She applied herself and finished, explaining that she had left one of her lab notebooks back at camp and found someone who was going in that direction to give her a ride.
She was pretty sure she could get back to the inn by morning. Perhaps if she could remember a few simple protection charms, she could get back sooner—maybe even before her companions discovered she was gone. The food and movies would keep them occupied until well after midnight.
If she met Lupeni at the camp, she’d deal with him. He was a wizard, after all—he should understand that she could and would protect herself from werewolves.
When was the last time she even spoke with a wizard, a living one? Fifty years? After she left the mountains twenty years ago, she avoided anyone from that world, for fear her secret would be obvious.
And now she was speaking to a wizard who killed vampires.
She tried not to think about that, instead remembering when Lupeni came to fix Mike’s arm, and that startling conversation about Greek poetry. Did he really fancy himself to be a modern Odysseus? He was an odd one, but he had none of the ruthless deviousness of the man from Ithaca.
But perhaps Lupeni had not been far off the mark to connect her with Calypso, the nymph who held Odysseus prisoner for love. She would have made him immortal so that he could stay with her forever if Athena had not intervened. Homer might have been describing a vampire. But vampires never love anything except their next victim.
Lamia stood, flinging the note on the bed, and tried to focus on the task at hand. The instruments at the cave needed guarding and that’s where she was going.
“You’re really missing some awesome stuff,” Mike boomed as he flung open the door. He stumbled over one of the bags in the dim interior of the room, but kept talking as he found his own bag and began pawing through the contents.
“This old lady told our fortunes and I think Vijay’s gonna get a Nobel Prize or something. Get this: A tall, dark stranger will make trouble for me. Can you believe it? They always tell you that sort of stuff. Probably Professor Luca trying to fail me out of quantum field theory.”
Mike pulled off an extremely mud-stained shirt and struggled to get into a clean one, chattering non-stop.
“And they had this contest for catching sheep. I only entered ‘cause Taofang said I couldn’t do it. Looked easy—they were in a little pen—but, oh, man! Maybe I had too much of the local beer. I dunno, but those suckers can run pretty fast. I’d make a lousy shepherd. Really took a dive into the mud getting that stupid—”
He was speaking to an empty room and finally woke up to that fact.
“Lamia? You in here?” Mike cast around the dimly lit room, as if she were hiding behind the furniture or the thick curtains blocking the windows. Noticing that the bathroom door was closed, Mike pounded on it, shouting, “Hey, you OK?”
His yelling and hammering brought no response. He rattled the doorknob and barged in when he found it unlocked.
“What the hell…where are you—?” Mike stopped short. There was no place to hide in the small, empty bathroom. Festival sounds drifted through the tiny open window over the old fashioned claw-footed tub.
Well, she didn’t just fly out the window, he thought with a scowl, then stomped back into the room and roughly flung open the curtains. He didn’t understand what was going on and that always made him angry.
Finding Lamia’s note did nothing to calm him down.
“She’s nuts,” he muttered to himself as he crumpled the note and sent the wad whizzing across the room. “Wolves, spiders, bats. What a crazy country.” He jingled the keys to the Jeep in his pocket.
“Seems like I’m gonna have to protect her…”
28. With Friends Like These…
With one glance to the east and one to the west, Caleb figured he had just under twenty minutes left in human form—just enough time to double check that the students had stayed away from their camp.
He was so sure he’d find no one that he didn’t see her until she moved. Coming to a screeching halt on a breath of wind isn’t possible, so he swooped around and dropped from the air in a sudden motion that would have impressed even Toby.
“Lamia!” he cried, running up to her at one of the computers in the pavilion. The others were still covered with plastic, but this one was completely unwrapped and she was settled in with a big notebook and a variety of pens and pencils, clearly intending to stay the night.
“Lupeni,” she responded calmly, not looking up.
“But you shouldn’t—it’s not safe!”
“It’s werewolves, isn’t it?” She looked pleased as he flinched, and showed him the pile of purple flowers among her writing implements. “I grew up in these hills. I scarcely need an American wizard to tell me about those monsters.”
“But—” He didn’t have time for subtlety. “There’s a werewolf I’ve been hunting,” he explained in a rushed breath. “He knows I’m after him and threatened to eat the graduate students at the caves. He is not a wizard, when human, but when he’s a wolf—”
“Perhaps you are concerning yourself overmuch with our monsters,” Lamia replied coldly. “Romania has had vampires and werewolves for thousands of years, and you, a foreigner, take it upon yourself to eliminate them?”
“No, no, it’s not that at all,” Caleb exclaimed. He wanted to explain, but complex Romanian sentences were beyond him so close to his transformation. “Really, be careful! I have to go now,” he added, turning and running for the underbrush as he felt the ache in his bones that signaled the change.
Caleb did not hear the rustling in the leaves or the quiet murmur of a hushed voice. Cuza slapped his hand over Vlad’s mouth as he saw Lamia raise her head to listen, and reached into his pocket for a dagger that he pressed into the werewolf’s hand.
Vlad looked puzzled, but quickly caught on as Cuza gestured towards the seated graduate student. With a swift pounce, Vlad planted himself behind her and held the blade to her throat.
Lamia screamed.
Caleb, no more than ten yards away, plunged pelican-like to the ground, catching his foot on a tree branch and falling on his face. Did he dare go back? It couldn’t possibly be a werewolf attacking her, since he was still human himself. Maybe a vampire.
That possibility convinced him. She’d promised she knew how to drive off werewolves, but if it was a vampire, the Wolf could help.
Caleb was caught by the moonrise before he even had a chance to take off his clothes. Five large bounds took the gray wolf back into the camp.
Caleb hid behind a clump of tall grass, watching his enemy. His fur bristled to see Vlad circling Lamia and growling, not attacking her, though she wasn’t holding the wolfsbane. His snaps were half-hearted, his tongue lapping occasionally with disgust and even fear. What powerful magic could make Vlad so uncertain?
Caleb never got an answer to his question. As he hid in the undergrowth, growling softly, he was distracted by a roar of tires and a screech of brakes as a Jeep tore into the campsite. The man who jumped out looked plenty tasty, and Caleb and Vlad paused only briefly to snarl at each other before they flung themselves at him.
“Help!” thundered Mike, pushing himself against the car’s grille as Vlad swiped him with a huge paw. “Lamia! Why did you come back here?” he cried reproachfully, barely dodging a clash of jaws.
Lamia grabbed the aconite and held it out in front of her, thinking fast. While werewolves could and did gut vampires, the Undead were not their favorite prey, and they would back off quickly when injured or frightened. It was much harder to make them surrender a chance to bite or devour a person.
Finally she gave up on flowers and started hurling balls of green fire. The first caught the black one in the rump, and he sat back and rolled in the grass, howling.
The gray one was smarter. She could see the calculating intelligence in his eyes as he anticipated each fireball and deftly sidestepped it, getting his body behind Mike’s and pinning the American to the ground.
They yelped, pawing at their faces and dragging their snouts along the ground. She was about to turn away and check on Mike when the wolves, half-blinded by fire and seeking cool and shade, chased each other into the cave.
The apparatus! This was precisely why she’d come back here tonight. Forgetting her fellow student, bleeding and perhaps bitten in the dirt, she tore towards the cave after the animals.
Only moments had passed, but the werewolves were nowhere to be seen. Still, they couldn’t have caused more damage if that had been their intent—and perhaps it was. She didn’t know what the creatures thought about, and she was still struck by the cleverness of the huge gray and brown animal, who had dodged her fireballs as if they were playing tag.
She quickly set about surveying the apparatus. Most critically, sharp teeth had chewed the rubber lines running from the argon tanks, releasing gas into the air. Low-oxygen sensors sounded alarms throughout the cave, their high-pitched wail likely to have been responsible for driving the wolves away.
Argon is a harmless, inert gas, except when it begins to replace oxygen in an enclosed space. Humans and animals can’t sense the absence of oxygen, only the presence of carbon dioxide, and so will breathe pure argon without any feelings of breathlessness or pain until they fall unconscious and die. The students had all been carefully trained to run from the cave if the sensors sounded, and not to return until they stopped beeping.
Fortunately, Lamia wasn’t alive. The shrill cries of the alarms bothered her intensely, but she couldn’t shut them off; if she did, she would have no way of knowing when it would be safe for breathing creatures to enter the cave again.
She tore strips from her T-shirt and stuffed them into her ears. It only dulled the sound, but she had to get to work—shutting off gas tanks, looking for the lines that had been chewed and digging around for replacements in cardboard boxes. Surely low oxygen would kill a werewolf? she wondered idly, as muffled howls filtered through the cotton. It was hard to tell how far away they were with her ears plugged. The animals could have been deep in the unmapped recesses of the caves, trapped and suffocating. Or perhaps the argon wouldn’t travel that far into the minor passageways? This was a purely intellectual exercise to someone who hadn’t needed oxygen for fifty years.
Lupeni will be proud of me if the wolves die, she thought suddenly, but quickly got back to business. Replacing the gas lines wasn’t hard, but then she had to check the argon pressure in all of the metal boxes. She wasn’t sure if any had lost gas, and she had to make sure that there were no other leaks. To do this she had to unwrap and boot up all of the computers that had been carefully shut down before the trip to the village.
If the others came back from the garlic fest and found her in here with the alarms going…Well, almost better to be revealed as a vampire than to be expelled from graduate school again.
This was her fourth try at a PhD, and she’d gone all the way back to the first year of university to provide herself with a respectable physics background before applying to this program. The undergraduates in physics had accepted her, at least, which was certainly more than she could say about her fellow students when she first went to college as a psychology major.
“Accepted” was too strong of a word, of course. The physics undergraduates had silently tolerated her presence in study sessions in which no one spoke in anything but equations, there was rarely any food, and the greatest possible accomplishment was to call your colleagues morons.
The perfect field of study for a vampire.
But that was why she had avoided “hard” science for so long: It would prove to her that she had lost every human quality. After rejecting the cold, merciless, gossipy Undead society, she had hoped to find, somewhere in herself, something that could connect with people and recapture some emotion, some warmth. She didn’t find it in psychology, where her fellow students speculated endlessly about her—Anorexia? Depression? Dissociative Personality Disorder? Sociology and economics were even worse. She’d despaired at her lack of inspiration and lapsed once more into drinking human blood. By way of scandal or simply boredom, she had always left, off to another school where she could use only her most recent credentials to hide a history that went back many decades.
Mike, Vijay, and Taofang didn’t ask why she never ate. They were impressed by her lack of emotion (even when she had papers rejected!) and too intimidated by her command of nine languages to press for details on how she had acquired them. If she could manipulate Maxwell’s equations and solder a busted circuit board, she was one of them.
So she was determined to prove herself now. The argon wells were soon sealed and filled once more, their pressures equalized, and neutrino capture events registering dutifully. The data were noisy, though. Had the wolves torn at the shielding as well?
She pulled aside the remains of the plastic installed to protect against bat guano and checked the metal rods that encircled the containers of gas. Sure enough, several had been knocked free, and she struggled to replace them. Eight feet long and unwieldy, they were a job for two or three people, and it was a couple of hours before she completed the task.
Once more she went over the gas lines, electronics cables, everything that snaked across the floor for an animal to trip over or gnaw. The cables to one of the oscilloscopes had been dislodged, but that was an easy fix. As she fired up the equipment around it to make sure everything worked, the oxygen sensors abruptly stopped their piercing wail.
With a sigh of relief, Lamia removed the cotton from her ears. She no longer had to worry about anyone coming in, and everything she knew how to test was operating perfectly.
A far-off howl and the scrabble of paws on rocky soil told Lamia that the werewolves were still alive, one of them at least—and a look outside the cave showed the full moon edging close to the horizon.
It was the black one who emerged from one of the narrow corridors of the cave, his rear still charred from the fire and his muzzle and paws dripping blood. She threw wolfsbane at him and blocked his exit before he could get near any of the equipment again, and she wasn’t going to let him run. Controlling him with the wolfsbane and her sheer will, she led the humiliated wolf slowly over the wires and out the main entrance like a good puppy.
She breathed a huge sigh of relief as the gas continued to flow and the oscilloscopes flickered, her mind hardly registering the eerie sound of the werewolf’s triumphant howl, followed by the sounds of footsteps in the leaves. Human footsteps, so the wolf must have transformed.
Human footsteps! She had forgotten all about Mike! Had her fellow student spent all night outside the caves? If the werewolves had bitten him, it didn’t matter—he would die. Still, she couldn’t just leave him there. Cautiously, she crept from the cave and saw in the light of the setting moon Mike’s body, lying pale and still near the Jeep. A cold ground mist crept through the camp, extending ghostly tendrils toward the lifeless form.
Several things were wrong. The moon was still above the horizon, so the wolf could not have regained his human form. She had distinctly heard human steps in the leaves; how could a person have come so close to a werewolf without being attacked? And why would the animal ignore a perfectly edible human, even a dead one?
Mike was not dead, she found as she approached him and lifted his cold, bloodstained arm. He had been bitten by a vampire. Again.
29. Lunacy
Deep down in the Petrosna caves, three feet into the collapsed area, Caleb growled with rage as Vlad’s triumphant cry claimed the territory. They had chased and fought each other all night. Caleb had been in the cave only once—and then only into one of the passageways, and under the influence of the wolf belt—and he had come ou
t by far the worst. He was lost in the twists and turns of the cave, with no idea how to get out except by digging through the cave-in he’d caused two months before. His bruised and bitten muscles rebelled at the slightest movement, sending constant jolts of pain that obscured the ones that signaled the dawn.
After he transformed, Caleb lay a long time without moving. Not having claws made it harder to dig, and he was bigger and stronger as a wolf than as a person. Worse, his human self felt panic and apprehension that an animal could not. How long could he live, lost in a cave without water? Did he even know which way was up?
He also remembered what he had found last time he was here: a skeleton, a human skeleton. He’d accidentally crawled over it in the dark, feeling its rounded rib cage, its jutting jaws, the last scraps of its decaying meat.
Death always made Caleb think about Toby, who was never far from his mind in any event. Was there even that much left of Toby, after five years? Had his bones been consigned to the waves off the Atlantic coast…or did the executioners burn the body like that of a plague-riddled vermin? Caleb felt cold, much too cold to move, his fingers turning to ice. The tears welling in his eyes froze his lashes like pellets of sleet. He wondered if there would be something familiar and recognizable about the skeleton of a best friend, or if it would be just another pile of bones.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a face emerged from the darkness, leering into his own. Just enough flesh remained on it for it to be called alive, but every bone and sinew stood out in horrifying relief, the specter all the more hideous for its resemblance to the laughing boy that had been Toby Byron. “I almost got them both,” it hissed in a low voice. The eyes were sunken and depthless, like a vampire’s. “René—always following us around—I could see he would be dangerous in the future. And Sophia…” The face twisted into a rictus of hatred. “She sat with the old man at my trial. I’ve had my revenge since then, though.”
Only the Moon Howls Page 19