Charming (29 page)

22

S
o I finally found a section of the New River,” I said. “And I jumped into it and thrashed my way toward the middle and then pretended to drown when the vampires came out of the woods and followed me to the bank. I knew there was no way they were going to jump in after me in deep running water.”

“And the vampires bought that?” Molly asked incredulously.

“I waited until the cold began to lower my body temperature,” I said. “Then I stopped moving and sank down for a few minutes before swimming off underwater. The sound of the current covered me, and I found a protruding rock to come up behind.”

“Vampires see in infrared,” Sig informed Molly when she saw her blank expression. “He’s saying the vampires saw his heat outline sink into the water, stop moving, and gradually fade out. That would be pretty convincing. Especially if these vampires are as inexperienced as we think they are.”

“So your core temperature got that low, and you were underwater for minutes?” Molly still seemed skeptical.

“My blood is more oxygenated than a normal human’s,
especially when I’ve been exerting myself for hours,” I explained. “I can hold my breath for a long time.”

“The vampires weren’t the only ones who thought you were dead,” Sig observed as she cut her double order of French toast into dainty little bite-size portions. “I’m going to shove a cell phone so far up your ass that you’re going to burp ringtones.”

I smiled. Sig could be in a bad mood if she wanted. The full moon was over, and I was free. Energized. Light. “I spent most of the night running around naked and then slept for eighteen hours in a cave. I couldn’t have called you much earlier even if I’d had a cell phone.”

“Why is it that every time I see you, you’re either taking off all your clothes or telling some story about taking off all your clothes?” Molly asked.

“Seriously,” Sig said. “Should we warn the waitress?”

“I think I can restrain myself until after dessert,” I said.

The three of us were at a truck stop about thirty miles outside of Clayburg. I had called Sig from there after finally locating my sweats and my knife. The place was OK. The waitresses were older women with wedding rings who looked like they’d had hard lives but didn’t take it personally. The food was simple and abundant, with lots of gravy and cheese and fried meat and your choice of canned and reheated vegetables. There wasn’t a lot in the way of frills. Every section was a smoking section, and the view of a jumped-up convenience store area at the entrance wasn’t emotionally uplifting, but the floors and tables were clean, the coffee was strong, and there were small plastic bottles of hand sanitizer on every table along with the usual condiments. What more do you want at four thirty in the morning?

“So this nest you stumbled into,” Sig said. “Can you show Stanislav how to get there?”

“Him in particular?” I asked.

Sig idly stuck her index finger in her cup of steaming-hot coffee and stirred it. I couldn’t decide if this was mildly erotic or mildly disgusting. “It’s no secret that Stanislav and I are having problems. But this thing where you two are acting like thirteen-year-old boys is really annoying.”

“He started it,” I said.

She failed to see the humor. “Stanislav can check the area while he’s out of his body,” Sig reminded me. “He can locate the tunnels, map out their layout, and tell us how many vampires are waiting there with virtually no risk.”

That made sense, unfortunately.

“I can show him the area on a map,” I said.

“Good. Let’s all meet up at Choo’s house this afternoon.” Sig returned her attention to her food. “We’ll get our act together and then raid them in a day or so at dawn.”

“Your whole group?” I asked.

“Since we’re talking about acting like adults,” Molly chimed in, “how about you and Sig let us normal humans make our own decisions about what is and isn’t too dangerous?”

Sig looked slightly uncomfortable. “Molly and Ted and Choo and I already had this conversation.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. I had misgivings, but the vampires were too numerous, the environment was too defensible, and the stakes were too high. I needed the backup.

Besides, I wasn’t really going in as part of a team. I was going in to set off trip wires and draw fire. Back when I was a squire, my confanonier (a knight who’s half drill sergeant and half nanny) had a name for anyone who made too much noise when they moved: he called them
Polish land mine detectors
. This was shortly after World War II, when people still believed the old Nazi propaganda about the Polish army attacking tanks
with horses and swords, and England and America were being flooded with more Polish immigrants than their economies could comfortably handle. Polack jokes were everywhere.

When one of the more ballsy squires asked what a Polish land mine detector was, our confanonier put his hands over his ears so he wouldn’t hear any explosions and began stomping on the ground as hard as he could.

Obviously I’m way too horrified at the ethnic stereotyping to find that amusing now, but at the time we all laughed.

Now it occurred to me, more than half a century later, Dvornik was Slavic, and I was his land mine detector. They say you should be careful what you wish for. If you survive long enough, you learn that you should be careful what you laugh at.

“I went by your house,” Sig said. “When you disappeared.”

“Went by it or went in it?” I asked.

Sig paused. She had just crammed about ten of her dainty morsels of French toast into her mouth and didn’t want to speak while chewing. I suppose good table manners are important when you’re female and bench-press small cars and eat enough food to choke a python. You don’t want people getting the wrong idea. In an alarmingly short time she answered my question obliquely. “You’ve moved a lot of stuff out in the last two days.”

“The important stuff,” I said.

“So you’re still determined to disappear?” she challenged.

I smiled again. “We need to talk about that.”

Molly stood up and scooted her chair back from the table. “And I have this sudden urge to buy some magazines and sit in the bathroom for half an hour or so.”

Sig shot Molly a dirty look, confirming my suspicion that she’d brought Molly along as a chaperone of sorts. “Then maybe you should eat more fiber.”

“I want to make it easier for John to hit on you,” Molly explained.

“First of all, everyone needs to stop talking about John and me in front of John and me,” Sig said irritably. “This isn’t high school. We haven’t done anything, we’re not going to do anything, and it wouldn’t be any of your business if we did. And second of all, even if it were your business, you’ve known him less than two days!”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Molly agreed. “Another way of looking at it is that I’ve known Stanislav for more than a year.”

And then Molly was gone.

“Wipe that idiot smile off your face,” Sig warned, turning back to face me. “Or I’m going to throw this plate at you.”

“You mean that spotless plate that used to be full of French toast?” I teased. “My God, where did the syrup go?”

“Bite me,” Sig said.

“Actually, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

She gave me a look that wondered just how many bones she was going to have to break.

“The werewolf thing,” I explained. “Something happened last night.”

“I know,” she said testily. “You warned the vampires that we’re still out there looking for them. Nice job by the way.”

That one got through my good mood a little. “It’s not like I planned it.” I kept my voice even. “And if this Anne Marie is as smart as we think she is, her intelligence will actually work against her here. Even if she doesn’t think I’m dead, she’ll figure out that if I were a monster in control of my actions, I would have taken weapons along. Or if I were a wolf controlling a man’s body, I wouldn’t remember any of it after the full moon anyhow. Either way she would be covered. I’m pretty sure she’ll
decide that I was some kind of crazy non-wolf non-man freak of nature.”

“I suppose a smart person would decide that,” Sig said dryly.

“Which brings me back to my point.” I was still grimly holding on to my temper. “I’ve always thought that when people turned into werewolves, something was taking them over. Something outside of them, like a kind of demon rabies.”

“You don’t believe that now?” she asked, curious in spite of her bad mood.

“I know I’m not 100 percent USDA-approved werewolf, but this weird thing has been happening the last couple of days,” I said. “There’s been this overlap.”

“Overlap,” Sig repeated.

“Last night, when I was in danger, the parts that I’ve been thinking of as my wolf brain and my knight brain had the same idea at the same time, and it was as if something fused together.”

“Fused together,” Sig echoed. She was going to have to stop that soon.

“Wolves always know where they are,” I said. “But they can’t read maps. Men can read maps, but they don’t always know where they are.”

“Yes,” Sig said condescendingly. “That’s why we invented maps in the first place.”

I held my hands out as if framing a photo shot. “Last night I visualized a map of the area I was in like a man. And I knew exactly where I was on that map. Men can’t do that without landmarks. Wolves can’t do that. But I could. The man part of me was taking what the wolf knew and visualizing it or translating it into map knowledge somehow. Or vice versa.”

“You said this has been happening for days,” Sig observed, leaning back in her chair.

“At that strip club, the wolf started the fight but the knight was using cover and lines of fire. When I was late to your house, it was because I was circling it like a wolf would, but I was checking for things a wolf wouldn’t have any knowledge of. Rental cars and out-of-state plates and sniper vantage points, things like that.”

“So why aren’t you freaking out?” Sig asked, reaching over and switching her empty plate with Molly’s, which was half full of pancakes. “Isn’t this the sort of thing you’ve always been afraid of?”

I looked at Molly’s plate.

“That’s what the traitor gets,” Sig said. “Why aren’t you worried about the big bad wolf becoming more powerful?”

She made air quotes around the word
wolf
.

Like there’s an easy way to say that becoming a werewolf is so alien and intense that the human mind completely goes into emergency mode and shuts that part of itself out as if it were a different personality. That the only reason I’d even gotten a glimpse of this was that my geas acted as a set of brakes that kept the experience from being too overwhelming. I settled for “I’ve realized that it’s still my soul, Sig. It’s still just me in there.”

I stopped and we waited while a waitress cleared our plates and refilled our coffee. Sig asked for some hot chocolate and a hot fudge sundae and a hot fudge cake for her friend. I asked for another country-fried steak and managed to keep my clothes on.

“I still don’t understand why you’re so excited,” Sig told me as soon as the waitress was gone.

“I’m excited because this means my soul isn’t being eaten up by some supernatural cancer,” I said, my voice going a little shaky with emotion. “This means I’m not a coward for not finding a way to commit suicide years ago, geas or no geas.”

“John,” Sig said for no apparent reason.

“All those years being hunted like some kind of monster,” I said. “And deep down, I’ve always thought I deserved it.”

Sig’s hand reached across the table and took mine. I don’t think she was aware of it at first. We stayed like that for a while, and then the energy passing between us stopped being comforting and started becoming something else. She took her hand away.

“I’m not damned,” I said quietly.

“I could have told you that, dummy,” she said, looking away.

“How? Your sight doesn’t work on me, does it?” I said. “Because of the geas. The stuff you knew that you couldn’t know… it was all Alison talking to you. And she’s gone now.”

She looked at me warily. “I don’t need a third eye to see some things.”

“And your sight doesn’t work on Stanislav either, does it?” I went on. “Because of his geas.”