She nodded and pulled out her phone. After we’d traded contact information, she began gathering up her belongings. “Do you think you could possibly take me somewhere with a real train station? Or maybe an airport? I’m not missing my stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
IT TURNED OUT YUMA had an airport. I offered to let MaddieAnne stay in the van until the sun rose, but she declined. The last I saw was the determined set of her shoulders as she strode into the building.
I assumed I’d hear back from MaddieAnne after she had some more experience under her belt. Assuming she didn’t get herself killed first.
But I could just about guarantee that MaddieAnne assumed she’d never have to see me again.
I couldn’t help but snicker just a little.
Wolf glanced up at me in the closest thing I’d ever seen to a wolfy side-eye.
“I know, I know. And I really don’t want her to get hurt. But she’s so damn snooty.”
Still, I grinned as I drove away.
In that last fight, I’d seen more than a hint of Gracie in MaddieAnne. They were definitely related. And though I wouldn’t admit it to MaddieAnne, it had felt good to once again tag-team a monster while fighting beside a cousin.
That hadn’t happened in far too long.
I hoped she could come to truly accept her destiny.
Her curse.
Our curse.
12. MaddieAnne
It took everything I had to trust Blaize.
As I watched the Sunset Express pull of out Yuma, Arizona on its way to cultured California, my heart sank. The last week had been the hardest of my life, and now I’d just learned that my destiny might involve breaking more than a few nails in hand-to-hand combat.
Just when you think you know yourself.
I waved good-bye to Blaize, Wolf, and the van at the departures terminal of the Yuma airport. I was sure I wouldn’t miss the van. At all.
It would be morning before I could get a flight to LA, but the airport was small, and the gate agent promised she’d wake me when my flight started boarding. I fell asleep at the gate, paperback open on my chest.
I was in LA by nine the next morning and settling in my suite just in time for lunch.
My room was plush and luxurious and a balm to my soul.
After ordering room service, I took a shower, washed the grime of the desert and the ghouls out of my hair, and wrapped it in a towel. I ate my chicken salad croissant in my robe and then snuggled into bed for a well-deserved nap.
When I woke, it was late afternoon judging by the slant of the sunlight streaming through my windows.
I needed a manicure, and a pedicure, and a new Louis Vuitton valise. All those would be easy to procure in Beverly Hills.
But when I thought of those things, things that used to make me happy, I felt a little empty inside.
Killing not one, but two, ghouls with the help of Blaize and Wolf had awakened something in me, a satisfaction I’d never felt before El Paso.
Maybe I was more than just a Southern girl who knew Lenox flatware patterns better than anyone who didn’t work at Macy’s had any right to. Maybe I was a little bit of a demon-hunting badass.
If I was, I wasn’t going to do it like Blaize. I was going to do it my own way, with grace and style and my trademark panache.
I picked up the remote, ready to escape into the world of reality television, but before I clicked the power button, I called downstairs.
“Concierge,” a man answered.
“I’d like for you to arrange karate lessons for me. Beginning tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am. What time works best for you?”
“Anytime. Just let me know.”
“Good enough, Miss Honeycutt.”
I hung up the phone and smiled.
It was better to be prepared. Just in case.
Sorcery and Silver
“Someday,” I said to Wolf as I wiped engine grease off my hands and onto the legs of my dirtiest pair of jeans, “I am going to spend New Year’s Eve at a party. I will have my hair and nails professionally done.” I glanced down at the accumulated dirt and grease under said nails. “I will wear a beautiful, sequined dress, and I will have an absolutely wonderful time.” I glanced around at the empty desert stretching away into the distance. “Instead of spending the beginning of every year in the middle of nowhere, killing monsters.”
Wolf gave me that lupine grin of his and shook his head.
“Yeah. You can laugh at me all you want, but I’ve seen you in your human form. Naked.”
He made a sound that was remarkably like human snickering.
“Okay.” I stepped back from the engine. “I think I’ve got the damned thing running again. Let’s see how far we get this time.” The sun had been dropping toward the horizon for hours now—the sun setting seemed to take an especially long time out here in the middle of nowhere. It finally dipped below the horizon entirely, casting dark shadows everywhere. I slammed the van’s hood down over the engine, praying that I wasn’t doing so prematurely and that we would be able to get off this particular stretch of highway.
Hell if I knew where we were going after that, though.
But, as usual, the Calling had come as an almost irresistible compulsion to move in a certain direction. I knew at the end of it, there would be monsters. Creatures I needed to kill in order to help keep the rest of humanity safe—and safely ignorant of the monsters in their midst.
My compulsion was definitely a curse—but at least it was a curse that allowed me to do some good in the world. It came with some limitations, primarily geographic ones. I couldn’t leave the southwestern United States. There was a little wiggle room around that. I had actually gotten to the Canadian border in Montana a couple of times, so I suspected the family legend was a little off—it might be more that I could only travel through whatever had been considered the Wild West at one point. The Pacific Northwest wasn’t available to me. I’d aimed for Seattle once, but I hadn’t been able to make it there before I’d had to turn back, vomiting and reeling until I hit the Southwest again.
Even worse than the geographical limitations—or at least, more likely to kill me—was the allergy to silver. Given how often I ran up against werewolves (not counting Wolf), that was a real liability.
The family curse had come from an ancestor of mine. Ruby Silver, a demon-hunter back in the 1880s, ran into a demon with a twisted sense of humor. She’d been with two other couples at the time, and everybody there got a curse. They differed only in the metal the others were allergic to. The cursed couples’ descendants called each other “cousin” and trained together—because nothing brings people together like a common curse—and eventually, some of the descendants even married one another. So some of us were actually blood-related. I lost track of all of the convoluted connections.
Anyway, now my cousins and I all dealt with demons and monsters in the Southwest. Well. Actually, it was just one cousin, singular, at the moment. My other demon-hunting cousin, Gracie, had died in the battle that landed me with a werewolf companion a few months ago. A werewolf in wolf form—I had thought “permanently stuck in werewolf form” until Christmas Eve, when he had shifted into human form long enough to pull my stupid ass out of a silver mine, where I had gone to take out a vampire that was just starting to terrorize a small mountain town in Colorado.
From there, we’d gone to see Daddy for Christmas. Nothing about him had really changed—he was still drunk, still mourning Mama’s death more than twenty years later. But he was still the best fighter any Silver heir had ever trained with. So whenever I felt like I needed a training refresher, I always went back to him. And sometimes, like this Christmas, I went simply to visit my father.
Then last week, we ran into... well, a woman I’d never met before, but I could have sworn was one of the cousins. Only one family member at a time takes on the curse, and I was pretty much certain that she was Gracie’s replacement. But unlike the other cousins, I had no ide
a how she fit into our family tree, such as it was.
Figuring that out was for another time, though. There wasn’t much I could do to help her until she confronted the things she’d learned about monsters.
In the meantime, I’d gotten hit with the Call, pulling me toward Utah.
And then the van had broken down again, for the second time in a week. I’d just gotten it exactly like I liked it, too. The inside had been converted to be a perfect living area for me and Wolf. But I was beginning to think I was going to have to get a whole new engine if I wanted to keep traveling in it.
Unless I’d gotten it running now. I climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned the key. Nothing.
“Dammit.” I banged my hands against the steering wheel. I checked my phone for about the sixth time since we’d ended up here in the middle of nowhere. No reception. I wasn’t even entirely certain where we were. That wasn’t all that unusual. I generally just let the Calling lead me once it took hold.
What was odd, though, was the fact that the Calling wasn’t pushing me right now. Until the van had stuttered to a halt an hour ago, I’d had a very clear sense of where I was headed—more than usual, even—but I hadn’t even realized that it wasn’t still tugging at me to keep moving until just now.
I paused, frowning, and turned in a circle, trying to see if I could find it again as if it were an errant scent on a breeze that for a second, I had picked up on.
Nothing. Just like the van.
Maybe for once, the damned Call was going to leave me alone until I was in a position to actually follow it.
Yeah, right. And I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona.
I climbed out of the driver’s seat and into the back compartment, where I flipped up the wood pallet that held my light mattress in order to get to the small storage area directly beneath it. I had a paper atlas there, along with maps for each of the states I was likely to work in. There are more cell towers going up every day, of course, but not everywhere had coverage yet. I wasn’t about to give up my paper maps until I could rely on my phone’s map apps one hundred percent of the time.
When you’re cursed, it’s best to be prepared.
Wolf padded behind me, and I sat down cross-legged on the van floor, using the bed like a desk. Wolf sat back on his haunches, craning his neck out to look at the map, too.
“There’s something weird about this area,” I said. “I just remembered it. Like, a ranch or something?” I flipped through the pages of the atlas until I got to Utah. “Oh, right, here it is.” I put my finger on it. “Poltergeist Ranch.”
Wolf tilted his head and perked his ears up in the signal that he used to tell me he wanted more information. At least, I assumed that’s what it meant—that’s how I treated it, anyway.
“It’s some sort of locus for all sorts of supernatural phenomena. Scientists came out in, like, the 90s, I think, and tried to prove the ghosts and monsters showing up out here were real. Daddy told me all about it—he and Mama were out here then, too, making sure that the scientists didn’t take away any definitive proof.” I shook my head at the thought of all the ways the Silvers worked behind the scenes to keep the world safe. “The owners turned it into some sort of tourist trap. I don’t know if there are even any more supernaturals out here.”
I traced the line representing the highway we were on back to the last town we’d passed through, then returned to about where I suspected we were now.
“At any rate, I think we’re close to the main part of the ranch. We should hike over there and see if we can get somebody with more mechanical skill than I have to work on the engine.”
Leaning past Wolf, I grabbed my heavy, Army-green parka off the back of the driver’s seat, where I hung it when I wasn’t wearing it. I pulled it on, then gathered up two water bottles and dropped them in the pockets. Wolf watched me with wary eyes.
“I’m going to bring the collar and leash just in case anyone makes a noise about you being a wolf. Or a giant terror of a dog.” I’d learned traveling with Wolf that he had plenty of facial expressions, even in his animal form—including rolling his eyes. I dropped the leash and collar into my pocket, anyway.
I went ahead and geared up, too. I always kept a knife in my boots and a loaded gun in the glove compartment. I had left it there while I was working on the van, trusting Wolf to let me know if I needed to stop and grab it. Now, though, I went ahead and strapped on the shoulder holster to wear under the coat. I never knew what I might run into out on the road.
I hoped I was right about where we were. At the absolute worst, though, we would walk a few miles and then come back and sleep in the van. We set out on the highway in what I hoped was the right direction.
About a mile and a half later, we came upon a sign pointing to the turn-off for the Poltergeist Ranch. “See? It’s not bad at all. We’ll get someone to come help us, maybe call a tow truck, and be back on our way in no time.”
Wolf looked askance at me at the oh-so-cheerful tone I adopted.
“A girl can dream, okay?”
Wolf snorted, and we continued along the road. It was less than a mile to the turn onto the unpaved drive that led to the ranch, according to the signs. We were only part of the way up that drive when, around a curve, we came upon a gate bearing a giant sign that said Closed for Winter.
“Dammit,” I muttered. But this time I didn’t have a steering wheel to thump. I inhaled deeply. “Okay. Last I heard, the family that owns the ranch lives here. Maybe they’re here all year round. Let’s see what we can find.”
I scaled the gate pretty easily and made my way along the barbed wire fencing until I found a loose piece I could hold up far enough for Wolf to shimmy through. Then we moved back to the driveway and headed toward what I hoped were the owners’ houses.
When we got there, there were houses all right, or at least buildings, but they were dark and completely empty. I could tell just from the quality of the air that there was no one else around, but I knocked on the door of the log cabin labeled Main Office, anyway. When no one answered, I sat down on the steps and put my head my hands. “Okay. This is still no big deal. We’ve got everything we need to stay in the van for days if we have to. And someone will come by before then.”
Wolf whined, I hoped in agreement. He put his chin down on my knees and looked up at me with his big, ice-blue eyes.
I took off my glove and buried my fingers in his brindle fur.
“You know,” I said, “if you would shift into human form once in a while, we could talk this stuff out. Maybe you’d even have some useful suggestions.”
He gave me a definite shrug at that.
“You can’t shift, can you?”
He shook his head, I assumed in agreement.
I sighed and gave him a quick hug. “Okay, let’s get back. We can figure the rest of this out tomorrow.”
Moonlight limned the trees casting shadows over the drive. The only other light came from the stars above. This far from city lights, I could see the Milky Way stretched out above me.
Luckily, nighttime in the country didn’t bother me. Unlike my cousin Cassie, who had hated training out in the desert at night when we were children. She’d had the same training I had—we all moved around, visiting each other’s families to learn what they had to teach us—but she’d never been interested in hunting anywhere but in the cities.
I could certainly manage city hunting—I’d done plenty of it in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Phoenix—but I preferred the open countryside. I liked being able to see what was coming at me before I could smell it.
Even in the dark, for example, it was possible right now to see that there was something slinking around the edges of my vision. More than one something, actually. Wolf’s ears went back out against his head, and he growled as the fur along the back of his neck rose.
As the creatures circled around us, one of them moved through a beam of moonlight, its form completely illuminated for an instant.
It was almost as tall as Wolf, moving on four legs, but those legs seemed somehow misshapen, the knees knobby and bent. It was furless and gray with a ridged back, a shortened muzzle, pointed ears like a jackal, and an almost human intelligence in its eyes.
“Oh, hell,” I exclaimed. “It’s a chupacabra. A whole pack of them.”
I had the entirely wrong weapons for this fight. The best way to kill a chupacabra was with a gold blade. I assumed that was left over from the Incas because they had, according to legend, created these particular monsters in the first place.
“I didn’t think they came this far north.”
Wolf rolled one eye toward me. He’d started doing that recently whenever he thought I was talking too much when I should be acting.
I was going to have to think for a minute to figure out what to do about this pack, though. “Okay. I believe my bullets will slow them down.”
Also, weren’t they like vampires? They couldn’t get into a building unless someone invited them in? I couldn’t remember. It wasn’t like I’d had a lot of experience killing chupacabras. Were we going to have to try to break into the house, or maybe one of the outbuildings?
We won’t have enough time, or a big enough head start, to make it back to the van. And even if we did, it’s stalled out. We can’t go anywhere from there.
Though at least I had gold blades in the arsenal under my bed.
Ah, hell. I’m going to have to use my magic to save us.
My magic skills had always been for shit.
Apparently, some of my ancestors had been good at magic. Daddy said Mama was a solid magic user, which from him was high praise.
But how could I use my magic to save us?
Gold. I need gold.
I had no idea if there was gold to be mined in Utah. And even if there was, I didn’t know if I had the magical strength to pull it up out of the ground. There were old stories of magic users who had been able to do that, but I was pretty sure metallurgy was not one of my strengths.
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