Charming (28 page)

Molly patted my arm. “It’s a full moon, Sig,” she said quietly. “He keeps telling us that.”

The tension in the room went down a notch at that, until Dvornik chimed in from across the room with a voice that was like a silk cloth draped over a chain saw. “It thinks you’re
bringing him meat because you’re asking to be his mate. It will eat whatever you feed it.”

“I’m. Not. An. It,” I ground out, still forcing my eyes to stay on the chili as I dug out another spoonful. “And I do not.”

“I’m not talking about you,” Dvornik said dismissively.

And this was the guy who was going to be watching my back in a dark tunnel?

21

T
here’s a certain kind of person who, when anything bad happens to you and you express unhappiness, they just give you a look and explain how they have it worse.

And it’s not like they don’t have a point, these people. Hell, I’ll admit it, sometimes I am one of these people. But somehow, I never feel like looking at them and saying, “Gee, you’re right; thanks for restoring my sense of perspective, wise friend!” I just want to tell them to shove it up their ass.

I mention this because, technically, I don’t really lose control during a full moon.

Again, I have no desire to eat humans, although there are some I want to kill. I never wake up the next day with no memory of what I did the night before. I don’t go through the agony of physical transformation. So compared to what full werewolves go through, my lunar jaunts are trips to Club Med, and that’s not even mentioning all the benefits that I get from my condition, to the point that I practically have superpowers. It could be a lot worse, and I do realize this.

I mean, yeah, I lost everything I ever worked for or cared about or believed in because of my condition, and I can’t ever just relax and enjoy life because the great-grandchildren of people I grew up idolizing are trying to hunt me down and kill me, and a woman I loved was killed because of me, and I sometimes feel this other thing scratching away at my consciousness, and I can’t tell if it’s trying to get in or trying to get out, which is a little unsettling, and according to the little voices that were beaten into me from an early age by strict Catholic monster hunters, I’m damned and going to hell, which can be a bit hard on my self-esteem to put it mildly. But it could be worse. So, yeah, I’m lucky, OK? I’m blessed. And by the way, shove it up your ass.

I was the first to leave Sig and Dvornik’s studio, because it was getting late, and I have a rule: I don’t hang around people on the night of a full moon. Any people. Ever. And I was barely out of their house before I started getting urges to go back and talk to Dvornik some more. And by talking, I mean taking him by the throat and shaking him around with increasing forcefulness until either he submitted or his neck snapped.

This wasn’t insanity. This was clarity. Sig and I really would be much happier if we just brushed away all the meaningless social clutter clinging to us like so many spiderwebs and followed our instincts. More specifically, tore our clothes off and had sex next to Dvornik’s dead body. This solution seemed so obvious and simple to me that I couldn’t believe I’d been struggling over it.

But I had my rule. This wasn’t my first full moon, not by a long shot. I had spent years in India refining meditation techniques specifically in hopes of dealing with my condition, and part of me remembered the rule and seized it as if my mind were a fist that refused to let go. Avoid all humans.

Following this rule is complicated by the fact that it’s almost impossible to stay inside a house on a full moon. I can’t concentrate on any one thing: I want to eat, or fight, or have sex, or… hell, I don’t know what I want, but I want it so badly that it feels like I’m going to explode out of my skin. So on this particular night, I did what I often do on full moons. I ran.

The woods behind my house lead to several patches of forest that don’t disappear completely for hundreds of miles, and I ran west as far and fast as I could. I ran and ran and ran and ran, silently flickering through the forest like heat lightning, stopping only to drink thirstily out of creeks that I normally wouldn’t touch. Stones and thorns tore into my skin—no matter how tightly I lace them, somehow I always lose my shoes at some point, but don’t grow pads to protect the bottoms of my feet. But it was a full moon, and I barely noticed the pain while my body recovered from the damage almost instantly. My skin was hot and the wind was the only thing that felt good on it. Lactic acids were washed away as fast as they could build up in my muscles, and my red blood cells were multiplying so fast that my oxygen intake remained undiminished. I was tireless, directionless, running in a fever dream of running, swerving to avoid any far-off sound or smell that seemed remotely human—not because I was afraid, but because somewhere in the center of my consciousness there was a part of me that was still reciting the rule I would not break, over and over like a mantra.

Avoid all humans. Avoid all humans. Avoid all humans.

And then I smelled the vampire.

It was like getting hit with a dose of smelling salts: for a second my human psyche snapped back into full awareness with a disorienting lurch.

Somehow, without being aware of it consciously, I had been
running over the target area outside Clayburg that Parth had identified as likely vampire territory. How the hell had that happened? Had the wolf somehow taken the memory of the maps on the screen and applied my human knowledge of cartography because it wanted to hunt? Or had my subconscious brought me here while I was distracted dealing with the wolf? Was this some aspect of the geas at work?

Reaching for my silver steel knife, I got my second shock: I was completely naked. When had that happened? Again?

I was in the middle of a large clear stretch of flat land on the edge of a forest, surrounded by waist-high grass and assorted weeds and thornbushes. Crouching low, I swayed from side to side, sniffing the air to determine the direction from which the smell was freshest. Then the wind shifted, and I began to pick up other vampire scents. Lots of them, from every direction, including the one I had just come from. There were large gaps in the circle if I was any judge, but I was still surrounded. No way that had happened by accident. They must have heard me running by from a distance at some point and formed a wide net in case I came back.

And that’s when I got my third and worst shock. I felt the wolf become as alarmed and surprised as I was. Baring fangs that I didn’t have, I tried to flex nonexistent claws. I had no pack. I was alone and vastly outnumbered in enemy territory and had no pack.

Up until that point my entire experience with the wolf had consisted of me trying to control its aggressive impulses. I hadn’t really believed that the wolf could feel fear; it wasn’t a welcome discovery.

Something came whistling through the air from the direction of the first vampire I’d smelled. I leaped aside, and a heavy object crashed into the ground next to me. I growled. It was a
large metal scoop: someone with great strength had ripped the wheels off a wheelbarrow and tossed the top half.

Wolf instincts and knight training merged in that instant—both were telling me to do the exact same thing at the exact same moment, and something fell into place that had never really meshed before. When psychologists talk about merging multiple personalities into one persona that can use the memories and strengths of both, they call it
integration
. This felt something like that. For a moment at least, two opposing viewpoints were fused together by a need to survive that was stronger than either of them.

I ran toward the vampire who had thrown the wheelbarrow. When you’re trying to break out of a circle of enemies, don’t try to avoid contact unless you’re completely powerless against them. If you aim for a point between two enemies, you’ll just find yourself being closed in on from two sides that each only have half as far to travel. The knight knew that his best bet was to aim for the closest vampire and go through it before its neighbors could arrive. The wolf knew that it had been attacked.

The vampire didn’t come to meet me. He just kept yelling slightly different variations of the same words. “OVER HERE! IT’S OVER HERE! GET OVER HERE! HERE!”

All vampires are predatory by instinct, but predators prey on the weak, and this particular vampire had not been brave in its human existence. It knew that I wasn’t human, and it knew that a lot of vampires in Clayburg had been disappearing recently. This knowledge was evident in the tension of its voice.

At the speed I was going, the vampire came into sight within seconds, although I didn’t orient on him until he threw a rock the size of a milk pail at me. The hunk of stone was dark and flying at over a hundred miles an hour, and it actually scraped my shoulder as it went by. I adjusted my angle to meet him.

The vampire was at the edge of the woods and, turning to a tree behind him, he tore a low jutting branch off from the trunk with a loud crack. He was an average-size male, a little shorter than me and a little stockier. There was a pile of reddish clay on the ground some thirty feet in front of him; it had probably fallen out of the wheelbarrow top he had thrown. I slowed down just enough to scoop a large lump of the clay off the pile but kept running. The vampire broke the top half off the branch he was holding until it was a manageable club, probably figuring that he only had to slow me down for a few seconds or so before help arrived.

In a move similar to the one that I had used with the bottle of holy water in the alley, I hurled the lump of red clay directly at his face as I closed in, running. He had infra-vision, but the clay was cold, and in the dark all he could see was that something was coming at his head. He smacked the hunk of soil away with the makeshift bat he was holding, but the clay burst apart and showered fragments of dirt into his face. His eyes didn’t melt, but they blinked, momentarily impaired.

At this point the vampire made two mistakes, both of them instinctive. The first was that he swung the tree branch blindly to keep me away and buy himself a few moments to clear his vision. Against a hesitant opponent this might have worked, but I charged in as soon as the branch went past and found him wide open.

His second mistake was that he was backpedaling, again in an instinctive attempt to buy himself a few more instants. It’s counterintuitive, but when you’re blind you should charge forward, get in as close to your opponent as you can, grapple, and not let go. It’s true you won’t be able to see what he’s doing, but at least you’ll be able to feel your way to tying his body up or striking back instead of just waiting helplessly to get hit by some unseen enemy darting in and out of your reach.

In this particular case backpedaling was an even worse move, because the vampire was stronger than I was, even under a full moon, and he wasn’t using any of that strength to keep me from knocking him back. He was actually traveling in the direction I wanted him to go. I charged underneath his arms and into his body, lifting him up and bull-rushing him backward like a tackling dummy into the broken fragment of branch that he had foolishly left behind him. He was immediately impaled, the branch entering his back and exiting his chest.

A quick swerve to the left and I was bounding past the tree, leaving the vampire spasming out his last twitches as he dangled helplessly above the ground. There were sounds of pursuit behind me, voices and the sharp cracks of snapping wood and the hiss of whipping leaves, but I was in my territory now. It didn’t matter if they had unnaturally sharp senses of smell. It didn’t matter if they were as fast as I was. For the first time in a long time, there wasn’t even a part of me that was ambivalent about my own survival. I wasn’t being tugged in several different directions at once by training and instincts and geas-driven compulsions and guilt. I wanted to live, and the knowledge filled me with a fierce and exultant joy until I felt like flame in a world made of paper. I wanted to live.

I howled my defiance to the sky and ran.