Chapter 12
Weak winter sun was in the windshield, too weak to penetrate the hull of the extended-cab pickup. Dodge trucks are RAM tough. Or is it Fords? Didn't matter; it was powerful and roomy and had a tank full of gas. Jeep vaguely recalled taking the truck by the light of the moon: approaching it on all fours as it sat unguarded in a parking lot and then discovering life inside; encircling it on lowered bellies and silent padded feet; Toni whimpering piteously until its occupants opened the doors to look for the poor lost puppy.
He had kept one of the bodies intact, dragging it by the throat a short distance away to pull clumsily at the clothing. Barry joined him and bore his weight on one end of the corpse while Jeep pawed and tugged with his teeth. The work yielded him a tattered but serviceable pair of pants and a shirt. Then that body was eaten, too.
Where the rest of their clothing had come from was entirely forgotten: a Goodwill donation box, a clothesline, a laundromat. Not from home though, goddammit. That spooky little bitch Elsie had almost run them down in their own driveway, and an assload of cops had shown up not long afterward, too many to try to take out and so they'd had to turn tail and run back into the desert.
Rita beside him by turns cursed and wept. In the back seat the others dozed. Jeep fished a Jack Daniels bottle from the floor and rolled the window down halfway, shivering as icy air swept into the cab. "Hey, Shug, watch." Holding the bottle by its neck, he extended his arm as far out of the window as he could reach. Then with deadly accuracy he arced his arm skyward and lobbed the bottle up and over the top of the truck and watched it explode with a satisfying smash against a county line sign.
Rita wiped her eyes and giggled a little. Her face was bleeding mascara and lipstick, and she rubbed the black and pink hemorrhage on her pants and sucked in a deep draught of the outside air.
"He's out this way," she smiled dreamily. "My Bobby."
Jeep nodded and laid his free arm across her shoulders. The boy's scent filtered in, thin and weak like the winter sun. Elsie D's scent came and went, too. Little cunt. Ungrateful fucking little cunt. Jeep stretched three fingers out across the steering wheel and watched his nails elongate into wicked points. They didn't have much of a plan, not yet, but one would come. And they had in their favor a wondrous thing, a thing Jeep saw on his hands and felt in his mouth. A thing that they all had known for a while but only now could put into words:
The line between the Man Time and the Dog Time was growing thinner.
There's magic in a Black Cat. Not an actual cat, but the little black firecrackers with grey lettering. One by itself was a miniature stick of dynamite; a string of them, woven together by their fuses in an intricate braid like hot Mexican peppers, was Hephaestus unleashed. Tear away their crackling paper cover and leopard head label and heft them in your hand - how many will fire? How long will the explosions last? Will you risk going deaf and take your fingers out of your ears?
Jordy lit a cone with his sparkler and leaped away as a fountain of multi-colored starbursts spewed from its top. It was New Year's Eve, and as long as no airborn missiles like Roman candles or bottle rockets were set off, Ashcraft police would turn a tolerant blind eye to fireworks. Thu Khiem The Slayer had given a sackful to the little boy, while her parents and his settled into a quiet, heartfelt discussion on the trials and tribulations of raising supernatural children.
They were still at it when Jordy went inside to go to the bathroom. He saw them, sitting by the fireplace in Mr. Wight's living room, looking sad and serious even with presents piled up under the tree at their feet. When he was done he went back out quickly, not wanting to hear what they said.
Thu Khiem had temporarily abandoned the fireworks to visit with the neighbors' teenage son and daughter at the edge of the yard. Oz, Fred, Spike, and Elsie D perched on the steps and broad railing of the porch, within champagne bottle-passing distance of each other, sipping directly from the shared container. Jordy sat down beside them with a melancholy face. Spike smiled at him playfully and waved the bottle. "Want to toast the new year, Sapling? Guaranteed to put hair on your chest."
"The last drink out of a bottle is ninety-nine percent spit," Jordy deadpanned.
Oz nodded somberly. "It's a proven playground statistic."
"Uh." Spike thought it over for a moment, peered down the bottle's neck with one squinting eye, then shrugged and took a swig. "Oh, well, what doesn't kill you makes you strong."
Fred pulled her knees up against her chest and rested her arms across them and studied Jordy closely. He sat for a while in silence. Then, not looking anyone in the face, he turned his head in Fred's and Elsie D's direction and said in a small, confessional voice, "Sometimes I turn into a monster."
No one said anything. Finally Elsie D replied, "My teeth come out."
She reached into her mouth and gently removed a partial plate. Jordy stared as her upper lip collapsed inward like a withering jack o' lantern's and she held the denture out for him to see. Between her thumb and forefinger, four disembodied front teeth glistened in the rotating colors of the Christmas tree window, green and yellow and blue and red.
Jordy's eyes were enormous. "You've got a grandma mouth!" he breathed. He touched the false teeth with a tentative finger. "Where'd you get these?"
"At the dentist." Elsie D's speech had taken on a noticeable lisp.
"What happened to your real ones?"
"They got knocked out in a car wreck."
Jordy was now doubly impressed. He watched in lurid fascination as Elsie put her bridgework back in place and the pink, pretty upper lip plumped out once more. Just like that, like magic, she was young again. From the yard, Thu shook the fireworks bag and called out, "Jordan! Whizzers!" Jordy hopped to his feet and galloped over to her, his melancholia forgotten.
Oz looked at Elsie D appreciatively. "Thanks. That was nice of you." She smiled back, a quick, cautious smile. There was a squeal of laughter and protest as Spike hoisted Fred up onto the porch rail with him and began to tickle her.
"What does the 'D' stand for?" Oz asked. "'D-e-e' as in 'Tweedle'?"
"Dean. My mama had a thing for James Dean." In her soft twanging accent the word came out thang. "She had posters of him all over her bedroom."
"Is it your last name or your middle name?"
"Both, I guess." Elsie D hugged her knees against herself as Fred had done before. "One of her boyfriends used to call me 'Wristwatch'...you know, L-C-D? Liquid Crystal Display?"
The tickle fight was escalating to dangerous levels. Spike was stretched out on his back along the railing, letting Fred have the upper hand, shouting laughter as her fingertips tried to attack his armpits. There was a final, brief struggle, then a sudden crash of branches and a thud as they both lost their balance and fell off the rail and into the hedge.
"Do you usually go by 'Daniel' or by 'Oz'?"
"'Oz' is fine." The empty champagne bottle rolled haphazardly across the porch floor. Oz reached out to it and set it upright between his feet. "Bottles can make excellent woodwind instruments; ever notice that?" He picked up the vessel and blew across its top, producing a low, hollow tone. Elsie plucked a piece of dead grass from a concrete planter on the steps, pinned it between her thumbs, cupped her hands together, and blew into them. The grass blade vibrated as neatly as a harmonica reed and made a loud goosehonk. She flexed her thumbs in and out, changing the pitch a dozen different ways, drawing the notes out in one long blast and then puffing her breath to create a Donald Duck chortle. Little giggles and soft rustling sounds came out of the hedge.
Oz momentarily stopped playing Bass Champagne Bottle and smiled peacefully at pretty Elsie. "Happy New Year."
On January 1st, while the Osbourne household opened its gifts, the former members of Angel Investigations and their new associates belabored over the werewolf dilemma. Their laboring was done in Dilip Singh's parlor, in the manager's apartment of the Happy Trails Tourist Court at the edge of town. An array of weapons and pages of spells and encyclopedism lay spread out on the tables (the striking contrast between Giles' and Wesley's mysterious antique parchment books and Dilip's Big Chief Tablets did not escape them.) Thu wielded a recently silver-plated sword thoughtfully - it was a good weapon, but she wouldn't be able to easily draw it from a sheath, as it was taller than she was. The length had its advantages, though; it meant more distance between oneself and a werewolf's dooming bite.
"I don't know, man," Gunn worried. "I'm still thinkin' it ought to be solid silver. I mean, we're on a hellmouth. That might make these puppies stronger, more resistant, know what I'm sayin'?"
"Silver is silver. The amount doesn't matter. All it ever takes is one tiny piece piercing a vital organ." Dilip stubbornly held his ground.
"We can make a few solid ones," Fred conceded, "But we should try the alloys first. We just don't have enough for a lot of pure silver bullets. As long as there's at least a trace of silver in the mix, it should work..and we've got the tranq guns, too."
Paloma sensed the humans' unease. By all accounts these loup-garou were no good, either as wolves or as people, but until her companions had seen proof of that with their own eyes there would be hesitation in their step. From the vampire, maybe not so much, but the others...when you tranquilize a wolfman and pen him up, what do you do with him if he comes to himself and is unrepentant? Where the hell would you jail such a creature? And could you bring yourself to shoot him as he stood defenseless in his jail cell?
Best to leave that job to me, mis amigos. I got no problem mercy-killing a killer. She settled deeper into her chair and wondered who among the chupacabra she could bribe into joining them.
"He looks wolfy," Thu commented. At the blank expressions, she clarified. "Oz. He's got a wolfy face. Kind of long, and his jaw's kind of jutting. And he doesn't shave very close. I wonder if he ever drinks out of the toilet?"
"Oh, my god, that's disgusting!" Paloma yelled. "Of course not!"
"...Does he ever scratch his butt by dragging it around on the carpet?"
"Do you?"
Under his breath Gunn grinned and muttered to Spike, "Can he lick his own balls?"
The telephone jangled, startling Singh's cat off of the kitchen counter. It glared at the phone balefully as its master answered, scribbled some notes onto a pad, and announced to the room, "Michael picked up another vision. The pack is in Phoenix."