Cade pushed the brim of his cowboy hat so that it rested on the back of his head. So
this
was the vampire his mother was so worried about? Although she did not look particularly dangerous, her scent told a different story. The odor that radiated from the unconscious woman rose from her in waves, like heat from a summer sidewalk. There was blood, darkness, and violence inside her, mixed with a tinge of madness. He felt an instinctual ill ease in her presence and fought to keep a growl from boiling from his gut.
Still, if what he had been told about vampire habits was accurate, the
enkidu
in Nate's barn was immobile until sunset. This meant he had a few hours to get her out of the hayloft and into the lock-up. Then he could question the creature at his leisure—and destroy it, if need be. He just had to get it out of the barn and into town without raising any suspicions on Nate's part. Transients wandering through the area were nothing new, so it would be relatively easy to pass the intruder off as a road tramp seeking a safe place to sleep. All he
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) had to do was find a tarpaulin to wrap her in before taking her outside, in order to keep the killing rays of the sun from her skin.
Cade grasped the vampire's legs by the ankles and began to drag her across the loft. The kick to his gut sent him flying across the loft and slammed him into the wall hard enough to make the entire barn shudder.
Cade grimaced in pain and clutched his middriff. His spleen was ruptured, damn it. To hell with inclusion and living in harmony and all that other politically correct crap. The kid gloves were off! He didn't like shape shifting while in uniform, but sometimes it couldn't be helped.
He closed his eyes and allowed the change to wash over him. There was a wet popping sound, like that of someone pulling apart a stewed chicken, as his bones realigned and his musculature warped and twisted itself. His body hair thickened and grew coarse, spreading to cover his entire body. His ears became longer and moved higher up on his skull while his fingernails thickened and curved in on themselves, becoming talons.
He growled and grabbed the encumbering remains of his shredded shirt and tore it from his body as he got to his feet, balancing on his crooked hind legs, yellow eyes blazing with anger. In total, it had taken thirty-three seconds to effect the change from sheriff to werewolf.
As he turned his snarling head towards the vampire, Cade saw that she was on her feet, her stance that of a martial artist cautiously awaiting an opponent's first move. Cade bared his teeth in ritual challenge and the vampire hissed in response, exposing a pair of ivory-white, razor-sharp fangs.
He came in low, clipping the vampire square in the chest with his left shoulder. The force of Cade's lunge carried the two combatants through the unsecured hay doors and plummeted them to the hard-packed earth of the barnyard.
Although the stranger absorbed most of the impact, the rough landing barely fazed her. As she pushed herself upright, Cade quickly moved out of striking distance. He nervously pawed the ground with his hind legs as he watched her casually knock the dirt off her jacket. Despite having fallen fifteen feet onto a hard surface, her mirrored sunglasses were still in place. Instead of burning, baking, melting, crisping or otherwise spontaneously combusting, she pulled a switchblade, opening it with a flick of her wrist. The knife was silver. Cade's eyes widened in alarm.
The stranger began circling Cade, switchblade at ready, her movements as smooth and sure as water poured over a rock. Cade was pretty sure vampires didn't move around in open daylight, and he knew for damn sure that they didn't handle silver weapons. Whether this woman was a vampire or not was beside the point now. Whoever or whatever she was, she definitely seemed to know a thing or two about killing werewolves.
Although he was graced with inhuman speed, strength and stamina, as well as a body that could shrug off otherwise fatal wounds, the damage done to his physical self was still very real, as was the pain that accompanied it. In a head-to-head battle with another
vargr
or an equally powerful nonhuman, he could find himself seriously crippled. And, in the case of the woman he was fighting right now, if he wasn't careful he could die of toxic shock if the silver knife pierced his skin. And, judging from her speed and strength, that scenario was a distinct possibility.
"Now wait a minute, ma'am," Cade said, holding up his forepaws, hairy palms outward. "I
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) think there's been a misunderstanding." He tried his best to smile, but his snout made it look like a snarl. "This is all a
big
mistake."
"Yeah, and you made it, dog-boy," she replied with a sneer.
The stranger thrust at Cade, the switchblade clutched in her right hand. Cade pivoted quickly on his left hind foot, swinging his left arm inward and his right foot backward, deflecting the knife thrust. Cade pivoted sharply, coming in close to his attacker, and delivered a hard right punch to her kidney.
The stranger groaned loudly but remained on her feet and did not drop her weapon. She staggered backward, spat a streamer of blood onto the barnyard dirt, and wiped the corner of her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket.
Before the stranger could make a second lunge, a shotgun blast ripped through the stifling afternoon heat like a thunderclap from on high. Both combatants turned to stare at Uncle Billy, who had a pump-action shotgun pointed at the stranger's head. Cully stood behind his adoptive father, looming over him like a statue carved from granite.
"Freeze, lady!" Uncle Billy barked. "This thing's loaded with silver buckshot!"
The stranger grinned broadly, exposing her fangs. "Go ahead and shoot—silver is no threat to me!"
"Perhaps so. But I suspect gettin' your head blown into itty-bitty pieces ain't something you can shrug off." He motioned with the barrel. "Now drop the weapon. That's right.
Now kick it over to me. No funny stuff, or I'll part your hair startin' at your chin."
The stranger grimaced as if she'd bitten into a sour persimmon, but did as she was told, kicking the switchblade to Uncle Billy with a sharp scuff of her right boot.
"Nate! Grab the knife!"
Nate Ferguson emerged from his hiding place behind Cully and scooped up the surrendered weapon.
The stranger shook her head in amazement, a crooked smile on her face.
"Vargr,
ogres and humans—what is this, a Pretender dude ranch?"
"What this
is,
ma'am," Cade said, trying his best to keep the snarl out of his voice, "is a law-abiding community of decent, peaceable folk. And
you
are under arrest."
The stranger turned to look at Cade, who was still in his wolf-skin.
"What for?"
"Trespassing, for one. Not to mention assaulting a peace officer."
"Peace officer
— ?" She paused for a long moment to stare at Cade, then began to chuckle. "Don't tell me
you're
the law around here!"
"Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid that's so. Now are you gonna come along peaceable, or do we have to get rough?"
"What the hell!" she said, throwing her hands up in mock surrender. "Whatever gets me out of this damned heat the fastest!"
Nonesuch's jail was one of the few buildings left over from the boomtown days that had been made of stone and still had the original iron bars on its solitary jail cell. The moment
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) Cade locked the door behind her the stranger laid down on the cell bunk and returned to the death-like state he had originally found her in.
He mulled over what little he knew about his prisoner as he shifted out of his wolf-skin and back into his human persona. On one hand she looked like a vampire: she had the pale skin, fangs, strength, indifference to pain, and instantaneous healing traditionally associated with the
enkidu.
But, on the other hand, she was capable of withstanding contact with direct sunlight and seemed completely immune to the silver that was lethal to both werewolf and vampire.
As he pinned his homemade sheriff's badge onto the new shirt requisitioned from Uncle Billy's dry goods department, the door opened and Changing Woman entered the cramped confines of the front office. She was dressed in her robes of office, an intact coyote pelt, its hollowed-out skull resting atop her head, the forepaws wrapped about her throat.
"You caught the dead thing." It was not a question. Cade did not ask her how she knew.
His mother had her ways of finding things out.
"I've got her locked up."
Changing Woman sniffed the air, a puzzled look on her face. "Her smell is strange. It is
like
that of the
enkidu,
but it is not the scent of the creature I caught the night before."
"That's what I was
afraid you
were going to say," Cade sighed as he sat down behind his desk. "However, I think you'll want to see what our visitor back there had on her." He reached inside the top drawer and pulled out a large manila envelope, dumping its contents onto the desktop. A Zip-Loc plastic baggie containing the stranger's knife, the blade extended, fell onto the blotter with a weighty thud.
Changing Woman gave an audible gasp and stepped back from the desk. Her eyes widened at the sight of the silver blade shaped like a frozen flame.
"Mother—what is it?" Cade asked, alarmed by the fear he saw on the shamaness' face.
"That is
not just
a knife, Skinwalker! It is a thing of power, like the Wolfcane," she explained, referring to the totem-staff of the
vargr,
used for millennia by the alphas to denote their supremacy over the pack. "The magic that abides within this blade is far older and angrier than any I have ever seen before!" She quickly turned her head, as if fearful of looking too long upon it. "Please, put it away."
Cade did as she asked, gingerly picking up the baggie by one corner and dropping it back into the drawer.
He had hoped Changing Woman would have helped solve the puzzle the stranger posed.
But now it looked like he would have to wait for sundown to find out exactly what it was he had locked up in his jail.
The thing that used to be Wiley woke up with meat on the brain.
The urge to taste warm, living flesh between his teeth was as urgent as a full bladder.
There was no language, no emotion, no memory— nothing but the need to feed. All other thoughts and concerns were wiped away, enslaved to a hunger that was as boundless as it was nameless.
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) He got to his feet, wobbling like a freshly foaled colt, and took an unsteady step forward.
He sniffed the stale, damp air of the mine-shaft. There was no live meat here. He staggered up the tilted floor towards the entrance, which seemed to shine like a magic gate. He instinctively knew that where the darkness was as bright as noonday was where the live meat could be found.
He stood at the mouth of the mine, his head tossed back like a hound catching a scent, then set off in the direction of the nearest meat, the drool pooling in his mouth and spilling from his lips in a steady stream.
The stranger opened her eyes as the sun set behind the mountains and the cool of the evening began to replace the heat of the day. She unfolded her hands atop her chest and sat upright.
"It
is
you."
The stranger turned to stare at the young woman, little more than a girl, who stood on the other side of the jailhouse bars.
"I never thought I would see you again. But when Uncle Billy told me about the strange woman in Nate's barn, and the knife you were carrying, I knew it had to be you. Who
else
could it be?" Cissy laughed with a nervous toss of her head. "You helped me a long time ago. You said your name was Sonja and you saved my family from a monster. Do you remember?"
Sonja Blue smiled, revealing a brief glimpse of fang. "Of course I remember you, Tiffany."
She walked over to her visitor, resting her hands on the crossbars of the cell.
"Nobody calls me that anymore. Everybody here knows me as Cissy. That's what Cully calls me."
"You've grown up. Has it been that long?"
"Ten years."
"I take it that wall of muscle I saw earlier was your brother."
Cissy smiled at the mention of her half-brother, her eyes lighting up with pride. "Yeah, that's Cully. He's one of Sheriff Cade's deputies. Sort of."
"And your father—?"
Cissy's smile faltered and her gaze dropped to the floor. "Daddy— Daddy's dead. He killed himself a long time ago."
"I'm sorry to hear that, kid," Sonja said, although there was something in her voice that hinted she was not surprised.
"He took the money you gave him and got us as far away from New York as possible; which turned out to be Taos. But he was never the same after Fiona. Six months after we came to New Mexico, he hung himself in the closet of the motel room we were living out of. Then it was just me and Cully."
"So how did you end up here—wherever 'here' is?" Sonja asked, gesturing to their surroundings.
"I knew if Social Services got ahold of me and Cully, they would split us up. And I knew
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) no one else could understand Cully the way I do. So I kept us on the move. We wandered around on our own for a long time. Then I started hearing these stories from other runaways... stories about a place up in the mountains, where the people who lived there weren't people at all. So we went in search of the town, hoping maybe we could find someone who would see Cully for what he really was, someplace where we would not have to leave after Cully would forget his manners and eat another cat. We've been here six years."