Strange Angels (24 page)

Right enough.

“Am I still human?” Graves took the next plate after I rinsed it off, swiped at it with the towel. Scrubbed at it a little harder as color mounted in his golden cheeks. Am I?“Yeah, sure. Of course you are.”

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He shrugged. “I dunno. I felt like I wanted to kill him.”

You’re not the only one.I suppressed a shudder. “I’m not surprised. If he is what he says he is, you guys are pretty much enemies. Wulfen don’t like suckers. Or even anything that smells like suckers.”

That managed to prick his interest. “Is it like a big war between them?”

“Not exactly. They’re just . . . well, they’re like jocks and nerds. Or hyenas and lions. They coexist, right, but they’re different breeds and they don’t mix. And they’re always on the lookout for each other.” I paused. “A group of wulfen might help another group of wulfen or something else they don’t like against a sucker, and suckers sometimes kill stray wulfen, of whatever type. There are lots of types, like tribes, and the suckers are organized into tribes, too. Their allegiances shift, but the suckers never band together to take out wulfen, and the wulfen don’t really go after suckers unless it’s to avenge one of their own. So they have this kind of agreement: Each group doesn’t really hang out with the other.” I handed him a dripping glass and was kind of surprised. Guess I knew a little more than I thought. That’s a relief.

“Okay.” He nodded, dried the glass with finicky care, and put it up. “So. Warding the house. That some sort of witchcraft?”

What do you know about witchcraft?“More like folk magic. My Gran was a tooth-curer and hex-lifter out in the sticks back East. A wisewoman. You start throwing the W -word around and people get a little tense.” They still burn people in some places. Even here in the good ol’ US of A. There was that one town—

“I guess so. So what’s involved in this?” He looked far more interested than I’d ever seen him in school, and it did wonders for him. His face looked leaner, more defined and less babyish. Maybe it was the light through the kitchen window, since Christophe had looked pretty nice under it, too.

God help me, I’d just dumbed down everything Gran taught me into folk cures. She would have just said, A little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that, and never you mind what I call it if’n it works, while fixing him with that beady-eyed stare that had made more than one grown adult quail.

They hadn’t called Gran a witch, but nobody wanted to cross her. And they would come to her door at dusk or in the middle of the night, for cures or other things. Payment was in eggs or salt pork, or herbs, or a bolt of material Gran would make dresses or quilts from. Those quilts sold for a good price, too, since rumor had it that Gran Anderson’s quilts would keep lightning from the house or help make for an easy pregnancy. I’d thought that was normal until she sent me down to the schoolhouse in the valley. And then later, after she died and Dad came to collect me, I’d found out other people didn’t take spitting in someone’s shadow as a deadly insult, didn’t wash their floors with yarrow, and had no idea how dark and inimical the night could be.

“Dru?” Graves looked a little worried. I came back to myself with a jolt and finished washing the spaghetti pot from a couple nights ago. All shiny-clean. “Some salt water. I’ve got my Gran’s rowan wand, too. And we’ve got a bunch of white candles. One of those should do fine.”

CHAPTER 22

They smell likedust, paper, old leather, and each one of them costs a pretty penny. There’s Aberforth’s Creatures of Shadow , Belt-Norsen’s Demoniaca , Pretton’s Encyclopedia of

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the Darkness , and Coilfer’s weird but totally readable Collection of True Folktales . Which I’ve scared myself with a number of times, because Patton Coilfer could write . Dad told me that he came to a bad end, something involving an African curse and a bunch of masks, one of which had belonged to the semi-famous Sir Edwin Colin Wilson. That’senough to give anyone who’s read True Folktales nightmares, let me tell you. We had other books, but those were the first I pulled out. After a few seconds of thought, I pulled out another prize possession—Haly Yolden’s Ars Lupica , with its tooled leather cover and worn gilt-edged pages. Graves was making coffee—probably too weak, of course—while I spread them out in the living room and started flipping through indexes. It’s funny, a lot of books that would be otherwise useful don’t have indexes. You have to kind of shoot by guess, and that’s never fun. Especially when you start sneezing uncontrollably at the dust, or when you have to find something in a hurry. The only thing more annoying is having to go through microfiche. Real microfiche, not just the electronic captures of ’fiche they’ve been doing whenever they have funding lately. Nothing like scanning ancient newspapers on a ’fiche reader to make you feel old and dry. And give you a headache like a mule kicking in your skull.

I had to go through a couple of different spellings ( dhampire, dhamphir, dhampyr ) before I found djamphir and figured out they were all basically the same thing, and when I did, I settled down for some scanning. True to form, Coilfer was the best written and most useful of the four.

The djamphir —he spelled it the way Christophe had pronounced it—was a half-human vampire killer. Some had a thirst for blood; most were rumored to have bone problems. Lots of them were twins, but girl twins were never mentioned. Just boys, like a lot of other things in the books about the Real World. It’s like girls are invisible. Anyway, they were supposed to be often born without bones, and most of the legends were from the Balkans. If djamphir survived to adolescence or adulthood, they hunted wampyr or upir —suckers. Suckers had the hots for human women in a big way, and often bred with them. The result of those unions were djamphir , and once there was a taint of sucker in the bloodline, there were always djamphir, no matter how many generations passed.

The half or quarter or whatever bit of wampyr in them made djamphir good vampire hunters. They were always paid whatever they asked for, in cattle, clothes, or “even women.”

Yeah. The Real World isn’t big on feminism.

Djamphirwere long-lived, possibly immortal— ifthe suckers didn’t hunt back. But a lot of the suckers did. A lot of them killed their own part-human progeny, too. With a vengeance.

I had to sit back and think about that for a moment. Ugh. That’s awful .

“Coffee,” Graves said, and stopped in the door, looking at me a little weird. “You okay?”

We’re going to play a game, Dru.

I shook my head, pushing the memory away. “This is gruesome stuff.”

“Figures. So, is he telling the truth?” He handed me my cow mug, the one that matched the cookie jar.

“Haven’t figured that out yet.” I pushed the Aberforth and the Pretton over to him. “Look in those for loup-garou , but don’t lose the pages I’ve marked, okay? And that one right

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there, Ars Lupica. Check that too.”

“ Loup-garou.” He looked down at the scrap of paper I’d written it on. “Okay. You got it.”

“You’re probably really good at this research thing.” I blew across the top of my coffee, took a small sip, and was pleasantly surprised. It was getting better.

“This doesn’t seem like math.” He spread his free hand, looked at it. Tendons stood out on the back, his fingers blunt and nail-bitten, his knuckles chapped a bit but getting better.

“And a lot of this is a direct violation of physics. Conservation of energy should make some of this stuff impossible.”

“I don’t know about that. I just know what I see.” I took another sip. I’m not one for a lot of caffeine, but I felt fuzzy-headed. Slow and stupid.

“Yeah. That’s the trouble with theories; the real world is always kicking the shit out of them.” He settled down, stripping his hair back from his face. “Doesn’t this sort of shit, well, bother you?”

I thought about it. “You mean, like it shouldn’t exist?” I couldn’t express it better than that.

But he understood, or I’d understood him. “Yeah. Exactly. It’s . . . well, it’s kind of obscene.”

That’s one way of putting it.“So’s a lot of other stuff we take for granted. Burning down rain forests. Serial killers. Rush-hour traffic. Life is pretty obscene whatever way you slice it, Graves.” I looked back down at the Coilfer. Having your dad turned into a zombie kind of takes a cake, though. I’m not sure which cake it takes, but it definitely takes one of them. “This sort of stuff is just icing, you know. On the cake.”

“Some icing.” He flipped immediately to the indexes, I noticed. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath, another sip, and pulled my attention back to the page. Thedjamphir can use a variety of means to kill a wampyr , of which the most popular in folklore is a hawthorn stake. . . .

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It was a productive afternoon, even though I took down enough coffee to feel jittery by four o’clock. I closed the last book with a sigh. We were as ready as our small collection of texts could make us.

“So we’re fairly sure?” Graves kept repeating “fairly” as if it were an exotic foreign word.

“I’m not going to get all hairy, like that thing we saw?”

“Nope. According to this, the loup-garou ’s a skinchanger, not actually a werwulf. Congratulations, you bucked the odds. About all you’ll have is a hunger for raw meat.” I shuddered. “Which you might even be able to eat, with the boost to your immune system.”

The way he squinched up his face made me smile.

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that dietary change. But nothing about girl . . . djamphir ?” He tasted the word, rolling it around on his tongue, and bolted the last swallow of his coffee. It had to be cold by now.

I looked out the front window at the mess of the front yard, bits of brown grass showing through like mange wherever he and Christophe had scuffed the snow all the way down. The sky was lowering, threatening still more as sundown approached, and the radio gave faint squawks about a weather advisory. Why they would bother now , after days of this stuff, was beyond me.

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Bits of wood were thrown in an arc, the porch railing completely shattered and flung out in an oddly perfect line. They’d hit it hard .

“Nope. Nothing on that.” I didn’t mention anything about my mother. It was nobody’s business, even with Christophe’s dark hints. I always thought I’d got the touch from Gran, along the Anderson side.

Now that I thought about it, nobody ever mentioned Mom’s family. It just wasn’t talked about. I didn’t even know her maiden name, though I could probably dig up their marriage certificate. It was probably in the fireproof box.

But I wondered, and it wasn’t a comfortable wondering. It was like having one of the legs your world rests on whomped away, and I wasn’t too steady already. All the legs of the table were getting chopped out from under me. Mom. Whomp. Gran. Whomp. Dad. Whomp.

If this was a cartoon, I’d be teetering on just one leg with my face twisted up in a picture of dismay.

It was late. Evening was gathering in the bluish shadows, even the reflection of light off the snow fading. Under the coffee jitter, exhaustion and sleeplessness plucked at my eyelids. My arms and legs were heavy, my shoulder hurt, and I knew I should probably take something for the way my back was twitching and sore.

“You hungry?” Graves asked, and I came back from staring at the front yard and realized I was. But given the choice between going to the store and getting some information under my belt, the information was probably the better bet. You had to be alive to eat, after all. I could always go tomorrow.

Which reminded me, there was the money situation to think about. And—

There was a flurry of taps at the door. Light, mocking taps. I jumped, letting out a thin little cry, and Graves flinched, knocking over his empty coffee cup. The door swept open, and I dove for a gun, my right leg prickling because it had gone to sleep. I rolled, my aching back fetching up against the ammo crate, and clicked the safety off.

I didn’t even think about it. Graves stupidly crouched right where he was, his eyes as big and green as a kid’s, flicking nervously between me and the doorway. The air around him shimmered faintly, stilled.

“Easy, little birdie,” Christophe called down the hall. “I can smell your adrenaline, you know. Come help me carry this in. I hope there’s some coffee left.”

Graves looked at me. We hadn’t even seen him approach, I’d just been staring out at the front yard. You could see the walk and the driveway, for Christ’s sake. Did he just show up out of thin air? Even in the daytime ?

Yeah. Pretty obscene.I clicked the safety back on and let out a breath I hadn’t been aware of holding. Dad would have kicked my ass for it, of course—holding your breath while under fire is a bad idea. You can pass out or just not think clearly if you’re starving your brain of oxygen. There were even stories about people passing out because they were holding their breath in combat.

I was lying there on the floor, feeling a cold draft tiptoe down the hall and into the living room, and all of a sudden I felt very, very lonely.

“Come on out, little rabbits,” Christophe called cheerfully. I could just see him grinning.

“Come see what Dyado Koleda brought you, eh?”

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What the hell is he talking about?

Graves pushed himself up. “Jesus,” he whispered. He edged through the doorway into the hall, and I realized that he was trying to stay out of my field of fire. Smart kid.

“There you are.” There was the crinkle of plastic bags. “Help me with this. I stopped at the grocery store. The air smells of snow again, and not just a little bit, either.”