Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock) (40 page)

And then his copilot trotted up.

The two-hundred-pound tan monster was named Pity Party, PP for short. The mastiff–bison mix (had to be, because she was too big to be anything else) had no manners, and sniffed us each in proper doggy style. No one objected. Though I wanted to swat her nose away, I held very still as the dog took her time with me. I could feel her low-pitched growl at my confusing, mixed human-predator scent, and waited until she decided I wasn't going to attack and eat her master. PP was still wary of me, and I made certain to put plenty of room between Sarge and his protection and me, with Eli and the Kid between us. It was often true that dogs and cats don't get along well, especially a dog bred for war, one who was big enough to give Beast a run for her money in a fight, and a big-cat. And for once, Beast kept her snark to herself and didn't disagree. PP was huge, menacing, and . . . huge.

The airstrip actually wasn't. An airstrip, that is. It was a canal, out in back of Sarge's house, the water a straight stretch, blacker than night, the only sounds the drone of insects and the rare splash of fish. The plane appeared out of the gloom like a white swan illuminated by the rising sun; it looked too delicate to survive a takeoff, let alone a flight.

I didn't like flying in planes. Wings and feathers were different, and I was almost used to the way that flight worked as a bird, the shift of wing and body, the spreading of flight feathers, the angling of wing into the wind, the way my body would plummet when I folded my wings and dove. This was no bird.

The plane was a single-engine Cessna with amphibian landing gear, and the inside stank like PP and fish, a combo that made me want to laugh when I thought about it. The cabin was cramped and tight for four plus Sarge's dog and the pile of stuff in back. Some of it looked like fishing gear, and some of it looked like plastic wrapped up in twine. One seat was fitted with a seat belt harness for PP, and she seemed as at ease in the plane as Sarge was himself, and even more taciturn.

I had never made a water-to-air flight, and it felt all wrong, so I closed my eyes, gripped the arms of the seats, and swallowed my breakfast back. It had been tasty going down. Not so great coming back up. Once we left the drag of the water, Sarge spent several minutes talking into his headset about his flight path and altitude and flying stuff, all of which I ignored, just glad he actually spoke airplane-speak.

But the sight that met my eyes once we were airborne and leveled out gave me chills. This was the way the world had to have looked back at the dawn of life on Earth. The sun was a golden ball at the horizon, the clouds a dozen shades of pink and plum and purple, with feathery fringes of gray and charcoal. We were low enough to see the black fingers of trees reaching for the plane, low enough to see fishing boats leaving the canals for the open gulf, their wakes rolling with the reflected sun. The water below us was black as sin except where it reflected back the sky's pink light and the falling, nearly full moon. It looked bloody—bloody moon, bloody water, blood, blood everywhere, and I couldn't repress a shudder at the sight. It felt like an omen. It was glorious and frightening, and it meant nothing, nothing at all, my brain assured me. It was only the sun rising. But my heart felt different.

The moment we leveled out, Sarge started drinking his coffee and talking to us over the roar of the engine. We got a geology lesson, with an emphasis on why Louisiana had so much oil and natural gas, a geography lesson with the central tenet being the rivers: the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, the Red, the Sabine, the Calcasieu, and a dozen others, most with Indian tribal names. So much for taciturn, but the chatter did help settle my nerves—along with the sun rising and turning the world golden instead of bloody. I listened with half an ear until the Kid got a question in.

“We mostly want to see the sites of the coordinates of the dog attacks.”

“Werewolf attacks,” Sarge said.

“Why would you think that?” Alex asked.

“You'll think I'm crazy, I know, but there's stuff out here in these marshes and canals and bayous, stuff no one's ever seen before. Stuff the U.S. government won't let no one near. Places they won't let no one go to no more.”

“Like what?” The Kid suddenly looked younger than his nineteen years. Like a puppy, all agog with the world. Like a kid looking up to an idol. I wasn't sure it was real fascination or just a way to get the older man to talk, but it worked.

“We got people who don't appear on no census, got no footprint on any information grid, and who live off the land and the water. We also got people who are there one day and disappear the next. Just gone, like that.” He snapped his fingers. PP wagged her tail. “We got animals that scream
in the night and leave eviscerated carcasses on the banks of bayous—carcasses that have been surgically dissected and drained of blood.”

I perked up. That was sounding like the possibility of rogue vamps eating whatever they could once their favorite food source was killed off. Before I took up working for Leo, I'd made my living killing rogue vamps, and the old pocketbook could always use a positive attitude adjustment. Leo Pellissier paid better than Uncle Sam any old day.

“What else?” Alex asked.

Sarge looked at him out of the corner of his eye, as if to measure Alex's interest, or maybe his level of gullibility. “We got magic. Real magic. The magic of the earth and the sky and the slow-moving water. There's power here, buried deep. And the government is trying to cover it up.”

“You mean like ley lines?”

Sarge tucked his chin in surprise. “You know about magic?”

“I know a witch or two,” Alex said. “Or maybe five or six.”

Sarge made a huffing sound. “I ain't talking about no witches. I'm talking about the rainbow people. The sirens. And the people of the straight ways.”

The Kid looked back at me, his expression saying,
Can you believe this guy?
But actually I could. I'd seen a person-shaped being leap through the air once, forming a rainbow of light and shadow, a here-not-here stream of energy and motion that covered the distance in a flowing surge of light-motion-force-time.
Rainbow people
was a good description. Sirens I didn't know about, except for the mythical creatures that sang sailors off their ships and into the sea. Maybe they were the same thing. But the straight ways—they seemed to slide off into ancient geometry and ancient mystical practices, like the Freemasons, but even older. Maybe as old as the ruler-straight canals below us.

I took a shot. “Were the canals built along the ley lines?”

“Not so's we can tell, at this time,” Sarge said. “Ley lines are straight lines that connect certain, specific ancient sites, and the lines have to connect three or more sites in a single straight line to count as powerful.” Sarge looked over and back at me as he banked the plane. “Only five major lines run through Chauvin, though I expect we'll find more as archeologists discover more ancient sites in Mexico and South America.”

“They aren't, like, magical power lines?” I asked.

“Sure they are. But ley lines are not something humans can use. Only witches can use 'em, and the last witches disappeared from here in the early nineteen hundreds.”

“Disappeared how?” Eli asked.

“Disappeared as in vanished from their beds overnight. Signs of struggle, some blood in the house, and they were never seen or heard from again.”

“Oh.” I had seen a house like that. The witches had been taken by vamps and were nearly dead by the time I had found them.

“What about liminal thresholds?” the Kid asked. Beside me, Eli's eyebrows twitched slightly in what might have been surprise at his brother's question.

“Liminal thresholds are different buggers entirely, son. They run in three curving lines across the earth,” Sarge said, “but only one matters here. It starts in southwestern Mexico, curves across the Gulf of Mexico to Chauvin. Then it follows the Appalachians east and north.” His hand made a curving shape up and down, like what the trade winds might make, but bigger and smoother. “It curves up through New York and Nova Scotia, across the North Atlantic, and back down toward the U.K. There it intersects some ancient sites including Stonehenge, follows the map through middle Europe and down Greece into the Mediterranean, through Saudi Arabia and into the Indian Ocean.”

I didn't know what liminal thresholds were, and I no longer had a witch best friend to ask. Fortunately the taciturn man who hadn't even spoken on land was voluble and verbose in the air. “Liminal thresholds are sites and places where the fabric of reality is thin, where one reality can bleed into another. Like physicists tell us, the universes are likely piled one atop another like a stack of coins. You ever hear of that?”

Alex nodded.

“Well, at certain places along the liminal thresholds, some beings can push through from one reality to another, and sometimes they end up here. Near Chauvin. And then there's the vertices,” he added, and I figured he was now pulling our collective legs.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But we're interested in the crime scenes and the dog sightings.”

“Werewolves,” Sarge spat.

He said it with such certainty that I didn't bother to disagree. I'd seen the photos. He was right. “Fine. Show us those.” The plane banked again and took us along Highway 56, back south to Chauvin.

The sites were all over the place, one close to 56, one near the end of 55, one off a canal on a spit of land that could be reached only by boat or plane. One was in downtown Chauvin. The others were scattered here and there, with no apparent relation to one another. Nine deaths in three months, here, and more, older ones, scattered along roads heading north. If this had been a mystery story, we would have been able to draw lines from site to site and determine the murderer's home at the site where the lines intersected, but that didn't work. Not here. The only thing the sites had in common was that there was always water nearby, but in Chauvin, there literally was water, water everywhere, on all sides as far as the eye could see.

And then I began to notice another similar feature of the earth and water below us. “Can you graph the sites,” I asked the Kid, “and tie them to the biggest ancient canal? The one with two lanes that goes so many miles? And then maybe put them in order along access from that one canal, with little numbers beside each one, so we can get a timeline based on the canal? I know the ones in town—”

“The two closest to town were the first and second ones,” the Kid interrupted, seeing where I was going. “Like they were hungry when they got to Chauvin. All the following ones were on the water. And yeah. All on the smaller canals that look like neighborhoods.” He traced them with his fingers. “And all related to and accessible from the big canal.”

I stared down and down, trying to memorize the world from above and hoping that I'd be able to put this view together with the Kid's tablets and then the actual, ground-and-water-level sites.

“You want to see the sites?” Sarge asked. His tone was without inflection, and he didn't take his eyes from the sky and the horizon line, but I could detect a scent from his pores that said he was disturbed, and far too interested in the answer to his unruffled question.

“How close can you get us?” Eli asked into the silence.

Sarge took the tablet from Alex and studied it for a moment. “I can land near some of 'em. Get you to within a few feet of shore. I keep a self-inflating, two-person raft packed in back.” He jabbed a thumb to the back of the cabin, and I figured that the twine-wrapped plastic was the raft.

“Let's do it,” Eli said. “Which site first?”

I sat, thinking, as the men discussed landings and locations. It didn't really matter which one we saw. I'd seen the pics both before and after the cops finished with them. And scavengers would have dealt with anything the cops left behind. We wouldn't see much.

More quickly than I had expected, we were dropping altitude and I got queasy again. Not because of the flight. But because of the smells I'd expect to find on the ground. My Beast was used to the smells of rot and decay; she even ate things that were farther along in decomposition than were strictly smart, at least from a human perspective. But . . . there could be maggots hatching from blood-dried ground or from small bits of tissue missed by the cops. I hate maggots. I just do.

•   •   •

We made the Kid stay in the cockpit with Sarge and PP, which he pouted about, but we wanted to see as many sites as possible before sundown. And a two-person raft meant time spent ferrying back and forth over the water if he came. “I promise pizza suppers once a week for four weeks when we get home,” I said to cheer him up. His brother harrumphed softly, and Sarge chuckled, but Alex grumbled to silence at the promised treat.

The raft was easy to use but had a musty smell, as if PP had slept here one night. And as if Sarge fished from the raft from time to time. But it was functional, if a little black-moldy.

There wasn't much left at the first crime scene site we visited, which had taken place on the second full moon after the wolves arrived. Even most of the smell of rot had been washed away by wind and rain and the movement of tides, and now there was little more than the stink of distant death, snakes, rats, nutria—humongous rats—and maybe armadillos, which would have been attracted to the insects feeding on the leftovers. And I caught the old wet-dog-that-rolled-in-something-dead smell of a werewolf, only one—a male, of course, since females went into permanent heat and went insane very quickly after being changed.

The second site was much the same, differing only by the smell of alligator. But the third site, which had taken place on the most recent full moon, only four weeks past, was very different. The paw prints and indentations in the mud were gone, thanks to the weather, and the body had been very carefully removed. But here I could still pick up not only the
stink of rot but the gender of the victim. She had been young. And terrified.