Staked Page 25

  “I’ll be back later,” I said.

  “Okay.” Rachel sounded tired and hurt. I fought the impulse to say anything else. Anything I said would have just made things worse. I’d never had a woman like her. She didn’t want to be a vampire and she liked being hurt, wanted it. I was going to have to get used to that.

  Thanks to the new thrall sense, I could feel Greta nearby, in the parking deck attached to the Pollux. When I reached her, she was sitting on the hood of a Pinto looking up at the moon. Dried blood clung to her chin and throat and the matted tangle of her hair was plastered to the side of her head. Two half-naked teenagers lay in the backseat; their disembodied heads stared with sightless eyes from the roof of the car.

  “I was really hungry, Dad,” Greta offered apologetically.

  A cat, two pigeons, and a rat lay on the concrete next to the car. Greta’s eating problem in a nutshell.

  “It’s fine. No lectures tonight.” I took off my shirt and wiped gently at the blood on her neck. “It’s my birthday.”

  “The girl was supposed to be your present,” Greta sulked.

  The blood wouldn’t come off. She needed a shower and a change of clothes. “Why don’t you get cleaned up and then as part of my present you can help me do something important.”

  “Really?” Her expression was a mirror of Tabitha’s. Why do so many beautiful women think so highly of me? It’s like a kind of brain damage.

  “Yeah.” I dropped the shirt on the car hood and put an arm around her. “I want to go kill those werewolves and put an end to this whole mess. It’ll be just the three of us: me, you, and your new mom.”

  “Okay.” Greta got up slowly, uncertainly. “Where are the werewolves? I wouldn’t think they’d still be hanging around the park.”

  They wouldn’t? No, I guessed not. The campground at the State Park couldn’t have been a long-term living arrangement. They probably went there just to set up the confrontation with me.

  “Why do you think they picked the park?” I asked myself aloud.

  “Because they like the woods?” Greta offered.

  “No,” I said, still rolling the idea around in my head. “Because it’s not the city. It’s exposed. A vampire could take cover from the sun, but not the same way he might in the city. There are no sewers to hide in, no people to hide among, no way to diffuse the scent.”

  We will never surrender our land to one of your kind. That’s what William had said. No matter how many dead you lay on our doorstep, we will not give in.

  Our doorstep… the only place…no, damn it; I couldn’t remember. It was somewhere…somewhere…I’d been out there. I found the bullet that went in the magic gun, the one that led to the Highland Towers…Yesterday I knew, I’d remembered it, known it.

  “Son of a bitch,” I shouted. “What the hell do you call it, the place with the big lake…” I barely noticed the smell of cinnamon and then I remembered. “Orchard Lake. William said I left dead werewolves at his doorstep. If he was talking about the ones Froggy killed, then he meant Orchard Lake. That’s where they are,” I finished triumphantly.

  “Will there be fish?” Greta asked.

  Will there be fish? What the hell kind of question was that? “Yes, sweetheart,” I assured her. “There will be fish, but we’ll be there for the wolves.”

  30

  ERIC:

  ORCHARD DAM ROAD

  The drive out to Orchard Lake can take anywhere from an hour to ninety minutes, depending on traffic. The trip takes you from interstate to highway to County Road 58 where you wind through Keener and Tartarus, cutting through broad areas of wooded acreage and low mountains punctuated by small townships and the occasional empty strip mall.

  I pulled off of 58 onto Orchard Dam Road and parked in the driveway of an abandoned house. I was still driving Carl’s loaner. The car’s rear bumper was somewhere back at Bald Mountain State Park, or maybe the werewolves kept it as a trophy.

  There was a farm across the road, boasting a small herd of cattle and horses, a hobby farm by the looks of it. The entrance to Sable Oaks was just beyond, a broad stone arch lit by ground lights so that it blazed formidably. Two vampires dressed like Secret Service men, in earpieces and black suits, stood on either side of the entrance to the gated community. I’d flown south when I’d left Orchard Lake the other night, partially to avoid the place. Sable Oaks was for high society fangs, not me.

  I’d half expected to find two werewolves on this side, standing guard over Orchard Dam Road from the empty house where we’d parked. A weathered piece of cardboard announced that the house was for sale, but the number had been washed away by rain or bleached out by the sun. If it had really been for sale, then the same vampires who owned Sable Oaks would have undoubtedly snapped it up. I could easily imagine the reason the werewolf community had abandoned it. Too close to the undead.

  I waved cheerily at the two vampires, but they stared straight ahead, ignoring me.

  Greta unfolded out of the backseat and stretched her arms. “God, it’s nice to be out of there,” she said.

  “You could have traveled as something smaller.” I stepped out and closed the door, slamming it so it would catch. It bounced back open and fell off. Vampire strength: gotta love it.

  “No thanks,” Greta said. “I’ll leave the shapeshifting to you.”

  “Why?” asked Tabitha. She still looked happy to have been invited. She’d even dressed appropriately. Her jeans, tennis shoes, and old T-shirt weren’t as glamorous or sexy as the clothes she usually wore, but were much more sensible for fighting werewolves. I wondered if she would still be happy once the killing started. So far, she had killed only when under the influence of the doped blood Froggy had slipped into my reserve at the Demon Heart. As far as I knew, she hadn’t ever killed to feed.

  “I’m not an animal,” Greta answered.

  “So?” Tabitha walked around the car and stood next to me, her hand tucked possessively into the back pocket of my jeans.

  “So, I don’t like being anything I’m not,” said Greta. “It feels weird.” She rubbed her left arm, taking in her surroundings.

  “Being a cat feels awesome,” Tabitha said.

  “Not to me.”

  “Are you two done?” I asked. “It’s half past one and sunrise is at six eighteen.”

  “You checked?” Greta’s hands flew to her cheeks in exaggerated shock.

  “Ha. Ha,” I replied dryly. “Yes, I checked.” El Alma Perdida was in the glove compartment. I leaned across the interior of the car, flipped open the compartment, and pulled out the gun, measuring its heft in my hand. The gun hummed, its grip warm, but the crosses still didn’t bother me.

  “That is so odd,” said Tabitha. “I barely touched the thing and it burned the crap out of me. Why doesn’t it hurt you?”

  “Talbot told me that my aura and the gun’s looked the same, that the gun might be inherited. Did you find anything else out about it?” I asked.

  “Just that it was used by a guy named John Paul Courtney back in the Wild West.”

  Greta laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Tabitha.

  “That’s Dad’s real last name, Mom,” Greta told her.

  “Could you not do that? Call me Tabitha.”

  Greta shook her head. “I can’t do that, Mom. That would just be too weird.”

  Tabitha looked at me for assistance, but I couldn’t help on this one. Anytime I turned a girlfriend, Greta started calling her “Mom” until we broke up. The only exception was Marilyn. She had always called her “Mom” or “old Mom.” Maybe in Greta’s head, even though we’d never married, Marilyn counted as my first wife and that made her Greta’s real mother. Marilyn had certainly helped raise her, taken her to school, made her lunches, and picked her up at the end of the day.

  Marilyn had been furious when I turned Greta at twenty-one, but I’d had my reasons. Most humans don’t know what they’re getting into if they become a vampire, but Greta had known be
tter than most. She’d spent twelve years with a vampire for a dad, watching what I did, how I was.

  I kept very little hidden from her, hoping that if she saw everything, if I took away the mystique, she’d change her mind. I’d expected her to grow to hate me, but she didn’t. To Greta, I’d always be her knight in shining armor, the hero who came in through the window one night and killed the bad guy. She didn’t care that if she’d been older, I might have also killed her.

  “I thought your last name was Jones,” said Tabitha, snapping me out of my fugue.

  “Alias,” I said. “Roger says we have to roll everything into a new identity every three or four decades so that no one at the federal level gets suspicious.”

  Courtney sounded familiar, but a lifetime away. “I used to be a Courtney, I guess. Marilyn would know.”

  What’s your father’s name? Marilyn asked again in my head. The truth was, I didn’t want to remember. I knew Marilyn’s name, though: Marilyn Amanda Robinson. It should have been Marilyn Robinson Courtney…

  “How can you not remember your last name?” asked Tabitha in amazement. Her hand was no longer in my pocket. She stood beside me, gesturing as she spoke.

  “I haven’t used it in forty years,” I replied defensively. I didn’t have time for this conversation. Talking about the past wakes up all the ghosts in my head. My brother, my parents—they were all better half remembered. I hadn’t made them proud when I’d been alive, hadn’t been what they wanted me to be. Even if I still had nieces and nephews out there, I didn’t want to know about them and they didn’t need to know about me. We weren’t part of the same world anymore.

  I began to walk up the road toward the marina. Greta fell in step beside me, but Tabitha blocked my path, hand on my chest. “But it’s your name,” she insisted.

  “So?” I stepped around her.

  “What do you mean ‘so’?” Tabitha moved to intercept me again. Her white T-shirt looked red in the sudden light from my eyes.

  “Why is it important to you that I remember it?” Now that I was away from Rachel, I felt more like my old self, my anger closer to the surface, harder to control. Tabitha couldn’t possibly understand the difference, but now that she had no heartbeat, it was difficult for me not to think of her as a thing, not a person, not a woman. She’d gone through the change, and she wasn’t my Tabitha anymore, just a convincing fake. The urge to crush that impostor, to tear it apart, brought my claws out. But then a look of surprise in her eyes that reminded me of the Tabitha I had given in to pushed that urge away and dimmed the red light in my own eyes.

  “It just is,” Tabitha said. “You can’t forget who you really are.” But she already had. She didn’t realize it, but she had. The Tabitha I knew would have screamed at me when she walked in on the birthday sex at the Pollux, or fled the room in tears.

  “Are you hunting werewolves?” I asked, exasperated. “Because Greta and I are hunting werewolves.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Good,” I interrupted. “Everyone who’s hunting werewolves is walking this way.” I pointed at the rough paved road that ran up the hill and down the other side to the marina.

  Tabitha moved to my right side and walked with us in silence. The night was quiet, any sound absorbed by the stands of oak and pine that flanked the road. A half mile from the intersection, the road turned twice. I stopped next to the yellow sign warning drivers of the sharp curve and looked down the hill at the creek forty feet below.

  “You okay?” Tabitha asked.

  “No,” I answered. I’d been thinking about Brian, the vampire I’d decapitated, wondering why we’d both been in the alleyway. If Roger was behind this, then it meant he’d talked Brian into it. Or had he scammed Brian too, knowing that we couldn’t get along, that my losing my temper in a fatal way was inevitable? “But it doesn’t matter.”

  We walked about another mile, the road continuing up a steep climb and then angling down at an equally steep incline toward the parking lot.

  We walked carefully along the downward slope and stopped about fifty yards from the parking lot, where the pavement turned into an uncertain mixture of gravel and dirt. A large blue Dumpster hulked in the corner of the lot, obscuring the sight of us from the small brick utility building that housed the restrooms. The werewolves had posted a guard outside the building. I smelled him on the wind as it blew both his scent and that of the Dumpster our way.

  Trucks, RVs, and all manner of off-road vehicles filled the parking lot, many more than when I’d last been here. The werewolves had regrouped.

  I set El Alma Perdida on the lid of the Dumpster for safekeeping and turned into a white cat, then picked my way along the gravel quietly until I got a better look at the guard. He was sitting in a lawn chair on the sidewalk that ran across the water side of the parking lot, near the steps that led down to the long bridge connecting the marina’s floating docks to the shore. His back was to the utility building, his eyes gazing out over the parking lot to the hillside where Froggy had left the bodies of the werewolves she’d killed. Hard rock classics played on a small portable radio, Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” suggesting ironically that the guard not give up without a fight.

  A small gray cat settled next to me. “What do we do?” Tabitha meowed.

  I looked back to where Greta crouched low and ready next to the Dumpster and gave her a nod. She darted across the parking lot, little more than a blur. The werewolf barely had time to blink before Greta picked him up by the feet and slammed his head against the wall of the utility building.

  She was back at my side before he hit the ground, blood and brain matter splattering. Tabitha and I morphed back to our human bodies and I stepped out onto the concrete, looking down the long set of steps to the boat slips below. I couldn’t smell or sense anyone down there. If anyone else was keeping watch, they were doing it from one of the lake houses.

  “We’re not allowed to eat until we find the werewolves,” said Greta. She looked pointedly at Tabitha when she said it. “Then we can eat anyone we want. Dad just doesn’t want us getting carried away.”

  “Oh, God.” Tabitha sounded like she might be ill. I guess she’d never seen brains on brick before.

  “Do you need to wait in the car?” I asked quietly.

  “No,” she forced out past clenched teeth.

  “Try to remember what it feels like when you’re hungry,” I advised. “Think of them as food, just blood sources, not people.”

  “That makes it worse.” Huh. Maybe there was more Tabitha still in there than I wanted to believe. What if I didn’t want her to be Tabitha, wanted her to be a monster like me, because that made it easier not to feel guilty about being with Rachel?

  “Then go back to the car,” I said sharply. The Tabitha I knew was squeamish about killing a mouse in a trap. She’d killed Veruca, yes, but that had been self-defense more than anything else. A straightforward werewolf slaughter was another matter.

  “It’ll be all right, Mom.” Greta tried to put her arm around Tabitha, but Tabitha pulled away. “Dad and I can handle it. We don’t need you.”

  “I can do this,” Tabitha insisted.

  “Then stop acting like a prissy little bitch,” I said as I walked back to the Dumpster and retrieved El Alma Perdida. I hadn’t meant to say that, it just jumped out there.

  “I said I can do it!”

  “Fine.” If you can, then you really aren’t my Tabitha anymore, I thought. I tucked the gun into the back of my pants and tried to turn into a bat, but nothing happened except an angry hum from El Alma Perdida. The Lost Soul didn’t seem to like vampire games. I couldn’t leave it behind; I was going to need it if I had to kill William. Only in my hands was the gun blessed, magical, silver, and inherited. As a bonus, I liked the idea of trapping William’s soul inside one of the bullets. For all I knew, death didn’t hold anything scary for him and I certainly didn’t wish him a happy afterlife.

  “You want to be helpful?” I asked Tabitha.
<
br />   “Yes. I said I could do this and I—”

  “Can you turn into a bat or a bird, mist, maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which?” I asked with a slightly impatient sigh.

  “I can do a bird. I can probably do a bat.”

  “Good, then turn into a bat and go find the werewolves,” I said. “Don’t fight them, just find them and come back.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Just do it,” I said.

  She shifted into a bat just fine, but fluttered to the ground and flapped weakly. Greta giggled, but I kept a straight face. It isn’t easy to fly the first time out. Tabitha got the hang of it after the radio played through two more songs and finally took off over the gentle waves of Orchard Lake, three bars into “Magic Carpet Ride.”

  I waited until I knew she was out of earshot, but still spoke quietly. “There are some kids with the werewolves.”

  “Kids or puppies?” Greta asked.

  “They’re werewolves, too.”

  She kissed me fondly on the cheek. “You old softy. Don’t worry, Daddy; I’ll kill them for you.” I let the music from the portable radio fill in the silence. I told you that there are other reasons Greta makes me uncomfortable.

  I don’t like hurting children. Hell, even though this whole outing had been my idea, I would have preferred not to have to kill any werewolves. I much preferred just beating them up enough so that they knew they couldn’t take me and then letting them go. Unless I went into a rage blackout, of course.

  Even the werewolf I had killed in the alley when all this crap started might have survived if I hadn’t been trapped by the sun. Killing werewolves tended to be more trouble than it was worth. As the last few days had shown, once you start killing werewolves, your wolf problems multiply. The pack gets angry. The pack comes after you. There’s more killing. The pack calls in reinforcements, maybe from the Lycan Diocese, maybe from one of the other freaky-ass skinchanger cults out there, but either way there’s even more killing. If you leave the cubs alive, then all you’ve done is buy yourself a brief respite, because cubs grow up and when they do, they remember the vampire who slaughtered their pack and the process starts all over again.