He was intimidated, all right. "How?" he asked, "How did you do that?"
I wasn't about to tell him the Glenwood Community Health Center offered evening classes in Tai Chi or Eastern Meditation Techniques. And then I suddenly understood why he was so impressed.
My arms were free.
The closed sleeves were torn open at the ends and the leather straps that buckled behind my back were shredded and hanging in tatters.
No wonder he had backed up. Hell, even I was impressed!
"You—you're not human!" He took another step back.
"Oh, I get it," I said, "she's the brains and you're the brawn. It's all so clear now."
"Nobody tells me anything!" he groused.
"Maybe if you didn't have this whole Dog the Bounty Hunter vibe going on, people would take you a little more seriously."
He stopped backing up. He tilted his head and fixed me with a look I can only describe as "distant." Ditto the voice: "What did you call me?"
He didn't look offended. He seemed . . . thoughtful.
His face lacked the tilted-eye exoticism that set Fand apart from ninety-eight percent of the human race. Likewise, the retro-hippie headband that tamed his reddish blonde Jeri curl 'do, revealed ears that were rounded in such a way to eliminate elven DNA from the suspect list. Never mind the fact that he was a foot taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier—all muscle: if he was human I should be able to take him. Laying aside the issue of my virally-enhanced strength, a single scratch would be sufficient to initiate a bloodwalk and go riding around inside his brain pan. Then he would be my bitch and we'd see about discouraging any future kidnapping plans involving me or my family.
That which does not kill me makes me angrier.
But then The Mullet screamed two words: "Your eyes!" And, whirling about, ran back the way he'd come.
Well, that worked, too, I guess.
"Heh," I said, watching him go. "What a maroon!" I reached behind me and started working on the remaining buckles and straps, singing under my breath: "Vampire-man, vampire-man; friendly, neighborhood, vampire-man, / Is he strong? Listen, bud: he's got necrophage-mutant blood! / Look out! Here comes—"
My musical improvisation came to a screeching halt as I got a good look at my hands. My fingernails had suddenly turned into inch-long talons!
Razor-sharp, inch-long talons!
Silvery, shiny, razor-sharp, inch-long talons!
I reached out and tentatively scratched at a piece of stone embedded in the tunnel wall.
The rock flaked and crumbled like badly cast Styrofoam.
I double-checked, just to make sure. Yep: limestone substrate and harder than any chunk of premium 4400 concrete you were likely to find.
I looked back down at my undamaged, stone-cutting, extendable talons. "Grandma," I murmured, "what big claws you have."
No wonder The Mullet had stopped chasing me: I'd just pulled a double Freddy Krueger and without any gloves!
Then I remembered: it wasn't my hands that had made him scream and flee in terror . . .
It was my eyes.
I didn't know much about faerie mounds in the theoretical sense (and nothing at all from the practical). I did remember enough poetry and fable from undergraduate coursework in Medieval and Romantic Lit to recall that they sometimes housed entire armies, if not cities.
Not exactly the case here.
Wandering back along the now-deserted corridor I discovered that I had been incarcerated in the underground equivalent of a Winnebago. All I had seen, up until my escape, was the inside of a padded cell. I had never actually observed anyone but Fand and the guy sporting the achy-breaky coiffure during my confinement. At least not that I remembered. And, all in all, there were maybe three more rooms—one of them sleeping quarters for two.
Everything had the look of a cot and bare walls, temporary setup for short-term occupancy. Which explained how they were able to evacuate so fast and leave nothing of apparent value behind.
Except the rest of my clothing and personal effects.
By the time I found these, my mystery-alloy, press-on nails had disappeared. This made buckling on my fanny holster so much easier. But, as I checked the magazine and seated my Glock 20 under my shirttail, I was faced with a minor dilemma. I wasn't sure which was more disturbing: that ten incredibly hard and sharp metallic knives had sprung out of my fingertips without explanation or warning—or that they had disappeared again without rhyme or reason.
A more thorough search of the premises was out of the question as my captors might be on their way back with reinforcements. The more distance I put between this place and me, the soonest, the bestest. With or without Swiss army digits, an automatic handgun loaded with silver-tipped dumdums has its limitations.
And such were no damn good against sunlight, which my newly retrieved watch said was on its way in a few hours.
I found an exit and emerged from a hillock in back bayou country.
It was dark. Not that I didn't expect darkness but it was the kind you only find far from human habitation and the electrical grid. The moon was high in the sky and the color of blood. Its uncertain light lent a dim tint of dread to the shadows that seemed to writhe just beyond the edge of my vision.
I took a moment to do a three-sixty scan of my surroundings. Then did another turn, running a check in the infrared spectrum. No heat signatures. The entire area appeared to be devoid of life. Which was both reassuring and discomforting.
I pulled out my cell phone, a long shot at best as it hadn't seen a charger in—how long? Yup: dead as a doornail. These past two years I'd learned that "dead" has all sorts of relative meanings when it comes to biological organisms. But you could always count on the steadfastness of technology dependent on batteries: dead really does mean dead.
I tucked it back away and took another look 'round at the horizon. Without knowing where I was, directions—north, south, east, west—were meaningless. Better to find indications of human habitation—city, town, farm, road—and head toward that.
As I said, it was dark and far removed from the artificial lights of human influence. So far removed that there were no lights visible in any direction from where I stood, even on the distant horizon.
And, of course, no signs on the ground around me of anyone's comings or goings.
Great.
In old movie serials and pulp thrillers the classic deathtrap usually comes equipped with all sorts of technology: sliding doors, lasers, conveyer belts, spike-lined pits, vats of acid. Where's the menace in a long walk home?
In the past two years a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian necromancer, an ancient Babylonian demon, cloned Nazis, cybernetic monsters, vampire assassins, and a female dhampir had tried to do me some ultimate harm. Their best efforts had failed. But if I didn't get home before dawn it would make little difference. My sensitivity to solar radiation had increased over the past six months. Since I was only "half-undead" it would probably take me twice as long to burn to a pile of ashes as a full-fledged vampire.
But the end result would be the same.
Just more painful.
I started with a slow steady jog, hoping I was headed toward rather than away from civilization and negotiable transportation. And something to drink.
I was very, very thirsty.
Chapter Two
As I crossed over the Ouachita River riding shotgun in a Ford pickup truck, the sun was just minutes away from marking me as "target acquired." We made an illegal turn and, after a series of unnerving switchbacks, found the unmarked exit and skidded onto a gravel service road.
"You're going to have to drive a little faster," I told Dennis, a heavy-set young man wearing a "Ducks Unlimited" camo cap.
"I don't know where I'm going," he answered pleasantly. "I hit a rut or take a curve wrong, we'll roll." He didn't sound too worried.
"Maybe," I told him. "But if the sun arrives before we do, no amount of detailing is going to salvage the inside of your cab. T
rust me."
"I trust you," he said, his voice still disconnectedly pleasant and detached from such trivial concerns as massive blunt force trauma and fiery immolation. His foot pressed down on the accelerator.
I had miscalculated the time and distance factors, discarding the alternate options of going-to-ground before going home. After three months of captivity I wasn't too keen on going all snoozy and vulnerable without allies around me. I needed to know the truth about Lupé. And whether Will, Jenny, and Kirsten had been born yet.
I shook my head: I needed to focus on the immediate problem at hand. Doing the orange-barrel polka on a twenty-mile stretch of bad road had put us seriously behind my original ETA. And I needed to stay focused on my driver in order to keep him focused on his driving.
The trick with vampiric mind control is to sufficiently bend the subject to your will while leaving them enough autonomy to perform the more sophisticated tasks. Maybe it served some plot point in the old fright flicks to have some mindless drone shuffle around the castle croaking "Yes, master." And doubtless there are fanged pervs who get off on doing the whole control freak on some long-necked honey down in their crypt even today. But when it comes to racing the sun down back roads and across not-so-open fields? Trust me: it's better to let the driver make most of the judgment calls.
I was clutching my shoulder harness, the dashboard, the door grip, and bracing against the cab's ceiling in alternating patterns like frenetic genuflections of religious frenzy as we bounced and spun and revisited iconic moments from all seven seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard.
At least it was keeping my mind off of the cramping hunger pains that kept drawing my eyes to his neck.
Just get home . . . just get home . . ., my mind chanted.
I periodically called out directions while he smiled and executed hair-raising stunt maneuvers. All the while continuing to chatter about the Book of Revelations and how all the signs pointing to the "End Times" were nearly in place.
I let him chatter. If he ended up going either too fast or too slow, it would definitely be the end times for one Christopher L. Cséjthe. And, as I said, it's best to keep 'em pointed in the direction you want and give 'em their head.
Forget the old Dracula Universal Pictures' black-and-whites or Hammer/Seven Arts colorfests. Unless the necrophagic virus that transforms the living into the undead has done a tour of your frontal lobes, this whole mental domination thing probably sounds a lot simpler than it really is.
For example, after hiking through miles of underbrush—not to mention a significant amount of overbrush—I finally did make it to a dirt road. And eventually flagged down a ride. You think it's easy getting someone to stop and pick up a stranger on a back road at three am? Not even Bela Lugosi, standing out in the middle of the road, doing the bulgy-eyed, hand-wavey thing, could have managed that.
Especially Bela Lugosi, standing out in the middle of the road, doing the bulgy-eyed, hand-wavey thing.
No, this guy stopped because he was a decent, God-fearing, Good Samaritan.
Who seemed to think that the recent spate of earthquakes around the world, flu pandemics, volcanic eruptions, wars and rumors of wars—not to mention a blood-red moon for the past couple of weeks—indicated that Yahweh was texting a very special visit in His celestial BlackBerry.
I guess my chauffeur figured it couldn't hurt to squeeze in a few, last-minute good deeds on the way to the Rapture. I refrained from asking whether he was an adherent of the pre-Trib, mid-Trib, or post-Trib doctrinal flight plan. He seemed a little busy as we spun off of the road and across a series of fields for the final lap.
We made it with just moments to spare.
The golden fingers of dawn were groping through the trees across the river as we skidded to a stop next to low stone wall. A cemetery lay just beyond. I jumped out and turned to my driver. "Thanks, Dennis. I really appreciate the ride." I tossed a couple of twenties on the seat. "Hey, man; look at my eyes . . ."
He did. He was very accommodating—had been nothing but since stopping to pick me up.
"You're going to turn around now, drive back to the highway, head for home, and crawl into bed. When you clock back in to your job this evening, you'll be able to tell all your buddies how you stopped to help a van full of cheerleaders with engine trouble and got distracted. Very distracted." I intensified the look I was giving him, pouring my will into his head through his eyes. "That's all you will remember. I do not exist. This place does not exist. Do you understand?"
He nodded, smiling. "Cheerleaders! Did I get lucky?"
"What?" The windshield was beginning to reflect a broken orange thread limning the tree line. "Oh. Yeah. Sure. Why not? You got lucky."
His smile grew. "How lucky?"
I didn't have time for this. Neither did he if Judgment Day was, indeed, just around the corner. "PG-thirteen lucky. And if you ask any more questions they won't be cheerleaders, they'll be nuns. Elderly nuns. Buh-bye." I slammed the door and hopped the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the old graveyard. Beams of golden death began to slice through the distant woods. I heard the truck take off as I stumbled and wove between tumbled tombstones and mossy monuments. I vaulted another low wall on the far side.
And then I was running past the remains of my house.
No banking institution in Northeast Louisiana will touch me when it comes to a home loan. I can't get homeowner's insurance for love or money. I can hardly blame them. I mean, who else moves into two different houses and utterly destroys each within the first year?
Rock stars excluded, that is.
In my own defense, how many other homeowners have fanged enforcers, cybernetic juggernauts, paramilitary black-ops squads, lycanthropic lynch mobs, and undead assassins dropping by to collect the reward for the mortgage holder's untimely passing?
Add fire elementals to that list, I thought, as I ran around the scorched cinder pit that once was my basement. Someone had taken the game to a whole new level a couple of months back and sent something very ancient and other-worldly after me. Not that vampires aren't other-worldly, you understand. But, while the undead inhabit a different zip code than the rest of humanity, fire elementals dwell in a separate time/space continuum. At least they do until one shows up on your front porch one night and tries to wrap you in its fiery embrace. Then it's all Elvis Karaoke Hour with multiple refrains of "hunk-a hunk-a burning love."
But that's another story.
A patch of sunlight fell upon my shirt and I felt my chest grow warm. I had maybe thirty seconds before I was on my way to matching the ash and charred stubble décor of my former domicile. Putting on a burst of speed, I reached the end of the front yard, passed the stairs leading down to the dock some thirty feet below and just jumped off the edge of the bluff.
I had counted on my altered physiology to keep me from breaking my legs on the landing.
I hadn't counted on the mud to cushion the impact.
Or sink me in up to my knees at the water's edge.
The wooded bluffs on the far side of the river put this stretch of the bank into enough shadow that I had a few extra minutes before the sun found me. I looked up and over at my new residence, moored at the dock just some forty feet away.
The New Moon was an eighty-four foot long, double-decker houseboat.
I'd thought that living aboard a boat would be confining but, so far, it had proven just the opposite.
I had plenty of room.
For now.
Lupé was hiding out down in New Orleans until our son was born. After that? Well, the last time she deigned to speak to me she made it clear that she wouldn't be coming back anytime soon.
And maybe never if Fand was to be believed.
I pushed that thought away immediately. I'd been deceived and lied to on so many levels that there was no point in borrowing trouble until I got the facts. Focus on the known problems: if—when—she returned, we'd need nursery space for three. Mengele had cloned my dead wife and daught
er and I'd managed to retrieve their cryogenically suspended fetuses before his compound and labs were destroyed. Now they were incubating away in surrogate wombs and would have a second chance at lives ended all too soon the first time around. In fact, stepmother, half sister, and Will were due to be delivered within a week to ten days of each other.
I could never mock The Jerry Springer Show again.
Deirdre was down in New Orleans until the Theresa Kellerman situation was resolved. She also claimed that she was providing security for Lupé and "the kids." I suspected she wanted a front-row seat on whether or not my ex-fiancée and I would reconcile. Suki had returned to Seattle.
The house had ended up being too big for me and Zotz before the fire elemental showed up and performed the ultimate house warming. Rebuilding with an eye toward permanence seemed an exercise in futility as long as all of the wrong people knew where I lived.
Still, the boat was just a temporary fix. Once my son—and my formerly dead wife and daughter—were born, I was going to have to revisit the real estate market.
Or, to quote the insightful and prescient Chief Brody: we were going to need a bigger boat.
I was hopeful, anyway.
But I refused to dwell on the intermediate future right now. Thoughts like that could wait until I was emotionally insulated with antidepressants—my own prescriptions, not potluck from the faerie pharmacy. Bigger boats and hopeful reconciliations could wait. Right now, here in the immediate future, I needed a rope and a tow as I struggled to free myself from the knee-deep muck.
Preternatural strength was of little help: there was nothing to pull or push against. I had no leverage. Working one leg half out of the muck forced the other in more deeply.
And a guillotine blade of sunlight was easing down the face of the cliff behind me with every passing minute.
I flopped backward, spreading my weight across the surface of the mud and tried backstroking my way out. It was slow and ungainly but it provided some traction and my legs eventually popped free with wet, sucking sounds.
Dead Easy Page 3