Dead But Not Forgotten (5 page)

Stan went back to sitting in silence, staring at nothing, surrounded by his vampires.

Kevin knew, with a sick feeling in his stomach, that he'd just made a deal with a devil, but he'd have dealt with Old Scratch himself to save Kenya. She might hate him for it.

He could live with that.

The area outside the club was silent except for the constant hum of traffic in the distance. Wallace was waiting in the parking lot, under the weak glow of a security light, and as Kevin came out, Wallace moved off, expecting him to follow. There was no sign of the other vampires who'd exited.

Kevin headed straight for the Bon Temps squad car, unlocked it, and strapped on his service weapon. He released the shotgun from its locked mount and took it, too. It felt better, being armed.

Kevin expected that they'd move toward the street, but he and Wallace went the opposite direction, behind the club where the rusting steel Dumpsters huddled in a row. They were up against a chain-link fence, which had been ripped open and wrenched aside. Kevin looked down. Hard to tell in the poor lighting, but he thought he saw a splash of fresh blood on the pavement. He supposed Glick would be easy to track for vampires, thanks to all the hemorrhaging.

“Is he dying?” Kevin asked. Wallace didn't seem to hear the question. “You said he got his hands on something he shouldn't. Was it a drug?”

“None of your business,” Wallace said. “Quiet.”

He slipped through the broken chain link like mist. Kevin had more trouble managing it and got himself scratched up in the process, but he wasn't concerned with a few dings. There were gouges in the ground on the other side of the fence, as if Kenya had fought to slow Glick down. He saw the impression of her heels.

More blood. It was still wet and glistening in the moonlight.

A dog barked somewhere in the distance, lonely and hopeless, and Wallace paused again, then set off to the east. This area was an urban jungle—twisted old live oaks, tangles of thorn bushes and trash trees. A possum, its grayish white fur matted with debris, peered at them blindly before ambling away. Kevin had no idea what kind of dangerous vermin Dallas might harbor; blundering around in the woods of Bon Temps was a sure way to get snake bit, or have a snapping turtle take a hunk out of you. He didn't imagine Wallace cared much, so he let the vampire break the trail, careful to follow exactly in his steps.

They broke through into another open area. It had once been some kind of brick building, but nature had long since shown it who was boss, and the remains were a couple of barely standing walls and a cracked concrete floor. Vandals had taken everything else and left a generous deposit of trash behind—condoms, needles, crack vials, bottles, fast-food bags.

In the corner between those two remaining walls stood Quentin Glick. He had Kenya in a bone-breaking hold against him, and she was definitely the worse for wear; Kevin saw rips in her jacket and jeans from the fence, blood running down the side of her face, and she was holding one of her hands at an odd angle. But she was alive, and she was
angry
. It crackled off her in waves.

When she spotted Kevin, her eyes widened and then squeezed shut for a moment. When she opened them she said, “Damn you, Pryor. Get the hell out of here.”

“Not happening,” he said. “You hang in there.”

“Got nothing else to do,” she said, but there was something in her eyes, her face that made him go tense and still inside.
She's going to move,
he thought, and he dreaded it so hard it felt like a knife turning in his guts. She'd accepted her own death. She just wanted to make sure Glick got what was coming to him.

Jesus
, he had no time. Wallace wasn't moving; there were other vampires here, too, crouched in the shadows, watching, but they weren't going in to save Kenya. It was as if they were waiting for some signal.

When it came, it was invisible to human eyes; maybe it was Stan Davis and his telepathy again. They all
moved
, white flashes in the starlight, vicious and deadly. Kenya was already twisting violently against Glick's broken hands, and the shotgun Kevin held wasn't going to work because she was in the line of the spread; before he even completed the thought, he was releasing the shotgun, and as it began to fall toward the ground, as the vampires closed in on Glick, as Kenya completed her turn, it felt as if everything ticked slower . . . slower . . . slower . . . except that his hand was moving in regular time, flashing toward the holster and closing and drawing with the same fluid motion he'd practiced all those hours at the range and
snap
the shot hit his senses at the same time the shock traveled up his arm and a black hole opened between Glick's bloody, rabid eyes.

By the time Wallace seized Glick, he was already dead, and Kenya was falling forward to the ground.

Kevin let out a wordless yell and lunged for her, went down on his knees amid the crack vials and needles and condoms and didn't give a good goddamn about any of that as he reached out to roll her over.
Don't be dead, don't be dead, don't be . . .

“Nice shot,” Kenya said. She sounded almost normal, but he felt the vibration under her skin, the tremors of adrenaline and the aftershocks of terror.

He didn't even think about it. He just grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. It didn't feel like embracing a partner. It felt more like coming home.

“She's alive,” Wallace said from behind them. “You owe Stan.”

“The hell I do,” Kevin said. “I shot him before you even touched him. Stan owes
me
.”

There was a moment of silence, of chill and whispering danger, and then Wallace shrugged. “I guess that would be between the two of you. Good luck with that conversation.”

The moment was over. Kenya's muscles were starting to tense, the animal comfort of their embrace passing, and he let her go before she had to reject him by pulling away. They didn't meet each other's eyes, but he saw that she was smiling. It looked a little shaky, but genuine enough that she felt like she needed to turn her head to hide it.

He didn't offer to help her up, and she wouldn't have accepted it. They just climbed separately to their feet, and Kenya retrieved the shotgun from where he'd dropped it as he holstered his sidearm.

When he looked up, the vampires were gone. Glick was gone, too. They'd carried his body off, and Kevin expected it wouldn't ever be seen again. The official
Wanted
posters would go up in Shreveport, and that dead young man's family would never have the comfort of closure, but at least Glick was done.

He expected to feel something after shooting a man in the head, but all he felt at the moment was a dull, ringing emptiness and a distant relief.

“Kevin?” Kenya was watching him. “We need to get out of here.”

It had been a hell of a long day, and the thought of getting the hell away from Dallas, from Stan Davis and the oppressive sense of being watched, made him say, “Let's get back home.”

They spent the drive not talking, but also not really feeling the need to talk; he pulled over at a rest stop along the way and got out the first-aid kit to clean up her cuts so they wouldn't get infected. Her wrist wasn't broken, just sprained, and he wrapped it tight. She let him do it, a concession of vulnerability that wasn't like Kenya Jones at all.
As long as we don't say anything,
he thought.
As long as we don't face it, maybe it can seem like a real thing.
Because he knew it couldn't be. His family would never accept her. Hers would never accept him. And then there was the working-together problem. There were rules and all.

But he knew what he felt, and she knew, and when he put the last bandage on, he met her eyes and sat back on his heels. Held the stare.

She leaned forward and without a single word kissed him.

It was sweet and warm and made his heart stop with longing, and he knew he didn't respond the way he wanted but he was too shocked, and it was over too fast, and then Kenya was buckling herself back into her seat and staring straight ahead out the car window. All he could do was stand up, clear his throat, and put away the first-aid kit before climbing back behind the wheel of the cruiser.

The silence continued, but after a while, after another mile or two of asphalt burning away under the tires, he found he was holding her bandaged hand in his, and the pressure of her fingers, light and strong and constant, soothed some ache inside him he didn't know he had.

They made it into Bon Temps just as dawn was warming the horizon a light pink.

“You never did get to take a shower,” Kenya said. “You still smell like swamp water.”

“You rolled around in crack house trash,” he said. “I'm not judging.”

“Guess we need to check in at the station and report back to Bud about what happened.”

“Do we?” He looked over at her, and her eyebrows rose. “What the hell are we going to say? That I shot a fugitive outside our jurisdiction?”

She didn't have an answer for that. She just put her head back against the headrest and sighed. “You know what the worst thing is?”

“I couldn't even guess.”

“We still don't know who threw that damn suitcase in the swamp. I'm not going to sleep until I figure that out.”

He laughed, and he couldn't stop laughing, and he had to pull the car over because it hurt so bad and so good, and for the first time in a long time he heard Kenya laughing without restraint, and she never let go of his hand. Never once.

What are we going to say?

Not a damn thing,
he thought.
Not a damn thing. Because it's nobody's damn business.

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

Christopher Golden's story “Tyger, Tyger” begins a few months after the final Sookie novel. Quinn, my favorite weretiger, is having a very bad day, which promises to get much, much worse.

—

Quinn watched the speedometer, kept the needle pinned at the limit, and tried to stop his hands from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. He had punched in a classical station on his satellite radio that played mostly baroque music, a secret pleasure. He liked all sorts of music but prided himself on maintaining an even temperament, and when stress or anger threatened to get the better of him, the beautiful strings of some of those baroque arrangements soothed him.

Soothed the savage,
he thought, with an expression that was half snarl and half grin. If someone else had said that to him, he would've been offended, but he had to be honest with himself. He was a full-blooded weretiger, after all. In the right circumstances, he had savagery to spare.

His cell phone rang. He'd stuck it into the console between the seats but had forgotten that it was linked into the car via Bluetooth, and now the number showed up on the little screen at the center of the dashboard. Quinn made his living as an event planner and the caller was a client.

He tightened his fingers on the wheel, knuckles going white as he waited for the ringing to cease. When it had, he reached into the console and plucked out the phone, then tried gamely to keep his eyes on the road as he powered it off and tossed it onto the seat beside him. No clients today.

Quinn steadied himself, then glanced down to see that he'd let the car creep up to nearly eighty miles per hour when the speed limit was sixty-five. As he eased off the pedal and the speedometer needle dipped, he spotted the nose of a Louisiana state police car ahead, half-hidden behind the supporting column of an overpass.

“Stay right there, my friend,” Quinn said as he drove past the police car, checking his speedometer again.

Sixty-eight miles per hour. The cop stayed on the side of the road.
Good for you,
Quinn thought.
Good for both of us.

Not that he was in the habit of starting fights with police officers, but if there was ever going to be a day when it would be easy to rile the tiger in him, it would be today.

Ever since the world's shifters had revealed their existence to the public, things had changed. When vampires had done it, fear and curiosity had raged, but the typical human expected to be able to look at a vampire and notice that he or she was something other than ordinary. It wasn't that simple, but many humans comforted themselves with the idea that it could be. Now that the two-natured—beings who could shapeshift between a human form and that of an animal—had stepped into the light, human society was more unsettled than ever. There was virtually zero chance that your mailman could be a vampire . . . but could he turn into a wolf or a dog? A distinct possibility.

That unsettled the hell out of people.

Incidents of violence had begun on the first day. Though new laws protected his kind, Quinn had heard many stories of persecution. He didn't worry for himself, but for his mother and his sister, Frannie, not to mention his girlfriend, Tijgerin, and their baby. He comforted himself with the knowledge that it was easier for weres to live among humans than it was for vampires. Most people had at least one two-natured friend or relative and never even knew it.

Today, his mother was foremost on his mind. Unlike vampires, Quinn's people suffered the tribulations of aging, and as they grew old and infirm they needed to be looked after in a safe environment. Once, it had been necessary to hide them, to keep their true nature a secret. Now aging and ailing shifters were kept apart from their human counterparts purely to ensure that they did not put themselves or anyone else in peril.

Vicki Quinn had spent a long time in nursing homes specifically for the two-natured. She suffered delusions and sometimes violent schizophrenic behavior stemming from psychological trauma, but recently her condition had deteriorated further. When she had begun to experience deepening dementia, the doctors at her previous residence had recommended a move to Evergreen Manor, a newer facility that offered treatments that might slow the progression of her illness.

Quinn turned off the highway and followed dimly remembered directions that, minutes later, brought him along a narrow, tree-lined street where a black wrought-iron fence guarded the grounds of Evergreen. For the sake of the residents, the facility's director would have said, to keep them from wandering off. But the fence was as much for the safety of the humans living near the property as for the patients. Either a werewolf with senile dementia or a pup going through the madness that sometimes gripped them during their teen years could do plenty of damage.

Tense and flushed with frustration, he gave his name to the guard at the booth and was waved through the gate. He said nothing to the guard about the circumstances of his visit but sensed the man's uneasiness. Would he call ahead and alert the administration that a big, bald, pissed-off were had arrived? Quinn thought he might.

The grounds were a lovely, rolling green, with flowers around the base of each tree and around the Roman fountain at the center of the lawn. Quinn inhaled the many rich scents of the place, and it calmed him a bit. He was here now. They could dodge him on the telephone but they couldn't ignore his physical presence. The time had come for his questions to be answered.

The home had a valet, but he ignored the service and parked the car himself. It tweeted as he thumbed the locking mechanism, and he headed for the ornate front steps without looking back.

“Good afternoon, sir,” a well-groomed young man said as Quinn walked through the door. He sat behind a desk, pompous and proper, as if he were a concierge instead of an ordinary clerk. “Can I help you?”

Quinn glanced around the marble lobby with its churchlike vaulted ceilings and studied the residents being slowly escorted here and there. He examined the faces of doctors and nurses and physical therapists and recognized none of them, which wasn't a huge surprise, since he'd only visited his mother there twice before. To his knowledge, his sister, Frannie, who waited tables out in New Mexico, had never bothered.

“My name's John Quinn,” he said. “I'm here to see my mother.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said with a broad smile. “And her name?”

“Quinn. You have a lot of Quinns here?”

The clerk—the little plastic tag on his chest identified him as Andrew—smiled more thinly. Even less convincingly than before.

“I don't know, sir. Let me just look her up for you,” Andrew said, tapping away at his computer keyboard. After a moment, his eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, sir. According to her schedule she's in physical therapy at the moment. I'll call up and let them know you're here, if you'd just like to take a seat.”

Quinn's pulse thundered at his temples. He breathed deeply, rising to his full six and a half feet, and glared at the clerk. Women always seemed to love the purple of his eyes, but when he was angry they grew darker, almost black.

“You know, most days I'm as polite as can be,” he said, “but I won't be taking a seat today.”

The clerk blinked nervously. “Sir?”

Quinn sniffed the air, breathed deeply again. He frowned as he glanced once more around the lobby. Then he stared at the desk clerk.

“You're human.”

Andrew nodded vigorously. More blinking. “Yes, sir.”

“The old place was staffed by two-natureds. When I was at Evergreen last, the same was true here. Now I smell humans all over the place. What is going on?”

The clerk gave a sheepish shrug. “It's becoming more and more common, Mr. Quinn. Ever since weres went public and piqued the curiosity of humans, we get volunteers. People are intrigued and want to help.”

Quinn snarled. “Gawkers. That's what you're talking about.”

“No, sir. Psychologists and nutritionists and orderlies and physician assistants, even a doctor or two.”

Quinn waved him away. “I want to see my mother, and I want to see her now. I've been calling for days and am constantly told she's sleeping or in PT or in the bath or out on the grounds with her minders.”

“Bad timing, I suppose,” Andrew offered. “And again today, sir. But if you'll take a seat, I'll have my supervisor come down and speak with—”

Quinn brought his fist down on the desk hard enough that a cup of pens spilled over and the surface cracked, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the lobby.

“Bullshit!” he snapped. “I'm tired of the runaround. This is my mother we're talking about. You people have a lot of explaining to do, but you can't keep me from seeing her. You're going to take me to her—”

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said from behind him.

Quinn spun to see a young, broad-chested security guard approaching. The guy unsnapped the holster on his hip and drew out a Taser gun.

“Please step away from the desk and put your hands behind your head.”

Quinn glared at him. “You must be joking. If you want to call the police, please do so. I'd like to speak with them myself. But I'm the wronged party here, kid, so you just stay where you are.”

“Sir, I'm not going to ask a second time,” the security guard said, coming toward him, ready for a fight, the Taser aimed at Quinn's chest. He thrust the Taser forward, about to pull the trigger. Quinn snarled, grabbed his wrist, and slammed him against the wall, shaking the Taser from his hand.

“Anyone else want to try keeping me from my mother?” he growled.

The
tick-tock
of high heels echoed off the linoleum and Quinn glanced over to see a tall, shapely woman approaching. She had ginger hair and wore a well-tailored skirt and jacket combination with old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses.

“Not at all, Mr. Quinn,” she said. “I'm Dr. Sondra Delisle, the new director of resident services. I'm sorry for the delay and I understand your frustration. Your mother's in our newly renovated dayroom with some of her friends. If you'd like to follow me, I'll take you to her.”

“I thought she was in physical therapy,” Quinn said, glancing at the clerk.

Dr. Delisle smiled thinly. “The therapist is out today. I'm sorry, Mr. Quinn, have we given you some reason to distrust us?”

Quinn stared at her, heart pounding, teeth still gritted but feeling foolish. He released the security guard, happy he hadn't broken the guy's wrist.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm usually in better control of my temper.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Delisle replied. “A man only has one mother. Come this way.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Quinn tried to give her his most charming smile but thought it must have come off as awkward. He shoved his hands into his pockets as if they were just as embarrassed by their actions as he was and accompanied her down a corridor, up a short set of steps, and then into another side corridor, where their footfalls echoed oddly off the walls. He frowned as he listened to their steps, surprised that he couldn't hear the voices of the residents in the dayroom yet.

“How far is the dayroom?” he asked.

“Just at the end of the hall and through a set of doors. Wait till you see it. The residents have all sorts of games, computers for their own use, a separate reading room . . . and the upgrades continue. We're putting in a new gym, specially tailored to the needs of our less able residents . . .”

Quinn inhaled, frowning deeply. He smelled something unpleasant. In a nursing home, that in itself was far from strange, but this was something else. A musk. A pheromonal scent he hadn't expected to find here—true fear. Not the confusion of madness or the dark dread of illness and death, but something inching closer to terror.

As they reached the end of the hall, the double doors swung open. Quinn started to back away, but too late, as a man stepped through with a rifle aimed at him and pulled the trigger, firing three shots.

Quinn tried to throw himself out of the way, but the corridor left little room to move. He hit the wall and slid to the floor, twisting to look at the darts that stuck out of his side and leg.

Tranquilizers.

Quinn roared, lurching up at Dr. Delisle. “You bitch,” he slurred. “Where's my mother?”

The man shot him with two more darts.

“You'll see her soon,” Dr. Delisle said with a beatific smile, as blackness swam in at the edges of Quinn's vision.

Then he was out.

He did not dream.