Bestial (32 page)

The voice was ignored at first as they continued rutting. Lupa reached up and gripped the front of the couch with both hands, her claws piercing the cushions.

More knocks, then: “Sheriff, I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s important.” It was Jeremiah. He knocked again.

Taggart stopped thrusting and pulled away from Lupa. His growl went from passionate to annoyed as he turned and looked at the door. He stood, and as he went to the door, much of the hair on his body disappeared. His erection remained as he reached out and pulled the door open.

Jeremiah did not express even the slightest surprise or discomfort. He looked Taggart in the eye and said, “Eckhart called in. He’s pulled over Gavin Keoph and Karen Moffett. The two you asked me to follow yesterday. The ones with the Uzis and the silver bullets. He’s waiting to know what you want to do.”

Taggart reached up and passed a hand over his face. A shaggy beard that nearly reached to his eyes covered the lower half of his face and his chin jutted, two fangs curving upward from his lower jaw. He made a grumbling, growling sound. As he diverted his thoughts away from Lupa and to the situation at hand, the hair on Taggart’s body became thinner. His fangs disappeared.

“I want to know who they work for,” he muttered. “Fargo is behind this somehow, I just know it. I want to know
how
.”

“What should I do?” Jeremiah said.

“Get Eckhart some backup right away,” Taggart said. “Tell him to bring them in and put them in the lockup for now.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I don’t want to be interrupted again until I’m done in here. Is that understood?”

Jeremiah nodded. “It is.”

Taggart slammed the door and turned around.

Lupa was sitting up now, facing him, her back to the front of the couch. Her hairy legs were spread wide and bent, knees up, a hand between them, fondling her genitals. Her tongue slid back and forth over her lower lip.

Taggart growled harshly as he hurried toward her to continue what they had begun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Moroi

Sunday was Abe’s day off, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not relax and enjoy it. He tried to occupy his mind by working on a bat house he was building for the back yard. He hoped it would attract some bats, which would then eat up the annoying insects that made sitting on the back deck on warm summer evenings such an irritating experience.

He had slept little the night before, and what little sleep he’d gotten had been shattered by nightmares in which the vicious little creature in the Emergency Room clamped its fanged snout on
his
crotch. He had jerked awake with a sharp cry at one point and Claire had sat up beside him. As they lay in the dark together, he’d told her everything that had happened in the ER. At first, she’d thought he was describing his nightmare to her. When he told her it had actually happened earlier that night, she became concerned, at first for his stability. But he convinced her by removing the bandage from his wrist and showing her the bite. When she asked him what he made of it all, he’d said, “I don’t know. But Illy is starting to sound a lot less superstitious.”

Over breakfast, Illy had said little, but she had given him several looks. Her eyes seemed to be saying,
You know I’m right, Abel. You
know
it.

He kept thinking of that look in her eyes as he worked on the bat house, of her many crazy superstitions and old-world beliefs. Being a doctor, a man of science, Abe took pride in his ability to reason. But all reason collapsed in the face of the creature that had attacked him in the ER. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, that experience was leading him to wonder just how “crazy” Illy’s superstitions were, and how “old-word” her beliefs.

He knew in his gut that something was very wrong in Big Rock, and after their behavior last night, he knew that the sheriff’s deputies somehow were connected to it, perhaps the entire Sheriff’s Department. He could not shake the fear that he and his family were in danger. But because he could not point to a specific source of that danger and give it a name he understood, he kept
trying
to shake it.

A splinter of wood dug painfully into his thumb, and he cursed as he shook his hand up and down. He gave up on the bat house for the time being and went inside. Illy was seated at the dining room table reading the paper. He could hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner running in another part of the house. He got a pair of tweezers and sat down at the table across from Illy to remove his splinter. A large, pale green Roseville vase—one of Claire’s prize possessions—stood between them holding a bouquet of flowers from Claire’s garden in the back yard.

“This place is cursed,” Illy said quietly without looking up from the newspaper.

“What place?” Abe said. He slid the vase of flowers aside so he could look directly at her.

“This place. This town. They have come here. The
moroi
. They have come and they will take root. Like thorn bushes, like poison ivy. Already they spread. Animal attacks nobody cares about. Mauling, biting, hurting. People care but they are
afraid
. And they
should
be.” She lifted her eyes from the paper and looked at him. “You have not told me what happened last night, but I know.”

When she didn’t continue right away, he said, “You know what, Illy.”

“I know it was bad. I see fear in your eyes—last night, today. What happen to your wrist? Why the bandage?”

“Well, I was... uh... bitten.”

Her tired old eyes widened as she crumpled the paper in her knobby hands and looked at him with horror. “
Bitten
? By the
moroi
?”

“I honestly don’t know
what
it was, Illy, but—”

”It was the
moroi
! And you know it. You
know
it!”

The doorbell rang. Abe listened as the vacuum cleaner continued to operate. The bell rang again, and this time, the vacuum cleaner fell silent. That meant Claire had the door. He turned his attention back to Illy.

“Illy, the
moroi
is a myth that—”

”No myth!” Illy insisted, weakly hitting the table with a fist. “Call it what you like. It exists, it is evil, and it has come
here
.”

Abe heard voices in the living room and wondered who had come to the door.

“You keep resisting it,” Illy said in a whisper as she leaned toward him. “You cling to your science, your medicine—but
before
science and medicine, there was good and evil. They have always been,
always
, and they will always be. And the evil that has come to—”

Illy was interrupted by Claire’s voice: “Abe?”

He turned to her standing in the archway. She looked worried.

“There are deputies at the door,” she said, frowning.

Abe suddenly felt as if someone had thrown over him a sheet that had been soaked in ice-cold water. His first clear thought was of the gun he kept in his nightstand drawer, the .357 magnum he kept for emergencies but had never needed. He thought of it now and had the strong sense that, for the first time, he needed it.

When he looked at Illy, he could tell she had seen it in his face—his sudden fear. He realized it was an irrational fear, the specific source of which he could not yet pinpoint. But part of that source was the deputies he’d dealt with the night before, perhaps all the deputies, perhaps the sheriff himself.

“Abe?” Claire said. “What’s wrong? Is there something I should know? Something you haven’t told me?”

He found himself unable to speak or move for a moment. He was frozen by his fear, bound and gagged by it.

“They’re waiting,” Claire said.

Abe heard movement in the living room. He forced himself to stand, tried to make himself walk forward into the living room with Claire. But he kept thinking about that gun. Claire turned and went ahead of him, and he followed her—but only for a few steps. Then he turned and headed down the hall to the bedroom.

“Where are you going?” Claire said, annoyed.

“I’ll be right there,” he said over his shoulder. “Just give me a second.”

He hurried into the bedroom, opened the drawer, and removed the gun. He kept it loaded, but he checked the cylinder just in case.

Claire’s scream cut through the house.

His body suddenly numb, Abe dashed out of the bedroom and down the hall, the gun in his right hand. As he passed by the dining room, he vaguely noticed that Illy was no longer at the table, where the open newspaper had been abandoned. He made the left turn into the living room so sharply, he almost fell over, then jerked to an abrupt stop, his jaw slack.

Two deputies stood in the living room, neither of whom he recognized—neither had been in the ER the night before. The deputy on the left was a lanky blond man, the one on the right shorter and stockier, with dark hair cropped short. The dark-haired deputy had his left arm wrapped around Claire’s neck from behind and was holding her tightly. Claire’s eyes were round with fear and confusion, and her mouth opened and closed silently several times.

When the deputies saw the gun in Abe’s hand, they instinctively reached for their own sidearms.

Abe didn’t think first. He acted immediately, wasting no time. He quickly leveled his gun at the blond deputy and fired.

A small hole appeared in the deputy’s chest and he fell backward, landing hard on the floor. Dark blood began to spread quickly on his khaki shirt.

The dark-haired deputy was clearly caught off guard. His shock registered in his face. As he clutched his gun with his right hand, his grip on Claire loosened and she took advantage of it. She threw herself away from him and came toward Abe with her arms outstretched.

As the deputy pulled his gun from his holster and raised it, Abe turned his own gun on him and fired. A chunk of the left side of the deputy’s face and head exploded in a spray of red and he dropped to the floor with an awful, sickening groaning sound. He writhed and twitched there, struggling to get back to his feet but unable to control his limbs.

Startled by the luck of his unpracticed aim, Abe grabbed Claire’s arm with his left hand and pulled her away from the fallen deputies. He dragged her stumblingly back to the archway that led into the dining room.

“Where’d Illy go?” he said. He almost didn’t recognize his own voice, which was high, breathy, and hoarse.

“I-I-I... I-I-I... “ Claire could not get the words out. Her eyes darted around the dining room as if it were unfamiliar to her. Obviously, she was having difficulty processing everything that had just happened.

“Come on, come on,” Abe muttered as he led Claire into the dining room.

“What happened?” she said. “What just
happened
? My God, they were at the door, and the next thing I knew—”

”Do you know where Illy went?”

Claire looked around, her head moving in jerky spurts. “I-I don’t know, she was just here.“ She looked at the sliding glass door, which stood half-open, then turned to Abe and said, “She must have gone back out to—” She looked past Abe and whatever she saw made her scream.

Abe spun around just in time for the blond deputy to grab his right wrist and twist with one hand while closing his other hand on Abe’s throat. Abe’s voice was reduced to a gagging, gurgling sound. A large spot of dark blood had spread over the front of the deputy’s shirt.

The deputy wrenched Abe’s wrist hard, trying to make him drop the gun. Instead, Abe tightened his grip on the .357, which was pointed at the deputy’s abdomen. At the same time, he squeezed the trigger once, twice, a third time.

The deputy’s body jerked in response to each gunshot, but his grip on Abe’s wrist and throat did not weaken. Instead, his lips pulled back and he growled as his teeth sharpened before Abe’s eyes. Dark-blond hair grew rapidly on his face, neck, and hands. His eyes went from blue to a shimmering silver. Abe felt sharp, piercing pains in his throat and wrist as the deputy’s fingers sprouted curved, deadly claws. The lower half of the deputy’s face extended into a tapering snout. Abe’s mind flashed on the snout of the small creature in the ER, on its menacing fangs.

As his body changed with thick, sickening sounds, the deputy’s uniform ripped to reveal more hair underneath. He was changing completely, transforming into something else in front of Abe.

As the deputy squeezed his throat tighter and tighter, Abe’s face felt on fire and his vision blurred. His tongue seemed to be double its normal size. He feared he would black out soon, and he was afraid for Claire and Illy.

His bleary eyes caught a quick movement behind the deputy. He got a glimpse of the pale green Roseville vase as Claire lifted it into the air, saw the flowers sail into the air and burst apart, like something in a fireworks display. She brought the vase down hard and it shattered against the back of the deputy’s head with an explosion of sound as water splashed in all directions.

The deputy—who was no longer a deputy but now a vicious, hairy creature in a torn khaki uniform—flinched at the impact of the vase and growled angrily, spraying spittle all over Abe’s face. It loosened its grip on his wrist and throat and turned its head toward the attack from the rear.