8: JOSHUA
Winnie had a purple Vespa that matched her hair. It had little violets painted all over it as if someone had sprinkled it with flowers. Joshua had grown up with dirt bikes; to him two wheels and a motor was the essence of masculinity. (His sister rode dirt bikes but she loathed pink and would kick anyone’s ass for calling her a “girl.” His mom kept to four-wheeled ATVs. His parents’ motto seemed to be “a family that gets muddy together, stays together.”) There seemed something intrinsically wrong for a scooter to be so girly-girl. He supposed it could be worse; it could be a pink motorcycle.
“Her name is Violet.” Winnie buckled on a black helmet with Hello Kitty eyes and whiskers bracketing the visor. She added in a whisper, “She’s very temperamental.”
“It’s leaking oil,” he pointed out. “It needs a new gasket and probably new spark plugs.”
Considering how much money they’d just won, she could just get a new Vespa. A fleet of them.
“You have a scooter?” Winnie’s black leather motorcycle jacket had a Hello Kitty stitched into its shoulder. Just so wrong.
“Dirt bikes. Mostly Yamahas and Kawasakis. Nothing Italian like your Vespa, but they’re single cylinder, four-stroke engines.” As she continued to stare at him, he added, “My parents are both mechanics. They have their own shop and tow truck. I grew up helping out when I wasn’t at school or at the dojo. I could take a dirt bike apart and put it back together before I could do algebra.”
His parents would rather show him how to take apart engines and put them back together than help him with his math homework, but that was a different story. Helping out at his parents’ garage (better known as “free slave labor”) was another reason he wanted to go to college. Customers had this weird idea that his folks shouldn’t charge so much for labor, ignoring the fact that his parents needed to pay for the loans on the garage and all their tools, insurance, electricity and an endless list of other incidentals. His parents should have been doing better money-wise but people were constantly bartering with them and bouncing checks. His mom and dad were too nice for their own good. He knew they would love for him to take over the garage but he didn’t want to be fighting every day for a decent income.
Could he win a decent living by being a werewolf? What a weird and unexpected benefit. He wasn’t sure that what had just happened was repeatable. If it was, it implied an even stranger future than he’d thought.
“So, she just needs a new gasket?” Winnie knelt down to eye the fresh drips of oil under the scooter. “And here I thought she might be possessed. My cousin had a car that was possessed. It constantly tried to kill him but it never needed gasoline.”
She swung her leg over the seat and hitched forward to make room for him. “Come on. We’ve got to scoot!”
“Where are we going?” He wasn’t sure that if it was totally wise to run off with a stranger—and Winnie definitely qualified as strange. She did, however, have ten million dollars in her pocket that theoretically belonged to them both. And he didn’t even know her last name.
“We’re going to my granny’s,” Winnie said. “We need to do a jam session to find out what’s going on with Jack.”
* * *
Harrowing was not a word that Joshua had ever considered using before.
No other word, however, came close to describing Winnie’s driving.
The only warning he got was when she canted her head to look up at Fred and said, “Fastest route to Granny’s, avoiding pigs.”
He was about to ask “what pigs?” when Fred flitted away and Winnie took off after the spirit guide at full throttle.
They cut between buildings via passageways barely wide enough for her handlebars. They flashed through intersections against the light. Winnie drove on sidewalks, through parks, and over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the Charles River. Oddly there were no pedestrians in their way, no matter how erratic a path they took. Unfortunately the same couldn’t be said of cross traffic. Boston drivers used their horns and curse words that Joshua had never heard shouted before but never their brakes.
After taking several one-way streets in the wrong direction, they cut into a vast parking lot for some kind of warehouse with dozens of tractor-trailer trucks that blared horns at them. Fred led the way through a narrow a hole in a fence, across a pedestrian crosswalk, through a gate that Joshua was sure should have been padlocked shut, and down into an abandoned unlit tunnel.
By then it was fairly obvious that when Winnie said “pigs” she meant the police.
* * *
Joshua’s grandmother lived in a big Victorian in Saratoga Springs. Her hair was titanium blond via monthly visits to a beauty parlor and always hair sprayed into a perfect hairdo. She favored turtleneck cashmere sweaters and wool skirts and low-heeled dress shoes.
The fact that they parked in front of a tattoo parlor warned him that Winnie’s grandmother was not like his. There was a porcupine drawn in tribal style on the window and the name of the shop wrapped around it: Sioux Zee’s Quill Pig Tattoo. Heavy metal music thundered somewhere close by. As they neared the shop, the noise grew louder and he realized that it was coming from within the building.
Winnie opened the door and the music hit them like a wall of sound.
Joshua followed, feeling bewildered and lost. Why was he here? Winnie had swept him up and carried him away like a leaf in a storm wind. Decker had said that as a monster, random chance no longer applied to Joshua. That he’d pulled the winning lottery ticket out of thin air seemed to prove it. It did seem to indicate that fate had taken him to the one person in Boston who knew all about werewolves. Destiny also gave him ten million reasons why he should stay.
Fate and destiny were the words his AP English teacher used to describe the setup in Macbeth, and that turned out badly for Macbeth.
The tattoo studio’s door opened to a large long room with high ceilings. The floor was polished dark oak. The walls were exposed red brick. There were five black leather adjustable chairs set up as tattoo stations with black enameled tool cabinets. On the walls were animals drawn in the same tribal-style as the shop’s logo, obviously tattoos, but framed like paintings. In the very back was a metal spiral staircase that led up to the second floor. A sign warned off customers with: Quill Pigs Only, Others will be Neutered.
The artist nearest the door was a girl slightly older than Joshua. She wore her long black hair swept up into a bun that was pinned into place with hummingbird-tipped hairpins. Her halter-top and low rider jeans showed off her full-body tattoo of green and ruby feathers. She glanced toward the door and then focused back on her client, an extremely muscular, metrosexual man. “Ooooh! I should have known!” Hummingbird girl carefully peeled a stencil paper from the man’s upper body, revealing the interlocking jagged black lines of a tribal tattoo that wrapped his left shoulder. “Sioux Zee is on the warpath. She just kicked on the metal a few minutes ago.”
“Shoot!” Winnie glanced toward the ceiling speaker as if noticing the music for the first time.
“Shape shift nose to the wind,” the voice of the male singer growled over heavy bass through vibrating speakers. “Shape shift feeling I’ve been. Move swift all senses clean. Earth gift. Back to the meaning of wolf and man.”
Coincidence or did Winnie’s grandmother know that Joshua was coming?
“Oh man!” Winnie cried. “Metallica?”
“Busted!” A male artist at the next station called out without lifting his head. His female client was lying face down in the chair as he inked a tribal crow with wings spread across the woman’s shoulder blades.
“What did you do to piss her off?” The hummingbird girl laughed and held up a large hand mirror to her customer. “Do you like it? Is it a go?”
“She probably quit her job again,” the male artist guessed accurately. “It was too boring.”
“Mark!” Winnie stomped her foot. “It’s not my fault! I’m meant to do one thing and I do it well. I just suck at everything else.”
“What do you do?” the male customer asked as he examined the stencil marked on his shoulder.
There was a moment of stunned silence in the room as everyone stared at him. Then Mark started to giggle.
Winnie put her hands on her hips. “I’m a broadband communication specialist.”
“What’s that?” the client asked.
The hummingbird girl tapped the mirror, calling the client’s attention back to the stencil on his arm. “Is it a go on your tattoo?”
“Yes, it’s awesome!” the client said.
The hummingbird girl picked up a needle gun. “Great! Let’s get started.”
Winnie caught Joshua and pulled him through the long room to the spiral metal staircase.
* * *
The second floor of the studio was Sioux Zee’s private sanctuary. It was the same basic design of polished dark oak floors and exposed brick walls. A lone tattoo station of adjustable chair and black enameled toolboxes sat next to the stairs. That area was stark and clean. The rest of the room was a wonderland of odd and unusual items that fought for Joshua’s attention.
Most riveting were the skulls of fierce animals that Joshua couldn’t identify. They were the size and shape of small dogs and large cats but with multiple rows of saw-blade teeth like sharks. Two had horns like sheep. One had what looked like a third eye-hole.
The second most riveting thing was the array of a dozen antique rifles and shotguns mounted on the wall. They had beautifully engraved stocks and well-oiled barrels. They put his father’s small collection of hunting guns to shame. As he studied them longer, he realized that the engravings were weird and mystical-looking and set his neck hair on end.
The third most riveting thing was a large old fashioned safe standing open. There was no cash inside, but a dozen thick, leather-bound books and a collection of crocks wired shut and covered with odd runes. The jars were even more unsettling than the guns, although he couldn’t tell why.
The fourth most riveting thing was Winnie’s grandmother. Sioux Zee was a tall leggy woman with long stark white hair down to her knees, a choker of turquoise, silver and bone, a two-tone leather vest, skinny blue jeans and knee-high buckskin boots. She was leaning over a big, ugly, dangerous-looking man. Her tattoo gun buzzed as she carefully inked in an odd complicated set of runes on his right shoulder.
“Granny! Granny!” Winnie cried. “You’re never going to guess—oh—well—you probably could guess—although this might surprise even you. Maybe.”
“You quit your job,” Sioux Zee stated coldly without looking up.
“T-t-that’s the start of my news…” Winnie whined. “It gets better. Well—better then worse and then maybe totally horrible.”
Her grandmother glanced hard at Winnie and then looked beyond her granddaughter to see Joshua for the first time. She jerked back with a gasp.
Which alerted the big, ugly, dangerous-looking man that something was wrong. He lurched off the table with a growl. “What’s wrong, Sioux Zee?” He caught sight of Joshua. “Can’t you read, shrimp? This is off-limits, you little…”
“Brutus!” Sioux Zee smacked the man hard on his bleeding shoulder where she’d just been working. “Look before you swing! Use that thick skull of yours for something other than breaking open walnuts.”
Brutus squinted at Joshua and then his eyes widened. “Shit!” He took three giant steps backward. “Where did you find a wolf?”
Was “werewolf” printed on Joshua’s forehead? He scrubbed at his brow.
“The supermarket,” Winnie said. “Deli aisle, next to the cold cuts. He was lost.”
“I’m was not lost! I was shopping!” Joshua held up his plastic shopping bags as proof. The last word came out more of a growl than he intended. Everyone took two steps back from him.
“I’m going now.” Brutus edged around Joshua, keeping Winnie between them. “We can finish up my protection runes some other time.”
Sioux Zee huffed as Brutus escaped. She followed him, calling, “I need to clean that and bandage you first! Brutus! Don’t make me hit you again!”
“Sit! Sit!” Winnie pointed at a poker table in the far end of the room.
“Okay.” The table was edged with leather. Eight brass cup holders were embedded into the surface between hardwood grooves to hold poker chips. “This is hard core.”
“Granny loves poker. Don’t ever play with her. She’s a shark.”
He’d been “outvoted” (read that as: tricked) into playing a card game with his cousins last Thanksgiving called Craits. (He thought they’d made up the game but later found the rules online.) He’d been hopelessly confused the entire afternoon. Tens reversed the order from clockwise to counterclockwise or back again. Eights were wild. Fives forced everyone else to draw a card. On and on and on. He suspected at the time, and later confirmed, if he’d been shown the rules first, he could have kept up. The gameplay wasn’t as complex as chess; it was just that his cousins never explained any of the rules. The sheer number of special cards and speed of play made it impossible to keep the rules straight.
There was a thick leather-bound book open on the table. It smelt old. The pages were handmade linen paper. The handwritten words were in an elegant lettering that was either Arabic or Cyrillic or some other alphabet that Joshua didn’t know. The large, carefully drawn, and footnoted rune matched the one that Sioux Zee had been inking onto Brutus’ shoulder.
Joshua realized that light shimmered over the table, like a heat mirage off a hot parking lot. He couldn’t tell what was causing the illusion; the area was cooler than the rest of the room. Gazing at the book while the empty eyes of the strange skulls watched him, Joshua felt like he was deep in the middle of a card game whose rules everyone else knew.
“What’s this?” Joshua pointed at the book.
“That’s Dorothy.” Winnie carefully closed it and patted its gilded cover. “Everyone thinks that the universe is one big dollhouse; that we’re nothing but Barbie dolls. Some of us get put in fancy outfits and set on the shelf and admired by all. Some end up naked with their hair hacked to pieces, covered with mud, but well-loved. Others are accidently tossed on the fire Christmas morning and end up one unhappy lump of wax. People act like we’re taken out of a box, moved around only by forces we can’t control, and end up back in the box. But that’s not how the world works. That’s not what we are. The universe is more like a box of tissues.”
“Crank!” Ian slapped down a Two card. Wayne threw down an ace. “Two crank!” Julian quickly slapped down another Two. “Three cranks!” Joshua frowned at the cards on the table, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. Throw down a Three? His cousins started to laugh—again—at the fact that he had no clue what was going on.
Joshua took a deep breath. “What do you mean by box of tissues?”
“It’s layer upon layer upon layer of realities. And we exist as some weirdness that we can’t explain yet. We don’t have the words. We’re atoms, or electrons or quarks or something. We’re part of the tissues but we’re not. Heaven and hell, they’re just one quantum state away, two or three tissues up or down, and we merely have to change particle state to move to that existence—to that tissue. Most people around us are only aware of the tissue, but a handful like Brutus and I can see a layer over. You’ve been changed to a higher state or something so that you live on two worlds at the same time. Earth and whatever universe your wolf exists in when it’s not here. Dorothy and Fred, they’re from another world too, but they’re also at a higher state than us, and can move around in our world too. And all those dead people that haven’t moved on to heaven or hell? They’re partially in our world or they’re in Dorothy’s and Fred’s world or they’re in some gray space between them.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around it. “Dorothy is a spirit guide like Fred?”
“Yup.” Winnie carried the book to the safe. “She was my father’s spirit guide. He copied these runes from a book that had been damaged when someone tried to steal it back before the Revolutionary War. Even though it was too damaged to read, it had been passed down through my family for safekeeping. My father teamed up with a friend that went to M.I.T. to use some kind of scanner to recover the information. Dorothy guards over it now that he’s passed on.”
Winnie carefully tucked the book between the other leather-bound tomes inside the safe. “Brutus is open enough to see what most people can’t, which makes him valuable as an employee for certain businesses, but it also makes him vulnerable. The runes close him off to anything that could take him over.”
“Couldn’t you use these runes instead of drugs?”
“I don’t want to close down for good. I just need a little time. A few months, then all will be golden again when the prince returns.”
“Who’s the prince?”
“Seth Tatterskein.”
“Where is he and why has he been gone for so long? Doesn’t he know that you need him?”
“He knows. It’s just that he was only thirteen when his family was massacred and he inherited his father’s power.”
“Oh, wow.” Joshua had been feeling sorry for himself because he had needed to leave his family. At least he had someone to go back to once the dust settled.
Winnie nodded. “Yeah, really, right? Seth needs to grow up before he can take on full responsibility for Boston. He’s sixteen now. His birthday is around Christmas. The expectation is that he’ll move back when he turns eighteen. Maybe. If the Wolf King lets him. But it’s not like Boston has totally gone to hell; Seth is holding back the worst of it just by existing. I can feel him sometimes, late at night, checking to see if I’m still me and not something else. Something dangerous.”
“That sounds—creepy.”
“It’s like when Granny comes in and checks under my bed when I’m sleeping. It was annoying until the night she found a growling hiding under it and shot it.” Winnie pointed at one of the skulls with saw-blade teeth. “That one there.”
“Holy shit! That was under your bed?”
“Yeah, during a new moon last fall. Most dangerous time in Boston is after the fall solstice as the year dies. I’m like an open door to things like that. So, no, the prince checking on me isn’t creepy. I know that if things go horribly bad, it won’t be just Granny trying to deal with the mess.”
Sioux Zee came back up the steps, her boots ringing on the metal treads of the spiral staircase. “I swear, I boasted out loud, when I was either too young or too drunk to remember, that I couldn’t be surprised. Something heard me and took it as a challenge. I suspect it was while I was drunk, because your father was like a rock. He was so predictable I always knew what he was going to do next, even get himself killed. Like a rock, you couldn’t stop him once he got moving. You,” Sioux Zee wagged her finger at Winnie. “I never know what impossible mess you’re going to fall into next.”
“Granny!” Winnie whined. “I didn’t do anything except go to work!”
Sioux Zee sighed. “And that’s the truly frightening part.”
“I got paid.” Winnie patted her various pockets until she found the lottery ticket and held it up as evidence. “Well, sort of. It’s two birds with one stone kind of deal. It’s a day’s wage—and then some—and proof that I was fated to meet…meet…meet…” Winnie turned to Joshua. “You know, you never told me your name.”
“His name is Joshua.” Sioux Zee huffed and took the ticket to examine it closely. “If you bothered to watch the news, you’d know that. He disappeared from his home in Central New York yesterday after a wolf tore apart half the boys of his graduating class. There’s an Amber Alert out for him. His parents were on the evening news begging for information on him.”
“They were?” Joshua cried. “I left a note on the refrigerator.” Not that it actually said where he was going. He claimed he was going to see an online friend and they shouldn’t worry about him. He figured if he mentioned Jack’s instructions to find the Prince of Boston, he’d only convince his parents that he was mentally unstable. (Personally Joshua thought he was a little crazy for picking Boston as a destination but Jack’s command was the only thing he could think of while trying to decide where to go.) “I—I—I don’t know what the hell is going on. Why is this happening to me? I had a normal boring life until yesterday. There has never been a real monster under my bed or anyone else’s bed. No real vampires or ghosts or those things—whatever those are.” He pointed at one of the skulls with horns. “Why didn’t I ever hear about them before? Why is this happening to me?”
“The odds of encountering real magic or real monsters are the same as winning the top prize in the lottery.” Sioux Zee waved the lottery ticket at him.
“Those odds are millions to one!” Joshua protested. “Since yesterday, I can’t swing a cat and not hit something supernatural.”
“You’re no longer human. Normal odds don’t apply to you; that’s how you ended up with this ticket.” Sioux Zee put the ticket in the massive safe. “And you’re still a minor.” She closed the safe and spun the lock. “You can’t collect the winnings until you’re eighteen.”
“But-but-but-” Winnie started. “I can collect it. Or you can, Granny. And then we can share it.”
“It’s ten million dollars,” Sioux Zee said. “The state officials are going to rake anyone who tries to collect it over the coals. The first thing they’ll do is ask you where you bought the ticket. If you turn it in tomorrow, they’ll pull the security tapes at the supermarket. And who actually pushed the button? A minor with an Amber Alert out on him; the sole survivor of a massacre who vanished without a trace. There’s no way that’s going to stay quiet. I’m guessing that he’s got a world of trouble chasing after him. Winnie, child, you’ve fallen into a big pit of trouble, no need to pull a basket of rattlesnakes in with you.”
“Oh pooh.” Winnie deflated.
“I do have trouble chasing me,” Joshua admitted reluctantly. “Or at least, I did. I’m hoping I lost it.”
“Certain troubles you need to kill to stop,” Sioux Zee said.
“Kind of did.” Joshua explained meeting Decker and Elise and the fight with the huntsman.
Sioux Zee huffed at the news. “The heavy hitters are all in the game.”
“Joshua came to me!” Winnie cried. “And it was Jack that sent him! I have a connection to Jack.”
“In your mind.” Sioux Zee moved to clean up her tattoo equipment. “Jack told Joshua to go to Seth, not you.”
“This is fated!” Winnie cried. “You’re refusing to admit it because you don’t want to get me involved but I’m already involved. And I’ll stay involved as long as I want. Jack was good to me and if something happened to a Thane, then we should know what’s going on before everything blows up in our faces.”
Sioux Zee crashed equipment together loudly for a minute before finally growling out, “Fine. We’ll do a session. Minimum time, though. You need to keep tightly shuttered if there’s heavy hitters stirring things up.”
Winnie squealed and clapped her hands. “Fred! Fishing time!”
Fred washed over Joshua, an intense wave of cold and dark and the smell of fresh dirt.
“What the heck?” Joshua leaped back, growling. Fred had vanished. Maybe. Being that the spirit guide had been just a smell and a lack of light, Joshua had to peer about the room to be sure. “What do you mean: fishing? Why did he do that?”
“It’s all just a crap shoot.” Winnie motioned for him to help her lift the wood cover to the gaming table into place. “Tons of people die but only a few of them stick around to talk. Some because they have unfinished business. Others? No idea why they stay. Marie Antoinette? I have a theory that she thinks God’s idea of fashion is scruffy men in loose robes and she wants none of that. She likes men in tight breeches.”
Sioux Zee lowered thick blinds and then drew heavy curtains. The fabric completely blocked out the sunshine. “Basically Fred goes out and finds someone whose psyche responds to yours.”
“To me?” The photographs that the police had shown Joshua at the hospital flashed through his mind. “Oh, I don’t think this is a good idea. Those kids didn’t like me in the first place. They’re probably are really pissed off at me now that they’re dead.”
Winnie waved off Joshua’s objections. “It’s unlikely Fred could get any freshly dead to travel this far.”
“I have had a really boring life up to now,” Joshua said. “The only other dead people that I would know are my mom’s parents, and they died when I was really little. I think the only thing they could tell you about me is my potty training.”
Winnie lit a candle in the center of the table. “The dead have secrets that they’re longing to tell.”
Sioux Zee turned off the overhead lights. With a flare of a match in the dim room, she lit incense that smoldered next to the lone candle. “Given a chance to talk, the dead rarely say anything trivial.”
Winnie took out her phone and started a music app playing a recording of ocean waves. The sound of restless water filled the room, waves crashing on some invisible shore and rushing back into the unseen sea. With the darkness closing in and the ocean waves filling the space, Joshua felt more disconnected from the real world than ever.
“Do we have to do this?” Joshua asked. “The lights and candles and everything?”
“Yes,” Sioux Zee stated firmly.
“There’s power in light,” Winnie explained. “Life is drawn to it. Death flees it. A recently deceased spirit won’t enter the light.”
“And the incense?” Joshua wrinkled his nose against the scent. Normally he liked the smell but there was something different about this. It seemed as if he could smell darkness. Not the black of night but something darker and enclosed, like a cave.
“Certain scents lure spirits closer.” Sioux Zee pulled the weight on what looked like miniature grandfather clock. There was a bronze bell at the top engraved with runes. The pendulum started to swing, ticking loudly. With each swing, the miniature hands of the small clock moved toward twelve. “Unfortunately it attracts everything. There’s a window of opportunity, and after that, it gets too dangerous. The timer will shut everything down. It’s a failsafe, one that human negligence and curiosity can’t override.”
“And the recording of the ocean?” Joshua whispered as the women settled into silence.
“It’s Winnie’s focus,” Sioux Zee whispered. “She needs to concentrate to open up enough to let a spirit talk through her. Even housed in Winnie, the spirit probably won’t be able to hear you. I’ll ask it questions. Now, quiet, so Winnie can focus.”
Joshua didn’t want to believe in ghosts but the séance was about to happen whether he believed in them or not. The spirits were as real as everything else that had happened to him in the last thirty-some hours.
With a rush of wind that sent the candle flickering Fred returned. The room grew colder and somehow more still.
Winnie took a deep breath, bowing her head slightly so her hair fell across her face. Another deep breath, she relaxed more, and then she jerked rigid. Her breath quickened and she peered upward through the screen of purple hair.
She locked gaze with Joshua. “Shit. Gandhi was right. Karma bites you in the ass in the end.” It was Winnie’s voice but pitched deeper with a faint Southern accent. Her gaze slid to Sioux Zee and her eyes narrowed. “Do you have a cigarette? I would kill for a smoke.”
“What’s your name?”
The ghost snorted. “Shit by any other name still stinks. It doesn’t matter what my name was. I just needed a computer, a printer, and a lamination machine, and voila, I could be anyone.”
“The name you were born with if you want a cigarette.”
The ghost laughed bitterly. “It was a stupid name. My mom was a new age hippie into peace, love, tie dye, crystal healing, reincarnation and spiritual beings. She named me Wonder Woman Alvarado. Try going through middle school tagged with that. I might have had a chance if my father hadn’t been picked up for identity theft the day before I was born. He wanted to call me Jazmin after his mother. He would get out of jail and tell me that my name was Jazmin. He would get picked up again for running some con or other, and my mother would force me to answer to Wonder Woman. I tried to go by Diana Prince once and that pissed them both off. You can call me Jazmin.”
Sioux Zee leaned back, opened the black metal toolbox behind her and took out an unopened pack of cigarettes, matches, and an ashtray.
Jazmin snorted at Winnie’s purple fingernails. “I always said I wouldn’t be caught dead in nail polish. You want the mark’s eyes on your face. Not on your hands.” She opened the pack and tapped out a cigarette, laughing silently, so it nearly seemed like she was sobbing. She flipped the cigarette that she’d taken out, and started to slide it back into the pack, filter first. When she realized what she was doing, she shook her head. “My mom always did that with her smokes. Her lucky cigarette. I thought she was crazy, always talking about crystals and negative energy and magic. I thought it was all bullshit until I met Linden.”
She lit the match with practiced ease and leaned back to take a deep drag on the cigarette. “Linden. Linden. Linden. He was the real deal. He had powers that made my mother look like a girl scout with a Ouija board.”
Another deep drag and she settled back to tell her story. “I was in Fort Lauderdale when I met him, running a fortune-telling scam on the snowbirds. With my parents, it was only natural that I ended up running cons like that. My mom gave me this bottomless pit of new age craziness to bullshit with and a touch of power to back it. ‘Persuasion’ was what Linden called it. My dad taught me how to read marks and steal credit information and get out before the law came crashing down on you. I had a pretty sweet setup running. Linden came sweeping into my place like a king. Gorgeous man. He reeked of money and power. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I was shit out of luck and didn’t know it. Do you have anything to drink in this shithole?”
Sioux Zee took out a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey and a shot glass.
“Oh, my boy Jack! How I have missed you!” The ghost moved for the bottle.
Sioux Zee shifted the bottle out of Jazmin’s reach. “Tell me about Linden.”
The room went frosty cold. “Give me the bottle if you know what is good for you.”
“I’m the real deal too,” Sioux Zee said. “Just a different flavor. You mess with me, and you’ll be in a cold dark place forever. Tell me what I want to know and you can have the shot. Tell me more and you can have another.”
The ghost licked Winnie’s lips and took a drag of the cigarette. “Linden Wakefield was a scary ass warlock. Not like that chick on Bewitched. No twitching the nose or chanting spells or anything. He’d just tell you to do something and you did.”
“He was Wicker?” Joshua asked.
The ghost squinted at him and then looked to Sioux Zee. “I can see him but I can’t hear him.”
Sioux Zee poured a finger of whiskey. “Did Linden make things with wood and herbs and dead things?”
“God, yes.” The ghost tossed down the drink and then shuddered at the burn of the whisky and bad memories. “We’d grab some wino off the street and go out into the woods and make these creepy-ass things.” Jazmin pushed the glass toward Sioux Zee. “You can’t get drunk enough to get it out of your mind. My mother was always going on and on about magic like it was a good thing full of light and happiness. Real magic is the stuff of nightmares.”
She tapped the empty glass impatiently on the table. “More.”
Sioux Zee lifted the bottle but didn’t pour. “Tell me how you know this wolf.”
The ghost frowned at the woman in a silence measured out by the ticking timing device. “Give me the bottle and I’ll tell you the plan.”
“A glass. Your information is years out of date.”
“Oh no, it’s not or he wouldn’t be sitting here.” The ghost pointed at Joshua. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. “It was a long-range plan. They planned big changes using him.”
Sioux Zee poured a shot glass and pushed it toward Winnie. “I’ll be the judge. Egomaniacs are always thinking that they’re going to change the world. It’s the ones that know their weaknesses who do.”
Jazmin tossed down the shot and pushed the glass back. “Oh, Linden knew his weaknesses. That was what it was all about. Why he came to my place in Fort Lauderdale. See, Linden was like a god. A vengeful god. Someone flips him off? He’d have them walk in front of a bus. Someone cut him off in traffic? He would follow them to the next red light, get them to roll down the window, and calmly tell them to drive off a bridge. Only he was a god on a very short leash.”
“What did Linden plan to do with the wolf?” Sioux Zee tapped the whiskey bottle on the table as if reminding the ghost of the possible reward. “Get to the point. Quickly.”
Jazmin laughed bitterly. “What is time for me? I’m the one that got the short end of the stick in all this. See, it was just dumb luck that Linden even showed up at my place. I’d gotten in a fight with some meth head and he scratched my left cornea, so I needed to wear an eye patch for a while. Customers liked the flair that it gave me. ‘A pirate fortune-teller! Oh! Ah!’ After my cornea healed, I wore the eye patch as a prop. I even got a freaking parrot. I figured that if I had to skip town, the eye patch would make it harder for the police to find me. The problem was that Linden was looking for a one-eyed fortune-teller.”
“He walked into my place, sat down at my table, and put a gun in front of me. Told me to shoot myself. It was like he put a pack of cigarettes in front of me. I picked it up, put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger as naturally as lighting up. Click. Click. Click. I sat, crying my eyes out, but I couldn’t stop pulling the trigger. Click. Click. I thought it was like Russian roulette, that there was only one bullet and sooner or later I’d hit it. There wasn’t—it was empty. Linden laughed at me, took the pistol, loaded it up and handed it back. I couldn’t even see because of the tears burning in my eyes but I could feel that the gun was heavier. I knew I was going to die.”
“I started to blubber out promises. Money. Sex. Kill someone. Find anyone. At ‘find anyone’ Linden had me put the gun down and talk.”
“Whom did he want you to find?” Sioux Zee growled.
Jazmin banged the shot glass on the table. “If you want to know, pay up.”
Sioux Zee glanced at the timer. It had just two minutes left. She gritted her teeth and poured another finger of whiskey into the glass. “What was his plan? What does it have to do with this wolf here? Where is Linden now? Here in Boston?”
“Linden beat me to the afterlife by a day; torn to pieces by a pissed off papa werewolf. It freed me of his control, though, and I ran, for all the good it did me. His coven is still alive and kicking. They’re an incestuous group of people just like him. His daughter wife Belladonna and their little hell spawn Garland and all the rest. Little petty gods. Able to make most people kill themselves with a word. They wanted to rule the world. They thought it was their birthright to be kings and queens. Instead they lived like cockroaches; scuttling for darkness every time the lights were turned on. See, the angels and the wolves—they’re immune to witches. They’ll kill a witch if they find it. At one time, the angels and wolves fought one another and witches could take advantage of the chaos. But for the last thousand years, there has been a treaty…”
“This is all ancient history!” Sioux Zee snapped.
“I’m getting to it.” Jazmin tapped the shot glass again.
Sioux Zee ignored the demand. “Get to it now!”
“Linden heard about a real-deal fortune-teller, a woman with an eyepatch. That’s what he was doing at my place. His coven was combing the country to find her. They needed her to pinpoint the right wolf. My little pirate shtick brought them down on me. What kept me alive was I knew all the tricks of hiding, so I also knew all the tricks of finding.”
“You found her?” Sioux Zee snapped. “What did she tell him?”
Jazmin tapped the shot glass on the table, indicating that she wasn’t going to talk any more without whiskey. “Come on, it’s good. You want it. You know you want it.”
Sioux Zee poured the whisky. “What did she tell him?”
“Very little that made him happy. He thought they were all set to go. They had a little wolf all picked out to grab; finding the fortune-teller was supposed to be a last-minute safety check while they were waiting for the right moment. If the shit hit the fan, it would take out everything within miles, so Linden decided to take the time to be careful. The bad news was that the puppy’s bitch mother had been messing with the milkman. If the coven used the puppy, most of East Coast would go under in a major shitstorm. The good news was him.” The ghost pointed at Joshua. “The stars aligned and all that shit with him. The problem being, they might also align for all his little brothers, if they were born. The apple never falls far from the tree. Linden was out of patience. He decided to do it the messy way.”
Sioux Zee shot Joshua a sharp look. “Still ancient news.”
The ghost laughed. “Do you know what the one-eyed fortune-teller said that was all so true? Half of knowing the future is knowing the ‘why,’ not the ‘what’ in past events. Sure you’re sitting there, so confident you know what happened, but do you know why?”
The hands of the clock were nearly at twelve.
“What do they plan?” Sioux Zee cried. “How are they going to ‘use’ the wolf? What will they do next?”
“Next? They drown Boston in darkness and…”
The timer hit zero and it rang the bronze bell. Joshua felt the tone, like it had struck him in the chest and resonated all the way down to his toes.
Winnie collapsed backwards in her chair, breathing fast as if she’d just run a race. “Oh geez, why do I always get the foul-mouthed smokers?” She dug through her messenger bag to find a pack of gum.
Sioux Zee flicked on the overhead lights and blew out the candle. “Foul-mouthed smokers are the people that usually have unfinished business when they die.”
“I don’t understand,” Joshua said. “What does this have to do with Jack Cabot? I thought we were trying to find out about him.”
“Where were you when you talked to Jack?” Winnie asked.
“Inside an MRI machine at Saint Elizabeth’s.” Joshua blushed as he fumbled to explain. “I really wouldn’t call it ‘talk’ so much as had a very odd—very odd but intense ‘vision.’ They were afraid I might have some brain damage so they were running all these tests. They put me in the MRI machine. It’s very loud and surprisingly scary. I was trying to do deep mediation to stay calm. And then suddenly, he was there. Well, not really there. It was like one of those dreams where you think you’re awake until really weird shit happens. I thought I felt a wolf lying on top of me, his head on my chest, pinning me down. I could feel his fur and he was really heavy. He said ‘You are not safe here. Go to the Prince of Boston. Run!’ I broke the MRI machine; I punched a hole in it. They were very upset with me.”
He had already torn the bathroom door off its hinges, broken his bed and reduced both his IV drip thingy and the automatic blood pressure machine to small pieces in similar panic reactions. He didn’t want to stay at the hospital after his vision of Jack. The hospital wasn’t hard to convince that breaking protocol and releasing him early would be best for everyone.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone, so I left home. I could have gone to New York or Buffalo or stopped at Albany. Because of what Jack said in the vision, though, I came to Boston.”
“Your vision sounds like a projection through the pack magic,” Winnie said. “With the Boston pack reduced to two or three individuals, the ties between the wolves might be stronger than normal. Jack is a Thane and most likely Seth’s heir.”
Downstairs the front door chimed as a new customer came in.
Sioux Zee stood up. “My next appointment is here. It will be dark soon. If you’re taking him home, you should go soon.”
She started down the steps.
“Granny,” Winnie called after her. “Do you think Jack might still be alive?”
Sioux Zee paused to give her a sad look. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up. If Joshua’s part of the Boston pack, then only Jack or Seth could have changed him. According to the news, the wolf that bit him is dead.”
“Oh pooh.” Winnie slid down in her chair to disappear under the table.
Joshua froze in place, unsure what to do. Girls were unknown to him except the ones that didn’t like him; they always just wanted him to go away. Older women were his mom and sister; neither ever turned to him for comfort. He felt like he should do something. He leaned sideways to look under the table.
Winnie huddled underneath, rubbing tears from her eyes. “I always thought that I was so weird because, when push came to shove, I’d be able to do something that no one else could do. That I could help. I could matter. Now something horrible has happened to someone I know—someone who was always nice to me—and this is all I can do?”
Winnie sniffed loudly and guilt stabbed through Joshua.
This was his fault; he just wasn’t sure how. There were people dead. Lots of them. He hated that they might have died because of him yet he didn’t have a clue why. He’d always been a dorky little nobody at school. The most interesting thing about him was his judo but he hadn’t been able to raise the money to compete at the national level. He wished he could remember what happened at the barn.
Witches had sent the huntsman after him. The ghost seemed to recognize him. Fred claimed that Jack had sent him to Boston. What was so special about him that all these weird things were after him? He wanted to know.
“You meditate on the ocean sound to contact the ghosts,” Joshua said. “I was trying to meditate when Jack talked to me. Maybe I can meditate and channel his spirit.”
He’d tried lots of quick meditations since he’d left the hospital, but nothing deep and focused. If this was a video game, though, the initial vision would have been an indication that certain keystrokes could recreate the ability. Up. Up. Down. Down. Left. Right. Left. Right. B. A. Ho! Ha ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust! Channel werewolf ghosts. Achievement unlocked.
“Oh! Oh! That’s a marvelous idea.” Winnie crawled across the floor to his feet. “I’ll ride shotgun since you’ve never done it before.”
“Ooookay.” He wasn’t sure how she was going to do that.
She leaned up and took his hands. “I listen to the ocean because I imagine I’m a whale. I start out swimming just under the waves. The deep: dark below me. The surface: a shifting gleam above me. Take a deep breath.”
Joshua closed his eyes and breathed deep. Usually it wasn’t hard to meditate. He’d learned how when he started martial arts in second grade. When he closed his eyes, however, all the weirdness wanted to crowd in. Fred’s fresh grave scent. The rustle of wind through invisible leaves as the spirit guide moved around them. How the dead leaves of the hounds had crunched under his fingers when he grabbed hold of them. The cries of seagulls outside the windows. The screams of his classmates at the barn.
He struggled to relax. Breathe deep. Be calm. Find your center. Be in the now. Anything that happened before this moment, forget.
Another dozen deep breaths and he settled into the calm that meditation usually brought.
“Now slide down into the darkness,” Winnie whispered.
She gave him a slight tug and they seemed to fall downward, through the floor. He jerked and opened his eyes.
“It’s okay.” Winnie tightened her hold. Her hands were warm and soft.
He realized that he was growling softly. “It wasn’t like that at the hospital. I didn’t slide into the dark.”
“Can you remember what you did at the hospital? You lead; I’ll follow.”
He closed his eyes again. His mother clung fiercely to his hand as she sat beside his hospital bed. Her hands were surprisingly small, like she’d shrunk sometime during the nightmarish night. Her palms had been dry from the harsh soap that she used to strip engine grease off every night.
She had to be worried sick about him. He knew that she would have fought to the death to protect him. Against werewolves and witches, though, all she could have done was die.
Breathe deeply. Be calm. Exist in the now.
It took longer for him to find his center the second time.
In the dark stillness, Joshua became aware that Winnie was breathing in time with him.
At the hospital they’d wheeled him away from his mother’s anchoring presence into the stark cold room with the MRI machine. Once he was on the table, the technicians had moved out of sight, leaving him alone in the hospital gown that barely kept him decent. He suspected that since he was in the pediatrics unit, they’d given him a child-sized gown. It was purple with puppies romping on it. It was so short that he felt like he needed fig leaves to stay decent, especially when the female technician tucked pillows under his legs, canting up his knees.
He pushed that embarrassing memory away.
The MRI bed slid into the chamber. A moment later, a loud jackhammering noise started. He’d closed eyes tight and tried to flee inward. The way had been shadowed, but not completely dark. He felt like he was running through a thick forest. He didn’t know yet what he was; the wood seemed safe and welcoming.
Could he find his way back to the forest?
He focused; trying to remember. It had been so simple at the hospital. Just close his eyes and there it was. Of course that was before the black wolf showed up to freak him out.
Once he concentrated on the quality of the darkness, he realized that he’d found his way back to the shadowed forest. Night seemed to press close. He could still feel Winnie’s fingers laced with his. He could smell Fred hovering close. The two were with him in the woods.
Was Fred the reason it seemed so dark? Last time it seemed brighter, even though it had been late at night. He tightened his hold on Winnie’s hand and cautiously moved forward. What was this place? Where was it? Somehow it felt familiar, but meditating had never taken him to someplace so real. Was it because Winnie was with him? No, he’d been here at the hospital but the sense of déjà vu ran deeper than that.
Something gleamed in the distance. For a moment he thought it was a searchlight cutting through the darkness. He realized it was a massive gleaming animal racing toward them.
“Not good!” Joshua cried trying to backup. “Not good at all. Run!”
The beast hit him like a hot wave. There was a flashing impression of fur and muscle and a rumbling growl as loud as thunder. Then heat poured over him, into him, until he was drowning in the warmth.
He flailed wildly, snapping open his eyes. He lay on the wood floor of Sioux Zee’s tattoo studio. Winnie huddled in the corner furthest from him, eyes wide in the darkness. They seemed alone in the dim room but he could feel a massive foot pressing down on his chest, pinning him in place. The candle on the table flickered, throwing shadows on the far wall. And then the shadows moved independent of the flame. A massive head glanced at Winnie and then turned back to study him.
The ghost wolf standing on his chest—that was there but not there—filled the room, its back brushing the ceiling. Its panting blasted over him, warm and smelling of ancient forests. He could feel it staring angrily down at him.
“This isn’t what was at the hospital!” Joshua whispered to Winnie. “Can you make it go away?”
Winnie squeaked.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he muttered. The great head leaned close and he had the distinct impression that it was smelling him. “What is it?”
She whimpered in fear.
The ghost wolf glanced again at Winnie. A growl rumbled like thunder in the enclosed space. “Keep your hands off what is mine!”
The weight on Joshua’s chest vanished. The room brightened. The candle stopped flickering.
“Holy shit!” Joshua breathed. It seemed worth repeating. “Holy shit! What the hell was that? Is it gone? Are you okay? What was that?”
“The Wolf King!”
“The what?” Joshua said before remembering that Decker and Elise had talked about a Wolf King. “You mean the king of werewolves?”
Winnie nodded and kept nodding.
“Are you okay?”
The nodding became a violent “no.” “I think I peed myself.”