I shoved the kid into the back and piled in immediately after him. Jeffrey jumped in the front seat and slammed shut the door.
The pale wolf crashed into the door, jaws open, slobbering on the window.
Stockton was filming it.
“Roger, would you put down that camera and drive?” I shouted.
The second time the wolf charged us, causing the whole car to rock on its wheels, Stockton put the camera down and started the engine. We pulled out onto the road a second later.
My straggler curled up in his seat. Hugging himself, he shook, sweat breaking out on his face. He mumbled, “Stop it . . . stop it . . .”
He was starting to Change. It began inside, a feeling like an animal clawing its way out. It hurt more when you tried to keep it from happening. When you couldn’t stop the Change from happening.
I grabbed him, taking hold of his face and making him look at me. “Keep it together, okay? Take a deep breath. Slow breath. Good, that’s good. Nice and easy, keep it together.” His breathing slowed; he stopped trembling. After another moment, he even relaxed a little. Some of the tension left his arms.
He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t look at me.
“What’s your name?”
He needed a moment to catch his breath. “Ty. It’s Ty.”
“Nice to meet you, Ty.” He nodded quickly, nervously, keeping his head down. I moved a hand to his shoulder—a light touch to keep him anchored in his body—and sat back.
Now maybe I could catch my breath.
I didn’t want to think about the can of worms we’d opened. In the long run, Smith being gone could only be a good thing. But all those people were homeless now, and confused. And monsters. At least we were in the middle of nowhere. They could only hurt each other. Which was bad enough.
“Kitty, you’re bleeding.” Jeffrey stared at me between the two front seats.
Blood covered my right arm. Just looking at it sent waves of pain riding through my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said, gritting my teeth. “It’ll be fine by morning.”
“The rapid healing, that’s true?” Stockton said. The reporter turned his camera onto me, holding it between the front seats with one hand while steering with the other and only half watching the road. “Can I watch?”
“No.” I glared until he set the thing down. I took the charm off and handed it to the front seat. Roger accepted it, pulling the chain over his head. “Roger, your grandmother got you into this, didn’t she? The fairy charms, the supernatural. Working for Uncharted World.”
He smiled wryly. “Some people think I’m on that show because I’m a crappy reporter. I could be on CNN if I wanted. Except I believe. No, I don’t believe. I know. The supernatural—it’s like any other mystery. You find enough evidence, you can prove the truth. This gig gets me closer to that.” Just like Flemming. The search for truth. Stockton was just traveling a different road. “So—you sure you won’t let me film you next full moon?”
“No.”
“How about you, kid?”
“What?” Ty looked woozy.
“No,” I said.
Stockton chuckled, entirely too amused. “Hey—where are we going?”
I found my phone in my pocket, turned it on, and hesitated, because I didn’t know who I could call for help. I hated to say that my first impulse was to call Cormac. He’d know what to do with a couple dozen rogue vampires and werewolves rampaging the countryside. Unfortunately, his solution would involve lots of silver bullets and stakes, and we’d end up with a bunch of corpses. I was trying to avoid that.
My next idea was to call Ahmed. I didn’t have a phone number for the Crescent, so I called information. They were able to get me through to the restaurant side. A cheery-sounding hostess whose voice I didn’t recognize answered the phone.
“Good evening, this is the Crescent. May I help you?”
“Hi, yeah—is Ahmed there?”
“Who?”
A sinking feeling attacked my stomach. “Ahmed. The guy who owns the place.”
“Oh! Just a moment. May I tell him who’s calling?”
“It’s Kitty.”
She set the phone aside. I could hear the murmur of generic restaurant noises—voice talking, tableware clinking— in the background. The moment stretched on. I started tapping my foot. I didn’t have a lot of time here.
A familiar, robust voice picked up the line. “Kitty! How are you?”
Situations like this made it so hard to answer that question. “I need some help, Ahmed. What would you do with a couple dozen vampires and lycanthropes who’d lost it and you wanted to get them under control so they didn’t get hurt?”
I grit my teeth. When I said it out loud like that, this mess sounded ridiculous.
He hesitated for a long time, so that I had to listen to the restaurant white noise again. Then he said, “I would leave the area, and wait until morning to return to see what was left.”
“But the vampires will die without shelter.”
“That would not be my concern.”
No, it wouldn’t, would it? “Then what about the lycanthropes? I know you’d want to help the lycanthropes.”
“If you can bring them here, to the club, I can shelter them.”
“But I have no way of getting them there.”
“Kitty, what have you gotten yourself into?”
I sighed. He wasn’t going to be any help. He probably never even left the Crescent, his little domain. “It’s a long story. I’ll have to talk to you later. Bye.”
“Goodbye?” He sounded confused. I hung up anyway.
That left one other option.
I called Alette to ask her if she could help. Bradley answered the phone, put me on hold, and returned to say that she could. She’d meet me at Smith’s caravan in an hour.
An hour later, we drove back by the site. The police had already arrived in squad cars, along with a sedan I recognized as the one Bradley drove, and a large, windowless van.
Stockton pulled onto the shoulder. A cop came forward and tried to wave him away. I rolled down the back window.
“I’m with Alette,” I called. The cop hesitated, then let Stockton park.
While a trio of cops moved alongside the road setting out flares and obviously standing guard, Alette and Leo stood at the edge of the grassy field. A group of people approached them from the caravan. Leo held something out to them, and they moved slowly, cautiously toward him.
“Stay here, lock the doors,” I said as I climbed out of the car. I didn’t stick around to see if they listened to me.
I didn’t get too close. I had my limits. The people drawn to Leo were thin, wan, cold—vampires. Leo held a jar of blood, open to the air, so that the smell drew them.
The vampires in Smith’s caravan hadn’t eaten in months, some of them. As they approached, Leo spoke softly to them. He touched their chins, their hair, and they bowed their heads and followed docilely. He led them to the van and guided them inside. Tom waited by the back door.
Bradley approached me, clearly on an intercept course to keep me from interrupting Alette and Leo.
“What’s happening?” I asked, before he could chastise me or start issuing orders. “It looks like some kind of vampire hypnotism.”
He said, “The ones who joined Smith aren’t very old, only a few decades. Easy to control. Older vampires aren’t going to go looking for a cure. If they’ve made it to a hundred without getting killed, it usually means they like it. But these—they’re looking for guidance.”
“What’ll happen to them?”
“They’ll stay with Alette until she can find out where they’re from and send them home.” He glanced back at Stockton’s car. Of course the reporter had his camera pressed against the windshield, glaring out. He even leaned half on top of Jeffrey to get a better angle. “Your friends should leave.”
His tone didn’t allow argument. Besides, I pretty much agreed with him. This was like an accident s
cene, and Stockton didn’t need to be broadcasting it on his show.
“I’ll ask them, but Stockton’s got the keys. Good luck getting him out of here.” Then I had a brilliant idea. Stockton reported on the paranormal. He’d absolutely love this. I told Bradley, “Let me get the kid out and back in his own car. Then could you maybe pull the Man In Black routine on Stockton? It might just scare the crap out of him.” I couldn’t help it—I grinned.
“Man In Black?” Bradley’s brow furrowed with distaste.
“Just be yourself when you tell him to get the hell out of here. It’ll be fun.” I trotted off to check on Ty.
Jeffrey unlocked the car for me. I opened the back door. Ty was sitting up, looking around, aware of his surroundings.
“Hey, Ty, you ready to go home? Can you drive?” I said.
He ran a hand through his floppy hair and nodded. “But can’t I stay with you?”
I absolutely did not need that kind of responsibility. I’d run away from that kind of responsibility. I tried to let him down gently. “Walk with me, ’kay?”
I held out my hand. He took it and let me pull him from the car. Staying close to him, I walked him to his car. “There’s a club in D.C. for people like us. A guy named Ahmed runs it. He can help you, there’s lots of people there who’d be happy to help you cope with this. You should go there.”
He scrounged a pen and piece of paper from his glove box, and I wrote down directions to the Crescent for him. I also gave him my number.
“No more quack cures after this, right?”
“Right.”
“You going to be okay?”
He nodded, a little more decisively than he had before. “Yeah. I’ll check this place out. Thanks, Kitty. Thanks a lot.”
I sent him on his way.
I turned around just in time to see Stockton’s car back up a few feet in order to zoom a U-turn onto the road, engine revving. Arms crossed, a looming monolith of a man, Bradley stood at the edge of the pavement and watched him go.
When Stockton’s car was out of sight, Bradley turned around. He wore a big grin. He said, “You’re right. That was fun.”
I was so sorry I’d missed it.
Leo, supervised by Alette, was still herding vampires. The scene was surreal and vaguely appalling.
“Does it bother you?” I said to Bradley. “Working for a vampire? Emma said her family has worked for her for centuries. What about yours? Or are you related to Emma?”
“Distant cousins.” His smile was amused, wry. He nodded to the cops. “One of the officers there is another cousin. I never really thought about it, to tell you the truth. It’s just how it’s always been. If you don’t grow up thinking any of this is weird, then it isn’t weird. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to her place to visit. It was like having another aunt.”
The lycanthropes wouldn’t fry when the sun rose, but I was worried about what they might do in the meantime. Alette wasn’t. She and Leo set out raw meat as bait and armed the police with silver bullets.
Wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. But it turned out the silver bullets were weapons of last resort. The vampire mojo worked on the weres as well. The two vampires lulled them to sleep, let them slip back to human, then let the police take over. Many of the people had missing person files on them. Eventually, they’d make it back home.
The two vampires cleaned up the whole mess. That was why lycanthropes needed large numbers to defeat vampires in a head-to-head confrontation.
We explored the caravan while Alette’s police friends put up yellow tape and marked the whole thing off as an investigation site. Under the tent, a temporary stage made of plywood and milk crates stood toward the rear, and a string of bare lightbulbs hung from tent poles, across the top. It looked harmless enough. The rest of the camp, though, was a disaster. None of the trailers had sewer hook-ups. The few available camp and chemical toilets were overused. Immortality and rapid healing didn’t preclude the necessity of other bodily functions. Nothing had been cleaned, piles of trash lay discarded in the corners of RVs, in the beds of pickups. Some signs of food remained: empty cans of soup and beans, along with dirty dishes, were stacked in sinks and on counters. Mold and slime spotted them, and dozens of flies rose and scattered when we opened doors.
I could hardly breathe, the smell was so strong. I kept my hand in front of my face.
We found a few people, both lycanthropes and vampires, hiding in the closets of campers, on the floorboards in trucks and cars. They hugged themselves, shaking, crying—symptoms of withdrawal. They looked pale and thin, their hair was dull and limp. I didn’t think anyone with lycanthropy could die of malnutrition, their bodies were so hardy and resistant to damage. But they didn’t look good. The vampires—their bodies might not break down. But they might lose their minds. Smith was sustaining them, that was how they had survived.
I tried to draw them out, talking to them, reassuring them, but they didn’t like me. My scent was unfamiliar, and they cowered, more animal than human. Some of them followed me into the open. Some of them, Leo had to come and whisper to them, work some of his vampire charm on them, until their eyelids drooped and they followed on command.
These people had been living a dozen to a trailer, no food, no showers. Smith had turned them into zombies.
Alette joined us as we finished our tour of the camp.
“This is a rather impressive coup you’ve accomplished, for someone who claims to have no authority,” she said, frowning.
She asked me what happened, exactly what we had seen and what we had done to banish Smith. She nodded and seemed unsurprised, like she recognized what he was and had expected as much.
“I never thought it could be this bad,” I said. “I thought Smith was duping people. But he was sucking them dry. Keeping them alive so he could continue using them.”
“It’s what his kind do,” Alette said. “What they’ve done for centuries, in one guise or another. The sidhe, the fairies, have always fed on the lives of mortal human beings. In the old days they stole infants and replaced them with changelings; they seduced young men and women; they kept mortal servants for decades. It’s as if they aren’t really alive themselves, so they need life nearby to sustain them. Vampires and lycanthropes have something more. They started as mortal, and became something powerful. Whatever the sidhe draw from living humans, they draw more of it from us. Smith created a situation where he could surround himself with their power. Because the sidhe have power over perception, especially over perceptions of space and time, he could make his followers believe anything. He could show them the world he wanted them to see. The stories say that food of the fairies would appear to be a feast, but turn to dust in your mouth.” She gazed over the abandoned caravan with a look of sadness.
We returned to Alette’s townhome near dawn. Bradley gave some excuse about finishing arrangements during daylight hours—Alette needed to rent a whole separate townhome where the vampire refugees could stay—and left me facing her in the foyer alone.
She stood, arms crossed, wearing a rust-colored dress with a tailored, silk top and flowing skirt, not at all rumpled after the evening’s outing. How did she do it?
“Well. You’re rather a mess,” she said, regarding my singed clothing, dirt-smeared face, wounded arm, and bloodstained shirt. The observation sounded even more depressing in her neat British accent.
“Yeah,” I said weakly. What else could I say?
“I do wish you had told me what you had planned. We might have been more prepared.”
I really wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare use any of the antique furniture in the room in my grubby state. “There wasn’t really a plan involved. We just sort of seized the moment. Look, I know I had no right to ask for your help and no reason to think that you’d give it—”
“Oh? You’re saying I haven’t given you any reason to believe that I would give aid in a crisis? That you believe I have no interest in what happens outside the boundarie
s of my personal domain? That my resources are for my own selfish use and haven’t been developed precisely so that I might lend assistance in any situation where it might be needed?”
Alette was the vampire Mistress of Washington, D.C., and that probably wasn’t an accident. From here, she could oversee goings-on around the world. She could make worldwide contacts. And she’d been humble enough to offer hospitality to a wandering werewolf. Hospitality, and the loan of a diamond pendant.
“I’m sorry.” I looked away, smiling tiredly and feeling like a heel. Any rebellion had been completely wrung out of me tonight, and my arm still hurt.
She continued, softer in tone, kinder. “I happen to believe that immortality ought to make one more sensitive to the plight of the downtrodden, and more apt to work toward the betterment of humanity. Not less. We have the luxury of taking the long view. I know the behavior of some of my kind leaves much to be desired, but please do not judge me by their example.”
Never again. “All right. I just . . . I keep wondering, asking myself . . .”
“Did you do the right thing?” I nodded. Destroying the church so abruptly might have caused more problems than it had solved. We might have found another way, if we could have lured people away instead of removing Smith all at once . . .
Alette said, “Elijah Smith drew people to him under false pretenses, removed their wills to decide whether or not to stay with him, and forced them to live in conditions that I consider to be criminal. Human law could not have remedied the problem. You did. Perhaps someone else might have done the job a bit more neatly. But as you say, you seized the moment. You shouldn’t worry.”
Would there ever come a time when human law could handle situations like this? I couldn’t imagine the local sheriff’s office with a copy of procedures on how to arrest and hold in custody an Unseelie fairy. Or a rogue werewolf, or a rampaging vampire. We kept having to police ourselves. We had to be vigilantes, and I didn’t like it. I kept claiming we could be a part of the “normal” world, of everyday society. Then shit like this happened to prove me wrong.
“Thanks. Again,” I said.