My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon (38 page)

The last sharp turn unreeled on my right as I bounded from rock to rock, twisting in midair to land splayed on an outcropping. On my left was a widening semicircle of gravel, the parking area for Lover's Leap. Instinct drove me into shadow at the far end, avoiding the bright glare of exposure. I nosed around the edges of the lot, trying to catch something of that thread of
wrong
.

Nothing. The night was still, except for frogs singing somewhere down in the valley and a raccoon bumbling along a ways away, the soft passionless talk of owls sometimes filtering through.

This was the only clue I had, and it was a bust.

Something has to be here. It
has
to be. Look harder. Look again
.

I stilled myself, watching the wide field of pebbles, stamped dirt, and moonshine. Heard the far-off thudding of an engine laboring through the turns. Someone was coming.

I decided to chance it and worked as far toward the edge as I could, nose to the ground. I slunk out into the light, tail held protectively low to keep my profile small, and stepped into the full force of the wind from the valley, the exhalation off the mountain changing to an inhale. Every sense strained, watching, waiting. Little points of light in the valley was the town, stars come to earth.

The knocking engine grew closer. It wasn't Bubba's truck, but every instinct screamed for me to get back under cover.

A stray draft touched my nose, teasing with the decaying tang of bloodsuckers. I stiffened, easing out past the rickety rotting wooden fence meant to keep idiots from taking a plunge. My front paws placed themselves delicately, testing the ground before I shifted my weight.

The draft came again, and I dropped my nose. It wafted up from somewhere below, foul death-reek, bloating flesh and old rotting blood. It was a fermenting smell, hot and juicy.

A nest.

I hesitated. The rock face wasn't quite sheer here, bulging and curving to point an accusing finger toward the town. The change melted away as I lay flat on my belly and swung my legs out over the drop, furry toes lengthening and finding crevices.

Never mind. You have to make it work
. Besides, the smell was close. Close enough to make the fur rippling up my back stand on end in hard bristles, a mane of adrenaline-laden fear.

The knocking engine eased closer, gunning, brakes squealing on the turns. Someone was going fast. I hesitated. My questing right foot stretched for a hold and found only emptiness.

What the hell
? Meaty warmth caressed my bare hairy foot, caught between wolf and man. Bones crackled as I shifted, trying to find a better shape, fingers jammed in crevices and my other leg twisted awkwardly, anchoring me to the cliff face.

The thought of a nest here, just under the surface of a high school makeout spot, turned me cold. The thought of Kat, maybe trapped in the close wet decaying heat, maybe waiting for the suckers to straggle back home and find a predawn snack waiting for them, called bitter bile up into my throat.

I moved my left foot to another hold, bracing myself, clambered down another few feet. My right foot still dangled. I was on the edge of a cave entrance, I thought, and shuddered at the idea of my leg hanging out in front of a sucker.

Another few moments of squirming while the engine roared closer and closer brought a gift—my right foot touched something solid and gritty, and I dropped onto a long low shelf in front of a pitch-black horizontal crack in the face of Lover's Leap. I peered at the shelf and the rock below, my eyes picking out hand-and-footholds. An easy
climb
for a Sunrunner—or for a bloodsucker powered by stolen life and ravenous hunger, looking for its safe hole to spend the night. A nest like this could go on, hidden, for a long time. Precious few would think to look for it here, or would believe what they found.

The nest was most likely empty, everything that called it home out looking for prey under the moon. I eased into the pitch blackness, miserably compelled. The sorcerer might only have to get Kat up here, easy if she had accomplices, and leave her tied up. A nice little sucker-snack before dawn sent them into torpor.

I couldn't smell her. The reek of suckers was too thick.

I tried to whisper Kat's name, forgetting I was half-changed and making only a little whine. The reek stung my eyes and filled my nose with stinging pain. Two more steps brought me to a stone overhang that might have brained me if I hadn't been warned by the hair-fine sensitivity of the half-changed. I had to go on hands and knees, squirming over a hillock on the rocky floor, a small part of me noting the geological irregularity that would keep daylight from streaming through the entrance.

A foxfire glimmer struck my eyes. The crack widened into a small corridor, one I duck-walked through. Every bad memory in the world was attached to that hideous wet smell. Suckers don't bring their prey back unless it's small and easily portable, but they dye the walls of their nests with pheromones and slick excretions that raise the temperature. I rounded a shallow bend in the corridor, and the floor sloped away underneath me, turning into fine sand. A low unhealthy glow came from chunks of rock daubed with something like lichen, and my hackles rose. The cave was large enough for a goodish-sized nest, and bones swam in the sea of rot-laced sand on the floor. Against the back wall was a drift of jumbled things—clothes, broken pottery shards, glass twinkling, all sorts of crap.

In the middle of the cave, sunk down three-quarters of the way, a hump of black obsidian surfaced. The light touching its face didn't reflect—it fell in, endlessly, dying in the stone's depths. A sharp tang of sorcery cut through the morass of foulness, and I had to blink several times, eyes streaming, before I realized the shadow in front of the obsidian chunk was humanoid, rocking back and forth as it whispered something lost in the susurrus of warmed air whistling through the crack.

I blinked furiously, trying to clear my vision. Kat was nowhere in here.

And Mrs. Evans, her bun neat and tidy as ever and her house-dress dragging on the filthy sand, crouched in front of me, her chanting suddenly rising from a whisper to a keening. The obsidian sparked, a bloody glow rising from its depths, and I suddenly smelled suckers, up-close and personal.

Now is not a good time to wish you'd studied sorcerers a little closer
. But Sunrunners don't tangle much with them. We're too busy with suckers most of the time.

Whatever Evans was doing couldn't mean well. And she, of all people, would know where my wife was.

I gathered myself, legs compressing under me and the change shifting me further toward wolf than man. Sand whispered underfoot, and Evans jerked away from whatever spell she was concocting, too late.

I hit her low and hard, hearing a bone snap as I jolted her across the cave, claws scraping in treacly sand. The chanting vanished, swallowed as her teeth clicked together hard enough to take a chunk of tongue out. She was an old woman, and stout, and hellishly strong. Why had I never noticed before?

I clapped a hand over her mouth and got my knee in her midriff, opening my mouth to snarl. Strands of her gray hair came loose as she heaved and struggled, and I had to change a bit to get a mouth human enough to talk with.

"
Where is my wife
?" I roared, the words splitting and echoing across the cave. "
You tell me or so help me I will kill you
!"

I still had her mouth clamped closed. How was I going to get information out of her without her mumbling more spells?

Evans shook, her eyes glazed with shock, her leg twisted at an odd angle underneath me. Sweat stood out on her brow, great pearly drops against doughy skin.

I heard, faint and faraway, the knocking of the engine that had followed me up to Lover's Leap. It cut off, suddenly, and other sounds crept into the cave's dense wet gloom.

Little soft padding feet, and a hiss. The obsidian in the middle of the cave chuckled like wet clay tearing apart. I knew that sound—it was the noise suckers made when their prey was close and unaware.

I snapped a glance over my shoulder. Against the foxfire, little pinpricks of light showed—sucker eyes, throwing back only a small point of light since their pupils are so far shrunk. They're all but blind in anything other than almost-darkness, but their heat-sensitivity makes up for it, and a sucker can hear your pulse a mile away.

I heard the faint thud of car doors slamming as they crowded in through the lips of the cave. Some of the pinpricks halted, the shapes slumping as the suckers dropped down to all fours, turning their heads to catch the sound of prey above.

Faint on the wind came a piercing cry, one I'd know anywhere.

"Mitch! Mitchell Black!
Where the hell are you
?"

Kat
? I looked down, and the sorcerer's eyes rolled back inside her head. They're tricky beasts, and once a sorcerer's spell goes far enough it completes itself, whether you interrupt them or not.

I rose unsteadily. A good half-dozen suckers swarmed into the cave, sniffing, probably uncertain of what to do. Without the sorcerer's will guiding them, they would mill around for a few seconds before their pack mentality reasserted itself.

More cries from up above. "Mitch!
Mitch goddammit
—" Choked off. Of course, if there were suckers down here there would have to be ones up there, it was one of their favorite hunting grounds. Food delivered right to their door.

No time for thought. I shifted and launched myself toward the cave entrance, for light, for love, for Kat.

A GUNSHOT CRACKED PREDAWN HUSH. HARV TOOK HIS foot from the sucker's neck as its head exploded into ash. "One thing I've always hated about this town." He paused as Kat brought the last stake down with a convulsive movement. It sank into sucker flesh like an ax biting deep into wood, and I let up on the thing's throat as it turned to ash. "It's all the damn vampires."

The sheriff holstered his gun. Dense cotton fog was filling the valley, creeping in on little cat feet. To one side, a battered Chevy Caprice painted primer-gray stood with both driver's and passenger's doors open. Gravel ground into my knees as I slumped, breathing heavily, staring at the carnage even now dissolving into dust.

"Are you all right?" Kat dropped her stake and cupped my face in her hands, examining me. "Mitch? Talk to me. Are you okay?"

I dunno, sweetpea. Am I
? I found my voice, and realized with relief that I was in human form. When had I changed back? I couldn't tell. I was bone-weary, little scrapes all over me singing with pain as the grit worked its way ever-finer against my skin, sandpaper rasping. "What happened?" I coughed hoarsely, hawking a wad of something dry, spitting toward the edge. False dawn was coming up, streaks of gray in the east.

Kat let go of me and sat back on her heels, sparing a glance at the drifts of dust settling in the stillness. "You were asleep, so I snuck outside to take another look at the garden. Something about that attack didn't seem quite right to me until I found this." She dug in her jeans pocket and dragged out a small leather pouch, humming as it dangled from its strap. Another fetish, probably the one Evans had used to get the suckers to jump Kat in the garden. "I heard a car and hid in the kudzu. Some man in a truck drove up, went into the house, he and Evans came out carrying something that looked an awful lot like a body. I snuck back into the house to get you, but you were gone. Then Evans came back up and sicced her
sanguinant
on me." A small shrug. "They were confused by the fetish, so after the fight I popped out the window and ran like hell. The truck had disappeared, you were gone, and I had a very bad feeling about it. So I hiked to that
other
bed-and-breakfast—the one you didn't like, remember? I pounded on the door until they opened up and had them call 911. Turns out Harvey here is an Argentum. Isn't that funny?"

"Hilarious." I struggled to process this. Kat was alive, sitting right in front of me, and covered in dirt, blood, mud, guck, and the dried remnants of mugwort paste. She had a scrape on her forehead, her cheek was still glaring purple, and one of her hands was bound with a dirty gauze bandage. Her T-shirt was torn, but she'd tied it together, the knot underneath her breasts, her nipples clearly visible against the thin material.

Harv's wide Sam Browne belt creaked as he lowered himself stiffly to one knee. He still moved pretty well, for an old fat man. "God have mercy on these poor bastuds. I been trying to figure out what it is with Lover's Leap for years. Kids vanish all the time, and somehow this place always seems connected. But these suckers is tricky—I could only kill 'em by one or two. I've known Widder Evans for years, never thought she was the sorceress type."

"She must have learned it from someone," Kat pointed out. "Where were you, Mitch?"

"There's a cave." I swallowed dryly, my throat clicking. "Under the edge there. Something's in it. Evans is too, and some of her suckers. I think I killed her."

A few moments of absolute silence ruled Lover's Leap. Gray light strengthened in the east, and the fog tightened its grip on Cotton Crossing's points of light.

"Well, goddammit." Harv sounded disgusted. "I woulda liked to question her, son. A cave, you say?"

I wasn't thinking of arresting her, you Southern-fried ape
. "Right under the edge." My hands went out, curled around Kat's shoulders. She was alive and breathing, and her blue eyes sparkled as they met mine. She looked happy enough to bust. "I'd take a few people in there with you, though. Looks like an active nest, and there's a chunk of what looks like obsidian. Evans was using it for something."