Sheep's Clothing (10 page)

I smashed the holy water vial against Russeau’s face with all my might. Broken glass and water splashed everywhere, but mainly across Russeau’s face. He recoiled with a bestial hiss of pain, releasing me and clutching at his face. Between his fingers I saw raw, half-melted stringers of flesh dangling from the bones of his skull. I took my chance and staggered away, rubbing my bruised throat and coughing painfully.

Russeau fixed me with an expression of pure, hellish hate, but he did not advance on me again. I decided not to offer him any further opportunities, and hastily took my leave of his room, hurrying back to where I had left Gib and May.

Gib looked up as I entered, and must have seen the expression on my face.

“Good God, man!” he exclaimed. “What happened? Ya’re shaking like a leaf.”

“I need a drink,” I croaked. “And I need to talk to you. Right now.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “This is a bit early for ya to start drinking, though.”

“I have my reasons,” I replied. “What’s the strongest stuff you have?”

“Whiskey,” he said. “Right this way.”

I checked May one more time before I followed him. Her color was returning and her pulse was stronger, but I couldn’t be sure how long that would last if Russeau decided to go after her again.

“Lock the door in her room,” I said, and then remembered something Wolf had said earlier. “And scatter a handful of something in front of the door. Anything small, like grain or seeds.”

He gave me an odd look, but nodded. “We’ve got rice. Will that do?”

I nodded, though I felt like I was making this up as I went. He locked the door to May’s room and scattered some rice in front of it. It seemed like a poor barrier, but it would have to do.

I took a deep breath. “Now,” I said. “The whiskey?”

***

              He poured me a glass of whiskey—the genuine article rather than rotgut—and left the bottle on the table. I drained the glass in several long swallows and immediately refilled it.

             
“I know what happened to Miss May,” I told him.

             
He sat across from me, leaning forward. “Well, out with it, then.”

             
I took a deep breath and a slower sip of my drink. “I didn’t quite believe it myself until last night, but I have reason to believe that Russeau and his lady companions are all vampires.”

             
He digested this at length. I fully expected him to dismiss the idea as rubbish, or call me crazy or a liar—though I cannot say which would have been worse—but finally he nodded.

             
“Okay,” he said slowly. “What’s a vampire?”

             
I nearly dropped my glass. A second later, though, I realized that what little I knew of vampires came from the European legends and what Wolf had told me about the children of Jumlin. I couldn’t be sure if the two were the same creature—if both existed—but Gib needed to know as much as I did.

             
I turned the whiskey glass slowly between my hands as I assembled my thoughts. “It’s… an evil spirit,” I said. “It inhabits a corpse and feeds on the living, by biting people and drinking their blood. They’re strong, fast, and vicious.”

             
Gib looked outraged. “And three of these
things
have been staying at the Lucky Lady?”

             
“It’s… I don’t think it was your fault, or Miss May’s. They can charm people to hide their nature. Wolf—that Indian who saved my life, you recall—gave me a trinket to protect me from them.”

             
Gib swore. “So… how many people have they got their hooks in?”

             
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I need your help with this, Gib.”

             
“Sure, Doc—anything to nail this creep to the wall.”

             
I nibbled my lip, but I was feeling less jangled than I was before. The whiskey was really quite good for that, even if it hurt my bruised throat.

             
“First, I need you to see if you can block him in his room. Scatter grains and the like outside his door and under his window.”

             
“That’ll raise eyebrows, me wasting my stock like that.”

             
“I know. Just… do it. It’s better than nothing.”

             
He sighed. “All right. What else?”

             
“Keep a crucifix or a rosary near Miss May. It’ll protect her even if the grain doesn’t work.”

             
“I got a wooden crucifix around here somewhere,” Gib said.

             
I nodded. “He’s stronger at night, so whatever you do, don’t try to confront him then.”

             
“Dammit, Doc,” Gib snarled, pounding his fist on the table hard enough to make the whiskey bottle jump. “We can’t just sit around and let him do whatever he wants. We need to organize a posse and—”

             
“No!” I blurted. “I don’t think a posse will do much but annoy him. Hanging won’t do anything to a dead man, Gib.”

             
Gib frowned.

             
“I mean it, Gib,” I insisted. “I don’t want you getting hurt over this. You need to protect Miss May, remember?”

             
He glanced away, but nodded.

             
“Now, this last part is very important,” I said. “I need to find out how many people have been bitten. They’ll have a mark on them somewhere, like four parallel scratches—you saw the mark on Miss May, right?”

             
He nodded.

“So spread the word—anyone who has a mark like that on them, no matter where they thought it came from, you send them to me, or you tell me about them. And tell them about the grain. Vampires have a compulsion to count things, so anything small that they have a lot of, nails or grain or beans or what have you, have them scatter it in front of windows and doors. Do you understand?”

              “I do. Is there any way to kill these things?”

             
I rubbed my forehead with the heels of my hands, not wanting to remember the terror of the previous night. I forced myself to focus on it, though. I took a deep, shaking breath and followed it with another belt of whiskey.

             
“Impalement through the heart will paralyze them,” I said. “Cutting their head off will kill them. I don’t know any other methods. Wolf’s the expert at this, not me.”

             
“Ya okay, Doc?” Gib asked quietly, grasping my forearm.

             
I shook my head. “Just scared as Hell,” I confessed. “One of them—Rosette, the red-haired woman—damn near killed me last night.” I rubbed the side of my neck where her fangs had torn my flesh, and shuddered. “I couldn’t fight her off—she was too strong. Wolf had to kill her.”

             
“Ain’t gonna call ya a coward over that, Doc,” Gib assured me. “If I came that close to getting my throat ripped out I’d probably have to change my pants, too.”

             
I wheezed out a weak laugh. “Thanks, Gib.”

             
“No problem. Now ya go on back home. I’ll watch over May, and I’ll let ya know what I find out by this evening, all right?”

             
I nodded, finished my glass of whiskey, and left, feeling better about this whole situation than I had in the past few days.

***

              “What the hell happened to ya?” Wolf demanded when I got back home.

             
“I had a bit of a run-in with Russeau,” I said. “He knows about Rosette, and Miss May got hurt bad as a result.”

             
Wolf swore, turning away with his hands on his hips. “What else?” he said.

             
“He also told me to stay out of his way, or it’d happen again.” I licked my lips anxiously. “He said he’d go after Miss Sarah. I… I smashed some holy water in his face.”

             
His expression lost some of its edge and actually took on an air of admiration. “In that case, I guess we need to take care of this as soon as possible. Did ya find out anything positive?”

             
“I think so,” I said. “There was a pine box in his room that he said had Kimimela in it.”

             
Wolf stiffened, and his head turned slowly towards me. “Did… ya see her?” he ventured, his voice shaking a bit.

             
I shook my head. “No. I didn’t get a chance to look inside—but they have four other boxes scattered around town that we need to take care of. We took care of two last night. Then there’s the one in the root cellar that we still need to consecrate, and the one I saw in Russeau’s room. We need to find out from DuPont where the last two are.”

             
Wolf set his jaw and cracked his knuckles. “In that case,” he said, “I think I’ll go have another conversation with the man.”

             
It seemed to me that the conversation he intended to have with DuPont would involve less talk than liberal application of Wolf’s fists. While nobody in Salvation would fault me for getting a bit of enjoyment out of the beating of a man who might have knifed me, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea.

             
“Wolf,” I warned him, but he waved me off.

             
“Don’t ya worry about it, Doc.” He dismissed my concerns with a wave of his hand. “I won’t break nothing.”

             
“See that you don’t,” I said.

After he’d gone, I thought about Russeau’s implied threat regarding Sarah, and my stomach turned over. I had to find some way to protect her, even while Wolf and I were weeding out the last of the lairs. Rosette had come close to killing me—how much worse would Russeau be, much less Kimimela?

I decided I needed additional guidance in this matter, and I girded my loins for what I was certain would be a very awkward trip back to the church.

***

              A scattering of townsfolk already occupied the pews, and it was clear enough why. I heard a dozen shaking voices murmuring a dozen prayers, all on a common theme:
Protect us from evil. Deliver us from this unknown terror. Banish the shadows back into the night
. Most of them sat towards the front of the church.

I slid into a pew at the very back and sat, my head bowed as I tried to gather my whirling thoughts. A few minutes later, Pastor Wood slid in next to me. I glanced over at him and murmured a greeting.

“Ya look troubled,” he said quietly. The expression on his face suggested that he knew that this was no average crisis of faith.

“I’m scared, Pastor,” I confessed. “I didn’t think these things were real, and now I’ve gone and tangled with two of them in the last twelve hours.” I reached up and scratched at the side of my neck, remembering in horrible detail how close Rosette had come to having my throat out.

Wood nodded with the sympathy common to all clergymen. “Go on,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “The holy water works, but—” I shook my head. “We still have more lairs to find. And we’ve only destroyed one of the vampires. There are still two more. One of them nearly killed me. If we encounter both at once—” I broke off, shuddering.

Wood remained silent, listening patiently as I rambled.

“And… the worst part of it,” I said, my throat growing tight, “The worst part is that he’s said if I don’t back off from this he’ll hurt Miss Sarah. I… I can’t do that.” Tears stung my eyes. “I can’t just... abandon Salvation to the likes of him. I’m supposed to help people out here. It’s my job to keep people alive if I can manage it.”

“A worthy cause,” Pastor Wood assured me.

“But I also want to keep Miss Sarah out of danger. I want to keep his claws out of her.”

“Have ya explained the danger to her?”

I shrank a bit in shame. “Not yet,” I confessed. "I've just started to come to terms with it myself, and… I don’t know how I can protect her. Wolf gave me this.” I pulled the agate from under my shirt and showed it to him. “It keeps them from hexing me, at least. Maybe I could give it to—”

Wood put his hand on my wrist. “Don’t even think it,” he said sternly. “I admire the sentiment, but there’s no need for ya to go running into the dragon’s jaws without any armor on.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rosary, its black beads worn by countless years of prayers. “Here. Give this to her.”

“Pastor, I couldn’t—” I protested, but he closed my fingers around the relic.

“Don’t talk that way,” he said. “Ya need this more than I do right now.”

I peered down at the rosary I now cradled in my hand. It seemed like absurdly fragile protection to offer to the woman I loved, but I decided that every little bit helped.