Charming (32 page)

My medical bag is one of the last things I pack when I leave a house, for obvious reasons, and my first aid kit is a little more thorough than your average collection of Band-Aids, gauze, and antibiotic cream. Rummaging through the airdrop bag under my sink, I found the hypodermic of adrenaline. I sniffed just to make sure it wasn’t the one full of mandrake root extract—which is effective against people who are possessed by a walk-in spirit—and went back to the dining room.

Dvornik hadn’t moved. At all.

After
Pulp Fiction
came out, there were a lot of movies where actors stabbed someone in the heart with a hypodermic full of adrenaline, and the actors always gritted their teeth and winced, and audiences always groaned and ooh’d in sympathy. I didn’t wince when I stabbed Dvornik.

The truth is, I kind of enjoyed it.

25

D
vornik’s knife was strange-looking. I had plenty of time to notice because when a man Dvornik’s age pulls himself back from that undiscovered country, he does so slowly. This was the second time I had legally killed one of Sig’s allies, and I wasn’t sure if this was something to be proud or ashamed of, so I studied the knife.

There was a seam running up the middle of the blade and a button in the cylindrical handle. I’d never actually held one before, but I was pretty sure it was a WASP Knife. WASP Knives were originally designed for divers and hold a small canister of compressed carbon dioxide in the handle. When you press the button, the knife injects carbon dioxide into the target. This can freeze an area of tissue the size of a basketball, or force someone’s internal organs to move around in ways they weren’t meant to move around if you stab the right body cavity.

The knives were issued to Navy SEALs for a while, but were eventually phased out as little more than an expensive gimmick. A knife is a lot more than a stabbing weapon if you know
what you’re doing, and it was felt that the WASP Knife’s design actually limited effective fighting techniques. Besides, what can a turbo injection system in a knife really do that a severed artery can’t do better, faster, quieter, and cheaper?

But given the wolfsbane smell… I didn’t think the canister in Stanislav’s knife held compressed carbon dioxide. He’d either converted the knife to inject liquid, or he’d figured out a way to vaporize and pressurize wolfsbane.

Well, it was mine now. I’d figure it out later.

Eventually my table was upright again, and so was Dvornik. I placed the survey map over the holes he’d blown in my table to make it look more domestic. I even got him a new coffee cup and filled it with water.

In his ham-size hand, the mug looked like one of those tiny plastic toy cups that little kids play with. The hand didn’t tremble, but Dvornik was moving stiffly and slowly.

He coughed a weak cough. “We should have a real drink for this conversation.”

“I don’t have any alcohol,” I said.

“Self-control issues?” He was pretty sardonic for a guy who had just gone grave shopping.

“You’re still alive,” I pointed out. “That ought to count for something.”

“It might,” he said, absentmindedly rubbing his chest. “But you and I both know why you brought me back from the brink.”

I rolled that one over a little. He wasn’t talking about the geas. I gave him a slight nod to let him know that I got it and agreed. “Sig.”

“Sig,” he agreed as if answering a toast. Maybe he was.

“So why are you in my house?” I asked him. “And why were your nephews in my woods?”

“You need to stop sniffing around my woman,” Dvornik told me. His voice came from the depths of his overdeveloped chest, and there was a tautness to it.

“That’s difficult,” I admitted. “I really like her, and I really don’t like you. And you’re not my neighbor, and she’s not your wife.”

“She and I have been together longer than most legally married couples,” he noted with the matter-of-fact tone of a man signing death warrants. “Far longer than any relationship you’ve ever managed to scrape together, I suspect.”

Alison had been killed by a man a lot like Dvornik, but I let that one go.

“So how come you never popped the question?” I wondered. “Or if you did, how come she never said yes? Is Sig your dirty little secret? Are you afraid the kresniks will take away your secret decoder ring?”

He built a smile around his teeth. “Don’t think today means shit. I won’t stop trying until I get you, and I know how to keep someone alive while I do damage to them. And that’s just normal humans who don’t regenerate the way you do. If you touch Sig, I’ll have fun with you for weeks. Your mind will disintegrate before I’m done with you. You’ll be nothing but an armless, legless, eyeless stump, shitting and pissing and screaming and whimpering from a mouth with no tongue or teeth.”

I stared at him. His pulse hadn’t fluttered even slightly.

“I’ve seen what’s left of living beings who have had that sort of thing done to them,” I said carefully, looking at him. His eyes were bright and unwavering. A madman’s eyes, or a saint’s. “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t kill myself when I found out that I’d been infected by a werewolf.”

“The other reason being that you were a coward?” he asked politely. “Selfish? Weak? Evil?”

“The thing was,” I continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “I knew that no matter what anybody said, I could never be as big a monster as a lot of the people who claim to be human.”

He made that expression with his teeth again. “If you’re going to start quoting Nietzsche, you’re wasting your time. Pretty words won’t change what you are.”

“Sig says I’m not evil,” I pointed out. “And she says she’s never wrong about that kind of thing.”

“I don’t care if sunbeams come out of your ass and an angel chorus tells me to leave you alone,” he said bluntly. “Touch Sig, and I’ll take you apart with a carving knife.”

I leaned forward slightly and showed him my own teeth. “Threaten me one more time, assbreath. You already used your
Get Out of Dead Free
card.”

Neither of us said anything for a while after that. Finally Dvornik broke the moment by leaning back and crossing his arms. I let him.

“Are my nephews alive?” It had taken him a while to ask, and he didn’t seem particularly concerned.

“They’re fine,” I said. “They’re probably having some circulation issues right about now, but that’s their problem.”

Dvornik shrugged his massive shoulders, then tilted his head sideways and cracked his thick neck. It sounded like an iron bar breaking. “There’s an issue here that’s bigger than both of us,” he said regretfully.

“I haven’t forgotten Anne Marie,” I assured him. “Have you? Because I didn’t need to hear about your big dream vision to know that she is one dangerous bitch.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” he snarled. “I wasn’t entirely sure my
own geas would let me attack you until I saw my nephews’ rifles. But I haven’t forgiven either.”

“I’ll tell you what I told Sig,” I said. “I’m leaving Clayburg after this, and I’m not coming back until I’ve come to terms with the Knights Templar.”

To his credit he didn’t laugh. His eyes went kind of fuzzy and condescending for a moment, though.

“By the way, Sig shot me down,” I added.

Dvornik cleared his throat. “That’s what she told me too. She sounded upset.”

He looked down at his left hand, which was curling and uncurling, fist, palm, fist, palm, as if his hand were a heartbeat. “I didn’t like the way she sounded.”

“She doesn’t seem like the cheating kind,” I said. “And if she leaves you, that’s her right.”

“You Americans love to tell other people how life works,” he grunted. “And you’re nothing but loud, spoiled children. You walked ass-backward into a rich country, and you think it makes you wise. It just makes you fat.”

I shrugged. “You can try to make this about me or my country if you want. But I notice we’re not having this conversation in your wrecked dining room.”

“You’re the one trying to seduce another man’s woman,” he growled.

“I told her how I felt. She rejected me,” I reminded him. “I took it. She told you she was staying with you, and you flew off the handle.”

Stanislav drained the water in a huge gulp and slammed the cup down as if he’d just done a shot. I remembered Sig doing the same thing in Rigby’s. They’d been together a long time. “You don’t believe she loves me.”

There are a lot of variations and gradations of love. But no, I didn’t believe Sig loved him. And neither did he.

“I believe she has the right to choose whoever she wants,” I said. “And I don’t think she’s going to choose either one of us, ultimately. She probably shouldn’t. And that hurts.”

“It hurts,” he mocked. “You’ve known her a few days. You have no idea what it’s like to give your life to someone, to grow old while she stays young and watch her get farther and farther away while she’s still right next to you. To see strangers staring at you with loathing and disgust, unable to figure out what your beautiful lover could possibly see in you, thinking you must be rich.”

“So you’re going to kill anybody she might choose over you,” I said. “And make them die badly. That’s your idea of being the opposite of a spoiled child.”

“That is my idea of protecting what is mine,” he corrected.

“How many young men have mysteriously disappeared from Sig’s life over the years?” I wondered. “How many of them have wound up in hospital beds or unmarked graves? She must attract a lot of attention, and you didn’t just get this way overnight. I can’t be the first guy you’ve ever been jealous of.”

He went quiet and still. He knew what a werewolf’s senses were capable of, but he had also trained to beat lie detectors.

“At least one, right? More than that?” I asked.

He still didn’t say anything. His pulse didn’t flutter.

“She doesn’t know, does she?” I shook my head. “Or she doesn’t really want to know.”

“You don’t know either. And somehow I don’t feel like enlightening you.” Stanislav leaned forward. “Stop trying to make trouble or I promise you this. A day will come when I will remind you of this moment.”

“Tell you what,” I said slowly. “If Sig ever says she’s willing
to give me a chance, I’ll track you down and kill you before I sleep with her.”

This time his smile was real. Feral and cruel, but real. “Who could ask for more?” he said softly.

For a moment we understood each other perfectly. It was the closest to a truce that we were ever going to come.

“Sig says that you know where the vampire tunnels are,” Dvornik said abruptly, carefully taking a pen out of his pocket and setting it on the map in front of him. “She says you can pinpoint the location on a map.”

“That’s true,” I said.

He knocked the pen toward me with a violent flick of his middle finger, sending it upward and off the table. I snagged it out of the air.

Dvornik shoved the map toward me and snarled, “Prove it.”

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