Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) (4 page)

“You killed some people you shouldn’t have,” I acknowledged. “But they were sort of threatening you, and I think you got confused. You’re going to stop killing people, right?”

“Aren’t you going to kill this person?” Sam wondered.

“I…” How the hell was I supposed to answer that? “I’m not sure this is a person, Samuel. It only looks like a person.”

“I only look like a person too,” Samuel observed. “So do you.”

Oh, for…He had to start displaying surprisingly developed intellectual curiosity and reasoning skills
now
? “I think this thing kills good people, Samuel. It’s mean. Do you know what hypnotism is?”

Samuel swayed his head back and forth and widened his eyes, letting his mouth hang open slackly. “Uuuuhhhhhh. I’m hypnotized.”

“Right,” I said. “This thing can hypnotize people. They aren’t hurting her or anything, and she makes them love her and trust her, and then she takes their money and kills them.”

Samuel didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he said. “So, I should kill
her
.”

“If she tries to kill you, yes,” I said. “Don’t let her hurt you.”

“I won’t,” Samuel said, and something dark and mature came into his voice that made me believe him.

We had been traveling outside Porter proper for most of this conversation. The paved roads became dirt and gravel, and the residential homes became scarcer and older and less well maintained. Stores disappeared altogether except for the occasional gas station, and then the houses turned into trailers or old, faded brown barns with missing boards that hadn’t held livestock in a couple of decades.

Suddenly, the satellite map turned off. It might have just been that I wasn’t getting a signal any longer, but I didn’t think so. It was energy-sensitive technology, and I had a feeling magic was in the area. If I’d had a cell phone, I might have taken it out to see if it was messed up too, but I’m still hoping cell phones are just a fad.

Most magic doesn’t have that big a radius of effect, so I turned the truck around and drove a ways until I found an old trail that was chained off and had a peeling
NO TRESPASSING
sign posted near it. The lock linking two ends of a chain was rusted shut. Most likely abandoned family land that someone had some vague idea of selling if real estate developers ever made it this far out. I yanked one of the wooden posts that the chain was threaded through back and forth until I dislodged it from the earth. No cars came along, but then, that was probably one of the reasons a supernatural predator would choose the area. I pulled my truck up the trail, parked it, got out, and went back and replanted the wooden post again.

“Come here, Samuel,” I said, fishing in my pocket.

“What?” he said a little distrustfully. Samuel had followed me out of the truck but was keeping his distance, picking up on how tension and adrenaline had changed my smell.

“I have some earplugs. I don’t want this thing hypnotizing you with its voice,” I said. They were good earplugs too, foam inserts that started expanding five seconds after being exposed to air. They would seal up an ear canal tighter than a steel weld. Which is why I took care to give Samuel some last instructions before removing the earplugs from their airtight wrapper. “You’re my secret weapon, Samuel. Just follow me and don’t make any noise, okay? If anyone attacks me, get them.”

“Someone wants to kill you?” There was a note of panic in his voice that hadn’t been there before. I hope it’s a mark of how intently I focus on a hunt or how long I’d been travelling alone that it wasn’t until then that I wondered what would happen to Samuel if I died. I wasn’t used to worrying about dying all that much. I can’t say I liked it.

I picked up the weird scent within two hundred yards of the pickup truck. It was thick and slightly sour and somewhat avian. Birds might look great when they’re flying, but there’s a reason
foul
and
fowl
are homonyms. I’m just saying. It wasn’t a normal scent trail though. I would pick up a scent, lose it, and pick it up again ten or thirty feet later. Maybe the thing I was chasing hopped or fluttered. Then I picked up another similar but unique scent following the same irregular pattern, and then another. So maybe the
three
things I was chasing hopped or fluttered. Come to think of it, sirens often hung out in groups in the old stories, and these specimens left large three-clawed marks in the soil when they did so. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I was tracking some land birds the size of ostriches.

At least sirens didn’t have any special immunities or regenerative capabilities, not that I knew of, so I was carrying a plain old double-barreled crossbow. I also had a katana sheathed between my shoulder blades, a Ruger Blackhawk holstered at my right hip, a small hip quiver with six quarrels on my left, and some really harsh language on the tip of my tongue. If none of that worked, I still had my most reliable weapon, a silver steel knife sheathed on the side of my combat boot.

The birds in the vicinity went quiet as I moved through the woods, and I was afraid sirens might pay particular attention to the sound of birds, but there was nothing I could do about it. If I’d been on my own, I might have stayed still at the outer perimeter for hours until the local wildlife had a chance to acclimate to my presence, but there was no way Samuel was going to be able to sit still that long, so I just kept shadowing the road.

Soon, I saw a place where a graveled trail branched off, and when I stepped back out onto what passed for a highway, I saw fresh tracks where a Jeep had recently turned. It looked like a rural driveway to me, and I followed it for about half a mile before I smelled something else worrisome: the faint trace scent of a decomposing body long dead and buried.

This is something most people don’t ever have to think about: A corpse buried underground will break down over time and provide nitrogen that soil desperately needs to feed plant life. This creates weird air pockets in the ground as gases expand, causing small fissures as the stuff tries to work its way up through the dirt. There is also downward movement as the roots of plants extend into the area where the enriched soil and the body are intermingling, creating more slight crevices and cracks. When the roots and the gas pockets connect, the plant releases more faint chemical traces into the atmosphere than just carbon dioxide. It’s one of the reasons corpse-sniffing dogs are still effective long after the physical trace smells have been washed off of the surface of ground concealing a buried body.

The other subtle sign of a buried body is a visible one. When the tree cover is thick enough to prevent much sun from getting through, and the surrounding ground is mostly bare of vegetation, plants above a buried body will get more nutrients than other plants in its vicinity. So, when I picked up the faint whiff of decomposition, I stopped and looked around and saw it…a nearby patch of ground where the sun-starved plant life was noticeably more verdant.

That wasn’t what creeped me out though.

It was the second patch of dirt that had unusually abundant forest growth. I saw it clearly now that I was looking for it, some twenty feet away. And the third patch of flourishing dirt. And the fourth. And the fifth. As I looked around, I saw at least thirty similar sites stretching off into the woods on all sides of me. No wonder I was picking up death smell. I was standing in the middle of an improvised cemetery.

Eventually, the driveway fed into what looked like a dried-out basin. There were no other houses around, no other roads, just a long circular clearing, the red Jeep parked next to twelve other vehicles. That was where I saw a home in those woods that was as strange as any castle or gingerbread house could have been. Seven large mobile homes had been parked next to each other to make one large dwelling, forming a strange, uneven shape with the ends of different-colored trailers sticking out at varying lengths, probably because doors had been stationed next to each other so that they would adjoin. Had the trailers been welded together, or were there little wooden walkways or canvas walls built between the doors so that people could go from trailer to trailer as if moving through the rooms of one large house?

I couldn’t figure it out at first. For as much money as all those trailers must have cost combined, why not just build a home? Or for that matter, if somebody wanted to put trailers together like Lego blocks to build a bigger structure, why not at least buy trailers that were the same model or color so that they would stack together neatly and form a more uniform structure? But then something occurred to me that left me cold. The sirens were attracting their prey from a distance, and these were mobile homes. Emphasis on
mobile
. Maybe their owners had been enticed into transporting their houses here, then killed so that the homes could be put to use by monsters who liked the location and didn’t want to leave a paper trail or have a bunch of construction workers hanging around for long periods of time.

There’s a word for ungainly homes pieced together from makeshift components. I was looking at a giant nest.

The shirtless young man who came out of the nest carrying a toolbox was wearing a collar. I watched him through a pair of collapsible field glasses, and I could tell that it wasn’t a metal collar like slaves used to wear or a Viking torque. It was more like something you’d see in an S&M club except for the black box built into it: a shock collar, probably one designed for really large dogs. Its wireless technology wouldn’t work while any sirens were singing for the same reason that my tracking device wouldn’t work, but the sirens wouldn’t want to sing twenty-four hours a day, and the man wouldn’t run away while their magic was in effect. If he ran away at all. I’ve seen captives before, and this man didn’t move like a prisoner or a slave. His body was sleek and well muscled and well fed, with that smooth, long-haired, vaguely androgynous look common to models. He moved like someone who was at home. When he reached the red Jeep, the man opened the hood and began to examine the engine.

Maybe the woman or thing driving it had reported some kind of problem.

This seemed confirmed when a dusky-skinned, black-haired female came out of the trailer after him. She was beautiful, with classic Mediterranean features and sleek, strong arms and a trim waist that flowed into strong, curving hips. I couldn’t see her legs; she was wearing a long sundress that went down to her ankles and fashionable-looking boots whose thick high heels didn’t really go with the terrain. I pictured the tracks I’d seen and imagined clawed feet stretched out within those boots, the front talons extended through the body, the back talons driven through those wide high heels. It might have been true. There was something slightly odd about her gait, but only if you really looked for it, a slight pause between each step as one of her boots briefly disappeared up into the dress, and then she would glide smoothly over the ground when the boot came down again. I wondered if her knees were joined oddly.

The woman leaned over the man as he looked over the Jeep’s engine, maybe companionably, maybe with a proprietary attitude. It was hard to say. She reached over and ruffled his hair affectionately. I thought her attitude was more like a pet owner than a lover, but maybe my attitude was biased by the collar he was wearing.

I wasn’t clear on what happened to a man who was repeatedly exposed to the effects of a siren song over long periods of time. Was it like being heavily and constantly drugged? Could he be trained or conditioned, or form an addiction to the song, if he wasn’t killed? According to Cassidy Chalupnik, her husband, Steve, had become increasingly erratic and desperate to hear the song again over time.

A sudden thought occurred to me, and I moved my field glasses over the license plates of the other eleven vehicles. They were all new, most of them expensive sport-utility vehicles, and their license plates were from all over. Maine. Wisconsin. California. Vermont. The closest one was from Georgia. The former vehicles of men buried out in the woods, most likely. Were the sirens keeping the best cars they acquired as toys or just using the clearing as a car lot while they parceled cars out to chop shops for extra income?

I was still thinking about that when I heard singing coming from somewhere behind me. It didn’t sound abnormally beautiful, but it wasn’t as annoying as I find those wailing soprano solos from big, formal choirs either. The siren I was watching through my field glasses straightened up from over the hood of the red Jeep when she heard it too, but she didn’t seem unduly alarmed. Well, neither was I. Knights can’t be tranced because we’re already bound by a geas, a magical oath to keep the supernatural world hidden whatever the costs.

But the siren behind me didn’t know I was a knight. Ok, ex-knight. Whatever. So, I let the crossbow hang loosely at my side and turned around slowly, letting my features loosen. I had a sudden mental image of Samuel going slack-jawed and saying, “Uhhhhh I’m hypnotized,” and bizarrely, I almost cracked a smile. But when I saw the siren, I didn’t feel like smiling at all.

She was maybe fifteen yards away, squatting up on a tree limb some thirty feet above the ground. I think the siren must have been sitting up there unnaturally still the whole time—watching me, maybe alerted to my approach by the birds around her. She was shorter than the other siren I’d seen, maybe five foot three, but she had the same classic features, black hair, dusky skin, and strong, smooth arms and shoulders. Unlike her sister, this siren was wearing a white tank top and blue shorts. The feathers from her legs had been plucked, and even from that distance, I could tell that the skin was goose-fleshed, no pun intended. Her thighs were muscular and unnaturally thick in proportion to the rest of her body, her calves swelled, and her legs ended in long, gnarled, orangish-yellow claws that gripped the tree limb beneath her the way a parrot’s claws grip a swing bar. Her jaw may have been hinged a little differently too. It seemed like her mouth was open a little more wider than a normal human’s, her song louder as her head tilted back to create a straight passage from her lungs through her throat.