After my experience with the snub-nose, I wanted something more modern. But at least a Webley had the reputation for being as reliable as a hammer.
“Ammo?”
“No problem.” Yo-Yo put the iPhone away.
I added, “Silver bullets.”
Gullah asked, “Who’s on your shit list? Vampires? Or werewolves?”
“Depends on who’s in front of me when I pull the trigger.”
Gullah tipped his head toward the door. Yo-Yo got up and left.
I asked, “What about your gang? I noticed that other than Rooster and Yo-Yo, the rest aren’t undead or chalices.”
Gullah answered, “I’ve fudged the rules regarding who knows who and what I am.”
“Fudge the rules too much and the Araneum might not like it.”
“Fuck the Araneum. I’m the King. What are they going to do?”
“You’re not worried about one of your crew turning snitch?”
“If you’re in the life, you talk, you die. Besides, the weres among the cops have their own interests in keeping supernatural matters within the supernatural.”
“When do I get my pistol?”
“Yo-Yo is putting the order in as we speak. You’ll get it before nightfall.”
I asked, “Where’s the gun now?”
“Safely stored under military lock and key.”
I was sure Gullah was kidding and let the comment pass. “Any refunds if I don’t like the gun?”
“You get store credit.”
He thumped the cane on the floor. Rooster went out the kitchen. Gullah stood and swung the cane at the front door. “I have to tend to business.”
We traded insincere good-byes. Rooster waited for me outside. Two of the other gangsters stood by an Escalade. The unmarked car with the cops had left.
Rooster and his crew drove me back to Tom Tom’s Barber Shop, where I got Lemuel’s Mercury. The crow on the lamppost was gone.
I’d hoped Yo-Yo hadn’t stiffed me about the gun. I hated to think that any trouble between Gullah’s gang and me would be over something as trivial as three hundred dollars.
It was middle of the afternoon, and as I slowed to enter the driveway into the mortuary, my sixth sense rang the alarm.
Someone hustled up to the Mercury from the right side. The passenger’s front door jerked open.
Wendy slid in.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Keep driving.”
CHAPTER 30
“I rushed here from work to catch you.” Wendy buckled the seat belt over her tour-guide uniform. She was breathing hard and smoothing hair from her brow.
I did a quick look around, then accelerated from the mortuary. My sixth sense eased from a tremble to a hum. I didn’t spot anything unusual but remained wary.
“Why didn’t you call?” I tried not to sound annoyed. “I would’ve picked you up.”
“You didn’t give me your number.”
She hadn’t asked for it, either. But I had to let go of my resentment and pay attention to what she had to say. “What’s going on?”
“I feel bad about yesterday. I was a bitch to surprise you about my seeing Calhoun.”
“You’re a spy. If I can’t handle it, that’s my problem.”
She gave directions toward Broad Street.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“My house. I live on the other side of the river.”
Anticipation ratcheted tight. I didn’t know what she had planned, if anything, but that wall of indifference from yesterday was gone. “Any particular reason we need to go there?”
“We’re caught between two clans of werewolves about to go at each other’s throats. We have to be careful where we talk.”
Broad Street merged into Lockwood Drive. We passed by the city marina heading for the bridge over the Ashley River.
I was glad Wendy was here, that she trusted me, yet I couldn’t forget that hollow, abandoned feeling when she had left me to go running for Calhoun’s limousine.
“Does Calhoun know you’re working for the Araneum?”
“I hope not. That’s the”—she made air quotes—“spy part of why I’m in Charleston.”
“Yesterday he saw you with me. He’s not suspicious?”
“He knows you and I are friends. You told him. And he knows that you’ve been very protective of me. Says you’ve been talking like an old boyfriend who won’t let go.”
“I’ll work on that. What about you and Calhoun? If you’re hooking up with him, I think as a honcho alpha, he should be able to protect you.”
“Hooking up?”
“Sleeping with him. Isn’t that how the Araneum told you to get information?”
Wendy pivoted in her seat and glowered. The freckles on her creamy skin became brown dots the color of hot coffee. “I was told to gather information, yes. I slept with Calhoun because I wanted to.”
Her scathing tone told me I had jumped a line it was not my business to cross. I let go of the steering wheel for an instant to make a T with my hands. Time-out.
“I’m not judging you,” I said. “If it sounded that way, forgive me.” I was going to add: You’re doing your job. It’s for the greater good. And so on, but it would’ve sounded patronizing. So I chose the best course I could under these circumstance. I kept my mouth shut.
Wendy’s freckles cooled to caramel-colored dots. “Thanks. This is a tough assignment. I’m having problems choosing between being true to myself and doing what I have to do.” Her left hand strayed across the console and clasped my wrist with a touch that asked for understanding.
“Meaning?”
“Sure, I sleep with Calhoun. He has his charms. Doesn’t mean I don’t use the opportunity to get him to talk.” Wendy pulled herself close and rested her head on my shoulder. “Afterward I feel like a fraud and a whore.”
“Then stop. Tell the Araneum you’re quitting.”
“A job gets difficult, you don’t run away.”
“How long do you intend to stick around?”
“Until the threat of war between the clans has passed.” Wendy rubbed her head against my shoulder. A tender gesture but not at all amorous. I felt more like a big brother than an ex-lover.
I swallowed and acknowledged the truth. I wanted to think we could start down that path we had taken together years ago. But that hope was naive. Wendy and I were settling into being close friends. For now, that would have to be enough.
Wendy sat straight and told me to turn off the highway. I signaled right and slowed behind a Volvo sedan. Traffic halted and waited for the light to change.
“What’s the Araneum doing with the information you give them?”
“Hedging their bets. If war breaks out between the were clans, the Araneum will sit tight and wait for the dust to settle.”
“What are the chances this war will spread into the human world?”
“Quite high,” she replied. “That’s why I’m here.”
“What were you asked to find out?”
“The disposition of the clans. Numbers. Locations. Intentions. What the military calls the order of battle. Hundreds of weres are converging on Charleston.”
“I saw. Bourbon took me to his place and pointed out the sailing ships bringing them.”
The light turned green, and I got on a wide road next to the parking lot of a strip mall. Wendy said to continue straight.
She grew quiet, and in her silence, she seemed especially small, as if shrunken by her worries.
I asked, “And Calhoun?”
“For my part, I try to help him keep a cool head. After yesterday’s ambush, he wanted to strike back at Bourbon. I talked him out of it. I told him to wait.”
“For what?”
“The selection by Le Cercle de Sang et Crocs.”
“What if the vote goes against him?”
“It won’t.”
Wendy sounded confident.
I asked, “The fix is in?”
Wendy gave her
head a slight shake. “I don’t know if the fix is in or not, but right now most weres think the choice is between the status quo and anarchy.”
“That’s how I see it.”
Wendy countered, “Some argue we’ve reached the limits of that status quo, and the real choice is between survival and annihilation. According to them, the situation isn’t going to get any better. There are too many humans and they’re becoming too sophisticated. Better to strike the humans first than wait for things to go bad.”
“You strike first and things just don’t go bad, they get worse.” Horrific images—houses exploding into flames, sobbing women holding lifeless children, vampires hacked to pieces and disintegrating into ash—flashed through my mind like painful bursts of light. I let those images recede and grasped for optimistic thoughts. “But should we worry? Sounds like Calhoun has the numbers to maintain control over the werewolves.”
“Unless Bourbon convinces enough weres from other clans to follow him. He only needs to stage an insurrection. That would provoke the war.”
“Don’t you have potions? Make everyone all lubby-dubby.”
“Not for werewolves. Not for this kind of madness.”
We arrived in the suburb of Ashley Forest and entered a wooded neighborhood of twisting streets. Wendy told me to park in the driveway of a modest brick home nestled between sweet gum trees and tall pines. A rainbow of coneflowers, goldenrod, and begonias blossomed from clay pots lining the porch and front steps.
Wendy got out. I followed. She pulled keys from a pocket in her shorts and unlocked the front door.
When she pushed the door in, a brass bell jangled at the top of the entrance. Immediately, the cawing of crows—must have been a hundred of them—roared through the house.
“What’s with the crows?” I shouted.
“I keep the local roost.”
“For the Araneum?”
“Who else? The crows come here for R and R. Charleston’s a nice place for them to visit.” As a dryad, Wendy had special empathy with animals. I could never get used to her trading gossip with the neighborhood fauna by cooing, clucking, and meowing.
A rich, humid scent rolled past us, a heavy hothouse smell of moist loam and fertile plants that brought memories of her house back in Denver.
There was a hallway to the left, a kitchen in front of us, and a small dining room to the right. Potted plants sat on almost every horizontal surface and still more hung from macramé slings. There was so much green the interior looked like it had been hacked out of the jungle. From down the hall came that squawking of crows, as if the birds were in the middle of a riot.
Wendy pointed to a stuffed armchair beside the dining table. “Wait for me.” She lowered the blinds in the front room, then proceeded down the hall and disappeared into the room at the farthest end. The crows began to quiet until all I heard was her making weird bird whistles.
I brushed aside the curtain of leaves and vines from spider plants, creeping Jennies, and sweet potatoes that draped around the chair and sat.
Something moved along the leaves above my shoulder. A sliver of green crept across the leaf of a sweet potato vine and stopped. A praying mantis, about two inches long. The triangular head swiveled left and right. It extended one barbed foreleg to groom the hooks with its mandibles.
I sensed more movement. Dozens of praying mantises crawled along the leaves and vines. Large mantises as big as my index finger, small mantises with green-and-white bands to match the leaves of the spider plants, skinny brown ones, wide gray ones with skins the texture of tree bark emerged from the foliage.
More praying mantises crawled up the sides of my chair. Some looked like walking flower petals, fantastic twisted shapes in white, yellow, or pink. Must be Wendy’s welcoming committee.
They scurried over my arms. Their tiny feet tickled. Others dropped from the vines and clung to my shirt.
Having so many bugs skitter over my body should’ve repulsed me, but I’m a vampire. I sleep in crypts, so I’ve gotten used to the occasional creepy critter. Besides, as a boy, I liked praying mantises and had kept a few as pets. I would feed them flies and black widows.
The mantises advanced without hesitation, though a careless move by me could squash bunches of them into crunchy goo. I kept still, as curious about them as I’m sure they were about me. They grasped onto one another, and after a minute, I had heavy ropes of mantises circling my neck and shoulders and crisscrossing the front of my chest.
The mass of insects seemed to tighten, and I got worried about their intentions. Even by supernatural standards, this was weird.
CHAPTER 31
Wendy came back down the hall. She walked in her socks, having taken off her boots, and yanked the tail of her white polo shirt out from her cargo shorts.
When she noticed the hundreds of mantises looped over my shoulders, around my neck, and across my chest, she halted and gasped. “Oh no.” She let go a faint whistle that turned into a series of clicks.
The mantises leaped into the air, forming a buzzing cloud of green with blurs of brown, gray, and the amazing flower colors. The whirring shapes disappeared into the plants. The leaves quivered for an instant, and the room went quiet.
I remained on the armchair, dumbfounded by the bizarre sight that had come and gone like a hallucination.
“Sorry,” said Wendy. “They get a little protective.”
“I was in danger?”
“They could’ve crushed you like the coils of an anaconda. Others would’ve gone after your eyes, your nose, down your pants, up your—”
“I get it.” My butt sphincter clenched at the thought. “If you need protection, why not get a pit bull?”
“Praying mantises are more vicious.”
Wendy used her ankle to hook one of the chairs belonging to the dining table and turned it around. She sat and examined me. I could see the weight of concern in her eyes. “Calhoun is very interested in you.”
“You’re supposed to be grilling him about the werewolves. How did I come up?”
“You’re a wild card. He hasn’t decided where your loyalties lie.”
“I thought I made that clear when I talked to him. My loyalties are to me. And I have loyalties to you, to keep you safe. The werewolves are none of my business.”
“Calhoun asked me to convince you to help him.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Wendy chuckled. “I’m not going to try.”
“Good. Did you ask about Paxton?”
“Calhoun told me the same thing he told you. He’d never heard of him until you mentioned his name.”
“You believe that?”
“I haven’t found a reason not to.”
Because you sleep with him? A worm of jealousy gnawed at my kundalini noir. “What’s Calhoun like?”
“Interesting.”
“But he’s a werewolf.”
“There’s an intensity to weres I find stimulating. Unlike you and me, they’re not immortal, so they squeeze pleasure out of every moment.”
“As opposed to us boring vampires?”
Wendy bit her lower lip and waited to answer. “Vampires are only boring when they ask stupid questions. That were intensity comes from their sense of mortality, which tightens their family bonds. Something you vampires don’t have.”
“We have chalices.”
“C’mon, that’s hardly close. Despite a few exceptions, you vampires regard chalices as a cross between pets and milk cows. That can’t compare with family. The trust. The dropping of pretenses and establishing real intimacy.”
“You sound like Oprah.” I was joking, but inside, I chafed. I understood what Wendy was getting at. Both vampires and werewolves are turned from human, and at that instant, they must pull away from their natural family.
She said, “You vampires go at it alone, while werewolves have packs, new families to bond with and share their lives.”
“Those tight families haven’t prevented them
from killing each other.”
Wendy gave a sarcastic grin. “As if vampires are a bunch of Quakers.” Her expression turned curious. “You haven’t yet outlived your human family. Ever think of them?”
I’d rather think of werewolves. That chafing from earlier heated to a burn.
When I told my older sister, Elvira, that I’d joined the army, she yanked off one shoe and threw it at me. “Cabrón,” she had yelled. “You’ve been to college. How many of our relatives have to die in stupid wars?”
I ducked and the shoe whizzed past my ear. “But there’s no war.”
Elvira took off her other shoe. “Just you wait. There will be.” She threw that one and it also missed. “At least tell me you’re going to learn a trade. Construction? Computers?”
“A trade?” I puffed up my chest. “No, I’m going to be in the infantry.”
Her purse smacked me across the face.
Elvira was right. There was 9/11 and then the war in Iraq. Since I was in the Third Infantry Division, I had an automatic RSVP to attend.
But the chief source of the estrangement between my sister and me came after I’d been turned into a vampire. I was sent home a wounded veteran in the protective custody of the Araneum. I kept to myself as I started my new existence as one of the undead. After nearly a year of silence, Elvira found me—only she was not so silent.
“Cabrón,” she had yelled over the phone. “I knew you joining the Army would bring us nothing but heartache. Where have you been?”
“Working. Are you calling for money?”
“We don’t need money. We need you to come home.”
What could I have said? Sorry, I’m a vampire.
I hung up the phone.
Elvira never called back.
Yeah, I know about family.
I’d let the acrimony simmer. Elvira had a way of whipping me with guilt despite our years and miles of separation.
“We’ve kept apart,” I said. “What about you, Wendy? Weren’t you born a supernatural? Where is your family?”
“After a hundred years, it was time to leave the roost. Besides, do you see me as a stay-at-home kind of girl?”
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