Charming (31 page)

D
rop me off here,” I told Molly.

She blinked owlishly but slowed her car to a halt. Even at six in the morning the road leading up to my house is too narrow and curvy for a car to stop just anywhere, and we were on the last straight stretch before my long winding gravel driveway.

“Who do you think is waiting for you?” she asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “But if I thought they were waiting for me, it wouldn’t be much of an ambush, now would it?”

“Thank you,” Molly said gravely.

“For what?” I hadn’t been much company since chasing Sig off.

Molly smiled shyly. “For making me feel mentally healthy.”

I opened the door. “You’re welcome.”

“Wait,” she called as I climbed out. “You’re not going to just leave us because things didn’t go well with Sig, are you?”

“I’ll be at Choo’s later,” I promised.

“Then be careful,” she said. “I don’t like the look in your eye.”

“Don’t worry about me, Molly,” I told her. “Worry about anybody dumb enough to mess with me right now.”

She started to say something else but I shut the door.

Slipping into the woods was like shedding a skin that didn’t really belong to me. The sun hadn’t come up yet, and there weren’t a lot of leaves on the ground in April, and nowhere near as many briars and vines as at the height of summer. I moved through the darkness like smoke.

I really wasn’t expecting trouble, but it was possible that the vampires had tracked my scent trail all the way back to my house, and it was possible that my recent activities had attracted the attention of a knight, and it was possible that… wait.

I smelled pine.

There weren’t any pine trees around my house. Some oak, hickory, and maple trees, a couple of other kinds of evergreens, but no pine trees. Not within a few miles. Keep in mind that I live in a world of scents as much as the average citizen lives in the world that he or she sees. I was no more likely to be mistaken about a strange scent than a suburbanite was to be mistaken about a lawn ornament that didn’t belong in their yard.

And pine-scented sprays are popular among hunters who want to mask their smell.

I had a few weapons stashed in the woods around my property—mostly because I had bitterly regretted not having them in Alaska—and the closest weapon to me was a Beretta M9 hidden in a tree about two hundred yards away. It didn’t have a silencer, which would have been nice, but at least it was in my hands when I located the source of the pine stink: two men who were aiming Barrett M82A1s at my house. These are military-grade sniper rifles that have been used successfully against light armored vehicles. Forget silver bullets—causing a supernatural being’s head to explode like a grapefruit counts as decapitation.

The two men were about three hundred feet apart, lying on
the ground beneath dirt-covered tarps and wearing camouflage and green ski masks and fingerless gloves. I recognized them by their identical builds even before I got a faint whiff of their real scents. Andrej and Andro. Dvornik’s nephews. Had Sig called Dvornik after leaving the truck stop? What exactly had she told him?

I could see my house from where I was watching Andrej and Andro. Dvornik’s car—a green Crown Vic—was parked in my driveway next to mine. My front door was open. Dvornik was announcing his presence and challenging me to come in after him. Maybe he had expected me to go straight into the house after pulling into my driveway. If he had hunted werewolves, he would know how strong the instinct to protect territory is, how fast and hot the rage at trespassers can run.

Which is why I waited. The full moon was over, and I don’t care how fast you are, how quietly you move, or how well you make use of cover; the most important quality in being stealthy is patience. Dvornik’s nephews were within sight of each other, and in woods that quiet and with the equipment I had, there was no way I could take them both out silently unless I was willing to kill at least one of them, and I wasn’t ready to go that far. It takes seven to thirteen seconds to choke someone out under perfect circumstances, and hitting someone hard enough to make them pass out makes noise.

So I waited some more. I was willing to wait all day until the bastards started packing up to go to Choo’s that afternoon if I had to.

My moment came somewhere between one and a half and two hours later, when Andrej got up to stretch and take a piss. He moved upwind of my house and went far enough away that the smell of his urine wouldn’t mark his location immediately, which was sensible. It also made it possible for me to take out
his brother by moving silently behind him and using the butt of the M9 like a blackjack.

There were several trees that I was able to keep between us as Andrej returned to his camp. He didn’t sense me until there were fewer than six feet separating us, and as fast as I am, six feet is too close.

Andrej never got off a shot. I tore the rifle out of his hands and slammed its butt into his jaw in the same motion.

That still left me with one essential question. Dvornik’s nephews might have been a hit squad, but it was equally possible that they were just there as a safety precaution. It’s not as if Dvornik hadn’t made it manifestly clear that he didn’t trust me. The question was, had he come here to talk to me or kill me?

I decided to ask him.

24

O
ne of the perks of hunting supernatural creatures is that monster hunters have access to salves, powders, and compounds made from those creatures, and some of these have unusual properties. I smelled something I’d never smelled before the moment I stepped onto my porch, and I never did find out for sure exactly what magical drug Dvornik was on. In retrospect, though, I’d be willing to bet that it was camahueto horn.

The camahueto is an extremely rare animal in Chile, and its horn can be ground up into a drug that’s like PCP, steroids, Viagra, and crack all rolled up into one. Humans are capable of some amazing feats under stress—those stories about mothers pulling cars off their children one-handed or PCP users snapping handcuffs as if they were made of aluminum foil aren’t urban legends—and camahueto horn takes a normal human straight to that place where they’re mainlining adrenaline, insulin, and testosterone. It can make a man as strong as a vampire for brief periods, though it also makes controlling aggressive and sexual impulses difficult, and the person taking
camahueto horn often comes off the drug with muscles that have been torn to shreds.

One of the big debates among knights in the middle of the twentieth century was whether or not pairs of camahuetos should be captured and bred like alpacas for their horns. A faction of knights calling themselves the Swords of Solomon believed that using magic to fight magic is only sensible. The traditionalist factions worried that this would violate the terms of the Pax, while the Crusaders thought it would compromise the knights and their insistence on remaining free of supernatural taint. The bug huggers were divided: some looked at the proposal as harvesting the camahueto for their ingredients while others saw it as a way to save an endangered species.

I don’t know how that whole thing shook out. I was forced to leave the knights while the debate was still raging. I also don’t know where kresniks came down on the whole issue. But Dvornik was using some kind of drug. Whatever I was smelling was combined with his sweat… it was literally coming out of his skin.

The other thing I smelled as soon as I got near my house was wolfsbane.

Everybody knows about silver bullets, but most cultures have forgotten that wolfsbane is one of the few natural toxins that will actually kill werewolves. It’s not easy introducing enough of the stuff into a werewolf’s bloodstream to do this, because a werewolf will smell it from a mile off, and a slash from a knife dipped in the stuff will just make a werewolf mildly nauseated and feverish—but it can be done.

Some people say that wolfsbane works on werewolves because it was one of the ingredients in whatever magic ritual created werewolves in the first place, and therefore they have no immunity to it. Others say it’s because hunters used to dip their
arrows in wolfsbane while hunting wolves, and over the centuries this took on some kind of symbolic/supernatural significance all on its own, the way magic does sometimes. I didn’t really care which was true at the moment.

Dvornik was in my house and packing werewolf poison.

His face stayed expressionless when I walked into my dining room. There was a survey map of Clayburg spread out on the table before him, and the bastard was sipping coffee from one of my mugs. The coffee was laced with the stuff I’d never smelled before, something acrid and pungent. Whatever it was, he was sweating heavily and didn’t look good.

There were all kinds of ruses I could have used. I could have tried to sneak up on him. I could have pretended to walk into the house not knowing that he had posted his nephews outside. But I was sick of mind games. I threw his nephews’ sniper rifles on the dining room table with a loud clatter. “Next?” I said, as if I were at a deli counter waiting to give out the next order. And today’s special was kicked ass.

In answer Dvornik stood up and kicked my dining room table upward and toward me. It was not a small table—it was made of real oak and could seat at least ten people, but it went flying as if it were a TV dinner tray. That was the second indication that whatever was in Dvornik’s coffee wasn’t a sugar substitute.

My reflexes kicked in the moment the table went airborne. I dove sideways into the living room while the table was crashing into the wall and breaking the window over my porch. Dvornik thought I was pinned beneath the table and began emptying his pistol—a .357 Magnum—into the tabletop, puncturing it with softball-size holes. I could see this clearly through the room’s entrance when I rolled back to my feet, although Dvornik was hidden from view.

I didn’t pause but charged toward the dining room wall in the rough direction of where Dvornik was standing on the other side of it. The wall was basically held together by a few slats of very old wood, some plaster, and some wallpaper. I burst through it like a stripper popping out of a birthday cake.

Surprise.

Things got very frantic very fast. I got ahold of two pressure points around the radius bone of his wrist and Dvornik lost the gun, but somehow he managed to tilt and throw me off him with his artificially enhanced strength. The outer walls were a lot harder than the interior walls, but I still dislocated more than a few bricks and my right shoulder when I smashed into the side of the house. Dvornik pulled a strange-looking knife that was the source of the wolfsbane smell and tried to pivot and corner me against the wall. Limiting my range of movement was smart. Whatever Dvornik was on was giving him an edge in strength, but I was faster. Fortunately for me he had pulled his knife from the side of his body that wasn’t facing me, and that gave me an extra moment to bounce off the wall and smash the heel of my left palm directly over his heart as he turned toward me.

A strange expression came over Dvornik’s face. He slowed and swiped the knife feebly at me, and I took advantage of his weakness to block his knife hand at the wrist with my left forearm, then leaned in with all of my weight and hit him in the same spot above his heart again with my left elbow.

This wasn’t arbitrary on my part. The guy was old and mainlining some kind of major stimulant, supernatural or not. Which is why I wasn’t surprised when the knife dropped from numb fingers and Dvornik tottered backward clutching his chest, his lips already turning blue.

He dropped to his knees, then fell backward.

I watched Dvornik twitch and gasp and seriously considered just letting him die while his feet kicked. I’d just gone to all that effort to kill him—it seemed a shame to waste it. I definitely wasn’t going to give him CPR: there was no way the wolf was exposing its throat to an enemy, dying or not. Finally I sighed and rammed my right shoulder against the wall, popping it back into place. Then I picked up the knife and the gun Dvornik had dropped and went through the kitchen doorway toward the bathroom on the first floor.