“Are you telling me to grow the fuck up and play the hand I’ve been dealt?”
“I’m telling you to deal with the fact that you aren’t a werewolf. You’re a vampire; that’s who you are as much as what you are.”
Pixi considered him; the lines of his face, the color of his eyes. Was he right? She wasn’t sure. No matter what he said, she would never be the vampire he or any of the other vampires like him wanted her to be. She would never own a club and spend the night drinking blood and having sex. There was more to life than that.
“We have a job to do,” she said, continuing to walk down the street. “Let’s just focus on that.”
Lionel followed her, his footfalls echoing like little intermittent claps in the dead of night. Up ahead, on the left, was the area they were heading to. The almost never-ending row of low-rise apartment buildings gave way to a flat, level block surrounded by a concrete wall topped with razor wire and floodlights. A placard hanging in the middle of a gap in the concrete wall, above what looked like a security booth, read Marv’s Scrap.
Wraith had set up shop inside a junkyard.
Pixi stood across the road from it and ran her eyes along the wall. It was once grey, but was now covered in graffiti, most of it obscene, the rest of it nonsensical to anyone who didn’t know a thing about gang-tags. The junkyard represented another border between two rival gangs, and the constantly changing graffiti showed what gang happened to have control of it on a given night. If you looked closely enough, you could see bullet holes in the wall itself.
Pixi crossed the street and checked inside Wraith’s car, which she spotted easily enough given how closely acquainted she had become with it. Empty. The hole she had made in the roof with her claws had been covered by with layer upon layer of duct tape. Spots of fine rain began to appear on the driver’s side window, distorting Pixi’s reflection.
“They’re here,” she said to Lionel as he approached.
Lionel turned his eyes toward the security booth. There was someone in there; a man wearing a uniform. Probably a security guard. “You’d better wait here and let me do the talking.”
“Talking?” she asked. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Do you expect we’ll be able to just walk in there and make all the noise we want without attracting unwanted attention? How long before that fat security guard hits the alarm and brings the cops down on us?”
“Cops?” she asked. “You clearly don’t know this side of the heights.”
“Oh, well, then in that case he’ll call his private security buddies over. The point is we can’t just waltz in there. So, stay here, and let me do the talking.”
Pixi clenched her jaw. “Fine,” she said. “But make it quick.”
Lionel nodded and slipped away, hopping onto the sidewalk and heading over to the security booth. She watched him approach and start talking; he was asking about opening hours, mentioned wanting to find an old banged up car to fix up—a roadster maybe. The guard resisted at first, repeating that the junkyard was closed, but seemed to relax once Lionel started talking about cars and this fake project he was working on.
Not wanting to waste another second, and noticing how distracted the guard was, Pixi approached the wall and steadily stalked along it until she reached the gap where Lionel and the security guard were talking. When the guard wasn’t looking, she took the opportunity and slipped into the junkyard.
Marv’s was a square of wasteland in the middle of the city. Shaking piles of dead and broken cars were stacked high here, stripped of everything of any value, leaving only rusting carcasses heaped one on top of the other, waiting to be fed into the crusher. In the distance, somewhere, a dog was barking. A big dog, by the sound of it. There were lights scattered around the junkyard, too, but these were few and far between, creating plenty of artificial, jagged, shadowy areas for Pixi to move through.
She walked along the wet gravel and the mud toward the nearest stack of cars and pressed her back up against it. From here she could see Lionel talking to the security guard; they were chatting about sports now, though his voice barely broke through the howl of the breeze; an eerie sound amplified and warped by the artificial wind tunnels created here.
He was taking too damn long.
Pixi turned around and headed deeper into the junkyard, treading carefully, with her back to the nearest row of hollowed out vehicles. Though this didn’t seem to be the kind of place to allow derelicts, she caught herself checking the cab of whatever car she happened to be passing, making sure there was no one inside, huddled under a blanket of cardboard boxes and just trying to make it through the night.
When she reached the end of the aisle, a walk that took a few minutes, she found herself staring at a wide, open clearing, in the center of which stood what looked like a large metal box with windows. Voices were floating out from inside; rowdy, raucous laughter. Floodlights positioned on the corners of the cabin illuminated its immediate surroundings, shedding light on a mess of scattered debris—car parts, mainly—and the large, hulking shape of a crane and the yard’s crusher. Standing freely outside the metal box were not one, but three large dogs; Rottweilers, Pixi figured. All three seemed to be taking turns barking viciously at the cabin in the center of the clearing, while at the same time keeping their distance from it.
Pixi knew what this was; they were challenging the predators lurking inside.
She was down-wind from the dogs, and knew they wouldn’t be able to smell her. Vampires didn’t have body odor of any kind, but cats and dogs had an uncanny ability to sense them all the same. Werewolves, too. She would need to be careful.
The door suddenly opened with enough force to swing right around on its hinges and slam the cabin wall. A man emerged, laughing and mumbling something incoherently. It was Wraith. He staggered out and walked into the middle of the clearing, cackling like he had just heard the world’s funniest, dirtiest joke. At one point, he tilted his head up to the sky and almost yowled into the night from the sheer joy of it all.
“Here poochie, poochie, poochie,” Wraith said to the Rottweilers as he approached them, a heavy slur to his words. The dogs were now backing away from him, hackles raised, growling and bearing their teeth. He zipped his fly open, whipped his junk out and let a stream of hot urine fly in the direction of the dogs. “Want a drink, doggies?” he asked. “There you go; good doggies. Good doggies!”
The wind blew the urine toward the dogs, who shook their heads and continued to growl, but never approached.
Pixi tightened her grip around a car door and grit her teeth. Her jaw was beginning to hurt, and her fangs were starting to extend almost of their own volition. In seconds her mouth felt too small for her own teeth, and she parted her lips as her fangs continued to descend, almost as if they could anticipate a fight about to happen.
Wraith continued to cackle. He was advancing on the dogs now, the urine leaving trails of steam in the cold night air. When he finished, he shook his junk vigorously, almost tauntingly, at the dogs. “You hungry too?” he asked, laughing as if he were the most amusing man in the world. “Come and get it, you little pieces of shit. C’mon. C’mon, poochie. Come get that sausage!”
He broke out into hysterics as he put himself away, then turned his back on the dogs and kicked at the dirt like a cat burying its shit in a litter box. Pixi saw how the dogs were a moment away from pouncing on him, if only they had the opportunity to, and started to move on Wraith, but someone grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her into the shadows again.
Pixi turned and took a swing with her fist at whoever dared touch her, but succeeded only in slamming her hand into a rusted old car chassis. The bang her fist made against the car resounded throughout the junkyard, but didn’t seem to alert Wraith or the dogs, probably because he was laughing so hard. Lionel put his hands up.
“It’s just me,” he said, “Pixi, it’s just me.”
She looked at her knuckles and noticed she had split the skin, but blood
didn’t seep out of the wound. “I could have killed you,” she said.
“You’d have killed yourself first if you’d tried to do what I think you were going to do.”
“He needs to die.”
“No, he needs to be taken in front of Murdock. If you go after him now, his pack will be on you in three seconds flat, and this time they won’t try to burn you alive.”
Pixi stared at Lionel, considering him, trying to let his words sink in, but all she could think about was how she would have loved to bite into that small, fleshy piece of meat dangling between Wraith’s legs and rip it off with her mouth. Her eyes fell on the werewolf again, but he was gone; disappeared beyond the cabin door.
“You just cost me my kill,” Pixi said.
“If you kill him,” Lionel said, “You don’t get your home back. Or your shop. You can’t help anyone if you or he are dead.”
“God dammit. Fine. What’s your plan?”
Lionel turned his eyes up at the shadow of the crane looming overhead.
“You know how to operate that thing?” Pixi asked.
“How hard can it be?” he asked, shrugging.
Chapter Eleven
Pixi and Lionel stalked around the junkyard, hoping to approach the crane from a different angle, but this place was a labyrinth of highly stacked husks shifting precariously with the wind. At the end of an aisle on the far side of the cabin, Pixi noticed an opening through a tunnel of jagged, metal edges, and went for it, emerging on the other side at the base of the crane.
A loud tear caused Pixi to look back at Lionel. The arm of his blazer had torn on a jutting piece of metal.
“Fuck,” he said, checking the shoulder he had ripped.
“Really?” Pixi asked, “I’ve got a burned face and you’re complaining about ripping your suit?”
“Your skin will heal. This suit cost three thousand dollars.”
Pixi reached for his arm, pulled him close, and bit into the suit, tearing another chunk of it open with her teeth.
Lionel yanked his arm away, scowling. “What the fuck?”
“Now it’s matches. You can make it a fashion statement.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Just get in the cabin, will you?”
Lionel put his foot on the step ladder and hoisted himself up into the driver’s cockpit of this towering eyesore of a claw crane. He tried the door, and it opened. He then stepped inside, sat down, and gave Pixi a thumbs up. The keys were inside. She climbed up after him, though she did so more deftly than he had done.
“So?” she asked, looking at the knobs, gears and controls. “Can you work this thing?”
“Probably not, but I’ll give it a shot.”
“There’s a chance, the moment you turn this on, that someone’s going to hear… something.”
“We could do with a distraction, then.”
“How am I supposed to distract them?”
“I don’t know.”
Lionel looked over the controls and touched the different gears and knobs. “I’m starting to think this was a bad idea.”
Pixi looked around and noticed, out of the corner of her eye, something she hadn’t seen before. It had been dark outside, and the floodlights, from ground level, threw shadows on everything they were directly shining their lights upon—including the crane. From down below she hadn’t seen the car clamped in the crane’s mighty jaws. It swung gently, the night air pushing it this way and that.
“That’s just great,” Lionel said. “So we have to set that thing down before we can use the crane on anything else, too?”
“Maybe not,” Pixi said, reaching into the cab. She grasped what looked like a lever marked Emergency Clamp Release and looked across the way. The crane had picked the car up from a spot not far from the main cabin. It was likely the operator had intended on dumping it into the waiting crusher not far from where the car hung now but had gotten distracted. If she pulled the lever, she knew, the car would fall right where it had been picked up. It wouldn’t fall on the cabin, but it would make a hell of a lot of noise.
“When I say,” Pixi said, “I want you to pull this thing.”
“Are you serious?” he asked.
Pixi didn’t answer, instead she swung around to the front of the cabin and started to pull herself up the length of the crane, using the hand-holds installed into the sides. She climbed with all the skill of a spider monkey, making it to the top in only a couple of seconds. When she reached the peak, she stared directly down toward the claw and the car below, and judged the distance from the area of impact to the cabin.
Thirty feet, at a guess, and well away from the dogs.
The ruckus coming from the cabin drifted upward, reaching her ears as an echoed, disjointed string of voices. What were they talking about? Why were they here? She thought maybe Wraith knew the owner, which suited her just fine. The kind of deplorable person happy to align himself with a man like Wraith deserved to have his front-yard smashed up. And if he was innocent, well, innocent people got hurt in Crow’s Heights every single day.
A crow came up and perched alongside Pixi as she sat, balancing on the crane’s edge. She looked over at its reflective eyes and it turned its head, then cawed. Pixi’s insides vibrated at the sound, as if she were a single guitar string, and it the guitar player. She tilted her head, and it tilted its head along with her.
“What do you want?” she asked.
The crow cawed, and Pixi’s entire chest vibrated again, only she couldn’t understand why, and wasn’t any closer to figuring out what it wanted.
She shooed it, and the crow took off into the night, sailing away into the Ashwood skyline of glittering rectangles, each striving to reach the clouds. When she turned her eyes down at the cabin again, she noticed by the new rectangle of light falling on the clearing, that the door had been opened. A moment later, Wraith’s pack came spilling out one by one.
Pixi’s eyes widened. The first wolf had stepped out and positioned himself directly beneath the car. A moment later, one of his friends joined him. By some stroke of dark luck, two of them were under the crane. A crow cawed distantly. Pixi turned her head to see if she could find it, but couldn’t. When she looked down at floor level again, three of Wraith’s friends were standing beneath the crane, talking about hitting up a strip club somewhere.
If the car fell, and they didn’t notice, would it kill them? She had no idea. Werewolves were tough as nails, but she just wasn’t sure. At the same time, she wouldn’t have another chance to incapacitate three werewolves with a single stroke—assuming the impact would hurt them at all.
She turned her head, found Lionel with her eyes, and made a downward-swipe gesture with her hand. Pixi then held tightly to the crane. Lionel pulled on the lever, and the crane opened its mouth with a rusty, metallic whine. The wolves looked up just as the banged up old husk of a car came crashing down on them, causing an explosion of sound so loud it seemed to shake the very ground itself.
But the werewolves had been faster than Pixi had thought. They scattered, the dogs with them, then Wraith came screaming out of the cabin, still clutching the bottle of whiskey he had probably been sucking on all night. He was followed closely by a guy with a bald patch on his head wearing blue overalls. Pixi didn’t recognize him, but judging by the logo embroidered into the overalls, she guessed he was Marv.
Pixi let her mouth fall open a little more, allowing a cool breath of air into her throat. She pulled her hoody down over her head, drew her gun, and did something she had only ever done once before; she threw herself off the crane. The wind blew through her hair as she descended, her eyes fixed on the ground.
When she landed in a crouched pose, she hit the ground gently enough to be able to keep her back straight and far enough away from the car so as to not be immediately spotted. With the men still busy trying to figure out how the hell the crane had fallen, Pixi launched herself into the fray, her gun arm extended, and put three bullets into the backs of
three legs belonging to three different werewolves.
Howls of anger and pain went roaring into the night as the silver caps tore into werewolf flesh, sending clouds of hot, rich blood into the air. All three went down immediately, squirming and screaming and holding the steaming wounds on their legs. She wasn’t sure they would die from the car falling on them, but she knew they wouldn’t die from this.
The silver would just hurt like a bitch, and prevent them from changing form so long as it was in their bodies.
“You!” Wraith said, smashing the bottle of whiskey against the floor. “I thought I fucking killed you!”
Marv yelped, turned tail, and ran back into his cabin, shutting the door behind himself.
“You didn’t stick around long enough; rookie mistake for an alpha,” she hissed. Pixi let the gun drop to the ground and leapt toward Wraith, her mouth open, fangs ready to bite into his skin. She wouldn’t shoot him, though—not yet. She wanted a fight.
By the time she had reached him, he had started to shift into his don’t-fuck-with-me form. The bones around his face had begun to reshape, pushing out his eyebrows, his nose, his jaw, and causing tough ridges of solid bone to appear all along his forehead. But the drink had made him slow, and Pixi was on him before his transformation could complete.
They toppled and rolled along the dirt. In an instant she got the better of him and dragged her right hand along his face, splitting his skin open wherever her claws touched. Delicious blood poured out of the wound, covering his face within seconds. Wraith jabbed her in the ribs, a solid hit with his left fist. She ignored the blow and went for his neck, fangs barred, and sank them into his meaty jugular.
Blood so hot it could have scorched her throat exploded from his neck in a delicious gush, and Pixi drank deeply of him while he flailed and kicked. But the drink was short-lived. He grabbed her by her hair and pulled. Pixi screamed and thrashed around, swiping at his face with her claws, but his reach was longer than hers and she couldn’t get to him. When he struck her across the jaw with his strong, right hook, Pixi saw stars. Her jaw had fractured from the hit, she was sure, and pain reverberated throughout her body.
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 75