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if I so wish it?"
I didn't like it. You don't give intel to the enemy. Or, at the very least,
to strangers. Especially when you have so little, yourself. But if Volpea was
even halfway serious, it would be my best and possibly only chance for
slipping through the Voodoo Queen's cordons and seeing Lupé.
Explaining my mode of transportation to Lupé could be a big problem but this
was not the time to look a gift wolf in the mouth.
So I explained what I did know from my surprisingly limited experience in
invading other people's bodies. I told her that I had never tried being the
"passenger" aboard a willing host. That all of my experiences in bloodwalking
had involved taking control of the body of an unprepared host and relying on
shock and surprise to help keep their consciousness suppressed while I sat in
the "driver's seat," as it were. And that the only time I had actually delved
past anyone's surface thoughts while visiting was to fish a security pass code
out of a panicked guard's memory which he surrendered as soon as I asked the
question. That's all.
I promised to be a gentleman, if that helped any.
Her response, after a long pause, was that her only formal acquaintance with
any "gentlemen" was at "gentlemen's clubs."
It was at that point that somethingelse that had been bothering me along with
all of the other things that had been bothering me suddenly jumped the queue
and rushed to the front of the line. I looked down at the discolored patch of
skin on Volpea's wrist where I had grasped it a moment before. I could still
see remnants of my handprint.
I looked at her hand now firmly enclosed about my own wrist. "Doesn't that
hurt?" I asked.
Her lips quirked into a smile. "Define 'hurt.'"
Fenris and Volpea had been briefed, of course, about the silver deposits in
my body. A couple of silver bullets from January's assassination attempt had
dissolved in my bloodstream before they could be removed. As a result, my
touch was more than a little uncomfortable to silver-sensitive creatures like
lycanthropes. Lupé had found my embrace unbearable and my lips on her forehead
had produced blisters. Just another of the several causes for our present
separation.
"There is a very thin line, at times, between pleasure and pain, Domo
Cséjthe," Volpea said breathily, moving my hand to her side and holding it to
the curve of her waist. "There are those who season their food with dabs of
catsup while others prefer quantities of Tabasco." She moved my hand so that
my fingers trailed across her belly, leaving reddish streaks across her
bronzed skin. "And there are ways, for those who choose them," she said as my
fingers brushed her belly ring, "to build our tolerance even our enjoyment of
intense stimulation."
I took a closer look at reddened interception of flesh and jewelry. "So
you're saying this isn't the standard stainless steel setting?"
She shook her head with a sly smile. "Silver alloy. As is this . . ." She
pulled her top open, exposing her right breast. A more elaborate ring spiraled
about and transfixed her engorged nipple with a ruby clasp.
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She stepped back and tugged on my hand. The red streaks across her finely
muscled abdomen were already beginning to fade. "Let's go back to your cabin
and I'll show you the others . . ."
Others?
As in more than one others?
I started to do a mental inventory as she pulled me toward the steps leading
down to the deck below.
Compromises, I told myself;you knew this would likely involve compromises.
Everything has a price.
The question was, was the price too high?
Chapter Five
The question of price got postponed before we reached the cash register.
Mama Samm and the Gator-man arrived just as I was starting to resist Volpea
on the public side of my cabin door.
At least I'm pretty sure I was starting to resist.
I did end up losing my clothes and getting a thorough going-over. Just not
the one I had been promised a few minutes earlier. In fact, Volpea departed
early in the process with a look that said we had unfinished business.
I spent the better part of the next two hours out in the salon getting poked
and prodded and asking when I could get dressed again.
The Gator-man was a Cajuntraiteur a backwoods "treater" who had performed
preternatural surgery on Lupé and myself when we had been shot six months
back. Since Lupé was a werewolf and I was what? Growing less human every
month? We couldn't very well present ourselves to the local ER. Imagine trying
to join an HMO and having to list preexisting conditions. So my health-care
options were severely limited. The arcane properties of my necrophagic virus
kept me away from traditional doctors and these untold millions of microscopic
machines in my bloodstream screwed up any hoodoopathic alternatives.
Even the preternatural options available via the demesne system were severely
constrained. I was lucky to have worked out an arrangement between Pagelovitch
and Laveau for the use of Dr. Mooncloud's services but I couldn't actually
visit any existing clinics, myself.
Staying healthy was going to be a very iffy proposition from here on out.
The Ggator-man couldn't "read" any conjure marks on me from my stay at the
underhill Hilton. "But I do not know if these Hillfolk are kin to the mound
dwellers that I know, me," the old Cajun said.
"How about the silver load levels, Alphonse?"
He shook his head and his ivory moustache bristled as he pursed his lips.
"You got more, you. Should be less but metal is not leaving your bones."
"Wait a minute," I said. "How can I have more silver now than I did when the
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bullets first dissolved in my body? I think I'd know if somebody shot me
again."
"Obviously his body is hoarding all of its Ag atoms so it can create
defensive weapons when he's under attack," Mama Samm mused. "Could these tiny
machines be building Ag atoms out of junk protons and electrons?"
"Have you touched or handled anything silver, you?" Alphonse asked me. "Maybe
you be absorbing silver molecules through skin contact."
"What? The nanos are sucking silver out of my pocket change and off of my
grandmother's flatware?"
Thetraiteur lifted my arm to show me. "Look, you: skin is more dark, yet
shiny. And eyes . . ."
I sighed. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Mirrored sunglasses would be redundant. But
what does it mean?"
The outer door flew open and Camazotz stood in the entryway with an armload
of containers. "It means," he announced in a shockingly girlish voice, "that
his nanobots have kicked into high gear and are now running new programming
and subroutines!" He stepped into the salon and then we could see that it was
Dr. Taj Mooncloud, standing behind him, who was speaking. "And, if we don't
find a way to reverse the process, he'll develop a full-blown case of
Argyria!"
* * *
It was like tag-team medicine in sudden death overtime now. Taj and Alphonse
were both short, round, and brown. She was both a shaman and a medical doctor
with long black hair, a heritage from her Amerindian father and East Indian
mother. He was a Cajun homeopath whose coloring hinted of exotic Creole
bloodlines that dramatically set off his white bristle of a moustache and
shock of ivory hair. Between the two of them they poked and prodded, consulted
and argued while mutually lecturing me on aspects of depression, latent death
wishes, and self destructive tendencies.
Argyria, I learned, was a condition where silver compounds deposited in body
tissues reached critical levels. One of the side effects was a transformation
in skin pigmentation to blue or bluish gray.
No wonder I was feeling a little "blue" of late.
Except: "I'm not turning blue, I'm turning brown," I protested.
"Once you go 'black,'" Mama Samm called from the galley, "you won't want to
go back!"
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