Demon Driven (10 page)

I jumped back down, not bothering to Lighten
at all, just bent my knees and touched one hand to the ground on
impact. Reducing my weight, would slow my fall, if only a little,
and I didn't want to be seen jumping thirty feet in either
direction.

Back at the base, I turned and looked at the
cliff. No ledge. I walked closer and put my hand up to feel the
rock. There it was, but the outer edge was higher than the edge
closest to the cliff face, effectively hiding the easily climbed
trail, from ground view.

I heard Gina come out to the back porch, so I
turned and waved her over. After pointing out the trail, I stood
back and watched her climb it. Piece of cake for the fit detective.
I jumped back to the top and met her as she finished the climb.

“Show off!” she accused.

“Hey, I'm great at parties!”

She smiled at that, probably because it was
the first wiseass remark I had made all day.

I pointed at the footpath leading up the
mountain.

“I think old Georgie has a little spot up
there to take in the scenery and maybe hide out from the world. I'm
gonna climb up and see if I can nail him down.”

“Wait up a sec,” she said, pulling her own
patrol bag off her shoulder. She opened it and pulled out a Subway
bag with three foot-long subs in it, sat down and patted the rock
next to her. Where and when she had gotten those I hadn’t a
clue.

“How about lunch first, eh, Skinny?” she
asked.

Gina was in league with my stomach,
constantly reminding me to eat and be careful of my burn rate.

She grabbed a six-inch section of the Italian
meat combo on wheat for herself and pulled a bottle of water from
her bag.

I'm not hard to sell on eating, ever, so I
quickly polished off one seafood, one turkey and the other half of
the Italian sub, finishing up before she was done. She shook her
head but didn't bother to comment.

My ability to eat is legend in our squad.
Chet Aikens, skinny beanpole that he is, is no slouch, but he is in
complete awe of my regular intake.

“How are we going to play this?” she asked,
wiping her mouth with a napkin from her seemingly inexhaustible
patrol bag.

“Well, seeing as you're not packing, I'm
gonna bounce up there on my own and see if Mr. Lassiter is
available for lodging in the local jail cell, hopefully with one of
Brock's weres flown up to talk him through the change.”

If that were to happen, and we had one of the
New York wolves handy, Mr. Lassister would be fine. Without that
tricky set of conditions, he was gonna go insane. Gina shook her
head.

“Briana won't let the New York pack near him.
I overheard them talking, they want to capture him for study, even
though he won't be sane. They have zoo-grade tranquilizers, heavy
tasers and bullets filled with diluted silver nitrate.”

Wow! Talk about stupid! Pharmaceuticals
didn't affect weres, tasers only pissed them off, and good luck
getting enough diluted silver nitrate into the bloodstream without
overdosing and killing your subject. Not to mention keeping an
insane were around at all. Like crossing Hannibal Lecter with a
grizzly bear.

“Chris, he'll have to be put down,” she said
softly.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Lydia and Afina both told me a rogue were
can't be saved.”

Afina was the Alpha female and she had also
met Gina, another of my stupid ideas. Lydia, I had finally
discovered, didn't date vampires. She had a soft spot for weres and
regularly went out with members of the New York Pack. Between what
she learned and Afina, Gina's information was solid.

I glanced at the sun, rather than my watch.
Holding my fist at arms length, I counted about four and half hand
widths from the sun to the horizon. Less than five hours till dark.
I stood up and dusted off.

“Okay, I'm gonna track him down. I've got my
squad radio on my vest here, so
I'll
call
you
when
I've got him,” I said.

“You’re not packing either! You need to be
real careful. I'm not gonna be the one to explain to Tanya and
Lydia if something happens to you!”

I frowned at Tanya’s name and she went on
immediately.

“We're not going to get into that right now,
but you don't know what you think you do!” she said.

I looked at her for a long time, then nodded
once.

“Alright then, I’m gonna go catch me a
wolfie, and yes Mom, I’ll be careful.”

* * *

I found his hideaway about five minutes
later. The two miles I had traveled had been straightforward and I
slowed when my nose picked up the scent of unwashed human. My
senses told me he wasn’t in residence.

His lean-to was tucked on the west side of
the mountain, about fifty yards from the proper summit. It was
built near the slope of the hill, a flat ledge in front of it that
peered out with a great view of what Briana’s topo map had named
Bald Mountain. It was a nice spot, easy to imagine George coming
home from work, climbing up with a beer and his little dog and
watching the sun set over the mountain.

The lean-to had been there a while, maybe
years. The sorry pile of clothes and old blankets was a newer
addition. Dirty cooking gear was strewn about, flies buzzing on the
moldy cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. Lydia had told me that some
weres, mainly the young and newly made, got moon-drunk as the full
moon drew near. It sure looked like a drunk had live here. The fire
pit was warm, as if a fire had burned in the morning or maybe the
night before, the coals only now dying out.

I searched around the little campsite, my
nose helping me avoid his latrine. One of his twisty little trails
led around the hill to the north side. That’s where I found his
clothes, the ones he had been wearing today. The scent was
fresh.

The sun was lower, and it occurred to me that
in these mountains, it would be dark quicker than I had thought. My
senses were hyper alert, picking out all the birdsong, insect sound
and scents of the Vermont forest. I had forgotten how alive the
woods make me feel, the thin skin of civilization sliding away just
a bit. The moon would begin its chase of the sun soon, rising in
the east as the sun set fully in the west. I could feel it, pulling
on me. George must be half mad with it already.

His trail led north along the saddle of the
hill, following the terrain to the next hill over, Hager Hill. His
scent was everywhere, stinky body odor mixed with an unsettling
odour
of wet dog.

His trail was meandering and I remembered
that I was currently hunting a moon drunk, a naked moon drunk at
that.

I climbed logs, jumped boulders, splashed
through streams. I was really starting to feel the hunt, the
blackness in my gut pulsing with anticipation. It was a gradual
kind of thing, the sort of feeling that sneaks up on you and
suddenly robs you of your wits. I found myself sniffing the ground,
tree trunks, moss-covered rocks.

The night was coming on fast, but I hadn’t
noticed, as the change in light slides right by you when you have
night vision like mine. Then I felt the moon, just starting to edge
over the horizon, and almost at the same time I heard him
change.
I was above him, high on Hager Hill, and his screams
of pain echoed from below. The pitch started to change, lowering
and deepening until it became a snarling growl of rage.

The sound tripped the hairs on the back of my
neck, stirred my very cells with the inherited memories of my
prehistoric ancestors. At the same time it triggered a powerful
instinct to hunt the predator that was below me. The human part of
me was a little scared, the virus parts excited and the deep black
rage in me was hungry to prove who was the top predator in this
forest.

I doubled my speed downhill, bounding over
gullies and fallen trees with abandon, slowing only when I reached
a part of the forest that was already silent.

Chapter 12

“
I feel it deep within, just
beneath the skin. I must confess that I feel like a monster.” –
Skillet

All the night-time inhabitants had gone dead
quiet in this part of the forest, frightened by a large unnatural
predator. My ears could tell the size of the silent zone, my
hearing acute enough to pick up the beginnings of crickets and
spring peepers fifty yards away on either side of me.

I started to follow the tunnel of silence, my
brain forming an image of the path the newly made monster had taken
by the vacuum of sound it had created.

I was moving slower now, all my senses
quivering like antennae. The path led further downhill, toward the
sounds of cars on Route 9 below me. To my right I could hear the
early evening sounds of a small development built on the south base
of Hager Hill. The monster I chased steered around it, and I
wondered at its avoidance of such easy prey.

The road appeared in front of me, the trails
of scent crossing and heading south. I jumped the road in one leap,
landing in a tree forty feet off the ground (forty-three-point-two
actually, but my ability to gauge distance had gotten so creepy
over the last few months that I started to annoy myself with the
precision of it, so now I round).

He was headed over the next hill, the one
named Prospect on the map in my head. If I remembered right (and I
did), there was a state campground on the other side. It should be
too early in the season for campers, but one never knew, so I
hurried, leaping from my tree to the ground and accelerating up the
hill.

Cresting the hill, I heard him, less than a
quarter mile ahead, grunting and growling softly. The campground
was laid out before me, wrapped around a small body of water.
Lassiter’s path headed straight for the rows of empty tent sites
and I suddenly heard voices, laughing and giggling in the dark. One
was deep, the other high and wind-chime clear.

I raced forward, bounding in twenty- and
thirty-foot jumps, the voices growing closer and louder, the
monster just ahead.

The trees thinned and I saw a tent – a small
two person dome, glowing with the meager light of an iPod or cell
phone that might as well have been a Colemen lantern to my eyes. A
fire burned in the little firepit and an older model Chevy Blazer
was parked nearby. Lassiter’s outline blocked the light of the tent
as he charged toward his prey.

A number of things happened in rapid
sequence. The girl’s voice changed pitch as she heard something in
the dark, then the beast that had been George Lassiter tore the
tent like tissue paper. The figure of a half-naked male jumped up
and turned to run, slamming headfirst into the tree on the other
side of the tent and falling unmoving to the ground. The girl
screamed, scooting backward as the malformed monster’s teeth
touched her leg, and then I landed behind old woolly George. He
finally sensed me, starting to turn, but I Posted my body in
position, grabbed his hind leg and twisted, throwing the
three-hundred pound creature against a tree fifteen feet away.

Enraged, the were leaped to its feet, giving
me my first clear look at poor George. Experienced weres generally
turn into perfect examples of their animal, albeit very large ones.
They can, over time, learn to stop the transformation half-way into
a wolf-man, bear-man or what have you. George Lassiter hadn’t been
able to make a full transformation. But his beast form was
misshapen and wrong to the eye. One arm too long, one leg slightly
twisted. His head looked partially melted, the fur not fully formed
on one side. He was a mess, an insane, superhumanly strong, enraged
mess. His teeth and claws had turned out well, though.

Observer-me noticed all this, as the black
rage was in full control of my fight brain. Here was an opponent to
give me a real fight. Not some poor gang members in a city park,
but a real monster of tooth and claw.

Were-George charged me, missing when I dodged
to the right, grunting when my left fist impacted his ribs,
snarling when my right hammer fist slammed into his back,
shattering the vertebrae.

He started to pull himself forward with his
massive arms, his broken back already mending itself with audible
snaps and crunches of bone. Poor George! He shouldn’t have to work
so hard to get to me, a dark part of me thought, so I went to
him.

His bear-trap jaws snapped in rapid fire, his
baleful eyes almost popping out of his head with rage. I offered an
arm for him to bite, but snatched it away, slamming his head with
my other fist, pounding it into the ground with a crunch. He rolled
to one side and swiped me with a huge paw-hand, his claws shredding
my nylon vest as I was thrown backward. I back flipped over,
landing lightly on my feet, a dark chuckle forcing its way from my
mouth. The blackness was amused.

Weres and vamps are tough to damage with
regular weapons, only silver makes a real impression. But physical
injuries from hand-to-hand combat are different somehow. It’s far
more damaging and can be ultimately lethal. George was healing but
slower than a steel knife wound or gunshot with lead. He was a
brand new were and his instincts were skewed, mixed as they were
with human ones. Up until this point he had fought as confident
predator, but now some part of him was realizing he was losing this
fight, and badly.

His spine re-grown, he shot from the ground,
charging me head on. At three hundred pounds and almost seven feet
tall he was not something to go-toe-to toe with. So, of course, I
did, and I laughed.

Holding his throat to keep those deadly jaws
at bay, I took the beating of his claws on my torso, my ribs and
skin Hardened. With my free right hand I uppercut, hard, fast. Like
a jackhammer. My vest was shredded, my skin cut, healed, and cut
again. He, however was beginning to fade. My blows were crushing
and recrushing his ribs, sternum, bursting organs and blasting bone
fragments throughout his torso.