Bad Moon Rising (Pine Deep 3)

“Run, for God’s sake!”

It was impossible that she had held him even this long—Vic was twice her size, many times her strength—yet somehow, impossibly, she kept him pinned there with his knife arm hard against the floor.

“Run!” she screamed.

“Mom!” He took a step toward her, desperate to help.

Lois Wingate whipped her head around toward him, and for the first time in days he saw her face. Her skin was as white as new milk; her eyes were as red as fresh blood. Her mouth was a snarling mask of curled lips and bared teeth.

Mike felt every molecule in his body turn to ice. He wanted to scream, couldn’t remember how to do it.

In a voice that shook the walls of the house, a voice that was a bellow of sheer force and volume that it literally staggered him back a pace, his mother screamed, “RUN!”

He ran. Of course he ran.

He screamed as he backed away and then turned and ran out of the house. He was still screaming when he grabbed his bike and jumped on it and tore away into the night. He did not remember doing that, he did not remember the nightmare ride down the street past neighbors who stood on their porches and stared at him, or stared at Vic’s place. No one called the cops. No one on that block dared.

Mike tore down the street. His mind was black with shock except for the clear and vivid memory of his mother’s face.

Her white, white face.

Her eyes, her skin. Her teeth.

Oh, God , he thought as he fled into the darkness, her teeth .

Chapter 23

1

They all met for coffee in Weinstock’s office. Val, Crow, Jonatha, and Newton were seated on a ring of chairs pulled around Weinstock’s desk, which was covered with the evidence he had collected. Weinstock had gone over it step by step for Jonatha’s benefit. The morgue videos had rattled her, and she accepted the doctor’s offer of a stiff knock of Scotch in her coffee.

After she’d downed half of it, she said, “I’ve been on the Net all afternoon, and I’ve made a number of calls to friends and colleagues who are deeper into the vampire folklore than I am. I told them the story that I was doing deep background work for a book, and now they all want to be footnoted. I made a lot of promises here, so our boy Newton here had better write that book. ”

“Did you find out anything new we need to know?” Val asked.

“Nothing you’ll like. ”

“No offense, Jonatha,” said Crow, “but we haven’t liked anything you’ve told us so far. ”

“Okay, I know we’re all pressed for time here,” she began—and Crow noted that she used “we. ” He cocked an eye at Val, who had registered it, too, and she gave him a tiny nod.

“First, Professor Allenby at Rutgers, who’s written the definitive book on Peeter Stubbe, said that the likelihood that Stubbe was born in Serbia is near to one hundred percent, not in Bedburg as most books claim. There are records in Serbia of the Stubbe family—under a variety of name variations—dating back as early as the 1420s. He wasn’t known in Bedburg until around 1589. That means that he was at least one hundred and fifty years old when he was put on trial for werewolfism. ”

Weinstock whistled.

“That would mean that he is likely to be a Vlkodlak, the dominant werewolf species of that part of Eastern Europe, and one widely believed—in folklore before now—to come back to life as a vampire. ”

“I’m confused about something,” Val said. “I was looking through some of Crow’s books and they seemed to indicate that Stubbe, or Stumpp as they called him, was brutally executed. Why didn’t he come back as a vampire then?”

“Allenby’s theory is that like many of the more powerful vampires, some werewolves were known to have human familiars and confidants. It’s entirely likely that Stubbe, who was known for being extremely charismatic, suborned some local yokel and—since Stubbe was not truly a native of Bedburg—used that other person as a kind of stand-in or body double. Maybe he appealed to their religious mania—kind of like Manson or Jim Jones. In such cases the person under the charismatic control is more than willing to die for their master, even to the point of undergoing torture. Like a martyr. Even in ordinary psychology there are plenty of cases of it. Add to that some degree of supernatural persuasion and, well, there you go. ”

“That fits with what we know of Griswold,” Crow said. “He had a whole crew of local guys who pretty much worshipped the ground he walked on. My own father was one of them. When Oren Morse killed Griswold, it’s a pretty good bet that these followers were the ones who murdered Morse. ”

“Reasonable,” Jonatha said. “Scary as hell, but reasonable. How many of them are still around?”

“Except for my father? All of them. ”

“Then we are going to have to work them into the equation…take a good hard look at them. ”