Bulls Rush In (2 page)

Deputy Reedy left the room for a while.

All of the food offered at the Comida Unida was meat and bread–based, the kind of inexpensive meals that would cook fast, keep well, and carry easily. I ordered four fajitas with rice and beans and got a bottle of lime green Mexican pop so bright that it was almost fluorescent. When my order came, I went to the table where one of the young guys I’d sort of met, Pepe, was sitting with some slightly older friends. I indicated the seat with my chin. “Mind if I sit down?”

“No hablo ingles,” Pepe said with a blank face and an overdone Speedy Gonzales–type accent. He was just fooling around and showing off for his friends, all of whom laughed.

“That’s okay, I don’t speak any Spanish either,” I lied. “Although you seemed to speak English pretty well when your friends were giving you grief about some girl named Paloma.”

The table erupted into laughter then. Apparently, Pepe had asked some girl named Paloma to marry him, and she’d refused. That had been a year ago, and Pepe was still getting ribbed about it and probably would be for the rest of his life. I didn’t know the full story, but occasionally, Pepe’s friends would fall down on their knees in the pumpkin fields and dramatically throw their hands up at the sky and yell, “PALOMA! PALOMA!”

Pepe shook his head sorrowfully while his friends calmed down. “You definitely can’t sit down here now.”

I scooted the chair away from their table and sat down with exaggerated slowness anyway. “I’ll sit way over here, then. I just don’t want to sit next to that big, scary guy in the corner.”

One of Pepe’s friends, a compact man with hard eyes but relaxed body language, said, “Samuel won’t do nothin’ unless you mess with him.”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing personal. I see a crowded place like this and a guy that big with empty tables all around him, I stay away. That’s all.”

“Samuel’s not all right in the head, but he don’t make trouble.” Pepe’s friend looked at me kind of sideways and asked, “Do you?”

I could tell Pepe’s friend was the leader of the group and the hardest man among them. He also wasn’t buying my “Aw shucks” routine, so I dropped it. “Not anymore,” I said, and pointed my pop bottle at his cerveza. “Not since I stopped drinking those.”

It was a lie, but it was a good one. Claiming to be a recovering alcoholic explained why I was working migrant jobs, why I was reluctant to talk about my past, and why I was trying to avoid trouble all in one quick fib. Maybe the lie was a little shitty, but alcoholism wasn’t a bad metaphor for my own condition.

He nodded like I’d confirmed something. “One of them mean drunks, huh?”

I released a puff of breath. “I’m not a bully. I only pick fights with guys who are bigger than me.”

Pepe’s friends laughed again, if a little thoughtfully. One of them said, “You don’t want to do that with Samuel. I saw a cop mess with Luis once. I thought Samuel was gonna go off on that
pendejo
.”

Another guy muttered: “
Recuerdas aquel juego en
Mount Airy? Samuel
hubiera matado a alguien si Luis no le hubiera parado.
”

Which basically referred to some game in Mount Airy where Samuel would have killed a guy if Luis hadn’t stopped him.

That got them going, and I sat back quietly and pretended not to mind or understand while they told Samuel stories in alternating Spanish and English. Almost all of the anecdotes involved Samuel displaying great feats of strength—like the time he lifted a refrigerator all by himself while helping someone move—or of Samuel losing or almost losing his cool until someone named Luis intervened.

“Who is this Luis whose name keeps coming up?” I asked when the stories petered out.

Pepe muttered: “Luis was Samuel’s father. He died a lil’ while ago.”

“How?” I ventured.

“He just dropped one day,” the leader said grimly. “It’s not like he got checkups.”

Probably meaning Luis didn’t have insurance and didn’t want to get deported. I shook my head regretfully. “That’s bad business.”

I didn’t get a chance to say anything else though. Samuel rose up from his table in the corner of the room and came over. He didn’t move carefully—his massive body plowed through the eating area like a battleship, people scooting hurriedly out of his way and a few random chairs getting knocked aside. Samuel loomed over us, his face flushed and his eyes fixed on me like gun barrels. “Why are you asking questions about me?!?”

“I guess he heard you across the room,” Jim Reedy observed. He was acting calmer after his little disappearing act. “You guys bein’ werewolves and all.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I never said Samuel was a werewolf.”

“Oh, right,” he nodded his head up and down slowly, exaggerating the motion. “Just you.”

“It’s why I’m on my own,” I said helpfully. “The knights who raised me weren’t crazy about me being a lycanthrope. I don’t see what the big deal is myself. Getting cursed is kind of a Charming family tradition.”

“I guess so.” Jim clearly stifled an impulse to lean across the table and slap some straight talk out of me. It was a bad idea. I’m six foot one and rangy-looking, lean but with broad shoulders and big forearms and lots of tendons and cords. The deputy liked to dominate situations though, and he didn’t much care if it was a good idea or not. You could see it in his body language and his eyes. Not a bad man, necessarily, but an alpha male with a bit of a complex about being short, and the combination had probably taken Jim Reedy to some dark places. “But you said it was Sam who was a monster.”

“I did,” I agreed.

“So, what kind of monster was he?” the deputy wondered. “A vampire? A zombie? A Martian? No wait, lemme guess. Big dumb guy like that, he musta been a Frankenstein!” He thought I wouldn’t catch the way he kept trying to put Samuel Blanco in the past tense.

“He’s not any of those things,” I said. “Samuel smells like bull.”

Reedy chuckled in a way that wasn’t really amused. “He ain’t the only thing.”

I gave him a small smile. “He’s an aatxe.”

“Let’s talk privately, Samuel.” I suggested, wrapping my fajita up and putting it in the bag with the others. I wasn’t going to leave it. It was a damn good fajita.

“We’re talking right now!” he said hotly.

“Sure. But let’s talk at your table so we won’t bother these guys and you can finish your meal.” I stood up, not that it improved things much. Samuel still towered over me. Walking slowly around him, no sudden movements, I tossed a comment at the table over my shoulder. “Nice meeting you guys.”

“Nice knowin’ you,” I heard the leader murmur quietly behind me. None of his friends laughed.

After a moment, Samuel followed me. I turned one of the chairs at his table around and sat in it backwards so that I could push off of it fast, keeping the table between me and the place where Samuel’s seat was positioned. I began to unwrap my fajita. “You need to chill out, big guy. You don’t want to get banned from this place. The food’s too good.”

“You don’t tell me what to do!” Samuel didn’t sit down.

“It was just a suggestion,” I said mildly. “If you want to talk standing up, that’s your business.”

“Who said I wanted to talk?!?”

“You did,” I reminded him.

He seemed to struggle with that for a moment. “You were talkin’ about me behind my back!”

I took a bite out of my fajita. “I knew you could hear me. I can smell what you are. Just like you can smell what I am.”

He still stood there. Pepe’s friend had said that something wasn’t quite right with Samuel’s head, and the word Colton and Ben Sigler had so cruelly spray-painted on his driveway suggested his mental processes were a little slow.

“You’re a wolf,” he said finally.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I said it quietly this time, almost gently. “You’ve scared me, okay? I won’t be able to sleep without a flashlight under my blanket tonight. But we might as well eat.”

“You don’t smell scared,” Samuel said petulantly, kind of angry about that but curious too. He sat down. “You smell like you want to fight.”

“That’s just the wolf reacting to the way you smell,” I said, hoping it was true. “I’m not looking for trouble. I’m just looking for a nice quiet place to settle down for a while.”

“You’re not movin’ here!” The words came out in a spray of crumbs, Samuel’s anger rising again.

“No, I’m not,” I agreed soothingly. “Not with all the attention you’re drawing.”

“What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

“You’ve been here for fifteen years,” I said. “People are going to start wondering why you’re not getting any older.”

It didn’t occur to him to ask how I knew how long he’d been there. His face closed down and became stubborn. “I’m not moving anywhere.”

Aatxes are very territorial.

“You keep tossing that word around.” The deputy’s irritation was showing through again. “What the hell is an aatxe?”

“That’s a little complicated,” I said.

“More complicated than you bein’ a werewolf and Prince Charming?” he demanded.

“I’m not a prin…yes.”

“Well, you could always just skip all this and just tell me what you did to Sam Blanco,” the deputy pointed out.

“No,” I said. “I can’t.”

He studied me and decided that I wasn’t kidding or bluffing or breaking any time soon. “Then get on with it.”

“Okay, but keep in mind I’m not making this stuff up,” I said. “There are these beings called elementals, and we’ve known about them for a long, long time. You can read about them in Pliny the Elder or Paracelsus if you don’t believe me.”

“Just tell me,” he sighed.

“Elementals come from dimensions where the life forms are predominantly made of fire or earth or air or water,” I explained. “They make themselves bodies that can move around our earth because they want to explore and have new experiences.”

“And Sam Blanco was an elemental? I thought he was an aatxe.” At least the deputy was paying attention.

“There’s more than one kind,” I elaborated. “Aatxes are a type of fire elemental. And when they make a body here, their primary form looks like a bull. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s our life form that most closely resembles whatever aatxes look like back home.”

“Sam Blanco ain’t a bull,” Reedy pointed out.

“If you came around looking for new arts and cultures and sciences and conversations, would you want to hang around a bunch of cows?” I asked. “Aatxes learn to take human form pretty quickly.”

“So, they’re werecows?”

“Their half-human children are,” I said. “Sometimes, experimenting and having new experiences means having sex with the locals.”

All Jim heard was
blah blah blah blah
. “Werecows.”

I could have gone on about minotaurs. The Colchis bulls. The Dagda bull. Apis. The Mithras cults. There are all kinds of stories and rites that mix men and bulls and flames and death together, lots of Celtic and Roman and Greek and Basque myths about gods or spirits turning into bulls to have sex with human women too. But Jim Reedy was clearly at the end of his patience. “Sure,” I said. “Big flaming werecows.”

“I’m not going nowhere!” Samuel repeated. The idea of moving seemed to frighten him, and he tried to cover it with anger. He probably knew he had to leave Vista Verde on some level, but he had no idea how to create bank accounts or fake identities, resumes, or credit histories without Luis Blanco.

“People are talking about those two boys you murdered too,” I went on.

“I didn’t murder nobody!” At least Samuel didn’t yell it. “I told those two little bastards to clean up my driveway and they pulled knives on me!”

“Knives that couldn’t really hurt you,” I reminded him. “And they were kids. Dumb, mean kids with men’s bodies maybe, but still kids. Did they smell scared?”

Samuel didn’t say anything. For a moment, he looked more miserable than angry.

“Did you like it when they smelled scared?” I asked softly. “Did making them scared make you feel powerful?”

“Those knives hurt plenty,” Samuel said stubbornly, holding on to his anger. “And I didn’t mean to kill the first one. His neck just broke.”

The kid’s neck just broke. Like it happened on its own. And Samuel wasn’t saying anything about not meaning to kill the second kid. I took a pull off the pop bottle. Given his instincts and what sociopathic shits those kids had likely been and however mentally competent he was, how much of what had happened was really Samuel’s fault? And how much did whose fault it was matter?

“This Luis those other guys were talking about…did he kind of take care of you?” I asked. “Was he really your father?”

Samuel made fists, the knuckles standing out like small mountain ranges on the plains of his hand. “He was family.”

“Did you know Luis when he was a kid?” I asked carefully. “Did you know his mother and father?”

“He was family,” Samuel repeated.

“What are you getting at?!?” Jim Reedy demanded.

“Samuel was pretty vague,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s because he was taught to never talk specifics, or if his memory was kind of murky. But I got the feeling that Samuel was a secret that the Blanco family had been keeping for a long time. Maybe generations. Maybe that’s how they wound up in America.”

“Generations,” Reedy repeated dully.

“I’ve never been to Basque country, but I understand family is important there,” I said.

“You’re sayin’ all this because these aatxe things come from this Basque place,” Jim clarified.

I nodded. “That’s where aatxe usually first appear. Maybe there’s some kind of portal there, some kind of intersection point where our dimensions rub against each other and get thin or something.”

“And Samuel was retarded.”

I didn’t like that word, but I let it go. “It must have been hard for Samuel’s family. One of their women gets impregnated by this legendary thing that they half revere and half fear, and the hybrid kid that results has some developmental issues and can’t quite take care of himself. But they love and raise the child anyway, keeping Samuel’s nature a secret for decades, maybe centuries…Can you imagine what a burden that must have been?”