If she showed up at work. She’d left the office last night without saying good-bye, and she wasn’t at home when I went there to change clothes. I needed to talk to her about DeWayne Carter. Why had she lied to Peter when she’d seen his picture with that alias? What was she doing in the cemetery? Why was she leaving a devil pod in her office? She could be in danger—and not only from a boxenwolf. The guy she’d brought out here to keep away from her brother could be more than a drug dealer. He could have killed that girl at the Sportsmen’s.
Peter’s car wasn’t hard to find; it was at the entrance to the park. I hid mine around a curve up the street and walked down and stood by the gate in the wet darkness, letting my vampyre senses flare. I could see, just barely, maybe eighty feet through the fog. More, certainly, than any human, but not enough to discern anything save reeds and trees on either side of the road leading down the hill. I knew where the duck pond was, though; I’d filmed there several times. Anyone who’d ever watched The Andy Griffith Show’s opening credits would recognize the area. Or The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I started walking into the blackness.
I was still a quarter mile from the pond when I heard the sound of ducks in the water. And something pounding against wood. Peter must have found SuzieQ because I picked up his scent and a female scent close by. And something else—farther away; something putrid and briny. The way Maral had smelled when she came home with DeWayne Carter.
The pounding stopped and I heard voices: Peter’s and SuzieQ’s. I couldn’t understand them at first—she was talking about killing President Nixon—and then Peter shouted, “Police!” That briny smell flooded my senses. In an instant, I was at the water’s edge. I knew Peter and Suzie couldn’t see me—the fog was impenetrable—but I moved behind a copse of live oak just in case. I didn’t want them to know I was there. Peter had already gotten pissed when I suggested he might need me to deal with the female were, and it probably hadn’t helped that I’d been right. I didn’t want to challenge that male ego again unless I had to, to save his life. And I definitely didn’t want to expose my true self to SuzieQ.
The briny smell was coming from DeWayne Carter. I watched while he came out of hiding in the bushes and Peter ordered him down on the ground. And then I realized what it was I’d heard when I touched that dead girl’s body in the Coroner’s office. It was the sound of an alligator in a death roll. Now it was coming from DeWayne.
SuzieQ screamed at the same moment I recognized DeWayne for what he was—a rougarou.
Peter fired at him as DeWayne started shifting. The bullet missed DeWayne and grazed my elbow. Damn it, how would I explain that when I gave SuzieQ back her sweatshirt? I barely felt it, but by the time I looked up from the wound, Peter and the rougarou were underwater. SuzieQ was racing towards a huge rock on the side of the pond; she had a sheet in her hands.
I waited. Rougaroux aren’t really vampyre and they’re not werebeasts. They can be killed as easily as a human, and Peter had a gun. If he’d just use it. What the hell was he waiting for? How long could he stay underwater?
Suddenly, SuzieQ was jumping on the back of the roug and tying his snout with the sheet. Then Peter fired, and fired again and again, and the damn thing was finished. I was glad I’d waited. I knew he could do it. And I didn’t really want to get in that water.
More than that, I didn’t want to expose myself to either one of them. SuzieQ wouldn’t know what to think, and Peter would think I didn’t trust him, which wasn’t entirely true. I trusted Peter enough to tell him what I really am; enough to make love to him. I just didn’t trust him to be able to handle anything nonhuman by himself. That’s like asking a piranha to go up against a bear. No matter how sharp his teeth, the fish is going to need help.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
SuzieQ calmed down a lot faster than I expected. I wanted to get her to the car and turn on the heater, but I had to make sure there were no signs left of that glob of screwed-up DNA. All I needed was an early-morning hiker to find an alligator tail growing out of a wolf’s leg. I mean, come on . . . I was still learning the terms for some of the things I’d seen—boxenwolves and loup-garoux and weres—but this creature wasn’t even one identifiable thing! “What the hell is a rougarou, SuzieQ? And how do you know about them?” I’d moved down to the water’s edge and was searching for body parts. “And how did you know to tie his snout like that?”
“Well, he’s part alligator, ain’t he? My daddy used to work summers in Brazos Bend State Park and he was always talkin’ about gators. How you could keep their mouths closed with your two hands ’cause they have real weak muscles for openin’ their mouths. He used to wrap duct tape around their snouts when he was trappin’ ’em. I just figured the sheet could do the same thing.”
I couldn’t see anything in the water. Whatever was left must be twenty feet down. All of a sudden it struck me: Here I was with another murder solved, another perp dead, and no fucking way to explain it to the Captain. What was I going to do, tell him the guy who killed Graciella de la Garza was lying in pieces at the bottom of another duck pond—and oh, by the way, they were pieces of a man-wolf-alligator? Fuck me a duck. “But that DeWayne thing was some kind of aberration, SuzieQ—some fucking supernatural monster. That’s like seeing Sasquatch or something. Bigfoot. What do you mean, you didn’t think it was real? How do you even know about it to begin with?” I couldn’t tell her this was one in a long list of Island of Dr. Moreau escapees that I’d suddenly discovered existed—just in the last month since I’d met Ovsanna.
“I’m a Catholic girl from the South, Peter. Everybody knows ’bout rougaroux, especially Ovsanna’s friend Maral. She’s from the bayou, right? Hell, the rougaroux come from the bayou. I just never believed they really existed. I thought it was a tale the old people made up to scare us kids, just for the hell of it. Like a bogeyman. A rougarou’s a man who breaks the rules about eatin’ during Lent, and that makes him change into an alligator and a werewolf and a vampyre all rolled into one. He roams around at night, tormentin’ folks he runs into. Only this guy wasn’t roamin’ around at random. He was after you. He came to your house snoopin’ around, and when he couldn’t find you, he grabbed me to use as bait. That sure wasn’t random. He told me Maral McKenzie sent him lookin’ for you.” She stood up and squeezed some of the water out of her pajamas. They were pale blue flannel, a western motif with rattlesnakes and armadillos and wooden rail fences printed on them. She was so tall, they ended two inches above her anklebone.
“There’s a lot going on, SuzieQ, and I can’t tell you most of it. Maral McKenzie brought him here from Louisiana, supposedly because she wanted to get him away from dealing drugs to her brother. That’s all I know for sure.” I didn’t tell her he was probably the perp in the Sportsmen’s Lodge murder. The less she knew about him, the better.
“Well, I can tell you somethin’, sugar. I think Ms. McKenzie wants you dead. I told you, didn’t I? Weeks ago, when you were thinkin’ she was the Cinema Slayer? I told you to be careful of her. She’s got the hots for Ovsanna Moore and you’re movin’ in on her territory. And she’s from the South, Peter. You know southern women will do just about anythin’ to keep their man. Or in this case—woman.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Once again, I could smell Peter’s blood. The rougarou had sliced his back with its tail spikes, and what hadn’t washed away in the pond was drying under his torn T-shirt. I could use my saliva to heal the cuts, but I’d have to wait until he told me what happened. Instead, I stayed hidden long enough to make certain he and SuzieQ were all right.
I heard SuzieQ talking about Maral, and finally I understood what was happening. SuzieQ was right. Everything she told Peter about DeWayne and Maral made sense. Maral hadn’t been using magick to make DeWayne go away. She wanted Peter out of my life. That’s what the spells were for. The animal hairs on his walkway; the pinholes in that candle stub in Thomas’s wastebasket. That’s why she was burying that pepper-covered candle in the cemet
ery. And when those hadn’t worked, somehow she’d found out what DeWayne was and she’d arranged for him to attack Peter. Maral had arranged for Peter’s death.
Rage flooded through me. I felt the change coming on, anger taking control of my body. If I didn’t calm down, I was going to have to drive with my fucking claws out and my fangs in place, seeing everything in shades of gray and having to concentrate on which traffic light was lit. Instantly, I shifted to my car, way ahead of Peter and SuzieQ. I sat hidden in the dark, breathing slowly and deeply to keep myself from changing. It took all my concentration to drive back to the house.
Maral was asleep when I got there, her red hair fanned out on her pillow like an Avedon photo of Suzy Parker from the fifties. I’d pounded up the stairs, intent on pulling her out of bed and throwing her against a wall.
She looked so innocent sleeping there in her pale pink nightshirt. I watched her soft breath, her arms flung open atop the sheets, her wrists exposed. Those pale, slender veins throbbing under the flawless skin; not a sign of the hundreds of times I’d pierced her in the decade since we’d met. I loved running my tongue up and down the inside of her arms, brushing my lips on her skin ever so lightly before penetration. I’d been feeding on Maral for nearly nine years. She’d been my confidante, my assistant, my lover, and my life’s blood. It had never been an equal partnership, but it had always fulfilled each of our needs. It worked for us. Until now.
I thought about what she’d tried to do, and my anger intensified.
“Maral,” I said, my voice so cold that I didn’t recognize it, “wake up.”
She opened her eyes. When she saw the look on my face, she pulled away to the far side of the bed, holding the blanket to her neck as if it could protect her.
“You tried to kill him, didn’t you,” I said. My words came out strangled.
“Who? What are you talking about?” Her face, already pale from morning sleep, drained of all color. The red began leaching from her hair, and I knew I was changing. The whites of my eyes filled with minuscule threadlike veins; soon they would be glowing red.
“You fucking bitch!” I growled, and this time I did throw her against the wall. My talons dug into the muscled flesh of her upper arms and I heaved her from the bed, pinning her to the full-length mirror across the room. I looked past her for a moment and saw my snarling face reflected back at me, lips pulled open, fangs descending. Talk about a money shot—it was a shame I couldn’t use that on-screen. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Maral. You’ve been using hoodoo to get Peter out of my life. And when that didn’t work, you used DeWayne Carter. DeWayne Carter killed that girl at the Sportsmen’s Lodge and you knew it and you sicced him on Peter!”
“I didn’t know he was a rougarou when I brought him here, Ovsanna. I swear it. I just wanted to get him away from Jamie. I didn’t figure out what he was until I saw that picture of him that Peter said was the killer. And then I thought about what you saw when you touched her body—about how she’d been killed like a gator would—and I figured it out.”
“And what . . . once you realized what he was, you decided to put him to work? Are you fucking nuts? Maral—he tried to kill Peter King!”
“I know that! I convinced him to do it! He was ranting about that girl being a dealer and trying to charge him street prices, even though they had the same supplier, and how he got so pissed off he ‘let the ol’ rougarou out and they took care of business.’ He said sometimes it pays to have a curse on you, and I said, Well, now he had the cops on him, and if Peter King showed up to arrest him, he could kiss his movie career good-bye. And that’s all I had to do. I just gave him Peter’s address and went home and put on my black bustier and crotchless panties to wait for you.”
“Why?!” I could barely speak, I was so enraged.
“Because I tried everything else. I used his business card and the ring you gave me, and I made a Breakup Spell and a Come to Me Spell. I left the animal hairs with the pins and nails at his doorstep. I prayed to the Little Cajun Saint, because that’s the only saint I know besides the football players. I poured breakup oil on a candle and pricked it with a rusty nail and threw the pieces far away from each other. I even poured hyssop tea on myself. Nothing I read about worked! He’s taking you away from me. I can’t let him do that. I won’t. You’re my whole life. Please, Ovsanna, you have to understand!”
I lost it. What little control I had once I’d changed was gone. Maral was squirming in my grasp, blood flowing from the rendering my talons had made in her flesh. The sanguinolent perfume was overwhelming. Coupled with my rage, it drove me to pure instinct, and I watched in the mirror, like I was watching one of my own horror films, as I drove my fangs deep into Maral’s throat.
The blood flowed out faster than I could swallow. I must have pierced her jugular, but I didn’t care. She writhed and bucked and begged me to release her, but I reveled in her juices—rubbing that rich red viscous liquid all over my face and eyes and throat. Sucking as hard as I could. Drinking as fast as I could. Swallowing as much as I could.
Minutes passed and her body quieted.
“Ovsanna,” she whispered.
I pulled my mouth away and looked in her eyes. Those beautiful gray-green eyes. She was dying. Blood pumped from her throat, even without my lips there to draw it out.
“I’m sorry, Ovsanna. I love you. I didn’t want to lose you.”
My rage had abated along with my Thirst. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t want to kill her. I couldn’t forgive her and I couldn’t trust her, but I didn’t want to kill her. In the mirror behind her, I barely recognized myself. Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline was there. Ovsanna Moore wasn’t. I stared at myself for a long minute, thinking back to the Turkish massacres in my homeland at the beginning of the last century. I had slaughtered indiscriminately until then, the first 350 years of my life, whenever I needed to feed; but seeing the brutality leveled against those Armenian villagers had overwhelmed me. Hundreds of thousands of them raped, tortured, and butchered or forced into the desert to die of starvation. Children. Babies. I couldn’t face being a part of that. It left me searching for a way to control my nature. And eventually I learned.
But the vampyre I was seeing in the mirror had forgotten what I had learned.
I stared at my reflection, willing myself back in control.
“Maral, listen to me. Can you hear me?” Nothing I could do would stop the bleeding. This wasn’t a simple puncture wound that I had made; I couldn’t close it and heal it with my saliva. There was only one thing I could do. If it had been anyone else I cared for, I wouldn’t hesitate, but no one else I cared for was as unstable as Maral had become. Would I be able to control her if I saved her? Look what happened to Rudy when I turned him. How much more unbalanced would she be?
“Maral, can you hear what I’m saying?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was thready. She looked so innocent. So helpless.
“I’m not going to let you die. I can turn you. Do you understand?” I wouldn’t do it without her agreement.
She opened her eyes and stared at me.
“Do you understand, Maral? Will you let me turn you? You will become one of my kind. It’s the only way I can give you your life.”
She nodded and moved her lips. I bent closer to them, her blood dripping from my mouth to her cheeks.
“Turn me,” she whispered.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
I held Maral in my arms as best I could while she underwent the transformation from her genus to mine. As angry as I was at her betrayal, I still wished there were some way I could lessen the violent agony brought on by the change.
I couldn’t. The pain was excruciating, I knew. I’d held Rudy and Ty and several others when they turned, watching them writhe and buck as they sucked on my nipples, with their insides ripping apart and rearranging themselves. It starts like the burn you get when you’ve
been working out—that feeling of hardness, of muscles expanding. Only it isn’t just the muscles, it’s everything inside pushing out. Like that moment before orgasm when you know you’re going over the edge, you’re going to explode, and there’s no pulling back. But with the turning, there’s no release, there’s no explosion. Just a consistent swelling, until the fullness becomes pain. An aching at first, throbbing, then sharper, a rolling pain that moves like waves through the body. And burns. Ty described it as a white-hot flame searing him from the inside out. Rudy said he felt as though someone were tearing his organs from their membranes, moving them around, scrambling them. Enkindling him from within. The only thing that lessened the pain was the sucking.
It was hours before Maral’s body stopped seizing and she lay limp in my arms. I slid out from under her and went to her closet for a robe. The French doors were open. A sharp December breeze tossed the curtains around, but Maral’s skin was unblemished by the cold. Just like mine. I covered her and moved across the room to sit. She opened her eyes.
“You’re alive,” I said.
“What happened? What did you do to me? The pain . . . is it over?”
“Yes, Maral. The pain is gone.”
“Am I . . . am I like you now?” She’d begun to shake.
“You are. You are vampyre now. You were dying—it was the only way I could save you. And you agreed, do you remember?”
She wrapped her arms around herself to lessen the tremors. She nodded. “You asked if you could turn me, didn’t you? I was moving toward a great brightness, but I didn’t want to leave you, and I said yes. I remember that. How long ago was that? What time is it, is it Friday afternoon?”
We both looked at the clock. It was one twenty. I expected Peter to show up at my door any minute with an arrest warrant for Maral.
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