Eveready leaned over its face, taking a small cylinder from his pocket with his left hand. It was a crusty old battery, of a type invented just before 2022 that had a very prolonged shelf life. A symbol of a black cat leaping through an electric hoop could be seen on the casing.
"Here I am again, hungry Prince," Eveready taunted at the snapping face. "Old Eveready got another of your drones, you murdering pig. I know it feels good when your little bloodsucker here takes a life. How do you like it when I do this?" He waved the battery label as close to the snarling face as he dared and brought the curved blade down on the thing's neck with a grunt of effort.
The body quit moving under Valentine's foot. He glanced down, afraid to meet those baleful eyes a second time. A fresh wave of moldy-crypt odor wafted from the corpse of the Reaper, causing Burton to empty the remains of last night's dinner from his stomach. Alistar sank to his knees, trying not to join him.
Eveready thrust the parang into the dirt and picked up the head, cautiously draining the black syrup from the neck. Holding it by the scraggly black hair, he displayed the trophy up for the Wolves to get a good look. "See how the teeth are black? We call that stuff carbonite. It's not a scientific name or anything; I think it's out of a movie. Stronger than steel, and Kur builds the Hoods so they use the stuff for their skeletons, teeth, and nails. Stops bullets pretty good. I saw one take a faceful of double-ought from about two feet one time. The eye and nose holes are baffled, not open like in a human skull, so the sumbitch was just blinded, and mebbe couldn't smell too good either. But it kept coming for us. And while I left this bastard's fingers behind, they have these pointed black car-bonite fingernails that can claw through a safe door, peeling it back layer by layer."
The Cat wedged the old battery into the Reaper's mouth and stuck the head in the crotch of a nearby tree. Its eyes rolled around in their sockets. "It's dead, don't let that unsettle you. Just nerve impulses or something."
Returning to the body, Eveready continued the autopsy. He began to peel back layers of skin with parang and skinning knife, sticking small broken branches through the skin to keep the wounds open. The black tar had stopped flowing with the creature's death, but an abundance of oily clear liquid seeped out of the cadaver. Alistar was still on his knees and looked about to go to all fours, and Hernandez was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. None of them would eat that day, Valentine suspected.
"Okay, a whole bunch of a human being is taken up by equipment to process different kinds of food into our blood. These monsters don't need all that; they have as simple a digestive system as can be. But they have this big bladder inside; see that thing that looks kind of like a honeycomb?" He opened up the spongelike organ, bigger than a bovine liver. "Those little sacks fill up with blood like a camel's hump, and pass through this thing, which is kind of like a big placenta, to its bloodstream. And see those two thick cables going down its sides? Those are nerve trunks; it's got more than one. Yours goes up the backbone; if that gets snapped, you're dead. You can break its back and maybe it'll just walk funny, "cause it's got these other nerve trunks. All wired to a couple of balancing organs in the head, gives them ungodly reflexes and agility. Little clusters of nerve cells at pressure points help that. Their spines are much more flexible than yours, like a cat's, and their knees are hinged so they can bend backward, coiling just about every major muscle in their bodies for a jump.
"Everything's heavier than ours: bone, skin, muscle. Makes them crappy swimmers. They can move through water, but they really have to thrash, so you can hear them coming with all the splashing. I keep telling the jokers in the FreeTerritory to dig wide moats around everything they build, something they can't jump over, but they don't want to make the effort. If you ask me, if a hundred Kurians got organized, they could go through Southern Command like a bullet through a paper target."
Valentine raised his hand. Since Eveready was showing this unsuspected schoolmarm side, it seemed the appropriate thing to do.
"Why don't they?"
"Overrun us, you mean? One of the things we don't know. We do know that each Kurian boss or Prince or Master or whatever has grown his thirteen Reapers to feed him and run his show. We think it hurts them when one of their puppets gets killed. There's some kind of special link that allows the vital auras absorbed by the Reapers to feed the Kurian that controls them. Over the years, the stories about Kur got confused, that is if our ancestors ever had them right to begin with. We combined the two creatures, the Reaper and its Master, into one vampire legend. But 'that's got nuthin' to do with nuthin'' as my old man used to say. The Masters don't like to have all their Reapers together in one spot. We think if all of 'em buy it, so does the Kurian. Those Kurians are selfish pricks, too. They don't risk their Hoods helping out other Kurians. You see it in the different ways their little principal-ities are organized. Maybe they even fight among themselves, like Mafia gangs-if you know what those were. We can only hope. They're not too creative. They don't seem to invent anything. The Lifeweavers got a philosophical answer to that; they say that the Kurians have degenerated over the millennia, becoming like addicts who can't see beyond the next fix. Nothing matters to them but keeping the vital auras flowing. Even when they invaded, they laid the groundwork well, but once it started, it was like the Oklahoma land rush: they all grabbed a spot and started harvesting... well, us.
"But all that is for the thinkers and strategists and leaders. You boys have got to be the killers, so just remember this one thing: the only damage that puts a Hood permanently out of commission is a central nervous system disconnect. That means severing the head or blowing it to bits. And since they duck faster than most folks can swing, let alone pull a trigger, it ain't easy. You got to get them when they're dopey, after they've fed or in good daylight. You get them out in the sun without their robes, they get so sick you can slice them up easy as pie. Sometimes they get laid up in a trance, either daytime or nighttime, and that's a good time to hit 'em, too. My theory is that a Kurian Lord can't really control more than one Reaper at the same time, and the others either go on pure instinct, feeding off whatever's around until they're gorged and pass out, or they fall into this trance while the Kuriali is controlling a different Hood."
"Sir," Hernandez piped up. "You said there would be others on this one's trail. Are we gonna jump 'em?"
A small smile broke out across Eveready's ebony features. "Son, you got more balls than brains. You ain't even blooded Wolves yet. For the last time, save the sir stuff for the ones that have to hear it to believe in themselves. I'm here to teach you how to keep hid so the Reapers don't find you. Fighting a Reaper's a job for a team of Wolves. Yassuh, about ten-to-one odds is what you need. And that's ten well-armed, experienced Wolves. Even I don't take on an up-and-running Reaper if I can avoid it. I got all these teeth by being patient," he said, fingering the rope of polished fangs across his hairy chest. "You need to hit the enemy when he ain't looking for you, not when he is. A stand-up fight is work for the Bears, and even they die faster than the Lifeweavers can replace 'em sometimes.
"Nope, it's been a fun summer, but I want to get you all back across the Saint Francis alive and well. Hopefully a little bit wiser, too. School's just about out, boys."
Getting to the Saint Francis meant they first had to cross the Mississippi. Wide, muddy, and sandbar-choked at this time of year, the Father of Waters was no easy obstacle to overcome. Quisling traders and river patrols frequented it in battered boats and bulky barges, pulled by diesel tugs.
The afternoon after the grim session with the Reaper's body, the party started a leisurely journey westward. The Cat encouraged them to concentrate on keeping lifesign down, but Valentine's doubts prodded and pulled him out of his sublimation with hard staves. What if he failed to keep himself centered, as the Cat liked to call it, and drew the hunting Reapers to his comrades like sharks to a blood trail? The others seemed so confident, talking about how they would take their first Hood, discussing ambushes and cross fires and carefully planned traps. Valentine had barely survived his first encounter with a Hood, and heard again and again in his mind the terrible screaming of the steady, stolid DelVecchio as the Reaper's needle-tongue found his beating heart.
The plentiful wild rice and bullheads of the Delta fed the five men on their bayou-bridging journey to the river. The Wolves had grown so experienced in navigating the trackless morass that they hardly thought twice about wading or swimming a bayou in pairs and trios, one group always covering the other as they moved southwest. They reached the great river on a hazy afternoon two days later. Upon sighting it, Valentine forgot his doubts in the breadth and majesty of the current. Or perhaps it was just the change in the air after the miasma of the backwaters.
"Two choices, boys," Eveready announced from a team-huddle squat. "We build us a raft, or we go find the one we sunk after crossing over back in the spring. Might take a day or two to find the spot; we're just a little south of it now. If we build a raft, it means chopping wood, and that can be heard a long way off. Also, we won't stand a chance if we run into a patrol except to swim for it. If we go to the old boat and raise it, we'll have something a little more navigable. But I've got my doubts it'll even be there after all these months. The river men and patrols spend all their time along the banks, and chances are one of them already thumped it with a pole or a paddle even if it is still underwater."
The Wolves decided to vote, with Eveready as tiebreaker. Valentine was the lone vote for building a raft, as he saw little reward and a good deal of risk in blundering along the bank in search of the old aluminum fishing boat that had brought them across the first time. The others remembered a little too well the want-of-a-nail lecture they'd received before departing for the Delta. It concerned coming home with weapons and gear issued, under pain of having to spend the next year on stable and livestock duty.
So they turned north.
Traveling the banks of the Mississippi made even the bayous seem like afternoon picnicking. The flooded and unattended banks turned the great river into a twisting mass of horseshoe loops and tadpole floods. Eveready took what shortcuts he knew and always kept an eye to the river. Although they could spot a patrol boat long before the Quislings had a chance at seeing the Wolves, every appearance of one of the noisy, fiberglass cabin cruisers made them get under cover while it plodded back and forth across the river. The first day there were two such sightings, each one wasting over an hour.
Valentine was jumpy the whole march. The others noticed it and put his mood down to bitterness over the vote on how to get across the river.
"Ain't nothing here worth the bogeymen keeping an eye on," Hernandez asserted.
"C'mon, Val," Alistar added. "With that old gumbo stirrer up on point, we've never even been spotted, let alone walked into an ambush." The gumbo stirrer in question waved from the crest of a small hillock ahead. Eveready had spotted something, and the Wolves obediently waited as the Cat went in for a closer look at whatever it was.
The sun was at the final landing in its descent of the staircase at the horizon. Valentine wondered at the simplicity of the age Eveready and his own father had been born into, when a red sunset meant only a beautiful end to another day rather than the beginning of eight hours of shadowed threat.
Valentine tried listening with "hard" ears as Eveready moved up the crest of the little hill at a level so just the Cat's head could be seen from the reverse slope of the hill where the object of his attention lay. Eveready's sure footfalls snapped no branch or twig detectable to Valentine's senses, raised to atavistic acuity. Eveready stopped, having found the best vantage, and stood for a full quarter-hour, staring motionless into the lengthening shadows.
Burton, who had already acquired the veteran's knack of sleeping at any opportunity, was softly snoring by the time Eveready returned. Alistar jostled him into wakefulness with a push of his moccasined foot.
"Is it that dogleg pond where we sunk the boat?"
"It's a boat, all right," Eveready said. "But not ours. Big wooden canoe, pulled up and overturned. There weren't any leaves or twigs or anything on it, so I bet it's just been there a day or two. And I'd just about bet Trudy against one of your FreeTerritory buckchits there's oars sitting under it."