My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon (37 page)

Normally I would have burned up the carpet getting my shaggy ass into bed. Right now I jammed a pair of jeans into the suitcase and remembered the clothes we had soaking in the washer. "Be right there."

"You're being ridiculous. I say we go take a closer look at Lover's Leap tomorrow morning."

You're calling
me
ridiculous
? "No way, Kat. Absolutely no way, nohow.
No
."

"You can stay here if you're scared, Fido. But I want to do some scouting. I'll call in before we go, it shouldn't take someone too long to get here."

"This," I announced into the suitcase, "is not my idea of a good time." My fists ached, wanting to clench. The room was stuffy, even with air-conditioning.

"It'll be daytime. Any
sanguine
is going to be torpid and easy to kill. Anything else is likely to be torpid as well." She yawned.

My shoulders were tight as bridge cables. "No, Kat. That's final."

A charged silence settled into the room, made itself comfortable, and cringed away from Kat's soft, inflexible tone.

"If I hear the words 'that's final' out of your mouth again, Mitchell Black, they
will
be." The sheets rasped as she shifted, irritably. "I didn't marry you so you could tell me what to do. I'm an adult, and I'm a Knight of the Argentum Astrum. You can either help me or you can drive that Jeep of yours back to Las Vegas and find yourself both a divorce and a nice little husky to have puppies with."

I don't think she meant to say that. The nausea under my sternum crested, I swallowed sourness.
Christ, don't fight with her. It's still your goddamn honeymoon
. "I don't want you getting hurt, Kat."

She sighed. "We've done all right so far. And I'll call the Argentum tomorrow morning, as soon as I get up."

I didn't have breath to agree or disagree, my stomach rolling like a ship during a hurricane. I'd've suspected some bad bacon, but any Sunrunner worth his nose doesn't eat spoiled meat. Still, I abandoned my packing and made it to the bed. Laid down next to Kat, who probably considered the matter finished, because she didn't speak, just clicked off the lamp on her side. I lay in the dark, my stomach griping, until I passed out.

SOMETHING WAS WRONG, I SMELLED DIRT AND FOULNESS, and there was something in my eyes. It reeked of death. A scattering of something heavy dripped across my face, wet and silken and laden with decay. Everything was black.

Smells. Wet dirt, decaying vegetables, a heavy cologne touching off a chain of association.
All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all
. Something heavy across my legs, my fingers tensed, dirt crumbling wet against my nails.

Kat
? I didn't smell her.

The men burying me couldn't have been prepared for the dead body to crackle with shifting bones, sprouting fur and moving in ways their entire experience of reality tells them can't be so. They screamed, one teenage voice breaking with fear and another deeper male tone adding a jangling harmony, as I woke in the flush of the metabolic burn fueling the change. Halfway there I realized what was happening, but it was too late. I'd already killed the boy and was on top of the older man, snarling meat-laden breath into his face, my muzzle spattered with hot blood.

Blood's dangerous when you're in between man and wolf. It can drive you right over the edge into crazy. The wolf knows blood but it takes second place to survival, and a real man won't let his blood-lust carry him too far. But halfway? Well, that's the danger zone.

The night breathed, a complex tapestry of scent. Not cold pavement and garbage like a city, but fragrant rotting woodland full of swamp heat and decaying vegetable matter. We were out in the woods, and they had been burying me in a shallow grave. I could still feel tree roots digging into my flesh.

What the hell
? I tried to talk, forgetting about my mouthful of wrongly-shaped teeth and tongue. The noises I made weren't human.

Neither were the noises my captive made. His baseball cap had been knocked off, and he was partly bald, smelling of beer and Lucky Strikes. I'd torn his overalls, slashing with long amber claws.

I finally got my wits about me and slowly shifted back, fur melting away. It was damn hot, and I was in a pair of jeans and nothing else. My knees dug into wet earth. The most pertinent question came tumbling out. "Where is my wife?"

The man gibbered and choked with fear, his glands opening up and pouring chemical terror into the meat.
Dammit
. Nothing sensible would come out of him for a while.

I decided to try to calm him down. "Hey. Why are you trying to bury me?"

Poison, you jackass. And you lapped it up
. I've never been the quickest on the uptake, I leave that to Kat. I settle for being the most thorough, most of the time. My fingers tingled and my chest constricted, something foreign burning off through my metabolism and sending a wave of weakness through me. Good thing about being Sunrunner, most poisons run right through us and disperse, defeated by heightened tissue regrowth and our neurological resistances, built to handle the sensory overload of the change.

Bad thing? It hurts like hell, and it makes us cranky.

I didn't smell anything in the meat
. Then it hit me again, a wave of sugar-coated nausea, and I cursed, grinding the chubby man down into the dirt.

The tea. Sweet enough to rot all the teeth, and sugar will cover up all
sorts
of things where a canine's concerned.

"OhGawd ohGawd—" A sharp stink wafted up. The man had actually peed himself.

Good Christ. What am I going to do now
? I showed my teeth in a wolf's grin and he cried out, trying to backpedal, his legs and arms flailing wildly. I let him go, standing up as he gibbered and moaned.

Just a good ole boy, never meaning no harm. Huh
. I bent down, quick fingers working, and found a heavy ring of keys. It would be worth my while to find out who the hell he was and why he was burying bodies for someone, but I had a bigger concern.

Poison meant Evans was involved. Which meant Kat was vulnerable, and in deep trouble. I wrapped my fist in the man's overalls and shirt, hauling him up. "Where's your car, Bubba? Be a nice boy and tell me, and I'll let you live."

I CUT THE ENGINE AND LET THE TRUCK drift, rattling, down the long slope. I was about a mile from Evans's place, and pretty sure she'd know my unwitting benefactor's vehicle. The man was trussed with duct tape and tossed in the back with two toolboxes and various other odd bits, since I didn't want to murder him.

Not yet, anyway.

I got out, my boots crunching on gravel. The moon rose, high and white, casting knife-edged shadows along the ditches and under each little rock in the road. It was still hot-humid-damp, so the roostertail of dust the truck left in the air wouldn't be too visible. Besides, it was night.

But what if you're not just dealing with suckers, Mitch
? It was the voice of panic.
Where's Kat? Dammit. What am I going to do
?

I rested my hand on the truck's hood for a moment, metal pinging as it cooled. The goddamn thing smelled like lit diesel farts and drove worse than a walleyed wino. It was loud and probably well-known in this neck of the woods. If I left it by the side of the road, sooner or later someone would find it, and whoever was behind all this would know I wasn't dead.

So I either had to dispose of both Bubba and his truck, or I had to work fast.

Of course, if Kat was already dead…

Still, if Evans had poisoned me, she might not be inclined to keep Kat alive either.

In the end I decided to leave the truck by the side of the road. If someone found Bubba taped up in the bed, it wouldn't make a rat's ass worth of difference.

I'm no murderer. But if they hurt even one hair on Kat's head we were going to see just what a pissed-off Sunrunner can do to frail human flesh.

THE RAMBLING ANTEBELLUM HOUSE WAS DARK AND DESERTED. My Jeep sat in the gravel parking lot bordered with tall thin willows on three sides and a sloppy mix of kudzu on the fourth heading toward the road. The creek babbled a little under more willows, a long stone's throw away. It was child's play to force the back door—deadbolts are strong, but wooden doors tend to tear away from them if you apply enough force.

The kitchen was pin-neat and the downstairs was completely tidy as well. I went up the stairs to the second floor, took a hard right, and found the door to our suite open and the entire room looking like a hurricane had hit it.

Kat had put up a good fight. The window was busted all to hell, humid night seeping in as air-conditioning escaped. Grit lay everywhere, the smell of suckers rasping against my instincts. The mirrors were shattered and the mosquito netting over the bed was ripped up, the bed thrashed out of recognition and our luggage scattered around. Chairs were upended, the plush settee in a corner where she had probably tried to barricade herself, to judge by the damage to the wallpaper and plaster. The lightbulbs were all smashed, the ceiling fixture pulled out and dangling by a thread like a loose tooth, the lamps both overturned, their fringes tangled.

Small, my Kat. But packed with dynamite. Birch stakes lay scattered through the room, one driven into the flooring like a straw into a potato.

Damn, girl
. If the situation had been otherwise, I might have smiled.

No clues. Just the remnants of a helluva fight. Violence still smoked in the air. Had I been deaf to it all, poisoned by sweet tea?

I made my way back downstairs, moving easily through the darkness. Evans's office was on the other side of the detached kitchen, in a connected outbuilding recent enough to still smell like fresh lumber to my sensitive nose. The lock was better than the deadbolts on the front and back doors, and the door itself was metal. Fortunately the new drywall wasn't nearly so resistant, and I walked right in, ducking to avoid the crossbar of the wall's skeleton, sneezing at clouds of chalky dust.

The office was pin-neat, with a wide tall window that looked out on the garden and a desk littered with paper. I glanced at the door and stopped, my skin chilling and rippling for a moment as I fought off the urge to shift to meet a new threat.

Hanging from the doorknob was a little muslin pouch tied with red ribbon. It stank of death, with a peculiar overtone of horehound candy. The fetish rocked slightly against the door, humming nastily to itself. The sound of its tapping was flabby fingers against a pane of wet glass.

I froze and looked around the office. The air was close, thick, and rank with sorcery. Another step in, and the sorcerer's den might wake up—who knew what little traps were left in here?

Great, Mitch. You idiot. How did you not smell her out? Her perfume, and that talcum powder
—
just the thing to dog up a sensitive nose. And she was scared, not of me but of the sheriff. Merciful Sun
.

Something caught my eye. I bent down a little, peering out the window. When sitting at the desk, Evans would have her back to the wall instead of the door. File cabinets marched along the other wall. The picture window framed gardens, the ribbon of the road, forest, and Lover's Leap, glowing slick and wet under the almost-full moon.

"Holy shit," I breathed, and backed out through the hole in the wall.

Of all the bed-and-breakfasts in Virginia, we had to walk right into one run by a sorcerer. I stared through the Sunrunner-sized hole in the wall at the moonlight flooding over the desktop, a big bad Southern moon drenching everything with dead light. There was probably evidence in that office that would tell me what the hell was going on and why Kat had been taken.

"Lover's Leap." My voice, flat and furious, took me by surprise. The house creaked and sighed its regular nightly song. Old houses are like that, they hum to themselves at night, the heat of the day leaching out of joints and beams. "Hang on, Kat. I'm coming to get you."

I LOPED ALONGSIDE THE ROAD IN FULL CHANGE, my pads silent on the forest floor. The burn of light on shifting textures of fur ran along my nerve endings, the night exploding like champagne on the back of my throat. There was a thread of
wrong
along the road, a scent that shouldn't be, well-traveled, like the passage of a predator at the edge of a herd. It raised my hackles and gave speed to my legs, the wolf's joy at its freedom matching my urgency.

A Sunrunner can cover a lot of ground on four legs, but the moon was lowering in the sky by the time I reached the base of the mountain, where the road took a sharp turn and started winding up to Lover's Leap. I could either cut across the hairpin turns, or I could follow them and lose time, remaining more cautiously hidden.

Kat
. I decided to take a direct route up the side of a sharp rocky incline, covered with all sorts of trashwood and clinging bushes, scrub pine and bare rocks. Instinct told me there was a way.

I made very little noise, scrabbling through undergrowth and using the rocks as takeoff pads. I'm no mountain goat, but a wolf's hardly the worst animal when it comes to getting up a hill. The faster you go, the easier it is to balance, like a tightrope. Each time I crossed the dusty ribbon of the road fresh urgency pounded behind my heart, each beat saying her name.
Kat. Kat. Kat
.