He heard Aurelia coming up behind him, and was pleased to note that she avoided making excess noise. An average man wouldn't have heard her footsteps on the spongy ground and would have been surprised.
"Watch out for snakes," he said before she had a chance to speak.
"I've never been afraid of animals," she told him. "Want some company?"
"Suits me."
She stood beside him, touching-close, and he could smell her in the darkness. Not perfume-she hadn't worn any since they had met-but an enticing, healthy woman smell. He wondered if a loup-garou could track her by that scent alone, or if he needed footprints for a guide.
"You're not afraid, either," she said.
"Not yet."
"Do you believe we'll find him?"
"One way or another," Remo said. "He may find us. It all comes out the same."
"You're pretty confident." Her own voice seemed to harbor doubt.
"We beat him once," he said. "He lost some of his little pets last time."
"I have been wondering," Aurelia said, "how much of that was luck, and how much skill."
He didn't answer her. The silence stretched between them for a while, before the Gypsy spoke again.
"This is a little strange," she said, "don't you agree?"
"Which part? The werewolf, or his working for the Cajun mafia?"
"Our hunting him like this," she said. "I mean, we really don't know where we're going, do we? All he has to do is lie back like a spider, waiting for us. Make a move when it's to his advantage, and he has us where he wants us."
"That's assuming he's still here, or ever was," said Remo.
"Oh, he's here, all right." There was a tremor in Aurelia's voice. "I feel him. Not on top of us, just yet, but getting near."
"You could have stayed back in New Orleans," he reminded her, "or gone to find your people."
"And what good would that do? If he wants me, there's no place for me to hide. It's cost my family too much already."
Remo said nothing.
"You blame yourself for that?"
He looked at her. In the blackness of the night his pupils dilated to an extraordinary degree, allowing him to see with catlike clarity where the Romany woman could only see his shadow. She thought the darkness hid her expression, and so allowed her interest, and her simmering passion for him to show on her face.
"You think," she continued, "that by coming to me, you led the loup-garou to me. Which makes you responsible for the deaths."
Remo shook his head. "I could have stopped this long before that, and I didn't. That's why I'm responsible for your dead."
She was surprised. "You could have stopped the wolf man before this?"
"I could have stopped the woman who made him into what he is. She was a scientist. She tampered with genetics. She somehow put animal DNA in the blender and came up with a secret potion to turn people into whatever she wanted them to be."
The Romany woman considered this for a moment. "You mock me," she asked gently, "when you try to tell me that this thing of magic and spirit is instead just a freak of science."
"Hey, I was being the victim here, not you. Remember, poor, guilty Remo?"
She was waiting for an answer.
"I'm not mocking you, Aurelia. What I told you is true. I failed to stop this woman twice before. She is what made Leon Grosvenor into an honest-to-God werewolf. But that is not to say I don't believe what you say. That you can feel his evil. That you can feel his presence approaching us. I've seen all kinds of creepy junk hanging out with the wacky old Korean."
In the distance, in a voice too soft for Aurelia to hear, Chiun said, "I heard that!"
Remo heard something else far away, too. Aurelia started to speak, and he shushed her with a finger pressed against her lips.
The sound that reached his ears stood out from the noises he had grown accustomed to since nightfall in the swamp. Aside from the unearthly call of birds, the whir of bats in flight, the splashing sounds of turtles, leaping fish or gliding alligators, there was...something else.
When Remo spoke again, it was a whisper. "Are you any good at climbing trees?"
She answered him in kind. "I do all right. What is it?"
"We've got company," he said. From the sound of things, the camp was practically surrounded.
"Leon?" There was something close to panic in Aurelia's voice, although she tried to hide it.
"We'll see," he said, and jerked a thumb in the direction of the nearest sturdy tree. "Just get upstairs, and don't come down until I call you or the sun comes up and you can see to get away, whichever happens first."
Aurelia abruptly experienced levitation. It took her a moment to realize that it was Remo lifting her by the waist as if she were weightless, and she found herself eye-to-eye with a branch that had been above her head.
"Where are you going?" she whispered as she scrambled onto the cypress branch.
"I'm putting out the welcome mat," Remo said.
THE PACK HAD a trail now, picked up at the water's edge, almost by accident, and followed over marshy ground. Leon could thank the bitch for taking them directly to the camp.
He used hand signs to send the bitch and her brothers on their separate ways, encircling the campsite. They had the critical advantage of surprise.
Leon hadn't gone hunting in this sector of the swamp for months, and he reflected that the normals had to have taken bad advice if they were searching for him here. It was a fluke that he had found them when they were so far off track, a touch of destiny perhaps, a signal that his run of miserable luck had changed.
Leon didn't care if they had guns, grenades and body armor. They were his, and they couldn't escape him. They had made one fatal error too many, coming to his own backyard in search of trouble, and he meant to help them find it one last time.
The crackling fire was closer now. His first sight of the men was a lone shadow figure, squatting near the fire, hands stretched out toward the flames for warmth.
The others should be in their places now, he thought, and started moving in a more direct line toward the fire.
Pausing in the midnight shadows of the tree line, less than twenty paces from the fire that had been kindled in a forest clearing, Leon threw his head back, breathing in the scent of his intended prey, mouth watering.
The wild, bone-chilling howl erupted from his throat, almost without a conscious thought. It warped and warbled through the tall dark trees and brought the startled humans lurching to their feet. Too late.
Leon was snarling like a wild thing as he broke from cover, running in a crouch, and charged the fire.
CHIUN HAD EMERGED from the boat of his own accord, sensing the presence in the woods almost in the same instant as Remo. A moment later Remo heard the first gunshot echo from the cabin cruiser downstream and he glanced back just in time to see a rag-doll figure vaulting backward through the air, head over heels, to strike the nearest mangrove like a sack of dirty laundry and slide down the trunk to vanish underwater with a muffled splash.
Remo knew without taking in the too-large size of the recently deceased that it wasn't the old Korean. One of their uninvited guests had made his way aboard the boat and learned the hard way that Chiun could take care of himself.
The gunshot from the boat may not have been a scheduled signal, but it had the same effect. Streams of automatic fire swept the bayou camp, converging from no less than five distinct points of origin, the bullets drilling cookware, sleeping bags, exploding into showers of embers when they hit the fire itself. He recognized the sounds of SMGs and automatic rifles but they were all just bullets, and bullets were swords were arrows were rocks. All just something sent in your direction in a big hurry with the intent of hurting you. You dealt with them-if you were Sinanju-in the same way. You got out of the way.
But there was no sign of Cuvier, and Remo couldn't tell if he was down, somewhere beyond the fire, or trapped inside one of the bullet-riddled sleeping bags. In either case, it was too late to help him now.