White Fangs (14 page)

"It'll be in its human form," she had said. "To get into Dawson unseen, it'll have to be. Fast, quiet, it'll move like a shadow. Bullets might slow it, but more likely they'll only piss it off. And it'll smell danger. Simpler we go, further we are from it, more likely it'll be we catch it."

"So what are you suggesting?" Jack had asked.

Callie had told them.

Now they waited, as the sun skimmed the horizon across the river and darkness settled itself over this dark land once again. Jack, Sabine, and Louis were in an abandoned house thirty feet from the two-story store. Vukovich, the Reverend, and Ghost were hiding in a wood shed behind the house, their view of the external staircase leading up to the sick woman's home just as clear. In both hiding places, the end of a strong rope was knotted and looped, ready to be grabbed and pulled when the moment was right.

Callie was out on her own, and she had told no one where she would be. She had simply slipped away from the others like a shadow herself.

They waited silently, and none of them passed comment as night descended across Dawson. Taverns remained open, and the sounds of merriment were even more desperate and frantic than they had been during the day. It seemed that those who chose to defy the mortal danger visited upon them — and there was no point trying to remain silent and unseen from these beasts — were living every moment as if it were their last. Jack had a healthy appreciation for their intentions, because he had always believed that the purpose of life was to live, not simply to exist. But drinking, singing, and gambling were not ways to live your last. What he and the others were doing
was
the way. Striving to go forward, to survive; not simply to give in and go out with a bang.

There were far fewer people on the streets. They walked in small groups, and faint starlight glimmered from gun metal on most of them.

There was a half moon. That was good. Jack knew that the wolves could change at will, but anywhere near a full moon would make them much more skittish.

"Did you hear that?" Louis asked.

"What?" Jack held his breath, and sensed Sabine doing the same beside him. She had been probing out toward the river, in case an attack came from there, but she reported that the waters flowed dark, cold, and empty.

"Gunshot," Louis said. "Very distant."

They fell quiet and listened again, and from way out beyond the edge of town came a more sustained volley of gunfire.

"It's begun," Jack said. He thought of the men and women up in those clumsily constructed watchtowers, nursing guns that would only prick the vampire polar bears and annoy them even more. Dawson survived, and that was testament to their resilience, and perhaps effectiveness. But there was also Truman's horrible death, and the shadow of a woman that was all that remained of his wife.

Callie had suggested that she would not be the only vampire amongst them.

"I can't tell how many there are," Sabine said.

"Only one that concerns us this night," Jack said. They watched the store, looking for shadows where there should be none and movement that betrayed their target.
What if they don't leave shadows?
Jack wondered.
Nature doesn't rule them, so perhaps they in turn can bend it?
He closed his eyes and tried to ride the currents of nature in his own way, sensing out into the darkness to connect with any creatures out there. But it seemed that at night, even the wildlife of Dawson sought sanctuary in deep holes or pits.

Louis sniffed. Froze. Sniffed again, a longer, deeper inhalation.

"What?" Sabine whispered.

"Something dead," Louis breathed. "Yet . . .
undead."

They watched the shape emerge from a darkness none of them had noticed before. It drifted, its movement sickeningly graceful. Jack caught a hint of long flowing hair, bulky shoulders, long limbs that on a normal person might have meant a fast runner or an athlete.

"A woman," Sabine said.

"A woman monster," Jack corrected her. "It changes nothing. Louis?"

"Nothing is changed," Louis agreed.

"Well, then," Jack said, taking up the end of the rope that snaked out of the door. They had taken care to hide it carefully where it crossed the muddy road. "Hold on with me. And now it's all down to Callie."

'Ware my signal
, Callie had said. So the three of them sat there holding the rope, and Jack knew that in the woodshed Ghost, the Reverend, and Vukovich would be doing the same with theirs. Whatever signal Callie had planned would start a fight that could well end with one or all of them dead.

The Tlingit vampire woman reached the base of the staircase and paused.

No!
Jack thought. He closed his mind and glanced away, afraid that she could hear his thoughts, sense the nervous tension in the air. To his relief she started climbing toward the landing and door at the top, and the hot red meal promised her within.

The door opened. The vampire paused halfway up the staircase.

Callie stepped out onto the landing, a shotgun nursed in her hands.

The vampire crouched and hissed, such an animal sound, and Callie gave her both barrels in the face.

"Pull!" Jack shouted. He, Sabine and Louis tugged at the rope and it sprung up from the street, flicking mud into the night as it tensed around one of the staircase's supporting legs. The other rope did the same as the others pulled, and two legs gave way almost instantaneously. Where they had sawn through the supports earlier, the wood cracked and splintered, parting to spill the vampire down into the mud.

Callie leapt from the landing into the mess of broken wood, landing astride the thrashing vampire's chest.

"It'll tear her to pieces!" Louis shouted. Jack thought so too, and he was watching for the woman changing shape, becoming one of the beasts they had fought the night before. But Callie was quick, and knew what she was doing. Pistol already in her hand when she jumped, she fired three times down at the struggling shape.

The vampire's hissing changed to a high-pitched shriek of pain.

"To me!" Callie shouted.

"Come on!" Jack said. They dashed from the house and across the street, carrying wound ropes for binding the fallen thing.

The vampire was waving her arms and legs amidst the splintered remains of the staircase, knocking wood aside, her face a mess of raw flesh and buckshot, and steam seemed to be rising from both hands.

"You've killed it?" Louis asked, looking at its hands.

"Silver?" Jack asked.

"Shot off some fingers," Callie said. "Silver's not left inside, so it'll be a slow enough death for us to get what we want."

The vampire shrieked and hissed, her eyes rolling up in the ruins of her face.

Jack's heart beat fast as he and the others helped bind the beast, a mixture of shock and excitement giving him a clarity he had only experienced a few times before — fighting the Wendigo, fleeing Lesya, tackling a werewolf. Ghost was grinning as they went about their task, and Jack glanced at the others quickly, pleased to see that the wolves were maintaining their human forms. Vukovich's hands looked larger . . . his shoulders perhaps even broader . . . but he looked at Jack and nodded, and Jack gave him a smile.

Together they had captured the monster. Now it was time for the next part of their plan.

"Will it talk?" the Reverend said, standing back and looking down at the pained thing.

"Oh, it'll talk," Callie said. Her certainty was chilling.

"And the woman?" Jack said, nodding up at the doorway now leading onto a barely supported landing.

"Ill. Bound. She's not our concern right now." Callie grabbed the end of a rope and started pulling. "So you gonna help me?"

Jack glanced at the second floor windows, then everyone grasped a rope and pulled. Together they dragged the screaming vampire across Dawson's fear-filled streets to the jail.

"So it's . . . what? Burnin' to death?" Sheriff Killebrew stood back from the bars, hands on hips to prevent himself from shaking, and his huge mustache twitched slightly as he chewed over what had come into his world.

"Shot some fingers off with silver bullets," Callie said. "I was careful not to leave any inside it. If I had, then yeah, it'd burn. And good riddance."

"Poison," Kikono said. He was still in the neighboring cell, pressed back as far as he could into the corner, but standing upright and remaining dignified in the face of this horror. Jack had a huge respect for the old Tlingit, and wanted to ask the sheriff to release him. Right now though, they had other concerns.

The bound vampire had worked herself into a sitting position against the wooden cot. Smoke rose from both hands, filling the gaol with an acrid stench that turned Jack's stomach. She shook, but her cries of pain had ceased, and between strands of long, hanging hair Jack could see a grotesque smile on the Indian woman's face. Her lips quivered. Her teeth were deformed, enlarged, and had slashed her lips to ribbons. No blood seemed to flow, and the damage wrought by the shotgun blast seemed already to have started healing.

The ropes were tied tight, though, and Callie had slipped a noose around her neck that contained a thin silver chain. She said it would prevent the vampire from changing into anything else — like a polar bear. Dragging her across town, they had all hoped that were true.

"So it's dyin'," Callie said. "Yeah, good. But we got things to ask it first. An' you're gonna help us."

"Me?" Kikono asked. Then he nodded, answering his own question. "Me. Of course. She is . . . old." He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "One of the old ones first touched by the blood spirits. If she still bore any humanity, perhaps she and I would be related. But she has long since ceased being human."

"Human, animal, damned vegetable, can you speak to it?" Callie asked.

Kikono muttered something under his breath and the vampire's head twitched sideways. She sneered, and spoke. Jack tried not to back away at the sound of her voice, but the Sheriff gasped and stood a shuffling step back against his desk.
She sounds like nothing that should be
, Jack thought. It was as if her voice was made of sharp shadows.

Kikono nodded once, slowly. Then he spoke some more in his own language, firmer and harsher, drawing shapes in the air before him with both hands.

The vampire hissed a single word, then spat. Smoke rose from her hands and curled around her head, like ghost snakes.

"She is
very
old," Kikono said. "Her language is basic, but has roots in my own. I understand. And she tells you to . . ."

"To what?" Jack asked.

Kikono glanced at Sabine. "I hesitate to translate with the lady present."

"We can trade insults all night," Callie said. "Ask the thing where its camp is? How far do they travel? How many of them are there?"

"I am not sure it will be willing to listen to —" Kikono said, but Callie silenced him, and made everyone's blood run cold, when she pulled her gun and shot the vampire through the thigh. The vampire shrieked as a haze of flesh and smoke splashed across the dusty cell floor before her. She leaned back against the cot, writhing as the touch of silver coursed through her body.

"Callie," Jack said. He took no comfort from seeing this monster tortured, felt no pleasure at her pain. The others remained silent, the wolves and Ghost guarding the two doors, Sabine close to Jack's side.

"Ask it," Callie said.

Kikono asked. The vampire seemed not to hear, hissing in pain. Then she spoke, and Jack watched Kikono's reaction, the proud Tlingit listening to words spoken by a travesty of what an ancestor had become.

"It begs to be killed quickly," Kikono said.

"An' I'll do that if it tells what we want to know," Callie said, aiming her revolver again.

Kikono spoke once more, his voice level and surprisingly calm, the vampire shivering, her head down and hair hanging across her damaged face. She held one hand over the wound in her thigh, and smoke rose from them both.

The vampire looked up, hair swinging away from her face to expose the shotgun wounds. They had already healed over, raw flesh now dry and covered with knotted, ridged skin. Her eyes were wide — pain or surprise, Jack did not know. She started talking. Her voice was as dreadful as before, a song of decay that might melt the flesh of those listening.

"Their camp is thirty miles away, in a limestone cave to the north of a place they call the Spirited Trees," Kikono said. "I believe I know where she means. She mentions something about the Wendigo, and haunting its domain. She says they are legion. She says they are as many as people in the world, because they will eventually take everyone."

"I like her ambition," Ghost said dryly. "But I think Mister London might be right, vampire hunter. I think perhaps — "

The vampire's talking, her hissing, her shrieking in pain, her writhing, her moaning, all merged into a final, terrible chuckle.

Then she moved.

For Jack, everything changed between one blink and the next, impossibly quickly, each instant loaded with the potential disaster to come. His first instinct as the vampire moved was to shove Sabine behind him. As he did so, the cursed Tlingit tensed, ropes snapping from around her limbs and body, smoking hand reaching up and tearing the silver-wired noose from around her neck.

On one side, Jack saw Callie lifting her revolver. To his left, Ghost crouched down and began to growl.

The vampire changed. The sound accompanying the transformation was hideous — cracking, groaning, crunching, wetness, a roar from her distending mouth and an awful scratching from the huge claws bursting from her feet and injured hands and scoring the floor. She grew, and the sudden change was disorienting. Jack fell back against Sabine, both of them leaning against the wall, and then someone was shooting.

The Sheriff had his gun drawn and was firing even before Callie was ready to shoot. Bullets impacted across the polar bear's side, and then it thrashed around in the confined cell, smashing the cot against the bars.

The cot shattered, showering them with splinters and shards of wood. Callie's gun discharged and then she fell before Jack and Sabine, hands going up to her face where blood was already blooming around several thick splinters protruding around her eyes.

"Silver!" Jack shouted, but his voice was drowned by another gunshot from Killebrew.

The three wolves spread across the room, keeping their distance from the cell.

Jack looked for Callie's dropped gun, but it had skittered away somewhere, or was hidden beneath pieces of the shattered cot that had powered between the bars.

The polar bear roared, impossibly loud in the confined space, and planted its paws on the cell bars.
They're still smoking
, Jack had time to think, and then the bear heaved itself forward, bars creaking and bending, one of them cracking with a sound louder than a gunshot.

"Out!" Jack shouted, but there was no time to move.

With a glance at Sabine, Ghost was at the bars, half-changed, fur bristling along his shoulders and down his thickening arms, claws slashing. But the bear simply reached out between bent bars and dragged Ghost through, into the cell with it where no one else could reach.

Ghost shouted in surprise as his head clanged from a bar, and his shout ended in a fading groan.

I'm going to see Ghost die
, Jack thought, and the idea was amazing and impossible, and terrible. In that moment Jack would have risked his own life to save Ghost, and he had no idea why.

But there was no need. Another three gunshots rang out and the Polar bear flipped back against the cell's rear wall, its mouth going wide for one final roar that it never uttered. As it slid slowly down to the floor it changed, shifting back to the Tlingit woman with more terrible cracks and creaks of bones changing shape, flesh transforming. She was dead before the change was complete, and smoke rose from the new wounds across her chest and throat.

"Damn," Sheriff Killebrew said. He was kneeling beside Callie, one hand on her shoulder to steady himself, the other bearing her dropped gun. He kept it aimed at the woman. The stillness felt loaded with a threat of more violence, and it was several moments before Ghost stood up in the cell and started brushing himself down.

Killebrew's aim shifted to Ghost. The Sheriff stood as well and backed away from Callie, from them all, until his back was against the wall beside Kikono's cell.

"Just . . ." Killebrew said.

"Thank you," Ghost said calmly. "If you hadn't done that, I would be dead."

"You would be dead," Killebrew said, staring at Ghost in confusion, blinking quickly as if to remove a memory from his eyes.

"Good shooting," Jack said, trying to calm Killebrew's nerves.

"Yes,
mon ami,"
Louis said from by the side door. "Excellent, Sheriff."

Sheriff Killebrew stared at Ghost, and when Callie gently took her gun from his hand, he did not resist.

Ghost climbed through the cell's bent bars, slipping through easier this time than he had going in.
Going in, he was almost as monstrous as that thing
, Jack thought, and he knew that the Sheriff was not a foolish man. He had lived a life, seen things, and now he had seen so much more.

"We're truly in your debt, Sheriff," Jack said. Kikono started talking in his own language.

"Speaking to the memory of his ancestor," the Sheriff said, perhaps glad for the distraction.

"Then we should leave him in peace," Jack said. "There's no more danger here."

"No more," Killebrew said.

Ghost nodded his thanks to the Sheriff once again and then left the cells, followed closely by the other wolves. Jack and Sabine helped Callie pick the splinters from her face and went to leave, supporting the brave woman between them.

"Jack London," the Sheriff said suddenly. "I think I remember that name now. While back, before I was Sheriff. There was talk of a London taking on one of those bastard slave drivers in a saloon."

Jack shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing.

"Seems trouble draws itself to you," Killebrew said.

Jack offered a gentle smile, and looked through the bent bars at the dead Tlingit. "Seems you might be right," he said.
And it's far from over
, he thought. He had no wish to enter into conversation with the Sheriff. Their immediate plans, and their destination, had to remain secret. The Sheriff had seen incredible, ghastly things that night, but there were still some things that could never be explained away.