Cocking an eyebrow, I ask, "Who?"
He shrugs. "We don't know yet but whoever it was certainly didn't wish you well. They reversed both your bilge pumps and opened the seacock to your head. If a plastic bag hadn't been sucked up by the intake and blocked the seacock, you would have sunk far before shore."
"Saved by litter," I say, and can't help grinning.
Arturo grins too, then turns solemn. "It could just as easily have been a bomb."
"Santos?" I ask.
"I don't think so. He just made bail yesterday. We both know where he was before that."
"Then who?"
"My people are checking."
"Your people are always checking," I growl.
Arturo sighs. "Be patient, Peter. These things take time. Just be careful in the meantime. Check your boat and cars before you use them. I'll have my people watch them but, until we get this resolved, you have to take care too."
To my relief, my bride agrees to cut back on her landside shopping trips. Our life as a couple settles into a comfortable pattern. Elizabeth turns her attention to her garden, which prospers under her renewed and constant ministry. Within weeks, new plants-many of them strange, brightly colored ones I've never seen-begin to crowd the formerly empty earth. The Dragon's Tear and other herbs become so numerous that she has to harvest her first crop.
Most of the time I go about the necessary chores to keep up the maintenance of our household while Elizabeth divides her free time between the garden and the kitchen, planting and weeding in the former, processing herbs and potions in the latter. Sometimes I work in the garden alongside my bride, brushing against her, both of us smiling, enjoying the intimacy of quietly sharing the same tasks. She never mentions Jorge Santos's name and, while he remains in my thoughts, neither do I.
"I've just brewed my first pitcher of Dragon's Tear wine," Elizabeth tells me a few evenings after her first harvest, just before we're to venture forth for our nightly hunt, both of us already in our natural forms. "Here," she says, placing a blue ceramic pitcher and two large crystal mugs on the oak table in the great room. She pours the clear liquid into the mugs. "Let's try it."
I recognize the pitcher as one of my mother's and wonder if she used it for the same purpose. I pick up my mug, sniff the colorless liquid, then swirl it. It gives off no smell. Looks like simple tapwater. "Should we, before we go out?" I ask.
Elizabeth nods. "Just remember, never drink this in your human form."
"Why?"
"In that form you have no defense against its power. It will stun you the same way it stupefies them, " she says, and waits for me to drink first.
I have a hard time believing it can affect anyone. The wine looks harmless, tastes as featureless as it appears. I drink two large swallows and then glance at Elizabeth. "It tastes like water, maybe a little thicker, a little greasy.…"
She laughs, drains her mug with one long, sustained swallow. "Finish yours and then tell me what you think," she says.
I shrug and follow her example. The warmth follows a moment later, radiating from my insides, tingling its way to my extremities. For a moment I feel dizzy. I have to readjust my stance, brace on my tail, to remain upright.
"Isn't it wonderful?" Elizabeth asks, moving closer, rubbing against me with her body, her tail.
My senses explode wherever she touches. I feel nothing like on my wedding night when Dragon's Tear wine, mixed with Death's Rose and alchemist powders, enabled us to merge our minds, but I find myself unable to stop grinning and unwilling to defer any of my appetites.
We begin to make love in the great room, let our passion take us from its floor to the sky outside, soaring upward until we consummate our union in the midst of a long dive toward the sea. Then we fly, side by side, in search of prey, the Dragon's Tear wine still warming our insides, making us hungry. I guide us offshore, thinking to take us to the island of Bimini, only sixty miles away.
Elizabeth, who has long complained about my insistence on our hunting over the waters, preferably far from home, asks again, "Why fly so long for food when there's so much prey nearby?"
"Father always insisted we do most of our hunting far away from our island," I say. "Even if we weren't spotted, too many missing people would make the humans too suspicious, too wary. Cuba and the Bahamas lie close enough and their people remain primitive enough to dismiss our acts with their superstitions."
But Elizabeth turns back toward land. "I'm hungry," she says. "It won't do any harm to feed close to home this one night."
"I don't like the homeless ones. It takes months holding them in the cells, feeding them, to make them edible," I say.
"Isn't there somewhere out of the way? Where we can find what we want now?"
Warm and content, my hunger a pleasant rumble in my stomach, I sigh, wishing she didn't have to puncture my mood. But either the wine or her enthusiasm makes me reckless. I guide us south, so we can approach the agricultural area west of Homestead from the Everglades.
By the time I decide on a white, two-story farmhouse, acres away from any other dwelling, I'm as ravenous as my bride. We burst through their windows, go from room to room, slashing, killing. I feed on the father, while Elizabeth feeds on the three small children and the mother.
We dispose of their remains over the ocean before we return home. Later, lying in each other's embrace on the hay in my room, the wine still coursing in our veins, we make love again.
News reports flash the missing family's pictures on the TV the next day and for days afterward. I have to turn away each time they show the children.
Chapter 20
When the middle of October arrives without our receiving a single new report on Jorge Santos's activities or any information on the shooter or the boat saboteurs' identities, I call Arturo.
"We have a problem," he says. "I didn't want to call you until I had some solutions."
"Do you?"
"Not yet. But my friends in the islands did find the two Bahamians who handled the shooting. The fools were flashing a lot of money at all the bars on Andros. On a poor island like that they were bound to be noticed. After some persuasion from my people, they admitted they had received a contract from an Italian gentleman in New York, Ralph Escalante."
"With the Gambini family?" I say.
Arturo says, "Yeah… gave them ten thousand dollars down, promised them ten more on completion. Someone he knows wants you dead in a big way…"
"I would think that's fairly obvious," I say.
"Anyway, you know there's no way we can intimidate Escalante. Fortunately, some of our Italian friends are friendly with him. They were able to find out that he was acting as an agent for some Chinese guy in Los Angeles."
"Has anyone talked to him?"
Arturo sighs. "No. No one's seen him for weeks. The word is, he may have gone back to China."
"It doesn't make any sense," I say. "Why would someone from China care about me?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me. And there's more too… When Santos got out of jail, I wondered how he could make bail so quickly. The judge is a friend of ours, he set it for far more than Santos's family could afford. I had my people check into it. The lawyer that posted bail for him was acting on the behalf of an attorney in California. Neither of them knew the name of the principal who put up the money and issued the instructions… And Santos didn't know any of them."
"I just don't get it," I say. "If Santos has so much help, then why hasn't he tried anything since he got out of jail? He's not the type to give up."
"Maybe he is," Arturo says. "He hasn't bothered anyone about you since his arrest. My operatives say his restaurant, Joe's, just opened for the season. He has to work again, five nights a week. He may be too tired to do much more on his days off than sail or hang out with the Morton woman."