I gestured inside. Rick bent around the side of the door and looked in. “Crap almighty. Who—shit! Who did this? What’s that smell?” He backed quickly away, a hand over his mouth and nose.
I was already upwind. “Partly the dead and partly the rogue. I think he spent the day here yesterday.” I calculated the distance from the edge of the woods. It was farther than it looked from the air. “I think he knew the vamps would put Katie to earth, and he hoped to get at the blood in her coffin.”
“Blood in her coffin?”
I considered his expression and decided that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t known what the ceremony last night involved. I wondered if any human knew. I also decided it was smarter not to know the answers to his question and smarter not to share the information I had discovered. “Katie’s blood,” I lied. “He didn’t finish draining her.” Which was the truth.
“Uh-huh.”
I had to work on my lying. To keep from having to respond to his skepticism, I walked to the chapel. On the way, I passed the other crypt damaged by the rogue, stealing mass. It belonged to Clan Mearkanis, and the damage was greater, two square feet of stone blasted away.
I reached the chapel. The cross was still lying on the small porch, but no longer glowing or burning. I leaned over it, pulling off my sunglasses to get a better view. The wood was untouched, unscorched by the fire I had seen, and no fresh scent of smoke clung to it. It wasn’t made from carved or cut wood; the crosspieces looked like large splinters ripped from a timber.
The cross looked old, blackened by time and usage. The four ends were smoothed, as if they had been slightly rounded off by sandpaper and oiled. Or slowly shaped from the repeated caresses of human hands. The two pieces were held together by twisted metal, the finish a green verdigris that had bled into the wood it touched. Old, I thought. Old, old, old.
Rick took the narrow steps and bent to pick up the cross. I reacted without thinking. Grabbed the waistband of his jeans. And yanked. He flew past me. Made a soft oof when he landed, tumbling, expelling air. I stood, blocking the porch, waiting for him to catch his breath. He groaned and cursed. “Why the hell did you do that?” he grunted. “What did I do this time?”
“You were about to touch the cross,” I said. “It belongs to a vamp. She’d have smelled your scent on it. Not smart.”
“Vamps don’t own crosses,” he said. He pushed his elbows under him and half sat, legs splayed, feet digging into the shells, making little troughs that ended in mounds at his heels. “Besides, a simple ‘Hey you, stop’ would have worked just fine. Anybody ever tell you that you tend to overreact?”
“Yeah. A few people. Some of them are dead,” I said, letting my grin out. “I’m not.”
Rick blew out a sound of disgust and rolled to his knees. “What do you press, anyway? You got arms like a gorilla.” He made it to his feet and stood looking at me.
Press. As in bench press. I didn’t like his expression. I had received similar looks when I did something a normal human couldn’t, and I usually just made light of it. That worked, mostly because humans didn’t want to recognize otherness, difference, or oddity. They would rather stuff the unusual into an acceptable niche, someplace comfortable, tucking a square peg into a round hole. It was easier for them and a lot less scary.
I had a feeling Rick LaFleur wouldn’t accept my usual misdirection. There was a certain look in his eyes, harder and more speculative than I expected; not an average-Joe expression, but something else entirely. I couldn’t come up with a single response, so I shrugged and walked to the dead tree. What you can’t fight or explain away, you can sometimes ignore.
The tree was a dead sycamore, thin bark curling, exposing silvery wood beneath. The branch where I had sat was scored by raptor talons. A small feather rested on the ground, one of mine, and it felt really weird to see it. Had I lost part of me when I lost the feather? If I lost more of me, say if a leg were amputated while in animal form, what would I be missing when I shifted back? How much could I lose and still be me? I tucked the feather in my pocket.
Scanning the graveyard, I took in the layout, refamiliariz ing myself with the clan crypts. I wasn’t sure if I had missed it last night or forgotten it, but most of the mausoleums had statues on top. Each marble statue was male, winged, had a weapon and shield, and was naked. They could have been carved by the same sculptor, but the faces and bodies of each were different, all male, all beautiful. Angelic defenders of the demonic undead. Weird.
Rick walked up behind me and I studiously ignored him. I had seen enough, and I was ready to put some distance between the yank-Rick-off-the-porch episode and me. I flipped open my cell and dialed Bruiser as I headed back to the bikes. When he answered, I said, “You got alarms going off at the vamp graveyard?”