I grabbed a handful of them and brought her face up to meet my lips. I kissed her, hard at first because I couldn’t wait any longer, because I’d been thinking about it for the hour it had taken me to get there and all the hours before, my lips grinding against hers and feeling the shock of her response. And then softer and gentler, exploring just her lips, not her mouth; not sure what I’d find there when I ran my tongue over her teeth, not quite ready for anything nonhuman.
She pulled away and looked up at me. Her eyes were huge. Liquid black. She was smiling. “Pardon the pun,” she said, “but . . . would you like to come inside?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Peter looked so sexy that it was all I could do to keep from throwing him down on the porch and fucking him right then and there. He had on jeans, a leather jacket, black Johnny Ramone Vans, and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. The jeans fit. The T-shirt fit even better. I didn’t give a shit about the Vans.
Without my heels, my head just grazed his chin. He made me feel small and feminine, and I liked that. That’s not the way I see myself, so it’s fun for a change. I was smiling when I led the way into the living room.
But when I turned around to resume our embrace, he walked past me towards the back windows.
“There’s someone out there,” he said, pressing his face against the glass. “I just saw movement down on the beach.” I saw him reach his hand around to touch the small of his back and realized that’s where he had his gun.
“It’s just a fan, I think. Or a photographer with nothing better to do on a slow news night. He can’t see in. The windows are tinted for privacy. And he can’t get any closer than the beach, so you can relax. If he gets really annoying, I’ll turn into a pelican and go down and poke out his eyes.” It was a new experience: teasing about my true nature. I was having fun. Maral’s the only other human who knows what I am, and her sense of humor ends with using “Werewolves of London” for her ring tone.
Peter wasn’t smiling, though. He declined my offer of wine or something to drink and perched on the edge of the sofa, waiting for me to sit opposite. “I can’t relax, Ovsanna,” he said, “not until I can explain why I came out here, and why I’m not staying.”
I felt the blood begin to pound in my body. My skin started to flush. “I thought the reason you came out here was to stay. What was that kiss you just gave me?” Anger flashed through me. I was aroused, wanting desperately to change. I tried to stay calm long enough to let him talk.
“Look, Ovsanna, you know I’m attracted to you. Every minute we’ve been together since Christmas has been leading up to this. It was all I could think about, driving up here. I want to make love to you. I have the feeling if I do, I’ll never want to stop. And that would be great, if I didn’t have a job to do. But I do.” He stood up and walked back to the window. “I mean, I’ve already done it, but no one knows that except you and me and your . . . fucking vampyres! No one else knows the Cinema Slayer is dead. So I can’t close the case. And you were involved in the case. Hell, Maral was even a suspect for a while. So as long as the case is open, I can’t sleep with you! I can’t even see you without a good excuse for the Captain. Do you understand that?” He turned back and looked at me with such pleading in his eyes that I couldn’t let my anger overwhelm me.
But I couldn’t keep it under control, either. My fangs unsheathed and my eyes turned red. I was royally pissed. I’d been imagining this night for days now, and this was not what I’d imagined. My vision sharpened, but the color leached out of everything. Peter’s face was defined in shades of black and gray. I looked past him out the window at the photographer on the beach, and my frustration and rage found an immediate target for release. Fuck Peter King and his explanations. Fuck his attack of conscience and his integrity. I wanted to tear something apart. I wanted blood.
In an instant I was in the sand, screaming at the poor bastard with the camera. He stared at me with his mouth hanging open, stunned at my sudden appearance from nowhere. “What the fuck are you doing out here?” I screamed. “You’re trespassing, you son of a bitch!” Talk about misplaced anger. I tore the strap from around his neck and hurled his camera into the water. It was heavy, but I tossed it like a pebble.
I turned back, expecting to see him cowering. My fangs hadn’t dropped yet, but even in the dark, he’d seen my red eyes. And my voice, when I’m angry, can level a baseball stadium. They don’t call me the Scream Queen for nothing.
He wasn’t cowering. He had something around his neck, some sort of fur band, and he was rubbing it, muttering to himself. His human scent dissipated, replaced by something lupine and feral, and I knew in an instant what was happening. That band was a talisman; he was using black magic. His clothes ripped apart as his body changed shape, his shirt and jacket shredding at the seams. His haunches tore through his jeans as if they were tissue paper. The smell of wolf was eye-watering.
The paparazzo was a fucking boxenwolf. He’d used the talisman around his neck to shape-shift, and he was coming at me. What was it with me and wolves these days? First the monster were at the house in Bel Air and now this prick bastard. You’d think I was in heat or something.
The boxenwolf was big. Not as big as the werewolf from Saturday night, but big enough to give me trouble. Bigger than a Grey and a lot more vicious. He circled me, snarling and snapping. I extended my claws and dropped my fangs. Wolves are very expressive; you can see their emotions in their eyes. This one wasn’t surprised I was a vampyre.
He backed away from me and started howling. I moved in on him, slashing at his throat. The fur talisman protected his neck. I came away with clumps of mangy brown hair under my nails but no flesh. He backed away again, his hind legs in the tide. I didn’t understand why he was retreating—until fangs clamped around my bare leg and something powerful struck me from behind. I went down in the surf, and the rest of his pack attacked.
There were five of them. All wearing fur-pelt talismans around their necks. All boxenwolves. Powerful. Ferocious. I shoved myself up from the waves, used one hand to throw one of them—a gray-coated female—farther into the ocean, and sank my teeth into the snout of the male who had me by the leg. I shook him loose; he came away with a chunk of my calf in his mouth. The smell of my blood and his blood together worked on me like a shot of meth. I crushed his muzzle between my teeth.
The gray female was fighting the undertow twenty feet from shore. That left my buddy the photographer and his three pack mates. We had a moment’s standoff while the four of them circled me and I held down the fifth in the sand. The pain in his snout left him barely struggling. He was yipping instead.
And then again they attacked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ovsanna had barely heard my explanation and she was out the door. At least, I think she was out the door. She disappeared. One second I was telling her I couldn’t see her until I had some way to close the Cinema Slayer case, and the next she wasn’t there.
I called out for her. The house was silent; she wasn’t anywhere near me. The front door was locked from the inside, but I opened it and scanned the driveway. Nothing. My Jag was parked in front of the door. I popped the trunk, grabbed my jacket and my flashlight, and walked over to the south side of the house, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. Whatever moonlight there might have been was obliterated by fog; I couldn’t see past the cliff face. I could hear something, though. Ovsanna’s voice cut through the blackness. She was screaming.
I pulled my gun and made my way to the back of the house. I still couldn’t see the beach; the fog was impenetrable, a moving wall of gray moisture. Ovsanna had lights set low to the ground along a stone path in the grass, leading out to the edge of the cliff. I followed them. The face of the cliff on either side of the house was sheer granite, almost straight down. Huge boulders jutted out in the center. With the flashlight, I could barely make out the footholds they had carved in them—a stairway down to the sand.
It was blocked by a decorative iron gate w
ith some kind of keyless lock. The lock held the whole thing shut with a foot-long steel bar. I couldn’t shoot it off. The decorative parts were razor-sharp fleurs-de-lys across the top edge, some designer’s version of barbed wire. I looked around for something to stand on.
Ovsanna had stopped screaming. Instead, I heard coyotes. There must have been a pack of them, howling and yipping. I’d seen Ovsanna in action; I wasn’t too worried about her ability to handle a few coyotes. But I didn’t like hearing her scream, even if she was just pissed at me. And on second thought, what if the one thing vampyre powers didn’t work against was coyotes?
I hauled a patio table over to the gate, stacked a ladder on top of that, and scaled the fleur-de-lys spikes, putting just a few gouges in my legs. At least I was up-to-date on my tetanus. I used my flashlight to follow the stairs down the rocks.
Goddamn it, wouldn’t you know there’d be another gate at the bottom of the stairs. This one was just as tall, maybe sixteen feet. Same keyless lock. Same spikes.
I climbed back up the stairs to a point where I thought I’d cleared the top of the gate. The fog was so thick, I couldn’t be sure. I went up a couple more feet. Studied the face of the cliff in my light and then shoved it in my jeans, still on and facing up. Using the spaces in between the boulders for handholds, and feeling for places I could wedge my feet, I climbed onto the cliff, my body hanging vertically, and moved south, toward the sound of the coyotes. When I was sure I was past the side of the gate, I loosed one hand and foot and swung out so I was facing the ocean with my back to the rocks, grabbing on to the far boulders. Then I prayed for soft sand below me and let go.
I landed on my hands and knees. Nothing broke but the flashlight. The lid came off and the batteries rolled toward the water. The fog wasn’t quite as thick on the ground, but I didn’t bother trying to find them. Those howls I was hearing weren’t coyotes. Fifty feet away from me, Ovsanna was on the ground in the surf, surrounded by what looked like a pack of wolves.
I pulled out my Glock and fired into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Even over the growls and howling, I could hear someone coming, and then I smelled Peter—his scent and his blood. It was flooded with endorphins and adrenaline. He’s worried about me, I thought as I kicked the wolf closest to me in the ribs and heard bones crack. I didn’t want to call out to Peter because I didn’t want the boxenwolves to know he was there.
The wolf I’d kicked retreated behind the mangy brown one that had been a paparazzo minutes earlier. I understood now why he’d been on the beach: to get me out of the house and lure me down where his buddies could tear me apart. He lunged at me, teeth bared in a rabid snarl. I let loose the muzzle of the gray male and rolled to the left, just as a gun fired. The brown boxenwolf crashed onto the sand, all two hundred pounds of him, right on the spot where I’d just been. He was bleeding from his shoulder; Peter had hit him from the back, behind his right foreleg.
I used my claws to hamstring him, then threw myself on his back and tried to sink my teeth into his neck. The talisman was thick and wide, like one of those collars African tribeswomen wear to elongate their necks. I shredded it with my teeth and tore the thing off with my hands, spitting out flesh and fur. I had a momentary image of a blond woman in a fur coat, playing video games.
Peter fired two more shots. Either he trusted himself as a marksman or he wasn’t worried the bullets would harm me. He aimed past me at the three remaining beasts. They’d turned tail as soon as the brown one went down. They were racing down the beach. Faster than a speeding bullet, I guess, because Peter’s shots missed. The Grey with the crushed muzzle was gone, too. I didn’t see the female in the ocean. I don’t think she could have survived that undertow.
The brown boxenwolf was still alive, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Except back to his original shape. Peter got to my side just in time to see the wolf’s body shift back to its human form: pale-skinned, tall, and narrow-chested, with a round beer belly protruding over his skinny legs and little penis. No wonder he needed magic.
Peter covered him with his jacket, bent down, and shone his flashlight on his face. “What’s your name?” he asked, but the man was beyond speaking. Blood frothed out of his mouth and washed away in the surf. I sheathed my fangs, retracted my claws, and helped Peter pull his dead body onto dry sand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I holstered my gun and kept the flashlight on the body. “What the hell just happened?” I asked. “I was shooting at a wolf and there’s a dead man on the ground.”
“He’s the photographer we saw from the house. He was a boxenwolf, Peter. He was using magic to transform into a werewolf.”
“Magic? What kind of magic turns someone into an animal? I thought he was one of you. What the hell, Ovsanna? Are there more weirdos around than just vampyres and those things in Palm Springs? How much more of this supernatural shit am I supposed to buy? Goddamn it to hell!”
“I don’t know if I’d call it supernatural. It’s magic. He was using a talisman and a mantra. I saw him mumbling to himself before he changed. That wolf pelt was the talisman.” She motioned to a shredded strip of drenched fur lying next to the dead body. I picked it up and studied it. Looked like roadkill to me.
“And what about those other guys? I counted three wolves around you and one on the ground. Did they start out as humans, too?”
“Yes, I think so. There was another one in the water. I threw her out there, and I don’t think she made it back. They all had fur collars around their necks—pelt belts, I guess you could call them. Talismans. They were all boxenwolves, Peter. Five men and a woman using magic to shift. Running in a pack, just like regular wolves.”
“Who do you think they are? And why were they after you? Are they all paparazzi? Have you sued some tabloid lately?”
“The last time I had a problem with a tabloid was when the Enquirer printed I was using Botox to get rid of my wrinkles. Pissed me off. I can’t watch these actresses who distort their faces with that stuff. They can’t move their muscles and they expect to emote? They’re even using it on their children! And what’s the message they’re giving society—you’re only valuable if you’ve got an unlined mask for a face? I wouldn’t use it even if I needed it. I sued the damn magazine for a retraction.”
“Well, somebody’s out to get you. And this guy was a photographer, so that’s where I start.” I searched the area for a wallet or some kind of ID, but if he’d been carrying anything before he changed, the tides had taken it. There was no sign of anything that had just happened, except for his body. And that gave me an idea.
“Ovsanna, I’m going to go back to my car to get my gym bag out of the trunk. I’ve got a pair of sweats and a warm-up jacket that should fit this guy. Then we’re going to talk about what just happened. How you called me because you’d found a threatening note from the Cinema Slayer in your mailbox out on the highway, and how you’d taken a walk while you were waiting for me to arrive, and I’d gotten here just in time to see someone attacking you on the beach. Thank God you’d left the gates open.” I could see Ovsanna’s mind working as she understood what I was planning. She shook her head in surprise.
“I thought I was the horror writer,” she said. “Are you sure this is what we should do?”
“Look, this guy tried to kill you. We don’t know who he is, but we know he was running around as a werewolf. No one’s going to believe that. Just like no one will ever believe the Cinema Slayer was a Baby Jane look-alike who was born before Christ and has a bunch of werecreature kids running around. I can’t produce her body, even if I wanted to try to convince someone. And without a body, I can’t close the case. Well . . . here’s a body. A human body. He was after you, just like Lilith was, and I can’t think of one good reason why he won’t work as the Slayer in her place.”
I pulled out my cell phone to call the Coroner. “We’ve just got to get our stories straight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Peter and I went over the details of our version of the attack. The waves had washed away the pack’s paw prints and the photographer’s clothes, so there was no crime scene to explain. A chunk of my leg was either in the ocean or some wolf’s stomach. It didn’t matter; my body was already healing. In an hour, there wouldn’t be any sign I’d been attacked. Peter stripped down in the dark and put his briefs on the dead body for verisimilitude. I don’t think he realized what a heightened sense of vision I have when I choose to use it. I chose, all right. I’m glad I did.
Peter’s warm-up jacket was way too big on the guy. We soaked it in the water, along with the sweats. By the time the Coroner cut them off, they’d still be wet and clinging. We could easily explain Peter’s DNA—he’d carried the body out of the waves. Peter held the jacket in the sand and fired a bullet through it to match the spot on the body where his bullet had entered. The water was a blessing. They wouldn’t expect to find much blood; most of it would have been washed away. Along with the threatening note I would say I’d received. I’d had it in my hand when the man had attacked me.
I “remembered” what it said, though, almost verbatim: “I’ve killed your friends and your partner. You’re next. Aren’t you sorry you never hired me to take your head shots?” And it was signed “C.S.”
If that didn’t convince Peter’s Captain he’d killed the Cinema Slayer, I didn’t know what would.
The only thing we had trouble explaining was how I’d managed to sever the man’s hamstring. It took a while, but I finally found a broken abalone shell with a sharp edge. I sliced it deep along the cuts my claws had made on his leg.
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