Strange Candy (Vampire Hunter 0.5)

She muttered something unintelligible, which meant she wasn’t awake at all. She’s the only person I know who hates morning more than I do.

“Come on, Susan, Irving broke out of his barricade and is terrorizing the tourists.”

She turned over, blinking at me. “He won’t hurt them,” she said thickly.

“No, but they don’t know that.”

She laughed, a rich, dark sound like good wine. “Do you think they’d believe he was a vegetarian?”

“Not with all those teeth,” I said. “Come on, we gotta go herd Irving back inside and repair the barricade.”

“You know,” Susan said, “Irving used to be almost exclusively nocturnal, but lately he’s active at all hours. I wonder why?”

I shrugged and ran a comb through my hair. “Unknown,” I said.

Unknown, a good word for lake monsters. Nobody knew much about them, and now they were endangered, nearly extinct. Two lake monsters had died in the last fifteen years, both killed by pollution. To make the tragedy worse, both monsters had been pregnant. The babies had been fully formed, but the pollution had gotten them, too. Lake monsters need nearly pristine conditions, and as man spreads out, pristine gets pretty rare.

The question that no one could answer was, how had the two dead females gotten pregnant? Sexual reproduction is a little hard without a mate. There are wonderful theories about secret tunnels connecting the lakes, but no one had found any tunnels. Another idea was that male lake monsters look so different from females that they had been classed as some sort of fish or…something. But Irving, and two other monsters, had male genitalia. Irving didn’t look anything like a fish.

Susan had come here three years ago to study Irving, the lake monster. I was a forest ranger with a master’s degree in cryptozoology, a nice degree if you work in the Enchanted Forest National Park. I was assigned to help Dr. Susan Greco, noted cryptozoologist, look into a possible breeding program for our lake monster. A female lake monster in New England was being studied as well. The idea was to transport her to Irving, maybe. There was always the chance that the two monsters would fight and kill each other. No one had ever seen two monsters together.

Three years later, married to each other for almost two years, and we still didn’t know a damn thing about the sex life of the greater lake monster. Whether there was such a thing as a lesser lake monster was a matter of great debate. Were the two small monsters in other states just younger greater lake monsters, or were they a separate species? How long did lake monsters live? We could reach up and rub Irving between the eye ridges, and we still didn’t know how old he was.

Twenty minutes later we were bouncing across the lake in a small boat. The sky was milky blue with cumulus clouds like white cotton candy. The water was the usual mirror brightness, reflecting the straight cones of pines, and the distant rise of mountains. Two boats passed us at full throttle; the passengers waved and yelled. I caught one word: “Monster!”

Jordan guided our boat. He was one of the junior rangers. He looked like his name: blond, handsome in a California surf-boy kind of way. Susan said he was cute. If Jordan hadn’t been such a hardworking nice guy, I could have disliked him. Jordan drove the boat so Susan and I could slip into diving gear. If you’ve ever tried to get into a wet suit while riding full tilt in a small boat, slip is not quite the word—struggle maybe. When I was encased in latex from ankle to neck, I took a quick peek through binoculars at our lake monster.

Irving looks like a cross between a Chinese dragon, an eel, and an oil slick. His head is the most dragonlike, with slender horns and rubbery spikes bristling around very square jaws. Most of his thirty-foot length is all slick and slightly flattened; eel, not land snake. His fringelike dorsal fin extends nearly the length of his body. Overall, his color is black, but he glistens in sunlight like an oil slick; rings of color flash and melt along his skin. The rainbow only shows up at close range, though. Most people aren’t much interested in how pretty he is when they’re that close.

Irving’s head was keeping pace with the last water-skier. It was a man in a bright orange ski vest. Though through my binoculars his tanned face looked bloodless. Irving’s mouth was half open, exposing a dazzling display of teeth. The boat was going full out, motor screaming. The skier was riding the white foam of the wake like his life depended on it.

The faster the boat went, the faster Irving swam, but quiet, no foaming wake for the lake monster. He could glide at incredible speeds nearly silent and waveless. The only reason we saw so much of Irving was because he liked people. He wanted to be seen. Most lake monsters gave a new definition to the word shy.

The skier fell into the water. He bobbed to the surface, trapped in his life vest. I could see him screaming and waving his arms.

The lake monster blew bubbles at him, then stretched his neck up ten feet and gave a great honking sound. It’s his version of human laughter.

If Irving had been human, he’d have been your obnoxious Uncle Ned—the one who makes really bad jokes, wears loud plaid, and slips you twenty dollars when your parents aren’t looking. Irving had a good heart, but his sense of humor was a little sadistic.

Susan waved and called, “Irving!”

His great head swiveled and looked at our boat. He gave a loud snort and dived under the water. The skier started to paddle frantically for his boat.

Irving surfaced about five feet from us. Jordan cut the motor and let us drift while the monster moved up alongside. I struggled with my diving gear while Susan coaxed Irving. He finally let her rub the bristles on his chin and then snorted into her wet suit, splashing her with water and making a happy humph sound. She laughed and rubbed his eye ridges.

Jordan started the boat again, and we began moving slowly toward the barricade and Irving’s part of the lake. Our walkie-talkies squawked to life. Someone was calling me. Jordan took it because I was still fastening air tanks into place. It was hard to hear anything over the whine of boat and happy monster noises.

“It’s Priscilla. She and Roy are at an abandoned campsite. A whole troop of Girl Scouts plus two of their leaders are missing.”

“How long have they been missing?”

“Unsure.”

“Damn. Any signs of a struggle?”

Jordan asked, then shook his head. “Looks like they just walked away.”

“Where were they camped?”

“Near Starlight Ridge.”

“What genius let them camp that far up?”

“You know how it is, Mike, they pick their own campsite.”

“But it’s June,” I said.

Jordan just frowned at me, but Susan let out a slow whistle.

“What?” asked Jordan.

“No all-female groups are allowed to camp above Bluebell Glade between May thirteenth and June thirtieth.”

“But…” Then the light dawned. “Oh, shit.”

I nodded. “Satyr rutting season. Have them check Satyr Glade. And find out who the hell OK’d the campsite.”

Susan said softly, “Somebody’s going to get sued over this one.”

All I could do was nod. I wasn’t usually in charge of anything but the monster. Unfortunately, our chief ranger was on the injured list for at least three weeks. I was acting chief ranger at the height of the tourist season.

The barricade stretched across the most narrow part of the lake, from pine-covered shore to rocky outcrop. It was a deluxe steel net, enough give and no sharp edges so Irving wouldn’t be able to break it. The barricade had been the single most expensive item of the Lake Monster Breeding Program.

The net stretched smooth and unbroken, which meant the damage had to be below the water line. Irving had learned that if he damaged the visible part of the net, we’d discover his escape sooner, but underwater we wouldn’t notice the breakout until we spotted him.

The water was cold even in June, not uncomfortable but cool, and it closed around me on all sides. Air may be all around you on land, but it doesn’t have the invasive push of water. Water lets you know it’s there. On a good day the visibility is twenty feet. Today wasn’t a good day.

A swirl of water and Irving coiled through the silver trail of my air bubbles, the thickness of his body looped against my back. I brushed a hand down his side as he eased past me. I expected monsters to feel like dolphins, rubbery and somehow unreal, or snakes with their dry, soft brush of scales, but monsters feel like…monsters. Slick, wet but soft like pressed velvet. And underneath it all, even when you can’t see most of him, just a glimpse of shining, black coils, there is the feeling of immense power. Even if you can’t see him, you know he’s big. You know he could flatten you if he wanted to, but Irving is like some of the great whales. He seems to know he’s big and that you’re small. He’s careful around us.