Mike just made a face and shook his head. “That means you hit me eight times. It’s not the ones you evade, it’s the ones you don’t that matter.”
“What jackass told you that?”
“You did, the first day we worked out.”
“You shouldn’t listen to strangers, Mike.” That got a tiny flicker of an artificial smile. “Okay,” Crow said, turning to get some padded mitts from his equipment bag. “Let’s see how you like hitting back.” He fitted on two gloves that had thick flat foam pads covered in black leather. “I’ll move around, changing the position and angle of the targets. You hit and kick them as many times as you can. Don’t worry about power—concentrate on speed—and don’t let up, even if I back off. When you’re winning a fight you press the attack until your opponent is down. Fighters who get a good one in and then step back like good sports to give their opponents a chance to collect himself deserve to lose the fight.”
“No mercy,” Mike said under his breath.
“Well…I’m not sure I’d go as far as that. Let’s just call it the will to win.”
“Whatever.” Mike raised his hands and began moving forward before Crow even had his pads up.
“Whenever you’re—”
Mike’s fists slammed into the pads before he could finish, and even through the thick pad Crow could feel the brutal power of the blows. Hard. Much too hard for the weight and muscle Mike carried. As they moved Crow watched the boy’s hips and legs and feet, and he saw that on each punch he was shifting his weight and torqueing his hips to put body weight behind each blow, and the speed gave each shot more foot-pounds of impact. It was right, it was perfect; and Crow was not really sure he had ever shown Mike how to do that.
Mike hit without a sound except for his fists and palms and elbows slamming into the targets. His face was bright with exertion and sweat, and all the while his upper lip was curled back away from his teeth in a feral snarl of hate.
Jesus Christ, Crow thought, this kid is in hell.
(4)
It became a busy night in the store and Crow never found a good moment to talk to Mike, and as the evening wore on the boy seemed more and more like his old affable and comfortably geeky self. Crow let it go.
At closing, Crow and Mike parted with a few jokes and with that it felt easier, more like normal. Mike rode his bike away through the tourist traffic as Crow locked up and shut off the lights. Val tapped on the door just as Crow was heading back to his apartment and he let her in. They kissed in the doorway and then walked hand in hand back to the apartment.
“How was your day?
“We have the memorial all set for Friday night. The Rotary wanted to host it, so we’ll be using their hall, and the college asked if they could cater it.”
“Nice of them.”
“Mark had a lot of friends,” Val said. “Everyone wants to make a gesture.”
“How are you with all of this?”
Val shrugged. “Better than I thought I’d be. I stuffed my purse with tissues thinking it was going to be that kind of a day, but I didn’t use a single one. Now, Sarah, on the other hand…she pretty much cleaned me out.”
“Yeah, she looked pretty rocky.”
Val sank down on the couch. “She’s keeping it together, but only just. No change at all with Terry.”
“I know, I spoke to Saul a couple of times today.”
They sat with those thoughts for a while. Val broke the silence by saying, “Twelve days.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Newton’s folklorist friend will be here on the twenty-ninth. Then we can find out what we have to do to put Mark to rest. The thought of him just lying there in that drawer…” She shivered.
“I know, but we’ll have to be pretty careful with how we ask her. Just ’cause she’s a folklore professor doesn’t mean she believes any of this.”
Val nodded. “We’ll be careful, but I intend to find out one way or another.”
“I’ll look through my books again tonight when Newt gets here. Maybe there’s something I missed.”
“You looked, honey. Newton looked. I looked, too. It’s not there. Your stuff, good as it is, is mostly the pop-culture version of folklore. We need to go a lot deeper than that.”
The doorbell rang. “That’s him.”
Crow let Newton in. The little reporter, looking seedier and more haggard than ever, slumped down into a chair and set a bag down between his sneakered feet. The contents of the bag clinked. Crow knew that sound and came to point like a bird-dog.
Val beat him to the punch. “Newt…you do know Crow doesn’t drink.”
Newton gave her a bleary stare that for once was neither deferential nor accommodating. “I do,” he said, and reached down into the bag and brought out a longneck bottle of Hop Devil, twisted off the cap, and drank about half of it down. “And, don’t bother getting mad at me…I didn’t bring it to share.” True to his word, he did not offer one to her.
Val opened her mouth to say something, but Crow touched her arm and shook his head.
“We were just talking about Dr. Corbiel,” Crow said. “And Mark.”
The bottle paused halfway to Newton’s mouth, hovered there for a moment, and then he took another long swig. “I talked with her about that today. No—don’t look at me like that, I’m not hideously stupid. I told her I was researching a chapter for my book and wanted to know about how vam…how these things happen. I told her about what I knew from movies and stuff and she pretty much dismissed all of it.”
“What did she say?” asked Val.
Newton looked over the mouth of his bottle at her for a long moment. “She said that there were a lot of ways, but that if I wanted a definitive answer I’d have to know what kind of…thing…did the attack.”
“Oh, Christ, Newton say the frigging word,” Crow snapped. The smell of the beer was making his stomach churn and his mouth water.
Newton gave him an evil look. “Okay, she said we’d have to know what kind of vampire bit him.” The room went quiet. Newton took another pull. “Jonatha said that in folklore different vampires have different methods of predation and different methods of, um…recruitment.” He finished the first beer and took a second from the bag. “The thing in the movies where a vampire drinks someone’s blood and then makes them drink theirs—that’s a distortion. She said that most transformations don’t even require a sharing of blood. Others require that the victim be willing to drink the vampire’s blood. In a lot of them a person can be transformed by a bite, but even if they revive as a vampire they aren’t evil unless they drink human blood, willingly or not. Apparently there are blood rituals to force a reanimated person to become a vampire. But in some cases there’s no bite at all.”
“What do you mean?” Val asked.
“In some cultures a person isn’t turned into a vampire by other vampires. It’s based on a bunch of other stuff. Dying unrepentant is a big one, dying by violence is another. Being born on certain days of the year. Holy days, I think, but she was going pretty fast and I missed some stuff. It’s a wonder we’re not ass-deep in vampires.”
“Yes,” Val said, her eyes thoughtful.
“So, bottom line is that we don’t know which kind of vampire Boyd was. If we did, then the folklore from that country would tell us what we need to know.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Crow said. “From what I read…and I’m admitting I’m no scholar here, but the problem is more complex than that because we don’t know how many of the folkloric vampires were even real. All we know about is Ruger and Boyd, Cowan and Castle, and even there we don’t know that much.”
Val got up and crossed to where Newton sat in the over-stuffed chair. “Beer,” she said and held out her hand. He obeyed without a hesitation and even twisted off the cap for her.