But this one wouldn't go to waste. Leon had already forgotten the raccoon. It was a simple appetizer. This was food.
Just when he knew the bitch was winding up to make her leap--a bit too far, in Leon's estimation, but he couldn't tell her that-the small man in the skiff produced a match and struck it on the gunwale of his old flat bottom, holding up the tiny light beside his face. A wave of feral disappointment surged through Leon as he recognized the thin, dark face.
HE knew this man. They had a deal of sorts. It would be wrong to share him with the pack... at least until he found out what the slender Gypsy had to say.
Leon wasn't much good at whistling, with his teeth and all, but he produced a low-pitched warning sound that told the others to stand back. No sooner had the order passed-a whimper from the brother on his left, a quick snarl from the bitch-than Leon stepped from cover, moving toward the water's edge. This man had seen him and was theoretically prepared. There was no point in hiding when a frightened man came all this way to bring him news. "What is it you want?"
His throat felt dry, the words emerging as a raspy whisper. With the pack, he mostly spoke their language-yips and growls and whines that drew their meaning from the circumstances of a given situation. It was a fact that Leon often muttered to himself, sometimes in French, sometimes in English, but he tried to keep it down so as to not offend the pack. It was a very different game to speak deliberately with "normal" men, so that your words conveyed coherent meaning.
In the skiff, his uninvited visitor recoiled, then caught himself and tried to make it look as if he simply had a nervous twitch. The overall effect was laughable, but Leon missed the humor in it, scanning back upstream in case the Gypsy had turned traitor on him, leading other "normal" men to find the pack. So far, there was no sight or sound of followers.
"I have news," the Gypsy said.
"I am listen," Leon said, suspecting that his choice of words wasn't exactly right but guessing it made no difference.
"Stranger come by the place today." The Gypsy didn't have to say which place, and time had little meaning in the bayou, once you drew a line between the daylight hours and the hungry night. "Asked some funny questions about you."
The wolf man felt his hackles rising, curled his upper lip to show a flash of crooked yellow teeth. His shaggy hands flexed in the darkness, talons scratching at his palms.
"He call my name?" asked Leon.
"Didn't have to," said the Gypsy. "He said he was looking for a loup-garou. I hear that, and think of you."
Leon tipped back his head and scanned the crazy quilt of stars above him. They were timeless, changing with the seasons and rotation of the earth, but always coming back again, as inescapable as weather, permanent as death.
It took a moment for the bayou night to mellow him, but he was getting there. When Leon spoke again, his voice was calm, no snapping at the messenger, no matter how he longed to roar and tear the Gypsy limb from limb.
"So, what did you all tell him?" Leon asked. His uninvited guest first looked dismayed, then terrified. It was a good choice in the present circumstances.
"Now you joke with me," the Gypsy said, lips spasming into the semblance of a smile. "Man didn't talk to me at all. What do I know?"
"You know how to find me," Leon answered. "Know about where I live."
"I never talked to him," the frightened man repeated stubbornly. "Man comes, he talks to Ladislaw, then goes in to spend some time with Aurelia. Paid Ladislaw handsome for whatever Aurelia had to tell him and then he goes away. Use your second sight and see if I be lying."
Leon wasn't big on second sight, but he stared at the quaking Gypsy for a moment more before he spoke. "Got what he come for," said the leader of the pack. "Got his palm read."
"I can't say that," the trembling Gypsy said, "but that Aurelia sees things. She has powers."
So do I, thought Leon. "That's it?" he asked. The Gypsy nodded, jerky little motions with his head. His hands clung desperately to the oars. If he was lying, Leon thought, the little man deserved some kind of an award.
"All right," the wolf man said at last. "You told me something, now I'm telling you. Don't go on right back to where you been. Find some other place to spend the night."
The Gypsy mulled that over for a moment, then finally nodded. The full weight of his betrayal made his shoulders slump and forced his head down, eyes avoiding Leon's sharp chin almost resting on his chest.
"Go on now," the leader of the pack commanded. "I got things to do."
He didn't wait to see the Gypsy turn his skiff and paddle back the way he came. Retreating toward his dark camp, Leon heard the others padding in around him, stony silence from the bitch, a couple of the others whining questions.
"We're going to take a little ride," he told them, smiling in the darkness. "Maybe get a bite to eat."
AURELIA BOLDISZAR HAD not told Remo everything she saw and felt when she was in his presence.
Then again, she never told outsiders everything. It was a lesson she had learned, partly from the instruction of her mother, but more by trial and error. She was twenty-five years old, and that was plenty old enough to understand that even members of her family, the Romany, did not desire to know the whole truth of their futures or to realize how much she knew about their secret pasts.
In truth, the other Romany rarely consulted her these days. They were polite enough, and treated her like family-her father was their leader, after all-but she still caught them glancing at her furtively, as if afraid that she was "reading" them against their will. They feared she would learn secrets they had closely guarded over years or decades, sometimes even from their wedded mates.
And they were right.
Aurelia didn't understand the power, but she had it. That was all that counted in the end. It didn't operate continuously, or she would have lost her sanity when she was just a teenager. Instead it came and went, influenced to some indefinable degree by her attempts to focus, calling on the energy or whatever it was to let her see behind the public masks that men and women wore in daily life.
This Remo, now, he was a different matter altogether. From her first glimpse of him, there had been confusion-not because he was inscrutable, but rather because she saw so much. Aurelia couldn't always say when those about her would face death, or how; in fact, that dark, oppressive knowledge thankfully eluded her most of the time. With Remo, though, there had been the inescapable sensation that he had already known death. Maybe that first, irrational impression was what had muddled everything else she saw when she was with him.
She knew he was an orphan-or had been one, rather, until he had found a father figure relatively late in life, and then, much later, found his biological father.
Aurelia felt that Remo was basically a good man, though his path had taken him to many places he would not have chosen for himself and forced him into contact with a brooding cast of villains. Most of them were dead now, she was certain, and she had no doubt that a majority of those had died by Remo's hand.
Consumed with her thoughts of her enigmatic visitor and his equally strange task, Aurelia missed the early-warning signals that might have saved her people.
Then again, it was entirely possible that the impending danger-like so many others-would have failed to warn her, even if she had been concentrating, actively pursuing any strange vibrations in the night.
When she heard the first scream, it took her utterly by surprise.
There was a vicious snarling, and a young girl cried out again. Aurelia thought it had to be Janka, but the knowledge didn't help her. Even as she struggled from her sleeping bag and pressed her face against the nearest window of the bus, the cry was cut off with a brutal, inescapable finality. Aurelia felt the life force torn from little Janka as if it had been her own. She didn't have to see the child to know it was too late to help her.
More of her people shouting now, some of them men. There was confusion, fear and anger mingled in their voices. Where the snarling
, baying canine sounds originated, she couldn't be sure-until it struck her like a swift blow to the solar plexus. Loup-garou!
The cursed man-thing had been smarter than she reckoned. It had found her out and tracked her down within a few short hours of her conversation with Remo. Something in the werewolf's cunning nature drove it to make a preemptive strike, to prevent her from assisting Remo with his hunt.
A flash of insight, crystal-clear, told her the best way to protect the others was to flee. The wolf man wanted her, and while she knew he wouldn't hesitate to massacre the Romany in search of her, there was at least an outside chance that he would follow if she ran.
There was no time to plan where she would go, grab any items from her minimal belongings. Gypsy life meant traveling, and traveling efficiently meant readiness to leave at a moment's notice. Thought translated into action almost instantly, and she exploded from the bus into the milling chaos of the camp, beelining for the mopeds parked behind the old VW van.
Before she traveled half a dozen strides, Aurelia almost stumbled on a corpse. The dead man lay facedown, but she could tell it was Sebestyen from his shirt-what there was left of it. He had been mauled, pale ribs exposed on one side, where the flesh and muscle had been torn, and blood was everywhere.
Aurelia glanced back toward the bus, in time to see a canine form leap through the open doorway she had vacated. Around the corner of the vehicle, a hulking man-shape suddenly appeared, moving with massive shoulders hunched, arms flexing, fingers opening and closing, seeking prey. She didn't see the creature's face and had no wish to, sprinting past the van.
One of the mopeds was missing, but that knowledge barely registered before she was astride the first in line, stamping on the kick starter. The two-wheeler was old but lovingly maintained, its engine sputtering to life upon demand. Aurelia hung on for dear life and whipped it through a tight U-turn, part of her terrified that she would fall, another part assuring her that she would not.
Behind her, an inhuman voice roared out stark fury. She was on the blacktop now, and had the moped's throttle open. It had not been built for speed, like some two-wheelers. Could it outrun a loup-garou ... or more than one?
It struck her that she had been wrong, somehow, about the local wolf man being on his own. There had been two of them, at least, and from the sounds she heard as she was running for her life, Aurelia guessed that there were still more in the camp. How many? She had no idea, and no sensation spoke to her as she drove north, the night wind in her face. The Gypsy camp was better than a mile behind her when it came to her that she was driving without lights. When she had remedied that situation, she felt safer from collision with oncoming motorists. Police would be another matter if they stopped her, since she didn't own a driver's license, but at least there was a chance she could persuade them to go back and check the camp.
By which time, she assured herself, it would already be too late.
She knew where she had to go. Desire House.
Remo didn't know it yet, but he was waiting for her. And there was a chance, although it seemed increasingly remote, that she might even save his life.
Chapter 9
At half-past midnight Remo was asleep and dreaming of Lon Chaney, Jr. The dream was in black and white. Just like when he dreamed about the Three Stooges.
He recognized the street scene as an image from another time and place. He couldn't have identified the town, wasn't convinced it had a name, but knew that he had seen it many times before. The cobbled streets and architecture told him that he was somewhere in Eastern Europe, in that blissful time before the War to End All Wars. Behind him, if he glanced across his shoulder, Remo knew that he would find the full moon just emerging from a mass of brooding clouds.
Lon was somewhere in front of him, most likely hiding in the pitch-black alley to his left, a half block farther on. Remo hadn't yet laid eyes on him. But he could feel what was supposed to happen next. Lon had ducked offstage to don his wolf-man costume, but he was returning shortly, with a vengeance. You could bet on it.
There came a strange sound from the alley. Not growling, or the scuffling sound of semihuman footsteps Remo had expected. Rather it was the thud of feet on a carpeted floor, far away and coming closer on the run. It was a panicked run.
Remo sat up in the same instant as Chiun. They were both on mats on the floor of the hotel suite they were sharing with Cuvier. The mob target was snoring on the bed.
"Well, are you going to answer it?" Chiun demanded. A second later there was a frantic rapping on the door.
Cuvier was a light sleeper, too. He snorted and snuffled back to consciousness and feebly grunted a warning. "It be the loup-garou!"
"Don't think they knock," Remo said. He was already opening the door, and the delicate aroma coming from the hall identified the visitor before he saw her.
Aurelia Boldiszar looked shell-shocked.
"I didn't know where else to go," she said by way of greeting. "There's a chance it may already be too late."
Remo stood aside, then poked his head into the corridor and listened. It was empty and there were no suspicious sounds.
"What may be too late?" he asked, closing the door and flipping on the light.
Aurelia uttered a small "Oh!" and put her hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a cry of alarm. She stared directly into the vivid emerald eyes that resembled those of an intense child. But the head they were inside of was covered in yellowed, water-wrinkled parchment.
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "It's just that I've seen-"
"I understand, child," said the ancient Master. Remo caught the unexpected compassion in Chiun's voice and realized he hadn't exactly been quick on the uptake. Chiun had sensed that what had brought Aurelia there in the middle of the night wasn't just a sense of urgency. It wasn't even just an emergency.
"I've made a terrible mistake," she said. "There is not one loup-garou, but several. I've seen them."
"Excuse me?"
"They came to the camp," Aurelia said, and her eyes seemed to grow hollow. "They were killing us. Killing and killing. I don't know how many. The loups-garous were after me. The best thing I could do was get away."
And lead them here, thought Remo. But instead of saying it, he asked, "When did this happen?"
"Half an hour, maybe forty minutes. It took time for me to locate the hotel."
"And now you're telling me you actually saw these things?"
"Two of them," she replied. "One was transformed completely, while the other...I can't do it justice. It was manlike, walking upright in the shadows, but its face..."
Aurelia's voice trailed off. She met his eyes, then turned her gaze away, as if embarrassed. Why? Because she had run out on her companions, even with the best of motives?
Remo and Chiun knew she was telling the truth. They could read it in her breath and the pulse of her blood under the skin of her throat. Cuvier knew she was telling the truth because he had faith.
Faith in the existence of the loup-garou.
Remo thought of going back out to the camp to see it for himself, but quickly scrubbed the notion. If Aurelia had been followed-even if she hadn't-it was far more likely that the loup-garou would try for Cuvier at their hotel than wait around the Gypsy campsite for a little one-on-one with Remo.
They could hole up in the hotel, thought Remo, or he could approach the problem from another angle. He could do, in fact, what he probably should have done as soon as they were settled in New Orleans.
"You'll be safe here," he told Aurelia, wondering if it was true. Chiun could handle any man alive, but if their adversary wasn't human...
"Why?" Aurelia pinned his eyes with hers. "Where are you going?"
Remo hoped his smile was reassuring, but it didn't feel that way from where he stood. Still, he plastered on a smile. "Let's say I've got a hankering to see Mardi Gras."
MERLE BETTENCOURT was happiest when telling other people what to do. He loved the sense of power and authority that came wi
th giving orders, telling his subordinates to jump and noting that they didn't even ask how high. The power of life and death especially excited him. It was better than sex.
At the moment, though, Merle Bettencourt was mired down in the bog of party politics. Venal politicians were a key part of the system, human cogs that kept the great machine moving forward, but that didn't mean he had to like them. Every time he was compelled to work with some asshole who styled himself a "statesman," it made Bettencourt feel he ought to take a long, hot bath. Given a choice, he would prefer the company of killers, pimps and pushers-they were at least honest about their motives and desires.
But here he was in an election year, and the primaries were unusually early, due to anticipated irregularities. Armand had to find it inside himself to finesse the oily bastards who were bent on suckling from the fat teats of the body politic. It seemed to Bettencourt that this year's candidates were worse than usual, and that was saying something in a state where politics and criminal behavior had been more or less synonymous since the days of Huey Long. The Kingfish was a pioneer of sorts; he set the tone for all that followed, teaching future generations of disciples how to realize their dreams, be all that they could be, and during his tenure graft had been refined to an elusive art form.
Still...
Gut instinct made him want to go with Elmo Breen. Breen was a lifelong veteran of gutter politics and had the morals of an alley cat, disguised by oily charm. He had started out with the Sicilians, in Marcello's pocket, but the changing times had prompted Breen to look for sponsorship among the nativeborn. For the past ten years or so he had been snuggling up to leaders of the Cajun outfit, kissing major ass at any given opportunity. He was a pro who asked no questions and provided value for the money he received, dodged nasty questions with the flexibility of a sidewinder and never let his patrons down.
Unless, of course, he saw the chance to cut himself a better deal.
It was an iron-clad rule of Armand Fortier's, with which Merle Bettencourt agreed, that you could never really know what the stupid voters might decide to do once they were shut up in the polling booth and confronted with a list of names. That being true, it only made good sense to have friends on both sides in any given contest, just in case. No matter how the dice came up, that way, the outfit couldn't lose.
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