“Suckers?”
You don’t even want to know. Dad never even wanted to know. “I had to know if you’d change.”
“So you tied me up and asked if I was a virgin? Help me out here.” He shifted, wrapping the quilt more tightly around his bare shoulders. He was shirtless. Of course—his shirt was ruined and his coat was probably still wet.
I glanced down. He wore a pair of my workout pants. They hit him at mid-calf and sagged around his narrow waist. Boy had no hips at all. “It’s near twelve hours. Generally, if you don’t change by then there’s a reason, and you’re probably safe. If you’re bitten while you’re a virgin, some of the transfer of werwulf stuff doesn’t get done. It’s all theory, but virgins have a higher incidence of not changing.” I watched him out of the corner of my eye, waiting for the leaning backward that would tell me he’d stopped listening. People don’t want to hear about the Real World, and if you ever try to explain, they just quit listening real early.
He didn’t move. Just stared at me. I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “It has to do with magic, I guess. Stuff like that. See, when a werwulf bites and doesn’t finish his kill, there’s an . . . an imprint, I guess you could call it. If you’re a virgin, the imprint doesn’t get made right. It’s like you’re a closed door, and once you have sex that door is opened and some things can take hold. Infect you, almost.” I looked down at my knees, just talking to hear myself talk now. Or maybe I was afraid of what he would say once I shut up. “Congratulations. You’re mostly safe from wulfbite for the rest of your life. Like . . . like an inoculation.” It was a pretty good explanation, and about the sum total of my knowledge of werwulfen. The silent house ate the words. I couldn’t think of anything else to tell him.
“Well. That’s comforting.” He swallowed so heavily I heard it. “Look, Dru, I—”
“I’m glad you didn’t change,” I said all in a rush. “Because I don’t know what I’d have done.”
“Shot me.” The raw edge of anger smoked under the words. I closed my eyes against it, leaned against the wall. “I guess. Right?”
Yes. No. I don’t know. I shot someone else. Hopelessness turned into a rock inside my chest.
“Dru?” As if I wasn’t listening.
“Fuck off.” Don’t lecture me.
He persisted. “That was real, wasn’t it.” It wasn’t a question, but he was still trying to convince himself. “I saw a huge-ass dog burning and running after you. I saw the thing that bit me, and the bite’s closing up like I’m Wolverine or something. It was real.”
“Bingo. You get a prize.” The gun was so heavy. If I let it slip through my fingers and tumble down the stairs, what would it do? Probably go off and kill someone else. Just my luck.
He asked the question that got everyone in trouble. “What else is real?”
You don’t want to know. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Some things you just have to see for yourself. But you’re not going to see it, are you? You’re going to head for the door and leave me to get through this myself. It’d be better for you if you did, I guess. Sour heat boiled in my throat. I pushed it down before it could make my eyes prickle.
“You could tell me and see. I mean, I was okay with everything else, wasn’t I?”
Wind mouthed the corners of the house. It wasn’t as lonely a sound as it usually was, because someone was sitting right next to me. “You got bit for it. I’m sorry.” There they were again, those two pale little useless words.
“Well, you’re an interesting chick, Miss Anderson.” When I didn’t reply, he moved, bumping his shoulder against mine. “Did you feel me up when you were tying me down?”
What? My jaw threatened to drop. “Um, no. Did you want me to?”
“Well, it would have been nice.” His shoulder bumped mine again. “Can I ask you something?”
I didn’t answer. He was going to ask me anyway. People don’t say that if they don’t want to pry something out of you.
But he surprised me. “What happened to your dad? I mean, really happened?”
“He got t-turned into a z-zombie.” I thought I was going to choke on the words, but they came out. Hoarse and broken, but they came out. “Someone did it to him.” There it was. Someone had beat Dad up bad, and then turned him into one of the reanimated.
I’d said it out loud now. Any chance of waking up and finding it all just a Really Bad, Really Lifelike Dream was now straight in the scupper, as Gran always said.
“A zombie. Okay. Whew. All right.” Graves let out a huge sigh, like he’d just finished carrying a heavy container up a steep hill. “So what are you gong to do?”
How the hell should I know? “Make some lunch, I guess.” I used the wall to push myself up to my feet. The heater clicked off. “You want something to eat?”
“I wanted to ask you something else.” His chin tilted up a bit, and he met my eyes. The skull and crossbones earring fell back, touching his hair. He’d taken off the necklace, and his muscle moved in his bare chest under the quilt. “You got anyone you can call? Like your mom or something, since your dad’s . . .” Graves had to swallow before he said the word. “Dead? He’s dead, right? That’s what zombie means.”
I shrugged. “It means dead and reanimated. My mom’s dead, too. So is my grandmother.” Everyone’s gone. They all keep disappearing on me. The words were full of old bitterness. “I’m going to make lunch. You must be hungry.”
“So you just live here by yourself? In this house?” He was a persistent one. He scrambled up off the steps, wrapped himself up in the red-and-white quilt like a mummy, and shuffled after me.
“For a while. Until I can’t anymore.” I led him into the kitchen and flicked the light on, setting the gun on the counter within easy reach. “Pretty much all I feel like making is grilled cheese. You want some?”
His eyes roved the surface of the counters like he was looking for contraband. “Why was that dog thing after you?”
That was another question that bothered me. I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you want some goddamn lunch or not?”
“Sure, I’ll take some. If you promise not to hold a gun to my head.” By the time I rounded on him he was smiling, and had both his hands up in hey, man, I’m harmless mode. “Just kidding, Dru. Lighten up, okay?”
Lighten up? I stared at him like he was crazy before getting the cheese and butter out of the fridge. I tied him down and nearly shot him, and he’s telling me to “lighten up”?
The grin widened, his eyes very bright green now, no hazel tint left. He shook his hair down over his face and puckered his lips, making kissing noises. That strange heat crawled up my cheeks again. It got to me and I laughed, with the butter in one hand and the cheese in the other. We had bread in the freezer—it probably would have frozen on the counter too. That’s a good way to keep it fresh down South, especially if you eat a lot of toast. Or grilled cheese.
“That’s better.” He leaned against the counter, wrapping himself more securely in the quilt. “We’re in the same boat, you know. I don’t have anyone either. Not anyone I can call or anything. I’ve been on my own since I was twelve.”
Great. What am I supposed to say to that? I got the frying pan out. He didn’t mention the plywood and taped-down blankets over the back door. I didn’t mention the closing and healing flesh on his shoulder. We were mostly silent, and the wind moaned against the corners of the house.
But I opened up a couple cans of tomato soup and dumped them in a pot, and I didn’t feel quite so lonely. Having someone in the house—someone who wasn’t going to leave just yet—helped. I even poured him a glass of milk.
Call me domestic.
CHAPTER 15
“Holy shit.” Graves peered into the ammo crate. “Jesus. Was your dad a survivalist?”
He was helping me clean up the living room. He didn’t ask about the bullet holes in the wall, or about the faint, horrible smell of rotting zombie. He also didn’t ask about the clothes he’d se
en me scoop carefully up off the floor and set to soaking in the washing machine. Dad’s clothes were torn up and stinky, all his weapons and his billfold missing, along with Mom’s locket on its supple silver chain.
I didn’t want to think about that.
Snow whirled down thick and steady outside, each flake a muffled erasure of the world. The radio said some people had lost power, but not us. Not yet. I was glad about that—even with the duct-taped blankets the kitchen was chilly, the heater working overtime until I scrounged up more blankets and another two pieces of plywood to create a baffle. It worked pretty well, actually. Especially since I’d braced the door to the porch.
I opened up the fire-safe box, sure I’d find what I was after. After a bit of digging through papers—birth certificates for both of us, my immunization records, a fat file of records from each school I’d attended—I found the ragged red address book, duct tape clinging to its vinyl cover. Dad’s kill book would be in the truck, but contacts were always kept separate.
Okay, Dad. Let’s see who can get me out of this, since you’ve ended up a stain on the living-room rug. A stain I should vacuum up, by the way. In a fresh bag so I can keep it.
A hot bolt of nausea scored through me. That was no way to think about my dead father, was it? But it was either find something snarky to say or start crying, and if I started sniveling now, I might never stop.
Dad hated sniveling. “Bingo,” I muttered.
“I mean, what do you use all this stuff for?” Graves continued. I’d given him a pair of Dad’s sweats, but he’d turned down my offer of a Peter Frampton T-shirt. So his narrow back was pale and goose pimpled despite the heater. I could have found him something else to wear, but he made such a big deal over the Frampton I decided he could go shirtless if he was going to be picky. I mean, it’s not like it was David Cassidy or something.
I kept trying not to look at his bare skin, though. It made me feel weird. “Hunting.” I closed the top of the safe box, made sure it was shut and locked down. “Get out of there, that’s live ammo.”
He was still poking around. “This isn’t really a grenade, is it?”
“Of course it’s real. You won’t clean out a roach-spirit nest with a fake grenade. Get out of there, you’re not trained.”
“Did your dad teach you how to use this stuff?”
“Most of it. He told me to leave the AK-47 alone, though.” I paged through the address book, deciphering Dad’s scrawl. Most of the numbers were down South, with a smattering in California and up around Maine. Nothing near the freaking Dakotas. I even recognized some of them—the hunter in Carmel who surfed almost every day unless he was too injured from clearing out sucker holes with a team of hard-faced mercenaries; the women who lived out on the back bayou miles away from anywhere and kept the gator spirits pacified and cleared out; August in New York who swore in gutter Polish when he drank with Dad and could make a thin shining yellow flame spring from the tip of his index finger if he was in the right mood.
Graves almost choked. “You have an AK-47?”
And a flamethrower, but that’s in the truck. “Only for emergencies.” I found a scrap of paper tucked three-quarters of the way back with a number in our new area code. Nothing else. No name, no inked cross that meant it was a safe number for me to dial, no ident info.
Great. Who would take a plane ride out here just to make me feel better? I’d have to explain what happened to Dad, too. Or as much as I knew about what happened to him. Which wasn’t much. But still.
The way my stomach turned over at the thought threatened to push out every bit of grilled cheese I’d eaten. It was my fault; I hadn’t told him about the owl. “Jesus,” I whispered, staring down at the number. It was on the back of a receipt from an occult shop in Miami, the one where Dad had found a glassy shard of obsidian good for taking down chupacabras. He’d FedExed it out to Tijuana for Juan-Raoul de la Hoya-Smith.
The goatsuckers were really bad around Tijuana. Juan-Raoul said it was the heat and the tamales.
Dad had stayed closeted with the dreadlocked, scary-looking owner of that shop for a good two hours after it closed, while I wandered around looking at things and getting hungrier and hungrier. When he’d reappeared, his face had been stony-set and white, and he’d stayed up drinking in our hotel room all that night. I’d ordered room service and watched old cartoons until I fell asleep.
Now I wondered if Dad had gotten this phone number there. I wondered if it was safe—the inked cross meant “safe”; the slashed circle meant “unsafe except in an emergency”; and no sign could mean anything.
It was Dad’s handwriting, no doubt about it. Nobody else had access to the book, and there was his way of making a 9 from the bottom with a single line. I wondered whose number it was.
I was going to have to go to a pay phone and find out. It was the only number in this area, but it didn’t have a mark next to it. It wasn’t like Dad to forget a thing like marking a safe contact.
It wasn’t like him at all. But he hadn’t been himself since that shop with the cottonmouths hitting the glass with hard, padded sounds, making that horrible ratcheting noise. I looked up at the living-room window. The blizzard wind made a low chuckling sound, mocking me.
“Dru? You okay?” Graves was suddenly there. I hadn’t seen him moving as I stared at the window, lost in thought.
Woolgathering, Gran would have called it. As in, Don’t woolgather when they’s work to be done, Dru. Go milk the goats and look’n fer eggs, and when you come back I’ll teach’n you how to use a pendulum. Won’t that be fun?
Only with her thick Appalachian accent, it sounded slow as molasses inside my head. I could get out the pendulum now, but it wouldn’t be any good when I was wishing and hoping too hard. Sometimes things like pendulums or tarot cards will just tell you what you want to hear, not the truth. Gran always said you should see it for yourself instead of using “crutches,” but the crutches were good when you didn’t have time to put yourself in a trance or wait for a dream or omen.
“I’m fine.” I shook the idea away and copied the number on a plain piece of anonymous scrap paper, then shoved it in my pocket. The receipt was Evidence, and we Minimized Evidence, so it went back in the book. The contacts went back into the fireproof box, and I looked around the living room. There was nothing to do for the time being while we were snowed in, so I searched for something to say to get the conversation off me. “You can’t go anywhere in this kind of weather, you know.”
“I thought I’d just stay with you anyway. Seeing as how you’re so interesting.” He waggled his eyebrows, but the effect was lost under his mop of hair. He rubbed at his shoulder gently, the pink traces of werwulf bite already fading. The scars would be white and star-shaped before long, little puckers where the teeth had punctured the skin. “Besides, I can’t get back into the mall just yet. Or anywhere else.”
The quick healing was eerie, and the wounds just looked wrong, the way all wounds from the Real World do.
I’m sorry. I didn’t say it. Instead I pushed myself to my sock feet and shivered, staring out the front window. The snowflakes were amazing, thick and cottony. “How often does it snow like this?”
“About four or five times every winter. School will be back open tomorrow; they’ll have the snowplows going all night. You should think about going.”
Yeah. I’ll get right on that. I rubbed at my temple, where the zit was gone. It still hurt a little, though, deep under the skin. I hate those zits that burrow underground. You think they’ve vanished, but no, they just barricade themselves right next to the bone and hurt.
And my back twinged as I stretched carefully. “I don’t have any big dreams to keep me in school. What are you, a guidance counselor?”
“You have to think about the rest of your life.” He sounded serious, just like an ABC After School Special, pushing his dead-black hair away from his forehead. “Seriously. High school isn’t forever. If it was, I’d kill myself.”
> That makes two of us. “High school doesn’t even matter. When I turn eighteen I’ll be able to smoke and vote, not to mention get a decent job.”
“Not if you keep skipping. The way to get a decent job is to play the game well enough in high school, so you can get into college on a good GPA. That way you don’t end up poor and sucking on forties out in the Circle K parking lot, like my stupid stepdad.” Graves stretched. His eyes had turned a sleepy moss green. “Can I have another sandwich?”
“You know where the kitchen is.” I need to find the truck. Then I need to find out who did that to Dad. And who this number belongs to. My left hand curled into a fist, shoved inside my pocket to touch the paper. It was the only lead I had for now.
I thought Graves would keep bugging me, but apparently he was really smart. He left me alone in the silent living room with its faint horrible smell that lasted even after I got the ancient vacuum cleaner out and sucked every last trace of ash into a fresh bag.
It was the only way I had to keep some piece of Dad. He deserved a funeral. He deserved to be buried with Mom.
That was the wrong thought, and it made everything even worse. Something inside my chest was tearing open, and it was hard work to try to keep it closed over. That’s the funny thing about old hurts—they just wait for a new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.
I taped the bag shut and tucked it in the fireproof box; then I had to lean over the top of the box for a while, shaking and keeping the sobs muffled in my throat while Graves clinked around in the kitchen, listening to the weather report on the radio and occasionally bursting into snatches of song.
I was glad he was in a good mood.
CHAPTER 16
The bad part of the storm lasted not a week but three days, and Graves turned out to be a halfway decent cook. I’m no slouch in the kitchen—Gran took care of that—but Goth Boy was better. He made me omelets and was a fair hand with coffee, even though he did it too weak like most civilians. He slept in Dad’s cot, dragged into my room and neatly made each morning.