Strange Angels

being on track again. Not right—it wouldn’t be right again, not ever. But on track. Better.

Right enough.

“Am I still human?” Graves took the next plate after I rinsed it off, swiped at it with the towel. Scrubbed at it a little harder as color mounted in his golden cheeks.

Am I? “Yeah, sure. Of course you are.”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I felt like I wanted to kill him.”

You’re not the only one. I suppressed a shudder. “I’m not surprised. If he is what he says he is, you guys are pretty much enemies. Wulfen don’t like suckers. Or even anything that smells like suckers.”

That managed to prick his interest. “Is it like a big war between them?”

“Not exactly. They’re just . . . well, they’re like jocks and nerds. Or hyenas and lions. They coexist, right, but they’re different breeds and they don’t mix. And they’re always on the lookout for each other.” I paused. “A group of wulfen might help another group of wulfen or something else they don’t like against a sucker, and suckers sometimes kill stray wulfen, of whatever type. There are lots of types, like tribes, and the suckers are organized into tribes, too. Their allegiances shift, but the suckers never band together to take out wulfen, and the wulfen don’t really go after suckers unless it’s to avenge one of their own. So they have this kind of agreement: Each group doesn’t really hang out with the other.” I handed him a dripping glass and was kind of surprised. Guess I knew a little more than I thought. That’s a relief.

“Okay.” He nodded, dried the glass with finicky care, and put it up. “So. Warding the house. That some sort of witchcraft?”

What do you know about witchcraft? “More like folk magic. My Gran was a tooth- curer and hex-lifter out in the sticks back East. A wisewoman. You start throwing the W-word around and people get a little tense.” They still burn people in some places. Even here in the good ol’ US of A. There was that one town—

“I guess so. So what’s involved in this?” He looked far more interested than I’d ever seen him in school, and it did wonders for him. His face looked leaner, more defined and less babyish. Maybe it was the light through the kitchen window, since Christophe had looked pretty nice under it, too.

God help me, I’d just dumbed down everything Gran taught me into folk cures. She would have just said, A little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that, and never you mind what I call it if’n it works, while fixing him with that beady-eyed stare that had made more than one grown adult quail.

They hadn’t called Gran a witch, but nobody wanted to cross her. And they would come to her door at dusk or in the middle of the night, for cures or other things. Payment was in eggs or salt pork, or herbs, or a bolt of material Gran would make dresses or quilts from. Those quilts sold for a good price, too, since rumor had it that Gran Anderson’s quilts would keep lightning from the house or help make for an easy pregnancy.

I’d thought that was normal until she sent me down to the schoolhouse in the valley. And then later, after she died and Dad came to collect me, I’d found out other people didn’t take spitting in someone’s shadow as a deadly insult, didn’t wash their floors with yarrow, and had no idea how dark and inimical the night could be.

“Dru?” Graves looked a little worried. I came back to myself with a jolt and finished washing the spaghetti pot from a couple nights ago. All shiny-clean. “Some salt water. I’ve got my Gran’s rowan wand, too. And we’ve got a bunch of white candles. One of those should do fine.”

CHAPTER 22

They smell like dust, paper, old leather, and each one of them costs a pretty penny. There’s Aberforth’s Creatures of Shadow, Belt-Norsen’s Demoniaca, Pretton’s Encyclopedia of the Darkness, and Coilfer’s weird but totally readable Collection of True Folktales. Which I’ve scared myself with a number of times, because Patton Coilfer could write. Dad told me that he came to a bad end, something involving an African curse and a bunch of masks, one of which had belonged to the semi- famous Sir Edwin Colin Wilson.

That’s enough to give anyone who’s read True Folktales nightmares, let me tell you.

We had other books, but those were the first I pulled out. After a few seconds of thought, I pulled out another prize possession—Haly Yolden’s Ars Lupica, with its tooled leather cover and worn gilt-edged pages. Graves was making coffee—probably too weak, of course—while I spread them out in the living room and started flipping through indexes.

It’s funny, a lot of books that would be otherwise useful don’t have indexes. You have to kind of shoot by guess, and that’s never fun. Especially when you start sneezing uncontrollably at the dust, or when you have to find something in a hurry. The only thing more annoying is having to go through microfiche. Real microfiche, not just the electronic captures of ’fiche they’ve been doing whenever they have funding lately. Nothing like scanning ancient newspapers on a ’fiche reader to make you feel old and dry. And give you a headache like a mule kicking in your skull.

I had to go through a couple of different spellings (dhampire, dhamphir, dhampyr) before I found djamphir and figured out they were all basically the same thing, and when I did, I settled down for some scanning. True to form, Coilfer was the best written and most useful of the four.

The djamphir—he spelled it the way Christophe had pronounced it—was a half- human vampire killer. Some had a thirst for blood; most were rumored to have bone problems. Lots of them were twins, but girl twins were never mentioned. Just boys, like a lot of other things in the books about the Real World. It’s like girls are invisible.

Anyway, they were supposed to be often born without bones, and most of the legends were from the Balkans. If djamphir survived to adolescence or adulthood, they hunted wampyr or upir—suckers. Suckers had the hots for human women in a big way, and often bred with them. The result of those unions were djamphir, and once there was a taint of sucker in the bloodline, there were always djamphir, no matter how many generations passed.

The half or quarter or whatever bit of wampyr in them made djamphir good vampire hunters. They were always paid whatever they asked for, in cattle, clothes, or “even women.”

Yeah. The Real World isn’t big on feminism.

Djamphir were long-lived, possibly immortal—if the suckers didn’t hunt back. But a lot of the suckers did. A lot of them killed their own part-human progeny, too. With a vengeance.

I had to sit back and think about that for a moment. Ugh. That’s awful.

“Coffee,” Graves said, and stopped in the door, looking at me a little weird. “You okay?”

We’re going to play a game, Dru.

I shook my head, pushing the memory away. “This is gruesome stuff.”

“Figures. So, is he telling the truth?” He handed me my cow mug, the one that matched the cookie jar.

“Haven’t figured that out yet.” I pushed the Aberforth and the Pretton over to him. “Look in those for loup-garou, but don’t lose the pages I’ve marked, okay? And that one right there, Ars Lupica. Check that too.”

“Loup-garou.” He looked down at the scrap of paper I’d written it on. “Okay. You got it.”

“You’re probably really good at this research thing.” I blew across the top of my coffee, took a small sip, and was pleasantly surprised. It was getting better.