“I’m going to call Bryson back and find out what safe house he’s at,” I said. “Then I’m going over there, to finish this one way or the other.”
“Not to nitpick,” said Sunny as she cleaned the needle in the sink. “But you could barely dent the guy as a human, and I don’t think he’s gonna be that when he’s getting his murder on.”
“That’s where you come in,” I said. “You’re going to make me a magic bullet.”
“I’m all on board with a plan,” said Sunny, “but . . . what the Hex are you talking about?”
“One of Grandma’s spellbooks has an anti-transformation working in it,” I said. “You know—the tincture that’s lethal to weres? I’m willing to bet it’ll slow down a Wendigo, at least long enough for me to kick him really, really hard.” I picked up keys, extra bandages, and a disposable syringe—anything I could think of to help me put Lucas down.
Sunny jerked her car keys out of my hands. “All right. That, I can do. But at the rate you’re shaking I think I’d better d
rive.”
CHAPTER 20
On the drive, I pushed down the dark thoughts un-spooling, the ones that said I still didn’t fully understand what was being wrought on my city.
I called Bryson back. “Where are you?”
“Greene Street safe house,” he said. “Now are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”
“In a minute,” I said. “Greene Street,” I told Sunny.
“How soon can you work that tincture?”
“As soon as I get home, mix it up, and get back to you,” she said. We rolled to a stop on the corner and I jumped out. “It’s number fifty-one, up the block. Hurry, Sunny.”
The Green Street safe house was an unassuming clap-board town house tucked between two identical counterparts. The safe house, unlike the other two, was painted pink with boxes full of sun-wilted violets under the front windows. Nobody ever suspects a pink house.
I pounded on the door, feeling my wound pinch. The humidity clamped down around me and I started to sweat. “First thing I’m gonna do when I find you, Lucas,” I muttered, “is make you pay for all the shirts that you’ve ruined.”
Bryson’s caramel-brown eye appeared in the peep-hole, and then he opened the door. “Christ, Wilder. What are you doing?”
“Saving your and Carla’s butts,” I said. “Let me in.”
“Why is it that every time I see you, you’re bleeding and demanding something of me?” Bryson asked as he swung the door wide.
“We do need to work on a relationship dynamic,” I said. “Did you have a domineering mother?”
“David? Who’s that?” Carla came into the foyer, rubbing her skinny hands over her skinny arms even though the house was stuffy.
“It’s just the crazy werewolf lady,” he said. “Don’t go near the windows, Carla.” She slunk back into the sitting room.
“Hey,” she said sharply. “The back door’s open.”
“Impossible,” said Bryson as I glared at him. “Whole place is alarmed.”
From all the corners of the room, giggling started. “Bryson,” I said, running for the back door. “Get Carla.”
The lock had been splintered neatly away from the door frame, just a few chips of wood missing, as if something had simply flicked the deadbolt out of the way. I drew my weapon out and pressed my back against the doorjamb. Peered outside. Nothing.
A brakichak hissed at me from the ceiling. Bryson came into the room, dragging Carla. “Wilder, what in seven hells is that thing?”
“A pest,” I said. “They turned off the alarm.” Nothing stirred in the dank, airless space. The safe house smelled like an iron foundry. No way for me to scent for Lucas.
A shadow flickered past the back windows, then another, and another. “Crap,” I said. “Lucas brought friends.”
The power went out, and nothing but the street lamps shone. In the split second it took me to adjust, the Wendigo struck. All three of them went for me, taking me to the ground and banging my head against the floor. I saw stars, and then I saw nothing at all.
A phone somewhere was off the hook, and the frantic pulse of the dial tone woke me. The safe house looked as if someone had taken a chain saw to a frat party. Blood sprayed one wall in a long arc, punctuated by bullet holes. The furniture in the foyer was tinder and the door to the room beyond was off its hinges.
Feet in wingtips stuck out from under the heavy mahogany. “Bryson?” I whispered, clambering up to lift the door off. It weighed close to a hundred pounds. “Gods, I never thought I’d be saying this but . . . I really hope you’re not dead.”
“Why, Wilder,” Bryson coughed, spitting out a mouthful of plaster dust. “I never knew you cared.”
I grabbed him by the torn shoulder of his pea-green suit and jerked him into a sitting position. “Where’s Carla?”
Bryson’s eyes roved, the pupils different sizes, and his breathing was labored. “They got in . . . damn it, Wilder, I let them get away.”
“Where did they go?”
“I was doing okay, too, you know?” Bryson muttered. “Got one of the bastards right in the neck. Arterial spray every damn place. Was doing fine until they threw a door at me.” His breath hitched, and pain paled his face to the color of old paper.
“Bryson,” I said, shaking him hard. “Where is Carla?”
“They took her out the back,” he muttered. “Gone. Just gone.”
I looked through the broken door. Greene Street rested in a hollow, and I saw the swell of the foothills, peppered with lights and a faint line of sunrise behind it. Just a hint, not even a promise of day.
“I’m gonna get busted back to crowd control . . . ,” Bryson moaned.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a little shake. “None of that matters now. How long ago did they leave?”
“Not long,” he moaned. “A few minutes. Just put me outta my misery, Wilder. Might as well be you.”
“I know where they took Carla,” I said. Jason had been staring at it every day he lived in the city. Made sense his possessed brother would go to the same spot. I handed Bryson the squealing phone and depressed the disconnect button. “Call an ambulance before you pass out from that concussion and you get more brain damage than you’ve incurred already. And give me your Sig and the keys to the Taurus. I lost my weapon when those bastards hit me.”
“Where do you think you’re goin’?” Bryson demanded, punching 9-1-1 unevenly on the keypad.
I climbed over the wreckage to the front door. My answer came out without thinking, and I meant it more than I’ve meant anything in my life.
“To stop Lucas Kennuka.”
As I sped through downtown and into the hills, I caught sight of fires along the roadside. An SUV was wrapped around a telephone pole on Winchester Drive, which wasn’t terribly unusual on a Saturday night in the summer, but as my headlights flashed over the scene I saw a pair of naked, fish-white figures skitter away into the darkness, and tightened my hands on the steering wheel.
Somewhere, a siren echoed above the bay and emergency lights sped across the embankment on Highlands.
“Hex me,” I muttered, spinning the wheel hard to make a turn onto Garden Hill Road. The cemetery was less than a mile away, but I ran into a road closure, an ambulance and a patrol car’s occupants working over a pair of still figures on the pavement. A darker stain spread from underneath one of the bodies.
A uniform came over to wave me around and I flashed my badge. “I need to get through, Officer. It’s a police emergency.”
“Lady, look around,” he said, sighing. “This whole damn precinct is a police emergency.”
“Watch that body,” I said, turning the wheel to go around the cordon. “If it gets back up, use fire.”
I pressed down on the gas, praying harder than I had in a long time that I wouldn’t be too late when I got to the graveyard. Sunny’s cell phone went straight to voice mail.
“You’d better get this. Bri
ng the tincture to Garden Hill Cemetery. And bring it fast.” I swerved around a snarling, incorporeal body that shied away from my headlights like they were sunlight and it was Dracula. Pulling to the curb in front of a burnt-out survival shop, I dialed Mac.
“Luna Wilder,” he said. “Why do I know that somehow, this is all your fault?”
“Mac, how fast can you get SWAT to Garden Hill?”
“Wilder, this is chaos. There’s no way.”
“Mac,” I said. “I’m sorry. When this is over, I promise I will make it right. I need you to help me now, though, or there won’t be anything left to cry over.”
He sighed. “Maybe half an hour. Reports from all over of animal attacks, traffic accidents, people seeing ghosts. It’s hairy out there.”
“Trust me,” I said, looking at the distant mound of the graves. “It’s about to get a lot hairier.”
“Wilder, whatever you’re thinking about doing, if it requires SWAT backup, then you wait for SWAT. Is that clear?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I can’t.”
Mac exhaled. “Of course you can’t. This is why my blood pressure is so damn high, Wilder.”
Donal’s phone buzzed with a waiting call and Sunny’s number blinked at me. “Mac, I have to go.”
“If you’re running around Garden Hill in the dark, watch your step,” Mac said. “You know that place is lousy with unmarked graves.”
A Wendigo howled from somewhere hidden. “Yeah. I heard.”
Sunny had rung off when I managed to manipulate Donal’s BlackBerry into answering her call. I cursed at it and punched buttons to bring up the last incoming number. Underneath Sunny and Bryson, JASON KENNUKA stared at me.
“I’ll be a Hexed human,” I said, blinking at it. The calls went back months, before the killings and any of Jason’s surveillance.
“Shit,” I breathed, and gunned Bryson’s car toward the cemetery.
Sunny was sitting in the Fairlane outside the gates, head rotating back and forth like it was on a stick. I parked crookedly behind her and rapped on her window. “What are you doing driving my car?”
She shrieked, arms coming up in a kung-fu posture. “Gods, Luna! Don’t do that to a person!” Sunny rolled down the window and handed me a stoppered glass bottle, warm to the touch. Inside, pewter-colored liquid winked at me. “That’s the best I could cast in thirty minutes. I called the working using a four-corner spread inside a circle and—”
“Will it hurt?” I interrupted.
Sunny smiled grimly. “Like a motherfucker.”
“Okay, then. Take Bryson’s car and get out of here.
It’s not safe.”
“Oh, no,” said Sunny. She got out and crossed her arms, staring up at me. “I’ll wait in the car, but I won’t be sent away like some sidekick.”
“I don’t have time to argue with you,” I warned. The BlackBerry hung like a weight in my pocket.
“Then don’t,” Sunny said. “Get cracking. Kick ass.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, getting into the car. I took the disposable syringe out of the car’s first-aid kit and flicked the cap off, drawing a full measure of the tincture into the barrel. I stuck it up my sleeve, letting the hypo hold it in place, and put the rest of the tincture in my jacket.
Then I drove through the cemeter
y gates.
CHAPTER 21
Garden Hill Cemetery isn’t used to actually bury people anymore. It got filled up some time in the 1950s, and just before the Hex Riots there was a scandal involving gravediggers exhuming the bodies of Nocturne City’s forefathers to resell plots. They dumped the bodies down in Waterfront, where I guessed they hoped to pass the desiccated remains off as Halloween props, or reanimated mummies.
The cemetery itself is poorly lit, with intermittent roads that go nowhere and plenty of sunken graves waiting to break your ankle. When I worked the area as a patrol officer, the most trouble I got was when I was assigned to the Bowers over Halloween and had to deal with a pack of wannabe blood witches attempting to sacrifice a cat. Our watch commander adopted the cat, and I let the nascent black magick workers get a flash of my were teeth, which settled them down pretty quickly.
If only it were that easy now.
The crooked sign pointing to the historical part of the grounds was obscured with a were pack’s spray-can tag, but I knew the place well enough from rousting junkies and lover’s lane couples to make the turns through the gathering fog without too much trouble. The Fairlane pulled under me as I took a corner too fast and clipped a headstone. “Sorry,” I muttered to the displaced spirit.
My eyes swung back to the road and I screamed as a shape darted in front of my car, slamming on the brakes out of reflex. The Fairlane fishtailed sideways, laying up against a monument, and my head whipped forward, clipping the steering wheel. A trickle of blood leaked into my eyes.
From outside, just out of view in the fog, I heard laughter. “Poor little detective dog. Did you get a bruise?”
“Hurt a lot more than that little prick you gave me,” I yelled back, fighting to disentangle myself from my seat belt. My door was dented in, and I kicked it open. “ ‘Little’ being the operative word there. Where are you, Lucas?”
“Behind you,” he hissed, and hands wrapped around my shoulders, talons sinking into my skin below the collarbone. I tried to duck him, but my feet were off the ground and I was flying before I could breathe.
The headstone I landed against wasn’t particularly soft, but it broke under the impact and saved me from crushing my spine like fresh celery. My knife wound opened again and started to seep.
“Putting your blood in the air?” Lucas shouted at me. “Are you really that arrogant, Luna? You think you stand any sort of chance against me?”
I saw him appear against the lights from the street, on top of a small burial mound. He was just a hunched black shape, his pointed ears stabbing through the fog and his teeth shining out of his shadow-body.
“I have to say, you’ve lived this long,” Lucas called.
“You might actually have some survival instincts. But she doesn’t.”
Two Wendigo, still human, dragged Carla up to meet him. She was struggling, but feebly, and I saw one of the Wendigo give her a shot in the neck of the stuff they’d gotten me with. That night in the Plaza seemed decades ago now.
“Leave her alone!” I screamed, standing up even though it hurt more than sticking my toe into a paper shredder. “You have a fight with me, not with her.”
“Oh, I disagree,” said Lucas. “My fight is with every last one of you sniveling bitches. But you had your chance, Luna. Her blood will spill just as red as yours.”
Lucas walked over to Carla and without any ceremony or hesitation drove his talons into her chest, drinking her blood down. His face was calm, peaceful, as she twitched under his grip. It seemed impossibly slow, but it was less than ten seconds before she crumpled, dead, at Lucas’s feet.
“Stupid mutt,” Lucas hissed. He toed the body in disgust. “Get her away from me.”
I had started moving when Lucas began to feed on Carla, but I was intercepted by Ponytail. He flowed into the space in front of me, seeming to take no time at all, and stuck out his arm. One moment I was bearing down on Lucas; the next I was on my back, vision totally black and a pain in my lungs as my throat closed from a blow.
The Wendigo shook out his arm, a bruise blossoming where he’d clotheslined me. “She’s solid. Fast, too.”
“Leave her with me,” said Lucas. “Since you couldn’t keep a leash on her before.”
“Lucas, I told you . . .”
“At this late date, Charlie, do you really want me to hear your excuse?” Lucas said. “I swear, you wild pieces of shit will be the death of me.”
Charlie whimpered and then I heard the rasp of Carla’s body being dragged away.
Lucas leaned down, brushing hair away from my face. “Breathe. Breathe, Luna. I prefer live meat.” He chuckled. “That’s
five. And not a thing you did stopped me. Poor little puppy.”
He stroked my cheek, and I batted him away, rolling to my feet. “Why don’t you come on out and join this party, Donal?” I shouted to the graves. “I know you’re watching. That’s your game.”
Lucas flowed forward and backward in alarm, snarling at me. “You don’t know what you’re saying!”
I looked him in the eye. “I’m not talking to you, Wiskachee. I’m talking to Donal Macleod.”
He came walking, with only a slight limp from our last fight, from behind a mausoleum. Two of the alley goons hung back in the shadows. “Too clever by half, just like all Insoli. That gutter cleverness, which I despise.”
“There is no shaman,” I said. “You gave that fetish to Jason Kennuka and let Wiskachee possess him.”
He spread his hands. “Guilty.”
“You had the weres killed by Wendigo so it would look like a vendetta.”
“I did.” He stroked the scar that ran down from his mouth. “Your deductive reasoning is top-notch, missy. Aren’t you a bit curious why I’m unconcerned?”
Actually, I was, but I’d been hoping he wouldn’t notice. From behind me, Lucas started circling and I backed up against the mausoleum, trying to keep Donal and him both in sight.
Donal took a fetish from his pocket, much like the one that I’d found in Jason’s apartment, except I could see the magick around this one, black and curling with a merciless hunger. “This is the part where I tie up loose ends.”
He raised the fetish so its mouth gaped at Lucas. “Wiskachee, necht tagh.”
“What—” Lucas said, and the fetish stirred, opened its mouth and eyes, and groaned. The ground under me vibrated and I stared as Lucas’s thin gray Wendigo skin stripped off, revealing smooth pink muscle and bones like liquid silver.
Lucas screamed, a very human scream, and fell to the ground. “I don’t believe in it!” he shouted as Donal stood over him, wielding the fetish like a demonic vacuum.
“That’s what made you useful, boy,” said Donal. “I didn’t buy your services away from those idiot Loup because you were a superstitious foul-up. But now you’ve done your job, all but the last bit.”
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