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“Here, drink this,” Val said, handing Mike a cup of hot tea. It was vending-machine tea, but if it tasted bad there was no sign of it on Mike’s face. He sipped it and then cradled the cardboard cup between his palms, body hunched over the rising steam, his face pale and unspeakably sad.
“Crow isn’t here?” he asked.
“No, he…had something important he had to do this morning. ”
Mike nodded, not looking at her. “He went back to Dark Hollow, didn’t he?”
Weinstock gave Val a sharp glance; she shook her head. “Mike?” she said softly, laying a hand on his knee. “What makes you think Crow’s gone out to the Hollow?”
“He’s gone out there to try and find Griswold. ”
When they didn’t answer Mike raised his head and looked at them. Both of them had horrified, stunned expressions on their faces, but these worsened as they got their first clear look at Mike’s eyes.
“God!” Val recoiled. “Mike…what’s happened to you?”
He managed the slightest of smiles, but his voice quavered as he said, “Don’t worry…I’m not one of them. ”
“You’re not one of…what?” she asked, and without realizing she was doing it she moved her right hand down toward her purse, where she had a . 32 pistol she’d taken from her father’s gun collection.
Mike’s eyes followed her, his smile flickering. The gold rims around his blue-red eyes seemed to flare for a second. “You going to shoot me?”
Her hands paused, fingertips just over the closed mouth of the bag. Narrowing her eyes, she said, “Do I need to shoot you, Mike?”
“I hope not,” he said. “I’ve already been dead once today. Don’t know how many times I can take it. ”
“God, Val, he’s a vampire!” Weinstock hissed.
Mike turned to him. “No,” he said softly, “I’m something…else. ”
Val paused a moment longer and then pulled her hand back. “What happened to you?”
He lowered his eyes. “I don’t know. I told you, I’m not one of them…but I don’t really know what I am. ”
“Mike, tell me what happened. ”
Tears pearled the corners of his eyes. “I…,” he began and a sob broke his word in half. Mike slid off the bed toward her and suddenly wrapped his arms around her; one sob became a flow of them and they built and built until he was sobbing uncontrollably, hanging on to Val as if he’d fall into the abyss if he let go. His thin body shook and bucked and after a moment of stunned hesitation Val gathered him in and held him as tightly as he clung to her.
He kept saying one word over and over again as he wept. “Mommy…”
2
Since he’d awakened in his grave a month ago the Bone Man had spent most of his time wandering the roads and fields of Pine Deep searching for some kind of purpose, for a reason that he was back. Some of the time his mind seemed to be opening up and filling with insights, with knowledge he could not have acquired while he was alive; but these moments of insight were always brief and they never let him look deeply enough into the mysteries. It was insanely frustrating.
He knew, for example, that Griswold was a psychic vampire and that Mike was a dhampyr; but he didn’t know the limits of what each of those things was, which didn’t exactly help him plan his next move.
He knew that the Red Wave was coming and that it was going to do great harm to the people of Pine Deep—but he didn’t actually know what form it would take, or the actual moment it would start. He knew it was going to be on Halloween, and he guessed that it would be sometime after sunset, but that’s where the whole process showed its rust: it was half knowledge and then guesswork.
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sp; He knew that he was here for a purpose, and that it was tied to Mike, certainly more so him than anyone; and along the way he’d learned that he could blind the eyes of that Bible-thumping tow truck driver any time he tried to put Mike in his sights. Yeah, mission accomplished there at least, but now he felt that there was a bigger, greater purpose.
He wondered if somehow Griswold was blocking him off from understanding his greater purpose. That wormy old bastard was strong enough—strong in ways that the Bone Man didn’t always understand. He was old strong, an evil intelligence centuries in the making.
Twice now he’d told that poor boy Mike the truth, first about his parentage, and then as much of the story as he knew. He knew, knew for a sure-thing certainty you could take to the bank, that it was the right thing to do, that telling Mike was part of why he had come back; but now, looking back on it, he was filled with doubts. The boy hadn’t taken the news well. Who would? The first time he’d crashed his bike and nearly died out in the fields. The second time the kid actually had died. That had scared the Bone Man worse than anything he’d known in life or death, and for a lot of long confused hours he’d sat by the boy’s body as it cooled. He’d never felt so lost and alone, so Judas guilty as he did then. Surely this boy was not meant to die. How could that make any kind of sense? And there had to be sense somewhere in this madness or why else had he been brought back? Granted, the kid was probably going to die during the Red Wave or maybe later when the strange genetics of the dhampyr wore the kid down and killed him as it did everyone cursed with that legacy, but the kid just up and had a coronary right there and then.
Sitting by the boy’s body the Bone Man cursed God until even the crows in the trees looked aghast.
Then Mike had stopped being dead.
