“Oh, shit.” He was in his sock feet, and stepped out onto the porch, grabbed my arm, and dragged me into welcome warmth. I leaned against the wall inside the door as he closed and locked it, and just closed my eyes.
“We need to talk,” I managed around the lump in my throat.
“No. Really?” If the words had been loaded with any more sarcasm they would have staggered. As it was, they only fell flat. “What the hell happened?”
“That’s my dad’s truck.” The shivers were coming in waves now. “I found it. I found the guy attached to the phone number. He kn kn-knows something.”
He took it calmly. “Huh. You should get out of those clothes. You’re dripping on the carpet.”
Then again, Graves didn’t know—and I couldn’t explain—about the streak-headed werwulf and the boy who stood on snow as if it was a dance floor. It’s not the sort of thing you can explain to someone who’s only touched the Real World once.
I wasn’t able to tell him that the boy was probably something more inhuman than the wulf who had ended up shredding his shoulder. That the boy wasn’t a boy, was probably older than any adult I ever knew. And that he’d probably turned my dad into a zombie, and I was next unless I could come up with a plan, and a good one.
Why would he turn Dad into a zombie, though? I mean, suckers aren’t the only thing that can turn people into hungry walking corpses. It happens all the time. Voodoo, burial in contaminated ground, black sorcery, working at big chain retail stores—there were endless ways someone could end up reanimated.
Still, they like to play with their prey, the suckers. Zombification is only one of their tricks.
They call themselves all sorts of tribal names, but hunters call them only a few things—suckers, nosferatu, “those undead bastards.” And they’re one of the few things everyone, no matter their personal feuds or dislike, will band together and try to kill. There were even whispers of werwulfen sometimes working with groups of human hunters to take a nest out. Wulfen and suckers don’t get along; nobody knows why.
But why would a wulf and a burning dog and a sucker be after Dad or me?
It was the same mental ground I’d been retreading for hours, not getting anywhere. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on driving, it was worse. But why did Dad have his number? What was Dad doing out here? He didn’t mention anything to me. He always had me help him find out what we were hunting.
If Dad was hunting a sucker and he wanted me out of the way, why wouldn’t he warn me or leave me somewhere safe? Why would he take me along and not talk about it?
I stared at the boxes stacked in the hall. It smelled red in here, like tomatoes and spice, and Graves put an awkward arm over my shoulder. “Look, I made some spaghetti. I also stopped by the mall and got some of my clothes and stuff. So, um, why don’t you just get cleaned up and dried off, and you can tell me what’s going on? You look cold.”
I was cold, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather running through the center of my bones. Ice in the marrow, a buzzing in my head. The circular mental motion started again, my brain struggling over the same rut it had been in since I turned the key and the truck ground into life.
Go over it again, Dru. Think it through.
Suckers could make zombies. I knew that much. As a matter of fact, it was one of the questions you asked first when you ran across the reanimated—was it voodoo, burial somewhere weird and bad, suckers, or something else responsible for controlling the shambling corpse? If it was just someone buried in contaminated ground, you could fix it easily enough. If it was voodoo, you could find out who had access to corpses and a nasty habit of raising them.
If it was a sucker bringing the rotting bodies up from the ground or making their own corpses, though, you were pretty dead unless you had luck or backup. I was running low on both.
“Dru.” Graves shook me a little, peeled me away from the wall. Peered down into my face, his unibrow puckering. “Come on. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He caught himself and gave his peculiar, barking laugh. “That’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”
You have no idea, kid. I found my voice. “Pretty possible. Yeah.” It took an effort to step away from him. I barked my shin on a box and winced a little. “I’ll go get cleaned up. Spaghetti sounds good.”
“Ragu.” He shrugged. “It was all that was around. You want me to reheat some?”
I know it was all that was around; Dad loved Ragu sauce. With tons of garlic. My heart gave a squeezing twist. “Sure. Thanks.” My stomach grumbled a little, despite being closed up tighter than a bank after hours.
His face eased. He let go of me and tried a tentative smile. “No problem. I was worried about you.”
You know what? So was I. I’m already as good as dead. There’s no way I can fight a sucker. He’s just playing with me. There it was, the stark truth. “Yeah. Me too.” I made it down the hall and up the stairs, stripped out of my wet clothes—my back twingeing every so often, reminding me that I’d wrenched it again—and crawled into some sweats and a T-shirt. The side of my head, where I’d clipped it on the fountain, stung softly. My ribs ached, and I had to wriggle around in the bed gingerly until I found a position that didn’t hurt. I lay still, trying to make the no-pain last as long as possible, hearing Graves humming a little, off-key, downstairs. I stayed awake only long enough to pull the blankets a little higher up and feel a moment’s worth of regret at not eating when he was going to all the trouble.
Then I blinked out.
I don’t often dream of my mother.
When I do, it’s always the same. She is leaning over my crib, her face bigger than the moon and more beautiful than sunlight, or maybe it’s just that way because I’m so young. Her hair tumbles down in glossy ringlets, smelling of her special shampoo, and the silver locket at her throat glimmers.
But there is a shadow in her pretty dark eyes; it matches the darkness over the left half of her face. It’s like the shadow of rain seen through a window, light broken in rivulets.
“Dru,” she says, softly but urgently. “Get up.”
I rub my eyes and yawn. “Mommy?” My voice is muffled. Sometimes it’s the voice of a two-year-old, sometimes it’s older. But always, it’s wondering and quiet, sleepy.
“Come on, Dru.” She puts her hands down and picks me up with a slight oof! as if she can’t believe how much I’ve grown. I’m a big girl now, and I don’t need her to carry me, but I’m so tired I don’t protest. I cuddle into her warmth and feel the hummingbird beat of her heart. “I love you, baby,” she whispers into my hair. She smells of fresh cookies and warm perfume, and it is here the dream starts to fray. Because I hear something like footsteps, or a pulse. It is quiet at first, but it gets louder and more rapid with each beat. “I love you so much.”
“Mommy . . .” I put my head on her shoulder. I know I am heavy, but she is carrying me, and when she sets me down to open a door, I protest only a little.
It is the closet downstairs. Just how I know it’s downstairs I’m not sure. There is something in the floor she pulls up, and some of my stuffed animals have been jammed into the square hole, along with blankets and a pillow from her and Daddy’s bed. She scoops me up again and settles me in the hole, and I begin to feel a faint alarm. “Mommy?”
“We’re going to play the game, Dru. You hide here and wait for Daddy to come home from work.”
This is all wrong. Sometimes I hide in the closet to scare Daddy, but never in the middle of the night. And never in a hole in the floor—a hole I didn’t even know was there. “I don’t wanna,” I say, and try to get up.