CHAPTER SEVEN
Malachi and I sat stunned by the news. Ling Zhu Han was dead? I rested the tintype on the table. I studied her visage. Her youthful, serious face framed by braids. The moody, judgmental eyes. She was an attractive young woman, and I wondered how pretty she would look with a smile. What a shame she was dead.
“Are you sure it’s the same woman?” I asked.
Hermosa nodded.
“Did you know Ling was Wu Fei’s daughter?”
“At the time, no.”
“Time?” Malachi pressed. “What time? When was this?”
I didn’t let her answer, “And you’re sure she’s dead?”
Another nod. Her eyes dimmed with an emotion I’d never before read in them: guilt. “I blame myself for what happened to her.”
“How so?”
“Last month I met Ling in San Diego. She and several other Chinese women had organized a venture with the Continental Sisters of Benevolent Light. It’s a charity to help girls and young women in unfortunate circumstances.” Hermosa mimed having a large belly.
“Ling was pregnant?” I returned the tintype to my coat pocket.
“You mean with child?” Hermosa raised an eyebrow. “No.”
Even though a murdered werewolf lay slumped beside Hermosa, I realized that in this world and time, certain words crossed the line of propriety. Apparently, “pregnant” was one of them.
Hermosa continued, “Ling was helping prostitutes from the Orient. The charity provided room and board, education, medical attention, correspondence with adoption agencies. The Sisters had approached me to provide protection services.”
“Protection services?” Malachi asked. “Against diseases? Or other unfortunate circumstances?” He patted his belly. “Like a little bastard.”
“Of course not,” she replied, tersely. “This kind of protection.” She reached into the pleats of her skirt, pulled out the butt end of a revolver, and slid the weapon back into its pocket. “The group was heading to El Paso del Norte to visit the border brothels. They would be traveling by train through rough territory in southern Aztlan. I was hired as a guard with the understanding I’d get three dollars a day plus expenses. Once on the way, the head patroness, Mrs. Abigail Widmark, reneged on the deal, saying that in the true spirit of benevolent assistance, I should’ve offered to serve for free. Meanwhile, Mrs. Widmark was riding first class with a personal maid and a hairdresser, all paid by the charity, I must add. I jumped the train at Yuma and returned to California … Monterey. Two weeks ago I read in a broadsheet that Ling had been murdered.” Hermosa fell silent, brooding.
I let her have a minute of introspection before asking, “Murdered? How? When?”
“By the time I got the news she’d already been dead for four weeks. She died in Tucson after their train had been attacked and robbed. Ling was one of two women killed. The other was Chen Li.”
“Anything special about her?”
“Chen Li? Not that I could find. She was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What happened to the rest of the party?” I asked. “Mrs. Wid—?”
“Hold on,” Malachi interrupted. He rubbed his chin and stared blankly in the direction of Cicatriz as if his corpse was a party in our conversation. “Wu Fei’s daughter is murdered and weeks later he hires us to find her killers? This puzzle is not fitting together.”
“Actually,” I amended, “Wu Fei never said that we had to find her killers. When he told me about Ling, he gave no indication that she was dead. If fact, he acted like he had no idea what happened to her.”
“How could the Dragon not know that his daughter had been murdered?” Hermosa asked. “Seems as soon as he heard the news, he would’ve sent an army of thugs south to rip out tongues until someone ratted on the killers.”
“Or,” Malachi’s mustache twitched as he sneered, “Wu Fei is after something else, and Ling’s death is only an excuse to secure our services.”
To do what? And why? Now it was my turn to keep silent and brood.
Malachi’s arm sallied across the table and returned with a gold coin. He examined the fifty-dollar Eagle and muttered, “The shit we do for some shiny metal.”
“What you don’t want,” Hermosa said, “you can give to me.”
“First try taking it from my wife,” Malachi replied. “You’ll find more mercy stealing from Wu Fei.”
“Where is Ling buried?” I asked.
“I’m guessing Tucson,” Hermosa answered.
“Wu Fei only hired me to find her and bring her back,” I noted. “He mentioned nothing about her being alive or dead. We find her body, dig it up, and bring it to him. She’s wearing a silver and turquoise ring that should help identify her. With that, it’s case closed, and we get the rest of our money.”
Malachi dropped the coin back on the pile where it landed with a heavy ping. “That easy?”
My jaw clenched. A sarcastic reply died in my throat, strangled by an abrupt hunger that climbed from my belly and clawed up my neck. My vision turned opaque and crimson, as if blood had flooded into my eyes.
Blood.
Blinded behind this curtain of red, my kundalini noir writhed, torn between panic and the call to feed. What was happening? My fangs yearned to extend and puncture a neck. I closed my fists to hide my talons. My head swam, dizzy with the lust for warm human nectar. I fought to keep control, something that wasn’t a problem in the other world. But here, my nerves jittered and ached for blood like a junkie starving for a fix.
My brow burned feverishly hot. The inside of my nose tingled with the smell of the rich, delicious blood of my companions. The ravenous hunger spread through me, swelling into my flesh, like a rabid Felix was fitting himself into my skin. This could be doom for Malachi and Hermosa.
Horrified, I wrestled against this sensation. My mind squared off against my kundalini noir, like a tamer whipping a lion, forcing it to yield, to back away. The hunger retreated down my throat, down my chest until it lay simmering in my belly. The red film ebbed from my eyes, and the details within the snug emerged back in focus.
Still confused yet relieved, and thirsty, I let my gaze rove across the table in a vain search for a bottle. A belt of whiskey would help soothe my nerves.
Paranoid that my companions had witnessed the beginning of my metamorphosis into a bloodsucking monster, I gave them both a sheepish look while I sought words for an explanation.
Then it was as if the moment had snapped closed.
A metallic pinging faded in my ears. Malachi was just drawing his hand back from the pile of coins. Hermosa was appraising me, and her expression betrayed no surprise or terror.
The rush of hunger and my reaction to contain it had passed faster than the blink of an eye. But my thoughts remained off-kilter and a lingering panic still plucked at my nerves.
What had caused this onset of vampiric blood lust? A need for sustenance? When had I last fed? In the old world, yesterday. No telling when in this world. And where would I feed? From who? As far as I could tell, Eunice at the bordello was not a chalice. Neither were Malachi nor Hermosa. Did chalices exist here? Or did I have to slip away and hunt for necks?
Malachi reached inside his coat and fished out a leather cigar case. He opened it and offered one to me. Did I smoke? If my friend so casually offered a stogie, then I guess I did. I accepted one. He proffered another to Hermosa, which she took.
Malachi put his case away and struck a lucifer. Its flare brightened the room and the odor of burning sulfur stung my eyes. I stuck the cigar into my mouth and leaned toward the lit match cupped in his hand.
“You might want to bite off the end first,” he suggested.
Of course. I chomped the end of the stogie and followed Malachi’s example by spitting my nub on the floor. Hermosa used a small penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle to trim her cigar.
Seconds later, we were puffing like chimneys. Ironically, the aromatic tobacco smoke cleared my head and chased away the vestiges of my vampiric doppelganger. For now, I felt safe. My thoughts swung back to Ling.
“What next?” Hermosa tapped ash on the floor.
“Tucson,” Malachi replied.
I motioned to the gold coins. “We shouldn’t travel with all this money. It’s better that we convert these Eagles and Sols into smaller change and put the rest in a safe.”
“What safe?” Hermosa asked, the gears and cams in her head already working the angles.
“Banks don’t open until ten tomorrow morning.” Malachi plumed smoke at Cicatriz. “In the meantime, we need to get rid of him.”
“I’ll handle it.” Hermosa withdrew her cigar and flicked her fingers against its ember. The cigar extinguished, she slipped it into a pocket of her jacket.
“You going somewhere?” Malachi asked.
“I am.” She reached into Cicatriz’s shirt and jerked free his Sioux medicine bag.
“What do you need that for?” I asked.
She held it to the light, and its beaded surface glittered like the scales of a snake. “It’s pretty. And now it’s mine.” She stood and reached for the doorknob. “Give me a half hour. When you hear my signal, drag his carcass out the front door.”
“What signal?” I asked. “What are you planning?”
She collected the Merwin Hulbert she’d taken from Cicatriz and two of the gold coins. “Use your imagination. Just be ready.” She palmed the revolver and edged between the table and the door to let herself out. For the brief moment the door was open, laughter and piano music wafted from the bar into the snug.
As I gathered the remaining coins in the satchel, Malachi watched Cicatriz. He asked, “We’re supposed to drag him out? Like no one would notice?”
“Why not leave him here?”
“Can’t do that,” Malachi replied. “St. Charles isn’t so wide open that we can leave a dead body behind and not expect to arouse suspicions.”
I didn’t relish touching this deceased man cur. “How about we walk him out, carried between us like a drunk?”
“That might work, depending on how inebriated the rest of the clientele is. Let’s get him ready.” Malachi climbed on the table, stooping to avoid banging his head against the overhead lamp. I scooted around the table and grabbed the dead werewolf’s arm.
He was as limp as a dressed turkey. I could’ve easily handled him but for the sake of concealing my supernatural powers, I helped Malachi lift and slide the corpse until we had it sitting on the edge of the table, propped between us. I adjusted his hat.
Our tobacco smoke thickened into a dense fog. Malachi coughed. He ground out his cigar on the table. “Getting hard to breathe.”
Since I didn’t have to breathe, I hadn’t noticed. But to share my friend’s concern, I knocked the ember off my stogie and pinched the end to make sure it was out. I tucked the cigar butt into a vest pocket.
“I gotta ask you something,” he said.
“Something personal?”
“Damn right, it’s personal. Otherwise I would’ve come right out with it.”
I couldn’t imagine what Malachi intended to ask and considered this an opportunity to learn more about myself in this world. “I guess if I say no, you’re going to ask anyway.”
“Pretty much.”
We sat perched on the table and stared at the door, waiting for Hermosa to return.
“Then ask, already.”
More waiting.
“You gonna ask, or are we going to drop dead from old age?”
“Okay.” Malachi leaned forward to peer around Cicatriz’s slumped form. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Plenty, but nothing I wanted to share.
“You’re acting like you fell out of the sky and landed on your head.”
What had he picked up on? I looked at my hands as if I was giving off clues that were invisible to me.
“See what I mean,” he explained. “Normally, you’re sharp as a barber’s razor. Now you’re kinda dull. You turning into a hophead? A grifo?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
I had to give him something. “I dunno. When I woke up earlier in Mattie’s I was feeling somewhat off.”
“You pick up the clap?”
“God, no.”
“What girl did you see?” Malachi was still leaning forward and he was squinting out one eye.
“Eunice. Why?”
His face relaxed and he sat up straight. He coughed and I thought he was choking. The coughs erupted into laughter. “Every time she milks a pecker it rings a man’s brain like a bell.”
“You speaking from experience? Does Lupe know?”
“Me cheat? Lupe would castrate me like a shoat,” Malachi replied with mock horror. “It’s only what I heard.”
If Eunice rang my bell, it was nothing compared to the reverberations Hermosa sent through me. She and I had a history that was more mixed up than her bloodline. She knew I had been at Mattie’s cathouse, and yet I hadn’t detected a whiff of jealousy. Were the tables turned, would I be as cool?
Minutes passed. Malachi checked his watch. More minutes passed. I checked mine.
“You notice this guy is starting to smell like a dead dog,” Malachi commented.
Without his pouch of protective magic, Cicatriz’s lycanthrope nature was seeping out his pores. Would his corpse shape shift? I said nothing. I waited and worried about myself. What had awakened my frightening wild and unrecognizable vampiric persona? Were my friends in danger? Could I keep the evil Felix dormant?
“I figured you would’ve picked up on that,” Malachi said.
“On what?”
“What else?” He gestured toward Cicatriz. “His stink.”
I regarded the corpse. All I sniffed was the lingering cigar smoke.
“Figured you of all people would’ve picked up his scent and wouldn’t have let him get the drop on you.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked, wary about Malachi’s interrogation. As in Cicatriz was a werewolf and I was a vampire?
Malachi let my question sit, and I was left stewing over whether or not he knew anything about the supernatural world. The quiet in the room amplified the muffled chatter and music sifting through the walls.
He asked, “You think Hermosa double-crossed us?”
I was glad he’d changed subjects. “Too early in the game for that,” I said. “Besides, she’s rattled by Ling’s death. I think she’s taking it personally. Whatever snipe hunt Wu Fei has planned for us, Hermosa’s going to see it through to the end.”
“Did she skip out on us?”
I patted the satchel. “Not without her share of the gold.”
“Then where the hell is she?”
“Cooking up a scheme.”
“Like what?”
A string of rapid-fire gunshots tore from outside. Men and women shouted in panic. More gunshots. These were closer, as if returning fire. Boots stomped the floor. Tables crashed. Glass shattered.
“Goddamn,” Malachi exclaimed. “It’s pandemonium out there.”
“No,” I corrected. “It’s Hermosa. Let’s go.”