Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

"These were enough, Ric."

As we spoke, the zombies ranged around the area, lifting dead werewolves now metamorphosized into a half-were form, wrenching off arms and heads with a sort of aimless curiosity. I looked away from them, shuddering.

"What happened to your hands?" I asked Ric again. "Did it take shedding some of your blood to raise them?"

Ric lifted the raw pieces of meat at the ends of his jacket sleeves and I felt myself grow faint.

"Only a drop of blood needed. This was overkill. I guess my hands got chopped up a little."

"Ric! What on earth! Tell me! What did this to you? Why?"

He shrugged. "Once I ran out of ammunition, I needed to raise the zombies to fight the werewolves. They were killed by werewolves, so now they're invulnerable to them. I needed a dowsing rod to do that. This is high desert. There's nothing suitable out here I could find but barbed wire."

Oh, my God! "You dredged up zombie after zombie with barbed wire?"

"Not enough maybe." He looked around, dazed and self-critical. "These were all I could bear to raise."

Nothing I'd said so far had seemed to get through to him, but what he said just now wrenched me to the core.

I felt every searing instance of it. Ric moving methodically over the desert ground, waiting for the dowsing rod to burn through his palms and point downward. The twisting, intense force grinding the rusty barbs into his hands…Each zombie clambering out of the ground, eager to follow Ric to the person…creature, who had put him there. Ric, dripping blood onto sand and scrub, moving to the next spot where the barbed wire would tear at the hearts of his hands to tell him a zombie lies there. And on to the next.

I pulled his jacket shoulders down on his arms, and eased his hands as carefully as I could out of the sleeves. He hardly seemed aware of that, but stood there docile as a child. I should have recognized shock: blood loss and horrendous pain. I hung the jacket over one arm and took hold of his upper arm with the other hand.

"I'll get you to an emergency room, a hospital, a micro surgeon."

That snapped him out of his daze.

"No! Can't go to the ER. That gets on the record. None of this can be on the record."

I sighed my extreme frustration, which was a form of fear. We were alive, but what did that mean if Ric was mangled?

The hair-snake was still sleeping and had nothing to offer. The gray spirit wolves of an older era had melted into the dark, for wolves had been hunted to extinction in this part of the country for decades.

So where else could I go for help? The cottage. Godfrey. Hector might know a good star-quality doctor from the silver screen days…

"Just get us out of here," Rick said, sounding a bit more like himself.

I guided him down the steep trail. "Where's your car?"

"Below the lodge in a stand of firs just off the road."

Madame Moon was generous with her light, even though her lopsided face made it look like she'd taken her lumps tonight too.

I ached in more places than I knew I had. Ric's right arm across my shoulders was heavy enough to drag me down and dripped blood onto my breast, but we tottered down the empty mountain to the road. The lodge was lit, but deserted, and the stillness was eerie. I wondered where the surviving werewolves and mobsters had gone to ground and what the zombies would do now that they were free.

The Corvette was well hidden, so low it blended with a stand of sage, but Ric guided me to it. I wrestled him into the passenger seat. My usual place. I wrapped his black, bloody hands in his lap, using his jacket like a muff. His Washington-white shirt was now spattered with blood.

I caressed his face once he was seated, and felt his lips kiss my fingertips in passing. At least he was conscious. At least I have fingertips. Tears seared my cheeks.

Above us, the sloppy-drunk moon was grinning down. The moon had to answer for a lot of crimes against persons tonight.

When I lowered myself into the driver's seat and started the powerful engine with a peace-shattering rumble, I could turn on the interior lights. I could see his face well now, but not his hands.

"How bad?" I asked. "The cuts."

Ric winced. "To the bone, I think."

"Madre de Dios! You must have the cajones of a chupacabra."

His look was rueful but his skin-tone was a sick sepia color. "That street Spanish book is improving your vocabulary, mujer mia."

Mujer mia. Woman mine. All right. What was I going to do about this? Ric's hands. With which he dowses for the dead. No more. Those hands, with which he dowses for my heart. No more.

"How do I drive this thing? I haven't driven stick shift for almost ten years."

Ric smiled, palely. He told me what to do and I did it. A couple minutes later we were barreling down a narrow mountain road in the dark in third gear. I tried to coast and ride the brake, but momentum pushed us faster and faster.

I looked in the rear-view mirror. The steel-toothed grille of a HumVee was barreling wildly down the mountain road after us. Suddenly I didn't dare brake at all anymore. I steered for my life. Our lives.

The needle pushed up to ninety as we slithered down that mountain road. I was trapped in a nightmare video game, moving my eyes and arms by raw instinct. Dodging and swerving until we skidded onto flat straight highway, where I put the car into fourth gear and spurred the Corvette up to one-twenty in no time. The highway was flat and straight and no lumbering HumVee would catch this baby now.

Maybe a state trooper would spot us and pull us over, then see the emergency and escort us, siren shrieking, to safety.

No. No one was out here in the desert tonight but ghost wolves and werewolves and zombies, oh my. Also a lot of enemies and damn few and very dicey allies. Now no one could help us but me.

The bright lights of Vegas in the distance seemed to mock our dark, desperate circumstances. I tried to take Ric's mind off his injuries by keeping him talking.

"How did you know where I was?" I asked.

His head lay against the headrest as he watched the off-full moon race us through the blue-tinted glass roof panel.

He smiled, thinly.

"When I could check my cell phone, I found your message and was alarmed enough to go to your guest house on Nightwine's premises."

I smiled. Premises. He still talked law enforcement despite being a free agent now.

"It's a cottage."

"Whatever, it still has the Hound of Hell for an unwelcoming committee of one. He was howling and snarling and bounding at the front door. I was standing there about to get out a credit card to B and E into the place-"

"Break and enter? Could you?"

"Sure. This CinSim in black tie and tails who talks like a British butler shows up, only he's American. He lets me in, then orders 'Master Quicksilver' back from the door and into the closest corner to be 'a good bad dog.' Then he tells me he's 'most concerned.' Seems a cousin of his at the Inferno has a friend who sometimes hangs out at the Gehenna. He told him that 'Mr. Cicereau and some of his less savory associates have taken our Miss Street for a ride' out to someplace called the Starlight Lodge near the Paiute Golf Club on Spring Mountain, and that it would 'behoove' me to look into that 'post haste.' "

"The butler dude was Godfrey, Nightwine's major domo. He looks after everything around the estate, including me."

What I don't explain, because I can't just yet, is how and why the CinSims have a secret communication network. Nor can I imagine why an Inferno CinSim would haunt the rival Gehenna, but I know who it was. That farewell butt pinch on being escorted from Cicereau's office makes sense now. My really, really secret admirer and the CinSim tattletale had been Claude, the Invisible Man. Curiouser and curiouser.