The specter gestured off into the distance, as if towards a movie screen. Blood chilling with horror, Caleb saw his remaining childhood friend torn to pieces in the all-too-human jaws of Monster René. The shambling hulk’s charred skin flapped in blackened strips and its face was cratered with scars in the place of ears and nose.
Up in the caves, Mike slept peacefully at Lamia’s feet as she recorded and analyzed data. She didn’t dare take her eyes off him again, because a vampire Mike was not a pleasant thought. At least it looked as if the werewolves hadn’t bitten him, though they’d certainly scratched him up pretty thoroughly. It was probably the smell of fresh blood that had attracted the vampire, who might have started licking from the wounds before making his own puncture opposite that of the first vampire to feed on this unfortunate American physicist.
Unless, she thought grimly, the vampire had been here the whole night, watching or waiting for something else, Mike’s wounds just a lucky midnight snack. The footsteps she heard just before moonset must have belonged to this vampire, which explained why he wasn’t attacked by the werewolf…and there was only one vampire she knew who dared to hunt at the full moon. The same vampire who had already been here once, who wouldn’t give up easily on his craving to win her back. Who might even sink so low as to consort with a dog, if it suited his purpose.
Cuza.
Her thoughts were interrupted by faint howls and moans from the cave that suddenly turned into clear English syllables. She thought at first it was Vijay—just what she needed, two bitten colleagues in one night!—but the accent wasn’t quite right, and after a few sentences she knew.
“No!” the voice cried, with anguish that was unfathomable to one who had felt little emotion for fifty years. “She didn’t want them to kill you. It wasn’t her fault!”
Lamia’s face hardened. So Lupeni had gotten lost in the caves, no doubt going after that werewolf he was hunting. He must have been successful, and that was why only one had come out. She hated and feared Cuza, and despised werewolves, but somehow neither was as bad as the thought of a half-mad American lying in wait like some kind of wizard Captain Ahab. Was he trying to escape his own darkness by killing all monsters? Such a philosophy could easily make a person go too far.
She had a good mind to let him die there, but the cries grew more piteous, and grated on her nerves even if they didn’t tug at her heart. If all of the equipment was OK, and Mike looked stable, she might just poke around in the passageway and find out what was going on.
“Dog Boy, old pal.” The words were Toby’s, but the hard, evil tone was not—and the hand he extended to grip Caleb’s shoulder was a bony claw.
Caleb was too numb with cold to feel it, nor could he feel the icy tears running down his face, except when they stung the burns left by Lamia’s ball of fire.
“Even if you won’t join me, there’s no escaping what you are,” the demon-Toby continued, its horrible arm elongating like rubber as Caleb pulled away from it. “You’re evil, old buddy, and you wanted to turn René into a monster even more than I did.” Here it stopped to throw back its head and laugh, showing yellow teeth.
Caleb pressed his hands over his eyes, but that didn’t block the vision, and his cry of “No!” came out just a whimper.
When he suddenly felt a touch on his face, it seemed as soft and warm as a kitten’s paw.
“This place is full of leptothrixes, Lupeni,” Lamia said matter-of-factly. “I can’t drive them off, but I can drag you out of here.”
The words meant little to him, but he didn’t protest as she took his wrists and started pulling him after her up the narrow passageway. In his demented state he wasn’t sure if she was a continuation of the vision or a real person, or even if he was truly being moved or if he was still huddled in the cave waiting to die.
When they were in the main cave, Lamia let go of him and he collapsed in a heap. She glanced around, seeing no one but the unconscious Mike. He would be out for days this time.
Did Lupeni spend the night in the caves? Did the werewolves attack him? What an idiot, she murmured as she grabbed him under the arms, forcing him to stand. “You can’t sit here like this, everybody’s going to come back soon.” She snaked her arm around his waist, guiding him through the racks of equipment and toward the mouth of the cave. “This way—and don’t trip on the cables. It took me all night to fix them, after those wolves got through tearing around. I should have let you finish them off—”
She stopped in mid-sentence. She saw his burned face, burns caused by her fireball—and blood from deep puncture wounds smeared her shirt. It was his blood, and it was not entirely human.
30. The Eye of the Storm
Realization lurched into her head as they stumbled out into a heavy fog, creeping in with the dawn as often happened on the mountainside. Lupeni hadn’t been attacked by werewolves. He was a werewolf, the gray one, the one with the spark of cunning in its yellow eyes.
He knew a lot about werewolves because he was one. Knowing this caused more confusion in her mind, not less, and she was struck with a crazy impulse to laugh. Werewolves were the lowest class of Dark creature: mortal, uneducated, unpredictable and vicious, with an animal shyness of humans except on the one night per month they tore them apart. She couldn’t reconcile her few encounters with “dogs” with this confident, articulate American wizard.
He had been bitten on a hunt, she guessed, and somehow had been powerful enough to survive. Perhaps he even continued to kill other werewolves the way he did vampires. Certainly he did not consort with them, since he had come to warn the students, a clear betrayal of his kind. This would explain, too, why he could not return to his home country, a single night of carelessness forcing him into perpetual exile.
He moaned incoherently, something about a stakes and burning, and struggled as if fighting off an imaginary enemy. She forced them both down the path and into the fog.
“Come on,” she urged, baffled why she was rescuing someone who should be her enemy. Overhead, sunlight danced through scattered clouds, the last pink of dawn just fading. Around them, however, a thick mist swirled through the trees, obscuring all but the closest parts of the path.
Lamia was rough with Caleb, forcing him to keep moving, although he seemed too weak and insensate to go on. In spite of the frosty cold of his skin, he felt alive beneath her fingers, like any other human. But werewolf blood flowed in his veins. Did it matter? She had sworn off human blood, after all.
A battle raged inside Lamia. The old fear of werewolves, the ever-present lust for blood, and the desire to be free from her past all clashed mercilessly. She felt as confused and muddled as if she had been feeding from humans. She needed to get him cleaned up, dressed, and on his way before things got even more complicated.
Once in the camp, she pulled him toward a wooden tank next to a coiled green rubber hose. She turned the spigot up full blast and sprayed him with cold water, removing blood and dirt and making the long gash on his chest start bleeding again. He stood without making a sound. She was gentler when she got to his face, turning down the water pressure and brushing off the smear of mud and tears with a light touch.
“Where are your clothes?” she asked, turning the hose on top of his head to rinse his hair.
He shook his head to indicate he couldn’t remember, not even able to make sense of the words.
Lamia sighed, looking at him with exasperation. A naked, bleeding guy should have been a vampire’s fondest wish, but his blood was about as appealing as a can of dog food.
“Come on,” she said roughly. “You can stay in my tent until you make sense. I don’t want to have to explain this to the others.”
She got him in motion again, leaving him at the entrance to her tent where he swayed unsteadily and shivered. After laying a plastic tarp across the tent floor so he wouldn’t bleed on everything, she shooed him inside and promised to borrow some clothes from Vijay.
Caleb’s teeth were chattering, and it was an
immense effort to speak. “Potion…in my pocket,” he managed. “The leptothrixes…have to drink…”
“Oh, is that your problem?” she exclaimed in surprise, going out past the camp to rummage in a trampled bush that looked exactly like where a wolf would hide. Sure enough, she found a pair of shredded jeans and a ripped oversized linen shirt with several small bottles still tucked into its pockets.
Some minutes later she crawled into the tent, pushing the bundles in ahead of her. “Here,” she said curtly, handing him the bottles.
He closed his eyes and drank from more than one of them, shuddering from more than the cold. When he opened his eyes again, she saw the human intelligence had returned, yet underneath his clear-eyed stare lurked the irrational beast.
“Why?” he asked through chattering teeth.
“Why am I here?” she said casually as she laid out squares of gauze and noisily ripped pieces of white tape into precise lengths. “To protect valuable equipment from rampaging werewolves, of course.”
“No,” Caleb shook his head from side to side, and couldn’t control the shaking that started from his shoulders and moved downward. “Why did you save me?”
“Why did you lie to me?” she hissed at him through clenched teeth. “You’re a werewolf! You didn’t want to protect any of us. You just wanted to run loose in the caves with your disgusting pack of wild dogs!”
“Vlad is not…one of mine,” he said firmly, struggling with himself for calm. “Yes, I was hunting him. He attacked my pack last month, and even his own has deserted him.”
“Your pack?” she spat at him.
“The strongest and best organized in the mountains,” he replied calmly. “You have been less than truthful yourself, Lamia,” he added, a hint of something—anger or betrayal or surprise—creeping into his tone. “You’re a vampire.”
“And you’re a vampire killer, aren’t you?” she said in response, drawing away from him quickly. “Emil wasn’t your first victim. What makes you do it? Just your filthy instinct, wanting to roll in something dead?”
“You could have left me to die in the caves,” he observed in a detached manner that brought the wild dog to heel. “You could have killed me easily any time since then. But you didn’t. Why, Lamia?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she turned her attention to the array of gauze and tape she’d laid out on the tarp in front of him.
“Here,” she announced, holding a bandage in one hand as she roughly pulled his arms down to expose his chest. “I’m going to put a bandage on this wound. It’s the worst one.” She smoothed the gauze and applied some tape to hold it in place.
“What are you?” he breathed into the absolute stillness of the tent.
She stood suddenly and moved behind him, unwilling or unable to confront the question in his eyes.
“I don’t know any more,” she replied slowly and cautiously after a long pause in which the sound of his breathing alone filled the space between them.
Lamia groped for a blanket, unable to take her eyes from the filigree of scratches etched across Lupeni’s back. She draped the blanket around his shoulders, but still she didn’t speak. What was she? Why had she come back? An hour ago, even ten minutes ago, she might have known the answer to those questions.
What was he? She thought she knew who he was, too, but that kept changing. If he had a pack, it meant he kept company with other werewolves, and had probably been one for longer than she suspected. The realization hit her suddenly, painfully, that if she could only figure out who he was, she might know herself again.
But that was crazy.
She pulled off the bloodstained shirt she wore and put on a clean one, wrestling to free her hair where the shirt tangled on her hair clip, a heavy gold piece she had gotten from an old gypsy in Bucharest years ago.
“I was, am, a vampire, it’s true,” she said harshly as she stood and returned to face Lupeni. He huddled beneath the blanket, regarding her with that same cunning she had seen in the eyes of the gray wolf last night. “But I don’t want—I didn’t come back for that. I want something different for myself.”
She broke off, still unable to meet his eyes, and knelt to collect the scraps of tape and paper wrappings. Then she picked up his clothes and shoved them toward him roughly. They were in shreds, but he could make do.
“You’d better go,” she said, desperately trying to add some note of finality to her voice. She was afraid now, afraid of what might happen if he stayed.
“Yeah,” he mumbled and tried to stand. His head brushed the roof of the tent as he swayed unsteadily, holding onto the clothes as if they could support him. He almost toppled over but she stood quickly, grabbing his arms and pulling him down again. He didn’t resist, but continued to stare at her, his tangled and matted hair falling all around his face.
He looked like a wild animal all of a sudden, and she needed him to look human. Gently she pushed the mess away from his face and gathered all the snarled strands together, letting them rest over one of his shoulders while she undid the clip from her own ponytail. Her hands glided over his neck as she fastened the gold piece in his hair. Those eyes of his were fixed on her own. Beyond the gray vortex, he waited.
Caleb raised a tentative hand and stroked her cheek. It felt smooth and cool. Was it what he expected? Surprisingly, her lips were warm when he kissed her a moment later. Perhaps they shared all the warmth they had between them as they clung together.
He wanted to surrender to her, but struggled against a craving to bite her. His werewolf wanted to sink his teeth playfully the way he did with Liszka, the only other female he’d ever known in this way. He was mad with a desire to nourish Lamia with all his warmth, until he would be left a cold and lifeless husk.
He felt his wolf growl gently as he kissed her, and then almost succeeded in banishing the beast as she pulled back slightly from the kiss. She kissed him gently along the line of his jaw, under his ear, and down his neck. He plunged his fingers into her hair, which was redolent with her perfume. The long, dark strands slipped through his fingers like fine sand at the beach.
They clung to each other, oblivious to the darkness and confusion churning outside. For an instant, the clouds ripped apart to let loose a shaft of sunlight—a gift from the gods—to light up their lonely struggle. For an instant, their darkness was banished and they could both remember what it meant to believe in beautiful dreams.
31. Who’s Got Your Back?
He’d never seen her at the castle before, but even from far off she was unmistakable, with her windswept red-brown hair and her short summer dress of undyed wool. She ran straight and fast, disappearing from view as she approached the high outer wall.
Caleb turned back to his gardening, knowing she had a quarter mile up the rocky trail before she reached the castle. This early autumn afternoon had brought the first peepings of the bernacae, and he was in the greenhouse seeing if they were ready to hatch. The green, leafy pods, held to the trunk by their beaks, would die if they hit dry ground. If they fell into water, they split down the center and small birds with black webbed feet emerged. The bernacae acted as messengers between the worlds of land, air, and water, able to speak to fish, birds, and people. In his irreverent inner mind, Caleb called them “vegetable ducks.”
The pods seemed in no imminent danger of bursting, but to be safe he dipped a pail of water from the running spring along the greenhouse wall and placed it under the tree. Then he left the castle by the stable gate to greet the leader of the Fives.
The tanned young woman came sprinting up the path, bare feet impervious to the gravel.
“Hi, Liszka,” he said politely. “It’s been a while. It’s good to see you.”
She rolled her eyes in disgust at his dry pleasantries, and kissed him on the nose as if they were still mates. He had forgotten how nice she smelled.
“I’m not here to chat, Lupeni,” she said, her voice tense. “There is something I need to tell you. The Sixes have deposed Vl
ad.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” he asked in mild surprise.
“Deposed, not killed,” she clarified, beginning to sound angry. “He came back to his territory at the new moon covered with wounds and crying for his parents. Something destroyed his mind.”
“All right,” said Caleb calmly. “Why don’t you come in and have some tea and tell me what you know.” He knew that she’d be hungry after running here, and having something to eat might make her a bit less temperamental.
Liszka scrunched up her face in annoyance that he didn’t seem to be taking this seriously, but she stood patiently as he undid the wards and let them through the old kitchens and into the Great Hall.
Mihail gave Caleb the glare he reserved for werewolves in the castle, but he courteously served them tea and meat pies in front of the fireplace. He seemed somewhat daunted by Liszka and she, in turn, was taken aback by him, fighting laughter when he said, “Will that be all, Mr. O’Connor?”
After bringing their food he departed stiffly to his room, where he could sulk among the garlic and wolfsbane.
As Caleb had expected, she was hungry, eating with gusto as she told a wild tale about Vlad plotting with powerful, ancient vampires. They were all supposed to converge on the castle at the next full moon to kill Caleb and the other wizards.
“Who told you this?” he asked, trying to cover his skepticism.
“Sasha Alpha, the Sixes’ new leader. He didn’t even have to fight Vlad to take over. Vlad lay on the ground for three days, crying. I think the vampires tortured him.”
“He got too close to a leptothrix, most likely,” said Caleb, wondering what illusion would so torment Vlad. He had certainly shown up at the caves last month, battling Caleb in the only way he knew. And there had been a vampire there who had drained Mike for the second time, but it was hard to imagine the events were related.
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