I let go.
Bitter pain cut through me and filled me with sadness.
I wanted something to blow away this pain and sorrow. I wanted something to let the light of hope shine through, but there was only the blackness and that pain and that sorrow.
And rage. Volcanic rage that could tear a mountain apart.
My fingers shook. My talons sprang out and I clutched at the air.
I looked out the window back to Charleston. Bile and wrath tore at my insides. I’d raze the city, demolish everything, punish innocent and guilty alike to avenge Wendy. Charleston had survived two wars, a siege, an earthquake, a pirate invasion, and slave uprisings.
But the city wouldn’t survive me.
CHAPTER 43
The helicopter had landed on Latrall’s estate and Wendy’s body had been taken off. The waiting medical staff didn’t have much to do except certify her death.
I had asked about the protocol regarding her remains. One of the were doctors, a guy with a European accent I couldn’t place, explained that since Wendy was a dryad, a wood nymph, she was to be returned to the forest around the Pilica River of her native Poland.
Wendy was Polish? Death reveals many secrets while it buries others. I had figured by her red hair and complexion that she was Irish. Wendy Teagarden was only one of the many names she’d used over the centuries.
I was given a change of clothes and bathed to scrub away the stink of smoke and failure. King Gullah had arrived with an assortment of contact lenses and, like any good vampire, a makeup kit.
He sat beside me in the back of one of his Escalades. We were on the way to Wendy’s house to cleanse the premises of any supernatural evidence.
Gullah did me the favor of not talking much. Sade whispered on the stereo. A gentle rain pattered against the roof and windows. We rode in haunted silence back over the Cooper River, crossed Charleston at the Neck, and continued over the Ashley River into the suburb of Ashley Forest. Rooster followed us in the other Escalade.
The rain let up and left a shroud of gray haze clinging to the trees. A sheriff’s patrol car waited at the curb of Wendy’s home. I wondered if this meant trouble, with Gullah and his gang being criminals. But Gullah gave no hint of being worried.
A deputy sheriff stood by the front door on the porch. All the drapes and blinds had been drawn over the windows. The blossoms on the porch had wilted and their fallen petals circled the flowerpots. Wendy’s house looked somber and forlorn as if in mourning.
Our Escalades halted behind the deputy’s car. Gullah’s gang jumped out and made no attempt to hide the fact they were armed. We climbed the short concrete steps onto the porch. Unlike yesterday, there was no ceremony with a blue haint cloth.
The deputy waited. A peek without my contacts confirmed he was a were. When we got close, he gave a casual salute to Gullah, who nodded in reply. Supernatural professional courtesy.
The deputy unlocked the door. A locksmith tag hung from the key. The cawing of crows sounded from inside the house.
Gullah let Yo-Yo enter first.
I remembered Wendy’s guard force of praying mantises. “Careful when you go in.”
Yo-Yo curled his lips and showed his fangs. He pulled his shirt up and back for access to the Glock inside his waistband. His teeth and gun were no match for the army of mantises, but before I could warn him, he and Gullah had gone in. I followed.
The house smelled musty.
A crunch came from under Yo-Yo’s shoes. He lifted one foot. “What the fuck?”
Hundreds of praying mantises littered the floor. Still more dropped from the wilting vines laced across the walls. Most of the mantises were stiff and looked brittle. A few crept along in the final throes of dying.
I asked. “What happened?”
“This didn’t grow on its own.” Gullah pointed to the mass of plants—now yellowing and shriveling—and the carpet of dead mantises. “Wendy died and took the magic with her.”
Yo-Yo swung his hand through the spider plants and ivy hanging from the macramé planters. The leaves and vines broke apart like old paper. “If you’re going to grow something, then it oughta be some crunk weed, not all these houseplants. You can’t smoke this shit.” He stepped around the piles of dead mantises. “And all these fucking bugs. What’s up with this? The chick liked animals so much, why didn’t she get a cat or a dog? Maybe a goldfish.”
Dozens of crows squawked from their roost in the back room.
I surveyed the interior, the hall to my left, the kitchen in front of us, the living room to the right. A sense of wrong screwed through me as we violated Wendy’s private world.
I brushed the leaves and mantis carcasses off the armchair. I sat, weary of the loss. Weary of death.
I told Gullah about the note Paxton had sent, the one written on a swatch of human skin. Gullah and Rooster stared, equally fascinated and disgusted.
Gullah asked, “How does this happen to you? Crazy shit like that never happens to me.”
He tapped my shoulder. “We got work to do.” He fished a chrome cigarette case from his pocket. He opened the case. Instead of cigarettes, there was a tuning fork clipped to the inside.
Gullah removed the tuning fork. It looked to be made of brushed steel with brass inserts along the tines. A sapphire knob decorated the stem.
He flicked a talon against the tines and the fork emitted a low whine. Gullah held the fork up and waved it slowly about the room. The sapphire knob began to glow.
Gullah handed the tuning fork to me. “You do it.”
“What’s this for?”
“Locates the Araneum’s property.”
“How does it work?”
“Move it around. You’ll figure it out.”
The stem was cool and vibrated faintly. Gullah gave the tines another flick. The stem vibrated harder and tickled my fingers.
I held the tuning fork up and moved it left to right. The light in the knob brightened or dimmed as the whine grew louder or softer. I kept the tuning fork at a point where the knob shone brightest and the whine sounded loudest, like a finger rubbed around the rim of a crystal goblet.
I got it. When the knob shone bright and the whine was loud, I was getting warm. Dim and soft, I was getting cold. The tuning fork was a homing device.
I advanced through the front room—dead mantises crackling under my feet like autumn leaves—and adjusted my steps to follow a path that kept the knob glowing bright and the whine singing.
The tuning fork pointed to the doors of a credenza against the wall in the dining room. Gullah opened the doors and pulled out a cardboard shoe box that he let drop to the floor. The box clanged from empty message capsules, the Araneum standard type, made of filigreed platinum and yellow gold, about the size of a little finger. These were the capsules that were clipped to the legs of the messenger crows.
I waved the tuning fork over the credenza. The box was all it found.
Gullah busied himself digging through the box. “Keep looking about the room.”
I waved the fork and followed its lead to a table against the far wall.
The fork pointed to a leather-bound book tucked within a pile of mystery novels and copies of Vanity Fair, Yoga Journal, and Blueboy magazines. Wendy had eclectic literary tastes.
When I took the book from the pile, the tuning fork began to whine loud and the sapphire knob became bright as a halogen bulb.
“Hey, Rooster,” I called out, “come take this.” I gave him the tuning fork.
Gullah said to Rooster, “Go search the rest of the house. Bring what you find.”
The book was the size of a hardback textbook. Bits of leather flaked from the cracked and wrinkled cover.
I opened the book, delicately, afraid the pages and binding would crumble in my hands. I glimpsed these words written in script on the title page:
The Endtimes Volume III
The Rapture
A Calendar and Index of Signs
Uncorrected Advan
ce Copy
A shriek loud as a fire alarm echoed in the house. Rooster yelled from across the room. “What the fuck you doing?” He held the tuning fork with both hands. The sapphire knob pulsed like a strobe.
I shut the book and the shriek faded back to its previous whine. The knob dimmed.
“Somebody doesn’t want you reading that,” Gullah said.
I held the book. Astonished. Awed. Afraid that it might validate biblical prophecy. “The Rapture. You know what this means?”
“It means we bloodsuckers are fucked. What else is new? When Jesus Christ, Allah, the Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard—whoever the hell is upstairs—starts plucking souls, you think we’re invited to the party?” Gullah gave an impatient wave. “Bring that book over here.”
With great care, I handed him the book. Gullah tossed the book into the box with the message capsules.
Rooster came from the hall. He carried a pillowcase lumpy with bulky objects. “I got everything.”
Gullah pointed to the box. Rooster shook the pillowcase over the box and dumped out two ancient-looking scrolls, a Tibetan prayer wheel, various clockwork devices made of brass and steel, and an English–House Cat language dictionary.
Rooster said, “I also brought this stuff from her desk. It ain’t Araneum property, but we oughta make it destroyed.” He tossed items from his pocket: a diary, a plastic bag with seeds in it, folders, and a handful of computer thumb drives.
Rooster dropped the empty pillowcase and the tuning fork into the box. Gullah sorted the items so everything fit close together. He said, “Go get the stuff.”
Rooster turned and left the house through the front door.
“What stuff?” I thought we were collecting Wendy’s things to take with us, but it seemed Gullah had another plan.
Yo-Yo came from a back room at the end of the hall. I noticed that the crows had long since gotten quiet. Had Yo-Yo killed them?
First one crow, then a second, a third, a half dozen, more crows, maybe forty, strutted into the hall. They moved behind Yo-Yo like a shimmering black pool.
He looked over his shoulder at the crows and then to Gullah and me. “Ain’t this some freaky-ass shit?”
Rooster opened the front door from the outside. He carried a package the size of a ten-pound bag of cement. His eyebrows perked up in surprise when he saw the advance of the crows.
He held the door open for the flock to march past him. When they crossed the threshold, each bird launched itself into the air and flew off.
One crow broke rank and walked to me, ignoring the mantises around its feet. It stopped and we exchanged glances. The crow lowered its head, shook it, turned away, and joined his comrades.
“You know that bird?” Gullah asked.
“I’m not sure. They all look alike.”
When the last crow had flown off, Rooster closed the door. He brought the bag to us.
“Dump it on that,” Gullah ordered.
Rooster extended a talon and sliced the bag open. He tipped the bag over the box. A gray powder spilled out, the odor metallic and acid.
Gullah crouched and shook the box so the powder filtered deep into the crevices between the items inside.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Thermite powder,” he answered, standing.
Thermite powder is an incendiary agent made with aluminum and magnesium. Other than a direct nuclear blast, there is no better way to destroy anything made of metal.
Rooster reached under his shirt and pulled out an olive green cylinder he had hooked into his waistband. The cylinder was a hand grenade, slightly larger than a beer can, with a yellow band across the middle and stenciled letters that read SMOKE WP BURSTING TYPE.
WP. White phosphorus. In the army we called it Willy Peter.
The plan was to set the grenade in the box and initiate the thermite burn.
“Why are you going to destroy this?” I asked.
“Property of the Araneum. Their orders. But am I going to destroy this? No, that honor is yours.”
Gullah pointed and Rooster handed me the grenade.
The grenade was heavy and felt like it contained concentrated evil. “Why me?”
“Because you knew Wendy better than any one of us,” Gullah said. “Burning her house to the ground will mean more to you.”
CHAPTER 44
I looked about the rooms, at the plants, the mounds of dead mantises, and the few pictures on the wall. Everything carried the presence of Wendy. To destroy the house was to destroy part of her.
But she was dead.
What was left behind was nothing but the flotsam everyone leaves on the deserted shore of their lives.
Gullah was right. Torching Wendy’s possessions would mean the most to me. I thought about dropping her key ring into the box, but it was the only memento I had of hers. I kept the keys in my pocket.
Every acquaintance we make is a joy and a curse. The time Wendy and I shared was the joy.
I gripped the grenade’s safety lever and pulled the pin.
This was the curse.
The aching good-bye. First on the helicopter when she died. Now again as I was about to incinerate her property and belongings.
A heavy sadness pressed upon my shoulders. A sadness that underlined how powerless I was over circumstance.
I checked to see that the front door remained open. I shoved the grenade into the box and released the safety lever.
By the time the lever had pinged loose from the fuse, I was sprinting out the door at vampire speed.
Yo-Yo, Rooster, and Gullah were on the lawn. Yo-Yo counted, “Three. Four. Five.”
The grenade exploded with a whump. The walls of the house shook. The front window shattered. A fist of dense white smoke punched through the window frame. More white smoke leaked from the front door, from the other windows, and from under the eaves.
“Damn,” Yo-Yo cried out. “I got dibs next time we use one of those motherfuckers.”
The deputy sheriff used his radio to call the fire department.
The white phosphorus and the thermite would melt the Araneum’s secrets into unrecognizable slag. Wendy’s house and possessions would be gone forever, just as she was.
The sheriff was here to add the veneer of authority.
Everything was under control.
Almost.
Something bothered me. Actually, a lot bothered me.
I asked Gullah, “What do you know about a vampire wearing a bat-wing costume?”
“What do you mean?”
I explained the attack on Angela and me.
Yo-Yo interrupted. “You were with Angela Cyclone?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Man, that is some fine trim.”
“I never got to trim anything.” I described the bat-winged vampire. “I’m sure he’s working with Paxton.”
Gullah chuckled derisively. “Anything else? Is Godzilla on the way? An asteroid?”
“There is,” I replied. “How was it you showed up with the grenade and the thermite?”
“We were going to torch the house. Standard procedure.”
Gullah reached into his pocket and withdrew an Araneum message capsule. “I do have something to show you.” He unscrewed the ruby-encrusted cap and shook the capsule’s contents into his hand, a roll of vampire parchment that resembled yellowed onionskin.
He crumpled the parchment into a wad and opened his hand toward the sun. As soon as sunlight hit the parchment, it began to smolder.
Gullah tossed the parchment toward my feet. The wad sizzled, smoked, and exploded with a pop that turned into a ball of smoke. The odor of burned rancid meat stank up the air.
Rooster clasped his nose and winced.
“What did the note say?” I asked.
Gullah twisted the cap back on the capsule with the assertive force he would use to wring the head off a chicken’s neck. “The note said, ‘Find Paxton.’”
I nodded, reassured that we had the Araneum’s at
tention. “Great. Let’s get started.”
“That’s not all,” Gullah explained. “The note also said, ‘Stay out of the werewolves’ affairs. Don’t let them drag us into their war. Whatever the price.’ And the Araneum listed your name.”
CHAPTER 45
Gullah put on his sunglasses as if to distance himself from what he’d just told me.
The Araneum considered me expendable in their effort to keep out of the werewolf war. I felt dizzy and scared like I was on the edge of a narrow cliff.
Yo-Yo and Rooster stood on opposite sides of Gullah. Both vampire goons let their hands dangle in such a way that they could grab their pistols in a hurry.
I raised my hands palms up to show I didn’t want any more trouble. I’d had enough with the werewolves, the mysterious bat-wing vampire, and Paxton.
“There was more to the Araneum’s note,” Gullah said. “They wrote my name after yours.” He jabbed his finger into my chest. “I’m not risking my ass for anyone. If these werewolves demand your head to keep the peace, I’ll give it to them.”
I pushed Gullah’s finger back. “I’d like to hear that from the Araneum.”
“You heard it from me. That’s enough.”
Rooster coughed, a warning. He and Yo-Yo straightened their backs and folded their hands over the pistols stuck in their waistbands.
A black Mercedes rolled stealthily to the opposite curb and stopped. Dan, Calhoun’s were bodyguard, got out the rear door on the driver’s side. He held the door open and looked at me.
Gullah said, “I need this guy like I need a turd in my salad.”
Why had Calhoun shown up? To express his remorse over Wendy’s death? I’m sure he wasn’t going to leave without first talking to me. I started for the car.
Gullah grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”
I shrugged him off. “He might have information we need.”
I walked across the street and entered the limousine and its cocoon of chilled air. Calhoun wore a black suit. Tie. Gold cuff links. I slid next to him. The spice notes in his cologne overlaid the canine musk smell. Dan got up front next to the driver.
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