Moonburn (6 page)

“Well, first off, the name Iroquois is a kind of insult. And as for manitous, that was the word my grandfather used,” Red said mildly. “I never asked him where he picked it up.” For a moment I thought Red had finished speaking, but then he added, “I only ever saw one once before, when I fasted for a week and went out into the desert.”

“Here,” I told Red, “try to elevate that as much as possible.” I took another sip of coffee and discovered it had gone cold. Setting the cup down, I added, “A week of fasting, huh? I imagine you can see a lot of things in that state.”

“Some things exist on the borders between sleeping and waking, between this world and the next,” said Red, very evenly. I wasn’t sure if he knew I’d been teasing him. “You see them better out of the corners of your eyes than you do straight on.”

I wondered how Malachy was taking all this. To my surprise, Mal indicated Red’s bandaged arm. “That looks pretty bloody straight on to me.”

I must have given Malachy a strange look, because he raised his eyebrows. “What?”

“I was expecting a different response. More along the lines of, harrumph, Indian legends, balderdash.” Northsiders might be blasé about the supernatural, but my boss was a recent transplant.

Malachy gave me his exasperated professor look. “My dear girl, do you have any idea how many supposedly mythic and extinct animals have subsequently been discovered by scientists?”

“Are you talking about people finding dinosaur bones and thinking they’re dragons?” Reflexively, I inflected my question with the faintest hint of impatience. Malachy
and I tended to spice our conversations with a bit of conflict.

Malachy made a little
tsk
of annoyance. “No, no, I’m not talking about fossils. There are living examples, like the tuatara of New Zealand, with a vestigial third eye on the top of its head.”

“I saw one of those, once,” said Red, reminding us that he was in the room. “The Maori tohunga I knew told me they were damn smart—lived in packs, not like lizards or iguanas. Breed even when they’re a hundred and fifty years old.”

“I didn’t know you’d been to New Zealand.” I knew that Red had been raised in foster homes in Texas before learning that he had a grandfather in Canada, but I’d had no idea that he’d traveled to the other side of the world.

Red gave me a wry smile. “Hell, you can’t learn all about me in one year. I have hidden depths, darlin’.”

“So tell us about this meeting with the manitou, already.”

There was a scrabbling sound as Rocky rearranged himself in Red’s sock drawer, and I could have sworn that the young raccoon flashed his foster father a look of warning as he settled back down.

Red stood up. “You know what? I think we could all use a change of scene.” Gesturing down at his half undone coveralls, he said, “What do you say I get cleaned up and we all go out for a bite to eat?”

Rocky and Ladyhawke watched us leave, and I had the bizarre impression that the two disapproving teenagers would be discussing us when we were gone.

Northside didn’t offer much choice when it came to dining out. There was the Belle Savage Cafe, named for a local Pocahontas and run by the three ancient Grey sisters, Dana, Enid, and Penny. The sisters served up delicious pastries, soups, and coffee. Unfortunately, they didn’t do dinners—the cafe shut up shop the moment the first streaks of sunset crossed the sky.

If you wanted an evening meal, our town boasted only two options. The more upscale establishment was called the Stagecoach Tavern and Inn. The Stagecoach had been around since the seventeen hundreds, when the stagecoach had brought customers in from Albany and New York City. These days, the chef was a recent graduate of the Culinary Academy, and I really hoped he would last. The odds, however, were against him. There had been a succession of different owners and chefs at the Stagecoach, none of whom had lasted more than a year. Supposedly the place was haunted by an ever-increasing number of ghosts, from the two-hundred-year-old spirit of a scullery wench who’d perished in a kitchen fire, to the revenant of Pascal Lecroix, the famed Manhattan chef who had ended his career and his life two years earlier, after a customer had complained about his veal.

Red, however, preferred Moondoggie’s, which was
the restaurant the locals tended to frequent. Moondoggie’s was the place to hear local bands while chewing on large hunks of meat or massive heaps of lasagna. It had two sections, one for people with small children, the other for people who rode in flatbed trucks or roared in on Harleys. Moondoggie’s was nothing if not tolerant of a little noise and high spirits. If, on occasion, one of the Calder children held his breath and floated up to the ceiling, the waitresses knew how to bring him down. And if one of the bikers became a little too vocal in his appreciation of a band, a plate of hot salsa and chips would magically appear, and the biker would find himself compelled to eat chip after chip until the entire musical set was over. I had nothing against the place, other than the fact that Hunter had sampled the pretty blond barmaid, Kayla. My only consolation was that she now disliked Hunter as much as I did, and she worked on the other side of the restaurant.

Naturally, we all wound up going to Moondoggie’s.

“What I don’t understand,” Malachy was saying as he frowned down at his chilled mug of Guinness, “is why Americans want to treat beer as though it were soda.”

Red looked around for the busboy who had brought us our drinks. The place was packed, and there was a lot of wandering back and forth as people spotted friends across the room and went over to join them. The waitstaff looked exhausted and a little unnerved, and I suspected that one of the cooks had gone off for a smoke.

“If it’s Kayla tending bar, you’re lucky she didn’t send it over with a straw,” I told Mal.

“Aren’t you being a bit hard on her?” Red leaned back in his chair, visibly more relaxed now that he’d gotten out of our cabin. The bandage on his right arm was covered by a dark navy sweater and he had taken the time to put on a subtle, woodsy aftershave.

I was about to make a biting comment, when I inhaled
another lungful of his fragrance. He’d never worn a scent before, but I liked this≔ whatever it was, it made me want to stick my nose into the bare skin of his neck and inhale.

“What’s wrong now?” Red asked, a touch of impatience in his voice. “You’re looking at me funny. I got more blood on me somewhere?”

“Not at all. I’m thinking that I like that new aftershave you have on.”

Red gave me a quizzical look. “Darlin’, you know I don’t wear chemicals.”

“But there’s definitely something different. Mal, can you smell it?”

Malachy raised one eyebrow a fraction. “Surely you are not suggesting that I sniff Red to ascertain if his aroma has changed? No, I thought not. Red, do carry on with the story of your manitou encounter.”

Red hooked his arm across the back of my chair. “Well, I went to this fellow’s house to remove whatever was skittering around in his walls. City fellow, late forties, big-shot executive, bought himself a bit of forest around Old Scolder Mountain.”

He injected a fair dose of venom into that last sentence. Back in the summer, the developer J. B. Malveaux had convinced the town that a few dozen McMansions planted around the town’s tallest mountain wouldn’t spoil its natural beauty. At the time, Red had been extremely vocal in his disapproval, showing up at town meetings and talking about the possible impact on local wildlife.

But the town mayor had decided that he didn’t need no stinking environmental impact statement; as he put it, “We got more than enough trees in Northside.” So the deal had gone through, and Red had packed up a small rucksack and spent a week on the top of the mountain. He’d come back home with Rocky, who had
been hit by Malveaux’s Land Rover on the site of one of the first houses.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to work for anyone who moved into the Old Scolder development.”

“You mean Mountain View Lanes,” Red said, giving me an ironic toast with his Budweiser bottle. “And, yeah, I know what I said, but if I don’t help those rich assholes, they’ll go hire someone to spread a load of rat poison around.”

Opal, our usual waitress, sailed by our table with a platter of trays, and I tried to catch her eye. “Sorry, guys, you’re not my station tonight. Your waitress should be by to take your order in a minute,” she said.

“We should have gone to the Stagecoach,” muttered Malachy.

“Yeah, well, if you don’t mind your steak stinking of specters and ectoplasm,” replied Red facetiously. At least, I thought he was being facetious. “So anyway, this city guy built himself some big
Architectural Digest
house. Naturally, the weather gets colder, and various critters move into the house.”

It never ceased to amaze me how intelligent people didn’t understand that wilderness and pertinacious vermin were a package deal.

“Okay, guys, I’m here,” said Kayla, dressed in tight black jeans and a white buttoned-down shirt that barely closed over her generous bosom.

“Hey, you’re waitressing now,” said Red approvingly.

“I wanted to get away from the roughnecks. Hi, Abra.”

I nodded and busied myself with the menu, as if I hadn’t memorized it. With her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail, Kayla looked older and heavier than she had last year. Then, I’d thought she had the bright, hard prettiness of a beauty contestant. Now, she’d gained at least twenty pounds, and although she
was still pretty, it was in a softer, more matronly fashion, and her sparkly green eyes were shadowed with experience. My creep of an ex-husband had been the one to add those shadows, so I supposed I ought to feel a certain kinship with her.

I didn’t. Last year she’d confronted me in the street, glaring at me as though I’d done her some injury and telling me that Hunter was stalking her. She’d let me know that some guy named Dan—a boyfriend or a husband, I didn’t know or care—had left her because of it. Call me hard-hearted, but this did not evoke any feelings of compassion. For her, that is. I felt plenty sorry for Dan, whoever he was.

I gave my order without looking at Kayla, and she left without her usual display of dimples and cleavage.

“You know, she feels real bad about how she was with you,” Red said. “She told me to tell you that.”

“Go on with your other story,” I replied, stone-faced.

“People can change, you know.”

I glared at him. “Not for the better.”

Red rolled his shoulders as if he’d taken a punch, but he didn’t argue. “So,” he said, “I head on over to this big-ass house and the owner’s shaking all over, telling me about something huge living down in his basement, going on and on about how he keeps hearing these terrible scraping sounds and once he saw these red glowing eyes.”

“And you go down and find a squirrel,” said a heavyset, bearded man sitting at the next table. In his red-checked flannel shirt, Jerome looked like the genial next-door neighbor from
Little House on the Prairie
, a look he cultivated; he had been a Wall Street big shot back in Manhattan. “Sorry, Red,” he said, “couldn’t help but overhear. It was a squirrel, right?”

“No, Jerome, but you’re right, I was expecting to find
a squirrel. Maybe a raccoon—they’re a lot bigger than most city folk expect.”

Like so many converts, Jerome was extremely prejudiced against the group he had left. A lot of people, I had learned, came to Northside completely unaware that it was to the realm of the supernatural what Saratoga Springs was to the world of horse racing. But after a few years in Northside, even nonmagical people soaked up some of the local culture. “So,” Jerome said, hooking his fingers into the loops of his belt, “what did you find in the guy’s basement, Red?”

“Well, I head downstairs to check out the crawl space in the basement, and sure enough, there was something in the shadows, staring out at me with glowing red eyes. I knew straight off that it was an Old One. Still on the small side, and more shadow than substance, but old as the hills and twice as powerful.”

I tore a bread roll in half, feeling a bit awkward having this discussion in front of Jerome and Malachy. This wasn’t the first time Red had encountered the kind of beastie that you don’t find in a field guide, but up until now, he had only acknowledged this aspect of his work with me and Jackie, his ex-girlfriend, who lived in a trailer some two miles farther up the road. Malachy might be prepared to believe in bizarre viruses and three-eyed reptiles, but those were basically scientific phenomena disguised as myth. As for Jerome, well, he probably just thought his adopted town was a little weird. But what Red was talking about was weird in the original sense of the word—uncanny, preternatural, not of this world.

Yet to my complete surprise, neither man blinked an eyelash.

“You know, I thought I saw something peculiar running across my front lawn just the other night,” Jerome
said. “Thought I was losing my mind, because I couldn’t figure if it was human or animal.”

“Surely, that could just have been a therian,” said Malachy to the older man. Red raised his eyebrows inquiringly, so Mal elaborated, “a shapeshifter?”