The Pardoner's Tale Read online

  "I did, actually. On one of my trips for Albert, out in New Mexico. They were already a family, though. They had their alphas and their pack order and I wasn't willing to start at the bottom and fight my way up. You can't have two alpha males in a pack and the others were very willing to protect their leader's position. It would have been seven against one and I didn't like the odds." I omitted the part about hating being a shifter at all. I skipped telling him that I couldn't stand myself, so why would I want to be around others like me? Judging by the sly smile he was giving me I had a hunch he already knew it.

  "So you haven't killed me because you were lonely."

  "Shut up, Alex."

  Our next destination was yet another truck stop not far outside of the downtown Baltimore area. The air was heavy with humidity and smelled of ozone and diesel exhaust. The skyline of downtown Baltimore wavered in the distance. I could almost smell the water. It smelled dirty and fishy. I wondered how far it was. The overpowering smell, the one that cut through all the others, was the greasy French fry scent from the fast food place down the hill from where we stood.

  Alex yawned, slung one arm around my neck, and planted a kiss on my cheek. "I'm hungry."

  "What, again?" Alex was a bottomless pit. I didn't know if the fact that he wasn't regularly feeding on blood meant he was always hungry for something or if he'd been that way before he was turned. He was living in a sort of prolonged adolescence in just about every other way.

  "I'm always hungry!" he called back to me as he started in the direction of the restaurant. "Are you coming or not? You'd better be, because you've got the cash."

  I pulled out my wallet and counted the bills, then looked around the parking lot. I wondered if there was time to get the money from the Western Union pickup. Alex was already at the door to the restaurant. The money would have to wait.

  I caught up with Alex inside, at the counter. He'd already placed the order and was just waiting patiently for me to show up with the cash. He grinned sunnily. I thought about punching him.

  I paid. We ate and watched the cars going by on the interstate. I used a fry to draw in the ketchup on his burger wrapper and thought about what we'd do next. Get the cash. Get a room. Take a shower. Sleep in a real bed.

  Wolf or not, I'm a civilized guy and I like having a shower that works, a toilet that flushes, and my own coffee maker. And my own room. I don't really enjoy the thought of sleeping with a vampire who keeps kicking me in the shins because he's having a nightmare. I was not made for that sort of lifestyle.

  It turned out that we were at a combination bus station, truck stop, and hotel. The Western Union was in the bus station. The brochures in the hotel lobby told us how to get to the zoo, the aquarium, the best places to eat, and told us we were very near a train station. There was, the hotel's brochure boasted, also a shuttle to get to the hospital quickly.

  Some or all of this information might turn out to be useful. I folded up the stack of fliers and put it in my jeans pocket.

  While I was browsing, Alex was busy chatting up the desk clerk. He sauntered over looking pleased with himself and handed me a hotel key card. "One king-size bed, twenty-five inch television, smoking room, coffee maker, hairdryer for drying your shaggy ass, and a complimentary buffet breakfast."

  "How did you... I didn't give you any money. You didn't... 'you know'," I waggled my fingers, "the girl, did you?"

  "I didn't 'you know' her." He waggled his fingers back at me. "I will need you to be out of the room tonight, for about two hours."

  "So you didn't..." I waggled my fingers again. "But you will..." I made an entirely different gesture.

  Alex nodded and tapped the side of his nose. I squeezed the bridge of mine and tried to think happy thoughts.

  Several hours later, I was sitting in a very dark corner in a very dark bar drinking a very warm beer. It was my third and I'd been nursing it not out of any attempt to remain sober but because I couldn't afford to drink as much as I wanted.

  The vinyl seat crackled every time I moved, the floor was sticky, and the jukebox seemed to contain only Lynyrd Skynyrd and Def Leppard. A skinny man with lank hair in a thin ponytail played pinball. I took a long drink of the warm, flat beer and sighed. My happy place was drifting away again. I signaled the waitress and ordered a double shot of Scotch.

  When I got back to the hotel I knocked quietly, then unlocked the door. I hoped Alex would have had enough sense to put the chain on the door if he were still busy with his "date."

  The door clicked and swung open easily and I stepped in with my eyes half-closed, using the mirror on the closet door to scope as much of the room as possible.

  Alex was curled up asleep in the middle of the bed. He was dressed, save for his shoes and his left sock. His hair looked damp, and when I stepped into the bathroom I confirmed that he had showered recently. The mirror was still foggy.

  I peed and then wiped a clear spot above the sink with the palm of my hand. "You look like hell, Nicky."

  "Don't call him Nicky. He hates that." Alex slurred from the bed. The springs creaked as he rolled off the mattress and padded over to stand behind me. "Whoa. You look like hell, Nicky. Who were you talking to?"

  "No one. Just myself. Alex. What are you doing?"

  What he was doing was nuzzling the side of my neck, just below my ear. I couldn't tell if the prickling along the base of my skull was vampire influence or his breath. Either way, it had to stop.

  I gripped his shoulders and pushed him away from me, leaning him against the bathroom wall. "Alex. What are you doing?"

  He opened one eye and sighed. "Nothing. Good night, Nick." He shuffled back to bed and curled up around one of the pillows, his back to the door.

  I made sure the do not disturb card was on the handle, then locked it and put the chain on. I kicked off my shoes and crawled into bed, my back to Alex's.

  When I woke up, I found him sitting in the chair by the window, a cup of coffee on the arm and muffin crumbs on his shirt. He was clutching a doughnut in one hand and a banana in the other. "Balanced diet," he said and took a bite from each one and chewed them together. Once the doughnut was gone he picked up the coffee. It looked like Alex had collected the entire complementary breakfast buffet and deposited it in our room.

  "Potassium. That's your problem. Not enough of it. Have some banana!" When he spoke he gestured at me with the banana. I curled up into a ball and put a pillow over my head. This didn't stop him. He climbed onto the bed and knelt next to me, tapping my shoulder with the side of his fist. "Ba-na-na. Ba-na-na. Ba-na-na." He chanted.

  "Alex," I grumbled into the pillow.

  "Ba-na-na!"

  "Alex!" I shouted into the pillow.

  "Ba-na-na!"

  "ALEX!"

  "What!"

  I grabbed the pillow and smacked him with it, breaking his precious banana in half. "You are a vampire!"

  "Yes!"

  "You're supposed to be nocturnal. Do you know what that means?"

  "I ... do stuff at night?"

  "Precisely. Therefore, you should not be a morning person." He blinked stupidly at me. "I am not a morning person, Alex. I am not a morning person on my good days. I am even less of a morning person when I've been getting drunk in a bar until closing time because you needed to get laid!"

  "Well, I didn't need to get laid." He picked up the broken banana and finished eating it.

  "You are not helping your situation."

  "Okay. Okay. I get it. I'm sorry. I was rude, inconsiderate, and I should be punished." He slid off the bed and turned around, sticking his butt out at me. "Right there. Come on. Just belt me a good one."

  I grabbed the pillow again and smacked him. Then I laughed. It felt like it had been months since I'd laughed, even though it had probably only been a day or two. My life had turned into something completely and utterly absurd, so what else could I do? It was either laugh or cry, and crying wouldn't get anything done. I smacked him again and again. Eventually h
e grabbed the other pillow and started hitting back. We didn't stop until we were exhausted and breathless.

  Chapter Four

  Fell's Point is a historic district that is almost entirely kitschy shops, bars, and tourists. I'd already spent several hours drinking in one of the more out-of-the-way bars in the area, putting out feelers for news and information. I listened intently to conversations. I watched the people and scanned the faces of everyone that glanced in my direction. I studied the people who made a point of not looking at me.

  Alex went to Fell's Point with me on our second night in Baltimore. We stood on the end of a pier, looking out at a giant neon sign. I was breathing shallowly. Alcohol, vomit, food, perfume, sweat, piss and shit, both human and animal. Fumes from the cars and the boats. The garbage-and-fish smell of the water. Everything I'd smelled back at the hotel. Everything I'd smelled the night before. Everything I hated about humanity. Alex embraced it all. In this case, he literally embraced it. He stood on the wooden rail that edged the pier and spread his arms to let the night wind blow his hair and jacket. He closed his eyes and sighed contentedly.

  "Why here?" he asked. "Baltimore, I mean."

  "Call it a hunch."

  He hopped down and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "Have you ever been here before?" He cocked his head to one side and patted himself down for cigarettes. I handed him the pack I was carrying; Alex lit two and handed me one.

  "Yeah, once. A long time ago. Just a few days on a pickup." There was just something about this place. I'd been here on retrieval and felt it then, before I really understood what it was I was feeling.

  Older cities and anywhere with a violent history usually have a high number of what I learned to call "hot spots." Hubs of supernatural activity. Places where things like ley lines cross or there's a thin space between the real world and the spirit world. Places that are very, very old or have a violent and bloody past. Take a place like Baltimore that combines crossed lines, age, and violence and it's prime location for a hot spot. Fell's Point even boasted about it, offering (for a price) a "ghost walk" that would take you around the area and show you the ghosts' favorite haunts. Pun intended.

  Anyhow, hot spots are usually a big draw for people like us. Well, I couldn't speak for Alex. I didn't know how much territory a vampire needed and if "overcrowding" was a problem among his kind. I wasn't even sure if there were any other vampires in the area.

  My fingers itched to touch a keyboard and find out if the Dayton police were looking for me. Find out if there were any "things" like us around. I wondered how serious Xyj'Ru was about finding us.

  Alex paced back and forth. His head was down and there was a look of concentration on his face that I had rarely (possibly never) seen before. I inhaled through my nose and mouth and couldn't pick up anything, but I had no idea if his senses were sharper than mine, or if he was tuned into something I couldn't detect at all. I still had three of the iron balls in the pocket of my jacket. If I needed them, I knew I could use them. What was he tracking?

  "Kimmy loves Bobby forever. Twelve, twelve, oh-two. Aww. Ooh, wait. Kimmy loves Marc-with-a-C. Also forever. Four, twenty-five, oh-five. I wonder if that's the same Kimmy?" Alex looked up at me, the glowing end of his cigarette bobbing as he spoke.

  "Reading the bricks," he said in answer to my unspoken question. Mystery solved. My highly supernatural and oh-so-special friend was only reading the dedications molded into the pavement. I would have sighed if I hadn't been so unsurprised.

  "Alexander, are you aware of anything?"

  "In general, or were you asking about something specific?"

  This did make me sigh. "Sometimes I wonder. I meant can you tell if there's anything like us around."

  Alex cocked his head to one side again and appeared to be listening to something. He squinted, wrinkled his forehead, and pursed his lips. "I'm going to have to go with no. I can't even tell you're like us and I know you."

  I raised my eyebrows, genuinely surprised. I thought about our meeting in the alley the first night. He demanded to know what I was and dodged the question when I asked him if he could tell. "You really can't, can you."

  He shook his head and shrugged. "Guess not. Maybe I just haven't learned how. It's not something I ever thought I'd need, I guess."

  "You never wondered about finding other vampires? You never needed to keep yourself safe from other... others? Xyj'Ru?"

  Alex offered me his one-shoulder shrug. "What about you? You hunt them. You knew I was one. Can't you pick up on anything?"

  "I can only tell by looking at them. If I know one's around I go where they were last seen and look around until I spot one."

  "That's not very practical, is it?"

  "It's worked so far."

  ***

  We spent three days in the hotel before guilt started to build up. Guilt, and the start of the weekend, which meant a different set of staff and the reality that someone would realize we weren't being billed. Alex and I slipped out quietly in the middle of the night, leaving the room nearly immaculate. Alex stole towels, soaps, and shampoo from a maid's cart and even made an attempt to put the little fold in the toilet paper that indicated housekeeping had been in there.

  "Too bad we can't wipe their memories," Alex whispered as we made our way through the halls. He waved his right hand in a subtle gesture. "These are not the men you're looking for."

  "Life isn't like the movies," I muttered back as we slipped out through the doorway that led to the bus terminal. This section wasn't what I'd call buzzing with activity, but there were signs of life. People sat on duffel bags waiting to board their buses. Old men dressed in tattered clothes clustered around the wobbly tables, nursing coffees and sodas. Bored janitors moved back and forth sweeping nothing into dustpans. We crossed through the "food court" and stepped out of the building.

  The night was cool, but humid. It was hard to decide if I wanted to shiver or sweat. I chose to do both. Alex wasn't bothered. I suppose it's one of the up-sides of being a vampire.

  We had nothing better to do so we walked the route to Fell's Point. The bars would be closed but there would still be bored kids reluctant to go home and people without homes to go to. Maybe Alex could find a snack or two. I had no idea when he'd last fed. If nothing else, there was at least one twenty-four hour diner. That would keep us occupied for a while; give us time to think.

  We were given no time to think. We were rounding a corner when a feeling of overwhelming dread came over me. I glanced sideways at Alex and watched color drain from his face. "We're fucked, aren't we?" Alex murmured, barely opening his mouth. We stood frozen like statues, afraid that even a movement as simple as breathing would bring down whatever it was.

  The fear was like a fog. It was working itself into my clothes and the pores of my skin and worming into my brain. I started breathing harder. The streetlights seemed to take on a reddish tint. Alex's hands were clenched into fists and he squeezed his eyes shut tight. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to tear his throat out with my teeth. I could envision myself shoving my thumbs into his eyes until I felt them pop. My head was filled with a hundred situations involving Alex torn to shreds. Judging by the look on Alex's face, he was having similar thoughts about me. He grinned and I could see the tips of his fangs. We stood facing each other. I crouched slightly, wondering if the wolf was going to be pulled from me or if we'd do this man against man.

  Alex's foot shot out. He was much faster than I'd expected. Much faster than he'd ever shown me before. The side of his heel connected with my temple and knocked me sideways. I grabbed for his leg as it continued past, but by the time my hands were up, he was standing in front of me, balanced and ready to spring if I moved toward him.

  We circled each other. He bounced on his toes and I crouched, almost crawling. I blocked another kick but couldn't hold on long enough to pull him to the ground. He grabbed my wrist and hauled me to my feet. Fists flew. I could feel my hands connecting with Alex's body but h
e took each punch and gave back as good as he got. One blow caught me full in the face and I felt my lip split against my teeth. The anger drained like someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.

  I spat. My blood smacked against Alex's cheek. "That's gross," he hissed and drew back his hand to hit me again. Then the smell of the blood broke through whatever had fogged his brain. He touched his cheek and looked at his fingers. Then he looked at me. I spat again (into the gutter this time) and pressed the back of my arm against my mouth. My mouth throbbed every time my heart beat and my lip was bleeding heavily.

  He used his sleeve to wipe my blood from his face. "I can..." Alex stammered, indicating my split lip. "I can do something about that. You won't like it, though."

  I knew what he could do. My face got hot. That just made everything hurt more. I tried to sigh but ended up coughing on the blood I swallowed. I nodded and closed my eyes, bracing myself for what would come next.