Chapter Fifty-Five

The moon is as pale as a fingernail tip in the black, starry sky.

The battle has come down to two forces: the double whammy of ruthless human mobsters unleashing their lethal animal natures, and me surrounded by wolves who should be extinct, and maybe are spirit wolves. I don't know. Those moonlit fangs look pretty solid.

So far I'm safe within a circle of the spirit wolves with their eerie lightning halos snapping and crackling. Thoughts of Ric dart through my every move as the wolves and I leap to repel any were that reaches us.

Still, several werewolves dance two-legged toward this intruding wolf pack, but retreat from that cold blue burning aura and the snarling jaws on four paws with hunched backs. Their fur is matted and gray, and now red-streaked, but the werewolves seem beyond pain, determined to reach me no matter how wounded.

The battle is an endless draw. What we need is the cavalry, not that ghostly desert wolves are anything to sneer at.

Instead, by the light of my guardian wolves, I see one man marching up an incline into view.

For a moment I think I see Ric, but it's not him. It's a man, weaponless, walking tall on two legs, coming on strong, not hesitating, making not for us, but for the werewolves!

In the moonlight, as I watch, another dark head breasts the rise forty feet behind the first man. Our reinforcements number two! Or are these unchanged mob bosses come to insure my end? Something relentless and swaggering drives their gait, a sense of arrogant, accustomed power.

Yet another dark head crests the hill and stalks onto the killing ground.

And another!

It's an army of heads, their eyes gleaming white and fixed on their objective.

Me!

Where's my silver familiar? I try to sense its place on my body, and fail. Has it deserted me? As good as! No, it's still here, all right, coiled into a girly, spindly "Hello Kitty" bracelet around my left wrist. Not only girly, but also juvenile. Child's play.

Rather like Snow and his games.

I try to rip it off out of sheer betrayed fury, but the thin chain cuts my fingertips, so I channel my rage forward and wade through the wolves. Impressive ghosts can't help me either.

I walk through them as into a mirror, I wade through a warm mist past their snapping jaws that give me mild electrical shocks. My electric personality doesn’t deter the latest wave of werewolves, which leap for me with huge bounds now that I've left my charmed circle of conjured wolves.

I see a wolfish snout howl and then plummet from sight among the mobster pack, as if trampled. Another goes down screaming, under the wave of wolfish muscle and bone and fur and ferocity that is Cicereau's human-killing pack. The full moon illuminates the scene like liquid silver.

On the edges, on the fringes the oncoming forces wear…business suits and camo-pants and leather jackets. They sport razor haircuts and ponytails. I'm seeing corporate headhunters side-by-side with gang-bangers. And they all wear faces as white as Snow's.

It can't be just the ghostly moonlight playing tricks on my vision. What are these things, besides eager-beaver werewolf-beaters?

Someone brings up their rear, comes charging over the incline, then stops to watch them. Supervise them. Herd them.

The dazzling moon glow reflects off the only white shirtfront in the vicinity to spotlight a familiar face.

Ric! Still alive! Then I shout it aloud. "Ric!"

His hands hold something dark as he watches from above, a general who's loosed the dogs of war and now sees his orders unfold. These must be Feds, FBI men and undercover agents, mustered from the Mexican border operations and flown in.

"Ric!" I wave to show him I'm all right.

I doubt he even heard me. He's intent upon the actions of his troops. The reinforcements who, coming closer, grim and expressionless, give me the chills.

These aren't faceless bureaucrats and cookie-cutter agents.

They're our new supernatural allies in the Werewolf-Law Enforcement War. Finally I understand who they are, what they are.

Zombies!

What perfect soldiers they make, the empty dead-eyed, implacable, endlessly moving. Harried and confused werewolves turn and leap upon them as if expecting Happy Meals. These terrifying killers fall beneath the undead strength of the oncoming zombies' limbs. The werewolves' attacks leave shredded skin but can't stop the marching legs and feet, the dead-zone zombie eyes, zombies as relentless as robots. Mindless. Soulless. Heartless.

Werewolves retreat before them. Some seemed to have vanished. The gray spirit wolves surround me again, howling like Quicksilver at the full moon. I look up at that always-present wonder. It's no longer totally full and round, but slightly lopsided, the way I feel right now.

It's waning. Only the merest sliver of a wane, but it's waning!

At that moment everyone, everything halts. Some unseen celestial director who had cast every creature here into the same terrifying, fatal script, has shouted, "Cut!"

Everything takes new measure of the fading night. Every entity, unhuman or human, sees the delicately withdrawing moonlight, ebbing like a lady inching a long white skirt across a black marble floor far away and high above.

The night itself declares a truce.

The wolves that circle me push inward no farther. Such beautiful creatures! All lean, lovely legs, all wise yellow eyes. Ghosts. Sages. Friends and lovers.

Why did I think that?

As I watch, they dissipate into silver fur and golden eyes flashing through a silvery sagebrush mist.

And the silver snake that made like a kiddie bracelet? I sense a metallic chill somewhere. Oh. It's now just a thin chain at my neck, a docile barrier, all sterling and no snap. Right.

The zombies have dragged down or run off all the werewolves. Now they're heading unchallenged toward me.

I lift my dukes, stomp my feet, hiss like an angry lynx. They split when they reach me, and make a second circle around me. This is when I get a good look at them. Not your ordinary working stiffs, for sure. I spot some famous faces, a couple from the silver screen. Most reek of mob muscle or street gangsters.

Then I get the full, ghastly picture.

What kind of living dead would surround the Starlight Lodge? Previous victims of the werewolves. It didn't pay to skip out on your gambling debts or irritate a mob boss in Vegas once the werewolves won the Werewolf-Vampire War. Instead of getting concrete booties in Lake Mead, you'd get sand between your dead toes in the desert. I was witnessing eighty or ninety years of anti-werewolf troops in the making, dead and buried all around them, just waiting for the right opportunity, the right moment to dig out, stand up, and take no prisoners.

Maybe not even me.

Something has stopped the zombie march, not just the retreat and defeat of the werewolves.

The zombies were waiting, unknowing, like I was, for just the right man.

I hold my breath.

Ric's finally walking all the way toward me in the moonlight.

When silver bullets weren't enough, he'd known just where to find fresh ammunition. Under the desert sand and rocks, waiting for a liberator. Like I had been.

"Ric! My God, Ric, we're safe. You did it."

I eye the zombies, their expressionless faces. Some are…more realistic than others. More whole. But, hey, handsome is as handsome does, and these guys have saved my butt, my bacon, my life. Nice of them, since they won't ever have any life again themselves.

Ric's face is strangely transfixed too.

His eyes focus on me, only me, and in them is recognition, triumph, and despair.

"I'm okay, Ric. Let's bid our underground buddies goodbye and get off this mountain. The weres didn't touch me, hurt me. Honest."

Well, they had, a little, but why dwell on the negative?

Ric stopped m front of me, his eyes on my face, as mine had fixed on his since he'd appeared again. In some deep part of my mind, I'd given him up for dead. I couldn't believe we'd made it. That we had both survived and still had each other, give or take a few dozen zombies.

Something more touched Ric's expression, something more than all the good things I had read. There was one bad thing I hadn't read, hadn't wanted to read.

His face, his body, had adopted some of that zombie rigidity, something so new for Ric of the flowing words and gestures and emotions that had given my own zombie heart a new Latin beat.

I eyed the dark thing at his center, his waist, where his hands held not a gun anymore but a dowsing rod. Right?

It wasn’t the shadow of night and dark deeds I'd seen, sensed in him.

It was the shadow of suffering.

Below the elbows, his dark suit coat, probably donned for a quick trip to D. C, was sopped with a deeper darkness…blood. His hands bore a simple tri-limbed object. And they, his hands and arms, the dowsing rod, were drenched in blood.

A follow-spot of moonlight poured down on that red ruin, painting it black, the black-and-white of a vintage film.

I shrieked.

"It's all right," Ric said. "The zombies drove off the werewolves. Anything human remaining ran."

"Zombies. Our allies. How?"

"I dowsed for them, one by one." He spoke with slow, almost painful reluctance. "I swore never to do that again. Once I raise them, they obey me until I release them."

He moved past me, gazing at his fresh-raised troop.

"The killing dance of the werewolves roused them, the scent of fresh, flowing blood. You have no idea how many souls are buried out here, burning for vengeance. This is just a fraction of the dead bodies out here." He was keeping cool, removed, instructive.

"Your…hands," I said. "The blood."

Ric was still lost in explaining everything, almost to himself.

"That's what I realized when the ammunition ran out. They had to be here for the raising. The werewolf mob was shortsighted, so secure in being killers in both human and wolf form. They'd defeated the vampires, the undead, decades ago. What could the dead do to them? No one knows how the dead wait. Unseen. Unremembered. Think how many there are, just a few feet under this shifting sand. Just a few clawing handfuls from resurrection. We're all so quick to forget those we've wronged. Now, after the Millennium Revelation, all bets are off. The walking dead and the dead walk. All I had to do was dowse for their gravesites, call them up, and they came. I could have raised more."

"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.