Crossed (42 page)

    41    

TABITHA:

GHOST ON A PLANE

I couldn’t find the gun anywhere on the plane. I sat there with Lord Phillip’s employees hovering over me like frazzled parents who can’t make things better. What do you do for a vampire who can’t feed? A faint buzz clicked under my seat as the warmers kicked on, but I cried anyway, not that there was any blood to come out. Red crept into the edges of my vision as my hunger grew. I could still discern the facial features of the flight crew, but hints of the veins beneath the surface of the skin became increasingly prominent, tattoos increasing in definition as some phantom inker worked her magic.

“If there wuz anything I could do to help, I’d shore as shootin’ do it.” A voice, southern in the way that grits and crawfish and clubs of little old ladies honoring the dear departed Confederacy are southern. One twang shy of a caricature. “Dern it. She cain’t hear me. If only she’d shot the dang gun once.”

“Hello?”

“Yes, Lady Bathory?” one of the stewards asked.

“I wasn’t talking to you!” I stood, looking for the speaker.

“Now she’s so hungry she’s hallucinatin’.” I saw him. In the back of the plane. A spectral cowboy in a red and white checkered shirt, bloodstained and bullet-riddled, with trails of smoke wisping up from the holes as he puffed on the stub of a cigar. “She’s already been tearing about some”—I assumed his next word was “foreign,” but he said it “fur in”—“country in her whorehouse clothes. With her woman parts all hanging out.”

“Whorehouse clothes?! Hey!” The family resemblance was unmistakable. I realized I’d seen this guy before, in a mystic image shown to me by Lord Phillip, back during the whole Orchard Lake thing. He’d been younger in that image. Seen as he was now, broken neck forcing his head to wobble slightly, you could tell he was related to Eric. “You do not get to call these whorehouse clothes. I look sexy in this!”

“I ain’t never said you didn’t look attractive, ma’am.” He dropped his cigar, stubbing it out on the ground even as it broke apart, little more than smoke. John Paul Courtney removed his hat and gave me a slight, but careful, nod. “I kin see how a getup like that might get a man’s pistol primed, but you ain’t never gone convince me that it don’t make you look more saloon hall night than Sunday morning church service.”

“Times change.”

“That they do, ma’am.” His smile was Eric’s smile, but where Eric’s smiles could often be hard to come by, John Paul Courtney seemed more practiced at doling them out. “But the Good Book don’t change, and I try not ta either.”

“Where’s Eric?” I leaned forward, and John Paul’s eyes dipped down toward my cleavage then up and away with a whistle.

“Put them young-uns to bed, missy,” he said, not looking at me. “Or cover ’em up. They’re out past their bedtime and getting inta places they have no business bein’.”

“Lady Bathory?”

I shooed the attendants away and they headed to the cabin.
Looking back at the ghost, I pulled my coat tight around me and tied the sash. “Better?”

“It is at that, thank ya kindly.”

“Where’s Eric?”

“Fornicatin’.” He shook his head from side to side, then caught it before it could topple over. “But I ain’t convinced it’s all his fault this time. I appeared to him to ask what he thought he was doin’ when he had a pretty little filly at home waitin’ fer ’im, but he couldn’t even hear me.”

Crimson overcame my vision, washing away the other colors. If Rachel was screwing my husband again, I’d kill her. Sister or not. I’d kill her. Particularly if she’d cast some kind of spell on him again.

“But where?”

“I don’t rightly know, ma’am. Truth be told, I ain’t never been to France afore, not to mention Paris, so I shore didn’t recognize the sights outside the window.” His cigar appeared again, as if in absentmindedly reaching for it, he’d re-created it. He puffed on it once, a long deep draw, the smoke obscuring his face as it coursed up from his wounds. “It ain’t even clear how it is you came to be able to see me. Usually if someone fires
El Alma Perdida
I feel it. That desire to kill someone rings through clear as a dinner bell. And you ain’t a Courtney.”

“Shooting the gun means I can see you?”

“No, it means I kin appear to ya.”

“Well, that settles it then.”

“Settles what?” he asked. The perplexed expression on his weather-beaten features looked out of place.

“I dropped
El Alma Perdida
and it went off, the night I brought it back to Eric . . . on his birthday. Shot him in the butt. And yes”—I held up my hand, flashing him my wedding band and engagement ring—“I most certainly
am
a Courtney. We were married in a real church by a real priest, and Courtney is my real last name now.”

“Well I’ll be.” He smiled again, smoke curling around the edges of his mouth. “I guess you’re my great-great-granddaughter-in-law then . . . mehbe one more
great
. Welcome to the family, honey.” He held out his hand and I reached out to take it, but found my fingers wrapped around the silver cross–etched grip of
El Alma Perdida
instead. The crosses didn’t burn my hand.

“How?”

“I ain’t lettin’ nobody take my gun in amongst no dern demon worshippers.” He pointed to his now empty holster. “Not unless Perdy’s bein’ shot at ’em. If no one’s got a holt of her, I kin always take her back.”

“I was talking about the crosses not burning me.” I examined my unburned palm, holding the gun by the barrel with my left hand. “But that’s good to know too.”

“The gun likes Courtneys. The bullets don’t pay no never mind. ’Course, they’re bullets, so I guess that’s all right.”

I spun the cylinder and only saw one bullet. “Does Eric still have the other bullets?”

“I reckon.” Courtney put his hat back on and drew deep on the cigar before breathing out a ring of smoke. “There’s a way to reload the gun even without the bullets, though. If’n you know the right words.”

“No!”

“No?”

“Don’t reload the gun.” I handed it back to him. “I can use it to find Eric.”

“Naw.” Courtney pursed his lips. “Most of the magic got drained out of ’em. They won’t build their power back up unless I reload ’em.” He drew the gun and snapped open the cylinder, removing the last bullet. “Hold tight.”

Smoke swirled around him and he was gone. Before the smoke had dissipated, he’d returned.

“Lord knows I didn’t need to see that.” He held out the gun, cylinder clicking as he showed me the five bullets and the empty slot. “Shouldn’t be running around with all six chambers loaded anyhow,” he explained. “That’s how accidents happen. Keep an empty chamber and ya ain’t likely to shoot when you don’t mean ta shoot.”

“He didn’t notice the swap?”

“Nope. The bullets was in his pants pocket.”

“And?”

“Well, ma’am.” He puffed on his cigar and waved the smoke away with his Stetson. “I thought I made it clear. He ain’t exactly wearin’ his pants raht now.”

Images of Eric on top of Rachel, Rachel astride Eric, and some nebulous second bitch feeding on both of them ran through my head. A cry of equal parts rage and frustration escaped my throat, and I wanted to hit something, anything. I clenched and unclenched my fists, ignoring the pain as my claws cut my palms.

“How fast can you move?” I asked the ghost.

“Speed ain’t exactly a problem, missy.” He floated to one end of the passenger compartment and back at a clip roughly equivalent to top human running speed. “It’s the range that does me in. Except for special circumstances, I can’t move too far from
El Alma Perdida
or my kinfolk. It’s that or the In-between and that ain’t mah idear of a home away from home.”

“Can you drive?”

JPC shook his head, shouting an annoyed, “Dadburnit,” when his head toppled over to one side. “I figgered up a way I think I could do it, but I ain’t never had no one to let me practice.”

“Then we do this on foot. I can see magic, but only when I’m a cat.” I turned into a cat, screeching at the emptiness that yawned in my belly as I made the shift. Normally, as a cat, I
feel alive, but hungry as I was, my body wouldn’t give up the special effects. My feline heart lay still and dead in my diminutive chest. “You lead the way,” I meowed.

“I don’t speak critter, miss,” John Paul Courtney told me. “But I reckon you want me to head on out.”

It took a few minutes to get the attendants to open the door and let me out, largely because I didn’t want to risk transforming again and also because my vision had gone completely red except for my ghostly in-law. The skin and hair of the humans on the plane had become translucent, the features hard to discern. Instead, all I saw was the blood.

Outside the plane, I ran, a few paces ahead of JPC, my head cocked at the slight angle required to make out the thin blue line of magic linking
El Alma Perdida
to the single round in Eric’s pocket. Shin high and at a dizzying slant was not how I wanted to see Paris at night. If I stopped to take in the sights, I lost the thread. If I didn’t stop, the rapid movement, combined with the angle of my head, made the world spin as if I were riding a roller coaster. Farther into Paris, the other shoe dropped. Webs of energy, close to the same as the line of magic I was following, crisscrossed the landscape, a lattice of magic. . . . I ran into the wheel of a parked car and sat still, waiting for the world to stop moving. “This,” I meowed, “is going to be a pain in the ass.”

    42    

ERIC:

WHAT HAPPENS IN PARIS . . .

Eating the same woman every night is weird,” I said to no one in particular. Rachel, the freaky chick with all the piercings and the butterfly tattoo on her cheek, ran her fingers through my hair as I lifted my mouth from her femoral artery. I kissed the fang marks, watching as they faded, and moved my ministrations up and to the right.

“A little faster,” she said, shifting me to the right spot and grinding against my mouth, rhythmically in time to some internal pleasure pulse.

Behind me, Irene chuckled. “There are so many ways a lady could interpret that statement.” Fangs out, she stalked to where I knelt at the edge of the bed upon which Rachel was sprawled, her body flickering as she moved there and back again in rapid succession. “Is there room for the bride to cut in or do I have to take a number?”