Heavy Metal Page 4

  In the winter snow, it took us two full days to reach our destination, a tiny town high in the San Juan Mountains, nestled at the base of a canyon winding up into the mountains, its walls rising high above the town.

  We stopped at a nearby campground, pulling the van into a secluded spot for the night even though the camp was technically closed for the winter. I doubted anyone would be out here to check on us.

  In the morning, I’d go into town and see what I could figure out. Until then, I had a new-to-me book I’d picked up at a library sale in some nowhere town we’d passed through, a flashlight with rechargeable batteries that were all full up on power, and the silence of snow falling outside.

  I’d gotten used to traveling with Wolf, but the van wasn’t really big enough for two people, or even one person and one werewolf. Several years ago, I had retrofitted the back end with a single bed along one wall, built-in drawers beneath that. The other wall held cabinets, drawers, and a tiny cooking area, complete with a hotplate and a basin for wash-water. Before Wolf joined me, it had been ideal for one person.

  Now I found myself drawing the curtain between the front and back parts of my living quarters more often. Not that Wolf wasn’t a perfect gentleman—he was. Any time I started to change clothes, he politely averted his eyes, generally moving to the front passenger seat, which he had claimed as his own.

  At night, he slept on the floor beside my sleeping pallet. After he joined me in Tombstone, I stopped at Goodwill and picked up extra blankets for him. There had been a few times, though, when I had been tempted to move down there with him on a particularly cold night.

  This was one of them.

  2.

  One of the problems with my monster-hunting first alert system was its lack of specificity. Horrible pain in my gut didn’t really help me know what I was going to be facing. Hell, even where I was going was often only a guess.

  As far as I knew, there was nothing in the tiny town of Creede, Colorado, that warranted my presence. Whatever the danger here might be, it wasn’t obvious at first sight.

  A single street made up the bulk of the downtown area, and it was lined with tourist stores carrying overpriced silver jewelry—the kind that made me jerk my hand away in pain when it burned me as I flipped through the display.

  This time of year, the entire town was blanketed with white snow. I took Wolf into a local store—San Luis Sports. They were nice enough there to help me figure out cold-weather gear. I had the basics, of course—a warm coat, a scarf, a hat. But this high up in the mountains, I was feeling the altitude in all kinds of ways. Not only was it bitter cold, but I kept running out of breath. I hoped I’d be able to acclimate in time to fight off whatever monster had called me here.

  In the meantime, the new hiking boots I bought wiped out most of the last of the money I’d earned at a waitressing gig a while back. Monster hunting didn’t really pay the bills. I was going to have to find work.

  I took a moment to assess my clothing. Anywhere else I’d have to head back to the van to change. Lucky for me, the Colorado mountain aesthetic is more about function than form. In my flannel shirt, jeans, and sweater—and now new hiking boots, too—I fit in perfectly with the people I saw strolling along the main street.

  The guy running the register was blond, probably in his late twenties—around my age—and everything about him screamed ski instructor. Mr. Cutie Blond’s nametag said he was Steve. I figured if anyone would understand the need for seasonal work, Steve would.

  “Hi. Blaize Silver.” I held out my hand for him to shake as I introduced myself. “I’m new in town and looking for work. You know of anything?”

  “Not much around here in the winter,” he said with a shrug. “The ski resort up at Wolf Creek can sometimes use extra instructors over the holidays.”

  I snorted. In addition to not paying bills, hunting didn’t lend itself much to recreational sports. Most of what I could do involved killing things. “Not really a skier,” I said.

  “Maybe your dog could be their mascot,” Steve suggested.

  This time Wolf was the one who snorted, and the blond guy blinked. I glanced at Wolf out of the corner of my eye. “Do you have any snow boots for a dog?” I asked lightly. Wolf lifted his nose up in the air and turned his back on me. I snickered.

  “Sorry.” Steve sized up my offended companion. “I don’t think any of our pet sweaters will fit him. He’s huge.”

  I changed the subject. “So no other work ideas, then?”

  “You might check with Nanci down at Rarities,” the guy said. “They sometimes take on extra help during the holidays.”

  I hoped he was right, and I’d be able to find some kind of work.

  Rarities was at the other end of the street, a cross between an art gallery and a jewelry shop. The woman inside was pretty, blonde, somewhere in her fifties, with a wide smile and a voice a little deeper than I expected. “We don’t get as many tourists up here in the winter,” she said. “But I could use some help with inventory. It wouldn’t be much—just today and tomorrow, if you could start right now.”

  “That’s perfect.” I tried not to let my relief show, but it probably came through, anyway. “I’m only in town for a little while. I’d like to make gas money to get to Arizona to visit family.” I shrugged off my coat. “Is it okay if my dog stays inside, too? He’s well trained.”

  “Sure.” She leaned down and scratched his head. Wolf endured the attention stoically, though he shot me a reproachful look.

  I ignored him.

  Two days. That was how long I had to learn why the curse had brought me here.

  3.

  As it turned out, it was easy to figure out what we were dealing with. Maybe a little too easy.

  I spent that day working with Nanci. She was talkative and laughed easily, and while we worked, I was able to entertain her with some of my less supernatural stories of being on the road. At the end of the day, she paid me in cash.

  After we left Rarities for the day, we stopped at the one open restaurant, where the owner didn’t allow Wolf inside—so I got him an order of enchiladas and beans, too. “That’s it, dude,” I said when Wolf whined for more. “Unless you can start pulling your financial weight around here, you’re going to have to go catch rabbits or something.”

  He peered at the snow outside and huffed.

  “That’s the price you pay for traveling with a Silver.”

  He ignored me and went to sleep.

  When I got up the next morning, I saw why the campground was closed in the winter. The road that we’d used to come in, already barely a track when we’d parked the night before, was all but obliterated by new snowfall overnight. Luckily, I had a shovel in the van—not a snow shovel, unfortunately, but it was enough to do the job. Especially with Wolf’s help, periodic though it may have been. I think he enjoyed rolling around in the fresh snow as much as he wanted to help get the van out of its space.

  “This from the werewolf who wouldn’t go out in the cold to hunt rabbits?” I demanded. He yipped in response and danced around me. I shook my head and kept shoveling but couldn’t help laughing at his antics. “Get back to work, you big doofus.”

  I was glad I had tire chains, as well. I didn’t often have to use them, but there were enough mountains in the territory I tended to patrol that they’d come in handy more than once.

  At Rarities, Nanci continued to let Wolf stay inside, especially once she saw what a well-behaved dog he was. He threw her a dirty look when she said as much aloud, but he didn’t move from his spot inside the storeroom where I was doing inventory. Instead, he simply snorted and settled his head back down on his paws.

  “He’s a smart one, isn’t he?” Nanci added, tilting her head as she regarded him.

  “Oh, I don’t think there are very many like him.” I grinned, and he ignored us both.

  Darkness fell early in the winter this high in the mountains. By four-thirty that afternoon, it was all but dark outside, and I w
as still inside the store, doing inventory in the background. Nanci wanted us to finish it before she closed up for Christmas day, and she’d had a small but steady stream of last-minute Christmas-gift shoppers all day long.

  I jotted down a tally for a box full of decorative notepads and then moved to the next box. I opened it without looking inside, turning to Nanci to make some smartass comment as I reached into the box.

  Hot pain flashed up my arm from my fingertips, and I whipped my hand back up toward my chest with a hiss.

  “Are you okay?” Nanci reached out to take my arm to check my hand, but I clasped it to myself.

  “I’m fine. Just a paper cut—I must’ve cut my hand on the cardboard.”

  “Is it bleeding? Is it bad? Do we need to get you a Band-Aid or a Kleenex or something?”

  “I’ll just go to the bathroom and rinse it off.” I scuttled into the employees-only restroom, where I finally pulled my arm down, away from its protective grasp near my chest, and slowly unrolled the fist to check the damage.

  I’d lied to Nanci. I hadn’t cut myself at all. The box had been full of silver jewelry. A necklace had come out of its box, and I had touched it without realizing what I was doing.

  Bright red blisters ran up to my fingers and into the center of my palm.

  I washed the hand in cold water, but I knew time was the only thing that would heal this—or possibly magic, and I didn’t have time or privacy to try to work any of the magical spells I knew. Such as they were. My cousins were always better with magic than I was. The only thing I could do with any certainty was a kind of earth-magic. I could read rocks, metal, soil. Move them around.

  Sometimes toss them at demons.

  That wouldn’t help here.

  I flexed my hand a couple of times, making sure I could still use it, and gritted my teeth. I’d have to keep working through the pain.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Nanci had left the room and Wolf was standing outside as if to guard me.

  “I’m okay,” I murmured to him. He tilted his head and stared at me suspiciously.

  “Really,” I insisted. “It’s just a small injury. I’ll be fine.”

  With his nose, he tapped my hand, which was closed in a light fist.

  “It was silver.” I opened my hand and showed him the injury.

  He sniffed it, then sneezed.

  “I told you. Silver. You can’t touch it, either.”

  With a clear shrug of one shoulder, Wolf turned and marched to his spot by the door.

  From the front of the store, I could hear Nanci chatting with a customer.

  Something about the customer’s voice from the other room set off my internal warning system. It ran up my spine like a lightning strike, lashing out to the same points that had sent me running toward Colorado in the first place.

  I didn’t even have to say anything. Wolf’s ears perked up and his nose lifted slightly as he used his head to gesture toward the other room questioningly. I nodded, and we moved toward the door.

  I couldn’t hear what the man in the other room was saying. His voice was a low murmur but hearing him made my stomach clench. It made my hands sweat.

  A curtain separated the stockroom from the front room. I reached one hand out, pulled it back slightly to peek out, and then jerked back quickly.

  Fuck.

  A vampire.

  I wanted to say as much to Wolf, but those bloodsuckers have seriously good hearing.

  Instead, I gestured for him to stay close and went about finishing the inventory. Using a clothes hanger, I fished the open silver necklace that had burned me earlier out of the box—but I kept my attention turned toward the showroom, hoping I could hear something useful.

  Wolf took up his station by the door but did not settle back into his comfortable resting position. I might not have been able to tell him it was a vampire, but I suspect he was able to smell it. At the very least, he knew I was feeling wary and, having picked up on that, was maintaining his own vigilant stance.

  As soon as I heard the bell over the door jingle, I grabbed my coat and dashed out into the showroom.

  “I’m going to step outside so Wolf can... do his business,” I said hurriedly. Wolf threw me a reproachful glare.

  “Sorry,” I said as the door shut behind us. “It was all I could think of.”

  Wolf shook his head, but I was already peering back and forth on the sidewalk to see if I could tell where the vamp had gone.

  He was about three stores down, strolling slowly—much more slowly than I knew they had the ability to move. He looked like any other citizen of the town, winter-pale and dressed in a dark coat and hat.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and made eye contact, first with me, and then with Wolf. His upper lip curled up on one side, flashing a fang—something else I knew he didn’t have to do unless he wanted to.

  The sucker was showing off, letting us know he’d been aware of our presence all along.

  Wolf growled deep in his throat, and I dropped my hand onto his back. “It’s not worth it,” I said. “We’ll take care of him later.”

  We watched as the vampire strolled up into the canyon at the end of the street, and then out of sight. If nothing else, he was laying a perfect trail for us to follow.

  “Do you have his scent?”

  Wolf nodded once, the affirmation clear in the motion.

  “Then we’ll follow him as soon as we’re done here.”

  4.

  As anxious as it made me to know the handsome, bloodsucking son-of-a-bitch vampire was prowling the streets, I went back inside the store to see what I could find out from Nanci.

  How long had a vampire been hunting here?

  This was a small town, and there weren’t many people to victimize.

  Surely someone would have noticed an excess of murder victims. Or even disappearances.

  “Oh, no, Creede is a safe little place,” Nanci assured me when I steered the conversation that direction. “I mean, sometimes people get drunk and rowdy, and it’s not like we never have any crime. But not much overall, and small stuff.”

  “So nothing like huge robberies or murders or anything? I know I’m only here for a few more days, but even with a big dog like Wolf, I sometimes worry. You know, a woman traveling on her own.”

  It hurt my soul to say that. I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself against any kind of threat, human or otherwise. But I had learned early on that pretended helplessness got as many—or sometimes more—answers as real toughness.

  “Oh, I completely understand. No, not much in the way of theft or murder. I guess it’s about average for a town the size of Creede. Once in a while someone goes a little crazy. But it’s usually typical domestic stuff. I’m sure you’ll be absolutely fine. Perfectly safe.”

  I nodded and changed the subject to something less morbid, pretending my mind had been eased by her assurances. It hadn’t. In fact, her claims that Creede was safe only made me more nervous. What the hell was a vampire doing in a place where his hunting would stand out so obviously?

  I gritted my teeth against asking more questions and went back to counting T-shirts.

  We had been quiet for several minutes when Nanci suddenly spoke up. “What we do get a lot of around here are people wandering off into the mountains and not coming back. They get hurt or lost and sometimes it’s years before anyone figures out what happened to them.”

  Disappearances. Of course.

  I had been hunting in the cities too long, hadn’t spent enough time tracking monsters through inhospitable landscapes. It made sense. In cities, bodies were hard to hide. Up in the mountains, though? A vampire could drain a body and hide it knowing it was unlikely to be found for a long, long time.

  Especially if he preyed on the more mobile population of the tourist town—people who came in for a season and left, anyway.

  People like the one I was pretending to be.

  Maybe—if I was lucky—I had caught his predatory
eye.

  5.

  “You know,” I said thoughtfully to Wolf as I waited for the van’s engine to warm up enough for us to drive away after work. “Normally, I would let the vampire track me. He was in the store today, he saw us, he might actually even believe we’re who we say we are—a drifter and her dog.”

  Wolf snorted and shook his head.

  “You don’t think so?” I rubbed my hands together and blew on them to warm them up. “So you’re guessing he knows I’m a hunter and you’re a... whatever you are?”

  He rolled his eyes and turned to look out the window, his breath fogging up the glass.

  “Well, then, that settles it. We absolutely have to hunt him. You got his scent, and it looked like he was hiking up the road into the canyon. Want to go see what we can find?”

  He turned back to face the front and settled more firmly into the passenger seat, which I took as a sign that he was willing to come with me.

  Good thing, since I couldn’t easily track the vamp on my own.

  Some things about my life had gotten much easier since Wolf had joined me.

  I drove up the street, all the way to the end of town, where the road wound through the canyon, steep rocky cliffs rising on either side. When we reached the last place we’d seen the vamp, I pulled over to the shoulder and we got out for Wolf to pick up the scent again.

  From the back of the van, I pulled out the drawer that held most of my vampire hunting gear, carefully stowed away. Somewhere along the way, I had acquired a giant wooden cross. It didn’t always work—for some reason, the vampires only sometimes seemed afraid of religious symbols, and I wondered how much of that had to do with what they saw in the movies. In any case, I set it aside, going instead for the stakes and a huge knife—almost a sword, really.

  The stakes were made of apple wood—it seemed to work best at cutting through whatever it was that protected vampires from dying when they were hit with other killing implements.

  The blade was wickedly sharp. It had once belonged to my cousin Grace. After her death, Daddy had given it to me. He might not have been able to bring himself to hunt any longer, might not have been capable of putting down the bottle long enough to pick up a stake of his own, but he still took care of my cousins and me in his own way. He had a whole room of his trailer devoted to stuff my cousins and I wanted to keep but didn’t want on the road with us for one reason or another. I didn’t know why Gracie had left this knife behind, but I was glad to have it now. It was perfect for lopping off vampire heads. At least, I assumed it would be. I hadn’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I slid the knife through a loop on my belt, tucked two stakes into my boots, and carried two more in my hands.