Coffin Fit (The Grateful Undead series Book 4) (21 page)

The creatures mingling in the room were freakin' awesome. Big guys with black, white, or red hair, massive bodies, and wild eyes stood next to werewolves gathered in packs, chatting. Some of the wolves were tan-skinned in human form, others in the fur. There was a troll standing by the front door, a female. She was a bulky block of mortar that moved slowly and spoke with authority. The crowd was peppered with fae, elves, and a shitload of living breathing things I'd never seen . . . and vamps. I know because the vampires in the room all dropped their fangs when we walked in like some sort of alpha pissing match.

"Those guys are berserkers," Christopher whispered, pointing at a group of men by three large cages hanging from rafters. They were the big guys with red, black or white hair.

"Mean as hell." Christopher looked from them to me. "I'd give them a wide birth. Things usually start flying when they get pissed."

It was a dark corner of the bar, but I could see muscles ripple as the berserkers burst out in animated shouts and laughter. They were wearing damp animal pelts, and smelled like the water in the sewer. When fists pounded wooden tables and splinters flew, I jumped two feet in the air.

"Jesus, Susan," Christopher hissed. "Don't act scared in here. You look like food in a friggin bait-trap."

I glared at him, and then turned to watch bettors wager with the big guys as one of the werewolves got into a cage.

A troll bumped me on her way out the door. "Tourist, sweetheart?" she said, and laughed her way out into the sewers. She was dressed in cut off coveralls, with nothing covering limestone mounds that looked like molded and kiln-dried mud. She had big gray eyes and only two nostril holes for a nose. Mort was much better looking than this chick.

I smiled at an elegant fairy with wispy pink hair and iridescent wings when she grinned at me as she passed by behind the Troll. "Sorry, is it obvious this is my first time?"

The fairy's wings fluttered. "Like a billboard." Her laughter tinkled like metal wind chimes poked by a gentle breeze.

"See," Christopher said as he pulled me toward the bar.

My eyes locked on the bartender. It had green hair that fell past my view below the countertop. Leaves and sticks poked out everywhere, and two pointy ears stuck laid over its pointed orange cap.

"What the hell is that?" I whispered.

Gibbie landed on my shoulder and immediately got tangled in my hair. As he swung from my curly tendrils, he squeaked, "That, my friend, is a Púca. They change their form more often than an electric billboard."

"It's right out of a
Grimm
fairytale!" I was in awe.

Howls and groans in the back of the room pulled my gaze in that direction as we headed for the bar. An ogre was being served a plate of raw, bloody, body parts. The ogre got beasty-threatening. Growling and snarling, it coveted and devoured the meat. As the six of us took seats at the half-empty bar, I was surprised to see Jake wasn't at all intimidated by the multiracial creatures in the room.

"I thought they stopped feeding ogres raw meat a few hundred years ago," Christopher said to Jake.

"They did." Jake motioned the púca behind the bar over. "But the ogre council won back the right."

I almost choked on my own spit when the creature shifted into a gorilla on its way over. Jesus, I had never seen a gorilla up close and personal. The thing was huge! I know I would've thrown up in my throat a little if there was food in my stomach.

I wasn't even aware that Gibbie had untangled himself from my hair and was in what looked like an in-depth conversation with Jane and Jake. I did, however, feel it when Christopher bit my left hand.

"What the hell?" I shouted and knocked him upside the head until he let go. Scanning the room, I was surprised to see that the outburst hadn't even drawn one set of eyes in our direction.

Everyone was gathered around a cage as the flesh-tearing ogre climbed in with a werewolf. The wolf's buddies went all ballistic-rowdy. Jeez, the wolves in the room seemed to like a fight. Paul always seemed passive unless really provoked.

One of the berserkers outside the cage blew a whistle, and a hush fell over the bar as all heads turned to the cage.

Christopher poked me. "I want to know why Jane's eyes flew to the other doppelganger when we walked in."

My head whipped to Jane, cackling with Betty, Jake, and Gibbie. The gorilla was back and set drinks in front of them while the room burst into bickered support for the fighters in the cage.

My pain-in-the-ass partner tugged me toward Lily. The little demon was moving down the bar in the direction of the door the other doppelganger and her handsome friend had stepped through.

"Oh, hell no." I shook loose from Christopher. "Gimmie a minute." I started toward the fairy holding the small glass of gold syrup he was about to take a sip from.

"Now." Christopher's grip on my arm was firmer this time. "While no one is watching us."

My partner dragged me after Lily. I was about to create a scene, but Gibbie winked at me, and it wasn't an inebriated wink. The fairy's eyes were clear and meaningful; they darted to Christopher, who trotted off after Lily. I made a management decision. I'd kill Gibbie later if anything happened to Betty. Right now, I needed to follow my partner.

As I jogged down the bar, a berserker burst through the door of a metal cage and took down three tables—the one I'd been standing next to was one of them—as he rolled across the room, blood splattering, fists flying, and angry growls spraying spittle. The crowd went wild; obscenities, whoops, and aggressiveness cranked. The flesh-tearing ogre stood in the open door of the swinging cage and roared laughter over the encouraging crowd.

I paused near the end of the bar when the room wound down to a sizzle.

The ogre grabbed the bars on either side of the opening as the berserker got two feet under him and bellowed a threat, riding a wave of acrid, carnage breath over the room. No one else seemed to notice the stink. It made me gag.

As half the clientele responded in testosterone injected frenzy and the rest varied in their levels of amenableness, I stumbled into Christopher, and together, we slid through the door, and into a small room.

The noise faded as the door shut behind us.

I sucked in a breath and froze. The only things in the small six-by-six room were the doppelganger, the sexy guy—both lying on a velveteen bed that just about took up the whole room—and us.

~~~

Nineteen

~~~

Marcus and Dorius stepped out of the drawing rooms with an excuse to check on Camillo, Antoinette's mate. The air in the room had grown tense with past hours and a lack of communication from the Stech team. Dorius wanted privacy to attempt contact with someone, anyone stateside, and then arrange a call-back when they were back in the drawing room with the wolves.

The brothers made haste down perpetually guarded passageways—lit by torches that flickered with low light—in the direction of a staircase that would take them to their secluded quarters. They spoke softly. The castle passageways had many ears at that time of night. The Morizzio brothers learned long ago though the immortals in the castle were brethren, not all could be trusted.

"Did you send Warren out to the Stech home?" Dorius asked.

"Yes, but it'll be close to daylight before he gets there," Marcus answered.

"What about Dennis?" Dorius asked. "Betty has become quite fond of him. Have you called him?"

Dennis ran errands, kept up with paperwork, the staff, and answered phones at BAMVC, the compound in Miami. He was always up on all the latest gossip, fabulous apparel sales, and wore his fangs proudly. Dennis
was a catchall for anything Dorius wanted to dump on someone. Tall, blond, and always flawlessly dressed, he had a great sense of humor.

"When I called to talk to Warren," Marcus said, "Dennis was the first person I asked because he and Christopher also talk often, but he had nothing for us."

"I will be having a little tête-à-tête with Elizabeth," Dorius said through clenched teeth. "And I assure you, it will not be comfortable for her."

"You know, brother, I have found disciplinary conversations do not work with Susan. It's better to
extol
her accomplishments in a given situation than chide injudiciousness . . . Yet add carefully placed repercussions for what might have transpired had
luck
not been on her side."

"I do not need to dance around my mate when it comes to discipline, Marcus!" Dorius hissed the angry words.

* * *

"What the hell is that?" Chick asked Paul and Resi.

"It's an armadillo, Nan," Resi answered. "Jeez, you've lived in Florida, what? Forty years? And you've never seen an armadillo?"

"Pieces and parts, road kill, never on all fours," Chick said, "and only from inside a moving vehicle. The little guy looks like a Nazi World-War-One tank."

Paul stared at the animal. "Yeah, it kinda does."

They stood behind scrub oak surrounding the large fans of a palm frond. The armadillo waddled atop a cement breaker in front of the neighbor's sleeping house.

"Are they nocturnal?" Resi asked.

"Yes, and they like the water because it keeps them cool," Paul said as they strolled closer. "I think that little bugger is headed to our cypress knees to look for termites."

"Gross," Resi said.

"Yeah," Chick crouched to get closer, "that coming from the kid that sucks blood for fuel."

Chick reached for the animal.

Paul yelled, "Watch out!"

The armadillo leapt eight feet into the air. With a tremendous splash of water, Mort sprung out of the lake and caught it midair.

Chick hobbled back, holding her chest. "Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a heart attack! What the hell?"

Resi burst out laughing. Paul turned away, plucking a noisy cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans.

As Mort smiled and dribbled lake water, the Armadillo tried to latch onto his rock-like arm with huge vamp-critter fangs.

"Uh, sorry. I thought I'd save you a nasty bite, Chick," Mort said at a slow and nerve-grating speed.

Chick's knuckles dug into her fleshy hips. "Well, you scared the shit out of me!"

Upstairs lights went on in the house, nestled in the woods behind them. Chick bounced a thumb over her left shoulder. "And looky there, you woke the neighbors."

"That's the least of our problems." Paul turned toward the Stech house. "Susan, Christopher, and Lily are in Purgatory. Jake is dealing with an inebriated fairy and Dorius's mate."

"That drunken fairy wouldn't be Gibbie, would it?"

"Nan, is that all you heard?" Resi said. "Mom's in the sewers where doppelgangers roam and the skies are not visible at night."

"Yeah, I heard that. Susan's gonna get her ass kicked, and you sounded like a bad country song." Chick huffed as she tried to keep up with Paul.

* * *

The mist of smoke over the center of a red duvet coverlet condensed into a rich, weighty mass. Arms formed and fell to the bottom of its triangular body. A mouth with needle sharp teeth unfolded. I felt like a character in a Stephen King novel and flattened myself against the door.

"Who are you, and why did you two dart back here when we walked into Purgatory?"

Red eyes blinked, and the creature said, "I'm Luna. The name is a gift from Gaire." It waved a trail of smoke in the direction of the handsome man on the bed beside it.

"The doppelganger chatting it up with the dragon shifter and fairy at the bar is my mother," Luna said. "And the chick with the street mentality is Jane. She was a host of mine. The serial-killing doppelganger had picked her up from a street corner in Orlando while I was wearing her."

Lily stepped between Christopher and me. "Actually, you
and
all your brethren are killers. And you do not have a mother. A doppelganger is incapable of reproduction. I will add fabricator to the doppelganger elucidation."

I tried to gasp silently, right before I reached around and covered the little demon's mouth. "She's just a child," I apologized.

"She's my mate," Christopher hissed.

Lily moved her sweet little face and mumbled through my fingers, "Actually, I am both."

The thing with the toothy mouth rose a bit, forming a wispy cloud of soot with blinking red eyes. "The elders ask us fledglings to refer to our guardian as Mother. I get it. A joke, right? Not to mention totally sexist—I could call it Dad. And I don't murder my hosts. I'm totally against killing to enjoy another's life. But this is firmly discouraged by my kind. Anyway, you're right, demon kid. Just about every other doppelganger kills the host they duplicate—anonymity and all."

"Thank you for that aspiring exploration into your personal preferences, while confirming my credibility," Lily said, "but duplicating another is not a commendable attribute."

I briefly entertained stuffing Lily under the bed.

Luna stared at me, and I must have looked pretty freaked because she turned her glaring red eyes back to Lily. "The humans I double up on go about their usual business, none the wiser. I put enough space between us to assure there are no issues, so that way my elders can only discourage, but they can't come down on me." The red eyes turned to look at the hunky guy lying next to her. "Well, not for that, anyway."

The half-naked cutie smiled at the doppelganger and then turned to Lily. "We are who we are. And you are who you are."

"How cliché, yet factual. I concede." Lily smiled up at me. "These two can be trusted."

I let out a breath I'd been holding. After being briefed by Christopher about Dorius's friend, I knew the good doppelganger, the one wearing Jane, was out at the bar with Jake and Gibbie. I felt mild relief, and could even push myself off the door and stand without wavering.

"So, Luna, you recklessly tempted a killer while wearing Jane?" Christopher still looked leery.

"I didn't know the guy that picked up Jane was a doppelganger until days later when it tried to kill another of my previously
borrowed
hosts. Evidently, it had been stalking me. I was putting subsequent hosts in danger."

Luna's mouth shut so that I could no longer see where it had been on the creature's constantly roiling face, but the eyes were still there, open and glowing red. I wanted to get the heck out of there and reached for the door handle poking me in the back.

"But there is a problem." Luna's eyes blinked, and I froze.

Of course, there was a problem. There was always a problem.

"Mom hasn't quite been herself since we destroyed the serial-killing monster Dorius is looking for."

I felt Christopher tense. "How do you know so much?"

Lily had popped her earbuds in, pulled her hPhone out, and was slowly rocking back and forth next to Christopher.

"One of the bartenders told me." Luna spread out beside Gaire again.

"Nothing is secret down here," Gaire said. "And anything is possible, for a price."

"Anyway," Luna said, "back to good old Mom. When she dressed in a man that resembled the ones the killer had worn, and then left for Italy, I became suspicious. My guardian hates going abroad. She doesn't even carry a phone, or use the internet. She's too territorially old school."

"Even then, I in no way, even for a second, thought Mother would've allowed herself to retain anything from that vile creature. We were both ashamed to call it brethren. But then she showed up here in Purgatory wearing Jane a few days ago. That is not my mother. She'd never select one of my castoffs, never mind let one live. Gaire and I checked. Jane is still on her corner of O.B.T in Orlando."

"Yeah," Gaire said. "And Luna's guardian would never see her here with me and not do something about it, either."

"It's because Gaire's a rogue," the doppelganger said. "He's has a price on his head placed there by his father."

"But that's another story for another night," Gaire said with a charming voice and smiling eyes. "Right now, I'd like to know why you're meeting with Luna's mother."

Christopher climbed on the corner of the bed. "Her mom is
supposed
to be able to lead us to a doppelganger that took possession of a werewolf in Italy. It used the double to try to start a war between the immortals and wolves. It killed the wolf it was wearing; the pack leader's son."

Gaire growled. He jumped off the other side of the bed away from us and stared at Luna. His eyes turned harsh yellow. "That could've been why your mother went to Italy!"

"I know," Luna squeaked. "But my mother isn't dead. I can sense her under Jane."

"What if its persona bled into your mother's?" Gaire turned to pace, and his spine rippled. "Would the dominant personality be able to take full control?"

Luna became cylinder shaped, tight and thick black. "Jane was very controlling. Even though I enjoyed her street mentality, it was hard to contain her."

Okay, so now I was totally confused.

Christopher backed off the bed. "Are you friggin telling me that the doppelganger inside of Jane is the same bastard that killed Karl's son?"

"I am so delighted." Lily popped an earbud out of one ear. "Together, except Aunty Susan, the rest of you have reached the logical conclusion entirely on your own." She popped the earbud back in. "Interesting."

The kid was vamping up my patience level. So glad she'd be out of there before I crawl out of my new doublewide tomorrow.

"We're not sure that's true." Gaire annunciated each word while glaring at Lily. His facial features looked sharper, harder.

"It's alright, Gaire." Luna moved over the bed like a shadow pushed by a ray of sunlight. "Settle down, now."

"Doubt is a human attribute, wendigo," Lily said. "And so is a lack of control."

"The demon's right," Luna coaxed. "It all makes perfect sense."

"Why?" I asked.

Lily stood on her toes, reached up, and patted me on my shoulder. Eyes soulful, her expression was empathetic.

Christopher punched the door behind us. "To stage a distraction, Susan—like a big ass war between the vampires and werewolves—just to get close to Antoinette."

Hold on. Did Lily call Gaire a wendigo?

"Exactly!" Lily said and clapped her hands, bringing me back into the here-and-now.

"Now what?" Gaire's voice was a throaty menace.

"We need to have the elders try an intervention." Luna's form slid up Gaire's body and wrapped around his chest.

"Is intervention some kind of Otherworld exorcism?" I asked, but my eyes were on Gaire. He was changing.

"
Yes
!" Lily spit a laugh, pulled both earbuds out, and stared up at me. "I must find a way to reward you, Aunty!"

Fuck me. This was not good.