Part 39 (1/2)

The lights of the cabin came into view as he crested the hill, headed into the clearing. Syd picked up his speed on the level ground, taking long clean strides, abandoning himself to his senses.

As he bounded up onto the porch, he heard the dead bolt slip. Then the door swung open, and he stepped inside.

”How is she?” was the first thing he asked, and the grim set of Mae's face told him almost more than he wanted to know. She looked at the handcuffs, she looked in his eyes, and a terrible sadness crossed her features. But she did not utter a word.

Mae locked the door behind him as he followed Jane's trail. It didn't go up the stairs, as he might have expected, but down the hallway toward the kitchen. There was another flight of stairs there, leading to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Gramma Mae appeared behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder.

”When this is over,” she said, ”you'll have to go away. You're not safe here anymore.”

”I know.” Breathing deep, averting his eyes. ”What about you?”

”I'm too old to run,” she replied. ”And this is my home.”

”Mae . . .” Voice cracking. Thinking of all he had undone.

”You didn't know.” Cutting him off. ”Just take care of her.”

He nodded, tears welling in his eyes. There were tears in her eyes as well. Syd turned, then, and stepped through the door.

Descending into darkness.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was musty and cluttered, with a packed earthen floor. The air was close, heavy with the aroma of dried herbs. He found Jane huddled in a dim corner, lying on a makes.h.i.+ft bed of pillows and quilts. She was panting heavily. She was entirely transformed. Gramma Mae had dressed the wound with a healing poultice; the bandage was nearly soaked through, and he could tell from the way she s.h.i.+vered just how terribly damaged she was.

Syd approached her, at once horrified and amazed. Such a beautiful creature. So unlike Vic and Nora. So literal an embodiment of the beauty at her core. He remembered the first time he looked into those soulful eyes, bore witness to the keen understanding there.

Now there was pain, as well. Incredible pain.

”I won't let him hurt you,” he said, reaching out to her. Jane made a mournful sound as he touched her head, stroking the coa.r.s.e, luxuriant fur. ”I won't let anyone hurt you.” She whimpered, and a shudder ran through her powerful form.

Upstairs, the bas.e.m.e.nt door clicked shut. Syd heard the tumblers of a lock slide home, then the sound of Mae's footsteps, moving slowly down the darkened stairs. She reached the bottom and rounded the corner, moving anxiously toward them.

”He's here,” she said.

He had found Nora's grave; and from the moment he began to dig, the last shreds of Vic's sanity peeled back once and for all. It was like his mind was the hole being carved now from the living earth, and his soul was the wet, rotting treasure that he sought to exhume. There was no hope in the quest. That didn't matter at all.

Just the digging, and the digging, and the digging.

The carnage at Chameleon's had filled him to overflowing, his nervous system humming like an overloaded transformer with the life-energy of dozens of slaughtered souls. The rush was sublime, a G.o.dlike buzz that countermanded the physical damage even as it broiled his brain, jacked his metabolism clear into the kill zone.

He was over the line now, and he might never go back. To revert to human form would be to invite incalculable suffering, more than even he could bear. Aside from the thousand little cuts and contusions, his flesh had been toasted to a blistering crisp-mostly first- and second-degree burns, all the way down to third in a couple of spots-and every little movement sent him slivers of purest agony. He only thanked whatever stars still cared for the lack of broken bones and ruptured organs.

Up above, the moon shone cold, no longer his lover at all. She hated him, clearly, as did all of Creation. He doubted, now, that she'd ever really loved him; no doubt, she'd been lying all this time. She could join the f.u.c.king club. And he could be its president.

And that was the big fat joke life had played on him, now, wasn't it? The ridiculous notion that he had ever been loved. As he tore into the soft, packed earth, he laughed and growled and cried, simultaneously tortured and amused and destroyed. He had been l.u.s.ted after and hungered for, sacrificed and died for a thousand times over.

But had he ever been loved?

And therein lay the bitter irony: that he'd had so many chances, and somehow blown them all. In the course of all that f.u.c.king and killing, killing and f.u.c.king, he had somehow missed the boat. And now the boat had pulled out of the harbor forever.

It didn't take long to reach the body. The grave was shallow; and once he hit that pocket of muddy soup, he knew he had arrived. Nora had changed substantially in the short time since returning to seed. Her supernature worked against her in death, accelerating the decomposition process. She was like a floater now: soft and rancid, bloated with scavengers and gas. She was barely recognizable as a woman at all, much less the woman he loved.

When he took her in his embrace, her flesh sloughed off in spongy, liquefying slabs; the fatty tissues beneath hung loose as well, muscles already going adipocerous, like candle wax made of lye and tallow. Her once-beautiful hair came out in knotted clumps, dragged down by its own sodden weight, leaving naked skull behind. Vic whined and hugged her fiercely to his charred and blackened breast, marking himself with her stench. Carrying her essence with him into battle.

But when he tried to touch what little remained of her face, it came away like wet tissue paper in his hands. Vic stared at the maggot-slick deathmask beneath it.

It could have belonged to anyone.

And there something in the howl that rose up now-something haunting and heart-rending in its expression of irreversible loss-that Syd could not help but identify with. It spoke to his love of the women here with him. It spoke to the deepest part of himself.

It meant that he and Vic had something in common, after all.

His clothes, all at once, had become too constricting, and every fiber of his flesh felt like bursting into flame. At last, the time had come. He stood and wordlessly began to disrobe. Any residual embarra.s.sment at stripping in front of Gramma Mae burned off in the urgency. There was nothing she hadn't already seen.

Besides, she was disrobing too.

While they undressed, he stared at Jane. Her eyes, in the dim light, were luminous pools, unwavering in their focus upon him.

”You know what you have to do,” Mae said. She dropped her clothing to the floor. As she stood, he saw that her weathered flesh was covered with scars: the raised welts of long-healed bites and slashes, each one marking the ghosts of battles past.

Syd nodded, peeling off the last of his clothing. He stood naked before her. Mae came to him, a small cloth pouch in her hands. She reached inside, pulled out a small stoppered vial. The vial was strangely familiar; Syd thought of Nora and shuddered.

”Remember,” she said, ”in the end, it's not so much a matter of finding it as it is of letting it come to you.”

She uncapped the vial, then tipped a quant.i.ty onto the crown of his head. The oil was sharply bitter, sweetly pungent, wild-smelling. It burned his skin as it soaked in.

”Just let it out,” she told him, began daubing oil at his chakra points: the center of his forehead, his throat, the center of his chest, then down to his belly and on, all the way to his root chakra. Syd tensed up as she neared his crotch.

”Relax,” she said, reaching between his legs. ”Don't forget to breathe. . . .”

As the front door exploded, directly above their heads . . .

. . . and Vic didn't understand why they bothered, it made no sense at all, it barely even slowed him down. Just as the pain meant nothing to him. Just another ridiculous makes.h.i.+ft matchstick obstacle.

Like anything in the world could stop him now.

He moved straight past the shattered storm door, great wolf-goblin body surreal against the quaint Americana he now so pointedly destroyed, las.h.i.+ng out to smash all the accoutrements of domestication he pa.s.sed: rustic antiques decked with pewter and chintz, all the homey little touches that really made a cage a cage.

Laying waste to this worthless c.r.a.p collection was one thing. But as Vic moved deeper into the house and caught a whiff of the old woman, he started going really crazy. The drying flora hanging from the eaves were enough to give her away, along with the wheat braidings and corn dollies and a.s.sorted other bits of funky pagan kitsch.

But more than that, Vic could smell her power. The reek of it made his hackles rise and his flesh writhe. She was trying to help them, that b.i.t.c.h, and for that he would make her pay. Vic would split her open and floss with her withered fallopian tubes.

Just as soon as I find you . . .