Dead Roses for a Blue Lady (22 page)

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) vampire's flesh bubbled and melted, dripping from her bones like wax from a candle.

Within seconds the Contessa had been reduced to a thrashing skeleton, and yet she continued to scream.

The fire, having consumed the bed, quickly spread to the red velvet wallpaper. The walls ignited like dry kindling, and suddenly the entire room was ablaze. Sonja leapt through the curtain of fire and smoke that had swallowed the door, rolling as she hit the hallway floor to extinguish the flames clinging to her jacket. The hair on the right side of her head was burned to the scalp and heat blisters were rising across her back, but she barely noticed.

The interior of the mansion was already filling with heavy, acrid smoke. As she hurried down the stairs towards the front door, Sonja felt a chill on her spine. Someone, or something, was watching her. She turned and saw what looked like a tall man the color of shadow standing on the landing above her, watching her with eyes made of fire.

Sonja ran out the front door and all the way to her car, throwing it into gear the second the engine turned over. She was halfway down the drive before she bothered to close the door. She didn't know why the old blood-witch's patron had chosen to lay low and didn't care. Vampire slaying was one thing, but demon-hunting was a whole other ball game.

Inside the Contessa's funeral pyre, a shadow shaped like a man stood in the grand foyer and laughed as the grandfather clock with the zodiac face struck thirteen. Upon the final strike, a pillar of fire punched through the roof, and the final visitor to Red Velvet Manor's gilded halls closed its burning front door behind him.

The Nonesuch Horror

The evil came with the night, adding its shadow to those already cast by the half-moon that hung in the New Mexico sky.

Its arrival was not presaged by the howling of dogs or the shooting of stars, but by a hot, dry wind gusting in from the Continental Divide that made babies whimper in their cradles and the bones of old women creak like ship timbers.

One such old woman, sleeping nose to tail, awoke from a dream of rabbits and lost love and stared at the stars stretched above her head with amber eyes. She sniffed the night air and caught a scent she did not like. The old woman twitched her ears and clicked her teeth, as she was wont to do when uneasy.

There was trouble headed her way; trouble that walked like a man. It had been a very long time since she had last smelled such a thing, but not so long that she had forgotten the beast that carried such a scent.

The old woman got to her feet and trotted back in the direction of the shelter she called home. There would be no more dreams of warmer days and chasing rabbits that night.

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) It wouldn't be fair to call Nonesuch a flyspeck on the map, but it wouldn't exactly be lying, either.

Even back in its glory days, before the copper mine played out, Nonesuch wasn't much of a town. It was more a collection of houses clustered around a company store than a real community. When the Depression hit for real, Nonesuch took the blow like a hedgehog.

By the time World War II rolled around it was a legitimate ghost town.

For the better part of seventy years Nonesuch was forgotten, save for the occasional hermit or footloose hippie. Then about ten years ago, a group of strangers stumbled across the old ghost town, and Nonesuch was reborn.

The strangers who came to Nonesuch were strange indeed, but certainly no less peculiar than many of those who had made their way to New Mexico in the past. In the due course of time they drew up a charter, elected a town council, and appointed someone to keep the peace. That someone was Skinner Cade.

Since Sheriff Cade more or less comprised the entire Nonesuch Police Department, he did not wear a proper uniform, like the lawmen down in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Even though he wore a pair of dungarees and a denim work shirt with a star cut from sheet metal pinned to his chest, and his squad car was a late model Jeep Wrangler outfitted with an old CB radio that worked when it damn well felt like it, Cade took his responsibility to the citizens under his protection very seriously. After all, everyone had the right to be safe from enemies and live free of fear, no matter what kind of skin they wore.

The day began as it always did for Cade. He woke before the sunrise, careful not to disturb Rosie as he padded into the bathroom for a quick shower. By the time he was finished, Rosie was awake. She was sitting naked on the corner of the bed, braiding the long, dark hair that hung to her waist.

"Sleep well?" she asked as he dried himself off.

"I had strange dreams," he said, yawning wide enough to display his back teeth. "It felt like I was being watched."

"You look tired," she said, caressing his thigh. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather come back to bed?"

"Believe me, honey, there's nothing that appeals to me more," Cade sighed, dropping down next to her. "But today's perimeter check."

Rosie leaned forward, resting her chin on his shoulder. "Couldn't you put it off?"

"It takes me all day to check on the farthest points. Besides, what if Wiley Simms has fallen down the shithouse again? It would be another week before anyone would find him."

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)

"You're always using Wiley falling down the outhouse as an example of why you have to go to work."

"Well, it was a pretty traumatic situation." "For you or him?" "Hey, I'm the one with the acute sense of smell!"

By the time he finished dressing, Rosie was already frying up a pan of bacon and a skillet full of eggs on the wood stove. The twins sat at the kitchen table, forks at ready.

"Morning, Daddy," they chimed in unison.

"Morning, Kachina; Morning, Wyler," Cade said, kissing his daughter on the top of the head while tousling his son's hair. A heaping platter of bacon and scrambled eggs arrived on the table as Cade sat down.

"Now, kids, let your daddy have some food," Rosie chided. "He's got work to do today."

"What do you have to do today, Daddy?" asked Wyler.

"Perimeter check."

"You think Wiley fell down the shithouse again?" Kachina giggled.

"Kachina Cade! Language,
please!"
Rosie admonished, fixing her daughter with a disapproving glare.

"Sorry, Mama. I meant do you think Wiley fell down the
crap
house again?"

"That's better," Rosie said. "But not by much."

"So, what are you kids supposed to be learning today?"

"Miz Nascha is teaching us about the big bomb they built in Los Alamos."

"Is that a fact?"

"Some of the littler kids at school got scared when Miz Nascha started talking about wars and the bomb."

"What about you two? Are y'all scared?"

The twins exchanged glances, but it was Kachina who answered. She had always been the dominant of the pair. "A little bit. Yeah. I guess. But World War Two was a long time ago, right? They don't have bombs anymore, do they?"

Cade pulled up in front of the Nonesuch General Store, which also doubled as the post office and town hall. The store's proprietor was seated on the wide wooden porch in a rocking chair, perusing the newspaper.

"Morning, Uncle Billy," Cade called out as he climbed onto the porch.

"Morning, Skin," Uncle Billy replied, peering over the top of the paper. "What's new in the world?"

"You tell me," Cade chuckled. "You're the one with the newspaper."

"So I am," the older man chuckled.

Uncle Billy wasn't Skinner Cade's biological uncle, at least not as far as either was aware.

The title was more out of respect than kinship. Although the shopkeeper looked to be no more than fifty, and was in top physical condition, Skinner knew Uncle Billy was far older than he looked. He was by far the oldest male in the Nonesuch community, and his wisdom and practical knowledge were highly valued.

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) Although he was a shopkeeper
now,
Uncle Billy had done damn near everything, at one time or another, from merchant marine to cowboy to ramrod on a railroad gang. He had made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime, knew how to deliver babies, set broken limbs and nurse sick calves. And, to hear him tell it, he'd been killed more than once.

Uncle Billy was one of Nonesuch's first new citizens. He had not been amongst the twenty or so original settlers out of Arizona, but sought them out shortly after they reached the former ghost town. It was Billy who refurbished and stocked the old General Store, using his own personal fortune to provide Nonesuch with its necessities and the occasional luxury.

"What's the date on that paper?" Cade asked.

"Relatively fresh. It's just two days old. Cissy brung it in when she fetched the mail." Billy pursed his lips in disgust. "Seems Santa Fe got itself a boney-fide serial killer."

"That a fact? What are they calling this one?"

"The Santa Fe Slasher." Uncle Billy clucked his tongue and shook his head. "Sounds like a ball team, don't it? It's a shame what folks get up to, ain't it, Skin?"

"It sure is," Cade agreed. "Cissy already back with the mail?"

"Yep. She an' Cully left just as the sun was comin' up. She's inside sortin'.

The interior of the store was dark, cool, and smelled of animal feed and aged wood. The store was divided into two sections. On one side was a long wooden counter fronted by a wrought-iron teller's cage, behind which stood a wooden cabinet full of different-sized pigeonholes. Behind the cage stood a young woman, little more than a girl, really, her blonde hair hanging to the middle of her waist in a tidy braid, dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a poet's blouse. She stood with her back to the door, popping the various letters into the appropriate cubbyholes.

"Morning, Cissy."

Nonesuch's postmistress turned and smiled at Nonesuch's sheriff. "Morning, Skin. How are Rosie and the twins?"

"Fine as ever." Cade glanced around. "Where's Cully?"

"He's out back splitting wood."

Cissy and her younger brother Cully were another of Nonesuch's recruits. Six years ago they had wandered into town dressed only in rags and dirt, Cissy all of eleven, Cully nearing four. Orphaned and long used to relying on one another, they were as close to feral children as any Skinner could remember seeing. It was Uncle Billy who more-or-less adopted them, stating that he, too, had once been an orphan. In the intervening six years, Cissy had grown into a stunningly beautiful and impressively strong-willed young woman, while Cully...

Well, Cully had grown.

Twice a week Cissy, with Cully riding in the back, drove Uncle Billy's pick-up down to Los Alamos, where she would pick up supplies for the store and drop off and pick up the mail for the entire town at the Mail Boxes Etc. Because of her unique position in the Nonesuch community, Cissy was the only one who traveled outside the perimeter on a regular basis.

The only other regular visitor from the outside was Tommy Bronco, the owner of Jicirilla Fuel & Oil, who drove up from the reservation once a month to refill the aboveground tank that served as the community gas station and swap out propane tanks in the various

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) homes.

Others in the community occasionally ventured forth into the wide world, mostly for economic reasons. As head of the Coyotero Tribal Arts Collective, Rosie made quarterly trips to a trendy gallery in Santa Fe, where she sold the traditional blankets, dance shawls and pottery she and the others made by hand to the owner, who resold them to even trendier tourists and wealthy collectors in New York and Los Angeles. The six-figure income the handicrafts generated was placed in the community treasure chest, which went to pay for those necessities, such as feed and fuel, that Nonesuch's citizens could not generate themselves.

Most of the homes had gardens, where they grew their own corn, squash, and beans, as well as chicken coops. The only building with electric lights was the general store, which ran off a generator. The rest of the community warmed themselves with stoves fed by propane or wood, while solar panels heated water that was pulled from wells by windmills.

The casual outside observer might assume from the proliferation of solar panels and high-tech windmills that Nonesuch was a commune full of back-to-nature, tree-hugging vegetarian hippies. That is the danger of allowing yourself to be deceived by outward appearances. For a casual observer would have no way of seeing that every household contained more than one born hunter and that there was always meat on the table at every meal.

Most of those who lived beyond the knot of homes clustered about the general store and the schoolhouse were ranchers. Some raised sheep for wool, others tended cattle for meat, and all of them bred horses for transportation. However, there were one or two members of the Nonesuch community who were quite different from the rest. These were refered to as the Old Timers; the quasi-hermits who first settled in the area while it was still a ghost town.

Most of the Old Timers were prospectors, living in primitive shacks that were little more than lean-tos. It was Cade's duty to stop by and briefly visit with each individual rancher and prospector, to make sure that they were doing well and find out if any of them had seen anything unusual since the last visit.

Wiley Simms' shack had once been the foreman's office of the Nonesuch Mining Company. It stood four feet off the ground on sturdy pillar-like legs and had a front porch, stairs and actual windows, although old burlap bags now covered most of the empty panes.

Wiley's burro, Sookie, sat in the shade under the shack, watching the sheriff warily as she munched on her oats. A hundred yards behind the Old Timer's shack stood the gaping mouth of the old copper mine.