“Strength of a River in His Shoulders,” I said. “You’re welcome at my fire.”
“Wizard Dresden,” River Shoulders rumbled. “It is good to see you.” He took a couple of long steps and hunkered down opposite the fire from me. “Man. That smells good.” “Darn right it does,” I said. I proceeded with the preparations in companionable silence while River Shoulders stared thoughtfully at the fire. I’d set up my camp this way for a reason—it made me the host and River Shoulders my guest. It meant I was obliged to provide food and drink, and he was obliged to behave with decorum. Guest-and-host relationships are damned near laws of physics in the supernatural world: They almost never get violated, and when they do, it’s a big deal. Both of us felt a lot more comfortable around one another this way.
Okay. Maybe it did a wee bit more to make me feel comfortable than it did River Shoulders, but he was a repeat customer, I liked him, and I figured he probably didn’t get treated to a decent steak all that often.
We ate the meal in an almost ritualistic silence, too, other than River making some appreciative noises as he chewed. I popped open a couple of bottles of McAnnally’s Pale, my favorite brew by a veritable genius of hops, back in Chicago.
River liked it so much that he gave me an inquisitive glance when his bottle was empty. So I emptied mine and produced two more.
After that, I filled a pipe with expensive tobacco, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to him. He nodded and took it. We smoked and finished our beers. By then, the fire had died down to glowing embers.
“Thank you for coming,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Again, I come to seek your help on behalf of my son.”
“Third time you’ve come to me,” I said.
“Yes.” He rummaged in his pouch and produced a small, heavy object. He flicked it to me. I caught it and squinted at it in the dim light. It was a gold nugget about as big as a Ping-Pong ball. I nodded and tossed it back to him. River Shoulders’s brows lowered into a frown.
You have to understand. A frown on a mug like his looked indistinguishable from scowling fury. It turned his eyes into shadowed caves with nothing but a faint gleam showing from far back in them. It made his jaw muscles bunch and swell into knots the size of tennis balls on the sides of his face.
“You will not help him,” the Bigfoot said.
I snorted. “You’re the one who isn’t helping him, big guy.”
“I am,” he said. “I am hiring you.”
“You’re his father,” I said quietly. “And he doesn’t even know your name. He’s a good kid. He deserves more than that. He deserves the truth.”
He shook his head slowly. “Look at me. Would he even accept my help?”
“You aren’t going to know unless you try it,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t help him.”
At that, River Shoulders frowned a little more.
I curbed an instinct to edge away from him.
“Then what do you want in exchange for your services?” he asked.
“I help the kid,” I said. “You meet the kid. That’s the payment. That’s the deal.”
“You do not know what you are asking,” he said.
“With respect, River Shoulders, this is not a negotiation. If you want my help, I just told you how to get it.”
He became very still at that. I got the impression that maybe people didn’t often use tactics like that when they dealt with him.
When he spoke, his voice was a quiet, distant rumble. “You have no right to ask this.”
“Yeah, um. I’m a wizard. I meddle. It’s what we do.”
“Manifestly true.” He turned his head slightly away. “You do not know how much you ask.”
“I know that kid deserves more than you’ve given him.”
“I have seen to his protection. To his education. That is what fathers do.”
“Sure,” I said. “But you weren’t ever there. And that matters.” Absolute silence fell for a couple of minutes.
“Look,” I said gently. “Take it from a guy who knows. Growing up without a dad is terrifying. You’re the only father he’s ever going to have. You can go hire Superman to look out for Irwin if you want to, and he’d still be the wrong guy—because he isn’t you.”
River toyed with the empty bottle, rolling it across his enormous fingers like a regular guy might have done with a pencil.
“Do you want me on this?” I asked him. “No hard feelings if you don’t.”
River looked up at me again and nodded slowly. “I know that if you agree to help him, you will do so. I will pay your price.” “Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Irwin’s problem.”
“What’d he say?” Officer Dean asked.
“He said the kid was at the University of Oklahoma for school,” I said. “River’d had a bad dream and knew that the kid’s life was in danger.”
The cop grunted. “So . . . Bigfoot is a psychic?”
“Think about it. No one ever gets a good picture of one, much less a clean shot,” I said. “Despite all the expeditions and TV shows and whatnot. River’s people have got more going for them than being huge and strong. My guess is that they’re smarter than humans. Maybe a lot smarter. My guess is they know magic of some kind, too.”
“Jesus,” Officer Dean said. “You really believe all this, don’t you?”
“I want to believe,” I said. “And I told you that you wouldn’t.”
Dean grunted. Then he said, “Usually they’re too drunk to make sense when I get a story like this. Keep going.”
I got to Norman, Oklahoma, a bit before noon the next morning. It was a Wednesday, which was a blessing. In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans.
Or wait: Soccer is the one with hooligans. Drunken American football fans are just . . . drunks, I guess.
River had provided me with a small dossier he’d had prepared, which included a copy of his kid’s class schedule. I parked my car in an open spot on the street not too far from campus and ambled on over. I got some looks: I sort of stand out in a crowd. I’m a lot closer to seven feet tall than six, which might be one reason why River Shoulders liked to hire me—I look a lot less tiny than other humans, to him. Add in the big black leather duster and the scar on my face, and I looked like the kind of guy you’d want to avoid in dark alleys.
The university campus was as confusing as all of them are, with buildings that had constantly evolved into and out of multiple roles over the years. They were all named after people I doubt any of the students had ever heard of, or cared about, and there seemed to be no organizational logic at all at work there. It was a pretty enough campus, I supposed. Lots of redbrick and brownstone buildings. Lots of architectural doohickeys on many of the buildings, in a kind of quasi-classical Greek style. The ivy that was growing up many of the walls seemed a little too cultivated and obvious for my taste. Then again, I had exactly the same amount of regard for the Ivy League as I did for the Big 12.
The grass was an odd color, like maybe someone had sprayed it with a blue-green dye or something, though I had no idea what kind of delusional creep would do something so pointless.
And, of course, there were students—a whole lot of kids, all of them with things to do and places to be. I could have wandered around all day, but I thought I’d save myself the headache of attempting to apply logic to a university campus and stopped a few times to ask for directions. Irwin Pounder, River Shoulders’s son, had a physics course at noon, so I picked up a notebook and a couple of pens at the university bookstore and ambled on into the large classroom. It was a perfect disguise. The notebook was college-ruled.
I sat near the back, where I could see both doors into the room, and waited. Bigfoot Irwin was going to stand out in the crowd almost as badly as I did. The kid was huge. River had shown me a photo that he kept in his medicine bag, carefull
y laminated to protect it from the elements. Irwin’s mom could have been a second-string linebacker for the Bears. Carol Pounder was a formidable woman, and over six feet tall. But her boy was a head taller than she already, and still had the awkward, too-lean look of someone who wasn’t finished growing. His shoulders had come in, though, and it looked like he might have had to turn sideways to walk through doors.
I waited and waited, watching both doors, until the professor arrived, and the class started. Irwin never arrived. I was going to leave, but it actually turned out to be kind of interesting. The professor was a lunatic but a really entertaining one.
The guy drank liquid nitrogen, right there in front of everybody, and blew it out his nose in this huge jet of vapor. I applauded along with everyone else, and before I knew it, the lecture was over. I might even have learned something.
Okay.
Maybe there were some redeeming qualities to a college education.
I went to Irwin’s next class, which was a freshman biology course, in another huge classroom.
No Irwin.
He wasn’t at his four o’clock math class, either, and I emerged from it bored and cranky. None of Irwin’s other teachers held a candle to Dr. Indestructo.
Huh.
Time for plan B.
River’s dossier said that Irwin was playing football for OU.
He’d made the team as a walk-on, and River had been as proud as any father would be about the athletic prowess of his son. So I ambled on over to the Sooners’ practice field, where the team was warming up with a run.
Even among the football players, Irwin stood out. He was half a head taller than any of them, at least my own height. He looked gangly and thin beside the fellows around him, even with the shoulder pads on, but I recognized his face. I’d last seen him when he was about fourteen. Though his rather homely features had changed a bit, they seemed stronger, and more defined. There was no mistaking his dark, intelligent eyes.
I stuck my hands in the pockets of my old leather duster and waited, watching the field. I’d found the kid, and, absent any particular danger, I was in no particular hurry. There was no sense in charging into the middle of Irwin’s football practice and his life and disrupting everything. I’m just not that kind of guy.
Okay, well.
I try not to be.
“Seems to keep happening, though, doesn’t it,” I said to myself. “You show up on somebody’s radar, and things go to DEFCON 1 a few minutes later.”
“I’m sorry?” said a young woman’s voice.
“Ah,” said Officer Dean. “This is where the girl comes in.”
“Who said there was a girl?”
“There’s always a girl.”
“Well,” I said, “yes and no.”
She was blond, about five-foot-six, and my logical mind told me that every inch of her was a bad idea. The rest of me, especially my hindbrain, suggested that she would be an ideal mate.
Preferably sooner rather than later.
There was nothing in particular about her that should have caused my hormones to rage. I mean, she was young and fit, and she had the body of the young and fit, and that’s hardly ever unpleasant to look at. She had eyes the color of cornflowers and rosy cheeks, and she was a couple of notches above cute, when it came to her face. She was wearing running shorts, and her legs were smooth and generally excellent.
Some women just have it. And no, I can’t tell you what “it” means because I don’t get it myself. It was something mindless, something chemical, and even as my metaphorically burned fingers were telling me to walk away, the rest of me was going through that male physiological response the science guys in the Netherlands have documented recently.
Not that one.
Well, maybe a little.
I’m talking about the response where when a pretty girl is around, it hits the male brain like a drug and temporarily impairs his cognitive function, literally dropping the male IQ.
And hey, how Freudian is it that the study was conducted in the Netherlands?
This girl dropped that IQ-nuke on my brain, and I was standing there staring a second later while she smiled uncertainly at me.
“Urn, sorry?” I asked. “My mind was in the Netherlands.”
Her dimple deepened, and her eyes sparkled. She knew all about the brain nuke. “I just said that you sounded like a dangerous guy.” She winked at me. It was adorable. “I like those.”
“You’re, uh. You’re into bad boys, eh?”
“Maybe,” she said, lowering her voice and drawing the word out a little, as if it was a confession. She spoke with a very faint drawl. “Plus, I like meeting new people from all kinds of places, and you don’t exactly strike me as a local, darlin’.”
“You dig dangerous guys who are just passing through,” I said. “Do you ever watch those cop shows on TV?”
She tilted back her head and laughed. “Most boys don’t give me lip like that in the first few minutes of conversation.”
“I’m not a boy,” I said.
She gave me a once-over with those pretty eyes, taking a heartbeat longer about it than she really needed. “No,” she said. “No, you are not.”
My inner nonmoron kept on stubbornly ringing alarm bells, and the rest of me slowly became aware of them. My glands thought that I’d better keep playing along. It was the only way to find out what the girl might have been interested in, right? Right. I was absolutely not continuing the conversation because I had gone soft in the head.
“I hope that’s not a problem,” I said.
“I just don’t see how it could be. I’m Connie.”
“Harry.”
“So what brings you to Norman, Harry?”
“Taking a look at a player,” I said.
Her eyes brightened. “Ooooo. You’re a scout?”
“Maybe,” I said, in the same tone she’d used earlier.
Connie laughed again. “I’ll bet you talk to silly college girls like me all the time.”
“Like you?” I replied. “No, not so much.”
Her eyes sparkled again. “You may have found my weakness. I’m the kind of girl who likes a little flattery.”
“And here I was thinking you liked something completely different.”
She covered her mouth with one hand, and her cheeks got a little pinker. “Harry. That’s not how one talks to young ladies in the South.”
“Obviously. I mean, you look so outraged. Should I apologize?”
“Oh,” she said, her smile widening. “I just have to collect you.” Connie’s eyes sparkled again, and I finally got it.
Her eyes weren’t twinkling.
They were becoming increasingly flecked with motes of molten silver.
Cutie-pie was a frigging vampire.
I’ve worked for years on my poker face. Years. It still sucks pretty bad, but I’ve been working on it. So I’m sure my smile was only slightly wooden when I asked, “Collect me?”
I might not have been hiding my realization very well, but either Connie was better at poker than me, or else she really was too absorbed in the conversation to notice. “Collect you,” she said. “When I meet someone worthwhile, I like to have dinner with them. And we’ll talk and tell stories and laugh, and I’ll get a picture and put it in my memory book.”
“Um,” I said. “Maybe you’re a little young for me.”
She threw back her head and gave a full-throated laugh. “Oh, Harry. I’m talking about sharing a meal. That’s all, honestly. I know I’m a terrible flirt, but I didn’t think you were taking me seriously.”
I watched her closely as she spoke, searching for the predatory calculation that I knew had to be in there. Vampires of the White Court—
“Wait,” Dean said. “Vampires of the White Castle?”
I sighed. “White Court.”
Dean grunted. “Why not just call her a vampire?”
“They come in a lot of flavors,” I said.
“And this one was
vanilla?”
“There’s no such thing as . . . ” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”
Dean nodded. “So why not just call ’em vanilla vampires?”
“I’ll . . . bring it up at the next wizard meeting,” I said.
“So the vampire is where all the blood came from?”
“No.” I sighed. “This kind doesn’t feed on blood.”
“No? What do they eat, then?”
“Life-energy.”
“Huh?”
I sighed again. “Sex.”
“Finally, the story gets good. So they eat sex?”
“Life-energy,” I repeated. “The sex is just how they get started.”
“Like sticking fangs into your neck,” Dean said. “Only instead of fangs, I guess they use—”
“Look, do you want the story or not?”
Dean leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “Yon kidding? This is the best one in years.”
Anyway, I watched Connie closely, but I saw no evidence of anything in her that I knew had to be there. Vampires are predators who hunt the most dangerous game on the planet. They generally aren’t shy about it, either. They don’t really need to be. If a White Court vampire wants to feed off a human, all she really has to do is crook her finger, and he comes running.
There isn’t any ominous music. Nobody sparkles. As far as anyone looking on is concerned, a girl winks at a boy and goes off somewhere to make out. Happens every day.
They don’t get all coy asking you out to dinner, and they sure as hell don’t have pictures in a memory book.
This was weird, and long experience has taught me that when the unexplained is bouncing around right in front of you, the smart thing is to back off and figure out what the hell is going on. In my line of work, what you don’t know can kill you.
But I didn’t get the chance. There was a sharp whistle from a coach somewhere on the field, and football players came rumbling off it. One of them came loping toward us, put a hand on top of the six-foot chain-link fence, and vaulted it in one easy motion. Bigfoot Irwin landed lightly, grinning, and continued directly toward Connie.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 28