She was right. Remo could hear her conviction in the beat of her heart and the rhythm of her breath. He could see it in the pattern of her pupils' dilation.
"I have one son," Remo Williams declared flatly. "I have one daughter. That's all."
They both knew he was trying to convince himself. He felt his face warm up and willed his circulation to get control of itself.
"You're distressed."
"Distressed?" Remo demanded. "Lady, three minutes ago my biggest concern was a swamp-dwelling wolf man and how to talk you out of your Romany uniform. Now you tell me I've got more kids than I know about and soon they'll be fighting among themselves."
"I did not say soon," she protested. "I did not say when."
"Whatever. Just threw me for a loop."
"That means you believe in what I say?"
Remo looked at the Romany princess and exhaled a long, long time and it sounded like the word "crap" stretched out inhumanely.
The problem was, he didn't want to believe in this kind of mumbo jumbo. The other problem was, this was the kind of mumbo jumbo that came true for him with annoying frequency.
"Back to the subject in hand, so to speak," he announced, trying to get his own mind back on track. "The Loopy Garou of the Backwoods Bayou."
"Whether he is the product of dark art or dark science, he's not to be taken lightly," the dark-eyed woman chided him. "This is advice that comes not from a vision. It comes from something I have seen with my own eyes."
"You've seen a werewolf?" Remo asked.
"I've seen enough," Aurelia Boldiszar said. "Beyond that, I can tell you that there is a loup-garou near by. Within a day's walk of New Orleans, perhaps. Whether he is the one you seek-or who seeks you-I cannot say. If so, it won't be long before he takes your scent. Your client is at risk, and so are you."
"I should be stocking up on silver bullets, then?"
"You're pleased to joke," she said. "So be it. But remember this, Remo. Like you, the loup-garou is not as other men. He can be beaten, even killed, but it requires more dedication to the task than you may be accustomed to."
"How do you know what I'm accustomed to?" asked Remo, curiosity encroaching on uneasiness. Would Harold Smith consider a seer's seeing as a breach in CURE security?
"Loups-garous and Romany have never been good friends," she said. "I may be able to assist you in your search."
"Well... "
"At the moment," she continued, "I do not know where this loup-garou is hiding, if or when he will approach you, but I may be able to discover more if I apply myself."
"How much?"
"My treat," she said, and flashed another dazzling smile. "I am interested in the manner of man you are. Tracing palms and looking into the crystal and reading the tarot, these are imprecise methods of divination. To understand the person and his soul and his fate, one must live within the arm's length of his or her aura."
"Yeah, well, maybe I'm one of those people you don't want to know," Remo said, and he realized he was offering her a way out. But he was fervently hoping she wouldn't take it.
"My choice, my risk," Aurelia said.
He saw no downside to it and responded with a shrug, "Why not? I'm at Desire House, in the Quarter. That's on Tchoupitoulas Street. Don't ask me how to spell it."
She was smiling now. "Desire House?"
"From what I've seen, it's nowhere near as friendly as it sounds."
"You'll hear from me," Aurelia said.
"Good night."
Outside, King Ladislaw was waiting to accept the other half of the one-fifty. Remo handed it over. "You are satisfied?" the Gypsy asked.
"Ask me again tomorrow," Remo answered, "If I'm still alive."
LEON WAS DRESSING out a raccoon, ready to discard the guts for anyone who might desire them, when the bitch heard trouble coming. Privately, he could admit that every other member of the pack had keener senses than his own. It galled him, but there was no arguing with simple facts of life. Whenever it began to get him down, Leon consoled himself with a reminder that he had the only working set of thumbs in camp, and thus was still the only one among them who could drive the van.
He had no license, registration or insurance, granted, but such details were a bore. Leon dismissed them out of hand. He liked to think of the Dodge Ram as his inheritance, although its former owner was no kin of his. They hadn't even known each other, really. Their acquaintance lasted all of six or seven seconds, while his shaggy hands enclosed the driver's head and twisted sharply to the left, with force enough to snap his neck and end his life.
Good eating, he had been. Not scrawny, like so many of the bayou dwellers Leon saw when he was out on hunting expeditions. Mr. Dodge Ram had been positively plump and redolent with health, a feast unto himself. A gift of Providence, which Leon had accepted in addition to the van.
Now he laid the 'coon aside, rose from his crouch, pricked up his ears. The others had begun to melt into the undergrowth before he rose, anticipating his command and acting on it while the thought was taking shape in Leon's head. It never crossed his mind that maybe they were leading him, and not the other way around.
He was the loup-garou. He ruled the pack and he always would.
At least as long as he was cozy with the bitch. He started moving toward the water, following his nose and instinct, picking up the first sounds from the skiff before he cleared the chest-high reeds. Deep night and trailing Spanish moss concealed him as he watched the lone intruder moving closer, paddling his cheap flat-bottomed boat and watching out for landmarks on the bank.
He didn't recognize the boatman yet, moonlight behind him making him a silhouette against the restless water, but the man was close enough now that he caught a smell he recognized. It was the smell of fear.
Off to his left, Leon heard one of his brothers approaching the water's edge. A "normal" man would probably have missed it, but the leader of the pack knew swamp sounds, and he knew at least approximately where the others were right now. The bitch was roughly fifteen yards to Leon's right, downstream, which put her closest to the new arrival. If the man kept veering toward the shoreline with his skiff, she could spring out and join him by the time he reached her hiding place.
The small man in the skiff stopped paddling then, as if he had picked up on Leon's thought somehow. It made no sense, of course. More likely he was tired, or maybe lost. Good luck if that turned out to be the case. A man could sit for hours in the bayou country, searching for familiar landmarks, and come up with nothing. He could sit forever, until the ants and larger scavengers arrived to pick his bones.
But this one wouldn't go to waste. Leon had already forgotten the raccoon. It was a simple appetizer. This was food.
Just when he knew the bitch was winding up to make her leap--a bit too far, in Leon's estimation, but he couldn't tell her that-the small man in the skiff produced a match and struck it on the gunwale of his old flat bottom, holding up the tiny light beside his face. A wave of feral disappointment surged through Leon as he recognized the thin, dark face.
HE knew this man. They had a deal of sorts. It would be wrong to share him with the pack... at least until he found out what the slender Gypsy had to say.
Leon wasn't much good at whistling, with his teeth and all, but he produced a low-pitched warning sound that told the others to stand back. No sooner had the order passed-a whimper from the brother on his left, a quick snarl from the bitch-than Leon stepped from cover, moving toward the water's edge. This man had seen him and was theoretically prepared. There was no point in hiding when a frightened man came all this way to bring him news. "What is it you want?"
His throat felt dry, the words emerging as a raspy whisper. With the pack, he mostly spoke their language-yips and growls and whines that drew their meaning from the circumstances of a given situation. It was a fact that Leon often muttered to himself, sometimes in French, sometimes in English, but he tried to keep it down so as to not offend the pack. It was a very different game to speak deliberately with "normal" men, so that your words conveyed coherent meaning.
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."