While I turned the rachet, Zee, who was holding a part in place for me, said, “I took a peek under that cover”—he nodded toward the corner of the shop where my latest restoration project lay in wait.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” I said. “Or at least she will be when I get her fixed up.” She was a 1968 Karmann Ghia in almost pristine condition.
“Are you going to restore it or make a street rod?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Her paint is still the original and there’s only a little cracking on the hood. I hate to mess with it unless I have to. If I can get her running well with original parts and Kim can stitch up the seats, I’ll leave it at that.”
There are three groups of old car enthusiasts: people who think a car should be left as much original as possible; the ones who restore it better than factory; and the people who gut them and replace the brakes, engine, and suspension with more modern equipment. Zee is firmly in the latter group.
He is not sentimental—if something works better, that’s what you should use. I suppose forty or fifty years doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to the rest of us—one person’s antique is another’s rusting hulk.
Since a good part of my income comes from restoring rusting hulks, I’m not picky. I have a partnership with an upholstery genius, Kim, and a painter who also likes to drive around and show the cars so we can sell them. After deducting the actual material cost of the restore and the shows, we split the profits according to hours spent on the project.
“Air-cooled takes a lot of upkeep,” Zee said.
“Someone who wants an original condition Ghia won’t care about that,” I told him. He grunted, unconvinced, and went back to his job.
Gabriel took my Rabbit out to get sandwiches, then sat in the garage to eat with us. I uncovered the Ghia, and the three of us ate and debated the best thing to do with the car until it was time to go back to work.
“Zee,” I asked as he raised a Passat in the air to take a look at the exhaust.
He grunted as he tapped with his index finger the exhaust pipe where it was badly dented, just in front of the first muffler.
“What do you know about sorcerers?”
He stopped his tapping and sighed. “Old gremlins go out of their way to stay away from demon-hosts, and it’s been a while since humans believed enough in the Devil to sell their souls to him.”
I got a little light-headed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in evil—quite the opposite. I’ve had ample proof of God, so I accepted that His opponent exists, too. I just didn’t particularly want to know that someone who made a deal with Satan was lurking ten miles from my home killing hotel maids.
“I thought it was a just a demon,” I said faintly.
“Ja,” he said; then he turned and saw my face. “Devil, demon—English is an imprecise language in these things. There are things that serve the Great Beast of Christian scripture. Greater and lesser spirits, demons or devils, and they all serve evil. The greater servants are bound away from our world, but can be invited in—just as vampires cannot enter a home without an invitation.”
“All right,” I took a deep breath. “What else do you know.”
Zee reached up and put his hand on the pipe. “Not much, Liebchen. The few men I’ve encountered who claimed to be sorcerers were nothing but demon-bait when I met them.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is who’s holding the reins.” The exhaust pipe began glowing a bright cherry red under Zee’s hand. “Demons serve only one master well, and those who forget it tend to become enslaved rather quickly. Those who remember might stay in control a while longer.”
I frowned at him. “So all the demon-possessed start out as sorcerers?”
Zee shook his head. “There are many kinds of invitations, intentional and not. Sorcerer, demon-possessed, it doesn’t matter. Eventually the demon is in control.”
The exhaust pipe made a loud noise and popped back out to its proper shape. Zee met my gaze. “This creature is playing with the vampires, Mercy. Stay out of its business. The seethe is better equipped to deal with such than you are.”
By five thirty, I was elbow deep in a Vanagon tune-up so I had Gabriel close up the office and tried to send both him and Zee off. My battered face made them more reluctant than usual to leave me working alone, but I persuaded them to go at last.
While Zee had been there, I’d kept the big air conditioner running and the garage doors shut, but, unlike the werewolves, I enjoy the summer heat. So once I was alone, I turned off the cool-air and opened up the bay doors.
“Does that help?”
I looked up and saw that the customer from earlier in the day was standing in the open bay door.
“Tom Black,” he reminded me.
“Does what help?” I asked wiping off my hands and taking a sip of water from the bottle balanced precariously on the car’s bumper.
“Humming,” he said. “I was wondering if it helped.”
There was something about the way he said it that bothered me—as if he was a good friend of mine instead of someone I’d exchanged a few words with. His earlier remark about white belts didn’t make him a martial artist, but his body movement as he walked into my garage did.
I kept my expression polite, though the coyote in me wanted to lift my lip. He was invading my territory.
“I hadn’t realize I was humming,” I told him. “This is the last car I’m working on today.” I knew it wasn’t his car, because it was one I worked on regularly. “If Gabriel didn’t call you, then we probably won’t get to your car until tomorrow.”
“How did a pretty woman like you get to be a mechanic?” he asked.
I tilted my head so I could see him better out of my good eye. Gabriel had told me that if I had kept an ice pack on it longer it wouldn’t have swollen up so badly. On good days, my looks were passable, today hideous and awful were more apt.
If we had been on neutral territory, I’d probably have said something like, “Gee, I don’t know. How’d a handsome man like you get to be such a pushy bastard?” But this was my place of work and he was a customer.
“Same as all the other pretty mechanics, I expect,” I said. “Listen, I have to get this finished up. Why don’t you call tomorrow morning and Gabriel will have an estimate for when you can expect your car to be done.”
I walked forward as I said it. The motion should have pushed him back, but he held still so I had to stop or get too close to him. He smelled of coconut sunscreen and cigarette smoke.
“Actually I picked my car up earlier,” he said. “I came by tonight to talk to you.”
He was human, but I saw the same predatory look in his eyes that the wolves had when they were off on a hunt. Being in my own garage had made me feel too safe and I’d let myself get too close to him. I had weapons a plenty in the form of wrenches and crowbars, but they were all out of reach.
“Did you?” I said. “Why?”
“I wanted to ask you how you liked dating a werewolf. Did you know he was a werewolf when you started dating him? Did you have sex with him?” His voice acquired a sudden razor edge.
It was such a shift in topic that I blinked stupidly at him for a moment.
This man didn’t smell like a fanatic—hatred has its own scent. When Zee first came out, there was a group of people who’d marched around the shop with placards. Some of them came out one night and spray painted FAIRYLAND in angry red letters across my garage doors.
Tom Black smelled intense—as if the answers to his questions really mattered to him.
Outside, a small-block Chevy 350 pulled into my lot and I recognized its purr. With the last of my trepidation gone, I realized there was only one reason for the questions he’d asked.