I’d hit him. Whatever he was.
I got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER 18
Five or ten miles an hour through blowing snow, chains rasping against ice and packed, sanded muck as well as a fresh, fast-falling layer of slippery whiteness that spun like feathers in the cone of my headlights. The drive home was no fun. I was shaking all over despite the heater blasting away, and when I finally made it into the driveway past 9 p.m., I parked at an angle that could only be described as drunken.
The lights were all on, solid gold shining warmly through thin windows. The blinds in the living room were finally down, though. My teeth were chattering by the time I got to the front porch, and I saw the shadow of something moving in the living room.
I hoped it was Graves, but my right hand went reflexively into my pocket and curled around the switchblade. I stood staring at the front door for a second—probably right where something else stood a day ago, I thought, and shivered harder. The memory seemed to belong to someone else, a long time ago and far away.
The locks chucked, and the door yanked open. “Jesus Christ,” Graves said. “Where the hell have you been? Whose car is that? Are you okay?”
I let go of the switchblade, finger by finger. All of a sudden I was so glad to see him it wasn’t even funny. He’d come back and waited for me so I didn’t have to come home to an empty house. He was right—nobody had twisted his arm into approaching me at the mall or taking care of me. And he really sounded worried.
I didn’t blame him. I probably looked like hell.
The porch creaked as I looked at him, blinking back something weird and hot. It overflowed, and one tear tracked its way down my cheek.
“Oh, shit.” He was in his sock feet, and stepped out onto the porch, grabbed my arm, and dragged me into welcome warmth. I leaned against the wall inside the door as he closed and locked it, and just closed my eyes.
“We need to talk,” I managed around the lump in my throat.
“No. Really?” If the words had been loaded with any more sarcasm they would have staggered. As it was, they only fell flat. “What the hell happened?”
“That’s my dad’s truck.” The shivers were coming in waves now. “I found it. I found the guy attached to the phone number. He kn kn-knows something.”
He took it calmly. “Huh. You should get out of those clothes. You’re dripping on the carpet.”
Then again, Graves didn’t know—and I couldn’t explain—about the streak-headed werwulf and the boy who stood on snow as if it was a dance floor. It’s not the sort of thing you can explain to someone who’s only touched the Real World once.
I wasn’t able to tell him that the boy was probably something more inhuman than the wulf who had ended up shredding his shoulder. That the boy wasn’t a boy, was probably older than any adult I ever knew. And that he’d probably turned my dad into a zombie, and I was next unless I could come up with a plan, and a good one.
Why would he turn Dad into a zombie, though? I mean, suckers aren’t the only thing that can turn people into hungry walking corpses. It happens all the time. Voodoo, burial in contaminated ground, black sorcery, working at big chain retail stores—there were endless ways someone could end up reanimated.
Still, they like to play with their prey, the suckers. Zombification is only one of their tricks.
They call themselves all sorts of tribal names, but hunters call them only a few things—suckers, nosferatu, “those undead bastards.” And they’re one of the few things everyone, no matter their personal feuds or dislike, will band together and try to kill. There were even whispers of werwulfen sometimes working with groups of human hunters to take a nest out. Wulfen and suckers don’t get along; nobody knows why.
But why would a wulf and a burning dog and a sucker be after Dad or me?
It was the same mental ground I’d been retreading for hours, not getting anywhere. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on driving, it was worse. But why did Dad have his number? What was Dad doing out here? He didn’t mention anything to me. He always had me help him find out what we were hunting.
If Dad was hunting a sucker and he wanted me out of the way, why wouldn’t he warn me or leave me somewhere safe? Why would he take me along and not talk about it?
I stared at the boxes stacked in the hall. It smelled red in here, like tomatoes and spice, and Graves put an awkward arm over my shoulder. “Look, I made some spaghetti. I also stopped by the mall and got some of my clothes and stuff. So, um, why don’t you just get cleaned up and dried off, and you can tell me what’s going on? You look cold.”
I was cold, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather running through the center of my bones. Ice in the marrow, a buzzing in my head. The circular mental motion started again, my brain struggling over the same rut it had been in since I turned the key and the truck ground into life.
Go over it again, Dru. Think it through.
Suckers could make zombies. I knew that much. As a matter of fact, it was one of the questions you asked first when you ran across the reanimated—was it voodoo, burial somewhere weird and bad, suckers, or something else responsible for controlling the shambling corpse? If it was just someone buried in contaminated ground, you could fix it easily enough. If it was voodoo, you could find out who had access to corpses and a nasty habit of raising them.
If it was a sucker bringing the rotting bodies up from the ground or making their own corpses, though, you were pretty dead unless you had luck or backup. I was running low on both.
“Dru.” Graves shook me a little, peeled me away from the wall. Peered down into my face, his unibrow puckering. “Come on. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He caught himself and gave his peculiar, barking laugh. “That’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”
You have no idea, kid. I found my voice. “Pretty possible. Yeah.” It took an effort to step away from him. I barked my shin on a box and winced a little. “I’ll go get cleaned up. Spaghetti sounds good.”
“Ragu.” He shrugged. “It was all that was around. You want me to reheat some?”
I know it was all that was around; Dad loved Ragu sauce. With tons of garlic. My heart gave a squeezing twist. “Sure. Thanks.” My stomach grumbled a little, despite being closed up tighter than a bank after hours.
His face eased. He let go of me and tried a tentative smile. “No problem. I was worried about you.”
You know what? So was I. I’m already as good as dead. There’s no way I can fight a sucker. He’s just playing with me. There it was, the stark truth. “Yeah. Me too.” I made it down the hall and up the stairs, stripped out of my wet clothes—my back twingeing every so often, reminding me that I’d wrenched it again—and crawled into some sweats and a T-shirt. The side of my head, where I’d clipped it on the fountain, stung softly. My ribs ached, and I had to wriggle around in the bed gingerly until I found a position that didn’t hurt. I lay still, trying to make the no-pain last as long as possible, hearing Graves humming a little, off-key, downstairs. I stayed awake only long enough to pull the blankets a little higher up and feel a moment’s worth of regret at not eating when he was going to all the trouble.
Then I blinked out.
I don’t often dream of my mother.
When I do, it’s always the same. She is leaning over my crib, her face bigger than the moon and more beautiful than sunlight, or maybe it’s just that way because I’m so young. Her hair tumbles down in glossy ringlets, smelling of her special shampoo, and the silver locket at her throat glimmers.