She moved forward jerkily and sat down beside me.
“I’m still getting used to this,” she said. “It’s like the glove I wore at Macbeth. This is just a doll, an inanimate object, a suit—I can move in it, live in it, but it takes a great deal of concentration. I don’t know how long I can manage this.” She lifted a hand and touched the side of my face. I saw her fuzzy spectral features. “It’s fully functional, I think.”
“I don’t need that, Spooky. I just—” But it was good to feel her touch. The fingers were fake, the hands and arms just plastic, but the pressure and the presence behind it, those were real. “We don’t need to see how functional it is,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her, pulled her down onto the sheets.
It felt so good to relax, to be comfortable, to be beside her. The spectral image was smiling, and I saw translucent tears in her eyes. She was soft, squishy, rubbery . . . but it was Sheyenne. And it felt wonderful to hold her.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Yes,” Sheyenne said. “Yes, it is.”
Don’t miss Kevin J. Anderson’s next
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HAIR RAISING
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CHAPTER 1
I’ve always been baffled by the things people do to amuse themselves, but this illegal cockatrice fighting ring was more bizarre than most.
Rusty, the full-furred werewolf who raised the hideous creatures and pitted them against each other in the ring, had hired me to watch out for “suspicious behavior.” So, there I was in a crowd of unnaturals who gathered in an empty warehouse, laying down bets to watch chicken-dragon-viper monstrosities tear each other apart. What could possibly be suspicious?
No case was too strange for Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations, so I agreed to keep my eyes open. “You’ll have a great time, Mr. Shamble,” Rusty growled. “Tonight is family night.”
“It’s Chambeaux,” I corrected him, though the mispronunciation may have been the result of him talking through all those teeth in his mouth rather than not actually knowing my name.
Rusty was a gruff, barrel-chested werewolf with a full head—and I mean a full head—of bristling reddish fur that stuck out in all directions. He raised cockatrices in backyard coops in a run-down neighborhood at the edge of town. He wore bib overalls and sported large tattoos on the meat of his upper arms (although his fur was so thick they were barely visible).
Cockatrice fighting was technically illegal and had been denounced by many animal activist groups. (Most of the activists, however, were unfamiliar with the mythological bestiary and had no idea what a cockatrice was, but they were sure “cockatrice fighting” had to be a bad thing from the sound of it.) I wasn’t one to pass judgment; when ranked among unsavory activities in the Unnatural Quarter, this one didn’t even make the junior varsity team.
Rusty insisted it was big business, and he had even offered me an extra ticket so that Sheyenne, my ghost girlfriend, could join me. I declined on her behalf. She’s not much of a sports fan.
Inside a decrepit old warehouse, the spectators cheered, growled, howled, or made whatever sound was appropriate to their particular unnatural species. Even some humans had slunk in to place bets and watch the violence, hoping that violence didn’t get done to them here in the dark underbelly of the Quarter.
In the echoing warehouse, the unsettling ambient noises reflected back, making the crowd sound twice as large as it really was. Previously, the warehouse had hosted illegal raves, and I could imagine the thunderously monotonous booming beat accompanied by migraine-inducing strobe lights. After the rave craze had ended, the warehouse manager was happy to let the unused empty space become the new home for the next best thing.
I tried to blend in with the rest of the spectators; nobody noticed an undead guy standing there in a bullet-riddled sport jacket. Thanks to an excellent embalming job and good hygiene habits, I was a well-preserved zombie, and I worked hard to maintain my physical condition so that I could pass for mostly human. Mostly.
The crowd hadn’t come here to see and be seen. The center of attention was a high-walled enclosure that might have originally been designed as a skateboard park for lawn gnomes. The barricades were high enough that—in theory at least—snarling, venomous cockatrices could not leap over them and attack the audience (although, as Rusty explained it, a few bloodthirsty attendees took out long-shot wagers that it would happen; those bettors generally kept to the back rows).
While Rusty was in back wrangling with the cockatrice cages, preparing the creatures for the match, his bumbling nephew Furguson went among the crowds with his notepad and tickets, taking bets. Lycanthropy doesn’t run in families, but the story I’d heard was that Rusty had gone on a bender and collapsed half on and half off his bed; while trying to make his uncle more comfortable, Furguson was so clumsy he had scratched and infected himself on the claws. Watching the gangly young werewolf now, I was inclined to accept that as an operating theory.
The fight attendees had tickets, scraps of paper, printed programs listing the colorful names of the cockatrice combatants—Sour Lemonade, Hissy Fit, Snarling Shirley, and so on. The enthusiasts were a motley assortment of vampires, zombies, mummies, trolls, and a big ogre with a squeaky voice who took up three times as much space as any other audience member. And there were werewolves of both types—full-time fully-furred wolfmen (affectionately, or deprecatingly, called “Hairballs” by the other type), and the once-a-month werewolves who looked human most of the time and transformed only under a full moon (called “Monthlies” by the other side). They were all werewolves to me, but there had always been friction between the two types, and it was only growing worse.
It’s human, or inhuman, nature: People will find a way to make a big deal out of their differences—the smaller, the better. It made me think of the Montagues and the Capulets, if I wanted to be highbrow, or the Hatfields and the McCoys, if I wanted to be lowbrow. (Or the Jets and the Sharks, if I wanted to be musical.)