Dead But Not Forgotten Page 15

  And doesn’t God answer prayers?

  TUESDAY, JUNE 29

  Mitchell came home today. He was surprised when I made him drop his bag at the door and didn’t even ask him how the trip had gone before I led him upstairs. I’m not usually the aggressor in our love life. But after the shock wore off on him, I guess he didn’t mind. We spent the afternoon in bed.

  Then I went downstairs to fix dinner and he went outside to unload the truck. He looks so happy.

  I’m going to continue to keep this journal. I’ll have to be careful. Mitchell mustn’t ever find it, but I’m glad I started it. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m more confident now than ever before that it will be good.

  I hear Mitchell on the porch. I have to find a place to hide this.

  I can hardly wait to tell him he’s going to be a father . . .

  SECOND AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  So began the journal Adele kept for almost a year. Most of the days are filled with the trivia of daily life, but nine months to the day after Fintan appeared out of the forest, she gave birth to a baby boy. It wasn’t the end of the story, of course. Fintan reappeared in her life two years later to father a daughter.

  At the birth of Adele’s children, Corbett and Linda, Mr. Cataliades, a man she called a kind of “godfather,” appeared to see them. He returned twice again—once after her granddaughter Sookie was born and at grandson Jason’s birth. He told Adele that he had given each of her grandchildren a gift. He wasn’t specific then, but clearly in Sookie he saw something, “an essential spark,” and because of that he bestowed upon her telepathic abilities. Jason, unlike his father and aunt, who seemed not to benefit at all in their father’s legacy, was given the powers of seduction and attraction, the ability to attract lovers. As Jason was to learn, not always a good thing.

  Later, when Mr. Cataliades appeared one more time, it was to Adele to pass along the cluviel dor Sookie eventually inherited. Adele was afraid to ask the question, but Cataliades’s words that Fintan had given it to him to bring to her if Fintan died first said it all. Fintan was indeed dead. Adele greeted the news with a mixture of sadness and relief. Sadness because if the words of the stranger were true, Fintan’s “gift” meant he really had loved her. Relief because although she loved her children and grandchildren more than life itself, guilt from keeping such a huge secret from Mitchell had taken its toll.

  In all the time to follow, Mitchell never questioned the paternity of two children he loved as his own, just as Adele would never regret giving life to Corbett and Linda. Watching Mitchell with the children, seeing the love on his face when he held his babies for the first time, she knew Fintan had been wise to advise her not to be hasty to tell him about how those babies came about. Mitchell deserved to be happy, and regardless of whatever moral questions arise over what Adele did to ensure that happiness, the results cannot be denied.

  And so I conclude where I began. Was this a story of betrayal and infidelity? Was Adele beguiled against her will by a beautiful creature?

  Arguments can be made for both. But the greater question is does God hear and answer our prayers? And if yes, who are we to question his ways? So, I propose again that this is a love story. A love story between two people who loved each other as much as they loved the two children and later, the three grandchildren who came into their lives. Two people who asked God for children and had their prayers answered.

  This is the love story between Adele and Mitchell Stackhouse.

  THE MILLION-DOLLAR HUNT

  JONATHAN MABERRY

  Jonathan Maberry decided to write about Mustapha, my ex-con lone wolf. To make enough money to give his lover a better life, Mustapha agrees to take part in a reality game show where weres of all stripes hunt one another for nonlethal sports entertainment. But there’s a much darker game running. The real game is an absolute killer.

  —

  -1-

  The trick was to remember that this was a game.

  Hard to do when you’re dying.

  Hard to do when they’re hunting you.

  Hard to do when you are absolutely sure you’re going to die.

  A game.

  Yeah, sure.

  Just not his game.

  -2-

  Mustapha Khan moved through the forest as silently as possible, doing his best to avoid the cameras mounted high on trees.

  Sometimes he ran on two legs.

  Sometimes on four.

  Different advantages to each.

  Different vulnerabilities.

  The werewolf could move faster than the man.

  But when he was human, the drugs didn’t seem to knock the world sideways as much. Whatever was on those damn claws was clearly designed to disorient the wolf, not the man.

  Weird science.

  Or, just weird.

  He didn’t care.

  Besides, at the moment, he needed two legs and two hands. One hand to pull himself up the slope of the ravine—grasping slender sapling trunks and gritty root tangles—the other to keep his wadded-up T-shirt pressed tightly against his wound.

  Wounds, really.

  Four long, deep cuts. Mustapha didn’t know how bad they were. The pain was less than he expected. Probably shock. And if it was shock, there would be one tossed-bone of a benefit. Shock slows bleeding. Put that in the win column. Kind of.

  He smiled weakly at the thought of that “benefit.” It was the kind of good luck he usually had. The universe was always being so damn kind to him.

  Shit.

  He looked up at the side of the ravine and could swear it was twice as high.

  “Come on, goddamn it,” he growled. Not sure if he was mad at the world, mad at himself, or just mad. As in batshit crazy.

  A purple-brown root curled out of the slope like a loop of intestine. He reached for it, closed his fingers around it, took a breath, pulled. Pain seemed to explode in every molecule of his body.

  “Fuck you,” he told the pain, the root, the slope, the drugs in his blood, and the son of a bitch who’d cut him. Bitterness was something he could grind his teeth on as he climbed, so he snarled with anger and pulled himself another foot upward. And another.

  Late yesterday afternoon, when he’d come this way, the ravine was nothing. A twenty-five-degree decline on one side, maybe thirty on the other. Nothing he couldn’t manage in human form without working up a sweat. Now that slope felt like a sheer cliff. He fought for every inch upward.

  Twice he slipped and slid all the way to the ravine floor. Thirty-five feet of hidden rocks, sticker bushes, rotted vegetation, and wormy dirt. This was his third try.

  Sweat ran in crooked lines down his skin. The rags of his clothes were soaked with it, and with blood. A small fragment of consolation came from the knowledge—the red memory—that some of it was his.

  His.

  The bastard who’d clawed him.

  At least he could bleed.

  At least that son of a bitch wasn’t as invulnerable as he wanted everyone to think. Close, yeah, sure. Real close. But if he could bleed, then . . .

  Mustapha took a breath, snaked his hand out for a maple sapling. His fingers closed around it but immediately began to slip, gravity and weakness prying his hand open.

  “No!” he shouted.

  No.

  But the day said yes.

  And he fell.

  He hit every goddamn rock and stone and root on the slope. He bounced twice and rolled over off the edge of an outcrop of limestone. From there it was a straight drop to the ravine floor.

  He landed badly.

  Far above him was a camera, but its red eye was pointed elsewhere. Maybe it hadn’t seen him. Maybe it was still looking for him.

  Or maybe a man bleeding to death in a ravine made for bad television.

  As his life leaked
out of him he found that he no longer cared.

  Mustapha’s grip on consciousness slipped as easily and completely as had his hand.

  “No . . .” he said once more, very weakly. The canopy of trees above him lost its form, the leaves smearing into a dark canvas on which was painted absolutely nothing.

  -3-

  Dreams offered no rest for him. They did not let him forget.

  As Mustapha lay in a rag-doll sprawl at the bottom of the ravine, his mind rewound the last few days as if it were all recorded on videotape. Be kind, rewind. Except it was no kindness.

  The tape seemed to be damaged. Splotchy. The memories came in chunks, pieces, with scenes unfinished and missing dialogue. As he fell deeper and deeper into the black well, he watched it as if it all belonged to someone else’s life. To a life that could not possibly be his.

  Sitting at the Hair of the Dog, drinking unsweetened iced tea from a sweating glass, thinking about the Long Tooth pack. Join, don’t join. Over and over again, looking at it from all sides. And in the middle of that come two guys in city suits. Big white guy, medium-sized black guy. Gray suits. Hand-sewn Italian shoes. Oakleys that they never took off. Big smiles with lots of white teeth. Gold rings and Rolexes. Money, even from a distance. As they come in, Mustapha sees the Lexus LX 570 sitting outside.

  Without preamble the black guy says, “KeShawn Johnson?”

  Mustapha gave him the look. The look. The one that says Go away while you can still walk in any language you want.

  The white guy says, “Our pardon. Mustapha Khan?”

  “Who’s asking?” Mustapha replies.

  The white guy produces a business card, holds it out, and when it isn’t taken he places it faceup on the tabletop.

  REAL ADVENTURE PRODUCTIONS

  Expensive card. Embossed.

  Name on the lower left is Ronald Hawes. The address is in Hollywood.

  “I’m Hawes,” Hawes says, then nods to his companion. “This is Mr. Bell.”

  Mustapha still gives them the look, though he changes the frequency to include a clear “so what” vibe. But he doesn’t say anything. Lets them do the work.

  “We would like to talk to you about The Million-Dollar Hunt.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Hawes and Bell smile their whitest smiles. “It’s how you become a rich and famous man.”

  “Not much interested in becoming famous,” says Mustapha.

  “What about becoming rich?” asks Bell.

  Mustapha takes a breath. “Yeah. We can talk about that.”

  And then only fragments of the conversation that followed. Snatches of sentences.

  “. . . whole new kind of reality show . . .”

  “. . . like Survivor or The Great Race but with a real edge . . .”

  “. . . two players . . .”

  “. . . like, not prerecorded . . .”

  “. . . subscription only . . .”

  After that, it was murkier for his dreaming mind. A flight to Los Angeles to meet with producers and a director. And lawyers. Papers to sign. Checks to deposit. Photos to be taken. Interviews timed for the rollout of the show.

  The show.

  The Million-Dollar Hunt.

  That’s what it was called.

  A new spin on The Most Dangerous Game, except that it wasn’t men hunting other men.

  It was were hunting were.

  Players go into the woods wearing only the clothes on their backs. They live off the land and follow scent markers to find equipment, weapons, and food. The weapons are mock—rubber knives, paintball guns, water-balloon grenades. No killing weapons.

  Even in his delirium Mustapha thought, Yeah, right.

  The rules were simple.

  In round one, it’s all about surviving dummy booby traps. That part was easy, even a little fun. With the tree-mounted cameras recording it all for all the pay-per-view couch potatoes out there, and the possibility of residuals from DVD sales down the road. Maybe even a book deal for the winner.

  Then there was round two.

  Round two was about weres fighting one another with fake weapons. Each weapon rigged with a little built-in sensor to record wounding blows and killing blows, like in fencing matches. Touch a throat and earn a beep.

  And earn a bonus.

  Starting pay before Mustapha set one foot into the forest was ten thousand dollars. Serious bank.

  Escaping or disarming booby traps earned cash ranging from two hundred dollars to a grand.

  Battles with rubber weapons were scaled, too. Disabling injury—a touch to bicep or thigh—was low pay. Getting a beep from touching a throat, a heart, a groin, an artery, was bigger bucks.

  All in fun.

  The fat slobs in their La-Z-Boys watching from the comfort of their homes would be getting boners imagining that it was them out there. Fighting with skill, fighting with ferocity.

  Mustapha still liked that part of it.

  Then there was round three.

  Round three was what it was all about.

  That was were fighting were for real.

  No rubber knives.

  No splashy water balloons.

  Round three was claws and teeth.

  Even so, it was supposed to be simulated. A fight with no more reality than the brawling in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Some bruises, sure. A little blood? Why not? It looks great on a flat-screen TV. But at the end of the day, the losers go home with a short count on their paychecks and the winner cashes a check for one million dollars.

  His dreaming mind sneered.

  Even drugged and bleeding, he knew the difference between a Hollywood truth and a brutal reality.

  This was either a scam of the most dangerous kind or a runaway train that was off the rails.

  In either case, Mustapha was losing the game.

  He lay there, sprawled in the dirt at the bottom of a gash in the earth. Four ragged lines torn in his flesh leaked blood into the soil.

  -4-

  The memory of the fight replayed over and over as he lay there.

  Mustapha had just won a mock fight with rubber hatchets. He and the werefox he’d beaten had stayed in human form for the whole fight. That was the rule for that round. They had to prove themselves as human warriors.

  The fox was a tall, wiry Texan with bright red hair and a dozen piercings on his face. Sunlight struck sparks from earlobes, lips, eyebrow, nose, and on the diamond stud drilled through the bridge of the man’s nose.

  Little bastard could fight, though.

  He and Mustapha had feinted and dueled for almost a full minute—which is a long damn time in a fight. In the movies and on TV a fight can spill out for minutes, but when it’s real—really real, not two guys measuring their junk in a bar—it was all over in seconds.

  Mustapha and the fox—he never did learn the man’s name—both knew how to handle blades, and the other guy had the kind of moves you only ever learn in a prison yard. Okay, not hatchets per se, but the dart-and-dodge body movements that kept a blade fighter alive while he deconstructed the other guy. The kind of fighting cons doing hard time pretty much hold a patent on.

  It was the prison thing—and all the memories that came with it—that made Mustapha want to win that fight. He did, too. He let the fox guy get close enough to land a solid elbow shot to the short ribs, which was part of a well-known combination to deliver a follow-up close-range shank. Mustapha took the elbow hit, but he was already moving to counter the follow-up. He pushed himself into the hit, taking it too soon, jamming the fox guy’s pivot, spun him around, and wrapped one muscular arm around his throat from behind, kneed him in the coccyx, and reached around to chop him in the crotch with the rubber hammer.

  Still hurt, though.

  Still hurt like a son of a bitch. Just n
ot as bad as what he’d done to the fox.

  Fox guy dropped to his knees, vomited, and collapsed sideways, clutching his balls and turning a nice shade of puce.

  That was the first in round two. Each round doubled the number of encounters, and that one wasn’t two guys bashing each other with rubber weapons. It was were against were, and in this case, a werepuma.

  That one was quick. Probably too quick for good ratings, and definitely too quick for a top bonus, but it was a win. Mustapha had trapped the puma on the edge of a bluff and when it reared to slash him, Mustapha had simply run into it. The puma went right over the edge and into the water. By the time he climbed out, the current had taken him too far downstream for Mustapha to bother. It wasn’t a simulated big-ticket kill, but it was a win.

  Mustapha figured that getting to the end of the game and snatching that big prize was going to do him a lot more good than getting scuffed up in a bunch of piddling duels. Especially if he had an opponent waiting for him who was going to be real trouble. Like a werelion or weretiger.

  Or werebear.

  Oh, my.

  Forty minutes after dunking the puma he ran into a bear.

  Son of a bitch.

  The bear.

  Buoyed by his win, and already counting the bonus money, Mustapha shifted to four legs and ran through the woods, burning off nervous energy, letting the adrenaline dilute as it passed through his racing blood.

  He ran up and down hills, delighting in the mental rush of power that came from winning. Even though there was no kill. Even though this was not fighting for inclusion in a pack. A win was a win was a win.

  Put it in the bank.

  He never saw the bear.

  He smelled it, though, about a half second too late.

  It was waiting for him. Patient, the way good hunters are. Silent. Snugged down in a tangle of fallen pine boughs that were clumped beside a well-worn game trail. Hiding amid all of those other scents. Deer and elk and raccoon. Invisible for that extra half second. Cameras in the trees recording it all.

  Mustapha was in midstride, his senses just beginning to alert him to a wrongness in the air. Then there was a blur of movement. Brown fur, white fangs, and yellow claws.