Moon Bayou (Samantha Moon Case Files Book 1), Page 4

  Werewolves.

  Where had they come from? Had Kingsley somehow sent them? If not, the question was: is the enemy of my enemy really my friend?

  I didn’t have time to stick around and find out. With my captors distracted, I beckoned Talos. In the process of transforming, I burst out of my clothes and launched myself into the air in the same motion. My draconic alter ego is the main reason I don’t spend much money on expensive designer clothes. I never know when I’m going to need to do something drastic.

  My Talos form is a draconic creature with giant bat-like wings and long talons sprouting from the toes. I’m bigger than a man, bigger even than a werewolf. I’m not entirely sure what my face looks like; as in my human form, I can’t see myself in a mirror. Judging by people’s reactions so far, I’m no beauty, but I am immensely strong and deadly and, as far as I know, immune to most or all weapons. However, silver-tipped bullets or crossbow bolts might bring me down, or even kill me. Though, Talos had supernatural scale armor which might deflect crossbows. Depends on if silver beats that magic too. Even if it didn’t, it made me feel more secure than having nothing but soft clothing between me and ouch. I had no intention of sticking around to find out.

  I flew upwards toward the roof of the canopy, grasped Wendy’s chain with one foot and used the other to slash at the Count Saint-Cyr, who fell to the ground and squirmed to aim a shot up at me.

  At that moment, the werewolves attacked. Their bestial roaring filled the air as they launched themselves on the vampires, eyes glowing blood-red, fangs exposed in their slavering jaws. A barrage of silver-tipped bolts met them. One of the attackers died, pierced through the heart. In death, the hairy, monstrous corpse reverted to his previous form, that of a teenaged kid only a few years older than Anthony. Tears briefly sprang to my eyes, but I had no time to lose getting all goopy, if this version of me was even capable of it. I flew out into the rain—and a searing, sickening pain pierced me in seconds.

  I knew that pain all too well. Silver. Nothing else would hurt like that, burning with the fury of a radioactive bullet. For an instant, I wondered if had hit my heart; then I realized it hit lower down on my right side. Wounded, I fluttered up onto the roof of the spinner canopy, and panting for breath, hauled the limp body of Wendy up to rest beside me. The rain complicated the task, still coming down in buckets. The canopy had been soaked slippery, and I could barely get a grip on the chain.

  Still, I managed to break a pair of chain links and dragged Wendy closer to me. My hands, which had elongated into the spines of my wings, weren’t exactly built for giving first aid, but I brushed the sodden hair out of the girl’s eyes with my thumb-claw. She looked like a drowning victim. I didn’t dare remove the keg-tap; she would bleed out in seconds. Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. Her pupils widened in shock at the sight of me.

  Your parents sent me for you, Wendy, I thought, planting the words in her scattered mind. Don’t be afraid. I was starting to fade. I needed to get that silver out of me, fast. I thought of it like tearing off a Band-Aid; it’s always best to get it over with all at once. I reached over with my other thumb-claw and, after a little digging, yanked the bolt out with a sharp scream that seemed so far away I didn’t even realize it was my own voice.

  The barbed bolt tore my flesh coming out. It must have pierced an organ, because I fainted briefly. When I came to, I found myself staring eye to eye with a dark shape rearing its head up over the edge of the carousel top. One of the werewolves. He must have jumped up all the way from the ground; I’d seen Kingsley make leaps like that, so it came as no big surprise. The canopy surface was slick from the relentless rain, and it took several tries before he climbed over the top. By then, I’d pulled myself into a sitting position. The werewolf came closer, grunting with exertion, his fangs bared.

  A second figure entered the picture as lightning flashed again, a magnificent vampire bat, snowy white, its great wings flapping against the beating raindrops. It sounds crazy, but my first thought was, My God, it’s beautiful! Do I look like that? I mean, I know the snub nose and glowing eyes and sharp teeth should have revolted me, but they didn’t. Something about the snow-white skin, radiant in the night, looked kind of like an angel. An evil, fallen angel, like the legends of Lucifer. Definitely male, if you know what I mean.

  “I’ll hold the loup garou off,” the vampire hissed at me. “Take the vessel and carry her to the cars!” I realized it was the Count Saint-Cyr, transformed like I was. The werewolf snarled with fury at the sight of him, and crossed the canopy in two swift bounds, slashing with his claws and causing the big bat to flap backward away from us.

  “We should not be enemies, Samantha Moon. We both serve the same great cause,” Saint-Cyr called to me. When I said nothing, he flew off.

  I looked down. Wendy Lo, whose head I still cradled like a baby’s, licked at the blood still leaking from my side. I didn’t even have time to deal with this; the werewolf already menaced us, his snout so close his putrid graveyard breath made me gag. His jaws gaped wider as he prepared to launch himself at us. Pinned down by Wendy’s weight and the weakness from my burning wound, I had only my fangs and the crossbow bolt, which I held like a dagger, to defend myself.

  The werewolf didn’t attack, even though wet gobs of saliva dribbled from his panting tongue. Instead, he sniffed at me like a dog.

  “You have the smell of us on you,” he grunted, sounding confused. He shook his massive silver shaggy head as if trying to clear it. “You are marked by one of our kind.”

  “That is because she is l’amante de loups, you fool,” said a second, slightly more human voice. “She is my friend, Madame Samantha.” Unnoticed, another of the werewolf pack joined us, nothing like any I’d ever seen before. After the night I’d almost been lynched by them up in the mountains, I’d thought I’d seen them all. That time I’d been rescued by Vlad Dracula himself, but he wasn’t around now…

  I did know one thing: whoever she was, she wasn’t my ‘friend.’ I had never met her before. She definitely was a ‘she,’ with breasts under her wet, dark golden fur and a body noticeably smaller than the others below us. Even though she had claws and fangs, her face looked more like a bat’s than a wolf’s, though she lacked wings.

  “Who—what—are you?” I asked the creature.

  “You do not remember me? Eulalie? I know it has been many years, but I thought… well, it does not matter. I am une métisse, a half-breed. What the movies call now a ‘hybrid.’ My father was a white man, a vampire, my quadroon mother one of the loups garous. Now come quickly, we must go before more of them arrive. We are few.”

  The larger brown werewolf squatted on his haunches as if to tear Wendy from my winged arms. I shied away and said, “No, she’s mine!”

  Eulalie said, “You are mistaken, Samantha—she is mine.”

  Wendy raised her arms, and the golden wolf embraced her.

  “Ma petite chérie, have they hurt you? Wendy is my vessel, and my lover,” she said turning to me. “She is the reason we are here, to rescue her, though it fills my heart with joy that you are here to help her as well. Can you move, or must we carry you, too?”

  I glanced down at the hole in my side, groaned, and shrugged.

  Chapter Nine

  There are many arguments pro and con for becoming a vampire.

  On the minus side, your soul is cast out from the cycle of life, a malevolent spirit takes up residence in your body, you’ve got to avoid daylight, and you can’t eat or drink anything except blood. Which, believe me, gets old fast.

  On the plus side, you keep whatever youthful looks and beauty you already have, you get to live forever, and even when you’re pierced by silver, which is basically vampire kryptonite, you generally heal up really fast. Faster in a shapeshift form that has armor like Talos. Only a small minority of us are blessed with that ability—or cursed with it, depending on your point of view. With a maddening sense of itch, my tissues regenerated as I lay there. This might ha
ve made me a little over-confident when I jumped off the carousel top after the werewolves. Maybe I wasn’t quite ready to fly again so soon.

  The moment I took flight into the darkness and rain, another crossbow bolt hit me, this time in one of my wings. Fortunately, that meant it passed through the thin membrane—largely harmless, but oh, damn, that hurts. Flapping wildly, I veered around, trying to stay on course to catch up with the fleeing taillights the half-breed wolf-woman, Eulalie, had pointed out to me.

  “Those are our people,” she said. “We know the back way out—we will rendezvous in the small parking lot behind the Jester. The rest of the loups garous will disperse to their homes in the swamps.”

  Pardon my French, but just WTF was a ‘Jester,’ anyway? Had I even heard her right? The stark black silhouette of a roller coaster ride loomed up ahead of me, and I knew I’d never be able to fly over it, not with a hole in my wing. I had no choice; I had to keep trying. I flew higher… higher, straining to make it over the top. I was almost there…

  I might have made it, too, except the familiar pale shape of Count Saint-Cyr suddenly blocked my way. For a second, I actually thought it was a giant white dove. He was radiant, almost beautiful, and his glowing eyes seemed to beckon me closer with the promise of love, and something else. A union; the founding of a dynasty that could rule over all the vampires in the world.

  Nothing loving or beautiful existed behind his mask. Nothing felt genuine about the promises he seemed to offer. In that instant, he knew I would reject him for all time, and he flinched away from it as if I’d punched him in the gut. Then another big bat-creature—smaller, darker, and nastier than his master—hit me hard from the side. The two of us fell, snarling and spitting and slashing at each other with our claws, out of control onto the rusting rails of the roller-coaster. We landed with a loud crash of bending metal and slid down, down, down… Until we flew off the track at a turn and free-fell for several seconds, then slammed to the ground, smashing together hard against the waterlogged mess on the concrete coaster bed.

  Every scrap of close combat training I’d ever had went straight out my ear as raw instinct took over. Our landing pinned my attacker beneath me. We slithered in the murk the flooding rain had created, raking each other with our fangs. He bit into my shoulder. I screamed, then ripped into a frenzy of slashing at his belly and groin with my feet like a cat. He howled, releasing his grip on my flesh. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glint of silver. A dead werewolf lay crumpled nearby with a crossbow bolt protruding from his chest; he’d been shot in the back. In a single reflexive motion, I yanked the bolt dangling free and rammed it into the bat’s diaphragm below his rib cage.

  As he writhed in shrieking agony, I worked it up and around until it pierced his heart. At the same time, I tore his throat out with my jaws and his life-blood pumped into my mouth and down my throat.

  “Let me out now, Sam,” whispered Elizabeth inside me. “I can save us both; let me take over this fight… you can rest…” The essence of the dying vampire had emboldened her, made her stronger. I could feel her powerful presence rising up inside me like a wave of hot bile, fed by the vampire blood in my belly. Blood, which was so much purer and more potent than any human blood could ever be. Too pure, I guess. I vomited it right back up again.

  Which at least shut the bitch up.

  I must have absorbed more of it than I thought. The weakness and dizziness vanished, and I managed to haul myself to my feet. We had tumbled down onto the remains of the entrance to the roller coaster ride; a huge plaster clown head, paint peeling and streaked with mud, stared at me from its side like one of the Easter Island sculptures. The Jester.

  As the vampire bat died, he reverted to his human form, that of a middle-aged man, the one the count had called Charles. He resembled an old-fashioned movie star with a dashing dark mustache and pale skin. He had a sallow look, very French and cruel. I figured he’d been a vampire for a long, long time. The body started to crumble away to dust and something cold and dark, inkier than the night, swirled up and darted away into the shadows.

  I wondered if I’d seen his Dark Master hurtling back to the void, the thing that had possessed him.

  Above me in the rain, Saint-Cyr still fluttered around, calling my name. “Samantha! Samantha! You know in your heart that we should be allies. We would have the world at our feet…”

  I guess I thought he’d been telepathically communicating this shit to me while I fought for my life with his minion, but the whole time he’d actually been yelling it aloud. The crazy thing was—I was still kinda-sorta tempted.

  I could totally see that for all his beauty and cruelty, he was a coward at heart—not the hero type like my Kingsley. Saint-Cyr had been too scared to fight me. Without any other henchmen to do his dirty work, the albino vampire bat stopped trying to bar my path and flapped away in a panic when I leapt up and flew right at him.

  I kept going, right over the sagging mess of the Jester and down again, until I spotted a GMC SUV below me speeding off down a service road. I decided this must be what Eulalie had meant by a ‘back parking lot.’ Catching up with it took some heavy lifting; I still felt weak and wobbly, so when I finally made it, I didn’t so much land on its black roof as crash. Inside the GMC, it must have sounded like an earthquake, as two people screamed. Whatever, the driver stopped, and a pretty multiracial woman in her mid-forties with close-cropped salt and pepper hair poked her head out of the passenger seat window and peered up at me. She didn’t look too surprised.

  “Eulalie?” I asked.

  “Now do you remember me, Samantha?” she asked.

  She sounded hopeful, but I shook my head. I transformed back into my human form. Which was, of course, that of a short, curvy woman of about thirty, bare-naked and soaking wet.

  “But you have not changed at all. I would know you anywhere. Come, I will give you something to wear. I keep many changes of spare clothing in the back because of my own transformations.”

  Her idea of ‘spare clothing’ was a red silk bathrobe and a pair of floppy white socks, but I wasn’t complaining. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. However, I realized I’d lost my purse, containing my wallet, as well as my clothes when I’d burst out into giant bat form under the spinner carousel. Now I’d have to borrow a cell phone to get back in touch with Kingsley, Mary Lou, and the kids. Not that they—with the exception of Fang—seemed to be all that worried about me, but I still wanted them to know I was okay. The wounds in my side and arm were already scarring over.

  Worst of all, though, I’d have to call BofA and Amex yet again to explain that my credit cards had been stolen. Not to mention calling in that favor yet again at the California DMV. I sighed loudly. Wendy Lo, all wrapped up in blankets, half-lay in the back seat beside me. Her lips had gone blue, but she opened her eyes. The keg tap remained in her neck; somebody had put surgical tape over it, so I guessed we raced to get her to a hospital where it could be safely removed and the artery closed surgically.

  “Girl, it wasn’t exactly easy finding you,” I said.

  Chapter Ten

  Our SUV raced down a back service road running parallel to the highway.

  The driver, a big hairy guy named Duane who looked like Kingsley’s blond cousin, stuck a red police flasher on his dashboard. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; cop by day, werewolf by night, a natural fit. Cop or not, he didn’t give a crap about traffic laws. He turned up through a grassy verge and a gap in the fencing, and bounced us onto the freeway, I-510. About a half-mile later, after veering two lanes over, he executed an illegal U-turn over the median strip.

  If any of Saint-Cyr’s people had still been following us, they weren’t now.

  We ended up in the ER at the all-but-deserted East New Orleans Hospital, a gleaming new complex that looked like it had been built on a bulldozed part of the moon. After Wendy had been stabilized, Duane bullied the nursing staff into letting me see her. One of the nurses had given me a spare set of
green scrubs to wear.

  Ever noticed that missing persons with perfectly sweet, normal, loving parents to go home to never seem to want to be found? Wendy was no exception. In fact, she kind of threw a temper tantrum when I suggested contacting her parents. Well, as big a tantrum as somebody is capable of when they can’t actually talk above a whisper because they’ve got tubes in their throat and multiple IVs in their arms.

  Eulalie, seated at her side holding her hand, explained that Wendy wanted to say there was no way in hell she would go back to her old life. I’d already noticed that about blood donors or ‘vessels’ or whatever the heck you wanted to call them. Once they started feeding a vampire, it became almost like heroin to them, except with a kind of kinky psychic link. A real addiction—almost as powerful as the need for blood was for their masters, or in Wendy’s case, mistress. I’d already noticed this syndrome with Allison and me (which, honestly, creeped me out a little sometimes).

  In Wendy’s case, I guess her romantic relationship with Eulalie amplified it.

  “Look, Wendy, your parents have spent the last few months thinking you were dead. They’re good people; of course, they’ll be happy to find out you’re just gay instead. Hell, I’d be relieved to find out my daughter was gay; she’s fourteen now, and I’m terrified she’s going to get knocked up by the first bad boy she meets. Or worse yet, marry him, like I did.”

  That earned me a half a smile, at least. It was kinda true. Danny was the first guy to knock me up, although ‘bad boy’ might be a stretch. Still, he’d had his moments.

  “So, for Chrissake, at least give them a call, will ya? Let them know you’re okay, once you can talk again. They deserve that much, right?”