Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (24 page)

“Lots of drinking, lots of dancing, lots of team sports. Lots of, uh, amorous entertainment. Lots of food.”

I put the next question as delicately as I can. “Is it . . . safe?”

“You mean for non-thropes? Sure. Mostly.”

He sees the look on my face and hastily adds, “I mean, any large event has its troublemakers, but the Moondays of today aren’t anything like they used to be. The whole idea behind them is to control our animal nature, by finding socially acceptable outlets for our instincts.”

“That sounds suspiciously like something regurgitated from a first-year university textbook.”

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“Maybe so, but it’s still true. Look, lycanthropes used to be a very different race. We’d hide our true nature from everyone around us, then go on a wild carnivorous spree once a month. Everybody knows how unhealthy that is now.”

“Oh, absolutely. I don’t care what anyone says, you have to get a few carbs in now and then.”

“These days, people split their times as lycanthrope or human about fifty-fifty. When Moondays roll around, there’s much less pent-up aggression to be released. We’ve turned it into a celebration as opposed to an explosion of primal urges.”

“Sounds like it’s still pretty primal to me.”

“Not in Seattle. New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Anchorage—those are places that can get out of hand. But—” He stops himself.

“But what?”

“Nothing. Hey, you should see this.” He gets up and motions me to follow him.

I do, making a mental note to pursue the topic later. He walks up to the table where the women are working and says, “Ah, making mirositors, I see.” The women are taking chunks of beef jerky and dried apricots, sprinkling them with herbs, and wrapping them in small, brightly colored squares of cloth.

“It’s for the young ones,” a woman who must be in her eighties says. “We sprinkle some herbs on the treats, you see? With a strong smell. Then we hide them and they must search them out with their nose.”

“Like Easter eggs,” I say. The woman smiles at me and nods, but I can tell she has no idea what I’m talking about.

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“You help?” she asks, motioning to a chair.

“Uh—sure.” I sit down and pitch in.

“I’m going to go catch up with some of the kids,” Dr. Pete says. He leaves before I can protest.

Not that there’s anything to protest, really. Putting the little packets together—the cloths have to be folded just so, and then tied with a little piece of colored string—is relaxing in that monotonous, mindless way that certain tasks are. The women ask questions about me and Dr. Pete, some sly, some blunt. I inform them that he’s just my doctor, then have to defend that position when they begin to detail the many, many fine qualities he possesses and why he would make a perfect husband.

It’s all right, though. I’ve had to use the same arguments before, with my own mother. In its own way, it’s as rhythmic and repetitious as the folding of the cloths, and almost as soothing.

Almost.

It makes me think about Roger, which is not a subject I tend to embrace. Still, he’s the closest I ever came to walking down the aisle—well, thinking about walking down the aisle—and the fact that my professional ability to recognize sociopathic tendencies completely failed me when it came to the person I was sharing a bed with screwed me up for a long time. The first casualty of that particular psychic battle was any thoughts of matrimony, ever. When you have your trust violated on the level that he violated mine, it’s hard to imagine ever having that level of emotional intimacy again.

So why is Roger the one who’s trying to warn me?

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I refuse to consider that he might in any way be real. I’m suffering from a condition that causes hallucinations; therefore, he has to be a hallucination. Never mind that the aforementioned condition was brought on by supernatural weirdness—I can’t just toss out the rules of deductive logic because the occasional natural law gets bent. Roger being more than a hallucination opens up a whole can of worms labeled: PARANOID

SUSPICIONS—CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE. Is Roger really an evil wizard? Is an evil wizard posing as him? Did an evil wizard send a demon to pose as him and get inside my head? Does Roger have an evil twin who is, in fact, an evil wizard? And why am I so obsessed with evil wizards when I’ve got vampire ninjas, Mafia werewolves, and Irish shape-changers to choose from? Maybe it’s an evil witch that’s getting into my head—Maureen Selkie in ex-boyfriend drag?

No. If she were trying to contact me, she wouldn’t pick an image from my brain that I associate with treachery. Unless maybe my own mind applied that as some kind of filter, trying to let me know the sender wasn’t trustworthy. . . .

Argh. It’s like trying to build a house out of wet spaghetti. I make a mental note to talk to Eisfanger about astral projection and telepathy later and whether they even exist in this world. I still don’t know everything that’s possible or impossible here. . . .

And then the zombie sits down next to me.

Half her face is rotted away. She looks like she was around seventeen when she died, and the undertaker who did her makeup used too much. The exposed, lengthened canines tell me she was a thrope, and the hole in her skull tells me how she was probably killed. I can see her brain.

“Hi,” she says. I’m surprised how good her enunciation is with only half her lips.

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“Hi,” I say cheerfully. Some stubborn inner resolve has kicked in, a grim refusal to be freaked out by anything else. Mummies, giant spiders, flaming skeletons, whatever you got; bring ’em on.

“I’m Alexandra,” she says. “I’m, um, Uncle Peter’s niece? And I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?”

“I’ll answer yours if you answer mine.”

“Okay, I guess so.” The other women at the table don’t seem fazed at all by Alexandra’s appearance—though a few of the older ones don’t seem to approve, either—so why should I?

“Are you dead?” I ask. It seems like a reasonable question, but it produces giggles from most of the kids at the table.

She smiles at me, which is a truly horrifying sight. “No. My turn. Are you really from another world?”

“Yes. If you’re not dead, why does your face look like that?”

“It’s called corpsing. It’s just a fashion thing, lots of people are into it. Is it true there aren’t any thropes or vampires where you come from?”

“Not real ones. But there are people who imitate them, fashion-wise.”

She frowns. “They dress like us? But we dress normal.”

I can practically hear the cultural gap yawn between us. “No, they dress like they think vampires would—lots of black, makeup to make their skin pale, artificial fangs. Like you imitating a corpse, I guess.”

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“Oh. We have those, kind of. Except their fangs aren’t fake and they like to speak weird.” Unlike the very mundane conversation we’re having at the moment, of course.

“Is corpsing painful?” I ask.

“No. It uses a charm, see?” She holds up her wrist, which has a small purple pouch tied to it with string. “And it’s just temporary. I take the charm off, everything grows back really fast.”

“Cool.” And it actually is, in a creepy kind of way. It’s actually less of a commitment than a tattoo.

“So, what’s it like where you’re from? I can’t imagine.”

“A lot like here, actually. We drive cars, we shop in supermarkets, we live in cities. Sometimes being here feels like I’ve just gone to another country instead of another universe.”

“So you don’t have Moondays?”

“Not as such.”

“God, you are so lucky,” she moans in that self-indulgent way only a teenager can really do justice to. “I hate having to change every month. I can’t wear any of my clothes, it makes my joints hurt, and I totally eat like a pig.”

“Bah!” the oldest-looking woman at the table says. “You should be proud of who you are! Not complain all the time!”

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She glares ferociously at Alexandra, who sighs theatrically and says, “Whatever.” She gets up and slouches away, probably to go find her socially unacceptable boyfriend and make out with him. Those lips will make it difficult, but I’m sure they’ll find a way. Teenagers are inventive.

I notice that the Urthbone effect is much more subdued than it was previously. I can feel the emotions around me, but they don’t seem to be affecting my own mood nearly as much. Perversely, at the moment I kind of regret that; the women around me are happy, surrounded by people they love and preparing for something they’re looking forward to.

Me, not so much.

It’s a nice illusion, sitting here and doing family-type things, but it’s not my family, it’s not my culture, it’s not my world. For every comforting detail I can identify with, there’s some bizarre off-kilter factor that makes the familiar horrible and strange. As if to underscore the point, a small child trots by, his mouth bloody, holding a dead rat between his teeth. His parents congratulate him, of course.

My phone rings, a number I don’t recognize. I answer anyway.

“Hello?”

“Hello. It’s Kamakura Tanaka. I realize that it’s the weekend, but I was wondering if we could meet.”

“You have new information?”

“Not . . . exactly. I simply feel that it would be productive to discuss the case. To share our perspectives.”

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He sounds sincere but a little hesitant. I realize he’s probably sitting in a hotel room, maybe nursing some too-expensive minifridge scotch and wondering what the hell to do with himself.

“I’m kind of busy at the moment, Tanaka. How about tomorrow?”

“That would be fine. Where should I meet you?”

I’m not that familiar with my neighborhood yet, so I just give him my address and tell him to ring the buzzer at noon. He thanks me and hangs up.

Dr. Pete finally returns, bearing two large glasses of iced tea.

He tells me he wants to show me something, and I excuse myself from the table. He leads me into the house and down to the basement, where I find . . .

Comic books.

“These are mine,” Dr. Pete says, opening up a cardboard box filled with them. “Had ’em since I was a kid. Worth a lot now—or would be, if they were in better condition—but I prefer to leave them here as a kind of library. Let the younger generation discover them, if they ever take a break from playing video games.”

“Here.” He pulls one out and hands it to me. “Check this out.”

The cover shows a woman in a skintight outfit and a pair of aviator goggles, striking a pose on a rooftop while lightning flashes behind her. She’s got a wicked-looking crossbow in one hand, and a curving scimitar in the other. The logo reads: “Amelia Earhart, Aviatrix.”

“You’re kidding. Amelia Earhart was a comic-book heroine?”

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“Sure. They called human adventurers ‘underheroes.’ They fought all sorts of bad guys, could do things thropes or pires couldn’t—endure sunlight, ignore the effects of garlic or silver or the full moon. Me, I liked the fact that they usually had to use their brains to get out of trouble as opposed to brawn.”

I study the cover, note that it’s dated 1939. “In my world, Amelia Earhart went missing during an attempt to fly around the world, in 1937.”

“Not here. She succeeded, and it made her an even bigger celebrity than she was before. She died piloting a paratrooper transport over North Africa in 1941.”

Congratulations, I think to myself, staring at the blurred image of the woman in her heroic pose. You did something no one else had ever done—then died four years later in a war over the scraps of the human race.

“I guess these comics are where it started,” Dr. Pete says. “My interest in nonsupernatural humans.”

I know what he’s trying to do, and it’s sweet—showing me a piece of his childhood, trying to demonstrate that I have value in this world, no matter how outnumbered or outpowered I am. But it still feels a little too much like a veterinarian explaining to a particularly smart dog how proud he is of her.

I hand him back the comic and force a smile. “Yeah, lucky me—not only do I get to be your patient, I can do double-duty on weekends as your hobby, too.”

I can feel his hurt without even looking at his face. “Jace, that’s not true—”

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“I know, I know,” I say, my voice tired. “I’m sorry. I think I’m just a little overwhelmed, okay? Thanks for inviting me out and everything, but I think I’m ready to go. Back to my apartment, I mean.”

“Of course. I’ll drive you.”

It takes a while to make the rounds and say good-bye to everyone. Most express sincere regret that I have to go and tell me I’m welcome back anytime. They mean it, too, and I start to feel like an ungrateful brat. Alexandra wanders out when I’m almost done, now using headphones to insulate herself from the party. She sits down on a lawn chair, nodding her head to whatever she’s listening to. It sounds like she’s really got it cranked, whatever it is—

No way.

I tap her on the shoulder. She jumps a little, then stares at me accusingly. “What?”