“Kitty!” The name, the sound of it, rattles her hearing. Her stride breaks, ears pricked forward, tail up, all awareness bent toward learning what’s wrong. “Kitty, back down! It’s okay!”
Her mate speaks. His voice is a wash of warmth and comfort, even as she is annoyed at his two-legged self. They should hunt together; he should be four-legged, fur-covered, like her.
“Get it away from me! Get it away!”
She would strike it down just to make it quiet.
“Drop that machete or I’ll tell her to go for it!”
The blade falls.
“Kitty. The police are coming. Angel’s here. We got this, you can rest now.”
She paces, whines. She wants the prey’s blood. As long as the prey is still moving, the hunt’s not finished, and this creature is dripping fear, ready for her to take it—
“Kitty.”
She droops, tail falling, ears flat. This is her mate, standing in front of her, and his scent means home and safety. If he says the hunt is over, she’ll believe him. But only him. He’s low to the ground, and she pads over to him, rubs along his body, pressing herself to his warmth.
“I need you to sleep now. Okay?”
Maybe. Only because he’s with her.
“Oh, Jesus!” the terrified voice cries again, and her hackles go stiff, her muscles tensed for attack. A growl burrs in her throat.
“Shh.” Her mate’s hand flattens her fur, strokes along her flank. In spite of herself, she settles.
“Why don’t you kill that thing!” Its screaming is desperate.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up!” another voice intervenes, as angry as Wolf feels.
But her mate murmurs, wraps her with his warmth, and she lets her weight go, leaning into him. He holds her. She’s safe.
“So, is she gonna turn back human now or what?” this other voice intrudes. Angel, her two-legged self murmurs.
“She has to sleep. It’ll take a little while.”
She is already fading, already slipping away, feeling like she has left a job unfinished . . .
The wolf loped off into the woods with giant, graceful strides, and disappeared. Angel couldn’t hope to follow her on foot, not even with the fresh jolt of brains fueling her. Dwayne had a dumpy four-wheel ATV that he used for hunting critters around here somewhere. It said something about how panicked he was that he hadn’t fled on that thing. Since it wasn’t out where she could see it, it was likely parked in the locked Tuff Shed around back. Breaking the lock? That was something her zombie strength could handle. She yanked on the door, and the dead bolt ripped through the cheap plywood. She rolled her head on her shoulders. Yeah, that was kinda satisfying!
She was about to fire up the ATV when the distinctive roar of a Harley-Davidson powered up the driveway. She’d recognized the rider from the crime scene—the thirty-something man who’d been with Kitty. Probably her husband, Ben. Angel decided not to ask why the hell he was on Jessie “Snake” Crowe’s bike. It was sure to be a long story.
“She’s out there,” she yelled to him, and before the sentence was fully out of her mouth, Ben leaped up behind her on the four-wheeler.
“That way,” he said, pointing.
They roared off like a couple of unlikely knights on an even more unlikely steed. Angel tried to follow in the direction she’d seen Kitty run; but it was Ben, evidently also a werewolf, tracking with his nose, who ended up finding Kitty and Dwayne.
The wolf had Dwayne cornered. With her smoky gray and tan fur fading to a pale belly, sharp ears flattened and all her fur standing on end, she did sort of bring to mind the image of Kitty with her shoulders bunched up. Dwayne held a machete—what he’d used to kill Jimmy, Angel was sure. She had no doubt the crime lab would match it to the cuts in what was left of Jimmy’s body.
Kitty looked like she wanted to rip into the man, and Angel was inclined to let her. She realized now that the slashes on Jimmy couldn’t have come from Kitty’s claws. Those cuts had been a lot cleaner than what was about to happen to Dwayne.
Ben jumped off the ATV and yelled at her to stop. Unbelievably, she did and, just like that, it was all over. Angel found duct tape in the ATV’s cargo bag and approached Dwayne, who was curled up on the ground in the fetal position and weeping outright.
“You’re a fucking worthless piece of shit asshole,” was all she could find to say to him. He simply huddled and sobbed. He looked as if facing Kitty’s wolf side might have given him a few nightmares. Good.
She finished duct-taping Dwayne’s wrists behind his back, yanked his shirt over his head so he couldn’t see what was going on, then watched in morbid fascination as Kitty became, well, Kitty again. Fur retreated into flesh. Limbs shifted, and bones melted and reformed. A moment later Ben cradled a mud-spattered human woman in his arms, gazing down at her with such tenderness that Angel had to look away, abruptly feeling as if she was intruding.
Using a ratty tissue she’d had stuffed in one of her pockets, she retrieved the machete from the mud and carefully set it in the cargo bag. The police would want to see it.
Back at the four-wheeler, Angel retrieved the clothing from where she’d stuffed it into a storage compartment, and by the time she made it back to Ben, Kitty was awake and more than ready to get dressed.
Ben rose to his feet and gave Angel a grateful smile, but it flickered as his gaze dropped to her left forearm. “You, ah, have a . . .” He trailed off, wincing.
Angel looked down to see a long ribbon of flesh dangling from her wrist. “Crap.” She sighed. “All those damn branches whipping at us. And my lunchbox is in my car.” She flicked a gaze toward Dwayne. Nice human brain right there . . .
Angel realized that Ben and Kitty were staring at her with matching looks of horror and consternation. “Relax,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not that hungry.” Mostly. She flopped the strip of flesh back into place and duct-taped it down. “But I’d better get to my lunchbox before the cops come.”
With Dwayne draped across the back rack, they managed to arrange themselves on the four-wheeler so that no one had to walk through the muck. Kitty stayed uncharacteristically quiet, and another creature still seemed to look out of her eyes. Dwayne had managed to cut her with his machete; the wound had already healed.
Angel darted to her car even as the first cop car pulled into the driveway, and managed to gulp down the left parietal lobe of a recent heart attack victim before the deputy parked.
She wiped her face, checked to make sure she was all in one piece again, and stepped out of her car in time to give the deputy a wide grin. “Hey, Billy Roy! Me and my new friends got a present for y’all.”
Well, that had been a little embarrassing. Sort of not really. Wolf was feeling pretty great—they’d gotten to go on a real hunt for a real bad guy and had maybe even done some good, bringing a murderer to justice.
But they hadn’t gotten to actually eat him.
Unlike Angel, Kitty didn’t need to eat people. She didn’t want to eat people. She got a little queasy thinking about it. But Wolf could almost feel the blood sliding over her tongue, and the flesh coming apart between her teeth . . .
“You okay?” Ben asked.
He was driving them back to New Orleans—he knew exactly the way to go this time. No GPS shenanigans for them. Kitty was hunched in the front seat, cleaned up and back in her clothes, reminding herself that she had arms and hands and not four furry legs ending in deadly claws. Her fingers itched.
“Yeah. Just . . . restless I guess. People can be so . . . shitty.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. And he should know; he saw some of the worst in his line of work. “But not all of them.”
“Angel ended up being pretty nice.”
“For a zombie.”
“For a zombie, of course. And I wonder if she’s out there thinking we’re pretty nice for werewolves.”
“Well, we are. I think. I mean, you didn’t actually eat that guy. So that’s good.”
“Yeah,” she said, but it came out a little wistful. That last bit of her Wolf still lingering on the surface. “And neither did Angel.”
Ben gave her a look and shook his head. “Someday we’re going to take a trip where nothing happens. No murders, no vampires, no zombies, no conspiracies. Nothing. Just relaxing by the pool or something.”
“Or something,” she murmured, raising an eyebrow.
He glanced over at her, returning the suggestive look. And the car sped down the highway just a little bit faster, getting back to the hotel that much quicker.
The Lessons of Room 19
WESTON OCHSE AND DAVID WELLINGTON
ONE
Grief can take on many forms. Sometimes it’s a granite headstone in a cemetery. Sometimes it’s a shrine by the side of the road. There’s a noble sort of grief in the elderly man sitting alone on a park bench. There’s the respectful grief for a soldier, his boots resting atop his coffin as his unit files by, reverently saluting. Grief can be a source of fuel someone can tap into to accomplish something they wouldn’t have ordinarily been able to accomplish. Grief can actually be a power for good. Or grief can just be a crazed man wielding a bloody coat hanger, beating the shit out of a ghost hanging on the wall who won’t stop moaning in the voice of his dead girlfriend.
Jack Walker let the coat hanger fall to the ground and grabbed the almost-empty bottle of Jameson sitting on the dresser. He tilted back the bottle and let the last two inches of warm bitterness rush through him. He gasped as the alcohol hit him, wobbling him back on his heels. He closed his eyes and imagined her blue eyes sparkling, red hair caught in an ocean breeze, the light winking off Coronado Bay behind her.
Then he opened his eyes and beheld the mewling pathetic thing on the wall, blue glimmers sheening off it like visible static, and how it hung like a saggy red skin-suit. But if he touched it, when he touched it, it became Jen. He’d spent the first day and a half leaning against the wall, touching it, speaking to it and letting it speak back at him. At first he was sure it was Jen, able to channel herself from wherever she was in the afterlife, into this piece of Amish-made ectoplasm.
But then he’d fallen asleep and when he’d awoken, it wasn’t Jen. It was someone else. Someone he didn’t know at all. And no matter what he did, he couldn’t get Jen back. So he’d begun his cycle of beating the thing into submission until it finally capitulated and brought Jen back. Sometimes it would pretend to be her if only to make him stop. But he could tell the difference. After all, they’d been engaged to be married. He knew her better than anyone.
Jack shoved the empty bottle into the box and pulled out another from the case he’d bought when he’d left Philly. He unscrewed the cap and took another gulp. But this time he was in front of the mirror and what he saw stopped him.
What the hell are you doing?
He let the question hang there as he stared at himself, hating himself. The unkempt hair, the bloodshot eyes, and the unwashed clothes couldn’t be his. After all, he was part of a unit that was at the very spear tip of America’s supernatural defense. He was a US Navy SEAL. He was the best weapon his country could create.
If you’re so good, why’d you let her die then?
He snapped his gaze away from himself. For a brief moment, he thought about breaking the damn mirror. Instead, he grabbed a sheet from the bed and draped it over the glass. Out of sight, out of mind.
The thought gave him a heartless giggle.
Out of mind.
He was surely that.
Out of mind.
“Jack, are you there?” came the words like a sizzle from a pan.
He averted his gaze from the ghost, went into the bathroom, and washed his face and hands. The cold water was a shock and helped shove some of the alcohol aside so he could actually think.
Somewhere down deep he knew that this wasn’t the ghost of his dead girlfriend, but it could sometimes look and sound just like her. The Amish man behind the motel counter who’d sold it to him said that the ghost was capable of channeling Jen, but that it would also be like a shining light, drawing any ghost capable of noticing. Like now, it sounded like an old man, voice barely registering, cracking at the end of life.
When SEAL Team 666 had returned from their mission to England, Jack had buried himself in books about ghosts and mediums. He’d needed to speak with Jen one last time. He’d needed to apologize for not being there. To tell her that he’d wait and never go with another woman again. Laws had offered to help, but Jack hadn’t felt like being part of Triple Six at that moment. He’d needed time to mourn . . . to be alone.
He’d managed to stumble across a story on one of the conspiracy websites, an Amish legend about people who not only could harvest ghosts, but could channel the spirits of the dead. He’d done additional research and found that there were several blogs pointing toward southern Pennsylvania. He cross-referenced the locations with the Triple Six mission logs and found that as early as the 1920s, the team had been sent to investigate the disappearance of a state senator. Ultimately, Triple Six was able to track down a family living in the town of Gainesboro who’d kidnapped the man, then killed and harvested his ghost in order to get information about disputed land titles. These witchbillies, as they’d come to be called, were able to cast spells to include reading the future. The family was rounded up and put to work by the War Department, divining future attacks to American interests. That’s where the information got skimpy.
So Jack had taken a few weeks’ leave, flown into Philadelphia, and rented a car. He’d headed west and was soon in cow country; houses and barns clustered far apart from the others, as if beneath the looming ridges and the deep, shadowy valleys they could remain alone, isolated, to do whatever they wanted.
On the edge of Gainesboro he’d spied a two-story motel with a hex sign painted on the side. The White Deer Forest Travel Lodge. He’d decided to park and spend the night. Now five nights later, he’d yet to leave. If it wasn’t for food delivery, he’d have long ago starved. He’d been lucky enough to stumble into witchbilly central. After an exchange of two months’ pay he’d been saving for his and Jen’s wedding, the motel owner had come into the room, hung a thing like a white deer hide on the wall, and bowed out smiling. That was all.
Jack wiped his face with a hand towel, tried to smooth back his hair, which was seriously out of regulation, and then found a clean shirt to put on—his last.
“Jack, is that you?” came the voice again, this time female, younger. Still not Jen.
He picked up the hanger from the floor and approached the ghost.
“I want Jen. Bring her back,” he commanded.
Eyes formed in the skin and regarded him. “Oh no, look at the man with the coat hanger.” A smirk formed, then vanished. Still not Jen.
“I know you’re keeping her from me.”
“Coat hangers make for great abortions, Jackie,” came the voice of his mother, long dead.
“Stop it,” he shouted.
“Stop it,” it mimicked. Not Jen.
He grabbed at the bottle, knocking it over and onto the floor. He fell to his hands and knees, pulling it from beneath the bed where it had rolled. He sat. Laying the coat hanger on his lap, he opened the bottle and took a deep draft.
“You know what you need to do, right, little Jackie?” said the voice of a Filipino child Jack knew had been run over by a cement truck. Not Jen.
He knew what he needed to do. Hell yes, he did. He got to his feet, drank three huge gulps of anger fuel, then sat the bottle back on the dresser. He turned to the ghost and held up his coat hanger.
“What do you know about abortions?” he growled.
The ghost seemed about to respond, but Jack wouldn’t let it. Instead he unleashed his own fury, slashing and hacking at the vile thing hanging on the wall. He screamed at it while he beat it, the words lost in his incomprehensible sobbing. Pieces of the ghost flew from it with each strike. The wall was scarred from where he’d hit it. But sti
ll he struck it. Over and over and over, until he was out of breath, his arms tired, his soul stained with what he knew he shouldn’t be doing.
But finally his pathetic tantrum was rewarded.
“Jack, is that you?” Jen.
He fell to his knees and let his head rest against the wall beneath the ghost. He struggled to control his breathing . . . his emotions.
“Yes, yes, it’s me. It’s your Jack.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here. They wouldn’t let me.”
He nodded and let the hanger fall to the carpet. “I know, Jen. I know. But I fixed it.”
“That’s good, Jack. Now tell me,” the ghost purred in the voice of Jen. “Where were we?”
“I don’t know,” he sobbed. “I forgot.”
“We were talking about how much you love me, Jack.”
He felt the bottom of his heart drop away. “Ah, that. Yes, we were, weren’t we?”
They talked long into the night until daylight streamed through the dirty windows, afternoon light burning the eyes, and two more bottles of Jameson littering the carpet like headstones of shattered dreams.
TWO
Laura remembered when Patience was twelve, and how seriously creepy her special talent was back then. Now that the girl was nearly twenty, it was . . . still creepy, actually.
Patience Polder wore a white dress, very plain in design, that buttoned all the way up to her throat. Her hair was covered by a white cloth.
She might have been an Amish girl, dressed like that. She definitely wasn’t. Patience was the leader of the witchbillies, a little community of people who dressed simply and lived simply in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, keeping their own ways. Like the Amish, they were wary of technology, but for a different reason. Because they’d found something better. Magic, for lack of a better term.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 16