“Did you?”
“Of course not.”
Even if he had, would he admit it? I had to hear his denial.
He clasped his hands again. The action reminded me of a nervous tic. “If anyone deserves to be the alpha of the territory, it is I.”
“How does that concern me?”
“An outsider, a vampire, takes him out—”
“You’re asking me to kill Randolph Calhoun? An alpha werewolf?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 2
I was brought to Charleston to murder a werewolf? I raised my hands. “Whoa, whoa, hold on to your leash. There’s one big problem. You asked me here to do an investigation, not an assassination. I’m no thug.”
Bourbon shrugged. “You’re a vampire, what’s the difference?”
No surprise that Bourbon had the same low opinion of vampires that I had of werewolves. To Bourbon, we vampires were scumbag indiscriminate killers who didn’t need much of an excuse to fang as long as we got to lap fresh blood. And to me, werewolves were oversize, barely housebroken mutts.
Bourbon tilted his head like a dog trying to figure me out. “I don’t understand. You get some money, we get some peace, everyone wins.”
“There’s an uneasy truce between your kind and mine,” I said. “We both share the same fear—being outed and hunted to extermination by humans.”
Bourbon unfolded his hands and laid them on the desktop. He kept his eyes steady on me.
I explained, “This truce”—more of a thin promise that we’d each stick to our side of the supernatural realm—“is what keeps the violence from blowing out of control between us. I kill a werewolf, especially an alpha like Calhoun, then my existence wouldn’t be worth one penny. If werewolves didn’t get me, the Araneum would for screwing up the peace. You’re looking for a fall guy and it’s not me.”
“Surely we can come to an agreement. Something we keep between ourselves.”
I gave him a forceful, “No.”
Bourbon paused and scratched along his collar like he was digging for a tick. “Is this about money?”
I laughed. “For half the money you offered me, you should have dozens of triggermen eager to collect. No one answered the call. They know the score.” I raised an eyebrow. Correct?
Bourbon’s silence was my answer. I was right.
“Kill Calhoun and…” I made a slash motion across my throat.
Bourbon steepled his fingers and looked through me, brooding.
His desk phone rang. His eyes cut to the caller ID display. He put one hand on the receiver and pointed to the door with the other. “We’ll keep in touch.”
“Why bother?” I got up to leave. “You’ve already got my answer.”
I expected Bourbon to frown. Instead, a tiny smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.
I didn’t like the expression. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Like I said, we’ll keep in touch.”
I went out and let the door close behind me. His receptionist—human—gave me the stink eye as I made my way out of the office.
I passed two were bodyguards. One was dressed as a janitor and he sat in a chair with a bucket between his boots. A towel covered the bucket. What was in the bucket? A Beretta submachine gun? Hand grenades?
The other were stood behind a coffee cart. She stiffened warily and slid her hand beneath the urn marked DECAF. The urn probably hid a Luger.
I rode the tiny, antique elevator to the ground floor. Once I was on the sidewalk, a humid spring warmth warned of hot, soupy days ahead.
I’d taken Bourbon’s deposit money. With the case dead in its cradle, I could bum around Charleston for a couple of days before heading home. Besides, I was curious about the charms of the local Southern belles.
But like it or not, I had been drawn into this murderous conspiracy between Calhoun and Bourbon. Calhoun might learn of the offer and try to calm his worries by taking me out. And now that I’d refused Bourbon, he might want to cover his tracks by shutting me up…permanently. In any case, the dangerous information inside my head had put me in the center of the bull’s-eye. So forget Charleston. Better that I return home ASAP.
I walked back toward the Atlas Mortuary, my digs here in the city. I’d found the place in the classified listings of The Hollow Fang, the online newsletter for vampires and their aficionados.
Charleston was a surprisingly compact grid of historic buildings—mansions, row houses, churches, slave auction markets, brothels—crammed into the tip of a narrow peninsula bounded by the Ashley River to the west, the Cooper River to the east, and pointing toward the Atlantic Ocean to the south. But outside the boundaries of the lower peninsula, Charleston and its suburbs offered the same sprawl you’d find in Atlanta or Tallahassee.
The Atlas Mortuary was a few blocks away, and rather than waste time figuring my way around in a car, plus trying to find parking, I’d walked to get my bearings and check out the scenery. I followed the reverse course I’d taken to Bourbon’s office, crossed a cobblestone road dating from colonial times, and continued along a sidewalk shaded by magnolias and cottonwoods.
The Carolina sun warmed my face. During my years as a vampire, I’d become expert in applying sunblock and makeup that allowed me to keep a daylight schedule. Yet I remained mindful to avoid the dawn, as the rays of the morning sun could burn through the thickest of makeup and incinerate any careless undead bloodsucker.
When I passed the parking garage near Church and Horlebeck, the hairs on the back of my hands and neck stood on end. My fingertips and ears tingled. My sixth sense, the braiding of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, heightened by supernatural awareness, rang my internal alarm.
I swept my gaze around me.
Nothing.
What caught my sixth sense?
A shadow grew around my feet.
I cast no shadow.
I looked up.
Something large fell from the roof of the parking garage. Something red, blue, and green.
A giant crab.
CHAPTER 3
The giant crab tumbled straight for me.
I dove forward at vampire speed.
The crab smashed onto the concrete right where I’d been walking. It didn’t go splat but shattered into pieces. Shards spun through the air and ricocheted across the sidewalk in a spray of iridescent colors.
I sprang off the sidewalk. The last of the pieces skittered around me.
The broken shell of a crab sculpture lay in the gutter. Fiberglass littered the area like shrapnel. A wiring harness connected several loose pieces.
I picked up something the size and shape of a doorknob. It was the end of an eyestalk with a recessed socket for a lightbulb. The fiberglass was a quarter of an inch thick, smooth on the outside and rough-textured on the inside. The piece had heft to it. I guessed the complete sculpture had originally been ten feet across at the widest and certainly weighed enough to have broken my skull and neck.
The crab had been airbrushed in gaudy shades of red, green, and blue lacquer. I tried to imagine the original purpose of the sculpture and decided it must have been for the marquee of a restaurant.
I palmed the fiberglass eyestalk and looked up to the roof of the parking garage. Hopefully whoever was responsible for dropping the crab was staring down. If for nothing else, to check his or her aim.
No one looked.
An elderly couple stepped toward me from across the street. Tourists for sure, judging by their baggy, casual clothing. She carried a lime-green tote bag and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. His greasy and tattered ball cap read BREWERS.
“Damn, you move fast,” the old woman said. Her accent was from the upper Midwest.
“Having a crab fall on you will do that,” I answered.
The old man rolled his shoulders, adjusted his cap, and said to her, “I used to move like that.” He shared the Midwestern accent.
“In your dreams.” Her lips twisted in scorn. “If that was
you instead of him, you’d be wearing that crustacean instead of that stupid cap of yours.”
“Nothing wrong with my cap.” He adjusted it again.
More people clustered around us in a parade of astonished moon faces.
I gazed up to the roof again. “Better see who’s up there.”
“If you find the careless sons of bitches”—the old woman gave her tote bag a hearty swing—“bring ’em down here and I’ll beat their asses good.”
The old man looked to the roof. “I’m sure they’re trembling in fear.”
I started for the closest stairwell up the garage. Once out of sight, I sprinted to the fourth level. I gripped the fiberglass eyestalk. Whoever had dropped the crab, I’d make them eat this. At the top, I kicked the steel door and pounced into the open, certain that I’d catch the crab droppers by surprise.
Brilliant sunshine lit an expanse of dirty concrete. The rooftop level looked as big and flat as the deck of an aircraft carrier. I stepped out of the stairwell, a brick-and-steel structure that jutted above the pavement. Cars were scattered across the parking spaces. The view was a cluttered landscape of tall leafy trees, church steeples, and square buildings.
To my left, an open trailer had been backed up to the wall at the spot where the crab had fallen. The sides of the trailer were made of metal sheets crudely welded together. Lengths of frayed nylon rope lay on the trailer where the crab statue must have been tied down to a cradle of two-by-fours.
A waist-high double railing topped the garage wall. The crab hadn’t slid from the trailer and off the roof—the trailer bed was too low. The crab would have had to be lifted and tipped over the railing.
I peered down the wall. The crowd numbered about fifty people. Large pieces of the crab lay in the street, blocking traffic.
Maybe the trailer had been backed hard against the wall and the crab got tossed by accident?
Just as I was walking below, and I didn’t hear the sculpture bang against the railing?
This was no accident.
I had been returning to the mortuary along the same path I’d taken to Eric Bourbon’s office. I’d been followed and ambushed. Served me right for being complacent.
I imagined my obituary in The Hollow Fang: DENVER VAMPIRE DETECTIVE CAKED BY A CRAB IN CHARLESTON..
Whoever did this had a sense of humor. Hope they wouldn’t mind my chuckles when I worked them over with my talons and a crowbar.
There wasn’t a license plate attached to the trailer. Even if I found the owner, I’d bet the trailer had been stolen.
I hadn’t noticed anyone leaving. If the crab droppers had escaped on foot, they must’ve disappeared through one of the other stairwells at the far ends of the garage.
I caught the whiff of something out of place.
I closed my eyes, breathed deep, and sifted through the layered scents.
Gasoline.
Motor oil.
Beyond that, the faint odor of a corpse in a crypt.
The smell of the undead.
The undead like me.
A vampire.
Here?
What else did I sense?
Vibrations from vehicles rolling though the garage trembled through the bottoms of my feet. My sixth sense sizzled with a warning. I felt another vibration, of rushing feet, moving toward me.
I opened my eyes and jerked to the side.
A vampire, talons extended, lunged from behind the staircase I’d come up. His mouth gaped wide, fangs aiming for my throat.
I pivoted, leaned back, and swatted his talons aside. As he passed by, I stabbed his neck with the broken end of the eyestalk.
He clutched his neck, howled in pain, and stumbled forward. But he caught himself and whirled around. He tore the eyestalk free and tossed it aside. Blood spurted from the wound and drenched his coat. The red gush of vampire blood oxidized into a spray of brown confetti that disintegrated into ash and smoke.
He was gaunt and looked about thirty in blunt-tooth years. His dark hair was gelled into a faux hawk. He wore black over black, down to his socks and buckled shoes, in the clichéd Goth fashion of the unimaginative newly turned.
We faced off. He leaped at me in a Matrix-style tornado of slicing talons and wild kung fu kicks that I easily batted aside. A clumsy attack. Downright insulting.
And a diversion. A second vampire appeared to my left from behind a Dodge Durango. He was also dressed in a black Goth outfit and attacked with a spear. Sunlight glistened off the shiny metal point. Silver.
Even a touch of silver would burn like red-hot steel. I backtracked to buy time. The dropping of the crab must’ve been Kill Felix Plan A. Two vampires against one was Plan B.
Both vampires advanced at an angle, certain I couldn’t defend against a simultaneous attack from two sides.
The vampire with the spear had blond hair matted into spiky points so it looked like he was wearing the pelt of a yellow hedgehog. He jabbed at my arms and legs to keep me on the defensive. The other vampire flexed his taloned fingers. I saw the moves clearly and distinctly, but as we moved at vampire speed, humans would’ve seen only a blurry cloud of arms and legs.
I faked a punch at him, knowing it would expose my left side. Spiky-hair vampire saw his chance and stabbed for my ribs. I snatched the spear just below the point.
The first vampire jumped for me. I lashed out with my right arm and socked him in the jaw. His head snapped backward and he staggered as if his ankles had turned to rubber.
I yanked on the spear, and as I expected, spiky-hair vampire yanked back. So I pushed the spear as a countermove against his momentum and caught him by surprise. The butt of the spear smacked his chest.
The blow stunned him and his grasp on the spear weakened. I pulled the spear free, twirled it around to whack him on the head, and left him stumbling.
The first vampire recovered and sprang for me. I hesitated for a split second, gauged the swing, and swatted the spear against his belly.
Crunch. Pieces of a cell phone fell from under his coat. He doubled over and dropped to his hands and knees.
Spiky Hair had caught his balance. He rushed at me with hands clawing for my face.
I held the spear at the ready like a bayonet. With a quick parry to the left and right, I knocked his hands aside and skewered him through the sternum. I pushed hard. The spear point poked out his back.
He clutched the shaft. His expression broke in pain and anguish. Blood spurted from the wound and drenched his shirt. The crimson drops turned into brown flakes, then ash and smoke.
I let go of the spear. He fell backward and the spear point protruding from his back clanked against the concrete. He squirmed while his face contorted hideously. Smoke plumed from his wound. In a few moments, he’d be nothing but dust and a bad smell.
The first vampire was back on his feet and danced around like a boxer.
I said, “Give it up. Let’s talk.”
He ran his tongue over the points of his fangs. “There’s no talking. Only dying. You.”
“How about your friend?” I pointed to Spiky Hair, who writhed and belched smoke. “Wanna join him?”
The first vampire raised both arms, stood on one leg, and folded the other leg before him. Heaven help him, he was assuming the crane pose.
I relaxed my arms. “Listen, Karate Kid, spare yourself. Quit fooling around and talk to me. Who put you up to this?”
The vampire squinted in angry concentration. His arms and body quivered in the effort of keeping still.
I circled around him. He made tiny ridiculous hops to keep me centered. Suddenly he jumped and snapped one leg at me.
I leaned to the side as his kick slashed where I’d been. I stung him with a couple of slaps, then popped him hard on the mouth. His lips burst into pulp. His head reeled back and I followed with a swipe of my talons across his chest.
His shredded coat and shirt fell open, exposing naked, translucent skin. The fierce Carolina sun immediately fried his unprotected body
. Smoke curled from the bubbling flesh. He yelped and beat his chest as if trying to put out a fire.
Jackass. “We can talk or I can watch you burn.”
His eyes bulged from the agony.
“It’s an easy choice,” I said.
I expected him to surrender. But the pain seemed to have filled him with determination and he sprang at me once more.
I swiveled on my feet, hip-checked him, and snagged his hair in one hand. With my other hand, I grasped the seat of his trousers and aimed his trajectory for the trailer.
I wanted to bash his face against the metal side and end the fight with him in decent enough shape to answer my questions.
But he jerked his legs, his feet finding purchase on the concrete, and gave himself a boost through the air.
I pulled against him a little too hard. Instead of smacking the trailer, his head swung over the ragged edge of the side.
The metal sliced across his throat like a serrated blade. His shoulders struck the trailer while his head continued in an arc, the spinal cord severing with a crisp snap.
His head spun into the bed of the trailer and landed with a hard thump. The stump of his neck was a circle of raw meat. Blood gushed from his head and shoulders, the red gouts turning into streams of brown flakes. I let go of his pants and let his body drop to the concrete.
His skin crinkled and cracked, destroying any protection sunblock and makeup might have provided for his flesh. He was gone; might as well let the sun finish him off. I stuck the toe of my shoe under his shoulder and flipped him over. Sunlight fell across the naked skin on his torso. His head and body began to smolder. Now I had two dead vampires.
They deserved this, the stupid bastards, but still, I recoiled in horror as nature reclaimed them with her pitiless fury.
Smoke rose from their skins, from inside their shirts, and from around their heads. In seconds, their clothes deflated as the flesh and bones of their bodies crumbled into gray ash.
A sudden breeze tossed their clothes. The ashes swirled and mingled into a dust devil. Soon there was nothing left of the vampires but gray smudges and empty clothes.
Werewolf Smackdown Page 2