobbiJean’s. The scream had been about right, too, ‘less BobbiJean heard wrong. Whatever kinda monster the Ew’ah was, a demon like David said or something else, I figured its belly needed filling, too, just like ever other critter I encountered.
But this’un was one of the more dangerous, if what David dug up was true. The Spirit of Madness. I shoulda never brung him along with me ‘til I knowed what I was up against.
David laid a gentle hand on my arm. “Don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“That you shouldn’t have brought me along.”
I winced. Me and my dadgum mouth. “Sorry. Guess I’m too used to my own company.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, firm and tough. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”
A laugh sputtered outta me before I could stop it. “You call facing down a monster fun?”
“What would you call it?”
Dangerous. Stupid. And a lot of other words besides. I finally settled on, “Not fun.”
He laughed and squeezed my arm, then settled down to take notes for me whilst the memory of our encounter was fresh and new and still a mite more terrifying than was comfortable.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Soon as I got home, I called Miss Jenny and delivered the bad news to her voicemail. Weren’t no getting rid of that Ew’ah without a good, stiff dose of help.