As I crossed over the Ouachita River riding shotgun in a Ford pickup truck, the sun was just minutes away from marking me as "target acquired." We made an illegal turn and, after a series of unnerving switchbacks, found the unmarked exit and skidded onto a gravel service road.
"You're going to have to drive a little faster," I told Dennis, a heavy-set young man wearing a "Ducks Unlimited" camo cap.
"I don't know where I'm going," he answered pleasantly. "I hit a rut or take a curve wrong, we'll roll." He didn't sound too worried.
"Maybe," I told him. "But if the sun arrives before we do, no amount of detailing is going to salvage the inside of your cab. Trust me."
"I trust you," he said, his voice still disconnectedly pleasant and detached from such trivial concerns as massive blunt force trauma and fiery immolation. His foot pressed down on the accelerator.
I had miscalculated the time and distance factors, discarding the alternate options of going-to-ground before going home. After three months of captivity I wasn't too keen on going all snoozy and vulnerable without allies around me. I needed to know the truth about Lupé. And whether Will, Jenny, and Kirsten had been born yet.
I shook my head: I needed to focus on the immediate problem at hand. Doing the orange-barrel polka on a twenty-mile stretch of bad road had put us seriously behind my original ETA. And I needed to stay focused on my driver in order to keep him focused on his driving.
The trick with vampiric mind control is to sufficiently bend the subject to your will while leaving them enough autonomy to perform the more sophisticated tasks. Maybe it served some plot point in the old fright flicks to have some mindless drone shuffle around the castle croaking "Yes, master." And doubtless there are fanged pervs who get off on doing the whole control freak on some long-necked honey down in their crypt even today. But when it comes to racing the sun down back roads and across not-so-open fields? Trust me: it's better to let the driver make most of the judgment calls.
I was clutching my shoulder harness, the dashboard, the door grip, and bracing against the cab's ceiling in alternating patterns like frenetic genuflections of religious frenzy as we bounced and spun and revisited iconic moments from all seven seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard.
At least it was keeping my mind off of the cramping hunger pains that kept drawing my eyes to his neck.
Just get home . . . just get home . . ., my mind chanted.
I periodically called out directions while he smiled and executed hair-raising stunt maneuvers. All the while continuing to chatter about the Book of Revelations and how all the signs pointing to the "End Times" were nearly in place.
I let him chatter. If he ended up going either too fast or too slow, it would definitely be the end times for one Christopher L. Cséjthe. And, as I said, it's best to keep 'em pointed in the direction you want and give 'em their head.
Forget the old Dracula Universal Pictures' black-and-whites or Hammer/Seven Arts colorfests. Unless the necrophagic virus that transforms the living into the undead has done a tour of your frontal lobes, this whole mental domination thing probably sounds a lot simpler than it really is.
For example, after hiking through miles of underbrush—not to mention a significant amount of overbrush—I finally did make it to a dirt road. And eventually flagged down a ride. You think it's easy getting someone to stop and pick up a stranger on a back road at three am? Not even Bela Lugosi, standing out in the middle of the road, doing the bulgy-eyed, hand-wavey thing, could have managed that.
Especially Bela Lugosi, standing out in the middle of the road, doing the bulgy-eyed, hand-wavey thing.
No, this guy stopped because he was a decent, God-fearing, Good Samaritan.
Who seemed to think that the recent spate of earthquakes around the world, flu pandemics, volcanic eruptions, wars and rumors of wars—not to mention a blood-red moon for the past couple of weeks—indicated that Yahweh was texting a very special visit in His celestial BlackBerry.
I guess my chauffeur figured it couldn't hurt to squeeze in a few, last-minute good deeds on the way to the Rapture. I refrained from asking whether he was an adherent of the pre-Trib, mid-Trib, or post-Trib doctrinal flight plan. He seemed a little busy as we spun off of the road and across a series of fields for the final lap.
We made it with just moments to spare.
The golden fingers of dawn were groping through the trees across the river as we skidded to a stop next to low stone wall. A cemetery lay just beyond. I jumped out and turned to my driver. "Thanks, Dennis. I really appreciate the ride." I tossed a couple of twenties on the seat. "Hey, man; look at my eyes . . ."
He did. He was very accommodating—had been nothing but since stopping to pick me up.
"You're going to turn around now, drive back to the highway, head for home, and crawl into bed. When you clock back in to your job this evening, you'll be able to tell all your buddies how you stopped to help a van full of cheerleaders with engine trouble and got distracted. Very distracted." I intensified the look I was giving him, pouring my will into his head through his eyes. "That's all you will remember. I do not exist. This place does not exist. Do you understand?"
He nodded, smiling. "Cheerleaders! Did I get lucky?"
"What?" The windshield was beginning to reflect a broken orange thread limning the tree line. "Oh. Yeah. Sure. Why not? You got lucky."
His smile grew. "How lucky?"
I didn't have time for this. Neither did he if Judgment Day was, indeed, just around the corner. "PG-thirteen lucky. And if you ask any more questions they won't be cheerleaders, they'll be nuns. Elderly nuns. Buh-bye." I slammed the door and hopped the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the old graveyard. Beams of golden death began to slice through the distant woods. I heard the truck take off as I stumbled and wove between tumbled tombstones and mossy monuments. I vaulted another low wall on the far side.
And then I was running past the remains of my house.
No banking institution in Northeast Louisiana will touch me when it comes to a home loan. I can't get homeowner's insurance for love or money. I can hardly blame them. I mean, who else moves into two different houses and utterly destroys each within the first year?
Rock stars excluded, that is.
In my own defense, how many other homeowners have fanged enforcers, cybernetic juggernauts, paramilitary black-ops squads, lycanthropic lynch mobs, and undead assassins dropping by to collect the reward for the mortgage holder's untimely passing?
Add fire elementals to that list, I thought, as I ran around the scorched cinder pit that once was my basement. Someone had taken the game to a whole new level a couple of months back and sent something very ancient and other-worldly after me. Not that vampires aren't other-worldly, you understand. But, while the undead inhabit a different zip code than the rest of humanity, fire elementals dwell in a separate time/space continuum. At least they do until one shows up on your front porch one night and tries to wrap you in its fiery embrace. Then it's all Elvis Karaoke Hour with multiple refrains of "hunk-a hunk-a burning love."
But that's another story.
A patch of sunlight fell upon my shirt and I felt my chest grow warm. I had maybe thirty seconds before I was on my way to matching the ash and charred stubble décor of my former domicile. Putting on a burst of speed, I reached the end of the front yard, passed the stairs leading down to the dock some thirty feet below and just jumped off the edge of the bluff.
I had counted on my altered physiology to keep me from breaking my legs on the landing.
I hadn't counted on the mud to cushion the impact.
Or sink me in up to my knees at the water's edge.
The wooded bluffs on the far side of the river put this stretch of the bank into enough shadow that I had a few extra minutes before the sun found me. I looked up and over at my new residence, moored at the dock just some forty feet away.
The New Moon was an eighty-four foot long, double-decker houseboat.
I'd thought that living aboard a boat would be confining but, so far, it had proven just the opposite.
I had plenty of room.
For now.
Lupé was hiding out down in New Orleans until our son was born. After that? Well, the last time she deigned to speak to me she made it clear that she wouldn't be coming back anytime soon.
And maybe never if Fand was to be believed.
I pushed that thought away immediately. I'd been deceived and lied to on so many levels that there was no point in borrowing trouble until I got the facts. Focus on the known problems: if—when—she returned, we'd need nursery space for three. Mengele had cloned my dead wife and daughter and I'd managed to retrieve their cryogenically suspended fetuses before his compound and labs were destroyed. Now they were incubating away in surrogate wombs and would have a second chance at lives ended all too soon the first time around. In fact, stepmother, half sister, and Will were due to be delivered within a week to ten days of each other.
I could never mock The Jerry Springer Show again.
Deirdre was down in New Orleans until the Theresa Kellerman situation was resolved. She also claimed that she was providing security for Lupé and "the kids." I suspected she wanted a front-row seat on whether or not my ex-fiancée and I would reconcile. Suki had returned to Seattle.
The house had ended up being too big for me and Zotz before the fire elemental showed up and performed the ultimate house warming. Rebuilding with an eye toward permanence seemed an exercise in futility as long as all of the wrong people knew where I lived.
Still, the boat was just a temporary fix. Once my son—and my formerly dead wife and daughter—were born, I was going to have to revisit the real estate market.
Or, to quote the insightful and prescient Chief Brody: we were going to need a bigger boat.
I was hopeful, anyway.
But I refused to dwell on the intermediate future right now. Thoughts like that could wait until I was emotionally insulated with antidepressants—my own prescriptions, not potluck from the faerie pharmacy. Bigger boats and hopeful reconciliations could wait. Right now, here in the immediate future, I needed a rope and a tow as I struggled to free myself from the knee-deep muck.
Preternatural strength was of little help: there was nothing to pull or push against. I had no leverage. Working one leg half out of the muck forced the other in more deeply.
And a guillotine blade of sunlight was easing down the face of the cliff behind me with every passing minute.
I flopped backward, spreading my weight across the surface of the mud and tried backstroking my way out. It was slow and ungainly but it provided some traction and my legs eventually popped free with wet, sucking sounds.
The sun was now high enough that I could no longer stand without doing my sulfur match-head impression. I rolled over and began to creep, on hands and knees, toward my floating sanctuary.
A couple of months ago I probably wouldn't have tried so hard.
All those crappy vampire novels make the fanged nightlife seem romantic and exotic—a real panacea for the mundane, nine-to-five, dronelike existence that plagues so many of the still-warms. Well, here's a news flash for all the blunt-toothed wannabes: the reason ninety percent of the undead don't survive their first year and master vampires rarely attain age spans of a century or more?
Suicide.
Those that don't go rogue and get hunted down by their own kind usually end up making some kind of dumb-shit mistake with death-wish underpinnings. That or engage in a deliberately willful act of self-sabotage.
Fearless vampire hunters, stakes, holy water, cloves of garlic, crossbows, and crucifixes—much further down the list on the undead actuary tables.
Why is cheating death such a downer you ask?
Well, first of all, no one actually ever cheats Death. It's not logistically possible. Death owns the poker table and the deck, marks the cards, and has been dealing multiple hands before your ancestors crawled out of the primordial oceans and climbed up into the trees to begin with. You know all that nonsense about knowing "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em"? The house odds are unbeatable and inescapable. The only workable strategy to shortcut Death is dying. As long as you're alive Death can screw with you. Semi-alive, undead—Death gets that much more time and opportunity to toy with you and on a much more cosmic scale. Drs. Mooncloud and Burton, even Mama Samm, say it's the combination of my meds and the depression talkin' here. But I'm tellin' ya: forget all the attractive come-ons of the Goth lifestyle. All you have to look forward to is the unrelieved horror of a cold eternity. Without love. Without warmth. Without light. Killing to live. Living without purpose except to kill.
Undead is a sucky existence.
Thirty feet.
I was luckier than most, I suppose. I was still half human. Perhaps I still had half a soul. I wasn't totally dependent on blood. Yet. And having money and owning a blood bank meant that I didn't victimize anyone. Directly. With the exception of those occasional little "accidents" . . .
Twenty feet and I had to drop and crawl on my belly another ten to reach the New Moon's shadow.
But my wife and my daughter were dead because of me. My lover had left me. I could practically count on my fingers all of the people who didn't want to kill me or turn me into some science-project-of-the-damned . . .
So I had taken to popping Prozac and Paxil like Skittles ( . . . taste the rainbow . . . ) and had numbed down to the point where I was just playing a waiting game. Either Lupé and I were going to get back together and this half-life I had cobbled together would start to feel like it was worth all the bother again . . .
Or not.
And then we'd see which would catch up to me first: my enemies or the consequences of not seeming to care too much.
About anything.
Apparently my not-so-normal metabolism made me resistant to the beneficial as well as the detrimental effects of drugs and pharmaceuticals. Hell, if it hadn't been for this brand new threat to my soon-to-be-born son, I'd probably still be sitting on a rock about fifty miles back, humming "Here comes the sun, little darlin'" . . .
But however worthless I felt my own twilight existence, fatherhood involves obligations—even in the womb. Literally or figuratively, now was not the time to be a deadbeat dad.
I climbed up on the walkway to the pier and duck-walked up the entire span to keep the silhouette of my three-story boat between me and the sun, checking the guards, wards, and alarms as I went.
All were disarmed or disabled.
Not good! Not surprising, either. Sooner or later the Nasty Things were going to come calling again—I'd come to accept that. Even anticipate it.
I'd just figured on having a little more time before they found me.
I eased the mud-slimed Glock out of its holster at the small of my back, chambered the first round, and stepped onto the gangplank, finally able to stand erect.
A demon erupted from the doorway leading to the salon on the main deck.
For the briefest of moments it appeared to be human but, as it left the confines of the man-sized hatchway, it expanded to inhuman size and proportions. The New Moon tilted towards me as the monster's mass doubled, quadrupled, octupled with its transformation into a spelunker's darkest nightmare.
It was vaguely man-shaped—emphasis on "vaguely"—standing somewhat erect upon tree-trunklike legs. And I say "somewhat" because its massive head bumped up against the overhang from the bridge deck forcing it to hunch forward, Quasimodo-style. Its arms bowed out on either side like a gorilla on steroids and long, sharp claws curved like scimitars from black, leathery fingers. Its thick, shaggy pelt rippled, revealing tectonic plates of muscle. The demon glared down at me with baleful, lamplike eyes and opened its mouth. The impossibly wide maw looked like a diorama of Carlsbad Caverns: a dense forest of stalactites and stalagmites in place of dentition. To say its head looked like a bat's would be about as accurate as saying a Tyrannosaurus rex resembles a gecko.
It paused as it eyed my Creature-from-the-La-Brea-Tar-Pits outerwear and then roared: "Where the hell have you been? We've been worried sick!"
The muddy runoff from yours truly had the shower drain backed up before the hot water ran out. I stepped out of the stall just as it turned into a sludge-lined wading pool. As I grabbed a towel and dried off in the master bedroom, I could hear the susurrus of voices through the cabin door. It was way past my bedtime but the forward salon was full of people. Apparently there had been search parties and strategy sessions going on for the past three weeks so it would be rude to blow them all off with a quick "good morning and good night."
I pulled on a pair of old, worn jeans, all the while looking longingly at my neatly made bunk. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the time differential when there was a knock at the door.
"Are you decent?" asked a muffled voice. It sounded like Olive.
"No," I answered, slipping into a paint-spattered work shirt. "But I am presentable." I began buttoning. "More or less. Come in."
Olive Purdue was a slender black woman who looked to be on the shy side of thirty when she was professionally attired in one of her color-coordinated pantsuits. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as she was now, made her look even younger. In point of fact, my former secretary was closing in on forty and liked to do The New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. Once I had figured out that I lacked the temperament and the organizational skills to run a detective agency I had found a better use for her talents. Now she ran it for me as my partner.
And it clearly irked her that she hadn't been able to track me down during the three weeks I'd gone missing.
"Three weeks?" I asked again as she entered and offered me a steaming mug. "I've only been gone for three weeks?"
"Obviously your . . . captors . . . wanted you to think it was three months," she said as I took it and tried to judge the color of its contents.
The shades were drawn and anchored. The only artificial light angled in from the bathroom. (Excuse me. "Head." Nobody warns you that owning a boat will involve learning a foreign language.) I tried sniffing: there was still mud up my nose. "What's this? Coffee?"
She shook her head. "O-Neg. I warmed it up for you."
"Thanks." I took a sip. Even warmed-over, plastic-stored hemoglobin had it all over caffeine.
The trick was to stay away from that potent ambrosia that bubbled straight from the vein . . . .
I had almost given into The Hunger on the ride home. The only thing that had kept me off of the driver's neck on the long drive back was the knowledge it probably would have gotten me home ten minutes too late.
That and the fact that I didn't have any fangs. Not any real ones, anyway.
And then it came to me that the motivation for my restraint was practical. Not moral. The forward momentum in my transformation from man to monster had not abated.
"It would appear that the plan was to get you to sign over your parental rights," Olive continued. "It would be easier to twist your arm if you believed your child to be already born and the mother dead."
"Yeah? Well, they screwed up," I growled.
"What tipped you off?"
I didn't want to have this conversation three times. I didn't want to talk, at all. But, get the social obligations out of the way, all at once and with everyone present. "'Twas the Bard of Avon, milady," I said, opening the door and stepping into the corridor barefoot. A little meet and greet and then head for bed. Suspended animato, Mr. Roboto.
"But why?" I couldn't help asking as we moved forward, past the open galley and entered the salon that took up more than a third of the main deck. "Why my son? Who isn't even born yet? And why act like they need my permission to kidnap him?"
Camazotz Chamalcan, ancient Mesoamerican bat-demon, was sitting on one end of the sofa on the port side. He wasn't all big and batty, now, having collapsed down and into the avatar of a small, nattily-dressed black man. "This is why I keep saying we need to go back!" he was saying.
"But even if we knew where this place was," a newcomer argued from a chair near the helm, "you won't find anything. They'll be long gone."
The new guy was big. Tall rather than bulky, with a lean muscularity that indicated an extremely athletic lifestyle and a tan that suggested that he pursued it outdoors—no gyms and barbells for nature boy, here. His shaggy brown hair was streaked with natural blond highlights and fell past his shoulders in thick, tangled locks. He wore a black leather biker's vest with matching pants and no shirt. He didn't have chest hair so much as a pelt with brief glimpses of bronzed skin here and there. Olive had introduced him as "Fenris" and—even without the no-last-name, Norse affectation—there was little doubt that our guest was a werewolf.
Likewise his companion, sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning up against the sliding glass doors that led out onto the fore deck.
Volpea's tan was so dark she made Fenris look pasty in comparison. She had more hair, too—also thick, also brown, also streaked from the sun—all gathered to her scalp and falling to the small of her back. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a khaki shirt tied midriff style to reveal an eight-pack of killer abs. Daisy Duke does Pilates.
Between the two of them they radiated so much health and energy that I felt like I needed a doctor. Maybe I would. They were probably enforcers. The questions were: from which demesne and why were they here?
"What other options do we have at the moment?" the deconstructed bat-demon countered. "First, captives would provide us with hostages—negotiating materials, should the need arise. Second, it reduces their ranks, reducing their threat. Third, one or more captives provide us with information, answers to questions like the one the Bloodwalker just asked."
I winced. "Don't call me that."
"A waste of time," Volpea disputed in a husky voice. "Even if you acquired a prisoner, they'd as like tell you nothing."
Zotz shook his head. "They would tell me . . . everything."
I don't know which creeped me out more. His voice, his words, his inhuman smile that never quite touched his eyes. Or maybe it was the eyes, themselves: eyes that looked like nothing so much as the deep dark holes that had spawned his kind.
The ancient Quiché Mayans had believed that the Afterlife—or the "Underworld" as most Mesoamerican cultures weren't big on the concept of "Heaven"—could be directly accessed through consecrated gateways called cenotés. Cenotés are essentially deep caves with sunroofs—great water-filled sinkholes that could serve as a cistern for an entire civilization or a sacrificial pit for thousands of human sacrifices.
The ancient ruins of Chichen Itza have two such sinkholes: the smaller Cenoté Xtoloc which served as the city's water supply, and the large and fearsome Well of Sacrifices where young girls were drowned as sacrifices to Chac, Mayan rain god and cosmic monster. When your hands and feet were bound and your body was weighed down with sacrificial jewelry and ornaments, the whole "gateway to the Afterlife" was more than a religious euphemism. A little push by the priests and, if the fall didn't kill you, your drowning was sure to be accomplished swiftly.
"And then what?" I asked. It should have been a rhetorical question—the kind you don't even ask out loud. Certainly not of an ancient, bloodthirsty bat-demon. "Turn them over to the authorities? I don't know about The Mullet but I doubt that a woman who can levitate and start fires with her bare hands is going to stay locked up in a conventional jail for very long." My only defense was that I was too tired to think clearly.
He snorted. "Why would we turn your enemies over to those who have no hope of restraining them? After they yield up all the information that we require, we should slay them so that they cease to be a threat."
Mama Samm D'Arbonne, palm reader, fortune-teller, and honest-to-God juju woman, was sitting on the other two thirds of the couch that Zotz occupied. She lazily lifted an oversized hand and suddenly bitch-slapped him upside the head like a stroke of black lightning.
Despite the fact that Mama Samm was immense and Zotz was single-serving sized, she was still human. Zotz only looked it for the moment. I would have feared for all of us had I not seen her do it a half dozen times before. Even a couple of times when he was still all supersized and demony.
"Now what do I be tellin' you about wastin' Mr. Chris' time?" she scolded, her ever-present white turban leaning forward aggressively. "He gots too much to worry 'bout wit'out some raggedy-ass monster always fallin' off the wagon . . ."
"What did I say?" he whined, flinching back as her hand came back up.
"You show up 'bout six month ago, all 'help me find the higher path, please, sir.' But you ain't learned nothin' in all this time. Now here you be talkin' 'bout torturing an' killin' folk. Next thing you know you be cravin' the sacrifices, again."
"But they aren't people," he argued. "They're creatures of earth and sea and air! Not human."
"Faeries," I muttered, closing my eyes and wondering how I could even contemplate a rational discussion of the subject matter. "I think the point that Mama Samm is trying to make, Zotz, is about you, not them. If you continue to set your feet to the path of violence, you harm yourself. It's about what happens to your heart, your soul—how your thinking is shaped and hardened, when you see every encounter as nonnegotiable."
Fenris and Volpea exchanged looks. Zotz muttered something under his breath. The only words I could make out were: ". . . see you negotiate . . . warrior-thane . . ."
I sat down at the table on the starboard side of the salon—a bit heavily if anyone was paying close attention. I had been running on pure adrenaline for more hours than I could remember and thought I might need something solid to hold onto before we were done. The warmed-over blood helped. I still needed some serious sack time in order to get my head rebooted and back in the game. But my unborn son's life was in danger and I had a boatful of people who had spent the better part of a month trying to find me. Not only did I owe them the basic amenities but there was also the matter of the two lycanthropes. Enforcers or freelance, it wasn't a good idea to show weakness or vulnerability until I knew more about whom—or what—they represented.
"Okay," I announced over the conversations being murmured around me, "I very much appreciate all of your efforts to find me during this little interlude. The question is where do we go from here?"
"As I was saying," Zotz began.
"They're gone, Bats. Let's move on." I turned to Mama Samm. "They want my son. I want to know why."
Mama Samm and Olive exchanged looks across the room.
"What?" I said.
"The world's been a little—busier—in your absence," Olive offered cautiously.
Like it was my fault? "Define 'busier,'" I said, not liking the hesitation in her tone.
"Well, there were a couple of big quakes in Mexico and Central America, some major volcanic activity out in the Pacific Rim . . ."
I shook my head. "That was before I got shanghaied to elvesville."
She shook her head back. "And since. Grand total of quakes in the past month, five. Two small islands reported sinking this past week. An undersea volcano growing in the southwest, bringing the grand total of spewing geological formations to four at present. Two major tsunamis, one minor. And the reason why people are looking up at the moon and using astrology and astronomy in the same breath."
"Atmospheric debris," I observed. "Filtering reflected light. Turns the moon's albedo the color of Ocean Spray CranApple juice."
"Maybe." Olive laid a hand on my arm. "But, for a lot of people, this falls into the Signs and Portents Department."
"The question is," Zotz growled, "does it juice the elves in a similar direction?"
"What do you mean?"
"Come on, Cséjthe, think. Some faerie tries to trick you into signing over your son. . . "
The look on my face must have been a little blank.
"Who's about to be born in the midst of end-of-the-world signage?"
"First of all," I said, "a lot of babies are about to be born in the next eight or nine weeks. And I don't consider three or four temblors, some heavy seas, and a handful of eruptions in the notorious Ring of Fire to be irrefutable evidence of the Last Days. You want end-of-the-world theories you should've been around for World War II or the great flu pandemic of 1918."
Zotz gave me a Mona Lisa smile. "I was."
Oh yeah.
"And, signs and portents aside," he continued, "none of the other babies being born at this point in history have your son's unique pedigree. Put 'em together?"
It was food for thought. "Okay," I allowed, "maybe there is a connection. Maybe the elves are all Seventh Day Adventists and this is their come-to-Jesus moment on the wheel of time. Whatever. Priority number one is making sure that security is airtight and in place, starting right now. Today."
Mama Samm D'Arbonne folded her immense hands in her immense—er—lack of a lap. "Now don' you be worryin', Mister Chris. I speaks with Miss Lupé every day since you ups and disappears. She be fine an' Miss Marie be seein' that she have plenty of protection while she a guest of Orleans Parish."
I gave her a glancing scowl: she knew I hated her Aunt Jemima act. It worked for the rubes who knew her as a mild-mannered fortune-teller—reading palms, cards, tea leaves, whatever the customer would fork over the most cash for. But that was all shuck-and-jive, sleight-of-hand costuming for her true gifts. And she wasn't so mild-mannered with her backroom clientele.
"I want to see for myself. I want to see Lupé."
Fenris started to rise but Volpea yanked him back down as Mama Samm shook her immense head. "Now, Mister Chris, you knows that won't do! She don' want to see you and New Orleans is our friends as long as you stays north. You try an' go down there and there be nothin' but trouble!"
Volpea fixed her gold-brown gaze on me and tried a smile. It almost touched her eyes. "You know the agreement, Mr. Cséjthe. You must understand why Marie Laveau cannot allow you to enter her domain."
"Yet you can freely enter mine," I growled back at her. "Right?" I turned back to the fortune-teller. "I need to know that she's safe! I need to know that our unborn child will be safe! That Jenny and Kirsten—" I broke off; saying entirely too much in front of Laveau's eyes and ears.
"That is why they are here," Mama Samm answered, her gesture taking in the two weres. "I was preparing to visit New Orleans when you disappeared. Now that you are back, I can go."
I cocked an eyebrow and gave her The Look. I didn't need to say anything. It was well known that she was no fan of Marie Laveau. Once upon a time the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans might have been a sister practitioner but, more than a hundred years before Mama Samm was even born, Marie had been turned by a vampire and was said to have lost her way on the Invisible Path.
I guess I was too tired to do The Look properly. She returned my gaze with a calm expression and said: "Madam Laveau has been preparing a solution to Deirdre's problem and needs my assistance. I will have the opportunity to look in on Lupé and Dr. Mooncloud personally as your surrogate. So, if there's anything you want to send them, have it ready by tomorrow morning and I'll take it with me."
"The only thing you won't be sending," Fenris rumbled, giving me a little less of a neutral expression, "is yourself. That's why we're here."
And there it was.
It wasn't just my physical presence the other enclaves feared. It was the fact that I could bloodwalk—project my consciousness from body to body, possessing others and wrecking havoc on small populations if I so chose.
As in New York, six months ago.
And beyond that, there was the danger that any enclave permitting my freedom within their borders would risk the appearance of an alliance with the Bloodwalker. Any suggested alliance and they, too, might become anathema within the undead communities, risking censure, war, annihilation from all of the other demesnes.
So Laveau and Pantera had sent a couple of enforcers to make sure that Mama Samm traveled light when she came to visit. No smuggling rogue semi-vampire shades inside her own head when she came a-callin'.
Bugger.
I held up my hands. "Okay. We'll keep it long distance. For now. As long as I'm satisfied that they're safe and happy. Otherwise all bets are off."
Fenris didn't like it and started to say so. Rather than give his protests any further attention, I asked our fortune-teller: "How come you didn't foresee my abduction or the location where I was being held?"
"No one ever expects the Elvish Inquisition," Mama Samm answered placidly.
I barely had time to get my eyebrow back up before Zotz chimed in. "Time does not pass in the same manner within a faerie mound. This suggests a distortion of the time/space continuum and could explain why the juju woman could not scry your location."
I was very tired and had run out of expressions so I took another sip of the cooling O-Neg in my mug. It was starting to coagulate. Like my brains. I really needed to wrap this up and crawl between the sheets. "Okay," I said, "aside from the Elfsteinian Clock Paradox, what else do we know?"
"Perhaps your nanobots have activated," Olive offered. She held up a small, steaming pitcher. "Freshen your drink?"
I blinked. "What?"
Mama Samm nodded, causing the great, white turban atop her head to wobble like a bobble-head mummy. "Think about it. At any time were you glamoured? Bespelled? Under any form of enchantment?"
I shrugged. "If I was, how would I know? Besides, they kept me drugged."
"And what would be the point of that if their majicks were not for naught?" the fortune-teller elaborated.
"Not for what?"
"Neutralized," Olive translated, pouring more sanguinary snackage into my mug before I could stop her.
"Elven magic defeated by nanotechnology?" I sighed. "It's about time that crap those Nazi boojums injected into me did something worthwhile." The nanobots that swarmed through my bloodstream and crawled through my tissues had yet to activate in any meaningful way. Beyond setting off the security scanners at the airport, that is.
Zotz nodded sagely. "The magic of the Sidhe is nullified by cold iron."
I started to take another drink but stopped. "Whoa, Bats! When did you become an expert on the Fey Folk?" The ancient demon's preferred method of information gathering and research was watching television. Lots and lots of television. It was only in the past month that I had been able to get him a library card and out the door to a more literary form of inquiry and examination.
"Lately I find that it is not enough to learn the ways of this time and culture," he said. "I think it wise to understand the ways of those tribes and forms which exist outside of natural law and perception."
"So you're deep in the stacks, dusting off tomes that pull back the veil on the unseen kingdoms?" I tried of sip of my now "freshened" drink. Too hot now. And the older contents had curdled a bit and risen to the top. No wonder jugulars were still the carafe of choice for the fanged crowd.
He shook his head. "I use the library's computers to surf the internet. Did you know that 'fairy' also means homosexual?"
I started to choke. Olive reached over and laid a manicured hand on his shoulder. "When Mister Chris is able to talk I'm sure he'll want to tell you how unreliable the internet can be as a research tool."
Zotz considered and nodded. "That would explain the librarians' consternation over some of the source materials that I have accessed."
"Consternation?" I repeated weakly.
"They seemed quite distressed."
Fenris cleared his throat after half a beat. "What are nanobots?" he asked.
Glances were exchanged. Perhaps too much personal intel already had been.
"We have some personal business to discuss . . ." Mama Samm said with a slight nod of her head.
" . . . and, rather than bore our guests," Olive added diplomatically, "why don't you take them up topside, Jamal? Where they can enjoy the sun."
We all turned and looked at Olive's nephew. He had tucked himself down against the wall, next to the corner fireplace, across from the helm. The shadows and his dark skin had provided camouflage up till now. Twin qualities of stillness and silence conjoined to chameleon him out of sight and mind. The gangly teenager unfolded slowly, standing up, still not uttering a word.
Jamal had been quite loquacious for the first seventeen years of his life. Perhaps I should rephrase that: Jamal was quite the chatterbox for the entire seventeen years of his life. Which had ended last year in the destruction of the BioWeb laboratories. Now he just sat or stood very quietly until asked to move. He performed simple tasks with an economy of movement. He never slept. Instead he would gaze straight ahead, his cloudy eyes unfocused, and seem to listen to distant music no one else could hear. He never spoke unless spoken to. And never answered in more than one or two syllables.
I could never decide which I felt the most guilt over: that running errands for me had put him in harm's way and, eventually, brought about his murder?
Or that, in bringing him back to the land of the semi-living with an infusion of my own tainted blood, I may have done more harm than good?
Fenris got up and stood near Jamal. "No need to keep us occupied out of earshot," he said. "We can get in a little run, pick up some supplies, pack, make preparations for tomorrow's return trip." He looked over at Mama Samm. "Unless you'd like to leave later today?"
"Honey, I gots to sleep before I makes a long drive down to Nawlins. I's an old womans." The serious voice was gone and the old shuck 'n' jive mask was back, firmly in place.
Volpea stood a bit reluctantly, I thought. Both enforcers were probably under orders to bring back as much intelligence as they could gather. So whatever we didn't want to discuss in front of them was surely eavesdrop-worthy.
"Jamal will see you to shore, then," Olive said.
Jamal didn't require a direct order. He seemed to process well enough most of the time though you'd be hard pressed so find anyone more close-mouthed about it. But he made no further movement toward the door.
"Jamal?" Olive asked.
Her nephew's lips moved. A sound of sorts emerged.
"What is it, baby?"
"Tu-lu," he finally muttered.
"What?" I'm not sure who asked that question. Maybe we all did.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Tulu," Jamal rasped, "R'lyeh wgah'nagl ftagn . . ."
We all sat there for a minute, stunned. Was it that Jamal had spoken in multiple syllables? Or that the words coming out of his mouth were pure gibberish? Or that the gibberish sounded like some actual, foreign language?
Some terrible, unspeakable language?
Perhaps it was the effect of strange sounds emerging from the vocal apparatus of a dead man.
And then Jamal raised his hand and gestured toward me with a drooping, clawlike hand. "He's coming, Mister Chris! He will wake and the world will fall into dreams of madness!"
And then he started to scream.