Nightfall (17 page)
“You did more than your duty.”
“And I am not the
curandera
anymore,” she said. “It has been forty years, Mr. Greer. I have been succeeded.”
And then the pieces cascaded into place. “Izzy. Is she your daughter?”
All the teasing and laughter fell out of her face like a stone. “Granddaughter. How do you know her? If you’ve hurt her—”
“It’s not me that’s hurt her,” he said. “But it is one of my kind. A were bit her, and it passed on the gift.”
This time she did spit. “How long ago?”
“A little more than twenty-four hours.”
She raised one eyebrow. “She’s still alive?” Her tone was hard and controlled, but he could hear the terror that underpinned it.
“She is, but her body is fighting.”
“Is she going to make it?” There was more of that fear now, leaking through. He could smell it in her, see it in the way her magic gathered more tightly to her, darkening like a storm cloud.
He sighed. “I don’t know. I came here to ask for help, but if you’ve given up the name of
curandera
—”
She scoffed. “Just because I let my daughter take the name doesn’t mean I gave up the magic,” she said. “You drove here?”
“No, I— Forgot that I had a car. I ran.”
She made a sound between her teeth, a scornful, dismissive hiss that encompassed her disgust with his gender, his race, and his person, all in one short little click. “We take my car, then. You drive. I prepare.” She shut the door in his face.
Julian took a few moments to try and breathe. This needed to be the right thing. It had to be the right thing. If it wasn’t—Izzy would die. Hell, she might die anyway. But if she didn’t, he needed to consider what he was going to do about it.
A magic-using were. There hadn’t been one in generations, and for good reason. To survive the inner war, one had to be incredibly strong, and the magic of the witch and the were could blend in ways that were incredible, and uncontrollable. Izzy could be an incredibly valuable asset. The trouble, of course, was that she would be an asset for the pack to which she belonged. And that meant that she would be an asset of his enemy. There were ways in which Alphas could exert their will over the lesser members of their pack. Even if the girl didn’t want to hurt her friend, or him, she might. She very well might do it, because she might have no other choice.
If that were the case… if it looked like she was going to survive, he might need to intervene. He might need to make sure she didn’t. It might make Roxanne hate him forever, and it might mean that Carmen would do everything she could to make a curse stick to his fur, but he had to consider himself. He had to consider the pack. The pack came before anything the man wanted. That was how it always had been, and that was how it would always be.
When Carmen Nunez came out of the house with a nylon backpack that bulged and clinked, he found a natural and easy smile to grace his face. “Ready?” he asked.
She gave him a smile, as if she were actually grateful to see him on her doorstep. “Thank you, Julian. Thank you for coming to me. Together, we'll save my granddaughter.”
“Yes,” he said. “We will.”
The easiest thing Roxanne could find in the moment was to ignore Izzy’s question. She helped her friend stand and rinse off the last of the filth from her body, then brought her into the bedroom and helped her dress in a clean pair of loose jersey pants and a sweater. Izzy had always been slimmer than Roxanne, though now, she seemed almost skeletal. Her eyes were still bright with fever, but she seemed calmer and more coherent than she had when Roxanne and Julian had arrived at the house.
Roxanne tucked the younger woman into her bed, tightening the blankets around her, as if that would help her spirit stay close and safe. Then she lied down on top of the blankets, stroking Izzy’s hair gently back from her face. “How’re we doing?”
“Mmm,” Izzy said, slowly and carefully curling on her side. “Hurts. But my stomach is better. And my head.”
“What you said in there—”
Izzy raised her eyebrows and smiled a faint and brittle version of her smile.
“How did you know?”
“Can’t you smell it on him?”
Roxanne laughed. “No, Izzy. He just smells like a man to me.”
Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed obvious to me.” Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment, then open again. “I’m thirsty. Do you have anything— juice, water, even?”
“Sure,” Roxanne said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
How had Izzy known? Roxanne hadn’t even managed to make
herself
think the word in all its syllables yet. Her mind still reeled from seeing Julian’s hands blurring between one form and another. From seeing that wolf, that wolf that shouldn’t have existed, big enough to shred her body into tiny pieces. From seeing the wolf that shouldn’t have existed in the first place turn into the body of a woman. The corpse of a woman. She wasn’t ready to live in a world where werewolves were real. She didn’t want to think about what else that meant—what else might be real. How many other things might haunt the night?
She tried to take a deep breath and find some focus. So what if he was a werewolf? There were stories about weres as vicious, animalistic monsters, but so far, that wasn’t what she’d seen from Julian at all. He’d been good to her. In bed, clearly, but also in helping her look after Izzy.
She had no idea why he’d run out, though. The strange scene of him bending over Izzy’s naked body, smelling her leg, and then the way he’d run out into the night again. What did she really know about him, other than the way he made her body thrum in an entirely unfamiliar way?
She flicked on the light in the kitchen and found a clean glass to pour some orange juice for Izzy. She had to think about her friend now. With her mind less muddled, she was a little more willing to try and let her wait out the fever, but really, it was going to depend on whether or not she could keep down the fluids. She ran through checklists in her mind about the dangers of fevers and how much fluid a person could lose before they’d be unable to orally rehydrate.
She was running calculations in her mind when the blow came out of the dark, slamming her against the wall. She heard the glass of juice shatter on the tile before her vision faded into swirling black.
* * *
Sight came back next, though everything was blurry and doubled. Her head ached, throbbed. She closed her eyes as soon as she realized that they were open. The dark comforted her, put a thick blanket over the rising nausea. It didn’t stop the spinning, though. The world spun like a top. She let it, just clinging to the surface of the earth, and waiting for the disorientation to fade.
She focused on the words. The voice was a woman’s, and not one she had heard before. The woman was speaking to someone else. Not someone in the room. On a phone? Most likely.
“Yes,” the woman said. “I’m here, she’s here, but the Alpha isn’t. She stinks of him, though, so he’s been here recently.” There was a pause, and then a nasty laugh. “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
Roxanne risked opening an eye again, and held on through the swirling, until the world decided to come into some kind of focus and settle into a reasonable pattern.
The woman standing in her kitchen was very tall, and had a wild mane of yellow-blonde cornsilk hair, far too bright to be natural. The curl, though—she’d never seen anyone get that kind of wild curl from anything other than genetics. She was lean as well, but muscled in a way that reminded Roxanne of female marathoners; all lean and hard, nothing extra anywhere, hardly any tits or ass to speak of. She looked incredibly strong, incredibly powerful, and utterly feral. She didn’t quite know what made that word come to mind, whether it was how the woman spoke, or the way she stood with her joints loose at ease.
In her head, Roxanne planted her feet on the tile below her and rose, smoothly and silently to her feet. She grabbed something—a cast iron fry pan would be a good choice—off the rack on the wall, and clocked the intruder in the temple with it. The woman would go down like a sack of potatoes, and she’d do something awesome, like plant her foot in the small of the woman’s back, before she called the police. It would be an amazing rescue scene. She’d end up in a made-for-TV movie.
Only what actually happened was that she pushed herself up a few inches, her arms shaking like butterfly wings, and then gave out. She dropped those two inches like they were a mile, and her head cracked on the tile floor again. She cried out, and the intruder turned. Her grin spread, showing far too many teeth that were way too white.
“I’ll call you back,” she said into the phone. “Things just got much more interesting.”
Roxanne made feeble attempts to push herself across the floor with her hands and her feet, but she couldn’t get any purchase. She watched the woman push a button to hang up her call, then toss the expensive device onto the counter as if it were worthless. She squatted down in front of Roxanne, looking at her with an odd expression that was something less than entirely human.
“Poor little bitch,” the woman said. “My name’s Susan. I wonder if the witch mentioned me to you?”
Roxanne wanted nothing more than to spit in the woman’s face, but her mouth had run utterly dry. She pushed away again, this time managing to do nothing more than slap weakly at Susan’s feet.
Susan rolled her eyes and reached down. With one hand, she caught Roxanne up by the back of her shirt, hoisting her into the air, then plunking her down in one of the chairs at the breakfast table. She leaned over, her blue eyes peering straight into Roxanne’s. She shivered at the contact, and felt like she was seeing farther into the woman than she wanted to, by any length. “I’m going to make this very simple,” she said, her voice quiet, and all the more dangerous because of it. “Where’s the Alpha?”
The world was spinning again; Roxanne clung to the seat of the chair, trying desperately to keep from flying into orbit. Her stomach heaved. She fought valiantly against the urge to be incredibly sick all over her knees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The slap exploded across her face, rocking her head back on her neck and making her vision go black around the edges. She heard a sound, a screaming rush of air whooshing out of her, and she fought to steady herself before she lost consciousness again.
There was a grating sound, a rhythmic and bitter sound. The woman—Susan—was laughing. “Stupid bitch,” she said. “Jog your memory?”
“Alpha,” Roxanne said, more to center herself than anything else. “Are you talking about Julian?”
“There you go,” Susan said, laughing to herself. She pinched Roxanne’s chin and shook her face from side to side in a less than gentle motion. Roxanne yanked her head back. Susan held on just long enough to make it incredibly clear that she didn’t have to let the other woman’s face go at all, and then relaxed her grip. “Tell me all about him.”
She didn’t want to say another word, but she thought that if the woman hit her again, she’d likely pass out again, and she had no real faith that she would wake up again. The crazy light in the woman’s eyes told her that the odds were good that she’d be killed before she could wake up again. She had to do something to get herself out of this. If only her head would stop spinning for just one minute, she was sure she could think of something.
“Roxanne?” she heard the voice, and her heart started to pound. She wanted to scream, tell Izzy to run, but she couldn’t find the words, or the breath.
Susan’s eyes sparkled, and she put a finger over her own lips, stepping carefully back into the shadows of the kitchen. She blended in like she was camouflaged, so well that Roxanne found herself wondering if she could even see the woman herself.
Izzy stepped into the kitchen. She leaned heavily on the door frame, her skin was far too pale, and she seemed to have lost far too much weight in the past twenty-four hours, but that unnatural brightness had faded from her eyes, and a faint sheen of sweat stood out on her skin, meaning her fever had probably broken, or at least come down. Roxanne saw all of this, but couldn’t organize herself enough to tell Izzy to be careful. When she glanced back at the spot where Susan had been, she couldn’t see anything or anyone. Either the woman had moved, or she was that perfectly hidden.
“
Nena
, are you okay?” Supporting herself on counter tops, Izzy made her way towards Roxanne. Roxanne managed to shake her head faintly back and forth. “What’s wrong?”
“Run,” she managed to whisper. Izzy’s eyes went wide as she heard the words. “Please run. She’s here.”
Izzy spun faster than Roxanne thought she’d be able to, fast enough to make Roxanne’s head spin back and forth, up and down. Still, she almost wasn’t fast enough to block the blow as it came down. She crossed her forearms like they were swords and braced them above her head, falling back just enough to get leverage. Susan’s hand blurred into claws and slammed down, stopping just a hair’s breadth above Izzy’s skin as if she had slammed her hand down on a shield. The two women looked equally surprised, but Izzy recovered faster. Whatever had blocked Susan, she let it drop a few inches to get momentum, and then shoved upward, hard and fast. Izzy was small, but she wasn’t weak; she shoved Susan off balance.
Susan stumbled back a few feet, her expression completely shocked. She snarled at Izzy, settled her balance, and then dove at the smaller woman again. Izzy was still staring at her hands in shock, and didn’t manage to dodge. Susan slapped her down into the kitchen counter, face first, pinning her easily.
Roxanne managed to get her feet under herself and planted them well enough to lift the nook chair over her head. From there, she let gravity take over, and brought the solid wood chair drop down on Susan’s head as hard as she could.
In movies, she’d always chuckled at how when someone got into a bar fight and dropped a chair on someone’s head, the chair shattered into tiny pieces. She’d waitressed in a couple of bars during college, and she’d learned from watching; it wasn’t the chair that broke, it was definitely the person. Especially with her solid maple chairs.
Susan stumbled again, but she didn’t go down. She snarled again, baring her teeth—and suddenly, a lot of things made a lot more sense. She rushed them, but Roxanne found herself standing tall, even as her head swam, and felt Izzy straighten up behind her.
“It’s a shame,” Izzy said, and her voice was lighter, more musical than Roxanne had ever heard her speak. At least, in English. “It’s a damn shame that he hurt you so badly.”
Roxanne glanced back at her friend. Izzy’s face was illuminated by some inner light, some deep knowledge that she had access to. It was a strange sight. She looked incredibly beautiful, ageless, but also filled with a terrible power as she stared into and through Susan.
“You don’t know anything about it,” Susan said, her voice vicious and sharp, but shaking softly.
“Don’t I?” Izzy smiled softly, turning her head ever so slightly to the side, her eyes closing a bit as she stared at something that Roxanne couldn’t see. She wore this look sometimes, talking to patients in Spanish, softly talking them around to a treatment they needed or a better explanation of how they’d gotten hurt. Roxanne had joked before that Izzy could see inside their hearts at moments like that, and for all of Izzy’s laughing and joking about it, she was suddenly sure that she was more right than she’d ever thought. “I know that it was your sister. I know that she died in agony, and that you think he drew it out on purpose. Made it harder than it had to be. I know that you’ve been hunting him for years, and that you mean to obliterate him. I know that you came here because you thought to take what’s his, or at least catch him off guard. I know that you’ve been playing from the shadows for twenty years, and that you’re scared to make this move right now, because it’s a frontal assault, and you don’t do that.” A smile grew across Izzy’s face, but there was nothing kind in it. Not this time. “What I know that you don’t?” Izzy leaned close to Susan. Roxanne thought she’d see the taller woman slap her friend away, but no. She was paralyzed, watching Izzy’s face in horror. Izzy whispered in her ear, but loud enough that Roxanne could hear it. “He was such a monster then that he enjoyed it. He enjoyed every second of what he did to her. And she loved it to. She begged him to keep going, even after it was clear that she was going to die.”
