Grim Tidings (8 page)

He started to leave and turned back. “You want to stick around? Make sure her remains get back home?”

I swiped at my eyes. Ava wouldn't cry over a hooker she'd barely known but I figured Phyllis might. “She wasn't some unfortunate,” I said quietly. “She had a family. They'll want her back.”

Tanner went to go out again, then sighed, his big shoulders heaving. He looked back at me again. “You got someplace to stay?”

“I'm not that hard up,” I said softly, looking at the greasy surface of my coffee.

“Neither am I,” Tanner said. “Staties give me a room and meal allowance. I never sleep through the night anyway.” He put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Come on. I'll take the chair and you can take the bed.”

I was tired, so tired I could barely keep one foot in front of the other. I'd been up for over a day, with the drive and Lady and every other awful thing. I followed Tanner out and to his car, an unmarked Ford that rattled when he made the left turn into the motel a few blocks from the hospital.

“Your timing belt's on the way out,” I murmured, after he parked. Tanner shot me a grin—uncalculated, boyish, his teeth gleaming in the neon light of the
VACANCY
sign.

“You a mechanic on your nights off?”

I returned his smile, just a little. “I pick things up here and there.”

Tanner stepped out of the car and got a battered cardboard suitcase from the trunk, along with a green army duffle holding a long rifle and a couple of boxes of shells and bullets. “I never could fix anything worth a damn. Much better at breaking things up, least that's what my ex-wife would say.”

I flinched when he brought up his wife, and told myself that sometimes humans just did want to help. They were the only ones who did things just because it was a compassionate,
human
thing to do. Demons would as soon pick their teeth with your finger bones as look at you. Reapers would never invite a girl into a motel room for anything as innocent as sleep.

“Oh, hey,” Tanner said, stopping when he saw my look. “Listen, if it makes it better she's the one that ended things. Ended them right on our kitchen table with my sergeant from back in Easy Company. Said I was no fun anymore.” He turned the lock on the door and jiggled, then kicked until the door gave way. “Guess she was right.”

I hesitated at the threshold and he sighed. “I'd sleep in the car if it wasn't colder'n a snowman's balls out there. I'm not going to hurt you, Phyllis. I don't pretend to know what's been done to you but I'm not interested in anything but a beer and sitting in my underwear until I pass out. Probably why Edith left me like she did.”

I followed him inside, shutting the door. After a second's thought I put the chain lock on. Tanner didn't want to hurt me, that much was true. He was being way too rude, too familiar to want that. The ones who did treated you like you were special, like you were a princess, so you'd feel like you owed them something when they turned ugly. Besides, if he did get fresh I wasn't above smashing his head into the mirror in the tacky gold frame stuck up opposite the bed.

“I'm not afraid of what you'll do to me,” I said to Tanner. Really, he should have the sense to be afraid of me, but that was the other heartbreaking thing about humans—they never did.

“Good,” he said, stripping out of his jacket, tie, and pants in
record time. His shirt landed on top of the pile right in the middle of the floor and he grabbed one of the folded towels, then headed toward the shower. The scar across his back radiated from one of the arm holes in his undershirt, tracing all the way down the back of his arm to his elbow. It wasn't raw and red any longer, just white, but I could still pick out every rough stitch from whatever field hospital had saved Tanner's life.

“Where'd you pick that up?” I asked, sitting gingerly on the bed. The bedspread itched the backs of my legs.

“France,” he said. He lifted his shirt on the other side, displaying twin puckers just over his kidney. “Belgium.” He turned around, lifting his leg and showing me a slim pale oval over a healed gash.

“Germany?” I guessed. He laughed.

“Tulsa, Oklahoma. My little brother hit me with a broken bicycle chain.”

“You two sound close,” I said. Tanner's smile dropped.

“We were,” he said, and shut the bathroom door.

Tanner wasn't kidding
about the beer and the sleeping. He pulled a bunch of case files from his floppy leather satchel, but he'd barely paged through the first one before the beer drew his interest. “Don't look at those,” he said as he tossed them to the floor. “They'll just give you bad dreams.”

I took off my dress and stockings and got under the covers, lying there until Tanner started snoring and the last fuzzy TV station had signed off for the night. My foot slithered over one of the photos when I stepped out of bed, and I avoided them as I went over to Tanner's satchel, easing the rope tie off and sifting through the layer of shirts and underpants. Spare tie, gun-cleaning kit,
shaving bag. A banged-up metal first aid box. A little black dirt trickled onto my bare foot from the seam of the box and I opened it, wincing as the springs creaked.

Tanner didn't so much as stir. Then again, if I'd polished off half a dozen beers on a mostly empty stomach I wouldn't let a little thing like someone searching my bags wake me either.

Sure, on the surface I was being paranoid and ungrateful snooping around, but this wasn't what it looked like, on a lot of levels. Tanner's call hadn't been random bad luck. Lady wasn't the victim of a run-of-the-mill murderer and when I looked at the box I knew Tanner wasn't just some burned-out cop chasing said killer.

The box had held bandages and iodine at one point, I was sure, but now it was crammed with bottles and tablets of an entirely different purpose. I could recognize a warlock's kit in my sleep, but this required a little more consideration. The black dust was graveyard dirt—the staple of voodoo and folk remedies from back in my home neck of the woods. There were hand-stamped silver coins in there too, the kind Romany put on the eyes of their dead, neatly labeled packets that smelled like a restaurant, and a vial of something dark and sticky that rolled rather than sloshed. Blood, although I wasn't opening the cork to take a whiff and see if it was human or other.

I carefully shut everything back up and checked the duffel, which really did just hold a shotgun, a rifle, and a paper bag of shells.

I looked back at Tanner's snoring form, and then I got my clothes and shoes and slipped out into the cold. Whatever he was really doing here, Tanner knew too much about the world I inhabited, and that meant he might figure out what I was.

As an afterthought, I scooped up the file he'd left on the floor and tucked it into my coat. The photos I left where they were. I had plenty of those kinds of pictures inside my skull. I didn't need any more.

I walked from the motel to the hospital to get the Packard, my shoes crunching frost-covered grass. I'd intended to just get in the car and drive until I was far away from Kansas, but I couldn't shake the photos lying on the motel room floor, stark in the white light from the street outside.

A nighttime road, an abandoned car. Faces obliterated to meat, so that even dental records couldn't identify their bodies—bodies that were not just mutilated but chewed, as if he'd given up on fists and started using tooth and nail in the depths of rage.

I climbed into the car, punching on the heater and opening the plain, coffee-stained folio. Nothing in Tanner's files contained a single clue to the Walking Man's actual identity. A psychiatrist had even typed up an opinion that took three single-spaced pages to say the Walking Man had feelings of anger and despondency that he acted out on his victims. He left no hair, no fingerprints, just bloody smears on window glass and chunks torn out of flesh with teeth.

Only one medical examiner, in Tulsa, had even been able to find a definitive cause of death. There, a woman named Marge Taylor, mother of two, had stopped on her way home from the graveyard shift at a tire plant to offer a downed motorist a lift. After a beating that must have taken hours, her neck had been snapped clean as a whistle.

I sat back, looking toward the hospital. Tanner was tracking the Walking Man, but Tanner also had the tools to track things that
were much worse. If he hadn't been a deep-sleeping drunk, I didn't know if I'd have made it out of his motel room. Maybe he'd already clocked me, and I'd been so desperate to believe somebody didn't have it out for me I'd fallen for the line.

My breath made a misty full moon on the Packard's window, one that froze as I turned off the engine.

If Tanner thought he was on to something more than a maniac who liked to beat women to death on the highway, what would the harm be in taking a look for myself?

I got out of the car.

The hospital was quiet, the orderly with the long hair dozing at the front desk listening to the radio. I didn't wake him, slipping off my shoes so I wouldn't make any noise on the hard floors until I got to the morgue.

Lady's body was one of two in residence, side by side on narrow gurneys. I pulled back the sheet from Lady's face. She'd died before any of the bruising had gone down. Nothing would ever make her look like herself again.

They'd taken off her gown and cut away the bandages covering her arms and torso, and I reached out to almost touch one of the deeper bite marks on her upper arm. I'd seen a lot of bodies in a lot of states, but I wanted to remember Lady.

I wanted to have something to picture when I finally tracked down the Walking Man.

I shut my eyes, breathing in the sterile smell of formaldehyde and bleach, and then I opened them and got to work. I might not have a badge and a state crime lab to help me but I'd tracked down men worse than the Walking Man with less.

Leaning close to Lady, I made myself inhale, deep. Aside from
slow decomposition, all I could smell was her blood, coppery and sharp on her skin. Next the bites—a shifter would have just torn out her throat or her femoral artery to bleed her quick. They also probably would have eaten at least one of her limbs if it was a feral or a rogue pack. A hellhound like me would have a wolf's bite, angular and much deeper than these shallow tears.

These were human teeth. Sharp, but human. There were folks— from the tribes, Mohawk or Algonquin—friends of my grandmother's who believed in the Wendigo, a man who filed down his teeth to consume human flesh, transformed at the first bite into a monster that could never eat its fill.

I gently rolled Lady onto her side, checking her back, and her hair fell away from her neck. It was still in its perfect wave from the last time I'd seen her, the ends stained pink from sitting in her blood.

The front of her neck was bruised from a hand—at least twice as large as mine—wrapping around it, probably to slam her head into a hard surface and knock her senseless. But the back of the neck was free of bruises, and the mark stood out clear and black. It didn't look like much more than a pen mark, a backward lowercase
r
with a little tail curling off the back, but when I rubbed at it, it didn't go away.

When I touched it, I smelled the smell. That bitter, burnt, hopeless smell from the camps. The ashes that I still woke up with in the back of my throat.

I lost my grip on Lady's body as I shuddered and she slammed back onto the metal tray. I winced, hoping no one had heard. “Sorry,” I whispered.

I was reaching out to pull up her sheet when her eyes snapped
open, clouded over with the cataracts death leaves. Her mouth gaped, and she let out one short, agonized scream before she wrapped her hands around my neck.

We both crashed to the ground, the gurney on top of my legs. Lady snapped frantically at me, screaming, spittle trailing out of her mouth to leave a freezing trail along my face and neck. “Lady,” I gasped, bracing my hands against her breastbone. “Lady, it's me!”

She whined, low in her throat, like a dog that hadn't been fed in days. That was it, I realized as she slashed and clawed at me. Lady was hungry. Hungry and so desperate she didn't even realize I couldn't feed her. Not in the way she needed.

And I had to make sure she didn't get through me to all the human residents of this hospital, sleeping in their beds like an all-you-can-chew buffet.

I braced one arm to keep her from sinking her teeth into my face and wrapped my other hand in her hair, knotting my fingers into her curls. They weren't as soft as they looked, more like a doll's hair now that she was dead. “Sorry, Lady,” I muttered, and slammed her head into the metal edge of the gurney as hard as I could.

I would have crushed the skull of a living person—I think I put a pretty good dent in Lady's—but she just rolled off me, dazed, shaking her head back and forth until her bloody hair fell in front of her eyes. I scrambled to my feet, glad now that I'd forgone my shoes and kicking myself that I hadn't helped myself to Tanner's gun.

Lady howled at me again as she rose up, crouched like a mountain lion who'd cornered a deer. The full extent of her injuries was apparent—her abdomen was dark and distended from internal
bleeding and there was a heavy boot print on her chest, across her left breast, where someone had held her down.

Held her down and fed her blood, like a vamp,
the hound whispered to me. But poor Lady hadn't been that lucky. She wasn't a vamp, pale and sickly as a junkie looking for their next fix, kitten-weak unless they had fresh blood in them.

I'd seen something like Lady only once before, and even as she screamed, pink foam flecking her lips, I resisted the thought.

I lit on a jar of dirty instruments sitting in the deep-basin sink in the corner of the room and I lunged for them, but Lady was faster. Faster than me, and a whole lot faster than the ones I'd seen in the camps. She landed on me, slamming me into the sink so hard I felt a rib give and fireworks exploded in my field of vision. I pushed back, throwing her off me. She slipped in some of her own blood, pinwheeling and smacking the light fixture so we were plunged into darkness. Before she could lunge again, the door banged open and I saw a tall figure backlit in the hall. Lady turned on him, her mouth unhinging so wide it tore at the edges, and she screamed loud enough to rattle the light fixtures.