I glanced around at the various building that made up the ranch. The main office, a stable or two, what looked like it might be some kind of quarters for guests, or maybe for the ranch-hands. And one building that looked like it was perhaps the house that the owners lived in.
That was my best place to start.
“Come with me,” I whispered to Wolf. He was already pressed up against the back of my legs and my waist, facing in the opposite direction from me. Watching my back, as always. I sidled toward the main house, Wolf moving with me. The circle of chupacabras tightened around us as we moved. All told, there were six of them, two more than I would comfortably take on even if I had a gold knife on me. And that was with Wolf’s help.
They didn’t let us get all the way to the front porch of the house. But we got close. About six feet away, the closest animal growled, warning us not to take one more step. Wolf growled back, but he didn’t move, waiting for my lead.
I turned in a slow circle, Wolf still protecting my back, to examine each of the creatures surrounding us. To anyone watching, it would look like I was searching for a weak point. And in a sense, I was, but more than that, I was sending my magical senses questing outward, up and down and to every side, searching for gold.
I didn’t dare close my eyes for fear of looking too vulnerable, but I did let them glaze over with a sort of magical haze, leaving me with an overlay of what I could see with my mystical sight as opposed to my usual vision.
The gold stood out in tiny, bright sparks. There wasn’t much of it, but perhaps enough.
“We’ll have to wing it,” I said to Wolf.
He huffed in response as if to say, When do we not wing it?
I need to talk to Wolf about his smart mouth. If I ever get a break from defending the world from evil.
I sent my magical senses questing into the ground once more, just in case there was some hidden vein of gold that I could pull up and use.
As with everything this night, nothing.
So, instead, I pulled on those bright sparks of gold in all the buildings surrounding us. I didn’t have an incantation prepared, didn’t have any special hand motions ready, so I decided to improvise. I spun my hands into a shape as if I were holding a ball, swirling them around in a circle as I gathered all the gold in any one building together.
I felt the metal straining against me, heavy and dense. My eyes were unfocused, hazy, but I could hear Wolf growling, feel him occasionally lunging out and snapping to keep the chupacabra at bay.
I felt my magic pitch higher, like a sound I couldn’t hear, a whine just out of sensory reach. Daddy’s voice came to me out of memory.
It’s like driving a stick shift, baby girl. You feel for when the moment is right, when the engine reaches a point where the whole thing vibrates around you with exactly the right edge, and then you reach inside yourself and pull on it. Change the gears and move your magic.
And so I listened, and I felt, and I waited until the pitch was exactly right. I yanked on my magic as hard as I could, concentrating on the gold. And as I did, the chupacabras attacked.
Real fights are not like the ones in the movies. The monsters don’t come at you one by one or even two by two. It isn’t choreographed like a dance or blocked like a camera shot. It’s bedlam. Mayhem. They attack like a mob, coming from all directions. And even when you’re slashing at them with one hand and shooting with the other and magic is swirling through the air in white-gold sparkles, you don’t miss getting hit. Not all the time.
One of them clamped onto my arm, his teeth piercing the skin, the pain sending me to my knees. The gun I held in that hand clattered to the ground.
I let myself scream even as I slashed across the animal’s nose with the knife I’d pulled from my boot. It wouldn’t kill him, but it hurt enough to make him let go. I snatched my arm out of his mouth. At that moment, as I pulled my gun arm in close to my chest, instinct causing me to protect it, I heard Wolf scream. It wasn’t a howl or any other sound I had ever heard him. It was full of anguish and anger, and I turned to see that the chupacabras had done to him what they had done to me—attack his limbs. Only with Wolf, two of them working together had broken his back left leg. It dangled uselessly, even as he pivoted and turned on the other, still snapping and lunging to protect us.
This all happened in a matter of seconds. Wolf managed to pin one of them down, ripping its throat out. If I’d had an ax, I would have chopped its head off on the theory that nothing can function well without a head, even if losing it doesn’t kill it.
As it was, I didn’t know how we were going to escape, if I couldn’t figure out how to use the gold.
With a golden ax, I could save my life and Wolf’s.
That thought flitted through my mind exactly at the same moment that a spray of tiny golden objects blew out of the buildings, smashing through windows and leaving glass showering down behind it. Necklaces, rings, I think maybe even one gold filling flew by me, though I couldn’t imagine why someone would have that without the tooth.
They swirled through the air, coming together in a ball like the one I had imagined as I’d moved my hands. But now they were outside my conscious direction. The objects flowed together, a white-hot light rolling around them until it was too bright to look at. It centered over Wolf, over the chupacabra he had injured, and then the silvery light flowed away from the golden objects to swirl around Wolf’s broken leg.
Still whirling through the air above Wolf, the gold itself seemed to melt and reform even as I watched, taking on the shape of a tiny tomahawk, a miniature ax with a blade so sharp I would be afraid to touch it. The handle itself was barely big enough for me to hold onto and seemed to be made of other material—maybe whatever else had been attached to the gold I had pulled out of the buildings. It had several jewels embedded in it, so that was my bet, anyway.
The ax dropped to the ground in front of me, and I dove for it.
Wolf had gone entirely silent and motionless as the silver-white light swirled up and around him, enveloping him in some kind of cocoon, almost. I worried that I might have to cut him out of it.
But I didn’t have time for that now. With a single swing, I finished severing the head of the chupacabra Wolf had taken down.
And then I turned on the others.
I kicked the first one to the ground by taking its paws out from under it. I didn’t manage to cut its head off in one clean stroke, but I severed its spine with the golden ax, leaving it twitching helplessly on the ground. That would have to do for now.
I managed to get scratches in on the others—small wounds, but if they were as allergic to gold as I was to silver, the wounds would fester, and without help, they too would die. As I slashed the nose of the last one, they all turned tail and ran into the darkness.
I started to pursue them, but my steps faltered at the sound of a strange whine behind me.
I spun around, my odd little golden ax held up in front of me as if to ward off another attack.
The sound came from the silver-shrouded cocoon that had been Wolf. It still swirled, but the mist had hardened. As I stepped toward it, the shell crumbled away, and in its place stood a human.
The same man who had saved me from the silver mine not so long ago.
Wolf. In his human form.
I froze, uncertain what to do.
But he lunged for me, grabbing me up in his arms. “Blaize.”
My name sounded amazing in his voice, even though it was a little scratchy from disuse.
“I don’t even know your name.” My response came out as a bare whisper as I stared up at him. Wolf in his human form was stunning. This was the first time I’d seen him without the haze of impending death clouding my vision. He was every bit as beautiful as I remembered.
I reached up to take his face in my hands. “Why don’t you take this shape more often?”
He shook his head, his dark hair catching the moonlight. “I don’t have much time. I don’t know why I can do
this now, or why I could in the mine, but I am stuck in my ... other ... form.” He glanced away from me, down to the ground for a second, and then back up into my eyes. He took a deep breath as if preparing himself to say something difficult. “I never cared until I met you. I want to be free of my curse. I want both of us to be free of our curses.”
“How?” I didn’t ask the other question: Why?
“I don’t know.” He glanced around. “I think we only have from the stroke of midnight until that moment is over. This minute.”
“One minute? But I have so many questions. Did my magic do this?”
“Yes. I think so. And I think you’re the only one who can save me—just like I’m the only one who can save you. We have important work to do together.”
I started to ask what he meant, but he put his finger across my lips. “And I don’t want to waste time trying to talk about it when I could be doing this instead.”
With that, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in close for a kiss. I tucked my injured arm against my chest between us. His lips brushed against mine, then pressed more firmly, sending sparks singing through my entire body. He deepened the kiss, and it was all I could do you keep from moaning aloud.
I knew when the minute ended because my magic exploded. It flew up into the air in sparkles like fireworks, falling to the ground and dying like tiny flames in winter.
What was left swirled around us both. I felt my arm healing as Wolf pulled away from me regretfully, staring into my eyes as a blue mist curled around him, and he melted and reformed in front of my eyes into the usual Wolf who traveled with me. I reached down to touch the sides of his face as I had done when he was in his human form. “We will save us,” I promised. “We will end both our curses.”
BEFORE WE LEFT THE ranch, I considered leaving a note about the broken windows, but I hadn’t packed a journal or a pencil. I’m not really a note-taking kind of hunter. And it seemed unnecessary to break into their houses to leave an apology for breaking their windows. So instead, I vowed to myself to make an anonymous call about vandals out here—at least the owners might be able to keep the buildings’ interiors from getting weather-damaged inside.
I finished off the twitching chupacabra on the ground. Then, I wiped my weapons off on my jeans, making them my dirtiest and bloodiest pair, now. Then I tucked my knife and my gun away. But I kept the ax out, just in case the chupacabras showed up again.
I fished a matchbook out of my coat pocket, piled up the dead bodies, covered them with scrub brush, and lit the whole thing on fire.
We stayed until there was nothing left but ashes and bits of bone and teeth, and then I scattered those.
We trudged back to the van in the gray light of dawn. A couple of times along the way, I tried to pull up my magic, but I had used it all, it seemed.
No, this spell had been a limited-time special, apparently. It was a spell like nothing I’d ever done before. But it gave me an odd sort of hope—also like nothing I’d ever known before.
When we got back to the van, I tried turning the key one last time, just in case. And it started up just fine, the engine turning over instantly and practically purring.
Wolf and I glanced at each other, and it was like we could communicate without even speaking. “I don’t feel the Calling anymore,” I said, and he nodded.
Whatever had happened out on the Poltergeist Ranch had fulfilled the curse’s need to keep me fighting the monsters.
But there was more to it than that.
Something had brought us here—something that seemed almost benevolent. And the curse definitely wasn’t that.
My connection to Wolf had changed the curse—had changed my destiny. We were bound together now, and I was determined to make sure I saved him from his curse. Soon, I would begin to figure out how.
For now, though, we needed to get out of here.
I put the van into drive and pulled out onto the highway, and into a brand-new year.
KEEP READING FOR THE story of how Blaize’s ancestor Ruby Silver ended up cursed with an allergy to silver and a compulsion to hunt monsters!
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Unwelcome Gifts
A Ruby Silver Story
1.
I always liked spending Christmas in the mountains.
When Trip and I got the message that there was some kind of bugaboo tearing it up in some tiny mining town up there in the Rockies, I was delighted for us to point the horses’ noses in that direction.
We’d been in San Antonio together for the second time, dealing with a brand-new infestation of trolls under their newest bridge. But as much as I like Mexican food and touring the Alamo, I was looking forward to some snow.
We had to get all the way up to Fort Worth before we could get tickets for the two of us, my horse Lakota, and Trip’s horse Bandito on a train headed toward the Rockies. As soon as we hit Fort Worth, I checked us in to spend the night in a real hotel, where I ordered a bath for the first time in weeks.
When I’d traded in my demon-hunting rifle to join up with a monster-hunting agency, it hadn’t occurred to me how dirty that kind of hunting could be. Troll killing left behind the kind of stench that you just couldn’t scrub away at a washbasin with a single washcloth. For that matter, I’d had a couple of dips in the San Antonio River and had the opportunity to dump more than one bucket of well water over my hair. It still hadn’t been enough to clear away the troll stink.
But Fort Worth, for all that it was mostly a hub for cattle drives—or maybe because of it—had some of the best amenities to be found west of the Mississippi.
Trip was kind enough to let me use the bathwater first.
I sank down into the hot, scented water up to my neck and stretched out my legs until my toes rested on the far side of the copper tub the hotel clerk had sent up to my room and had the hotel help fill.
“Read the telegram to me again,” I instructed Trip.
“Ruby, darling, I have read it to you repeatedly, despite knowing that you are quite capable of reading it to yourself.”
“One more time?”
He fished it out of the saddle bag hanging from the back of his chair. “FIRE DEMON IN LEADVILLE COLORADO STOP MEET HOTEL GLENWOOD DENVER SOONEST STOP CARTER CARLISLE, PI AGENT & GENERAL MANAGER.”
“And that’s it?” I asked for what must have been the fifth time.
“That’s all. Looks like this new outfit doesn’t give as much detail as the last one.”
Trip and I had once worked for a nationwide agency that dealt with problems of the supernatural kind. Our severed contract didn’t allow us to advertise that fact, though. Or even tell people which one. Anyway, at that time, the old company hadn’t had much competition. But since then, a couple of others had sprung up. One of them, The Psychical Investigations Agency, had approached us while we were in San Antonio with such astounding employment offers that we simply could not turn them down, particularly once they agreed to allow us to remain a team.
This would be the first case assigned to us by the new company.
I was rather looking forward to meeting with the company representative. The one in San Antonio had demonstrated to us a number of surprisingly advanced—and, I hoped, effective—weapons to take into our ongoing battle with all the supernatural forces arrayed against us in this world.
“Have you ever dealt with a fire demon before?” I asked Trip now, lazily running the soap up and down my arms, one after the other.
“No.” Trip’s answer was perfunctory, his attention clearly distracted by the motion of my hands on my body.
“Do you think any of the weapons Mr. Johnson showed us would be especiall
y helpful against one?” I ran my fingertips across my collarbone to test my emerging theory. His darkening gaze followed them.
“Trip, darling, do you think perhaps there is room in this tub for two?” I hadn’t even finished my question before he was standing and peeling out of his riding clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor.
Dear Reader, there was, indeed, room for two.
Barely.
2.
Although Mr. Carlisle had specified that he wanted us to make our way to Denver as quickly as possible, we spent a full day in Fort Worth rejoining the ranks of what passed for society in the Wild West of the 1880s. Primarily, that meant having our current clothes laundered and using some of the funds the PI Agency had advanced us to purchase new clothing suitable for a business meeting in a hotel in Denver.
This season’s skirt, the dressmaker had assured me, was much narrower than last season’s, and complete with ruffles and flounces and more lace than I could bear to contemplate.
Curses.
“This will take some time,” I informed Trip, who had simply placed an order with a tailor he’d used before. “Perhaps you could return in an hour or so?”
He grinned, his cheerful demeanor, as always, making me happy in return. “Of course. I’ll look in on our riding gear.”
With a tip of his hat, he departed the dress shop to attend to having all our leathers checked and repaired.
I turned to the dressmaker. “We should discuss the skirt first.”
By the time Trip returned, I had thoroughly offended the dressmaker’s sensibilities, but with a large enough financial incentive, had sent one of her girls to fetch the local corsetier and her best seamstresses.
“What is this?” Trip asked, picking up one of several sketches from a side table next to the upholstered chairs in the dressmaker’s front room. With one forefinger, he traced the loops and pockets I’d added.
“That, my darling, is a tactical corset. I’ve just created it.”
Heavy Metal Page 10