Supernatural Heart of the Dragon Page 5

  The moon landing had only been a few months ago. To Mary, it was a wondrous thing. Neither Deanna nor Samuel seemed all that interested, especially since it looked as if there was a shapeshifter on the loose in St. Louis, and they were preparing to take the truck onto the turnpike to check it out.

  “But Dad,” Mary had said back then, “what if we go into space and get away from the monsters?”

  Samuel hadn’t had a good answer to that, so he’d just shrugged and continued his preparations.

  There were times when Mary wondered what it would be like to have a normal life. Most of the time she was happy not to have one, because the only way to live a normal life was to remain ignorant. Sure, she’d be able to go to birthday parties and hang around with her friends and do all the other things teenagers did, but she wouldn’t have known that at any moment a vampire or a shapeshifter or some icky creature might come and kill her.

  No, knowledge was power. She preferred to know what was coming. If that meant fewer dates, then that was fine.

  They drove back from Big Springs after burning the vampires and their house. As soon as they arrived, Mary’s first destination was the bathroom. Her long blonde hair was all sticky with vampire blood, and it was just awful. Besides, if she let her mother or father go first, they’d take forever.

  She peeled off her blouse and dungarees, tossing them into the bathroom hamper. Once they’d all showered, Deanna would put the clothes in the laundry with that special soap that Xin—a fellow hunter—had turned her on to.

  As she stood under the hot water and rubbed baby shampoo into her hair—she’d learned early on that baby shampoo was best at getting out organic stains—she thought about the fact that she’d be following a night of vampire hunting with a day at school and her ignorant classmates.

  There were times when she wished she could have it both ways. Have the normal life and still be a hunter. But she knew that was impossible. Sadly, it left her a bit of an outcast at school, both with her fellow students—who thought she was weird—and the school’s teachers and administrators— who were frustrated by her all-too-frequent absences. Much to their chagrin, parent-teacher conferences didn’t seem to do any good.

  That was probably why she was spending so much time at the mechanic’s place after school, whenever she could. John Winchester worked there. He was a nice boy, and refreshingly normal. But he wasn’t like so many of the other high-school students, who just seemed so stupid. John was always so thoughtful about everything, whether it was homework, the war, politics....

  Plus he didn’t judge Mary the way the other kids did. He respected her privacy and in a time when women were burning their bras and demanding equal opportunity, he treated her like a person, instead of a girl.

  Of course, there were times when she wanted to be treated like a girl. Despite the hot shower, she shuddered at the thought of what her dad would say if he knew what she was thinking.

  Such thoughts were nothing compared to what some of the girls at school were doing. In fact, some of them really were tossing out their bras, and not shaving their armpits, and doing other far-out things.

  Laughing to herself, she turned the shower off. She’d have gladly stayed under for several more minutes, but that wasn’t fair to her parents, who probably stunk pretty bad by now. Toweling herself off, she found herself giggling that she—who’d just spent her evening being bait for a vampire who’d intended to suck her blood—thought that bra-burning and armpit hair were “far-out.”

  Normally she’d blow-dry her hair, but she decided to let it air-dry so Deanna could get in next. Wrapping herself in a towel, she opened the bathroom door to a burst of cool air.

  Deanna was standing outside, arms folded, foot tapping.

  “About time.”

  “Sorry,” Mary said, even though she’d moved as fast as she could.

  “You’ve got a letter,” Deanna said as she retreated into the bathroom. “I left it on your dresser.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Mary said as she padded down the hall to her bedroom.

  Closing the door behind her, she slipped the towel off and tossed it onto the floor. It fell into a crumple near the hamper with all the other dirty clothes that always wound up on the floor instead of in the hamper that her mother had wasted her money buying—as she always put it. Mary opened the top drawer of the dresser to pull out some underwear.

  As she did so, she saw the envelope Deanna had left for her.

  It had one of the “Plant for More Beautiful Cities” commemorative six-cent stamps for postage, and a San Francisco postmark. There was no return address, but she didn’t need one, because she recognized the handwriting immediately.

  She tore open the envelope and read both the letter and the San Francisco Chronicle clipping that it came with. Then she threw on a tie-dyed T-shirt and a fresh pair of bell-bottom dungarees over her underwear.

  As soon as she opened the door, she hesitated. Pulling the T-shirt off, she went with a white button-down blouse instead. If she was going to convince her father to go to San Francisco, she needed to do it without wearing what he called “hippie clothes.”

  Deanna, as usual, had showered in record time, and was already toweling off by the time Mary left her room. Dressed in her terrycloth bathrobe, she walked downstairs with Mary. They found Samuel seated at the dining room table looking over the Lawrence Journal-World’s sports section. Unwilling to wait for the women to finish in the bathroom, he had chosen to sponge himself off in the kitchen sink, which meant he was clean, but his shirt and pants were water-stained.

  Mary plunged straight in.

  “There may be a job in San Francisco,” she announced.

  Her father looked up from his paper.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The letter I got in the mail?” Mary offered the letter and clipping. “It was from—”

  Samuel winced.

  “Do not tell me it was from Yaphet. That crazy hippie is—”

  “—in Florida,” Deanna said. “Remember, he went down there last year?”

  “No, I don’t remember,” Samuel said with a sigh. “I don’t keep track of bad poets.” Then he turned his attention back to Mary. “So who is it from?”

  “Jack Bartow,” she replied. “Remember him?”

  Grimacing, Samuel snatched the letter and clipping out of her hand.

  “Yeah, I remember him.” He looked as if he’d just stepped in something foul.

  “C’mon, Dad, he was cool.”

  Ever the diplomat, Deanna joined in.

  “He was a very skilled observer of the supernatural, Samuel.”

  “And an even more ‘skilled observer’ of our daughter.” Samuel said without looking up.

  The Campbells had been in San Francisco a year earlier, tracking a witch who was working her way west on a mystical killing spree. Bartow—who was only a few years older than Mary, and whose family had also hunted until they were killed by a pack of hellhounds—had helped track the witch down.

  Mary had thought Bartow was incredibly groovy, which of course made Samuel a little crazy. They had a great deal in common, really, but all Samuel cared about was that Jack was a boy who was interested in her.

  Samuel didn’t like anybody anyhow, and he especially didn’t like boys who “sniffed around her,” as he put it. She’d always hated that phrase.

  Deanna went over to stand behind him, and she read the letter and clipping over his shoulder.

  Then she looked up.

  “He thinks it’s a dragon?”

  “There’s no such thing,” Samuel said emphatically.

  “Maybe,” Mary said, “but something killed those people in a way that sure looks like a dragon did it. The corpses were sliced to ribbons and burned to a crisp.”

  Deanna gently took the Chronicle clipping from Samuel’s hand.

  “It says here that the first body—the one in the Inner Mission—was found on the morning of the fourth of November.”

  Ma
ry was confused.

  “So?”

  Samuel scowled again.

  “November third was the last new moon.”

  Abashed, Mary lowered her head.

  “Right. Sorry.” Her parents had trained her to know the phases of the moon. New moons and full moons were always rife with supernatural activity. It was stupid of her to have forgotten.

  “It may just be a spirit that happens to act like a dragon,” Deanna said. “But it doesn’t help that the second and third killings were both in Chinatown.”

  “So will we go?” Mary asked hopefully. She’d enjoyed San Francisco the last time, and she really wanted to see the city again.

  Besides, she had a history test tomorrow that she hadn’t had time to study for, and this was the perfect way to get out of it.

  Samuel looked up at Deanna, who nodded.

  “Fine,” he said, “let’s pack.”

  “I’ll call Marty,” Deanna said, referring to Martin Jankowitz, their travel agent. He was always able to get them quick flights relatively cheaply.

  Mary ran up to her room. Since it was San Francisco, she was definitely packing her tie-dyed shirts, no matter what her father might say....

  FIVE

  Deanna Campbell had to resist the urge to kick her husband under the table, again.

  She was sitting with Samuel, Mary, and Jack Bartow at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Upon their arrival at the airport in San Francisco, Mary had found a pay phone, called Bartow, and set up a time and place to meet and get more information on this supposed dragon. Meanwhile, Samuel and Deanna had waited for the luggage.

  They’d packed two suitcases, one with enough clothes to last them all for a week, and the other with all the supplies and weapons they might need. It took forever for the second suitcase—the one with the clothes—to arrive, and Samuel was close to just abandoning it when it finally was disgorged onto the carousel.

  “Could’ve been worse,” Deanna had whispered to her husband, “it could’ve been the other one that got lost.”

  Samuel just scowled. Both suitcases were too large to fit into the overhead compartments, so they’d had to check them before boarding, which made Samuel nervous. The weapons they’d amassed—pistols, crossbows, shotguns, longbows, machetes, swords—would be prohibitively expensive to replace. Samuel’s dry-cleaning business and Deanna’s occasional substitute teaching work provided them with enough money to pay for Mary’s education and allow them to keep their armory stocked.

  And occasionally buy last-minute plane tickets.

  Yet here were times when the bills threatened to overwhelm them. That was the problem with hunting—it was a calling, not a profession, and callings didn’t feed the bulldog.

  Mary was still on the phone when Deanna and Samuel found her.

  “Look,” she was saying as they approached, “that was my last dime, and I really need to—Oh! Here’s Mom and Dad. I’ll see you soon, okay? Right on, Jack. Bye!”

  “You used all your change?” Deanna asked before Samuel could say anything.

  “Just catching up,” Mary said, then she shot a look at her father. “It’s not like we warned him we were coming.”

  Samuel hadn’t wanted to pay the long-distance charge for a call to California.

  Turning back to Deanna, Mary continued.

  “Anyhow, he’s going to make reservations for six o’clock tonight at a place in North Beach.”

  With that they rented a car and proceeded to their hotel—the Emperor Norton Lodge on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin—to unpack and make sure the weapons were all clean and ready.

  It was Deanna’s idea to take the bus to North Beach— more popularly known as “Little Italy”—so they wouldn’t need to deal with trying to park in that busy neighborhood.

  “But I don’t want to go weaponless,” Samuel had protested.

  “The killings are in Chinatown, Samuel.”

  “It’s not the dragon I’m worried about.”

  Deanna just sighed, and Mary rolled her eyes.

  They weren’t wholly unarmed, of course, but they did leave their firearms at the motel. It wasn’t wise for civilians to wander around a big city armed in these days of civil unrest. The local law tended to take a dim view of people carrying guns, and the last thing the Campbells wanted to do was gain the attention of the San Francisco Police Department.

  On three separate occasions as they walked towards the restaurant, someone with long hair and bare feet tried to give Samuel a flower. It made his scowl so deep that Deanna feared his face would collapse in on itself.

  Bartow was late for dinner, leaving the three of them waiting outside the restaurant. The reservation was in his name, and Samuel refused to wait at the bar with an underaged girl, even though nobody in the restaurant seemed to mind.

  Finally, Bartow limped up the hill of Columbus Avenue, after having come out of the front entrance to the City Lights bookstore. Since the last time they’d seen him, he’d exchanged his plain wooden cane for an ornate walking stick sporting a dragon’s head handle.

  Samuel’s eyes naturally went straight to Bartow’s left foot—or what was left of it. He’d had the injury before they met him last year—when he’d just turned seventeen—and claimed it was an accident due to a poorly maintained handgun. But Samuel was sure the young man had shot himself in the foot deliberately to avoid the draft.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Bartow said. “Ferlinghetti was doing a reading, and it ran over.”

  “Wow, that sounds swell,” Mary said with a smile, but Samuel just looked confused.

  Deanna rode to his rescue.

  “Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He’s a poet, and the owner of that bookstore down the street.”

  That just prompted a grunt, and with nothing more left to be said, they all went into the restaurant.

  Once they were all seated and had ordered drinks, Bartow started asking Mary about school. His brown hair was Brylcreemed into a duck’s ass style, and he had a pencil-thin mustache that was almost black. He was exactly the type of boy Deanna would have swooned over when she was fifteen.

  Before long, the conversation turned to the young girl’s social life, and that was what prompted the kick. As soon as the personal questions began, Samuel’s mood darkened— if such was possible—and he started glaring openly. He was about to interrupt when she let him have it.

  Samuel jumped slightly, and looked at his wife.

  She frowned at him, and her expression said, Let the young people talk. She knew how these things went, and didn’t want to be thrown out of such a nice restaurant.

  He sighed, and held his tongue as long as he could. After a while, as Mary was telling Bartow what a nerd her math teacher was, he glanced at Deanna again, and she nodded.

  “So, Jack,” Samuel said sharply, “what can you tell us about this so-called dragon?”

  Bartow smiled.

  “I’m not the only one calling it that, Sam,” he said.

  Samuel’s face twitched, and Deanna sighed. He hated any diminutive of his name, and it would only serve to make an unpleasant conversation even more so.

  Where are those drinks, she thought, glancing around for the waiter.

  “It’s ‘Samuel,’” Her husband said evenly. But to his credit, he didn’t snap. “Or better still, ‘Mr. Campbell.’”

  “Dad...” Mary started, but Bartow put a hand on her arm.

  “No, it’s all right, Mare,” Bartow said in a suddenly subdued tone. Then he turned back. “I apologize for my disrespect, sir.”

  Samuel looked surprised, not knowing how to react. Deanna smiled into her napkin.

  “Apology accepted,” he muttered.

  Nodding confidently, Bartow reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Anyhow, like I said, folks are referring to whatever it is that’s killed these four folks as ‘the heart of the dragon.’”

  “Four?” Deanna interrupted. “I thought it was three.” />
  Placing a cigarette in his mouth, Bartow lit it with a zippo.

  “It was, ma’am, but there was another last night. SFPD’s keeping this one out of the newspapers to avoid a panic, but I got a buddy on the job.” At Samuel’s dubious expression, he added, “I helped my parents exorcise a demon that had taken the guy’s son—sometimes a little Latin goes a long way. And that sort of thing buys a lotta gratitude.”

  Samuel relented a bit.

  “My buddy couldn’t get me the files, but he did provide some details about the victims. The first was named Michael Verlander, but everyone called him ‘Moondoggy.’”

  “A hippie,” Samuel said.

  “Yes, sir. But the place where he was found belongs to a guy named Frederick Gorczyk, whereabouts unknown. The next two were ordinary citizens of Chinatown. One was the manager of a laundry, and the other owned a restaurant. But the victim last night was different—a woman named Marybeth Wenzel, a student at Berkeley.”

  “Do the victims have anything in common?” Samuel asked.

  Bartow shook his head while dragging on his cigarette.

  “At least not that anybody could find. Hard to say for sure, since the Chinese don’t usually talk to cops, so nobody knows much about those two. And this latest victim, the girl? She just makes it even worse. That’s why mum’s the word with the PD on the latest one. A hippie and two Chinese is one thing—they’ll barely get noticed. But this is a nice college girl, and that usually means lots of attention from the fourth estate.”

  Their drinks arrived at that moment. Deanna sipped her 7-Up in annoyance at how right Bartow was. Immigrants and a dropout wouldn’t garner much press attention, but the newspapers would become a lot more interested once word of the girl’s death was made public.

  “Do you really think it’s a dragon?” Mary asked eagerly.

  Bartow shrugged and sipped from his glass of red wine.

  “Dunno, Mare, but word all over Chinatown is whispered talk of ‘the heart of the dragon.’”

  Samuel slugged down some of his beer.