2

A HORSE OF A DIFFERENT CHOLER

How long do you think we have before more people start waking up and moving around?” I asked. It was a little after seven, the time when the dining hall on the other side of the campus opened.

Kincaid University was large for such a small population, just a few thousand students, and some of those students would be in overseas exchange programs or away on internships. Rolling hills had stone stairways built into them, and bicycle and walking paths threaded through the various halls, dorms, libraries, gymnasiums, common rooms, auditoriums, administrative buildings, and gazebos (it was a no driving campus), but the paths were empty.

“On a weekday, the gophers would already be climbing out of their holes,” Cahill mused. It was a Saturday. “But there aren’t any eight o’clock classes to worry about, and the cold will keep a lot of the early risers who weren’t out partying last night in bed. I’d say we have at least an hour.”

“That ought to be enough,” I assured him. The stables were on the fringes of the campus proper anyhow, and we were headed into an increasingly thick-wooded area. I had a dark blue sling bag across my back, a tight cylinder rather than the teardrop-shaped kind. “One way or the other.”

Cahill ignored that qualifying remark and put on a pair of dark sunglasses though the sun was just barely starting to make its presence felt. Most dhampirs can function in sunlight, but their eyes are weak during the day, and they get sunburn or sun poisoning easily. “You’re dressing a little sharper than you used to there, Charming.”

“I got most of my clothes from Goodwill or Salvation Army centers when I was being hunted by knights,” I explained.

“Some of the sharpest dressers around wear consignment stuff,” Cahill countered. He himself dressed well when he wasn’t wearing a sheriff’s department jacket.

“That’s true,” I acknowledged. “But I mostly wanted to pay in cash and travel light and keep changing my appearance. My clothes were disposable.”

What I wasn’t saying was that Sig had given me the jacket I was wearing for Christmas. I’m not a big fan of men letting their women dress them like Ken dolls, but it was the first Christmas gift I’d gotten in a long, long time.

The trees were leafless and the ground frozen, but Cahill still wore an expression of mild distaste, moving awkwardly despite his inhuman agility as he avoided the occasional curling bramble or fallen branch.

“I take it you weren’t a Boy Scout,” I observed.

Cahill actually laughed before he remembered that we were being tense around each other. “Not in any sense of the word. I grew up in Queens. The only reason I moved to Clayburg before you met me was that I was still trying to save my marriage back then. My ex-wife wanted me to be a cop someplace where there wasn’t a huge gang problem.”

And he’d wound up hanging around a bunch of monster hunters instead. Cahill didn’t particularly want to talk, but he really didn’t want to linger on his ex or Clayburg either, so he tried to switch topics. “So, an Each Uisge huh? Wasn’t there some book about taming a sea horse?”

“There’s a line from that Browning poem, My Last Duchess,” I said. “The guy in the poem mentions a bronze statue of a sea horse. He calls having the statue made taming a sea horse.”

“You’re kind of a fucking know-it-all,” Cahill observed. “Did you know that?”

“What I know is that the statue of the sea horse is a dead thing,” I answered. “It doesn’t have any of the wildness or beauty or magic of the original. But the narrator is a control freak who tried to do the same thing with his wife. He couldn’t dominate her, so he had a beautiful painting made of her and then killed her. The poem is about what happens when you try to control the people you love. You wind up killing the things you loved about them in the first place, or the things they loved about you. You become a monster.”

Silence.

“I meant the book by Robert B. Parker,” Cahill said finally. “Taming a Sea-horse. I like mysteries.”

“Oh,” I said. “I forgot about that one.”

I could smell the approaching lake when Cahill said, “You’re talking about me and Sig. You think I tried to control her.”

Actually, I hadn’t had any intention of opening up a big emotional discussion on the brink of a possible monster battle. But sometimes, conversations have a mind of their own. Sometimes, things need to be said, and if you dam them up, they just find another way of getting around to the subject.

“I don’t think that,” I said. “You did try to control her. The only question is whether you meant to or not.”

“I didn’t,” he ground out. His right hand was a little too close to his gun for my taste.

“And you asked for help and we’re here,” I reminded him. If I ever discovered that Cahill was using his mental whammy to make women have sex with him, I was going to cut his head off and burn his body down to ash. But there was no point making threats. If I decided to do it, I’d do it.

Cahill bared his teeth. His fangs were showing, just slightly. “So, this hunt wasn’t just an excuse to get me out here for some he-man ass-kicking contest?”

“We’re not rivals, dumb-ass,” I informed him bluntly. “I don’t need to protect Sig from you. She already did that.”

Those words hit him harder than the whole sea horse thing.

“What do you fucking know?” he hissed. “You’re a man who got turned into something else, just like me. You had people chasing after you, and you put Sig right in the danger zone! And you’ve done all kinds of fucked-up things; any cop could tell that just looking at you.”

“What do you want me to say, Cahill? That life isn’t fair?” I asked quietly. “What was your first clue?”

It didn’t take enhanced senses to hear his teeth grinding.

I took my sling bag off of my shoulders. Might as well use the time wisely, since we were stopping anyway. “The question is, are you going to man up and deal with it or not?”

“You’re not sleeping with her,” Cahill said. “I’d be able to smell it if you were.”

It was true. I was courting Sig, and she was setting a slow pace. And it wasn’t any of Cahill’s business.

“I left Sig alone when she said that’s what she needed,” I said evenly. “And she came and found me again. I don’t know why. To be honest, I thought she was smarter than that. But she did.”

Cahill let out a long, harsh breath. It sounded like some of his soul came out with it. “If I leave her alone, I don’t think she’s going to come looking for me.”

I pulled out a sledgehammer that was rolled up in my sling bag. The sledgehammer was already smeared with mud, which was good. I’d gotten it from a room in the stables while Sig was talking to the student in charge of morning cleaning. “So grow a pair, or freak out and attack me, or shut up while you decide. I’m about out of bullshit.”

“Fuck you,” Cahill said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe because he didn’t have one.

Next, I pulled a bottle out of the sling bag. I usually carried the bottle and a few other things around in a specially made guitar case, but I was in Tatum as an expert tracker, and that would have looked awkward. Cahill watched me pour a small amount of liquid over the metal head of the sledgehammer. Then he watched some more while I removed a matchbook from my pocket and struck a match, causing the top of the sledgehammer to flame briefly.

Finally, he gave in to curiosity. His voice wasn’t apologetic, but it wasn’t angry either. “What the hell is that stuff?”

“Absinthe,” I said. “Distilled down to the point where it’s basically jet fuel. Absinthe is made from wormwood, and wormwood is potent against water elementals.”

“Why?”

I sighed. One second, he was griping about me giving explanations; the next, he was asking for them. “My best guess? There’s a prophecy in the Bible about a fallen star called Wormwood poisoning large bodies of water at the end of time. It may be that so many people have read and repeated that verse over the centuries, believing it, that it became a kind of crude magical ceremony, and now wormwood has taken on symbolic properties. Magic works that way sometimes.”

“Do you even hear yourself talk?” Cahill’s voice was flat, all of the emotion drained out of it.

“Here’s the other piece,” I held up the weapon while the flames burned out and left a scorched patina behind. “I just combined fire with the earth that makes up this sledgehammer. When I swing this thing fast and cause it to whistle through the wind, I’ll be combining air too. That’s earth, fire, and air. Three natural elements against the truce this thing made with water to move around our home.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Cahill’s tone was showing some small signs of becoming normal again.

I sealed the bottle of absinthe and handed it over. It was shaped like a World War II Nazi hand grenade, though a little bigger. “Break this over the Each Uisge and light it on fire. Then grab the biggest branch or rock you can find and go at it.”

I removed my jacket and rolled it up in the sling bag, careful not to knock the katana inside to an odd angle.

“I don’t like you very much,” Cahill pointed out, as if that were directly relevant.

“So ignore my friend request on Facebook.” I stood and shifted the sling bag back over my chest and shoulders. “Are we going to do this or what?”

He didn’t answer, which meant that he sort of did. I started walking again and he followed. We were almost at the lake when Cahill spoke again. “Do you even have a Facebook page?”

“No,” I answered tersely, and we emerged from the woods at the edge of a large lake. The Kincaid University material I’d printed off said that the name of the lake was Contemplation, but that sounded like something the university founders had come up with. As opposed to Lake Intoxication or Lake Procreation or whatever the students actually got up to around those waters. If I’d known we would be dealing with a water elemental, I would have looked up the lake’s original name. True names are important.

Hell, I would have brought some rotisserie chickens from the local grocery store too. Back in ye olde days, knights used to lure Each Uisge out of their watery bolt-holes with roasted meat while the creatures still had the taste of flesh in their mouth. But you can never prepare for everything.

“Here’s what I don’t quite get,” Cahill ventured. “This thing just wants to leave? Why don’t we let it?”

“Because it broke the rules and killed someone from our home.” I didn’t take my eyes off the lake. I didn’t know much about this Lindsey Williams. I knew she had a passion for horses. I knew she had people who cared about her. And I knew she’d deserved a chance to fuck her life up and learn and love and try to figure out what she wanted to leave behind. And some thing had taken that from her. It wasn’t right.

Cahill grunted, so I gave him an answer he could be happier with.

“Besides, it’s easier for cunning folk to summon creatures that they are already familiar with,” I said. “Letting this thing live so that the person we’re really after can summon it again would be like leaving a loaded gun lying around.”

He nodded but still didn’t look convinced. Fuck him.

I yelled out over the water: “SCIO ENIM QUIA HOC! VENITE CERTAMEN! ET FERTE PRESIDIUM! VENENUM EFFUNDAM EN LECTO! ET MATREM TUAM TERPIS!”

Nothing happened.

“What was that?” Cahill wanted to know.

“Latin.”

He snorted. “No shit. What did you say?”

“I challenged and insulted it.” The sledgehammer was balanced casually on my shoulder, my feet comfortably apart and my left hip angled toward the lake. The terms of the Pax Arcana actually keep me from attacking supernatural creatures unless they have done something to make their presence known to the world at large, but if I let a creature smell werewolf and give them a little attitude, they usually attack me.

We waited a while longer. Cahill started to say something but I interrupted. “All right, we’re going to have to pull out some juju. Take your badge out and hold it toward the lake. You’re the closest thing we have to a symbol of local authority.”

He did so, cautiously, as if the badge might catch fire.

“Now stand on one leg—that symbolizes meeting someone halfway between worlds—and hop widdershins… That means in the same direction as the sun travels because it’s our earth. Hop in a circle to symbolize the rotation of the earth, and yell Ego sum stultus three times.”

He started to argue and I cut him off again. “Magic rituals are meant to look stupid. It’s one of the ways cunning folk keep random people from messing around with them. Just do it.”

Gritting his teeth, Cahill held out his badge, stood on one leg, and hopped in a circle yelling “EGO SUM STULTUS! EGO SUM STULTUS! EGO SUM STULTUS!1”

Still nothing.

“Your ritual didn’t work,” Cahill’s jaw was clenched. It sounded like every bodily opening he had was clenched.

“That’s because I made all that up,” I admitted. “I just wanted to see if I could get you to do it.”

“You ass—” Cahill started, and the Each Uisge erupted out of the water. It was an enormous horse, as big as a draft animal but shaped like a war steed. At some point in the last forty-eight hours, it had begun to turn a dark and virulent green. Its eyes would have been bloodshot if the threads lining its black irises hadn’t been violet.

And it was headed directly at Cahill while he was off guard, moving faster than any normal horse. Fortunately, I move faster than any normal human, and I stepped between the damnable thing and my sort-of partner, sliding my topmost hand down the sledgehammer’s haft and twisting my hips for maximum impact as I swung.

The Each Uisge halted as if momentum were just a wild figment of some physicist’s imagination and went up on its hind legs. The swing I’d begun would have missed if I’d followed through on its natural extension, and the Each Uisge could have brought a front hoof down on my skull, but instead, I whirled into a side step that brought the sledgehammer upward into the side of the Each Uisge’s jaw. The elemental came down awkwardly on its front hooves, and I was already stepping back into another whirl that would bring the sledgehammer around when I was ready to move forward again.

Not my first rodeo.

Unfortunately, Cahill didn’t anticipate my back whirl, and shoulder checked me slightly off-balance while he was surging forward to smash his bottle over the nightmare horse. Cahill succeeded in soaking the thing in absinthe, but when I tried to stop my swing, the end of the hammer still grazed Cahill’s forearm, and I lurched closer to the Each Uisge than I’d intended.

A strike from a foreleg dislocated my left shoulder and sent me hurling into a tree trunk some four or five feet behind me. I am ashamed to admit that I lost hold of the sledgehammer.

Vampire-strong or not, Cahill still got slammed off his feet by the Each Uisge’s charge and dropped the lighter he was pulling out of his pocket. The monster came at me while I was hauling myself to my feet by using my right hand to grab a small overhead broken branch. The problem with regeneration is that it doesn’t heal a dislocated shoulder because nothing is broken, and jamming my left arm back into its socket wasn’t going to be as easy as they make it look in the movies.

So, I didn’t try. I snapped the top off the branch stub I was holding and kicked off the tree, snarling and lunging to meet the damned thing head-on. Again, my speed and decision took it off guard. I don’t think the Each Uisge had ever fought something that was human-shaped but not entirely human before. It brought its right foreleg up and sent me spinning off again, but not before I anchored that jagged section of wooden branch in its right eye.

It screamed.

The Each Uisge was careening and stamping wildly, and I was scrabbling on the ground with one bad arm and a few newly cracked ribs, trying to stay in its blind spot. I was close to getting a knee broken or a breastbone smashed or a skull crushed when Cahill finally set the horse on fire.

Which would have been awesome, but apparently, some of the absinthe had spilled on the left front of my hoodie. When the Each Uisge went up in flames, so did I. Ever yanked a burning jacket over a dislocated arm? Personally, I don’t recommend it.

The Each Uisge homed in on my yell and swerved its head around to see me, but I retained enough presence of mind to swing my burning hoodie at its good eye. The Each Uisge screamed again and went up on its hind legs so that its forelegs could drive me back, but when it came back down on all fours, a sledgehammer came down on its skull.

A sledgehammer that had been picked up by a hundred and ninety pounds of pissed-off dhampir. The Each Uisge’s skull shattered. Then its entire body shimmered and slipped and dripped down into a smoking mound of black jelly chunks. A piece of partially digested riding boot was sticking out of the mess.

Cahill sank down onto one knee and leaned on the sledgehammer like it was a walking stick. Apparently, he had caught a back-kick at some point. I could hear a grinding click as part of his jaw popped back into alignment. Speaking of which…

I grabbed my left bicep in vise-tight fingers and lined my shoulder up with a tree trunk. It was the slight lifting motion that I had to use to position the arm that sucked. For some reason, it made me arch my chin violently to the right as if some unseen puppeteer were pulling my strings.

“What are you—” Cahill began, and my angry grunt cut him off as I slammed my arm back into its socket.

“Shit,” Cahill observed when I was done. “You’re lucky I was along to save your ass.”

If stares could physically impale people, the look I gave him would have been a fourteen-foot-long jousting lance. With spikes on it. And a power cord. But if getting into an emotional discussion with someone right before a life-threatening situation is a bad idea, getting into it with someone right after a fight is an even worse one. So, I didn’t speak until I trusted myself not to comment on Cahill’s looks, intelligence, sexual preferences, competence, or probable parentage.

“Thanks,” I finally said.