The emcee cupped Angela’s chin. “Several of us will soon return to Charleston. We’ll see you in a few hours.”
Angela wiped away tears. “Did I do the right thing?”
The emcee gave me the once-over. She let go of Angela’s chin and walked off.
Angela started to get up. I grasped her arm. She leaned against me like a wounded soldier.
Werewolves hustled around the fire. They set up taiko drums and began dancing from drum to drum as they beat a rhythm that slapped the air.
The circle picked up the cadence by barking, “Roff, roff, roff.” They stamped their feet and turned to the right. The werewolves paraded in formation behind their pack standards, stamping their hind paws in rhythm with the drumming. One wolf within each group let out a long howl. Then another wolf. Then a third. Soon the night air thundered with the howling of hundreds of werewolves.
The circle parted to let us through, eyes averted, like Angela was unclean and not worthy to look at.
I had gained my life.
She had lost hers.
CHAPTER 72
The S-76 helicopter shuttled us back to Latrall’s estate. Angela found clothes and I changed out of the shirt and trousers the werewolves had shredded. She took a Lexus coupe from the garage and we zoomed back to Charleston. Destination, the Washington Hotel. I had to pack and get ready to leave for Denver.
Angela’s expression looked hard as glass and just as brittle. Headlamps shone in the rearview mirror and her dull dark eyes swallowed every bit of the reflected light.
My insides churned in joy and sorrow. Joy because I’d beaten the damning odds. I’d escaped being roasted by the werewolves. The enemies who had schemed to destroy me were themselves destroyed. Eric Bourbon. Julius Paxton. His vampire henchmen. There would be no werewolf war. The Great Secret remained intact. I was on my way home, safe.
Then my insides churned again, and sorrow welled through my kundalini noir. A viscous sorrow tainted with guilt. Guilt over those who had died by my coming here. Lemuel Cohen. His intern, Shantalya. And most of all, Wendy Teagarden.
And guilt because Angela had sacrificed herself in order to save me. She’d been ripped from her clan, her pack, and her family, and thrown out of the Lowcountry. Banished to live as a rogue.
We reached the bridge over the Cooper River. Angela relaxed her shoulders, like she was resigning herself to whatever fate awaited her.
This seemed like a good time to ask, “Why did you save me?” I hoped to hear something profound, something that would wipe away my guilt.
She kept her eyes on traffic. “Because letting you die would’ve been wrong.”
“That’s it?”
“What else do you want to hear?”
“I feel shitty about the way this has ended for you.”
“So do I.” Angela guided the car from lane to lane.
A CH-47 Chinook roared overhead, traveling south. Another followed. Their passengers had to be werewolves returning from Le Cercle.
The moon cast its glow across the pewter surface of the river. Dozens of ships—crammed with werewolves from outside the territory—crowded the wharf. Lights strung from the rigging gave the scene a festive glow.
A rocket shot from one of the tall ships and embroidered a trail of red sparks across the night sky.
My kundalini noir jumped in panic. The fear I thought I’d left behind suddenly caught up with me. Fireworks? Was this a signal? Perhaps not all the renegade weres had been captured, and the survivors were threatening a coup.
I sloughed off the fear. Calhoun had the territory in his supernatural grip.
More rockets launched from the ships. The first rocket burst into a cascade of gold and red sparks. The rest of the volley exploded and stabbed the velvet sky with sprays of glowing color. The blasts drummed the Lexus.
Another volley followed. Then another. In less than a minute, Charleston along the Cooper River was lit up with a fireworks display bright as the sun.
Traffic backed up on the bridge. Angela slowed down. Colored lights from the fireworks whisked across her face and the interior of the car.
She didn’t look up. “Calhoun must be very happy.”
Angela kneaded the steering wheel. Hardness and brittleness returned to her face, and I thought she was about to break.
She said, “I need you to do me a favor.”
Angela had given up everything for me; how could I say no? “Name it.”
“Stay with me tonight.”
“Absolutely.”
“There’s a catch,” she said. “When I say good-bye to my family, you and I have to be in wolf form.”
“I can do that.”
Angela turned to look at me and smiled, the only time she’d done so since we left Le Cercle.
We turned off the bridge and headed south along Meeting Street. We turned left on Broad.
Pedestrians jammed the sidewalks and streets and gawked at the fireworks exploding above.
Angela tucked the Lexus into a no-parking zone between a minivan and a Dodge Charger. Keys in hand, she hustled out of the car. Together, we zigzagged through the crowds toward the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon at the corner of Bay and Broad.
Dungeon? Didn’t sound comforting, but I trusted her.
She bounded up the steps with me close behind. At the entrance, a guard in colonial dress waved us inside. One side of his upper lip curled to show a canine. Beneath the brim of his tricornered hat, his eyes shone werewolf red.
I followed Angela past the exhibits on the main floor and down the stairs to the dungeon, a large room of connected vaults made of bricks. Despite the dungeon being hundreds of years old, the extensive restorations made it seem recently built. The subterranean construction muffled the booms of the fireworks.
Mannequins in colonial-era costumes—one had a red parrot on his desk—occupied the vaults. The harbormaster. Guards. Clerks. And of course, the prisoners.
We walked to a jail cell at the back of one of the vaults. Except for Angela, me, and the mannequins, the dungeon was empty.
“Where’s your family?” I asked her.
“On the way.” She jiggled the cell door open and entered. She stood on the straw-covered floor next to a mannequin in a tattered pirate outfit. “We’ll meet them outside.”
“Outside?”
“It’ll be my last night to enjoy my favorite spots. There’s a network of tunnels that connects what’s left of the original Charles Town. Werewolves use the tunnels to get around without being seen.”
She shucked her blouse, bra, and jeans and shimmied out of her panties. Her shoulders and arms sprouted fur. Her nose darkened and her face distended into the beginnings of a snout. The sparkle returned to her eyes. She hid her folded clothes behind the mannequin.
“C’mon,” she ordered. “Get undressed and turn.”
I entered the cell, stripped naked, and lay in the straw.
The transformation came as it always did, in waves of pain. Afterward, I lay still for a moment. The air smelled of dank water, moldy straw, and dust.
Angela as wolf trotted around me.
I got to my paws.
She slipped out of the cell and ran down another vault. She jumped into a dirt pit and sprang toward an old wooden door. Rising on her hind legs, she smacked the door with her front paws and scooted to one side. The door popped open and revealed a dark tunnel. She disappeared into the opening and I chased after her.
The bricks of the tunnel walls were sometimes neat rows and sometimes crooked stacks that seemed ready to cave in. The loose dirt on the floor puffed beneath our paws. The tunnel cut side to side, past other doorways filled with piles of bricks and rocks.
Dim light illuminated the far end of the tunnel. The floor sloped upward. A breeze heavy with the smells of water and plants drifted from an opening before us.
Angela scrambled up the slope. I stayed close. We climbed out of an exit disguised as an open sewer grate.
We were in
a park near the ocean. I looked around to get my bearings—the southern tip of the peninsula. White Point Gardens.
Wolf musk tainted the air. I picked up the scent of five wolves slinking in the shadows, unseen by humans ooing and aahing at the fireworks.
Angela raised her tail and turned toward the other wolves.
A gush of cold air sliced through my fur. Angela didn’t seem to notice. I looked in the direction of the breeze.
A bush to my right rustled. I lowered my head and advanced. I caught a new smell. Strawberry ice cream. A cup with one scoop rested at the base of a holly shrub.
The breeze circled me.
Deliah the ghost waited unseen. Because of her I’d survived two attempts on my life. I owed her almost as much as I owed Angela. Now Deliah wanted her reward.
She’d have to sleep for months to make up for the energy she’d used to bring the ice cream. I wondered where she got it. How did she know I was going to be here? More important, how was she going to know what the ice cream tasted like?
Angela scratched the dirt and gestured with her snout toward the other wolves.
I looked at the holly bush and back at her. I had one final task.
Angela lowered her tail and pressed her cold nose against mine. It was like a kiss, but it wasn’t done out of desire—it was done with understanding. She turned in the direction of the wolf musk and waited for me. I continued to the holly.
A mist caressed on my face and I pictured Deliah as clearly as if I’d seen her. Gray ethereal smoke swirling into the shape of an attractive woman in her twenties. Her proud forehead. That pretty nose that kept shifting from pointed to rounded. Hair that curled from under her bandanna and trailed into vapor.
I opened my mouth and the cold wet mist swirled over my teeth and across my tongue. Deliah and her ghostly magic. My taste buds became sharper than ever before.
Now to eat the ice cream.
Deliah and I would share. This was going to be one of my better memories of Charleston.
CHAPTER 73
I was back where my adventures usually ended, in my office on the second floor of the Oriental Theater at the corner of Tennyson and Forty-fourth in Denver. The marquee on the front of the building was lit up and the neon bathed my office with an orange glow.
A new paperweight rested on my desk blotter. The paperweight was a deformed lead slug inside a dome of clear plastic resin. The bullet I’d clawed out of my chest. One souvenir of my trip to Charleston. Another souvenir, Wendy’s key ring, rested in my top desk drawer.
I had one more souvenir of that trip. Angela.
At the moment, she wasn’t in my office. She’d gone up to the roof, where, during the day, she’d sunbathe. But it was night, so she’d be looking at the moon—like the wolf she was—and sifting through her memories, her longings, her regrets.
Something tapped against the window and startled me. But at this time of night and since I was on the second floor, the tapping could come from only one source.
A messenger crow.
The crow sat on the window. He tapped again impatiently, like I was delaying his rounds. Orange and blue highlights from the marquee and the corner streetlamp glistened across its shiny black feathers. It dug its beak into the edge of the window screen.
I opened the window sash and undid the bent nail securing the screen. The crow wiggled through the opening and hopped onto my desk. A message capsule glittered on one leg.
I unclipped the capsule and removed the cap. I turned my face to avoid the odor of rotting meat wafting out.
The crow strutted across my desk, its claws tick-ticking on the glass top.
I took the parchment note and unfolded it. The message said:
Our esteemed Felix Gomez,
Our condolences regarding the death of Wendy Teagarden. She will be missed.
You handled Julius Paxton and the impending werewolf war with your usual disregard for good sense. No one else could’ve succeeded considering the circumstances.
Prepare yourself for a new assignment.
Araneum
I crushed the parchment into a wad. This note was as close to an “attaboy” as I’d get from them.
Ingrates.
Assholes.
Standard procedure for destroying these notes was to expose them to sunlight. But I didn’t have to wait until morning to get rid of this one.
I tossed it to the crow.
The wad of parchment landed between its feet. The crow looked at the wad and then at me with beady eyes that seemed to say: The things I do for my job.
The bird sighed and picked at the wad with its beak. It chewed the parchment until the entire wad disappeared into its mouth, and swallowed.
The crow shifted from foot to foot.
It burped a puff of stinky gray smoke.
I dispersed the smoke with a wave. After clipping the message capsule back on the crow’s leg, I set the bird on the windowsill. It pushed against the screen, scrambled out, and leaped into the night sky. The crow fluttered past the marquee and disappeared.
I twisted the nail holding the screen in place and lowered the sash.
I left my office and took the stairs to the maintenance closet on the third floor, then climbed the ladder to the roof. I opened the access hatch and stepped out.
The roof was a flat rectangle surrounded by a low brick wall and cluttered with rusting swamp coolers, vent pipes, and discarded TV antennas. From up here I could see all over the Highlands neighborhood and to the east, the high rises of downtown Denver, the chaos of lights from the amusement rides at Elitch Gardens, and the red and white glow of traffic cruising north and south on Interstate 25.
Angela sat on a sheet of cardboard to avoid resting on the rough gravel and tar roofing. Her legs were scooped against her chest with her arms around her knees.
She was facing away from me, staring at the waning crescent moon. I knew she’d heard me, but she took no notice of my presence.
I leaned against one of the swamp coolers behind her. She wore a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, a few of the clothes she’d bartered at the thrift store in exchange for her designer dresses and high heels.
“New tattoo?” I asked.
She touched the skin around the fresh tattoo on her upper right arm, a circle of wolf heads and broken hearts interlaced with a swirl of barbed wire.
A confusion of tattoos—more barbed wire, spines, thorns—covered her left arm from shoulder to wrist. Jagged red and blue flames flared across her shoulder blades. Her ponytail dangled over a Chinese character at the back of her neck. She had similar characters tattooed on the inside of her forearms and the backs of her calves. She wouldn’t tell me what the characters meant. A full moon circled her navel and matching Carolina palm trees decorated the tops of her feet.
When we first arrived in Denver, sex had been carnal lucha libre. While there was vigor, the passion seemed forced, like she was trying to exorcise demons with her pelvis.
Then her thighs quit gripping me so tightly. Her bright eyes clouded with apathy. Her smile cooled. Her touch felt as though a membrane had grown between us.
If the words to warm her and bring her close to me existed, I had never found them.
She didn’t have words to express herself either, as if the trauma of banishment had grown like a malignant tumor and choked her heart until it became mute. So she communicated her unhappiness with tattoos.
Angela surprised me when she waved and whispered, “Sit, I have something to tell you.”
She scooted to make room on the cardboard. I sat. Our hips were close but didn’t touch.
She kept her eyes on the moon. The tattoo of a star marked her neck below the earlobe. “I’m leaving.”
The last pins of hope broke away, and I found myself tipping into a void of sadness.
“I’m going to Montana. Join a pack of rogue weres.” She chuckled faintly. “That’s an oxymoron. How can you have a pack of rogue werewolves?”
“I unde
rstand what you mean,” I replied. She had tried to meet local weres, but they had shunned her.
“I’m going to miss you, Felix.”
I wanted to believe her. “I’m sorry life in Denver”—I should have said life with me—“wasn’t what you expected.”
She bumped her shoulder against mine, the first gesture of affection we’d exchanged in weeks. She still didn’t look at me. “Thanks for coming up. Now I need time alone.”
I bumped her back. “You know where to find me.”
I got up and returned to my office.
I counted the supernatural women that I’d gotten close to. Wendy was dead. Carmen remained in outer space, a prisoner of alien gangsters.
I’d lost them both and now I was losing another.
Angela.
My kundalini noir ached. I am an undead immortal bloodsucker. I have no heart. No soul. So where did this hurt come from?
Though I’d miss Angela, I had to let her go.
What business did I have with werewolves?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincere thanks to HarperCollins, specifically my publisher at Eos, Liate Stehlik; my editor, Diana Gill; her assistant, Will Hinton; marketing manager Jean Marie Kelly; publicist Gregory Shutack; and online marketing manager Shawn Nicholls. Also, much thanks to my agent, Scott Hoffman, and staff at Folio Literary Management, LLC. I couldn’t have gotten this far without my critique group: Jeanne Stein, Sandy Maren, Terry Wright, Tamra Monahan, Warren Hammond, and Margie and Tom Lawson. To those in the rah-rah section: Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Mystery Writers of America, El Centro Su Teatro, the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, and the League of Reluctant Adults. Rebel Sinclair and Mark Jones of Black Cat Tours, thanks for showing me the high and low in Charleston, South Carolina. To Dr. Roberto Cantú, of California State University, Los Angeles, for putting up with my weirdness. And a shout-out to Manuel Ramos, Jennifer Mosquera, Eric Jaenike, and Eric Matelski. I can’t forget the support from my sons, Alex and Emil, and family, especially my sister, Sylvia.
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