“You don’t have to do this,” said Raina. Her eyes were fixed on her sister, and the look of bleak despair on her face made me revise every thought I’d ever had about Shelby’s occasional expression of funereal gloom: this was what it really looked like when a Tanner girl’s heart was breaking. “We can find another way. A less dangerous one.”
“I won’t live in a cage,” said Gabby. She sat up straighter on Basil’s shoulder, and the moonlight slanting through the trees made a halo of her pale hair, making her look like some sort of fairy-tale heroine getting ready to embark on her big quest. Gabby and the Werewolves wasn’t likely to be coming from Disney any time soon, but maybe it should have been. “I love you, and I wish I didn’t have to risk this, but I won’t live in a cage. Not for you, not for anybody. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Take care of our girl, Basil,” said Shelby.
“I will,” pledged the great green man, as solemnly as if he was promising her the moon and the stars. Then he turned, Gabby still riding easy on his shoulder, and slogged away into the swamp. The three of us stood silently in the boat, watching them go until we couldn’t see them anymore. Raina sobbed, a short, cruel sound that cut off abruptly at the end as she swallowed the rest of her sorrow, forcing it to stay penned inside. We were alone.
Shelby was the first to move. Raina was in a state of something resembling shock, and I knew it wasn’t my place to try to force the matter: she wasn’t my sister. Shelby had no such compunctions. She picked up both oars, thrusting one of them at me, and said, “We need to get back to the house before Mum loses control completely. Alex, you’re going to help me row. Raina, you’re going to sit down, and hug your dog, and stop looking like someone’s just died. Gabby will be fine.”
“You don’t know that,” snapped Raina.
“You’re right; I don’t,” said Shelby, which stopped Raina in her tracks. The younger Tanner looked from her sister to me, clearly confused as to how she was meant to proceed. Shelby didn’t give her time to figure things out. “She could die from the wagyl’s bite. We know next to nothing about them. We don’t know whether their venom is hemolytic or neurotoxic, we don’t know whether they can control how much they deliver—it’s a gamble. But Basil wouldn’t have taken her if he didn’t truly believe that he could help, and our mother needs us. Dad’s in quarantine. We’re all she’s got.”
“This would never have happened if you hadn’t brought him here,” muttered Raina, directing a sharp glance at me as she fell back on what I was starting to think of as the Tanner family’s favorite song.
“Oh, because Alex is a mad virologist who traveled backward through time to invent lycanthropy and spread it through the therianthrope population, thus leading to a situation where Gabby would get bit? Don’t be daft, Raina. It’s not becoming. Alex isn’t at fault here. Cooper is, for having her bitten. We’re going to shoot that man until he’s more holes than skin, and then we’re going to shoot him again a few times, just to be sure.” Shelby sat down on the boat’s center board, dipping her oar into the water, and motioned for me to do the same. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before something else decides to have a go at eating us.”
I sat down next to Shelby, falling somewhat awkwardly into the rhythm of rowing toward the distant, unseen shore. She was better at this than I was, thanks to what must have been years of practice; I had only ever rowed the little rental kayaks around Puget Sound, and once in Lake Washington, when we had taken a trip up the coast to chat with the local sirens. My left arm shouted and moaned in protest at the repetitive pulling motion. It hurt like hell, but it wasn’t enough to burst my stitches, and so I kept rowing. My discomfort was less important than giving Raina the time she needed to pull herself back together for the dangers that we had yet to face.
Dangers . . . “I saw Cooper,” I said.
Shelby’s head snapped around to face me, eyes so wide that I could see the whites of them even through the gathering dark. “What?”
“He and three of his werewolves came after me—and Basil—while we were waiting on the bank. Didn’t you wonder why I was sitting in a tree in the middle of the swamp?” I found myself mildly but irrationally annoyed at the yowie, who should have told them what was going on when he went to fetch them from the playhouse.
Maybe he’d assumed we would have more time together. Or maybe he just didn’t care about making things easier for me. Either way, he was gone, and I was here, with two Tanner sisters staring at me in the dark.
“Three werewolves?” demanded Raina. “Who were they?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They stayed in wolf form the whole time. If I’ve met them in their human forms, I don’t know about it.” That would have been too easy. Cooper knew that. Things were chaotic enough back at the house that he could easily have pulled three, or five, or a dozen of his people from the fringes of the crowd without being noticed; all they’d have to do was return clothed and clean and join the others in shouting, and no one would remember that they’d ever been gone.
“Bastard,” muttered Shelby.
“It’s worse than you think,” I said, and took a deep breath, watching Raina carefully as I continued, “He’s the one who bit Gabby. In a way, though, that’s a good thing.”
“I’m going to slit your throat and bathe in your blood,” said Raina serenely.
“Alex, you’d better explain yourself fast, or I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stop her from making good on her threats,” said Shelby, a warning note in her tone. In that moment, she didn’t sound like she wanted to stop Raina from making good on her threats—and I couldn’t blame her. If it had been my sister, I would have felt much the same.
“Cooper’s cover only got blown when he was ‘killed’ during the encounter that saw me bitten,” I said. “He must have been planning the attack before we went out there. Let himself get wounded so we wouldn’t suspect him, and then get put into quarantine with me. It would have given him free access to convince me to break out with him. All he’d have needed to do was play up the Thirty-Six Society reaction to things that weren’t—or were no longer—human, and I might have listened. I’m sorry. It’s true.” Discovering that I had a toxic but effective treatment for lycanthropy would have accelerated his timeline. The tincture made me sick, but it could kill someone whose infection was already far enough along to allow them to transform. “When that didn’t work out, and he’d been forced to ‘die’ to avoid being treated for his disease, he took the first opportunity he had to get away. That’s when he went for Gabby. We know when she was infected. We know how far along she is.”
“So this is your fault.” This time, Raina sounded resigned, like she’d always known that if she followed the narrative for long enough, she would be able to blame everything on me.
“I think it’s more ours,” said Shelby. “We knew Basil. We knew that people could be nonhuman and still be, well, people. And we didn’t say anything. Not even when we grew into positions of vague influence, we didn’t say anything. We helped create an environment that made men like Cooper almost inevitable.”
“Jack said—”
“Jack was going to change things after he was in charge, Ray-Ray. He was going to remake the Thirty-Six Society for the modern world, and no one was going to be able to stop him. But that didn’t happen, did it? A Johrlac came here and killed him, and we all got so wrapped up in being sad and paranoid that we stopped thinking about being better. We should have kept thinking about being better.” Shelby’s voice broke a little on the last word. I glanced over, and saw tears gleaming on her cheeks, catching glints from the moonlight.
I didn’t say anything. Those tears weren’t mine to betray.
Raina sighed, deep and slow and pained, like the sound was coming up from the very center of her body. “I miss him so much,” she admitted.
“So do I,” said Shelby, and kept rowing.
>
My strokes got less ragged and more effective as we rowed through the swamp. I wasn’t ready to try out for the Olympic team, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I wasn’t actively hindering our forward motion. Creatures chirped and hissed and hooted in the dark, making me wish for a floodlight. Something that sounded almost as large as Basil splashed off to our left, and I was suddenly just as glad we didn’t have the floodlight. Seeing our neighbors wouldn’t have made them go away, but it would have forced me to admit that they really existed.
I don’t know how long it took for us to reach the bank, and the little dock where Gabby had originally launched the boat. Shelby took over both oars in order to guide us to where we actually needed to go, and Raina climbed up onto the dock to tie us down. That was a relief. We would have been there all night if they’d tried to leave things up to me.
“Come on, you,” said Shelby, pulling herself up onto the dock and then turning to offer me a hand, which I accepted gratefully. My family worked hard to give us all the skills that we would need to survive in our chosen professions, but my lessons had never involved much to do with boats. Maybe that was something to consider for the next generation.
Nothing growled or lunged out of the bushes at us as we walked into the woods and started toward the house. I drew my gun, carrying it low against my thigh as I scanned the trees and waited for something to attack. All my vigilance was for naught: either we were alone, or we were being watched by Cooper and his wolves, who we would never see coming.
The trees up ahead began to get lighter, brightened by the bleed from the house beyond them. We sped up a little, and voices began to trickle back to us. The argument was ongoing, then, and probably had been the whole time that we’d been gone. I realized I had no idea how long that had actually been. It didn’t feel like it had been more than an hour—probably more like thirty minutes—but it was hard to say. Fear and adrenaline do funny things to the body’s sense of time.
The back door was still standing slightly ajar. Raina was the first one through, followed closely by Jett, with me and Shelby on her heels. The voices got louder once we were inside, apparently coming through the open door, and we half-walked, half-trotted the rest of the way back to the porch, where all three of us stopped dead in the doorway. Jett danced a few feet farther, bouncing on the pads of her feet as she gave one ecstatic bark.
Charlotte, who had been in the process of lowering one of the Aeslin mice toward the face of a waiting Thirty-Sixer, turned to blink at us. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You decided to come back. That’s brilliant. Just let me finish this, and then we can have a nice chat about what made you think this was a good time to run off.”
I blinked at her. So did Shelby and Raina.
“Mum, are you okay?” asked Shelby slowly. “You didn’t ask about—”
“Is Gabby alive?” A note of fierce need overwhelmed the serenity in Charlotte’s tone for a moment.
Shelby nodded.
“Then I trust you to have done what needed doing. So am I.” She waved a hand, indicating the lawn, where the rest of the Society had formed itself into a long line that snaked across the grass like a bizarre conga. A few stood off to the side, not joining the conga; they seemed oddly relaxed, as if their troubles had all faded away. The reason why became apparent as Charlotte turned back to the Thirty-Sixer in front of her and finished lowering the Aeslin mouse to the level of his face.
The mouse sniffed. The mouse pushed its whiskers forward as far as they would go, forming a bristled fan that brushed the tip of the man’s nose and caused him to exhale with the effort of not sneezing. That had apparently been the goal: the mouse sniffed again, more rapidly, before squeaking proudly, “Not infected!”
“Uh . . .” I said.
“Well, it is what we told her to do,” said Shelby, as the cleared Thirty-Sixer trotted off to join the others on the side of the yard. Apparently, those were the ones who had already been cleared by the mouse jury, declared free of infection and released back into the safe haven of their human lives.
There were a lot of problems with what we were witnessing, but I decided to go straight for the big one: “Is there any way of knowing that everyone is here?” I asked.
Raina shook her head. “No,” she said grimly; she had looked at the yard, packed with people and not organized in any coherent fashion, and come to the same conclusion I had. “We can ask, but people have been on and off the property all day. ‘Did you see so-and-so’ is going to get a positive response no matter who we ask about, because someone will have seen virtually everyone we can think of.”
“And someone else will be right there and ready to say that so-and-so was going somewhere predictable, but was definitely going to be back before the infection checks began, so they must be clean,” said Shelby, keeping her voice low. “Someone needs to be taking names.”
“That’s not happening,” I said. I stepped forward before the next person could step onto the porch, clearing my throat. “Charlotte? Can we have a moment?”
“Sure thing,” she said, setting the mouse back on the porch rail. She clapped her hands together, eyes still on the yard, and called, “Everyone, hold tight and don’t give up your spot in line. I’ll be right back with you, all right?”
Some grumbling greeted this announcement, but not enough to be dangerous. After the rest of what we’d been through, I was willing to take that.
Charlotte dusted her hands against her thighs as she turned to face us, eyes still bright and glossy with too many shocks, packed too tightly together. I spared an instant to wonder whether she even knew what she was doing, or whether she was just going through the motions because it was easier than stopping and really thinking about what was happening to her family, to her world. I dismissed the thought just as quickly as it came. Regardless of whether Charlotte understood her actions, she was going to have to live with them. That meant we all would.
“Well?” she said brightly, looking from face to face. “Where’s Gabby? You did find her, didn’t you? She shouldn’t have run off like that. She scared the life right out of me.”
“We found her,” said Shelby. “Mum, she’s been bitten. Cooper bit her. He passed the infection on to her.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Charlotte, almost serenely. “She would have told us if she’d been bitten. She knows better than to hide something like that.”
“Apparently not,” said Raina. “She ran because she’d let the cat—or wolf, I suppose—out of the bag, and she was afraid of being locked up. I bet that’s why Cooper’s found support among the Society, you know. Anyone who’d been exposed saw the world getting narrower around them, and they took the only option they saw left.”
Charlotte frowned at her daughter, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned to me, raising her eyebrows, and asked, “Well? Where is she?”
“She’s with a friend who may be able to offer her some unique treatment options,” I said. “It was her choice, and we decided to allow her to make it. Charlotte, how are you organizing this line? Have you been keeping track of who’s in it, or who’s been cleared by the Aeslin mice?”
Charlotte blinked, frowning again, before she said, “The Aeslin mice haven’t found anyone who’s been infected yet. I don’t think the situation is as dire as you’ve made it out to be.”
“Mum, that doesn’t answer the question,” said Shelby. “Have you been keeping a list? Making notes? Anything that lets us know who’s already been cleared?”
The mice on the rail began squeaking and squawking, saying something I couldn’t make out over the sound of the humans on the lawn. I tried to peer unobtrusively around Charlotte, who was blocking my view of the rail.
She shifted positions as soon as she saw me lean, blocking my view more effectively. “Look at me while we’re talking,” she snapped. “Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”
&nbs
p; “Please leave my mother out of this,” I said, as politely as I could. “I have done nothing to question your parenting skills, and I’ll thank you to do the same for her.”
“No, but you’re questioning everything else, aren’t you? ‘Did you keep a list’ and ‘we’ve taken your daughter for a new sort of treatment’ and ‘the werewolves are infiltrating your organization, good thing I’m here to save the day.’” She took a step toward me, jabbing her finger at my chest. There was a cold, glossy look in her eyes that made it clear she’d been looking for a good target, and thought she had found one in me. “Got anything else you’d like to question, Mr. Price, or shall I get back to the business of saving my people?”
An unearthly screech rose from behind her, high and shrill and agonized. It had barely registered with me before I was moving, shoving Charlotte out of the way and diving for the rail.
I was already too late. The sound cut off a short second later, while I was still lunging forward. A large Thirty-Sixer stood frozen on the top step of the porch, red leaking from between his closed fingers. One of the mice was nowhere to be seen. The two others had raced halfway up the porch support with the uncanny gravity-defying powers shared by terrified rodents the world over. They were clinging to the wood with all four paws, shrieking.
As my lunge ended, carrying me into range of their tiny voices, I finally made out the words: “MURDER! MURDER! HELP! MURDER!”
I didn’t stop. I didn’t think. I didn’t consider the fact that the man in front of me was easily a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I was. I just let my momentum carry me into him, burying my fist in his nose with a satisfying crunching sound that did nothing to lessen the sickening dread in my belly. The man stumbled back, losing his balance as his heels went over the step, and toppled backward into the crowd—less because of my awesome pugilism skills, and more because gravity does not like being treated as a toy.
Pocket Apocalypse Page 31
