Valentine sweltered in his cocoon of mosquito netting in a shallow sleep brought on by heat exhaustion. His usually pleasant hammock had been transformed into a torture chamber by the temperature and humidity. Naturally he preferred to keep himself, like his clothing and his pack, off the ground and out of reach of the various multilegged crawlies and snakes that might be attracted to a warm, motionless body on the damp earth. Only the earliest hours of the morning brought a lessening of the heat. He would give anything he owned for a swim in one of Minnesota's clear cool lakes in this Delta summer. But even if he had been physically comfortable, he would still have passed a fitful night. The old dream about his family home had come back.
Eveready's predawn return cut off his old nightmare. The Cat had walked off into the east within an hour of picking the spot for their camp days ago, leaving orders to wait and not to use guns while hunting. Eveready declined to explain whether this was because of nearby danger or just the parsimony brought on by visiting a supply station twice a year.
"Everybody up," Eveready announced, laboring into camp with a heavy sack across his shoulder. His ancient M-l carbine was slung across his chest, stock glowing with its usual loving polish of well-oiled wood. Burton, who had the third watch, started to pour water into the coffeepot. "Forget that for now, Burt," the Cat rasped. "You boys aren't going to want breakfast when you see what I've brung home. Hand me that water, boy."
Valentine tried to rub the gum from his eyes as he watched Eveready drink. Though the black-skinned man was a Cat, one of the caste whose members operated alone deep in Kurian-conquered territory, there was nothing catlike about him. Eveready was a grizzled old warthog: all tough-minded determination on a thick body beneath a thicker hide. Barefoot, with ragged black trousers that ended at calves as wide as horse hooves, the rest of his body resembled a barrel with arms added as an afterthought. Chest muscles strained from an equally ragged vest cut from the heavy ablative cloth that the Reapers wore, and his neck was festooned with dangling teeth pulled from the Hoods he'd exterminated. The Wolves had never seen him eat anything but oversalted game stews and apples-Valentine believed Eveready knew the location of every single apple tree and grove within a three-hundred-mile arc of the Yazoo Delta-and this eccentric diet had left him with ageless vitality and shining white teeth. He was bald as the man in the moon but hid the fact with a battered baseball cap with a Saints logo. Eveready could climb like an ape, float like an alligator, and leap like a deer, all without making enough noise to cause a mouse to startle.
Easing himself out of the hammock, Valentine shook his head and took a pull from the water bottle he bedded down with to save a trip out of the mosquito netting. He pulled on his moccasins after eyeing the insides. Though they had hung from his hammock, the ingenuity of the Yazoo wildlife at curling up for a nap where least expected had been brought home to Valentine by a painful centipede bite earlier in the summer.
"What did you bring us, Santa?" Alistar, one of the Wolves, asked.
The Wolves gathered, and Eveready dumped the stained sack in the center of the campground. At first Valentine thought it was a trick of the rapidly growing light, but the sack seemed to writhe as it hit ground.
"Valentine, get your chopper," Eveready ordered. Valentine retrieved his parang, a fourteen-inch broad hunting knife swelled at the center like a pregnant machete. It had a heavy wood handle with the tang capped at the end, combining the sharpness of a skinning knife with the utility of a hatchet.
Eveready used his own smaller clasp knife to cut open the bag, which Valentine saw with a kind of cold horror really was squirming on its own in the center of the ring of five men. The big Cat dumped the sack's contents.
"Fuck me!" Burton said, and pulled at the beard he had been growing all summer.
Flopping in the dawn was a pale humanoid torso. Where arms and legs should have been, only tarry stumps remained. A second sack fixed by cording circled around the neck and hid the thing's face. Burton half laughed, half retched at the sweet corruptive odor that made the Wolves take a step back. Sixteen-year-old Hernandez, the youngest of the new Wolves, crossed himself.
"Never seen one this close, boys?" Eveready asked. The four shook their heads, disgusted and fascinated at the same time.
"There are these big hunting cats in a place on the other side of the world, boys. India, it was called. Big stripy orange things called tigers. You wouldn't think they could sneak up on anything, unless you saw them moving through tall grass on our televisions, that is. But a momma tiger would teach her baby to kill by swatting something so it was half-dead; then the cub would kill it. Now that ain't exactly what I'm doing with you cubs, but I want you to get a good look at a Hood up close, minus his robes, in such a way that you'll live through the seeing of it. Sort of a National Geographic, courtesy of old Eveready."
The thing rolled on its back and made an inarticulate glubbing sound.
"Bastard can't talk too good," Eveready continued, reaching into his forage pouch. "I yanked this out." The Cat handed over the Reaper's limp, sixteen-inch-long tongue, and the Wolves passed it around dubiously. It reminded Valentine of a snake, scaly with a beaklike point at the end. "That's the straw it sticks into you. See the scales? They come up in you like barbs, keep you from pulling away. Not that you have much chance if this honey's got you in his arms."
"How... how did you bag it?" Valentine asked.
"I was scouting a little railroad town southeast of Big M's ruins. HollySprings. Sources told me this fella came into town about midnight, doing the usual checkup with a company of Quislings out of Corinth. Any time a Reaper comes through, a few folks try to leave town real quick, and this thing goes after them when it was getting on toward dawn. The Quislings were too busy in the henhouses and pigpens to notice much. A hungry Reaper is hard enough to keep up with and maybe they didn't want to be around when he fed. So these refugees are heading for tall timber on horseback, and the yellow eye here is after them. He got one jifst as the sun came up, fed, and I caught up with him when he got all dopey from the drinking. It was a pretty bright morning for a change, so his eyes weren't working too well, either. I emptied old Trudy into him from about ten feet," he said, patting his carbine affectionately. "Shot a leg more or less off where it was showing under the robe, and took the rest off with my cavalry saber before he knew what hit him. I hacked around at his throat and pulled his tongue out from beneath the jaw, Colombian-necktie style. Sacked him up, then caught up with the horse belonging to the poor bastard he caught. Then I about broke my ass getting west."
Eveready chuckled. "I wouldn't care to be that Quisling commander in HollySprings. The Big Boss in Corinth will send some Hoods out to settle things, with me and them both."
"You covered some miles," Alistar said. "Where's the horse, rode to death? We could've traded it, at least."
Eveready shook his head. "There was some border trash camped out by a crick a few miles northeast of here. I gave the horse her head, just took the saddle and bridle off, and she scented the other horses and wandered off. I carried the saddle aways, but it was too much lugging the ghoul and all that leather, too. I didn't want to be too slow; this guy's friends might home in on him."
"Hard on the group by the crick, if the Reapers catch up with that horse," Valentine suggested.
"They ain't no friends of yours, son. That's why I've been warning you boys about these borderlands. No law and order. There's the bad order of the Kurian spaces, and the law of the FreeTerritory. In fact, you'd be surprised at how orderly some of those Kurian towns are. Everybody with identity cards and permission slips and papers just to go to the outhouse. But between 'em where we are is up for grabs, and these bastards will rob you and leave you for dead as soon as they'd say 'Good morning." I figure any Hood pursuit is welcome to 'em.
"Now let's get down to business. Gimme your slaying blade, Valentine. Now watch this," Eveready lectured as if he were in a classroom with glossy black experiment tables instead of a patch of soggy ground forty miles from nowhere. He opened a vertical cut along the thing's stomach. "See how that black goo comes up when the air hits it? It's something in these things' blood that makes an instant suture. If you ever get any on your hands, get it off quick, and whatever you do, don't get it in your mouth. Put some of this stuff on a dog's tongue, and it'll kill the man holding the leash. It's not so bad though; even when you're hacking one up, the goo doesn't fly around that much. It's too sticky. Make sure you pull your blade out quickly, though; if you leave it in for a few seconds even, this stuff will sometimes glue it right in place. Take my word for it, you don't want that to happen."
The Reaper thrashed around in pain, and Valentine stuck his foot on its chest to hold it in place. The smell sickened him. He felt thankful for his empty stomach.
"The sumbitch is moving around too much," Eveready decided. "Let's finish him. But I want to look him in the eyes for a second," he stated, cutting the cords around the thing's neck with the sharp edge at the tip of Valentine's parang.
The Reaper's face was a mess. Two gummed-over bullet holes in the cheek and forehead stood out against the deathly pale skin. Black fangs snarled at them from above the butchered neck. Its eyes were not the pink of a true albino's but rather black, with slit pupils and yellowish reptilian irises. It hissed, glaring hatefully at the five humans around it. Valentine felt hard pressure against his foot as it tried to wiggle loose despite its injuries. Valentine looked into "its eyes and felt lost in the black depths. Was there such a thing as blacker than black? He felt himself compelled to lift his foot off the thing's chest.
"Steady there, David. You look like you might keel over," a voice said from somewhere near the GulfCoast.
Valentine tried to raise his eyes from the black slits, failed.
Don't give in to the darkness, a part of his consciousness urged. It's only the black eyes of the crow, picking at your father's brains. He raised his eyes up to the lightening sky and planted his foot even more firmly on the mutilated torso.
"That's better, David," Eveready said, patting Valentine's shoulder. "You got to watch those eyes. For a second there, you looked like a bird staring at a snake. You weren't seeing the Hood, it was the Kurian behind it."