In the skiff, his uninvited visitor recoiled, then caught himself and tried to make it look as if he simply had a nervous twitch. The overall effect was laughable, but Leon missed the humor in it, scanning back upstream in case the Gypsy had turned traitor on him, leading other "normal" men to find the pack. So far, there was no sight or sound of followers.
"I have news," the Gypsy said.
"I am listen," Leon said, suspecting that his choice of words wasn't exactly right but guessing it made no difference.
"Stranger come by the place today." The Gypsy didn't have to say which place, and time had little meaning in the bayou, once you drew a line between the daylight hours and the hungry night. "Asked some funny questions about you."
The wolf man felt his hackles rising, curled his upper lip to show a flash of crooked yellow teeth. His shaggy hands flexed in the darkness, talons scratching at his palms.
"He call my name?" asked Leon.
"Didn't have to," said the Gypsy. "He said he was looking for a loup-garou. I hear that, and think of you."
Leon tipped back his head and scanned the crazy quilt of stars above him. They were timeless, changing with the seasons and rotation of the earth, but always coming back again, as inescapable as weather, permanent as death.
It took a moment for the bayou night to mellow him, but he was getting there. When Leon spoke again, his voice was calm, no snapping at the messenger, no matter how he longed to roar and tear the Gypsy limb from limb.
"So, what did you all tell him?" Leon asked. His uninvited guest first looked dismayed, then terrified. It was a good choice in the present circumstances.
"Now you joke with me," the Gypsy said, lips spasming into the semblance of a smile. "Man didn't talk to me at all. What do I know?"
"You know how to find me," Leon answered. "Know about where I live."
"I never talked to him," the frightened man repeated stubbornly. "Man comes, he talks to Ladislaw, then goes in to spend some time with Aurelia. Paid Ladislaw handsome for whatever Aurelia had to tell him and then he goes away. Use your second sight and see if I be lying."
Leon wasn't big on second sight, but he stared at the quaking Gypsy for a moment more before he spoke. "Got what he come for," said the leader of the pack. "Got his palm read."
"I can't say that," the trembling Gypsy said, "but that Aurelia sees things. She has powers."
So do I, thought Leon. "That's it?" he asked. The Gypsy nodded, jerky little motions with his head. His hands clung desperately to the oars. If he was lying, Leon thought, the little man deserved some kind of an award.
"All right," the wolf man said at last. "You told me something, now I'm telling you. Don't go on right back to where you been. Find some other place to spend the night."
The Gypsy mulled that over for a moment, then finally nodded. The full weight of his betrayal made his shoulders slump and forced his head down, eyes avoiding Leon's sharp chin almost resting on his chest.
"Go on now," the leader of the pack commanded. "I got things to do."
He didn't wait to see the Gypsy turn his skiff and paddle back the way he came. Retreating toward his dark camp, Leon heard the others padding in around him, stony silence from the bitch, a couple of the others whining questions.
"We're going to take a little ride," he told them, smiling in the darkness. "Maybe get a bite to eat."
AURELIA BOLDISZAR HAD not told Remo everything she saw and felt when she was in his presence.
Then again, she never told outsiders everything. It was a lesson she had learned, partly from the instruction of her mother, but more by trial and error. She was twenty-five years old, and that was plenty old enough to understand that even members of her family, the Romany, did not desire to know the whole truth of their futures or to realize how much she knew about their secret pasts.
In truth, the other Romany rarely consulted her these days. They were polite enough, and treated her like family-her father was their leader, after all-but she still caught them glancing at her furtively, as if afraid that she was "reading" them against their will. They feared she would learn secrets they had closely guarded over years or decades, sometimes even from their wedded mates.
And they were right.
Aurelia didn't understand the power, but she had it. That was all that counted in the end. It didn't operate continuously, or she would have lost her sanity when she was just a teenager. Instead it came and went, influenced to some indefinable degree by her attempts to focus, calling on the energy or whatever it was to let her see behind the public masks that men and women wore in daily life.
This Remo, now, he was a different matter altogether. From her first glimpse of him, there had been confusion-not because he was inscrutable, but rather because she saw so much. Aurelia couldn't always say when those about her would face death, or how; in fact, that dark, oppressive knowledge thankfully eluded her most of the time. With Remo, though, there had been the inescapable sensation that he had already known death. Maybe that first, irrational impression was what had muddled everything else she saw when she was with him.
She knew he was an orphan-or had been one, rather, until he had found a father figure relatively late in life, and then, much later, found his biological father.
Aurelia felt that Remo was basically a good man, though his path had taken him to many places he would not have chosen for himself and forced him into contact with a brooding cast of villains. Most of them were dead now, she was certain, and she had no doubt that a majority of those had died by Remo's hand.
Consumed with her thoughts of her enigmatic visitor and his equally strange task, Aurelia missed the early-warning signals that might have saved her people.
Then again, it was entirely possible that the impending danger-like so many others-would have failed to warn her, even if she had been concentrating, actively pursuing any strange vibrations in the night.
When she heard the first scream, it took her utterly by surprise.
There was a vicious snarling, and a young girl cried out again. Aurelia thought it had to be Janka, but the knowledge didn't help her. Even as she struggled from her sleeping bag and pressed her face against the nearest window of the bus, the cry was cut off with a brutal, inescapable finality. Aurelia felt the life force torn from little Janka as if it had been her own. She didn't have to see the child to know it was too late to help her.
More of her people shouting now, some of them men. There was confusion, fear and anger mingled in their voices. Where the snarling, baying canine sounds originated, she couldn't be sure-until it struck her like a swift blow to the solar plexus. Loup-garou!
The cursed man-thing had been smarter than she reckoned. It had found her out and tracked her down within a few short hours of her conversation with Remo. Something in the werewolf's cunning nature drove it to make a preemptive strike, to prevent her from assisting Remo with his hunt.
A flash of insight, crystal-clear, told her the best way to protect the others was to flee. The wolf man wanted her, and while she knew he wouldn't hesitate to massacre the Romany in search of her, there was at least an outside chance that he would follow if she ran.
There was no time to plan where she would go, grab any items from her minimal belongings. Gypsy life meant traveling, and traveling efficiently meant readiness to leave at a moment's notice. Thought translated into action almost instantly, and she exploded from the bus into the milling chaos of the camp, beelining for the mopeds parked behind the old VW van.