Case nodded.
The doctor brought a hand up to the side of his mouth and whispered, “Pubes?”
“Wha—” Case floundered. “What? No . . . I . . . no. Gross.” He wrinkled his nose and scooted away from the old man.
“Some guys like a hairy thatch,” Abrams said. “You wouldn’t be the first.” He squinted up at Case’s head. “Anyway, you can’t want it on your head. I know I don’t exactly have a pilot’s vision, but I can see well enough to know that you’ve got a full ’do up there. The hairline might be receding just a smidge, but nothing a man your age needs to worry about.”
The doctor’s own hair was a wispy spider’s web draped across his gleaming scalp.
“I don’t need it for my head.” Although he doubted the doctor could really see him even from just those few feet away, he lowered his gaze. “I—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “I need it for my back.”
He looked up in time to see the old man cock his head and furrow his brow. “Your what?”
“I have this spot—”
“Your back?”
Case nodded, realized the man probably only saw a swaying blur, and said, “Yes.”
Abrams wheezed, brought a fist to his mouth, coughed into it, and then wheezed again.
Case had a brief recollection of a female werewolf hyena-laughing at him. He gritted his teeth.
“I’m sorry, son,” the doctor said when his bout of coughing ended. “We don’t do that sort of thing here.”
Case asked him why not.
“Why would we?”
“Because,” Case said. “I need a transplant, and you’re a hair transplant specialist. What do you care where I put it?”
The old man wheezed again but managed to get hold of himself a little more quickly this time. “We’re in business to help people, Mr. Case, not make sideshow freaks.”
Case glared at him.
The old man coughed again, and Case imagined him hacking up one of his internal organs. The thought sent a hunger pang through his stomach, which rumbled almost immediately. Case licked his lips. They’d started to thin already. He felt his nose recede into his growing snout. His teeth stretched into wicked fangs, his ears flapped against the sides of his head, and his body began to rip its way through his clothes.
When the doctor realized what was happening, Case was no longer Case. He was the Case-thing.
The doctor screamed, but it was too late. For him, and for everyone else in the building.
• • •
Walmart’s rug selection was pretty sparse. Case wondered if maybe he should have gone to Target instead. While he browsed, a woman strolled into the aisle steering a wobbly cart with one hand and pushing the loose strands of hair out of her face with the other. A drooling toddler sat in the front of the cart, slobbering all over the handlebar and the woman’s fingers. A pile of food large enough to gag a whale filled the cart’s main compartment. The woman pawed through a couple of nasty-looking rugs that appeared to have been barfed upon—maybe to hide stains so you didn’t have to clean it as often. She passed on those particular monstrosities (from the dusty looks of the things, she wasn’t the only one who had) and wheeled her cart closer to where Case stood.
“Not much to choose from, is there?” she asked when she noticed him.
Case shook his head. He squatted and pulled out a thick, brown, two-by-three-foot number. The rug certainly wouldn’t have looked good anywhere outside a shrine to the ’70s, but the fibers were thick, silky, lustrous.
“What do you think of this one?” He held it up for the woman’s inspection.
She said nothing, but the eyebrows she arched spoke whole diatribes. Your call, the brows said. It’s your rug, but we wouldn’t put that thing in our house. Hell, we wouldn’t use it to wipe our shit. If eyebrows could shit.
“That bad?”
She shrugged. “It’s definitely not my style, but maybe it will go with your décor.”
Case’s décor was the last thing on his mind. “Yeah,” he said after studying the rug for another few moments. “Maybe it will.”
He thanked the woman, tucked the rug under his arm, and went off in search of some superglue.
In his shoebox of an apartment, Case used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut the rug to size. He stripped out of his clothes, kneeled on the floor beside the reshaped rug, and spread the entire 16-oz bottle of superglue (“SUPER DUPER-SIZED SUPERGLUE” the label proclaimed) on the rug’s underside. He sat down at the end of the rug and did a reverse sit-up until his back pressed against the film of sticky glue. When he was all the way down, he wriggled a little from side to side, back and forth.
He lay there for almost half an hour, giving the glue time to set, letting the rug meld with his body until the two of them were one and the same. When he stood up, he went immediately to the bathroom for a look in the medicine cabinet mirror.
The rug didn’t match his hair exactly—it was a few shades darker—but that was all right. That was perfect. When he became the Case-thing, he tended to get dirty. With mud. With blood. His normal chestnut-colored follicles became darker brown, almost black. Every once in a while he’d find clumps of the stuff strewn about his apartment after a hunt. Shed? Torn out? He could never quite remember, but he guessed more than a few of those clumps had come from the space between his shoulder blades and his ass.
He reached over his shoulder and gave the rug a tug. He was able to shift it around a little, but only as much as the skin beneath would allow. It was stuck fast. He smiled and headed for the front door.
The only way to know for sure was to give it a little test run.
The Case-thing burst out of the snack-den’s front doors and skittered to a stop on the cool concrete path. He breathed in the world around him, smelled dozens of snacks in the den behind, several more in the open, concrete-floored area ahead. There were no other things around—not yet—but once he’d spilled some blood, they’d come running. In a populated area like this, there’d be a whole pack.
He smelled a young woman-snack taking bagged food out of the back of her rolling metal box. It wasn’t the woman-snack his snack-self had met earlier, the snack he only vaguely remembered, the snack he’d barely been able to smell and hadn’t thought of as a snack at all. Not at the time. This was a new smell. A younger smell. And this snack had no child-snack in tow.
The Case-thing padded between two more of the rolling boxes and found the woman-snack with arms full of plastic bags, trying unsuccessfully to kick shut the hatch to her metal box. He growled at her and she spun toward him. The muscles in one hand loosened and the bagged food crashed to the concrete below. The other hand squeezed. He could smell the muscles working. He licked his muzzle.
As the woman-snack screamed, her bladder let go and the front of her pants were suddenly ripe with the stench of urine. The Case-thing tried to unsmell the piss and, of course, couldn’t.
The snack tried to run but slipped in her own spilled food and fell to her haunches. He was on her in a single bound. He tore a chunk from the side of her throat and flung the hunk of meat aside, trying to distribute the smell of the kill as widely as possible. Not that it would matter. If there were any things within five miles, they’d smell the carnage.
While he waited on the others, the Case-thing chose a few of the choicest bits of meat—the teats, the rump, the dangly-bit holder—and wolfed them down. There were other snacks nearby, all hiding. He saw one man-snack in a metal box a few jumps away. The snack stared through the box’s glass side, eyes wide and full of tears. Even through the metal and glass, the Case-thing could smell the snack’s fear.
The first thing to arrive was another he-thing. The Case-thing growled at the new, smaller thing and the small-thing backed away, also growling but very low in his throat, unassertive. The Case-thing had always been the alpha, and he promised himself that he would remain so despite his scanty pelt.
The small-thing looked at the man-snack in the metal
box and took a step toward him. The Case-thing lowered his head.
You have my permission.
The small-thing leapt onto the hood of the metal box, rammed his face through the glass, and tore the snack out in less than a second. The man-snack screamed once before the small-thing ripped out his throat. The small-thing swallowed the meat after only a few perfunctory chews.
When the first she-thing arrived, she looked first at the small-thing and then at the Case-thing. The Case-thing gestured toward the woman-snack. He and the she-thing went through the ritual: share the kill, pick it clean, bathe each other.
When she approached his back, the Case-thing tensed. She rubbed her head against him, pulled away momentarily, rubbed against him again, and then pulled away for good.
She backed off.
The Case-thing waited.
She wheezed.
His growl started as a soft gurgle in his throat and escalated into an earthquakelike rumble that seemed to shake the whole world.
The she-thing began to revert back to her snack self. Her muzzle shortened, her teeth shrank, her hair retreated into her skin. Her large, glowing eyes paled. She stopped changing halfway through. Just enough, he guessed, to regain control of her vocal chords.
She said two words the Case-thing could almost understand. He let the words replay over and over in his mind. When he finally realized what she said, the earthquake of a howl became a nuclear bomb of a howl. He leapt at her before she could change back and gutted her on the spot. As her intestines spilled out across her half-formed body, the Case-thing stepped back to watch her die.
Nice rug, were the words she’d said.
Other things had come. A pack of them, as he’d guessed. The small one on the hood of the metal box took a final bite of his snack and then hopped down to the concrete.
Some of the things were wheezing at him. He turned to face them one at a time, growling.
What are you looking at?
The things turned from him and padded away. He was still bigger than them, still stronger. They wouldn’t test his temper.
When they were gone, and when the she-thing had breathed her last breath, the Case-thing clawed at the fur on his back. The fur that wasn’t fur. He jerked his head over his shoulder and chewed at the stuff. When he had dug away all the fake fur, chomped down through the hide to the raw meat beneath, he stopped and panted.
He looked up at the sky, saw the now-full moon, and wailed at it.
“It’s quite common,” the psychiatrist said, “for men to feel a sense of inadequacy when they begin to lose their hair.”
Case listened to her from the armchair on the other side of the small room.
“But I have to ask: do you think you might be blowing things slightly out of proportion? After all, you have very nice hair. Many men would kill for hair like yours.”
Case laughed.
“May I ask what you find so amusing?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. And anyway, it’s not the hair on my head that I’m worried about.”
“Not—” She looked at him for a moment before glancing down at his crotch. “Ahh.”
Case crossed his legs and said, “No. Jesus. What’s wrong with everyone?”
She looked him in the eyes again. She smiled but didn’t laugh. When her eyes flicked down to check her watch, Case felt his face begin to morph.
“—time is almost up,” the woman was saying.
“Yours is anyway,” the Case-thing said and leapt from the chair.
American Banshee
ERIC JAMES STONE
Filiméala finished her keening as “Dapper” Donny O’Grady, head of the O’Grady mob, breathed his last. Leaning over his bed, she planted a kiss on his age-mottled forehead. She was glad he had died peacefully at home rather than in a rain of bullets, like too many of the extended family.
“Right, then, we’re done with that infernal screeching,” said Harry. “Time for you to be on your way.”
Filiméala sat up straight and fixed her gaze on Harry. Even at thirty-five, he still had the air of an impatient six-year-old. She had never been sure whether his nickname “Hair-Trigger” was the result of his impatience or the cause of it. “Show some respect, lad,” she said. “Your father has just passed on. I have sung his soul—”
“Right, right,” Harry said. “My father, may he rest, et cetera. But I’m head of the family now, and there are going to be some changes, starting with you.”
“Me?” Filiméala could not keep the startlement from her voice. She had been with the family O’Grady for over five hundred years, even following some of them to America during the Great Famine—though her spirit still yearned sometimes for the hills of the Old Country. The last major change in her life had been over sixty years ago, when Dapper Donny’s father had convinced her to keen the deaths of all members of the O’Grady mob, even if they were not family by blood. What could Harry want of her?
“Yes, you. My father was one for the old ways, but this is the twenty-first century. We don’t need a banshee shrieking about, frightening the neighbors, whenever someone’s going to die.”
“Bean Sídhe,” Filiméala corrected. “The B is—”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’re in America, so speak American. But that’s not the point. The point is, you’re a symbol of the past.”
“Your father and grandfather—”
“Are dead. And all you could do was wail about it. Now, if you could actually warn us someone was going to die in time for us to prevent it . . .” He cocked an eyebrow at her.
She shook her head. Harry had never been the brightest fish in the barrel. “That’s just foolishness, lad. If you prevented a man from dying, I would not feel the call to sing his death now, would I?”
Grabbing her by the left wrist, Harry said, “I am head of the family now. You will show me respect.”
She nodded.
He twisted her arm behind her back. “They say if you capture a banshee, she must tell you the name of who is going to die. You must have been giving my father that information, which could still be useful, even if the death can’t be prevented.”
“Rubbish,” Filiméala said. “If it’s obvious who will die, like your father on his deathbed, then I know, just the same as anyone else. But usually I keen the death without knowing whose it is. Who told you such nonsense?”
“I read it on Wikipedia,” Harry said, his voice defensive.
She didn’t use the computer in her room for much more than emailing some of her sister Bean Sídhe back in the Old Country, who were constantly forwarding her chain letters and YouTube clips. The Internet did not seem worthy of trust to her, because she did not understand the magic behind it. Humans were different—willing to rely on magic beyond their mortal comprehension. “I believe I know my own powers better than Wikipedia.”
“Whatever.” Harry released her arm and waved dismissively. “If you can’t make yourself useful, then I see no reason not to replace you.”
“Replace me?” Her voice rose to a squeak, and she struggled to lower its pitch and speak in a reasonable tone. “I have served your family faithfully all these centuries, and now you want to bring in another Bean Sídhe to take my place? I promise you, she can tell you no more than I.”
“Not another banshee,” he said. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “The head of one of the Haitian gangs owed me a favor. One of his men voodooed an app for my iPhone that will warn me when an O’Grady is going to die, but since I can set it to play any mp3 I want as the warning, it’s more discreet—and a whole lot easier on the ears.” He grinned at her. “You, my dear, are obsolete.”
Filiméala pulled her gray cloak tight around herself. “If you have no need of me, then I will retire to my room.”
“I don’t think you understand yet,” said Harry. “Get out of my house and don’t come back.”
Filiméala found it hard to breathe, like she had been kicked in the stomach by a s
tubborn mule. “Where shall I go? What shall I do?”
“This is America, the land of opportunity,” Harry said with a sharky grin. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”
Dapper Donny’s widow, Meara, slipped some paper into Filiméala’s palm as a couple of Harry’s strongmen escorted her to the sidewalk outside the walls of the mansion.
Filiméala had not been outside the walls in decades. She resisted the urge to throw herself against the gates and beg to be allowed back in. She straightened her shoulders and walked away. She would not give Harry the satisfaction of seeing her devastated.
Éire. Back to Éire. That was where she would go, back to the emerald hills of the Old Country, where she would forget all about the family O’Grady and her brief hundred and sixty years in America.
But not by ship this time. With a small shudder she remembered the journey by steamship, all the passengers crowded together in a space hardly big enough to contain them.
No, she would take one of the aeroplanes of which Donny had often spoken. How grand it must be to sail above the clouds, free as a nightingale on the breeze. She would merely have to ignore the fact that she did not understand the magic that held aeroplanes up in the air. Perhaps it was the same magic that had prevented a steamship made of iron from sinking like a stone in the ocean.
But first she must get to the airport. She looked at the papers Meara had given her: several hundred-dollar bills. She hoped it would be enough.
After some frantic waving on her part, an orange-colored taxicab pulled over and she got in.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
“The airport, please,” Filiméala said, faking confidence.
“Which one?”
“Em . . . One with aeroplanes that go to Éire—Ireland?”
“You want JFK?”
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but across the years, Donny had spoken about an American president named JFK, and if she recalled correctly he had been of good Irish stock. Maybe it was a sign she was on the right path.
Blood Lite II: Overbite Page 23