The Pardoner's Tale Read online

  "Oh, my God. I was kidding! You are, aren't you?"

  "Didn't I just say...?" I turned around to face him.

  "Virgin! A real, live virgin over thirty! Can I touch you? Not in a dirty way, of course. Don't want to tarnish your halo." We were circling each other, waiting for an opening.

  I made the first move. My fist met his jaw. His head snapped back. When Alex looked at me again, there was something dark in his eyes. There was also something that looked pleased. He punched me and gave me a bloody nose. He laughed.

  I hit him again, in the chest this time, and shoved him. He shoved back, forcing me against the wall. His pupils were blown to the point where there was almost no color left. "You can't take me," he hissed, "but I can take you any time I want to."

  To prove his point, he thrust against me. I could feel his cock, hard and tight against mine. Then his mouth was hard against mine in an indelicate kiss. His tongue rasped against my lips, trying to get them apart.

  I spat in his mouth. "Fuck you," I said when he backed up to wipe his face.

  "In your dreams, virgin."

  "In yours." I reached down and grabbed him, squeezing hard through his jeans. "This is what you've wanted since the day we met, isn't it?"

  "God, you're bad at this," he said. He moved before I had time to react or even be offended. Zipper down, cock out, his hand over mine, guiding me. He touched his lips to mine again, speaking softly, his low voice vibrating through me. "That's a little better. Slow, like that. Now put this finger here and your thumb..." he paused and drew a shallow, shaky breath, "right there. Fuck, yes."

  His tongue nudged again. This time I met it and probed his mouth instead. Until I felt the sharpness of his teeth and tasted copper and tin, at least. Alex laughed through his nose and murmured dark words without breaking the kiss. "You want this so much, Nick. You're fucking hard as a rock."

  His hands were down my pants, squeezing and stroking in the confined space, and for a moment, I was helpless. "Come on, Nicky. I know what you are. You can't be afraid to fuck me because of the wolf."

  His jeans were down past his knees so when I pushed him off me he flailed helplessly for a second before ending up on his back, on the floor.

  "Do not ever say that again." I tried not to stare at Alex's erection. It was difficult to look anywhere else, especially while he was stroking it.

  "Which part? Fuck? Me? Fuck me, Nick?"

  I tackled him. I sat on his legs and grabbed his jaw, forcing him to hold his head still. I slapped him. I could have killed him. I wanted to. But I didn't want to. I just wanted to hurt him. A lot.

  My fingers closed around his throat. I slapped him again. He bucked under me and grabbed not for my arms, but for my thighs. He thrust up harder. He didn't waste time; he unbuttoned, unzipped, and wrapped his fist around both our dicks. He pumped hard, fast, the pressure building quickly. Grinding against me put even more pressure and friction on my balls. One of us let out a low howling sound. It might have been me.

  "Just. Come. You. Fucking. Jerk." Alex punctuated with a hard, twisting pull. I couldn't even take a deep enough breath to tell him I was trying.

  Alex came first. The warm, wet fluid coated his hand, my cock, and triggered my own orgasm. It was embarrassingly short, painful, and probably not impressive by anyone's standards.

  We stared at each other, both of us sweaty and panting. Alex was somewhere between pleased and sated. I probably just looked confused, angry, and sore. He reached up and patted my cheek. "Not bad for a first time."

  I glared. "Go get cleaned up. I need a drink."

  ***

  We were sitting in the bar, at a table near the men's room talking about our options when the hair on the back of my neck started to rise. Alex gave me an odd look. Whatever I was feeling, he was feeling, too.

  "Well good evening, Mister Finch and Mister Pardoner," a man said in a voice too jovial to be real. We both looked up at the person standing beside our table. He looked familiar, but I was having trouble putting a name to the face.

  "Good evening, Officer..." Alex started, then blanked. He remembered more than I did. "Doodlebug," he said.

  Okay. He didn't remember that much.

  The cop almost blushed and tried to scowl. "Doderberg."

  "I was close!" Alex smiled brightly and slid across the bench so he was closer to the wall. "Have a seat, officer."

  "John," he said. "I'm off-duty, so you can just call me John."

  John Doderberg sat down next to Alex. I kicked Alex. Alex jumped. Doderberg looked back and forth. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

  "No," said Alex.

  I kicked him again. "Yes," I said.

  Alex kicked me back. "No, really. You're not."

  Alex was smitten. I wished I was telepathic so I could point out that this was not the time to be hitting on anyone, let alone a cop that might think we murdered someone. Especially when I had just murdered someone. Two someones. But I'm not telepathic, so I kicked him again. Hard. He ignored me.

  We fell into an awkward silence. I stared at my beer. Doderberg stared at my hands. Alex stared at Doderberg. The waitress came by and took Doderberg's order. She came back with his drink and refills for me and Alex. None of us had spoken yet.

  "So," they both said at the same time. Alex grinned and made a small "after you" gesture. Doderberg coughed and started again.

  "So, uh, last... last night." He couldn't look at either of us. Alex went white and looked like he was trying to figure out if he could go over the back of the booth. I put my palms flat on the table, ready to push myself up and run if it seemed necessary.

  "Last night," he said again, and then glanced up. The panic had to be obvious. His eyes widened and he stammered. "I'm off-duty! I swear I am! This isn't a sting or anything. I'm here unofficially, as a civilian, because there's no way in hell I can tell anyone at work about this."

  "You saw what happened?" It looked like Alex's crush was coming to a screeching halt.

  "I did." He drank almost half of his beer in one long swallow. "I was coming by your place to talk to you about... about the other day when I told you about your friend. There was something you did," he nodded to Alex, "that made me wonder if you were... different."

  Doderberg looked directly at Alex. "When he left the room, there was a change, like you were trying to push something at me. I knew you wanted me to leave, but there was something more than that. When I left, I kind of had a feeling like I was forgetting something. By the time I got back to the station I had forgotten why I'd gone there. But I keep notes. I've got to because it's part of my job. And I saw on my calendar that I was going there and I remembered that what I forgot was that I'd just gone to see you."

  I spoke slowly. "Everyone has forgetful moments, John. Nothing to worry about."

  He glared at me. "There's forgetting, and there's having your memory fucked with. That's how I knew what he was. I thought maybe you both were. I thought you might have had more to do with your friend's murder than you wanted to admit. I didn't have proof, though. And it didn't make sense. Vampires just don't do that to people, you know?"

  Doderberg's volume was creeping up. Alex put a hand on his shoulder and I pushed his beer closer to him. "Keep it down, please?"

  "Oh, don't worry. We get vampires in and out of the city all the time. Most people don't believe it, sure, but..." he shrugged. It was close to what Buck had told us.

  "So you were coming by last night to... what? Stake us? Ask us to turn you into a bloodsucking creature of the night?"

  "Can I do that?" Alex sounded surprised. "Ow! Knock it off, you bastard. I'm going to bruise."

  John looked at us strangely and shook his head slightly. "I was going to ask you what really happened to your friend. I knew if you weren't behind it, you had an idea of what did it. On my way there I heard the commotion and thought I'd better check it out. See if I needed to call it in. I saw him hit the ground and you change. I saw him get up when he should have bee
n dead. Then I got the hell out of there before I was next."

  "Are you going to turn us in?"

  "How? 'Hey, this vampire and this shape-shifter killed those two vics that weren't there' isn't going to go over well.

  "After I saw you guys leave, I called it in anonymously and left before the responding officers showed up. Word today is some kid called in a phony report. There were no bodies in the alley. Plenty of blood. Big chunks out of the buildings and some dog hair, but no bodies."

  "Wolf," I muttered.

  "Huh?"

  "Wolf. Nicky's a werewolf."

  "You really are, aren't you?" Doderberg nodded. "I really saw what I saw."

  "Yep," I exhaled slowly and wished the bar wasn't non-smoking. "And a demon killed Buck."

  Chapter Six

  We took Doderberg back to our place, sat him down with a bottle of wine, and told him the story of Alex's creation, and our teaming up, and why we were in Baltimore, and what really happened to Buck. He was on his second bottle of wine by the time we were finished, and Alex and I had made it through almost three bottles of gin.

  "So, what you're telling me," he slurred, "is that you're a werewolf, he's a vampire, you're being stalked by the demon mafia, and I'm either very drunk because this makes sense, or not drunk enough because I'm scared out of my fucking mind."

  Alex hiccupped and leaned over until his head was on the arm of the sofa. "Yes," he said as he closed his eyes. "No one can ever be drunk enough."

  "That's not what he meant," I said. It sounded like my voice was coming from somewhere else. Did I always mumble like that or just when I was drunk? "He meant he's not drunk enough because you're a werepire and I'm a cop and he's a wolf."

  "No, he's a cop, and you're a wolf. A very sexy wolf, might I say." Alex leaned over the other way and put his head in my lap. "And we're all fucking scared."

  "And we're all fucking drunk," Doderberg said.

  "Three cheers for Doodlebug. The most observant cop!" Alex sloshed booze on my knee when he tried to get the bottle to his mouth. "Pardon me," he said, and moved to suck the gin from my jeans. I pushed him to the floor.

  "Guys," I said. "Guys," I repeated, not sure if I'd actually said it out loud the first time. "Ducking frunk or not, we've got to find an ironwood box."

  "What do you mean 'we'?" Doderberg said. He blinked slowly and pointed vaguely at himself. "I'm not in this."

  Alex grabbed Doderberg's shoe. "You know too much. You're in, or we have to kill you. I'm not kidding. Tell him I'm not kidding, Nicky. I'm not kidding."

  "He's kidding." I fished my own bottle out of its nest between sofa cushions and eyed it. There was just enough left to send me to sleep. "My friend here will just fuck with your memory again." I finished off the bottle and let the world fade to black.

  ***

  There are only a few really effective ways to prevent waking up with a hangover. One is to not get so drunk that you get hung over. Clearly, this wasn't something that existed in my world. Sleeping until it was gone was also not an option in my world.

  Not if I was living with a vampire that never got hung over no matter how much he drank, anyhow. He woke me at the crack of three p.m. by sitting on my legs until my feet went numb.

  "How are you?" he asked. He was shower-fresh and smelled like coffee and bacon. Something deep in my stomach did a barrel roll and tried to climb up my throat. I didn't answer him.

  "Doodlebug's not doing much better," he said and looked over at the door. Doderberg, pale and sweaty, stood with his arms crossed over his stomach, looking less like a cop and more like something we should be putting into an iron pellet. That almost sobered me up. Almost.

  Doderberg collapsed onto Alex's bed and looked over at me. "I almost wish you would kill me."

  "You didn't..." I gestured at Alex.

  "I thought about it. We might need him. Three heads are better than one."

  "Two."

  "Yours is pretty much useless right now. I made coffee, if either of you think it'll help."

  Doderberg and I both groaned. Good to know we were on the same page.

  "I went through the trouble of making it. You're drinking it." Alex left, presumably to get the threatened coffee.

  "He didn't make it. He went down the street to the coffee place," Doderberg mumbled. He looked like he was trying to suffocate himself with a pillow. "Until about twenty minutes ago, Alex wasn't so bright and perky."

  "Jesus. What's his secret?"

  Doderberg held out one arm. There was a bruise in the bend of his elbow.

  For me, there is one cure for a hangover that never fails: righteous indignation. The idea that Alex fed from this cop ñ this stranger ñ pissed me off and burned away the headache in a matter of minutes. I rolled out of bed, grabbed what were more-or-less clean clothes, and stalked off to the bathroom, pausing long enough to shout at Alex who was standing in the kitchen with paper cups of coffee.

  "Go fix up your friend. We've got work to do."

  ***

  The three of us assembled in the living room again, this time with coffee, the computer, and the phone book. We started contacting every antique store and consignment shop we could find in the state of Maryland. Doderberg used his cell phone, Alex used our phone, and I used the computer.

  "What if it's not in Maryland?" Doderberg asked.

  "What if it was in Albert's shop after all?" Alex added.

  I glared at them and kept typing. I wasn't certain, but I had a feeling that any box made of ironwood would do, as long as we had a way of making sure it was sealed shut. Maybe the key was a key in the sense that it stood for something.

  If I were a praying man, I'd have prayed that my hunch was right. The tickle at the base of my spine meant we didn't have a lot of time.

  We stopped speaking to each other and focused on our task. Alex muttered that we should have started earlier in the day. I reminded him that he was the one who let me sleep until three. Doderberg reminded me that Alex had slept nearly that late. Alex tossed a pen at Doderberg and called him a traitor. I tried not to think too much about what might have gone on while I was unconscious, and tried not to think too much about why I cared if they got a little "personal".

  "You're kidding!" Alex exclaimed and waved to get my attention. I turned from the screen and raised an eyebrow. He was grinning like a maniac and scribbling something on his notepad. "In stock? H-how much did you say? Four hundred?"

  I crouched down next to Alex "Ask if they'll take a personal check."

  "Will you take a pers- Oh, you heard him. She says yes, that'll be fine." He listened a little longer. "Yes, tomorrow morning at ten. Absolutely! We'll see you then. Okay. G'bye."

  I tackled him after he'd hung up. "Tomorrow at ten?"

  Alex, not the least bit concerned he was pinned under me, gave me his familiar, sunny smile. "They'll be closed in about fifteen minutes. We'll never make it in time."

  "We might not make it through the night! Where are they?"

  "Ellicott City?" Alex tipped his head back and looked at Doderberg. "You know where that is?"

  "Yeah, we'd never get there before they closed."

  "Can you get us there in the morning?"

  Doderberg sighed and flipped open his phone. "I'll call the station and tell them I'm still down with the stomach thing."

  Alex burst out laughing. "Nicky, it's fate. The box? Has a wolf on it." I stared at him for a second, and then, impulsively, I kissed him.

  That night, Doderberg slept in Alex's bed and Alex slept in mine, wedged between me and the wall. I didn't sleep much. The tickle at the base of my spine had grown to an itch that was working its way up to the back of my neck.

  Xyj'Ru was coming for us. Albert, Linda, and Buck were dead. John Doderberg was now part of this and I didn't know if he had any idea that he was likely to die.

  We were all likely to die. A demon as old and as powerful as Xyj'Ru wasn't going to go down easy. I didn't think any of us had the knowledge or
the skill to handle this. None of us had the experience.

  Chapter Seven

  We were on the road by nine the next morning. I drove while Doderberg rode shotgun, giving me directions. Alex lounged in the back seat, playing some hand-held video game he'd picked up somewhere. It was comforting to know he was on alert and ready for action.

  It took us almost no time at all to get to Ellicott City. The shop was in the historic district, though, and finding it and finding a place to park was trickier. It was just about ten when we found the store.

  The clerk, a woman with long, white hair parted in the middle and hanging loose down her back, smiled when we came in. "You're here about the box, aren't you?" I guess we just looked like the sort of people who'd show up at a Southwest gift shop at ten in the morning to buy an ironwood box.