The bulwark erected by sleeping pills and exhaustion crumbles and THE BARN returns in full force. But memory falters, staggering like a badly spliced motion picture. Time has passed in this sequence. It's as if missing episodes were run through the projector of my subconscious these past few days while Dr. Burton's prescriptions capped the lens and switched off the lamp.
But now the dream continues, like a horrific home movie full of washouts and jump-cutsa herky-jerky chain of snippets in which time and events are linked like boxcars on a night train to nowhere.
My arm aches where the needle was gouged, trenching my arm in search of an adequate vein. I keep averting my face away, but my eyes are ever drawn back to the tube carrying my lifeblood away. The cow continues to grunt and huff, sending quivers of distress through the bloody pool that soaks my shirt, permeates my jeans, and fills my shoes. It is a horrific sound that is eclipsed by a more dreadful noise: something else is stirring beside me in this pond of gore.
"Just like 'Nam," the man with the knife is muttering. "Once a corpsman, always a cordon't move!" he screams at me.
I feel life and strength ebbing from my body. It is more than the leeching of my blood. Here, in the darkened portion of the star map that covers the barn floor, a black hole has opened up and I feel as if my very soul is being drawn into a remote and empty universe.
The hand that came out of the bloody stew and clamped down on my arm is growing stronger. I don't want to see, I mustn't see, but my head rolls over anyway.
And I see.
There is a skull surfacing from the visceral swamp, remnants of charred flesh clotting the bone and suggesting what might have been a face before the fire got at it. That tattered charcoal ruin rolls so that its melted features face mine from just a couple of feet away. The nightmare seems complete: it can't be worse than this, there is no imaginable room for greater horror.
And then it opens its eyes and looks at me.
I was dead.
Even as my screams reverberated and died in the narrow confines of the grave, my hands were moving, beating at the walls, the ceiling of my coffin. I was dead and buried. Alone for eternity, smothered in darkness and the memory of something so terrible that I could only peek at it through the fingers of my dreams for a few seconds at a time.
And suddenly, there was light!
I looked up, half-blinded as the lid of my casket swung away, and tried to focus on a blurry face.
Fuzzily, its mouth moved. "It's Chris!" Suki's voice said.
"He's here?" Lupé's voice sounded farther away.
An unfamiliar voice harrumphed: "A stowaway."
And then I heard the whine of tires on pavement beneath me. "Where am I?" I asked groggily.
An old man with a mouthful of snaggled dentatia, wearing a rust-red beret, stepped into view, towering above me.
"Colorado," he said.
So much for a clean getaway.
Although no one seemed to see any need to turn around and take me back, a phone call was made and the Doman informed that I hadn't been abducted after all.
We were on our way to Kansas City, where the rogue vampire had last been sighted. More than sighted, actually: Mooncloud, Bachman, and Luis Garou had run him to ground there. Cornered, he had turned and fought back. Mooncloud had spent the past week in the hospital. The rogue was still loose and running. Lupé's brother and Elizabeth Bachman were dead.
As to the incursion on the Doman's home ground. . .
"Our best guess is another New York hit," Suki said, explaining the little intelligence that had been assembled before they had departed that same day. "They came in and passed through quickly and were gone again without anyone making a positive ID."
"Vampires," the old man said. "They took enough damage t' kill humankinds and still walked oot." The old man's name was Angus, and he wasn't really a man but a dark elf and a "haunt" of one of the lowland castles that bordered England and Scotland. More specifically, he was what was known as a "redcap," the embodiment of ferocious warrior spirits that habitually dyed their hats in their victims' blood.
"Could have been lycanthropes, General." That from a grim-visaged Lupé, who had just traded off the driving chores with Suki.
He shook his head. "Och, not bluidy likely. They'd ha' reverted to natural furms to make their escape."
"Was anybody else hurt?" I asked.
"A few flesh wounds," Suki answered from the front. "Nothing serious. Our folk are naturally resistant to the full effect of gunshot wounds, and these were pros on a specific mission and in a hurry. Once their presence was known and they had little likelihood of success, they blew."
"The worst casualty was Ancho," Lupé said with an uncharacteristic smile. "They nearly had to hospitalize him."
I felt a stab of guilt. "He was protecting me."
"Tell it to Hinzelmann. After the gunmen ran off, the little hütchen grabbed his cane and started beating the salvani black and blue for breaking his elevator. Poor Ancho would have been better off shot."
Angus wasn't smiling, however. His red eyes glowered at me as he spoke. "Ye say the one that attacked ye in yuir room was a vampire, as well?"
I nodded. "Pretty sure. And, looking back, it was either a slightly built man or more probably a woman, now that I've had time to think about it."
"An inside job," the redcap pronounced.
"What makes you say that?" Lupé wanted to know.
I caught a movement at the corner of my eye and turned to look. Someone had stashed a furry cow at the back of the vehicle where the sleeping area was cordoned off by sets of curtains. I looked back at Angus.
"Because one of them knew where the lad's rooms were. . ." The old goblin scratched his leathery cheek with a long, talonlike fingernail and seemed to take no notice of the beast. " . . . and, as they were vampires from outside the demesne, whoever opened the back door had to invite them to cross the threshold, as well."
I looked again and saw that I was mistaken: it wasn't a shaggy cow. It was a dog the size of a cow. And it was green.
"Do ye ken wha' this means?" the redcap said.
"I have no idea," I murmured, staring at the "dog." It was hugenearly the size of a two-year-old bullockand had a tail that had to be at least four feet long that was coiled up on top of its back and hindquarters. Its feet were as big as my own, yet it made no sound as it moved forward a bit more.
Suki finally noticed. "Luath," she commanded, "go lie down." The creature obediently backed up behind the curtains and disappeared.
"It means there's a traitor in the Doman's household," the goblin growled, "an' that traitor could even be one of us on this bus right noo!"
The house was an imposing, multistory affair of stone and brick, replete with garrets, gables, turrets, widow's walks, and a liberal infestation of gingerbreading. Even though the house was well preserved, the lawn neatly mowed, and the shrubbery clipped and groomed, my eyes were drawn to the black, wrought-iron fence adorned with hundreds of twisty points directed toward the night sky.
"You didn't tell me she was staying with the Addams Family," I said.
Lupé ignored me. I had initially chalked it up to distraction over her brother's death. Now I wasn't so sure.
Suki turned to Angus. "Do you mind staying here with Luath, General?"
"Och, I'll keep the cu sith company, lass, whilst ye fetch the sawbones."
"There may be a few social amenities to attend to, sir. It might take a while."
"We'll hold the fort."
We exited the bus and I followed Suki up to the front door where Lupé was already waiting.
The doorbell didn't sound like a foghorn, no gargantuan butler answered the door, and the owners didn't look anything like the cartoon creations of Charles Addams. Susan Satterfield was a buxom redhead whose youthful enthusiasm and friendliness belied the fact that she was about to enter her fourth decade. Her husband, Jim, had curly, sandy-colored hair and a laid-back demeanor that was affable in its own way. In fact, he seemed deceptively serious-minded at first.
It didn't take long to discover that they were marvelous hosts, adept at making one feel comfortable and devoid of the need to impress anybody. They were children of the sixties with its inherent values, educated in the seventies, and successful in the eighties; all of which they had retained and brought with them into the nineties with the joie de vivre that comes from being well-centered and unpretentious. And nurtured a wee bit, Suki explained sotto voce, by having won the state lottery a few years back, as well.
Like the poem "Vagabond House," their home was a three-story treasure trove of antiquities, a museum of knickknacks from around the world, and a gallery of exotica. It was obvious before we reached the end of the hallway that the quick tour would take hoursif we were allowed to ask questions: days.
We entered what would have been the drawing room in another, bygone age and found Dr. Mooncloud.
She sat half-swallowed by an overstuffed armchair with her left leg in a cast and propped on an ancient ottoman of leopard skin and with legs of filigreed jade. Her head was bandaged and one eye still drooped a bit in a lake of purple and red flesh. There was a surprising resemblance to one of the African ceremonial masks that adorned the wall behind her.
She was not alone. A pale man in a dark suit sat in a caneback chair adjacent to hers.
"Lupé! Suki! Chris!" She struggled to rise, but it was clearly a lost battle before it even began. The girls converged, hugged. I hung back and smiled. And wondered.
Wondered about Bachman's and the general's belief that there was a turncoat in the Doman's household. Did that put the finger of suspicion on Lupé since Mooncloud was out of town and essentially out of commission at the time of the raid? Or had she arranged things long distance?
Wondered if they were both guilty but not particularly good at this double agent business as both had suffered heavy losses this past week.
And wondered if this was a good time to make a run for it.
"And you are Mr. Csejthe?" The pale man rose from his chair and extended a hand so white as to be practically indistinguishable from his shirt cuff. "My name is Smirl. Dennis Smirl." His hair was dark, shot with strands of silver, and I figured him for the mid to late forties.
I shook his hand. "I'm Chris Csejthe." I also noticed his impeccable tailoring and how it came surprisingly close to concealing the bulge under his left armpit.
"Mr. Smirl is from Chicago," Mooncloud said. The pale man suddenly had Suki's and Lupé's full attention.
"Perhaps we should all sit down," Susan Satterfield suggested.
"Something to drink?" her husband offered.
It was an interesting collection of stories we had to tell each other.
Smirl explained how the New York enclave had been interfering in Chicago's business dealings these past two years and how there were rumors of a new Doman running affairs in the Big Apple. Lupé followed up with recent attacks on Seattle, and then Mooncloud and I took turns trying to define my part in the current equation. Which brought us around to the Kansas City assignment and why we were all here.
"We tracked it for several days, never quite catching up to it," Mooncloud said. "It's fast. But the reason we were having trouble isolating a pattern and narrowing the search grid turned out to be handlers."
"Handlers?" Smirl asked.
"Black limo and at least three people assisting. New York boys. We also picked up some information on a separate day team operating out of the old HoJo up on the bluff, above the river. Apparently they were investigating the whereabouts of one Victor Wren, but we were spread too thin to check them out beyond that."
I felt a peculiar prickling sensation at the nape of my neck. "Who's Victor Wren?" I whispered.
Mooncloud shrugged.
"Handlers complicate a trackdown," Lupé was saying. "A rogue generally leaves a trail because it's new to the undead lifestyle . . . has no resources. . . ."
"The handlers have been covering the spoor," Mooncloud added. "Eliminating whatever bodies may have accumulatedand, believe me, there will have been bodies with this one."
"What is a rogue doing with handlers?" I wanted to know.
"This one's different." Mooncloud's face looked haunted. "We're not tracking a newly created undead this time. This one has been a vampire for a long time. Maybe a very long time. I think New York provided handlers because this one isn't quite human."
"You sure about the New York connection?" Smirl asked.
Mooncloud nodded. "I recognized my opposite number."
"Dr. Cutler?" Lupé was incredulous. "But he's not a field operative, he's strictly research!"
"Apparently he's doing some field research this time around." Mooncloud shifted her cast to a more comfortable position. "I didn't recognize the other two, but Luis identified them as vampires."
"What happened to my brother?" Lupé's voice was calm but anguish leaked from her eyes.
"It was two nights after we finally tracked them to the old River Quay area. They were using an abandoned warehouse for a nest."
"Certainly fits the New York MO," Smirl murmured.
"Luis had the scent. I was loaded down with the whole AV rig and packing two crossbows, cocked and ready. Ditto for Lizminus the rig, of course. She was supposed to hang backwait for my signal. I was waiting for Luis to get in position. Something went wrong. I don't know what she saw from the other sidemaybe they were tipped off, heard us or somethingbut she went crashing in before either of us were ready."
She shook her head. "It was a mess. Cutler's human, so we didn't waste time on him. Luis took down a vampire and I shot another and the rogue."
Suki leaned forward, an expression of uncharacteristic intensity on her face. "How did you know that it was the rogue?"
"The other two wore suits andI don't quite know how to say thislooked normal. But the other guy . . . whoo! He was a nightmare! Tall, thin, almost spideryand dressed in black from head to toe. His face was, well, distorted in some odd way. He looked feralwild, and barely restrainedand, in the brief opportunity I had to observe him, I got this uncanny feeling that his handlers had their hands full."
"But you shot him?" Lupé demanded more than asked.
Mooncloud nodded. "Could have sworn the bolt caught him square in the chest. He went down like he'd been poleaxed. A moment later, he was back on his feet, holding the bloody bolt in his hand. He started for me, but Luis finished the first vampire and intercepted him. The other one had Bachman down. I didn't see her discorporation because he was blocking my view and I was a little distracted at the time, trying to recock the first crossbow. The next thing I knew, he was up and coming at me. Knocked me down before I could get the quarrel in place. If it hadn't been for Luis. . ." She shivered.
"Tell me about Luis?" Lupé was unwavering in her pursuit of her brother's fate.
"The rogue killed him," Mooncloud said simply. Only there was something that wasn't simple in the way that she said it.
"How?" Lupé was relentless.
"It doesn't matter how. He died bravely. He saved my life. And we must decide how to proceed from here."
"No!" Lupé's fist came down on the chair arm and there was a sharp report as wood cracked from the force of the blow. "I want to know how he was killed! It is not so easy to kill a werewolf and I want to know if they were carrying!"
I looked at Suki.
"Silver bullets," she whispered.
"I don't know," Mooncloud said. By now it was obvious to all of us that she was being evasive.
"Then, how did he die?" The blood from the Latino side of Garou's ancestry was in full evidence now.
"I don't really think that this is a good"
She was on her feet. "I will look at his body and learn for myself, then!" She turned and took two steps.
Smirl was up and had her by the arm with surprising swiftness and she swung around, growling. The metamorphosis had begun and, as she raked her fingernails across his face, they were already becoming claws. He refused to release her arm, even though the left side of his face was hanging down to his collar in ribbons.
"Ms. Garou," he said quietly, seeming to take no notice that a portion of his jawbone was visible through the spaghetti spill of flesh. Curiously, there was no blood yet. "Dr. Mooncloud has her reasons for sparing you the details."
"I don't want to be spared the details!" she snarled, peach fuzz matting into dense hair along her arms and up her throat. "He was my brother! Do you understand? I have to know! I can't walk away and go on with the rest of my life not knowing!" Her voice became more guttural as her face began to elongate. "I've got to know!"
"Sit down and promise me," Mooncloud demanded, "that you won't try to look at your brother's remains."
"Sit down," Smirl echoed mildly. The muscles in Lupé's captive arm bunched and the shoulder seam parted in her shirt but the man from Chicago refused to relinquish his grip. "You're right: you have a right to know. And so I will tell you. But you will sit down. You will control yourself. And you will have to be content with what she chooses to tell you because you will want to remember your brother the way he was. Not the way he is now."
Slowly, she lowered herself back down into her chair. As he released her arm, her skin resurfaced amid the dissolving fur and her teeth retracted back into smooth, white uniformity. Smirl reached up, gathering the shredded flesh into his fingers, and pushed it back into the gaping wound in the side of his face. There was still no blood, and the white strips of skin and tissue seemed to melt back into a contiguous whole like a sculpted expanse of pale vanilla pudding starting to set. He sat back down, and it was as if his face had never been touched.
I leaned over and murmured to Suki: "Vampire?"
"No," she whispered, "why do you ask?"
I shrugged. Maybe I'd pursue it later. Maybe I'd decide to forget the whole thing and go get quietly drunk.
"Lupé. . ." Taj Mooncloud took her hands in her own, "there is no way to mince words and still satisfy you on this. The rogueit tore your brother apart." It was painfully clear that she meant this in the most literal sense.
I got up as Lupé began to cry and wandered to the far side of the room. There were display cases containing shrunken heads, a monkey's paw, a purported unicorn horn, helmets, keys, skulls, charms, amulets, totems, talismans, and other occult and exotic bric-a-brac. There was even an honest-to-God Egyptian mummy.
"Imhotep."
I turned and looked at Jim Satterfield, who was standing at my shoulder. "Excuse me, but you're what?"
He smiled and shrugged. "Im-ho-tep. We named him after the original mummythe one in the old Boris Karloff flick."
"I thought it was Kharis or something like that."
"Those were the later movies. Kharis and his deathless love for the Princess Anaka. Lon Chaney, Jr. did two or three in the forties, maybe the early fifties, as well. He's remembered for the Wolf Man but I think he was an even better Mummy."
What could I say to that? "A boy's best friend," I mused.
"It's authentic," he said, looking as if he should be wearing a cardigan and smoking a pipe. "We have several consignments of Egyptian antiquities. That bowl right there contains genuine Tanis leaves that we handpicked ourselves in San Al-Hajar Al-Qibliyah, the ancient site of Pi-Ramesse, in the Egyptian delta."
"Tanis leaves?"
"For the elixir of life. You know: three leaves to keep the heart beating, nine for movementnever more than thatand boil them in the sacred urn. . ."
"The sacred urn."
"Right. And over in that display case is the Scroll of Thoth."
"Scroll of Thoth?"
"Containing the magic words that enabled Isis to raise Osiris from the dead."
"Oh, that Scroll of Thoth."
"It's an authentic copy. The one next to it is an authentic translation of the text."
"An 'authentic' copy?"
He nodded. "Got it from a dealer in Egyptian antiquities."
I squinted at the spidered calligraphy. "Oh, Amon Ra! Oh! God of gods," I read. "Death is but the doorway to new life. We live today, we shall live again. In many forms shall we return. . . ."
"Enough." Taj Mooncloud was suddenly by my side, wobbling on her crutches, one hand grasping my arm.
I looked at her. "What?"
"You don't know what you're messing with. Leave it alone."
I looked at the scroll. I looked back at her.
"It contains Words of Power," she murmured.
I bit back a smile. "For heaven's sake, Taj, it's only a tourist's souvenir," I said in low voice. "There must be thousands of these things sold every yearread by thousands of people."
"Ordinary people," she qualified. "In the hands of a shaman this could be something quite different."
"Oh, and am I a shaman, now?"
"We don't know what you are. You have your own confluence of power. Perhaps you could trigger other Powers. Perhaps not. It is best to err on the side of caution and let sleeping gods lie."
There was no point in arguing. I helped Mooncloud back to her chair. The scroll had to be a second-rate souvenir. Likewise the mummy. Even though it looked genuine, Egypt hadn't permitted the sale or export of its cultural treasures or antiquities for many years. It was highly unlikely that a midwest couple living in the Kansas City suburbs could be harboring a genuine Egyptian mummy. But then I would have calculated higher odds against said couple hosting a werewolf, a semi-vampire, and a Chicago gangster whose real name was probably Gumby, under the same roof.
Behind me I heard Mrs. Satterfield saying: "Are you sure you want to leave so soon? We have extra beds. . . ."
"We're wasting moonlight," Suki said as I turned around.
Mooncloud had just sat down and was once again struggling to leverage herself out of her chair with her crutches. Smirl stood and helped her up. "I appreciate your hospitality and handling the arrangements for Luis's remains. But we dare not let the trail grow colder by another night."
Jim Satterfield nodded. "Is there anything else we can do to help?"
"Cross your fingers," answered Mooncloud.
"Light a candle," Suki added.
Get me outta here, I thought.
We drove to the abandoned warehouse on the riverfront. Smirl followed in a long black limousine. He sat in the back where silhouettes suggested at least one additional passenger. I only caught a glimpse of the driver: it was enough to convince me that I didn't want a closer look.
Smirl's "people" had already tossed the premises so we weren't expecting any additional clues, save one.
"All right, ye great slobberin' beastie," the general was prodding the cu sith down the rear steps of the bus, "it's time fur ye to earn yur not so inconsiderable keep."
The cu sith yawned, displaying teeth that might have coerced A. Conan Doyle to rename his story "The Chihuahua of the Baskervilles." Mooncloud produced a scrap of black fabric that had been left behind in Luis Garou's grasp.
The redcap held it to the green dog's snout. "Here now, Luath: get the scent, now. Have ye got it, lad?" Luath sneezed and wagged his ropelike tail, causing us all to scatter. "Right, now!" the old haunt shouted. "Hunt, laddie! Bring it to ground!"
The Faerie beast raised its emerald jaws to the sky and made a great baying sound that put city-wide disaster sirens to shame. He followed that with a second that was even louder than the first. I had my hands over my ears before the third bay sounded, but could distinguish no lessening of the volume. I took my hands away from my ears as he lowered his muzzle and could hear the tinkle of broken glass coming from all over the neighborhood.
Then Luath leapt forward, unfolding into a run. He vanished into the darkness of the night.
Suki appeared in the doorway of the bus as we heard the tattoo of massive paws whisper away into the distance. "All aboard or we're gonna lose him!" We all piled into our vehicles. As the bus pulled out again, the limo turned on its lights and followed behind us.
Suki drove, keeping one eye on the CRT display that tracked the homing device in the cu sith's collar. Lupé and the general opened one of the locked closets and were checking out a veritable storehouse of weapons. There were regular crossbows and crossbows with double and triple bow/barrel compositions. There were firearms of more recent designuntil you studied them closely and noted deviations in the standard configurations. Some weapons appeared to be the latest in state-of-the-art, while others looked like they'd been ancient before Angle met Saxon.
"The head," the general said, hefting a broad-bladed battle-ax, "a stake through its heart and removing its head from its shoulders shuid do the trick."
"We've never had to do that before," Lupé said. "A stake through the heart has always been sufficient."
Mooncloud stared out the window at an unpleasant memory. "I could've sworn I nailed this thing's heart. When it got up, I assumed I'd missed. But if I didn't. . ."
"We could be in a whole lot of trouble," Lupé mused.
"There are myths and stories that suggested other means of disposal," I said.
Mooncloud nodded. "Too bad we can't go back to Seattle and spend a few days in the Doman's library researching this."
"Maybe we don't need to." I got up and retrieved my laptop computer. "I've scanned a number of books and reference articles onto the hard disk. Unfortunately, I've had little time to organize it much less do any actual cross-referencing. It may take awhile to come up with something pertinent."
"Then you'd better get started," Lupé said.
Even with a week's head start, our quarry probably hadn't gone far.
Judging from the trail that the cu sith was following, they had spent at least three more days in the Kansas City environs before heading south on Highway 69. Luath circled three different motels between the river and the intersection of 435 and 69 South, indicating our targets had spent time there. Whether they spent more than one day/night cycle in any or all of those places was anyone's guess.
There didn't seem to be much point in spending more time in checking them out: they were already gone and, as Suki had already said, we were wasting moonlight. We left K.C. behind, following the cu sith's collar tracer, and hit pay dirt shortly thereafter.
"Gonna see daylight in a little less than two hours," Suki called from the front of the bus.
I had volunteered to spell someone on the driving chores but was told that my top priority lay with the computer texts and researching alternate dispatching techniques.
Mooncloud laid a hand on my shoulder. "If you've come across anything helpful so far, now would be the time to share it with us."
I scowled at the screen. "The deeper I go, the more complicated it gets. So far, I've identified over thirty different vampire legends from more than a dozen different countries, most requiring different rituals of protection and warding and separate means of extermination."
"Can you isolate any common threads? The next time we run into that thing we need a better plan than the ones we've used in the past."
I opened another file on the computer's display. "See for yourself."
She scanned my short list. "Stake through heart or navelmust be driven with a single blow. Decapitationconsecrated ax or gravedigger's shovel. Complete immolation. Bury face downwards. . ." She shook her head. "The rest are just techniques for warding, delaying, or discouraging vampires."
"You asked for the common antidotes. I'm still compiling data on the more unusual vampire legends."
The general leaned over my shoulder. "Make yur lists, laddie, but I'm bettin' on number two, here." He thumbed the edge of a nasty-looking halberd that seemed to materialize in his hands like magic. "This beastie may not have a heart where we'd expect it, but there's verra little guesswork when it coomes to taking a head from atop its shoulders. It'll no be gettin' oop again once't Axel-Annie, here, has barbered it proper."
"I'm sure you're right, Angus" Mooncloud stared out the windows at the rushing dark "but, just the same, I think I'll break out one of the flame-throwers. For luck."
"He's slowing down," Suki called from the front of the bus.
The rest of us crowded forward to watch the blip on the monitor.
Mooncloud frowned at the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. "What's the map say?"
"We're in Miami County," I said. "Should be Louisburg up ahead."
"What's it like?"
I shrugged. "Don't really know. Small town, maybe a couple thousand residents. I've never spent any time there. Drove through it once."
We turned off on State Route 68 and slowed down as we headed east into Louisburg.
The general leaned toward the screen. "He's stopped."
"About two miles ahead," Lupé said, studying the readouts. "Maybe less."
"Want in a little closer?" Suki asked.
Lupé shook her head and began unbuttoning her shirt. "Give me a minute and then stop the bus." She walked to the back of the bus and behind the curtain, loosening her clothing as she went. A moment later a great grey and black wolf emerged from the sleeping area and trotted up the aisle.
"Be careful," Suki said, pulling the vehicle over to the side of the road. She opened the doors and the wolf leapt to the ground before we had reached a complete stop.
"Get in position, but wait fur us, lass," the general called as she bounded away in the darkness.
"I don't like this," Suki muttered as the bus started back onto the road. "We're cutting this a bit close to sunrise."
"Mayhap. . ." the redcap's hands gripped the back of the driver's seat, "but I'd rather tackle these beasties noo than try to restrain our Lupé fur another eighteen hours."
An unearthly sound suddenly shattered the silence: Luath had found his prey.
"Ah," I said, "de children of de night! Hear how dey are singing?"
The general snapped out an oath. "Sa much fur the element o' surprise!"
Suki said nothing, pressing her lips together and pressing her foot to the floor. We roared down the road until she reached over and flipped a pair of toggle switches: the engine noise dropped to near imperceptibility. Before I could ask about the muffler system, we were swinging off the road and into the parking lot of a small motel on the outskirts of Louisburg.
The general handed me a machete and then pressed a crossbow into my hands. "Here ye go, laddie; look sharp and don't let the big 'un get away!" He was out the door before Suki had the bus at a full stop. I followed, trying to tuck the machete under my arm while juggling the crossbow and a handful of wooden quarrels. Our driver was right behind me while the engine was still dieseling the last of the carburetor fumes.
Luath was nowhere to be seen, but his foot-wide paw prints were clearly evident where they crossed the dust and gravel parking lot and led right up to the door of one of the units. The door of that particular room was slightly ajar, dim light spilling a wedge out across the weedy doorstep.
"No point in sneaking up noo," the general said, brandishing a wicked-looking halberd. And with that, he charged the partially opened door. Suki and I were hard-pressed to keep up: the redcap was a couple of strides from the door and a good ten feet ahead of us when we heard Lupé call out: "No, General! Don't come in! It's a trap!"
It was too late, of course. Even if he'd had time to break off his charge I doubt that he'd have chosen to do so. The door slammed open as he burst across the threshold and then the entryway lit up as if a roomful of paparazzi had chosen that very same instant to take flash pictures. The strobe of light was followed by a clap of thunder and smoke hazed the doorway as we came up more cautiously to peer inside.
It looked like any other motel room and, except for the swirl of dissipating smoke, it was cleaner than most. The opposite wall was covered with mirrored tile to create an illusion of depth. When you walked through the door, the first thing you would see (assuming you weren't a vampire) was yourself. The next thing you'd see was scriptureif you walked into this particular room, that is. A message was painted on the mirror in red brush strokes large enough to read from the doorway. It said:
And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Daniel 12:2
"They were already gone when I got here," Lupé said. She was sitting on the foot of the bed with the cover pulled loose and wrapped about her nakedness.
"When I heard Luath bay I figured the jig was up and came charging in. I only beat you by a minute, at best, and didn't notice the sign until I had reverted and the general came rushing through the door."
Suki sniffed delicately. "They used blood."
Lupé nodded. "They knew that blood would get the general's attention even if the positioning of the message didn't."
"So what happened?" I wanted to know.
"Scripture," Smirl announced from the doorway. "You want to banish a redcap? You read a passage from the Bible to them." He looked at the painted mirror and shook his head in admiration. "Diabolical: tricking a redcap into reading the passage himself!"
I looked around. "So where did he go?"
"Ask Taj," Lupé snapped. "We've got to get out of here right now!"
"Clues?" Smirl asked, looking around the room.
"None. They were expecting us. But I checked, anyway." She began shifting back to wolf form.
"We'd best do as the lady says," Smirl said, backing toward the door. Suki was already outside. "Company will be showing up any minute and we don't want to be here when they arrive." He went with the wolf right behind him. I was the last one out and, as I closed the door behind me, something on the ground caught my eye. I grabbed it and ran for the bus.
Suki already had the bus in motion as I jumped on board and back on the road out of town before I could find a seat. The black limo was nowhere in sight.
"Where?" Suki yelled as she steered a return course toward the highway.
Mooncloud was studying the road map. "If we head back down Highway 69," she said, "we won't hit another town until Pleasanton."
"Time?"
"At least a half hour," I said. "Stay on State 68, past the highway; go another six miles or so and look for an unpaved road going south."
"Where will that take us?"
Mooncloud looked up from the map. "Somerset?"
"Not so much a town as a wide place in the road," I said. "But it will give us a place to park and talk about what we do next."
Suki nodded decisively. "I am going to have to trade off, soon."
Mooncloud picked up the cellular phone and punched in a number. "Dennis? Taj. Where are you?" She listened for a moment. "We're still pulling up our socks, here. Chris has recommended we stop over in a little place called Somerset. West on 68 then south ondamn, the map doesn't even name the road! Can you find it on your map? Good. After I get the kids tucked in, maybe we can find a restaurant and continue our search for the perfect cup of coffee and slice of pie."
As she hung up, Lupé emerged from the back, buttoning her shirt. "Brief me," Mooncloud demanded, shifting her leg to balance the end of the cast on the seat opposite her.
Lupé did and, true to its etymological roots, it was brief. "Nothing to show for it," she summarized, "and we've already had a casualty."
"Two casualties," I said, holding up Luath's collar with the electronic tracer still attached.
"Where did you get that?"
"On the ground, just outside the motel room."
"This is bad," Lupé said, folding up in her seat to rest her chin on her knees. "Now we have no easy way of tracking them."
"Worse than bad," Mooncloud said. "Bad enough that they'd be clever enough to set a trap for a redcap. But to neutralize a cu sith. . . ."
I hadn't planned on going to sleep so soon, but the sunrise had a more potent effect on me than I had expected. While it still seemed unlikely to dissolve my flesh and render my skeleton into a vague, chalky outline in ash, I was beset by irritated, itchy skin and a pounding headache. These were relieved as soon as I settled down into the dark, coffinlike compartment in one of the bus's fold-down seats and pulled the lid down to block out the offending solar radiation.
There hadn't been time to sort through all the questions in my mind, much less ask them before hopping into the box. I made a mental list as sleep encroached, planning to corner Mooncloud as soon as the sun went back down. She'd nearly convinced me that vampires could exist in the same physical reality as moonwalks, quantum physics and William F. Buckley. But dark elves and Faerie dogs and gangsters that belonged in a Dick Tracy comic strip?
There was comfort in the thought that maybe I hadn't emerged unscathed from the accident that killed my wife and daughterthat maybe I was still lying in a hospital bed, unconscious and plugged into a variety of tubes and wires and such. That this past year was nothing more than a trauma-induced, brain-damaged delirium.
That's right, Pam, last season was nothing more than a silly old dream; Bobby Ewing is back at Northfork and would you hand me the soap, please?
Sure.
Unfortunately the plots on Dallas were more likely than the events of my life these past few months. . . .
The last thing I thought about before drifting into a black, dreamless sleep was the scripture left behind on the motel room mirror.
Surprisingly, I knew the Old Testament passage from my childhood. I had learned it in Sunday School and remembered it long afterward for the verse that followed: And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars forever and ever.
It had once been a comforting thought, a scripture for the times when a young mind turned to thoughts of its own mortality and the endless darkness threatened by the grave. What comfort now for one who, by all religious and secular lore, was considered damned for all eternity?
And they that be wise shall shine. . . .
The darkness embracing my dreamless sleep was blacker than the absence of light, deeper than the confines of my encompassed bed.
Now the shadows cut to the bone.