Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (16 page)

The taste, even the scent, of blood for a were-wolf was overwhelming. In the animal form, they were driven to hunt. It was their instinct. Overcoming that desire and controlling it with their human nature had to be the most important thing for a lycanthrope to learn.

A were-wolf would hunt. The human, therefore, had to keep a much firmer grip of the animal side of themselves.

If a lycanthrope ever tasted human blood as a wolf, then the chances of them carrying the taste for it into the human shape became disturbingly high.

Were-creatures were quite susceptible to human blood addictions, a genetic flaw to an otherwise generally harmless creature.

“I’m glad you’re getting a chance to see the possible enjoyment the other side of your nature offers.”

Jonathan thought he saw a flush come to Frank’s cheeks.

“As long as it’s the human running the show, it’s all right to bask in the potency and speed of the canine, Frank. You should learn the things you can do on your time. You don’t want to be caught unaware by ability or urges. If you know the canine, then you can control the canine.”

“I think I see your point now, Mr. Alvey.”

“Frank, if you can’t get used to calling me Jonathan, can I at least get you to drop the Mister from the equation?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Now, did you see or smell anything—any person, vehicle, or maybe even another animal, following Wendell?”

Frank shook his head.

“Sorry, Alvey, but I didn’t. I tried to keep as far back as I could, while still being able to see Wendell, but I spotted nothing.

“I even made loops around the house before he left, just to make sure there wasn’t someone hiding on the other side from me. I couldn’t see, hear, or smell anything. And let me tell you, that nose takes in a lot. It’s like seeing smells.”

“All right. I need you to keep at it, at least until morning.”

“Sure,” Frank said without hesitation. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“I appreciate it, Frank. And remember—don’t get involved. If you do see anything, watch and watch only. If you think maybe you’ve been noticed, just leave. Get back to your car and go home, or better yet, to the yard. Just get yourself gone and I’ll find you, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, so keep on following and observing—even if he’s with me—until I get a chance to check in with you again tomorrow.”

“No problem, Alvey. You are buying when this is finished, right?”

“Seems fair enough, but I think we should include Ralph. It’s so pathetic to see someone so big pouting.”

Frank laughed quietly and then motioned for Jonathan to turn around again. A moment later, a soft growl informed Jonathan that Frank had resumed his animal form.

Jonathan turned and, picking his coat off the ground, watched the large canine stroll out of the alley. He shook his coat to rid it of the worst of the crap it had picked up from being on the ground. Gratefully sliding it on against the cold night air, he made his own way back to the bright lights of the downtown streets.

He walked up the stairs to the studio, trying to put out of his mind the fact that he’d spotted three owls perched on the edge of the building’s roof. A voice of a fourth had been just audible over the din of the downtown activities.

Jonathan heard Wendell’s and Mary’s voices as he ascended. When he reached the door to the studio, he heard Mary explaining to Wendell what she did, what she was.

Clearly, Wendell had been asking questions about her ability to use the tarot. Mary, being the sweetheart she was, appeared to be doing her best to answer his questions.

Jonathan assumed her banter was probably a defense system. A block against the reading she’d just given a kind stranger.

“Okay, Wendell, I think it’s best if we get going,” Jonathan said.

Wendell nodded and, taking Mary’s hand in his, thanked her for her time. He even thanked her for the reading.

Mary could only nod in response.

“Mary,” Jonathan said, “I’ll be in touch.”

“I think that would be good, Jonathan,” she replied with a note of steel backing her soft voice.

Jonathan led Wendell out of the studio and clearly not a moment too soon. As they descended the stairs back out to the early night, people began to come in the door at the bottom of the flight of stairs with yoga mats rolled up under their arms.

When they reached the street and past those heading to their yoga class, Wendell spoke. “She’s a nice person. To think, the first witch I meet and I have to make her feel bad.”

“Technically, Mary isn’t a witch.”

“Oh.”

“But close enough,” Jonathan told him, not feeling like getting into a discussion of semantics. “Where are you parked?”

Wendell pointed in the opposite direction of Jonathan’s Lincoln, which most likely had a ticket flapping against the windshield.

“Look, I want you to come back to my office.”

“Okay,” Wendell said, and though he hadn’t hesitated, he did ask, “What are we going to do there?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m going to grill you for a couple of annoying hours on every aspect of your life. See if I can spot who, or what, might be doing this. There has to be some reason this is happening to you, Wendell. Somewhere, somehow, you really pissed something or someone off.”

Wendell opened his mouth to object, but Jonathan overrode him. “It could be a person with a short fuse and a psychopath’s responses, or it may be you stumbled onto something else and unknowingly hurt or offended something that isn’t even human.

“Either way, we need to pick apart every second of your life starting from the moment you went into that antique store and working back.”

“Uh—okay,” Wendell said without enthusiasm. “You don’t make it sound very good though, see? I got to say, you’re no salesman, Mr. Alvey.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that,” Jonathan mumbled.

Then, sensing a theme to his day, he insisted, “Wendell, please call me Jonathan. And no, I’m not a salesman.”

He sighed and admitted, “I’m telling you the truth because we don’t have any time to fool around. I need to figure out not only what’s behind this, but how to stop it.”

“What—well, what if you can’t?”

“Let’s just not go there, Wendell. We are far from beat, so I don’t want you thinking we are.”

“Sure.”

“The other thing I want to do today is try and give you some protection, some immunity to magic. I want to see if we can turn away the spells against you.”

“Can we—you—do that?”

“I’m going to do what I can. And tomorrow, I’m going to take you to see someone who can do more.”

“Another friend?”

“No. No, not that.”

“You are an odd man, Mr. Alvey.”

Jonathan didn’t bother pointing out the name usage. “I’ll see you at my office.”

They parted ways and Jonathan walked to his car thinking of what charms, amulets, and other forms of protection and magic repulsion he could supply.

When he reached his car, Jonathan got in and eventually coaxed the old Lincoln to life. Only as he pulled into traffic did he realize he hadn’t been ticketed after all.

“Maybe our luck is turning.”

J
onathan gave Wendell a nod as he walked through the office door, and pointed to the chair. “Give me a minute,” he said, and picked up the phone receiver.

The two of them would be at it for a while and he saw no point in starving themselves. He could quiz Wendell and feed his stomach at the same time.

“I’m calling across the road for food. Anything in particular you might want?”

“Those things you ordered for me last time were tasty enough. I could eat them again.”

“The dumplings,” Jonathan clarified. “Okay, good.”

Quan answered the phone after only two rings and Jonathan couldn’t resist asking him if he’d spent the fifty on a girl yet. The kid snorted a ‘no’ and then asked if he wanted the usual.

Jonathan had a feeling by the time the night was over, he’d have worked up quite the appetite. “Actually, I’ll need a double of the noodles and dumplings.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Alvey. I’ll bring it over soon as it’s ready.”

“Thanks, Quan.”

He hung up and Wendell admitted he didn’t think he could eat so much food.

Jonathan waved away the comment. “Whatever doesn’t get eaten tonight will make a delicious breakfast. I speak from experience.”

He took the bottle of bourbon from the drawer and set it on the desk. Seeing how low in the bottle the level of amber liquid sat, he thanked the gods he had a full bottle in the filing cabinet.

Jonathan filled his own glass and then the mug Wendell had used the day before. He pushed the mug across the desk towards his client, lit a smoke, and then offered one as well. Wendell’s long arm extended and plucked a single smoke from the silver case.

Jonathan had spent the drive going over and over the cards Mary had lain out. By the look on his client’s face, he hadn’t been thinking of much else either.

“Look, Wendell, about the reading Mary gave.” Wendell looked up without lifting his head. “It doesn’t mean we’re beat. Not by a long shot.”

“So, it was just another prediction, is what you’re saying?”

Jonathan hadn’t meant that. In fact, it had been the first time he had taken the concept of his client’s life being in jeopardy seriously.

“Nothing’s written in stone.” He took a swig of the bourbon and realized the statement could be taken either way. “We make our own way through life and I’ve had a lot of practice finding the way through to staying alive.”

“You really aren’t worried?” Wendell straightened more in the chair.

“I won’t lie.”

Much
.

“I’m a little worried, but that’s my job. If I didn’t worry, I’d be leaving you open to a possible assault. But let me do the worrying.”

“She didn’t seem very happy about the experience,” Wendell said.

Jonathan didn’t know if the statement came from fear for himself or concern for Mary.

He decided to assume the latter.

“She wasn’t. That’s Mary for you. She cares and empathizes, maybe too much, but it’s probably what makes her so good at the readings.”

In truth, Mary’s readings were too good to be anything but genuine. Sometimes eerily so. But Jonathan hadn’t lied about staying alive, and he had confidence in his ability to transfer those skills to keeping another person alive.

Jonathan continued to work at easing his client’s fears, while in his own mind working out what he should fear.

When Bao’s nephew came through the door with the brown paper bags of food, both men had been working hard on killing the bottle of booze.

Jonathan thanked Quan for the quick delivery and, still having money from the Apatedyne representative, passed over the second to last fifty.

Jonathan found it hard to believe his run-in with Apatedyne had only been that morning.

It had just been one of those days—both so much and so little had happened. Connecting the one experience with the rest of the day took effort.

Quan reached into his pocket to make change, but Jonathan shook his head.

“I came into a bit of money this morning. I feel like sharing the wealth. It will balance out all the times you’ve been kind enough to give me credit.”

“Ah, it’s no problem, Mr. Alvey. You are our best customer.”

“Well, most frequent anyway.”

The young man laughed and nodded, then said, “There’s a lot of crows on the roof of the building. I noticed when I came outside.”

“Yeah. Great. Thanks, but my client and I had better get to it.”

“Of course, Mr. Alvey. Goodnight.”

“Night.”

Jonathan waited until he heard the outer door close and then, opening one of the brown paper bags, he passed Wendell a Styrofoam container of dumplings and placed a container of Singapore noodles on the desk before him.

Jonathan worked quickly to quell the worst of his hunger pangs, before starting in on Wendell about his every move since entering the antique store.

When the beast in his stomach no longer growled and threatened to disembowel him from the inside out, Jonathan decided he’d better start.

He took a legal pad from his desk drawer and dug up a pen from under the assorted mess covering the desktop. He waited for Wendell to stop chewing and asked the first question he could think of.

“Did you touch, break, try out, or in any other way, manipulate any item in the antique store before using the fortuneteller machine?”

Wendell took the question seriously. He lowered his fork and the dumpling on it back into the container and thought.

Jonathan could almost see him replaying in his head every move he had made in the store.

“I picked up a statue,” Wendell finally confessed with something bordering on excitement.

Jonathan could understand the feeling. Sometimes, all it took was one small puzzle piece to get the whole picture.

“Can you remember what it was made of? What it looked like?”

“A plaster recreation of the Venus de Milo,” Wendell answered promptly.

One part of Jonathan’s mind tried to recall if he had seen the statue when he’d cased the store. Another part called up anything he knew about the goddess, or the church of Venus. He hoped for a fit to the effects Wendell had experienced. Unfortunately, nothing matched.