CHAPTER 58: SIMPLER TIMES

“Theo, what are you doing?!” Shannon demanded, taking several unconscious steps forward to stop him from enthralling the girl. Even then, he could see the magic of his fangs puncturing the life-force of the woman’s leg like twin wells of blackness staining a flowing blue silk.

“Hey Shannon?” Theo said, not taking his eyes off the Frenchwoman’s face. “Go wait in the car. The lady and I need a little time to introduce ourselves.”

“Go wait in the car?” she gasped. “What, like I’m twelve?”

“This might get ugly,” Theo said, though it sounded like he was talking to the woman and not to Shannon. “I suppose if you want to stay for it, you can…”

He tightened his hand on the woman’s thigh and the Inquisitor shivered but didn’t cry out, her face filled with loathing as she stared Theo down, daring him to eat or enthrall her.

Seeing that, Shannon swallowed hard. Well, what did you think he was gonna do when he told you to walk outside? she thought. Ask her nicely to stop? And, remembering the ease with which this total stranger had called her a disgusting demon, Shannon really had to side with Theo on this one.

I hope he doesn’t eat her to death, Shannon thought. Hope he just enslaves her and makes her play nice for a little while… And then, realizing the horrible thought she’d just had, and how casually she had thought it, she immediately blushed and felt sheepish. All this paranormal crap is rubbing off on me, she thought. And not in a good way. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’ll go check on Angus.”

“Maybe let him out to take a dump, while you’re at it,” Theo said. “Just don’t watch him—he hates that.”

“I’ll bet,” Shannon said, making a face. Then, with one last look at the vampire lord and his self-righteously defiant victim, her chin high despite the fangs, their gazes locked in challenge, Shannon turned and left them there behind the shop. Almost immediately, she heard the woman gasp and whimper, and Shannon grimaced and moved faster.

When she got around the corner, Angus was not in the car. The old woman, seemingly oblivious to the mastiff’s disappearance, had pulled out her bag of yarn and was knitting in the back seat. Glancing around nervously, the sun only slightly beginning to burn with the second-hand taste of Masaaki that Theo had given her before getting into the old lady’s car, Shannon nonetheless felt uncomfortable in the full sun of midday. She walked over to the car and, glancing around for Angus, reluctantly opened the door.

“Hey, did that dog go looking for us?” she asked.

“He said he’d be right back,” the old lady said cheerfully, still twiddling her knitting needles together.

“He…did?” Shannon squinted at the old woman.

“I think he didn’t want anyone to see him pee,” the old woman mused in her feeble voice. “Where’s your guardian?”

So the old woman was a lot more perceptive than she let on. “Oh, uh…” Thinking of how he was currently eating someone, Shannon swallowed. “Getting lunch.”

The old woman’s brown eyes flickered to Shannon and she saw amusement there. “I see.”

Shannon straightened to look over the roof of the car, uncomfortable that Angus had just run off. “Which way did he go?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” the woman said. “He’s very fast.”

“Yeah he is,” Shannon muttered. She considered seeing if she could smell where he went. Theo seemed to be able to do it a little, though nothing like the barghest. She glanced back at the café. “Okay, I think I’m gonna go make a call.” The only thing she could think of was calling her house and hoping the barghest had made it back without killing anyone.

Odin’s balls, this day couldn’t get any worse…

“We should talk,” the old woman said. “We haven’t had a chance to introduce ourselves yet.”

Shannon ducked back down to look inside the car. She’d told the old woman her name, in passing, as they were hijacking her car, and the woman had seemed satisfied enough with it back then, probably because Angus had told them everybody was old friends. Shannon squinted at the old lady, wondering just how much of the woman’s brain they had broke.

“Come on, child.” Holding her knitting in one hand, the old woman patted the seat beside her. “Join me. Your friend will be busy for a while—you have time to talk.” She smiled up at her encouragingly.

Shannon glanced down at the guns and radio that they had taken off the Inquisitor, then glanced at the café, wondering if she could safely leave them with the old woman while she went to make a phone call.

“I won’t bite,” the woman said, grinning.

Oh, if only she knew… But, seeing the twinkle in the old woman’s eyes, Shannon sighed and slumped into the car, yanking the door shut behind her. She piled the Inquisitor’s guns and radio on the seat between them and leaned back, head tilted towards the ceiling as she thought about just how screwed-up her life had gotten. “Gawd I just wanna hit the RESET button.”

The woman glanced down at the guns as if they were two writhing vipers. “What are these?” The radio was still crackling with distant static here and there, but the old lady made no attempt to touch it or the guns, even going so far as to pull her knitting to the other side of the car.

“There was one of those guys from the Inquisition inside,” not expecting the old lady to know what she was talking about, but too tired to explain. “Girl, actually. Theo’s…having a chat with her.” She still felt a little guilty for leaving the black-clad woman alone with him. “God I just need a nap.” Good thing Theo had given her that pick-me-up a few hours back. In between getting attacked by paramilitary Church crusaders and finding out a dog-man wanted her to pop her cherry, she’d slept maybe three hours back at home before Theo showed up puppeteered by a lobotomizing shadow-warping asshole and dragged her into a lung-killing, pre-dawn nature run.

“You look tired,” the old lady commented in her feeble way, still weaving with the needles. “Long day?”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Shannon blurted. She glanced sideways at the lady. “I mean, I could try to tell you, but I’m pretty sure you’d have some sort of hemorrhage and start bleeding from the ears.”

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The old lady chuckled. “Probably.” She cocked her head at Shannon, amusement twinkling in her rich brown eyes. “You have a fine jaw for such a pale girl… Do you have native blood?”

“Meh,” Shannon said, waving a hand. “Dad claimed he was like eight percent Cherokee or something. Nothing really to write home about.”

But that seemed to make the woman smile. “It’s enough.”

“Nah,” Shannon said, “I always thought those white people who claimed Native American heritage because they were point-zero-five percent Chippewa or something were just posers. We’re all mongrels here in America, we just need to admit it. Even the natives aren’t really native anymore—they’re all a percentage of white somewhere down the line.”

“Not all,” the old lady said softly. Her knitting needles had paused as she seemed to contemplate Shannon’s words, her wrinkled face thoughtful. And, now that Shannon was looking, she saw that the loops she was weaving together looked like a chaotic mess. Seeing the product, Shannon couldn’t help but feel bad for breaking the woman’s brain.

“So tell me,” the woman said, seeming to shake herself. “Are you a virgin? Has a man yet taken your blood?”

Shannon twitched, instantly uncomfortable at the ancient woman’s rapid conversation shift. She knew old ladies—old people in general, actually—had generally stopped giving a shit about social mores and pretty much asked and said whatever was on their mind in their twilight years, but it still made her cringe. Ever polite, however, Shannon said, “Well, uh…I’ve, uh, got guy problems.”

“Oh?” The old lady went back to weaving her tangled mess. “What kind?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Shannon gave a nervous laugh. Then, because the lady was old and probably going to die soon and she was nervous and Theo wasn’t in the car to hear it, she said, “Naked people make me panic. Shrink says it’s childhood trauma, probably from seeing my parents…” she coughed, “…in the act. So you can imagine how hard it is to…uh…” She made a ring with her thumb and forefinger and put her index finger through it suggestively.

But the woman’s brown eyes warmed and her smile widened. “I see.” She seemed to contemplate her matted ball of yarn for a moment, then said, “You know, Shannon, to be naked is to be without barriers to the spirits. Every child is born this way, and to return to that natural state removes restrictions…opens your heart.”

Yeah, she so didn’t see it that way. Still, the old lady was trying to be nice, so she timidly met her eyes and tried to go along with it. “So, uh, you have kids?”

“No,” the old woman said, both amused and wistful. “I was saving myself.”

“That…” Shannon winced as she looked the eighty-year-old over, stopping on the wrinkled skin of her arms and her too-big arthritic fingers. To think of waiting all that time for the right guy, only to end up too old to have kids… It kind of made her nakedness problems seem a lot less important, in the whole scheme of things. “…must really suck,” she finished.

“Oh, I still have hope,” the old woman said, meeting her eyes with a quick wink and smile before looking back at her knitting.

Shannon’s eyes went wide. “You…do?” She knew human medical science was advancing, but she was pretty sure that being eighty was disqualifying. “I mean…are you even still having periods?”

The old lady laughed, spontaneous and genuine, from the chest. “No.” She shook her head, still chuckling to herself. “No, can’t say that I am.”

“Ohhh,” Shannon said. “You’re adopting.” Still, it seemed not really fair to the kid, considering the lady was probably going to drop dead any minute.

“No, I still hope to find a mate.”

Ouch, sucks to be you, lady. Shannon gave the woman a look of pity. Demented, she thought. Or Alzheimer’s. “So…” she began gingerly, “…just how…old…do you think you are?”

The old woman’s knowing, wrinkly smile was gentle. “Seven hundred and thirty-eight next Tuesday.”

That was…oddly specific. Then again, demented people were really good at remembering stuff that had never happened.

“That’s…old.” She coughed. She glanced over her shoulder looking for Theo, but he still hadn’t finished…doing whatever he was doing…with the murderer-chick.

The ancient woman went back to her gnarled ball of knitting and began poking it again with the needles. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” Shannon said.

The woman jerked, eyes wide, to face her. “That’s…young.”

“Meh.” Shannon shrugged. “Most girls nowadays are getting laid for the first time at like fifteen.”

The old woman continued to stare at her. She seemed to clear her throat, then refocus on her knitting. “And what is it that girls are looking for in their young men nowadays? The modern courtship rituals…baffle me. Things were…” she twirled some yarn around, “…simpler…in my time.”

I’ll bet, Shannon thought, thinking she had to have been born around World War II.

Then the woman looked up at her and said, “When a man wanted to marry a woman, he’d simply kidnap her, take her to his house, and make her his. Now, I hear that’s frowned upon.”

Shannon laughed, despite herself. “Yeah, yeah it is. Pretty sure that would get the police involved.”

The elderly woman smiled with obvious amusement. “The police.” She shook he head. “In my day, there were no such thing. Just man, the sky, the earth, his family, and his tribe. No one to tell us what to do except our own fathers, nothing to tell us how to behave but our own instincts. Good people were made to lead, bad people were killed.” She scoffed again, and her disdain was absolute. “Police. A white man’s contrivance, to control other white men.” The old woman’s words sounded so bitter.

Shannon squinted at her. The woman didn’t look particularly native. “So, your forefathers were Indian or something?”

More incredible, overwhelming bitterness. “My parents were the blood that originally seeded this land. Before the white men spoiled it.”

Shannon got prickles of unease along the back of her neck at the old woman’s weird fixation on white men. Softly, thinking to carve through the creepy cloud of dementia, she said, “What year did you say you born?”

But, without a hitch, the woman smiled longingly said, “The summer of twelve-seventy-one, one week from now, in the year of great thunderstorms, in what is now called Tennessee.” And, with those words, there was a weird intensity in the woman’s brown eyes, a calm and powerful knowing and sadness.

Immediately, the uneasiness became a wash of goosebumps of alarm up and down Shannon’s arms. And, she had realized in the last two and half weeks of dealing with immortals, goosebumps were Bad. She glanced at the woman’s ‘knitting’ again. It wasn’t, she realized, actual knitting, but rather, a wad of yarn that the woman was twirling around with the knitting needles.

And, now that she was paying attention, the old woman’s brown eyes were too intense, too…questing. “It was beautiful then. Simple. Clean.”

As Shannon was tensing, getting ready to punch first and ask questions later a la Master Masaaki, from the seat between them came, “Scheisse! Scheisse! Dieser Ficker der barghest just punched—barmherziger und gnädiger Gott—I think he just punched Pestilence in the face!”

The old woman—or whatever it was—blinked and looked down startledly, and Shannon used that moment to grab a gun and yank it up between them, leveled on the woman’s wrinkly face. With her other hand, she started sliding back against the seat, reaching for the door handle.

“Who are you?” Shannon snapped.

The old lady tensed like she now held a viper, focused on the gun, making absolutely no move to reach for her. If anything, she looked slightly irritated. “We can either do this the old way or the new way,” he said softly. “Your choice.”

“Where’s Angus?” Shannon said, letting herself out of the vehicle, “What’d you do with him and the old lady?” She glanced behind her, saw that the parking lot was empty, and started backing away, towards where she had left Theo. “Hey Theo!” she called, still keeping the old woman in her sights.

Theo didn’t respond. “Theo!” Shannon shouted, her voice raising a couple notches. “We have a problem!”

“The lord is no longer your concern,” the woman in the car rumbled. Her image was shifting, growing taller and larger as she rounded the car. Suddenly, the silver blood-web of a vampire lord was clear within him, laced with the gold of a yatagarasu and...green of a feylord? He looked amused, full of swagger and confidence. “And since you’re choosing the old way—”  He popped his knuckles, grinning, and Shannon knew if he reached her, he could overpower her just like Theo.

If you must run, Masaaki warned in her head, strike the knee hard first. Try to dislocate it. Those with ill intent can’t follow you if they cannot walk.

“—it will be my pleasure to introduce you to—”

Shannon shot the huge native guy in the right knee until she ran out of bullets, then, as he was collapsing to the parking-lot in a pool of bone and cartilage, dropped the gun and bolted for the last place she’d seen Theo, leaving the native lord moaning and rolling on the asphalt.

When she rounded the corner, however, Theo was gone.