Charming (41 page)

My eyes opened.

Everything was white. The walls were white, the lights above me were bright, and there were three pale sculptures around me. I focused on them and realized that all of the statues were of Sig.

“And a lack of closure.”

“OK. I could start bullshitting about frequent-flier miles or something, but I can’t really think of any more good ones.”

“So shut up and drive.”

It didn’t feel like I was in heaven. For one thing I was stripped down to my boxer shorts and lying on a cold metal table. A very hard metal table, and I was bound to it by heavy chains and manacles that bit into my flesh. My arms were bent above my head and my ankles were pulled shoulder-length apart.

For another thing I was smelling Dvornik now. He was breathing behind me, heavily, blowing traces of himself and scotch all over the room.

My brain finally started taking the sensory data and making connections. The voices were a recording. I was in Dvornik’s sculpting studio. Suddenly the voice recording stopped and the sound of a stool on wheels clattering over a floor filled the room. Then Dvornik was sitting above me and next to me, toward my right. He was wearing pale blue hospital scrubs that looked bizarrely frail on his overdeveloped upper torso, like wrapping paper on a bulldog. His eyes were full of pain and malice and he looked like he hadn’t slept in three years. The little hair he had on top of his forehead peak was going in
several different directions, and the expression his mouth was making was somewhere between a smile and a snarl and a gasp of agony.

“I’ve been trying to decide if you are incredibly lucky or incredibly unfortunate,” he mused. “I had decided to kill you quickly, just to be safe. You were supposed to be past the mound when the bomb went off. Instead of channeling the backblast into you and protecting the others, the barrier protected you.”

I heard the words, but I didn’t really understand them at the time.

“You bugged Sig’s purse,” I said, except it came out “You buh huh pur.”

“Yes, I did,” Dvornik agreed, stroking my forehead with a proprietary tenderness that was more terrifying than a punch or a slap would have been. “But you can do better than that. You’re so good at coming up with smart things to say.”

“Where’s Sig?” I croaked.

“I thought about cutting off your arms and legs while you were asleep.” He held up a small acetylene torch and thoughtfully examined the blue flame that emerged from it. “I thought, what could be more horrible than that? You wake up, you open your eyes, and then you realize that you are completely helpless. Nothing but stumps.”

Dvornik leaned forward slightly and made sure that I could see his face. “But I want to see your eyes when I start removing your limbs,” he whispered. “And I want to see your eyes as you grow them back.”

“Where’s Sig?” I repeated, or tried. My throat was so dry I could barely make a sound. Dvornik frowned in incomprehension.

“A moment.” He set the torch on the floor and scooted his stool out of my line of sight. A moment later he returned with
a bottle of scotch and poured a large quantity of it over my mouth. I choked and blew some of it back before going into a coughing fit.

“I told you,” Dvornik said. “Some conversations require a drink.”

“Sig,” I gasped.

He slapped me then, hard. His hand was covered with blood when he brought it back up, but I couldn’t tell if it was from my nose or my mouth. Everything stung and was numb at the same time. “STOP SAYING HER NAME!”

“What did you do to her?” I rasped, and blood leaked into my mouth.

“I left the faithless whore the same way I FOUND HER! Shot up full of drugs and a plaything for vampires!” he barked.

Sig.

You hear about the mind’s eye. You never hear about the mind’s throat. Mine was starting to scream. Scream and scream and scream, and it wasn’t getting hoarse.

“How did you do it?” I asked, as if I weren’t having a hard time focusing. “How did you get around your geas? Were you making that stuff about Anne Marie up? The stuff about her growing to become truly dangerous if we didn’t stop her?”

Dvornik made a sound like a drain unclogging. “No. I didn’t make that up. Andro killed that vampire bitch two nights ago, right when she was returning to her hole at sunrise.”

I must have looked confused.

“We have a trick,” he explained. “I stand right next to the vampire in my spirit body. They can sense something there but they can’t see it, and it distracts them enough that my nephews can line them up in a sniper scope without setting off their internal alarms. Andro blew Anne Marie’s head off from over seven thousand feet away.”

There was something wrong about that. I tried to think.

“That was a good shot,” Dvornik said, like a man conceding something. “Andro was a good shot. The vampires were much more ready to listen after that.”

“You made a deal with vampires?” I showed my bloody teeth. “Stanislav Dvornik. Vampire friend.”

He smiled a lifeless, mirthless smile. “I’ve had to deal with a lot of vampires in my day. Do you know how to make vampires do what you want them to do? Make them think you’re serving them.”

“By killing one of them?” I growled.

“But I didn’t kill their leader.” Dvornik pointed at me. “You did.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“You have never understood how powerful a psychic I am,” Dvornik continued. “When the vampires made an escape tunnel for the next night, I was waiting for them on the other side.”

“They should have killed you,” I said fervently.

“I told them I knew who had killed their leader.” Dvornik pointed at me again. “Then I told them a story about a werewolf with a knight’s training who went around killing vampires to make himself feel less like a monster himself. They recognized your description from the night you ran by their tunnel and killed their hive mate.”

Dvornik suddenly grabbed my throat and squeezed.

“I told them that you’d stolen my woman,” Dvornik whispered. “That you thought I was too weak and old to do anything about it. I begged them to let me do things for them. I offered to warn them when you were coming again. I made them a trap that would destroy werewolves. I even offered to keep their existence a secret from the knights if they helped me capture you and your friends. My geas doesn’t care if a bunch
of vampires keep humans prisoner as long as they stay hidden… not if they’re no threat to the Pax.”

Dvornik released me and I took in several ragged gulps of air.

“And do you know what?” he said with a calm that was like a thin layer of ice over very dark waters. “Their senses are as good as yours. They believed me because I mostly told them the truth.”

“So what was all that with the attack in daylight?” I gasped.

He made a dismissive noise. “They are animals. They tried to betray me and kill us all. Once we subdued Sig’s friends, though, it was easy for Andrej and me to drag you back into the light and leave the rest of them there as an offering.”

Dvornik’s focus wavered again.

“That was a good shot,” he repeated. “Andro’s dead, you know. That prick hound Cahill shot him when things went to hell in the tunnel. But I shot Cahill.”

“He had a remote detonator, didn’t he?” I asked. “Andro.”

Dvornik reached down and picked the blowtorch up again. “You were supposed to wait until Andrej and I were down there with him. He set off the bomb and shot Sig in the back of the head while she was running to see where you landed. Cahill shot him.”

“Andro shot Sig?” I asked. My voice was sinking into a lower register. It didn’t sound entirely like a human voice should have.

“She has hard bones,” Dvornik said. “Shooting her in the back of the skull is the best way to knock her out.”

The words were spoken with something like fondness. Then Dvornik’s face twisted. There was anger there, and sour amusement, and despair. He lit the blowtorch and looked down at me. There were tears streaming from his eyes, but his eyes didn’t seem to feel them.

“Here’s what I don’t get.” It was an effort to get the words out, to think. “I smelled where a vampire got shot outside the tunnel. And it wasn’t Anne Marie.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Now that’s clever. You think if my geas forces me to leave and investigate your lies, I’ll have to kill you quickly.”

That would have been clever, but that wasn’t it at all. The powerful, concentrated stench that I’d smelled definitely hadn’t been essence of Anne Marie.

I growled.

Knight, wolf, and geas were all in one accord.

The table seemed to turn into a stretch rack. I stared at Dvornik’s face through the pain as my head began to split open, my field of vision shrinking. Darkness closed in, and I screamed a welcome. The last recollection I have of Dvornik is the startled look of horrified comprehension coming over his face.

The next thing I remember is staring down at my hands on the floor. I was crouching on all fours, but not because I was hurt. All my pain was gone. I had never healed so thoroughly so quickly before, but I wasn’t thinking about that. My hands were covered with blood. The floor was covered with blood and shed fur. There was blood on the desk beside me. There was blood in my mouth. None of the blood was mine. In some way I didn’t know how to define, it tasted like Dvornik smelled. I held my hand up and gazed at it, the hand that was too big to have ever slipped out of that manacle, the manacle attached to chains built to restrain vampires. Even if I’d broken my thumb at the joint, the hand still would have been too big. But a paw wouldn’t have been.

Not a paw.

I dragged my body over to a corner and vomited, threw up
until it felt like I was spitting toenails and bits of colon, until my stomach was wrung out like a washcloth being twisted in on itself and my throat was scraped raw. I didn’t care. I welcomed it. The thought that there might be some of Dvornik in there kept me heaving.

I should have known. All that drivel about being healthy, about finding my balance and believing I might actually be able to be happy. The wolf had been chasing me my entire life, and it had finally caught me and eaten me whole.

Was I still me? I tried to examine myself as if my soul were a sore tooth and my mind were my tongue. I ran through my memories, my feelings, my fears, my desires. Was I crueler? Darker? Does an insane person know he’s insane? Does an evil person know he’s evil?

Could I still… Sig.

I remembered Sig. I would write down every sign I could think of that a werewolf was losing control. I would make a checklist like a pilot on a preflight, and if I found myself violating any of the rules or exhibiting any of the warning signs, I would kill myself. I would. The thought calmed me down.

My soul was mine. Not anyone or anything else’s.

But before I did anything else I had to save Sig.

34

A
ndrej opened the door.

“Guess what?” I said.

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