by Raven Hart
“I was following the three of them,” Donovan said. “And they slipped into an unused underground rail tunnel, then turned into the sewers. I lost sight of them around a bend, and the stench was so strong, I couldn’t follow them by odor either. And then I got lost. Diana must have doubled back and come for me, because before I knew it, I heard a seductive voice behind me. When I turned around, she staked me in the chest.”
“If it weren’t for the goddess, you’d be dust right now,” Olivia mused.
“As you say,” Donovan said, raising his cup in tribute. “Praise Brigid.”
“I shouldn’t have let you go,” Olivia fretted. “I keep forgetting you don’t know the sewers like the rest of us do. We use them to get around the city when we need to move in the daytime or take shortcuts at night. When bodies started turning up there not long ago, we figured there was some rogue vamp activity in the area. It’s not like a human serial killer could have been dumping bodies there. Any human without bulky oxygen equipment would have died of asphyxia going into those tunnels. Then we realized it was Hugo and the others. It’s how we figured out where they were.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Donovan said. “So what’s been going on since I pulled a Rip van Winkle?”
Olivia filled him in: Will had agreed to cooperate, we’d discussed the vampire council, and our plan for rescuing Renee.
“What do you know of the Council of dark lords?” I asked him.
“What does anyone know of them?” he answered cryptically. I wondered if he was being evasive or just philosophical. “I had heard the same as you, that they’re learning to wield elemental power. But that’s a tricky business and hard to control. The first time they tried to wield this power, they had some unintended consequences.”
“What kind of unintended consequences?” I asked.
“Nobody I ever spoke to was ever able to say. But it did some damage to the Council as individuals and as an organization. They’ve been all this time repairing themselves, sleeping in the earth for rejuvenation, being fed from the blood of their minions. And now they seem ready to strike again, or try to.”
“Strike how?” Olivia asked. “Isn’t their goal still the same? To force all of us into making vampires and feeding off humans?”
“Yes, but I think they have a show of force in mind. Some way of flexing their collective muscle.”
“Does anyone know exactly what they intend?” I asked.
“No, nobody I’ve talked to knows for sure. But many of the old vampires I’ve run across in my travels think that they planned this grand gesture as a way of getting our attention and making us afraid of standing up to them.”
“Have you met this Ulrich?” I asked.
“No, but I’ve heard of him. The word is that he is trying to become the next dark lord. There are two vacancies on the Council, and he wants one of the seats.”
“I’ve tried to remember everything I ever heard about the dark lords in my existence,” I said. “Most vampires are ignorant, even some of the old ones. Reedrek himself told me what little I know, but I never heard him say what it takes to be included in their ranks. Do you know?”
Donovan shook his head. “All I know is that it takes a gesture so evil it would make Satan himself sit up and take notice. And from what I hear of Ulrich, he’s the essence of evil. He’s been the hidden force behind some of the most gruesome chapters of history. I’ve heard it said he was the one who gave Caligula his ideas.”
Olivia shuddered and glanced my way. “And now Ulrich wants to make an uber-evil gesture. Like sacrificing an innocent child?”
“Not just any innocent child,” I said. “But a child with a power that they fear but do not understand.” My gut was churning at the thought of it.
Donovan reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was as cold as the grave, but I knew his heart was sincere. “I give you my word, William, if there’s anything I can do to help you find Renee, you can count on me.”
“Me too, but you know that,” Olivia said, and put her hand over mine and Donovan’s. To my surprise I found that I was touched by their words.
“I thank you, my friends,” I said. I just hoped it would be enough.
Jack
Back at the garage, I walked in to find an extra player at the card table, a woman of all things, and a werewolf woman at that.
As soon as he saw me, Jerry stood up. “Jack, this here’s Wanda. Wanda, this is Jack McShane, the guy I was telling you about.”
Wanda shifted her cards to her left hand and extended her right. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. McShane.” She had a slight but pleasing Cajun accent.
“Call me Jack,” I said, and shook her hand. It wasn’t as soft as most women’s, but that’s to be expected from a shape-shifter. After all, when you spent part of your time running on all fours, well, you get my drift.
I looked at Jerry. “Does Wanda have a last name?”
“Uh, Thrasher,” he said, and looked at the floor.
“I call,” Huey said, throwing two quarters into the kitty. Everyone showed their cards. Huey, who only had one pair, lost again and was as surprised as ever, even though he lost every hand. “Durn,” he said.
“Ms. Thrasher, why don’t you and Jerry sit out this next hand?” I looked at Jerry and jerked my chin in the direction of the office. He took the hand of the lovely Wanda and followed me there.
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess,” I said when I was seated behind my desk. “You are Nate Thrasher’s wife, right?”
“Estranged wife,” Wanda corrected. “How’d you know?” She sat on the sofa across from the desk and Jerry sat down next to her.
“Just call it a hunch.”
Wanda patted her hair and gave me a flirtatious look. “Are you really a—a vampire?”
Keeping my face as expressionless as possible, I looked to Jerry for an explanation. As I’ve said before, I’m no Emily Post, but Wanda’s statement was a real breach of the unwritten code of unhuman etiquette. Besides Connie and Seth, The V word was never spoken in my presence by anyone outside William’s household who was not another vampire. I didn’t want to come off as a nervous Nellie, but it just wouldn’t do.
“Uh, honey pie,” Jerry said, addressing Wanda, I hoped. “We don’t call a v-a-m-p-i-r-e a v-a-m-p-i-r-e; it’s not nice.”
“Jerry,” I pointed out, “I’m sitting right here. And I can spell.”
“Oh,” Wanda said, putting her hand against her vermilion lips. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never met one before. A v-a-m-p-i-r-e, that is.”
“Good. We can all spell,” I said.
“She’s a little nervous is all, Jack,” Jerry hastened to explain.
She didn’t look nervous. She looked hot to trot. In fact, she was looking at me like I was a big slab of rare sirloin on the hoof. “Miss Wanda, for safety’s sake we don’t talk about our nonhuman tendencies around here. Most of my customers are human, and we don’t want to scare them off. You understand, don’t you?”
Wanda nodded vigorously enough to make her blond curls bounce. She made the sign of a zipper across her lips and gave me a wink.
“Won’t you excuse Jerry and me for a minute, darlin’?” I got up and took Jerry by the arm.
“Back in a minute, sweet cheeks,” Jerry called as he followed me to the coffee area.
“Sweet cheeks?”
Jerry shrugged and I handed him a Styrofoam cup. “Aw, Jack, you know how it is.”
I sighed, thinking of my last run-in with Connie. I wished. “What are you doing here with Nate Thrasher’s wife?”
“I had to get her away from there. He was beating up on her all the time.”
Jerry held out the cup and I poured him some of Huey’s finest brew, that is to say, coffee that tasted like tar-colored bog water. Or maybe bong water. I was beginning to wonder if he didn’t use his zombie-flavored sweat socks as filters. I was also beginning towonder if Wanda hadn’t triggered the famous Thrasher temper by
presenting for every swamp dog that came within sniffing distance. But all the flirting in the world didn’t justify abuse. I just didn’t want to see Jerry get hurt by a conniving woman or by a cuckolded werewolf.
“I heard she’s been missing for a while. Where have you been hiding her?”
“We’ve been staying at a friend’s trailer, but the friend got nervous when he found out we were on the wrong side of the Thrashers, so we had to run,” Jerry said. “How did you know she was missing?”
“Because Connie—Detective Jones—has done everything but drag the swamp looking for her. She suspected foul play. I’ve got to call her and tell her Wanda’s alive.”
“No, Jack, you can’t! Nobody can know who Wanda is and where she’s run off from…or who with.”
“What about all your card-playing buddies out there?” I asked.
“They won’t tell anybody.”
“Look, Jerry,” I said. “Connie infiltrated the pack, undercover. She even went out with Samson Thrasher. She’s risked her life to find Wanda. I’ve got to tell her.”
Jerry took a sip of the coffee and made a face. “All right, but I have to ask you a favor in return.”
“Oh, okay. What is it?”
“Can Wanda stay here until this thing blows over?”
“Here? At the garage? Geez, Jerry, isn’t there anywhere else you can go with her?”
“There’s nowhere else the Thrashers are afraid to go looking for her,” Jerry said with a beseeching look. “They respect you, Jack. I know it sounds kind of backward, but that’s why they want to take you on.”
I sighed, remembering Jerry’s admission that he liked to hang out at my garage because the Thrashers, who he was on the run from himself, wouldn’t dare come looking for him here.
As I was thinking it over, Jerry said, “C’mon, Jack, it would only be for a couple of days. Word is on the street that Samson and your buddy Seth are going to settle things in two nights.”
“Hmm. That’s right. I’ll tell you what, Jer. You come to the fight with me as Seth’s backup and it’s a done deal. She can sleep right in there on the couch in the office. I lock the doors in the daytime anyway, and if anybody tries to mess with her and you’re not here, Huey can run them down and eat their brains.”
Jerry looked sick. “Do zombies really eat people’s brains? I thought that was just a wives’ tale.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I do know that he tried to nibble a customer or two early on, before we broke him of it. If we actually sicced him on somebody, who knows? It might be pretty interesting to see what happened,” I said. Who’d win a fight between a hungry zombie and a werewolf sounded like one of those stupid questions little kids asked one another, but it was still an entertaining one.
“I reckon it’s about time I faced up to the pack,” Jerry said. “It’ll be a helluva lot easier with you and Seth there, too.”
I clapped him on the back. “Sometimes a man has to take a stand, Jer. You’ll be glad you did.”
Jerry thought for a second. “Who else is going to back up Seth besides you and me?”
“Werm’s going to be there with bells on,” I said cheerfully.
Jerry looked down at his coffee cup. “Do you have anything stronger than this zombiefied coffee?”
Jerry and Wanda rejoined the card game after I told Wanda that a policewoman I knew was going to want to talk to her. She seemed fine with that. I called Connie.
“Jack, haven’t we talked enough for one night? Do you know what time it is?” she asked groggily.
“I’ve got Wanda Thrasher here at the garage,” I said.
“I’ll be there in ten,” she said, and hung up.
I hoped for all I was worth that finding Wanda would score points with Connie. I couldn’t stand to leave things with her in the sorry state they were when I left her apartment. The other upside to finding Wanda was that now maybe Connie wouldn’t feel like she had to come to the dominance fight. After all, working the Wanda case was her original excuse for going.
While I was waiting for Connie, I called Huey away from the card table. “There’s something I want you to do for me, buddy,” I told him. I put my hands lightly on his shoulders and looked him in the eyes. That was harder than it sounded as his eyes now worked somewhat independently of each other, kind of like some species of amphibian. You kind of had to sway this way and that in order to stay in his line of sight. Whenever I talked to him head-on, I felt like one of those Indian snake charmers.
“Name it, Jack. I’ll do anything you want.” Huey said, tracking me as best he could.
“You see that nice lady over there—Wanda, Jerry’s girlfriend?”
Huey had to turn all the way around and cock his head to one side to see her. “Yep, I reckon I do.”
“I want you to be her bodyguard,” I said gravely. “Her husband is one mean sonofabitch and might want to come and beat up on her, but you do whatever you have to in order to protect her, all right?”
One of Huey’s eyeballs did a U-turn back to me, and the other soon meandered over to see what number one was looking at. Curiosity, I guess. It was almost like they each had a mind of their own in addition to independent locomotion. “You can count on me, Jack. I’ll protect that lady with my life.”
“Good man,” I said. Technically, of course, Huey had no life to protect Wanda with, but who was I of all people to quibble with semantics? Huey could be trusted completely to follow through with his commitments and that was the important thing. I gave the little guy’s shoulders a final squeeze before I turned him back around toward the card table.
Connie showed up a few minutes later. Both pain and hope stirred inside me as she walked through the door. Even though I had found Wanda for her, I guess I still wasn’t sure if she’d ever forgive me for refusing to be her conductor on the streetcar to hell.
I introduced her to Wanda and showed them both into my office so Connie could question her in private. When they came out, Wanda was dabbing her eyes with a tissue. Connie and I watched her go back to the card table where she sat by Jerry and put her head on his shoulder.
“So what happened?” I asked Connie.
“I tried to get her to press charges against Nate Thrasher, but she refuses.” Connie glared in Wanda’s direction in frustration.
“Not everyone is as brave as you are,” I said.
Connie’s attention snapped back to me. “What do you mean?” she demanded. Her gaze searched mine for a sign of something.
“I just meant that you were willing to go undercover and risk life and limb to find her when you thought she’d been beaten up or worse. And now she won’t even go so far as to press charges against Nate so he can’t do that to Sally, or anybody else for that matter.”
Connie visibly relaxed. “Oh,” she murmured. “Well…”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing. It’s not important.”
I had a feeling it was important. Very important. But if Connie didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t, and that’s all there was to it. Recent experience proved that.
“Jack, I want to thank you for finding Wanda for me. The case had become very important to me. It’s very frustrating when a missing person seems to just vanish into thin air. Even though she won’t press charges, I’m really pleased to have her disappearance solved.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “But listen, I’m sorry about what happened the last time we talked. I shouldn’t have given you a hard time about something you’re not ready to talk to me about—something you might never want to talk to me about. I didn’t mean to pry. I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry for how we left things, too,” she said. “I know you’re just trying to look out for my safety. I’m going to quit bugging you about the afterlife thing. I mean, I still want to talk to them, but I’ll work with Melaphia some more first so I’ll better understand how to approach this. Maybe I can contact them wi
th a medium, without us having to, you know, go anywhere.”
I relaxed, knowing that she’d talk to Melaphia about things. She’d listen to Mel. Yep, Melaphia would straighten her out. But there was still the issue of the werewolf fight. “Now that you know where Wanda is, I guess there’s no point in your showing up at the dominance fight, is there?” I suggested hopefully.
“Hmm,” she said. “I suppose not.”
Now I really did feel like a two-ton anvil had been lifted off my chest. “Good.”
Connie pushed out her bottom lip in a mock pout. “I was kind of looking forward to seeing the show, though. I mean, how often does a girl get to see a bunch of guys change into werewolves?”
“You’ve got me there.” She was angling for something, but I couldn’t tell what.
“So how are you going to make it up to me?”
“Hmmm. What do you have in mind?” Visions of Connie shinnying out of her pink sweats danced through my head.
“Jack, stop playing dumb.” She hit me lightly on the arm. “Werm’s club is opening tomorrow night. Signs are posted all over town. It’s supposed to be a pretty big deal. But you probably already have a date.”
“Who? Me?”
“Yeah. You.”
I cleared my throat. “Consuela, would you be my date for Werm’s club opening tomorrow night?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “If we’re going to dance tomorrow night away, I’ve got to go home and get my beauty sleep.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to her car. Unlocking the door, she said, “I’m really looking forward to our date. I got the night off by switching shifts with another cop. The entertainment should be very…interesting.”
I barely heard her, high as I was on knowing that she not only didn’t hate me anymore but had actually asked me out on a date. “Mmm-hmm,” I murmured. “Very interesting.”
She got behind the wheel and I gently shut the car door. She said something else, but the window was up and she’d started the engine just as she’d said it.
“What?” I called out to her as she was backing away from the garage.