As I shifted position for the thirty-seventh time, I felt the thin flooring over the spare shift with me.
Perhaps there was another way to "retire" from this situation. . . .
* * *
By the time the car reached its destination, I was ready.
There was plenty of warning. First, we left the main road and went some distance on a gravel surface. Then another turn onto a dirt road. And, eventually, the ride turned so rough I had to assume we were off-road entirely. Given that a '68 Rambler Rebel is not an all-terrain vehicle, I knew that it wouldn't be long so I assumed the position.
I was right: we came to a stop in just under two minutes and the engine was turned off. The car resettled itself as the driver got out and slammed the door. I braced myself, waiting.
I waited a lot longer than I expected.
Eventually there were footsteps and voices approaching the trunk.
"You're sure she's completely neutralized?" a new voice was asking.
"She's been dosed with enough aconite to knock her out for forty-eight hours, Gordon," Fenris growled. "Even if she did wake up, she won't be able to shape-shift for at least a week and she's under restraint."
"Wolfsbane?" The new voice sounded horrified. "How did you calculate the dose for her?"
"You're missing the point," my oh-so-ex partner snapped. "She knew there would be risks. She volunteered anyway."
"For her version of the plan," the other argued, "not yours. But this new twist—"
"—is a simple practicality," Fenris interrupted. "If the Bloodwalker will not assist us in overthrowing the madwoman and that blasphemy she has set to rule over us, then we must turn this opportunity to our advantage. By destroying the Bloodwalker, we gain Laveau's trust and favor. Hell! We earn the gratitude of every bloodsucking Doman in the country!"
"But we are still slaves to the vampires."
"Perhaps. For a bit longer. But Laveau becomes less suspicious of our motives and loyalties. We earn better opportunities to rise up, strike back, and free ourselves from the fanged oppressors!"
"And do you think the other enclaves will sit idly by and allow one demesne's werewolves to overthrow the masters? They will have to crush us as an example to their own packs of shape-shifting servitors!"
"Perhaps they will be too intimidated," Fenris replied.
"Intimidated?"
"They have tried to kill the Bloodwalker many times and he only grows more powerful. I think they would hesitate to challenge those who accomplished what they, themselves, could not. And then there are the other packs. They should be more than willing to rise up and challenge their own masters once they have witnessed our success."
"It is a bold and dangerous risk that you propose, Fenris. The council must decide whether we are prepared to gamble on such high stakes. And I cannot help but wonder if Volpea would feel the risks were justified."
There was the sound of a key being inserted into the trunk lock.
"She was willing to risk her life in defying our vampire masters to join this rebellion. She was willing to risk her life to try and seduce the Bloodwalker into joining us. To even offer up her body and her mind, distasteful as it might be, so that he might hear our offer."
"Somehow I do not think he will be very receptive to anything you have to say after what you have put him through. And I doubt Volpea will ever trust you again, for that matter."
"She is a soldier. She will either understand that some things must be done or she is not worthy of the cause. Frankly, I do not believe that we can trust this creature, this half-vampire, to help us in any way even if he did want to. He is a liability at best and now, possibly, a threat to our existence just because of the little that he does know. No, the council can deliberate but Volpea and I are directly exposed and every were in Louisiana will be suspect if he is allowed to live."
"I see your point. This has not gone according to the original plan and, although your hand is heavy in its changing, she bears some responsibility, as well. Perhaps Volpea will vote to sacrifice herself given that there seems to be no way back. But she would know the mind of the Bloodwalker better than any if he resides within her. She should have a seat at the council and be given a say as well as a vote."
"There is no time for that! We are already missed and must return to the city or everything we've worked for will be undone!" The trunk lid came up and I got a glimpse of two figures: Fenris and a shorter, older, bearded man. "We must act tonight and Volpea won't be able to speak or vote, as you say, for another day or two!"
As I rose to my knees and cocked both arms back over my left shoulder, both turned to look down at where I was supposed to be, curled up and unconscious. By the time it was registering that something was very wrong, I was whipping the heavy tire iron around to smash into the side of my captor's head.
"Voting by proxy," I snarled as Fenris dropped like a sandbag from a scaffold, "Volpea signifies in the 'nay' category!"
I turned on the other guy who was starting to back up. "Don't move!" I bellowed.
He stopped.
"Keys! Check his pockets."
The beard looked down at Fenris and hesitated.
"Now!"
He bent and started riffling though the unconscious man's clothing. "This is all a big misunderstanding . . ." the guy called Gordon began.
"Yeah, yeah, I heard. Seduce the Bloodwalker. Try to convert him to the cause. Oh wait: here's a better plan. Let's kill him for the street cred. Too bad about Volpea. I'm sure she'd agree to sacrifice herself if we'd gotten around to mentioning it."
"This was Fenris' idea."
"Sounded like you were getting ready to sign on." I gestured with the tire iron. "That's the trouble with lots of exposition. Unless it's meaningless jabber designed to distract your opponent, it'll just come back and bite you in the ass before the end."
He produced a set of car keys. There was a handcuff key on the ring. "It isn't up to me," he protested. "It's a committee decision."
"Well," I said, "too bad they're not here."
He looked around. So I had to, too.
The poet Francis William Bourdillon wrote that "the night has a thousand eyes."
The songwriting team of Weisman, Wayne, and Garrett grabbed the line and turned it into a hit for Bobby Vee.
No one was likely to write poetry or top-40 hits about tonight's ocular statistics.
Perhaps thirty feet away, reflecting the pale glow of the automobile's trunk light, were two rings of eyes. There were maybe two dozen in all; a semicircle that might account for standing, human watchers and another that suggested the audience was crouching—though in what form I could only guess.
"Great," I said. "Let me guess. A quorum."
"I'm sorry, Volpea. I know this wasn't part of the original plan but what Fenris proposed does make a certain amount of sense . . ."
"Volpea isn't in, right now," I announced. "You'll be negotiating with the guy who trashed the New York demesne."
Apparently everyone was still playing mental catch-up. I didn't know much more about my bloodwalking ability than everybody else but I had discovered one little advantage while staggering around Mengele's fortress: I could take control of a dead body. So, not so much of a leap from a corpse to an unconscious corpus.
"The keys, Gordo."
He looked at me. And then back at the glowy eyes of our unseen and, so far, reticent audience.
I waggled the tire iron at him. "Uh uh uh! Here's how it works, Gordy. You do anything but hand me those keys within the next fifteen seconds, and I toss this thing. At you. Not hard enough to cripple you. Just hard enough to draw blood. Which opens the door and rolls out the welcome mat, if you get my drift? Then I don't need Volpea's body because you'll be my new bitch. At least until your committee, here, decides to kill you to get to me." I looked back at them. "Of course, anybody who gets within smacking distance runs the same risks . . ." And looked back at Gordon. "That's ten seconds, now, G: only five left. Four.
Three."
He started to toss them to me.
"Uh uh uh. Hand. Not toss. You toss?" I waggled the tire iron again. "I toss."
He stepped toward me, the keys held out like they had a sputtering fuse protruding from the ring fob.
Stepping out of the trunk without falling on my face was a major accomplishment. My—our—hell, Volpea was still unconscious so they were mine for now—my legs were numb and wooden from hours of confinement and trying to hold a tire iron while your wrists are handcuffed doesn't permit much support work while extricating one's self from a car trunk and taking keys from the enemy while surrounded by a couple dozen more.
Fortunately, the element of surprise had not only served me well, but I was able to ride it into an additional two minutes of overtime.
"Now here's how we're gonna play this," I announced as I fumbled the handcuff key into the evasively tiny lock entry. "I'm no big fan of Marie Laveau but, for the moment, she has something that I want and I have no reason to upset her. Hopefully that will all be done, soon, and, as far as I'm concerned, what happens in the Crescent City, stays in the Crescent City." The cuffs dropped from my left wrist. "And since I have familial bonds with one of the furry folk, I can't help but see you all as family." The other cuff unlocked and my metal bonds dropped to the ground. "A somewhat dysfunctional and difficult-to-get-along-with family." I turned to Gordon. "Get in the trunk."
"Wh-what?"
"Get. In. The. Trunk." I waved the tire iron emphatically. Much simpler when your wrists are free to pursue separate trajectories. "I just want a little travel insurance." I turned back to the committee. "So, Volpea and I are going down to the Big Easy where I will check on things that are important to me. Mentioning peripheral issues like werewolf coups will not be important unless somebody decides to make it a matter of concern do you GET MY DRIFT!"
I heard murmurs that could have been interpreted as growing consent. Gordon was nodding his head. "Why," I asked him, "are you not in the trunk, yet?"
"I—I—"
"Look, I'm a reasonable guy," I said, lightly smacking his upper arm with the tire iron. "Maybe you don't have any experience in dealing with reasonable guys." I whacked him a little harder. "I'm not going to tie you up or gag you or knock you unconscious." Whap. "I'm just going to drive down the road a little ways and, once I see that I'm not being followed, I'll release you." Smack. "Okay?"
"I guess—"
"Now get in the damn trunk before I stop being reasonable!" I yelled, whacking him across the rear. The look in his eyes said I'd be sorry for that particular humiliation but, honestly, there's only so much crap I'll put up with in a single evening.
And there was a good chance that my borrowed body was PMSing.
Chapter Six
I pulled over and let Gordon out about thirty minutes later.
And reiterated my little warning about how any further messing with me would activate my whistleblower instincts.
And that any werewolf revolutions ought to be postponed until late fall or early winter—anytime after my son was born and my people were elsewhere.
He seemed a little pouty about how this whole seduce-and-use-the-Bloodwalker subplot had turned out so I scratched his cheek and repeated my demands while jogging around the inside of his skull. By the time I was back out and reinvested in Volpea's body, he had adopted a more cooperative attitude.
How long that attitude might last was another matter. The long walk he faced in getting to a payphone might alter his new spirit of rapprochement. If so, I'd deal later. Right now I had people to do, things to see. I drove away, leaving him bloodied by the red wash of the Rambler's taillights and headed back to the not-so-main road.
Fenris had diverted us to the back roads. Between that and the hostage-management pit stops, I was unlikely to make New Orleans before sunrise. Fine with me. Laveau and Pantera would be doing the coffin snooze along with just about every other vampire in the Big Easy. That just left their human servants and the weres—more than a little tricky; less than downright impossible.
The changes in the landscape were less noticeable in the dark as I drove south, only the more obvious details popped at the periphery of the headlights. Pines and deciduous hardwoods gradually give way to softwoods and a growing number of palms. Waterways and bayous become more abundant. Cinderblock outbuildings and bait shops were secretly mating and begat more shacks and temporary structures. Fewer structures stood on concrete pads, more and more were raised on brick and rusting iron pier foundations. Depending on their proximity to the water, some buildings were raised high enough to sit under. Others you could park a car under. Some, a couple of tractor-trailer rigs.
More than a few actually were.
I stopped for gas at a little off-road island of bait, groceries, and knickknack shacks offering such delicacies as alligator-on-a-stick and fried nutria. This bathroom break was all up to me and proved to be educational. I wasn't sure how the knowledge gained would come in handy but I figured the sooner I was back to working with directional plumbing, the better.
I splashed a little water in Volpea's face and got back in the car. A mile down the road the headlight on the driver's side blinkered out. Now I was tunneling through the darkness on an unlit secondary road with one dim headlight canting off to illuminate more gravel shoulder than asphalt lane. I missed my infravision. If Volpea was able to shift her eyes into the infrared spectrum, I was unable to trip the appropriate wetware switch.
A lot of moody piffle has been penned about "The Witching Hour" but I find the early morning hours more disquieting than midnight. Maybe once upon a time the line of demarcation between the old day's demise and the new day's birth had some mystical connotations but today's kids stay out too late clubbing and bar-hopping. Things don't really get quiet and lonely and deserted till around three in the am. A perfect time to feel the atmospheric pressure increase as I drove south.
The personification of history—in the North, in the East, in other regions of the country—generally exists as a series of shrines or preserved sites. Call 'em monuments or historic registers or sacred spaces, these "places" coexist with present day life and landscapes but stand as separate, static patches of real estate—sort of like windup clocks run down to silence on a shelf of electric chronometers.
History is different in the South.
Down here you steep in it like a teabag gone soft and soggy in ancient waters. Southern history is like Einstein's clock paradox, simultaneously existing in the past, present, and all conceivable futures, spanning transdimensional vertices and theoretical probabilities. Time travel is a science fiction fantasy anywhere else. In the South it is a common state of mind. An addendum to daily unraveling of the ticktock of moment-to-moment existence. Here, this moment in time is all times and all times may be found in this moment and in this place.
Especially in Louisiana where land and water mix in uncertain quantities and configurations. The farther south you go, the less terra firma you enjoy. Boundaries drift. The world shifts. Elsewhere you gaze upon this patch of history or that. Here, history in its vast, unknown entirety, gazes upon you—watching with ancient, unblinking, reptilian eyes.
And, sometimes, very late at night—or very, very early in the morning and deep in swamps and bayous—it feels hungry, as well.
Night driving used to sooth me. By the time I reached the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain, I was ready for any kind of distraction. Even though the sunrise was still moments away, I fished Volpea's cell phone out of her purse and thumbed in Mama Samm's number.
"'Bout time you call," she answered before I could even hear the first ring. "You have any trouble?"
"Um," I said, "do you know who this is?"
"Should I put this number on my speed dial list or are you gonna be abandoning that foxy lady for some other poor fool's body in the next couple of hours?"
I blinked. Was everybody in on my spur-of-the-moment ploy to infiltrate Laveau's demesne?
"N
o," she said, as if reading my thoughts, "Doctor M thinks you be all tucked in, back home. Nobody else suspects. So far. Think you can keep a low profile? For a change?"
"Depends on the wolf pack." I gave her a quick sketch of the night's events.
"Boy, you come down here and it gonna hit de fan, fo' sho!" she scolded. "You jes' turn around and go back home. You gots other fish to fry."
"Not until I talk to Lupé."
"I'll take her my cell phone and see that you have your talk."
"In person," I insisted.
"Well now how that gonna happen wi' your body back on the New Moon and you all dressed up 'Dude look like a lady' style? I think explanations are gonna take more time than you got."
I ground Volpea's teeth. She had a valid point. But I couldn't go home without seeing Lupé and looking in on the others. "I'll figure something out."
There was a longer pause at the other end of the line. "I have an idea," Mama Samm finally said, the regional patois suddenly absent from her voice again. "Meet me at the Place d'Arms Hotel."
* * *
The Place d'Arms is the only hotel located on Jackson Square—the St. Louis Cathedral, Café du Monde, and French Quarter are only steps away. Nevertheless, I repeated the address over and over as I drove, hoping that the litany would distract me until I made landfall, again.
I had reached the midpoint of the Pontchartrain Causeway, connecting Mandeville and Metairie. At that location on the twenty-four-mile span, neither shore of the second largest salt water lake in the U.S. was visible—just mile upon mile of open water in all directions. Beautiful and more than a little creepy: it was as if I were suspended over an endless ocean on a fragile ribbon of concrete and steel, dissolving into nothingness at both ends.
I've felt that unease, that dreadful vulnerability of insignificance when out on the ocean in a boat of any size. Canned like Spam in a car, trundling over a narrow conduit—like a tightrope act where you cannot see the ends of an uncertain cord—awakens something more in me, each time I make the trip. Something more and more like dread.
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