"We’ll see about that."
"You will have to forgive my associate," said the tall man. "Mr. Bennet can be a bit hot-headed. You’ll find things much easier if you cease your charade." French, definitely French. "I have little time for it, and I assure you, I know all about you and Katherine. I’ve been following you both for a long time."
"If you know about her, why follow me?" Zolotow asked, genuinely curious, despite the pain and the rage.
"You’ve proven remarkably intuitive, Detective Zolotow. I haven’t always been as successful in tracking her. In fact, I lost her completely several years ago. It was only your investigations that tipped me off and put me back on her trail. One of your PIs, you see, was also working for me."
Things were falling into place. "You guys—probably Bennet—gave me the zoo tape."
"Of course."
"You killed all those girls —"
"Nonsense. Oh, I’m sure Bennet would do it if I asked him to. He has no qualms about murder. I assure you, though, that the Voodoo Killer is nothing more than an interesting coincidence. Without him, we would have had to manufacture our own serial killer to lure her in, or go through all this messiness in another city. And of course, in another city it wouldn’t have been nearly as convenient —" He patted Bennet’s shoulder. "— without agents on the force."
Agents, Zolotow thought. Plural. "Then the only murder you’ve ordered is Janice’s," he said. "I want to have all this straight when I put it on the warrant."
Bennet laughed. So did the third man, still hidden in the shadows, the first sound that he’d made. Until that moment, Zolotow had assumed it was Garza, especially when the Frenchman had indicated there was more than one policeman involved, but the laugh didn’t sound like the Hispanic.
"I don’t think you’ll be arresting anyone, asshole," Bennet remarked.
"Oh, not you," Zolotow replied. "Certainly not you, Bennet."
"Okay, let’s cut the small talk," said the Frenchman. "You know that she’s here in San Antonio, Zolotow. You’re going to tell us how we can find her. I thought we had all the time in the world, but Bennet here says the police have a lead on the Voodoo Killer. Once they catch him, Kat will move on and I’ll have to track her down all over again. You, my whore-loving friend, are my ace in the hole.
"If you don’t start talking, I’m going to instruct Bennet to work on you with his knife."
"And I’ll start somewhere really intimate," Bennet added. "Like your balls." He pulled the knife from under his sports coat, a wickedly curved, serrated monstrosity, like any of a dozen blades made famous by Hollywood icons like Stallone, for sale in any mall.
Zolotow ignored Bennet. "And you want her because . . .? You’ll pardon my candor, Stilts, but you don’t seem like the type to lose sleep over the deaths of a few citizens here and there, regardless of their chosen profession."
"She has something that is mine," answered the Frenchman. Zolotow detected a deep note of . . . Longing? Pain? "Something that has been in my family for a very long time. I would like to have it back."
Zolotow digested this, filing the information, his inner gears already clicking, merging bits and pieces of the puzzle. Questions were beginning to form in his brain, and he was thinking of pushing his luck, when the room went suddenly black. The light had been unbearably bright—the darkness swallowed them whole.
In the lightless void, sound was magnified. He concentrated, struggling helplessly against his bonds. There were several grunts, a curse—Bennet. The next sound he heard chilled him straight through to the center of his heart. A scream ripped through the room. Not a normal scream of fear, or of pain, but a primal, guttural yowl that set his hair on end and stopped his struggles cold. He went rigid in the chair, fighting to penetrate the shadows, to get a glimpse of what was happening.
There was a quick scuffle, a crash, and a moan. Then a sound like flesh impacting on something solid. Suddenly she was behind him, and he nearly fainted at the proximity—the heady scent of her. Despite the danger of his situation, despite the bonds and the men holding him captive, he felt himself reacting to her, felt the erection struggling against the bonds of his clothing. The ropes suddenly dissolved, sliced away. He felt soft fur brush against him, felt the quick, sandpaper-moist touch of—her tongue? Then he was free, and another scream erupted to his right.
Staggering from the chair, Zolotow stumbled forward. He found a wall and worked his way along it. He came against an indentation, scrambled about and found a door handle. He grabbed the handle and pushed. Nothing. It was locked. Pulling back, knowing his throbbing brain would never forgive him, he rammed the door with all his strength. The wood gave with a splintering crash, and he fell outward into a dim alley. It was still night, but barely. He could make out the orange beginnings of dawn painting the rooftops of surrounding warehouses. He rolled to his feet, clutched at the brick wall along one side of the alley, and lurched forward, heading for the nearest street. Behind him, the sounds were fading. He heard someone empty all six rounds from a revolver, heard another crash, then he was on the street and moving away as rapidly as his wobbling legs would take him.
He never heard her approach, but seconds later, as he was about to stumble in front of a city bus, she was there. She insinuated herself beneath his arm, holding him upright with amazing strength and leading him further down the street. Somehow she managed to hail a cab and get him inside it, sliding in behind him and giving the driver quick directions.
There were sounds on the street. Pursuit? It didn’t matter. The cab pulled away from the curb, and Zolotow checked out for a minute. She had him now. There was nothing he could do about it. He laid his head back, and she pulled it onto her shoulder, stroking his hair gently, possessively.
The cab driver looked at them in the mirror. "You two need a hospital?"
"Just take us to Renaissance Plaza like I told you," she said, and though there was doubt in the driver’s eyes, he obeyed without question. His eyes even left the rearview.
Zolotow took a deep breath. From her directions, he could tell they were still on the north side of town, not more than a few miles from the strip joint where the evening’s nightmare had begun. "You saved my life," he told her. It did not escape his mind that this was actually the second time she had done so.
She shrugged against him. "Just another chapter in a conflict that started long before I met you," she whispered.
"Are they. . .?"
"Dead?" She wiped at the blood on his face. "No. Two are down, but not seriously injured."
She was wearing some sort of short robe which gaped open in the front, revealing her cleavage and six inches of washboard abdomen. There was a lot of blood and, as his eyes panned down to her legs, he realized some of it was still flowing, that not all the blood on her came from her victims. He suddenly realized she was leaning on him as much as he was leaning on her.
"You’re hurt."
"The Frenchman. He’s a wild shot in the dark. How he missed the two cops I’ll never know."
So the other man in the shadows had been Garza. "You should have killed them," he said, only slightly surprised at his own vigilante attitude.
"At the moment, you were more important." She pulled aside the robe, revealing a dark triangle of pubic hair, sculpted hips, and her side. There was a bullet hole in her side. She twisted enough so that he could see the matching hole in the back. "Clean through. I took it while changing."
He thought he understood that statement all too clearly. She had made herself vulnerable for his sake, thinking he would not have been approachable in her other form. "But I shot you in Corpus Christi —"
"You shot . . . the other. The Frenchman shot me . . . while I was changing."
A weakness then. Like the water thing perhaps. She must not be thinking clearly or she would never have given him that insight. And what of this other? Were she and the cat not one and the same?
The cab driver turned into a parking lot, heading for the steps
of an office building. "We’ll get out here," Kat told him. "Stop in the parking lot."
When the cab came to a halt, Zolotow dug the hundred dollar bill out of his shirt pocket and passed it over the seat. "You never saw anything. Understand?"
The driver glanced at the bill and nodded vigorously.
When the driver was gone, Kat led the way to a black Geo Metro, passing Zolotow the keys. He was impressed that she’d been smart enough to leave a rental here rather than at the warehouse. If the cab driver wasn’t bought off with the hundred, at least the trail would end here. "You drive," she said weakly. "I think I’m going to pass out. I’ve got a room at the Embassy Suites . . . across from Lincoln Center."
Given the late hour and the lack of traffic, it was only five minutes away. She fell against him and he had to help her into the car. "Maybe I should get you to a hospital," he suggested.
She laughed. "The first thing they’d do is take a blood test, and then all hell would break out." She stroked his cheek. "I’ll be fine, Zolo, darling. It’s yourself you should be worried about."
Zolo carried me from the parking garage to the elevator and up to my room. I’d forgotten how strong he was. The year he’d spent on my trail, a year of airports and hotels and a hundred seedy bars, had burned off whatever fat he’d once carried. His large frame was nothing but muscle and bone now. I was amazed that he could put aside his own mortal aches and pains, possibly even a concussion, to take care of me. The night must have been a tremendous ordeal for him, mentally as well as physically, but he shrugged it off easily.
We were both covered with blood. His. Mine. Blood from the Frenchman and the two cops. Blood from the stripper they’d murdered. I’d lost more than I realized. I was weak and dizzy, slipping back and forth through the dark shadows encroaching on my vision. Much of that first hour together I’ve lost. What I’ve retained is, at best, sketchy. I remember him taking me into the bathroom, checking my wound.
"You need a hospital," he said again. He applied a compress of hand towels to both entry and exit wounds.
"Don’t worry. My healing powers are remarkable, Zolo."
"There’s infection to worry about," he said. "A wound like that can kill you just from lead poisoning."
"It’s alright. Really. If it’ll make you feel better to be doing something, there’s a complimentary sewing kit in the desk drawer over there. You can sew me up."
I meant it as a joke, but he took me seriously. I remember thinking that the tiny pain of the needle puncturing my flesh seemed incredibly negligible. I remember watching how steady his hands were as he threaded the needle, how gentle his fingers were as he drew the lips of the wound together. I passed out sitting there on the toilet while he reinvented stitches.
I regained consciousness sometime later in a panic. There was water cascading down around my neck, pouring in deadly rivulets over my bare breasts. I could feel it pooling around my ankles, sucking at my feet with ancient hunger. I screamed and struck out, but Zolo held me tight against him and told me everything was okay. It was just the shower. I was naked. My bloody robe lay on the bathroom floor with several bloody towels and a pile of his own clothing. He was as naked as I was. I could feel his heart beating against my breasts. I could feel the blood pounding through his arms where he held me. I could feel the press of his erection against my thigh.
The filth and blood streamed off our bodies, swirling round the tub to disappear down the drain. The water took what it could, gurgling and chuckling and wishing for more.
"You’re afraid of the water," he said.
I put my head back on his shoulder and said nothing.
"Why?"
"I wish that I knew," I whispered.
"How can you not know?"
I trembled. "The water wants me. That’s all I know."
"The water wants you? Katherine, that makes no sense."
I leaned into the spray, letting it pound first my breasts and then my neck. I closed my eyes, leaned back my head, and opened my mouth. At first, nothing. Then, sensing the advantage, defying the laws of physics, the water diverging around my neck began to advance. Up past my windpipe. Up over my chin. Past my bottom lip. My teeth. And then it was filling my mouth. My nose.
I hadn’t moved.
Zolo pulled me back, turned me to face him with my back to the spray. "That’s impossible!"
"Impossible, my dear Zolo, is what I’m all about."
"But . . . how? Why?"
I put my head back on his shoulder and didn’t bother trying to answer him. He decided to try a different line of questioning.
"Who is the Frenchman? What does he want?"
"He has many names. Moyset. Jacques Rollet. Pierre Labourat. He is le Meneur des Loups, the leader of the wolves. He thinks I’m a witch, a loup-garou, and once he sought to bring me back into the fold, to have me bear his children, but now all he wants is my death."
"Loup-garou?’
"Werewolf."
Silence reigned for several minutes and I could imagine him trying to make sense of it all. Had I said werecat, it might have made some sense to him. Hell, it might even begin to make some sense to me. Faced with knowing what I was, he didn’t make the usual argument: that there was no such thing as werewolves. I didn’t have to tell him about Pierre Burgot, Gilles Garnier, the Comte de Saint-Pol, the Beast of Gévaudan, Philibert Montot, the Gandillon family, the Tailor of Chalons, Michel Verdun, Jean Grenier, or any of the others from France. People think of Hungary when they hear of werewolves, but I know better. Werewolves eat escargot and drink fine wine.
Between 1520 and 1630 alone, some 30,000 individuals in France were tried as werewolves.
"He said you had something of his."
"That may be, but I don’t remember."
"What do you remember?"
I raised my head from his shoulder and kissed him long and deep. "I remember wanting you from the first moment I saw you."
It seemed to Zolotow that he’d had the same erection for hours. When she knelt in the shower and took him in her mouth, he thought he would explode immediately, but she took him in slowly, tenderly, her hand clamped tight about the base of his erection while her mouth worked up and down its length. She brought him to the very brink of orgasm, but she didn’t allow him to fall over that edge.
The shower was growing cold. She turned off the water, took him by the hand, and led him to the bedroom where she pushed him back on the bed and straddled him.
As she slid down, sheathing his engorged cock in her moist warmth, Zolotow let his hand slip back beneath the pillows to make sure the PPK was still there. When she’d fainted in the bathroom, he had taken a few seconds to hide it under the pillows, uncertain where this night would end. The image of Tony after such a night wouldn’t leave him in peace.
She rode him, her hair hanging wild and wet in her face, her eyes catching the morning sun where it bled through the blinds and lending it a special, unholy glow. He lay there, quivering and moaning, and she slipped up and down his cock, engulfing him—hot and wet and impossibly exotic. With one hand under the pillow wrapped around the handle of the Walther PPK, he arched his back and cried out, squirting his seed deep within her as he fought to match his final thrust to her rhythm.
Afterward, she lay at his side, stroking the semen and wetness from his quivering penis, rubbing herself against his thigh. He rolled her over on her back and took her nipple between his teeth, suckled and kissed while his hand slid down her velvet belly to the wet spot between her legs. They stroked each other, panting like animals. His fingers probed the depths of her for several minutes until her hand, which had been pressing his face against her firm breasts, pushed his head down. His tongue trailed across her abdomen, lingered to tease her navel and then her pubic hair, and finally sought out the cleft between his fingers. She tasted of animal and musk, of his semen and her feminine juices, of sex and violence and woman and beast, of earth and sky and all in between.
She pushed him b
ack several minutes later and rolled to her knees. "I think you’re ready again," she gasped and thrust her backside into the air. He got up behind her and plunged himself into her warmth. Rhythm ate at his reality until it was his reality. He forgot about the gun. He forgot about the beast. There was only the rhythm, the backbeat of her desire, and the syncopated hammering of their hearts. Again and again and again he thrust himself into her; nothing else in the world mattered as much as the sheer pleasure of merging to become one with this woman. He closed his eyes and gripped her sweet ass and let total fulfillment have its way with him.
When he first felt the fur under his hands he wanted to stop. He wanted to open his eyes and to pull away, but something within him, a beast to match her own, a demon which knew nothing but the pleasure of being in her, refused. He felt the tail suddenly thrashing against his chest. He heard a growl that was more lust that rage. He pumped. And he pumped. And as his own orgasm built within him, he thought that every ounce of sanity was rushing for his loins where it would explode and leave nothing behind but this wild beast that was clawing its way free from his soul.
She kicked him off. He collapsed on the bed, and for the briefest of moments he experienced a rationale thought. His hand slipped under the pillow and he actually entertained the thought of drawing the PPK and blowing her (its?) brains out. Too slow. She climbed onto him, and as her jaws clamped around his throat, she slid back over his throbbing erection. Her rear legs came up and he could feel her claws, poised over the taut skin that protected his viscera. He knew that with one kick she could open him up like an autumn buck. Balanced there, she rode him once more, her front paws on either side of his face, her tail tickling his testicles.
He thought then that he was surely a dead man. Any second now and the jaws would close, crushing the life from him, or the taut muscles of her legs would release their energy, spilling his guts out across the white sheets. He wanted to pull out the PPK, but knew that it was useless against her. He wanted to pull out his cock, but being in her was the greatest feeling he’d ever known. He continued to thrust back at her with every ounce of his strength. As the two of them pounded towards climax together, he opened his eyes and found her own eyes just inches away. No longer the eyes of Katherine. But of Kat.
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