by Rob Thurman
She hissed in a way that made any monster, including an Auphe, seem like an amateur. I was too hard on myself, because she gave me a run for my money and then some. Strangely enough, it made me feel a little better—all human and worse than ninety-nine percent of the monsters I’d run across. Skirts swirling, she turned, less than five feet tall, but that didn’t make a difference. When she moved back down the highway, she was a miniature tornado of pure spite.
“Plague of the World and all,” I said, getting to my feet, “is Suyolak honestly that bad?”
Niko was already up. “Next to her, maybe not, but we’re not comparing apples and oranges. We’re comparing black widows and black mambas. Both can make you wish you were dead. Now let’s rid the world of at least half of that combination.”
This time Rafferty drove. Any one of us would’ve had to fight him for the wheel. We were close, he said. As a wolf or Wolf on the scent, he would know. As a healer, he knew absolutely; he’d already told us. He wanted Suyolak and not for a fee or to save the world. He wanted him for Catcher and that was a thousand times more motivation than the rest of us had. I’d seen the same motivation and intensity in my brother a half hour ago that Rafferty was showing now in nailing the antihealer to save his cousin. Either kill Suyolak or drain him dry, whatever it took.
Best of luck to him.
14
Catcher
Knock knock.
I’d said that to Cal, but I should’ve been saying it to myself too.
Knock knock. Who’s there?
Catcher . . . as I’d told myself a hundred times before. Catcher. I was Catcher, yes, now. But before? No. There wasn’t any point to lying to myself. I’d gone bye-bye. That was six times in the past month. I could blame what had happened earlier for my last trip if I wanted, but that was still the most times ever. I could only pin one of those on Cal.
I’d seen a different side to him with the Ördögs, his Auphe side, the one I’d tried to ignore at our McDonald’s McNugget-up-the-nose stop. There was no ignoring it at the creek. I’d been right there with him when we caught up with the truck traveling off the road and also caught up with Cal’s own traveling. What he did, I couldn’t describe it to anyone else but a Wolf. Humans couldn’t see what we could. I’d been in human form and wolf form and although as a human I saw more colors, as a wolf I saw depths and textures humans couldn’t imagine. I saw reality bleeding around Cal every time he disappeared and reappeared. It was like a visual scream. The world was screaming.
I wasn’t sure if that’s what tipped me over into wolf and nothing but wolf. It could have been that or the battle. Sleek black shapes here, there, everywhere. There was flesh ripping under my teeth and the taste of blood. I wasn’t Kin. I was proof that all Wolves weren’t criminals and careless murderers. I’d been a biologist. My cousin was a healer. I didn’t go looking for trouble. Sometimes you couldn’t avoid it, no matter how hard you tried, not in our world where almost everyone was a predator—it was only a matter of big or little, slow or fast.
But me? I was a peaceful guy, laid back and fun loving. In the day, I could bong a beer and tutor you in anatomy. I’d pledged a frat . . . all the better to blend in, and, to my shame, get free beer. Once in a while in my past I’d run into those a little less nonviolent than I was. I’d tried to be reasonable, but there were those who wouldn’t listen to reason. Then there were the times you just had to go to the woods, the forest, the jungle—whatever was available—to run and hunt. We were Wolves, first and foremost, above all other things. It was natural, and there was no denying we were at our most wolf in the hunt.
Either Cal or the blood; it didn’t make a difference what had been the trigger. I remembered tearing into the Ördögs and then I remembered waking up in the car. In between were the dreams you forgot two seconds after waking up. You knew there’d been something and you had a sense of the emotion, even the happy, slow drift of colors, but anything tangible was gone. I woke up floating in blissful satisfaction and to a full stomach. Deer. I could still taste it. It was a familiar taste. It was what we “tame” suburban Wolves tended to hunt. The Kin would kill and usually eat their enemy. I couldn’t do that. If it talked, I couldn’t eat it. It could deserve to be eaten, but it didn’t make a difference. If it could talk, I couldn’t knosh down on it. I was a softy that way. I couldn’t eat octopus either. I’d done a study on them in college. Those things could open jars to get at food. Jars . . . with screw-top lids. That was smart. I didn’t remember how long it took me to figure out how to open jars when I was a kid. I knew it hadn’t been anywhere near as fast as an octopus and I’d gotten all gold stars in kindergarten.
Rafferty had once said I was the closest thing to a wolf vegetarian he’d ever seen. A tree- hugging, vegetarian wolf—worse yet, Wolf, and he was embarrassed to be seen with me. This from the guy who healed broken wings on birds and tossed them back, free, into the sky. “What?” he’d gruff. “I just ordered pizza. I’ll take pizza over blackbird any day.”
It was why he fought the Ördögs as wolf instead of killing them with a brush of his fingers. It was to give them a chance. It was what was right and fair. He’d only ever killed as a healer to give mercy, the way he had the pregnant woman Suyolak had corrupted beyond all hope of curing. That he was going to change that when he took on Suyolak wasn’t his fault. Only a healer could stop another healer as strong as Suyolak. Rafferty had to do it because that bastard had to die. I could live with that. Rafferty could too. I didn’t know if either of us could live with his doing it by draining Suyolak of a life force that was as tainted as a well poisoned with cyanide.
Whether or not using it could bring me back to what I once was wasn’t the issue. What was, was what would Rafferty be if he did. I’d give up my furry butt—no, I’d give up my life for my cousin, and I knew he’d do the same for me. While I didn’t want it to come to that, it was part and parcel of family, the right kind of family. What I couldn’t accept was his changing. Not the way I had changed, but like Cal had changed during the fight. I didn’t want to be whole and right again, only to look into my cousin’s eyes and see a shadow of Suyolak staring back at me. If he could pull it off and make me like I once was without darkening himself, that would be great. I’d pay for the party . . . buffet and piñatas. We’d hit Mexico and the beaches and not come back for a year. Nothing but fun, sun, and knock-you-flat tequila. We more than deserved it.
But if he couldn’t put me right and keep himself the same in the process, I’d rather live a clean if intellectually simplistic life. I’d rather be the Catcher who lived only in the moment, a Catcher without an identity beyond the most basic concept of “me.” A Suyolak-contaminated Rafferty was not a clean life, for either of us. It was wrong, a polluted existence. And I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t change his mind; I could only hope he was telling the truth: that he could handle it.
“Ah, but, dog, what if he cannot?”
I swiveled my head as I sat in the passenger seat of the moving car but saw nothing. It didn’t stop Suyolak’s oily voice from sniffing around the inside of my brain like a cat in heat, ravenous for any satisfaction he could get. I didn’t know if anyone else could hear him, although no one looked as if goosed with an icy finger, which was how I felt. All that was missing was a doctor telling me to cough.
I closed my eyes and I could see him as he was a long time ago: human with wavy black hair to his shoulders, mischievous black eyes, and a smile that outshone a thousand commission-hungry salesmen. I didn’t think they had such good teeth in those days, but he was a healer. Who needed fluoride if you could heal a dying person or turn him inside out, depending on your mental wiring? Suyolak had some very bad wiring. A conscience was only a word to him, without any real meaning. He had never healed a bird and let it fly away.
“You think that being born without a conscience is my fault, my friend?” The moon was orange as Cal had said it had been in his dream and Suyolak was sitting on a vine-covered log
by a small fire with a pot of bubbling stew. In his lap he was casually bouncing a small boy. The child was three or four years old and dressed in an old- fashioned nightshirt with colorful embroidery around the neck. His head swung back and forth, lolling without any control. His legs and arms were limp and his eyes blank, but he breathed. He had dusky skin, a mop of black curls, and a face as flawless as Suyolak’s.
“You’re smart enough to follow the rules of society.” There were only words in my head, but I heard them as if I were still able to say them aloud. It’d been so long since I’d heard my voice, even in my dreams, that I’d almost forgotten what I sounded like. “Smart enough to know they’re there for a reason even if you can’t understand or feel the reason behind them.”
“You are the first sanctimonious Wolf I’ve crossed paths with. Curious. And, yes, I am smart, more than enough to know that rules don’t apply to one such as me.” Even as he said the words, the grin was as compelling and charismatic as before. The bait to pull in the unwary. Nature at its darkest and most chaotic. Biology. I was a biologist, but I didn’t have to be to see it. I didn’t have to be a psychiatrist either to know Suyolak was a creature beyond redemption. Nature was nature. The volcano didn’t cry for Pompeii—it didn’t care whom it killed and neither did Suyolak.
“I wanted a son,” he added, the fleeting concept of conscience of no further interest to him. A sociopath before humans had come up with the label. He bounced the boy one more time and then let him roll carelessly onto the ground where he landed face- first. He hadn’t cried or made an attempt to catch himself. “But that’s a lie.” The smile only became warmer. “I do like to lie. Do not hold it against me, brother.” Amiable; happy and amiable. Born in a human body, but one untouched by a soul.
“No, I did not want a son. I wanted another me, because, truly, what could be more entertaining than the Plague of the World? Would you guess? No? Two Plagues. We would devour the world and then one of us would devour the other. Now that would be a game genuinely worth playing; a challenge like no other. But instead, this is what I received.” He pushed the unmoving boy farther away with a disgusted nudge of his foot. “Even in the womb of his useless cow of a mother, whom I took great pleasure in drowning in her own amniotic fluid during childbirth, he was like this. When he was smaller than my fist, I felt it. No brain. Oh, a spoonful perhaps, but not enough to be anything but an empty, breathing sack of nothing. No potential for consciousness. No chance to be the challenge I craved. And I could do nothing. You can change a brain; you can easily tear it down if you wish, but you cannot make one. I tried again and again, but it was only more of the same.”
He followed my gaze still fixed on his son. I hadn’t given nature the credit it deserved. It had tried to make up for its mistake. This was its answer to no more Suyolaks. I wished nature had found that answer before Suyolak himself had been born. “Do not worry about that one. I let him live although he’s long dust now. I let them all live. Why kill what was never alive? Where is the pleasure in that?”
“But your cousin.” That smile, that endlessly magnetic and intimate smile. “A challenge finally arises and at the same time that I arise. It is fate. Destiny.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded. “Because I do have better things to do than listen to the medieval version of Ted Bundy. Why are you yapping to me like a bored cub?”
“Because your cousin isn’t listening right now. He isn’t listening, and he is going the wrong way.”
This Suyolak, the one suddenly in my face, the moon gone and the fire smelling of burning human flesh, was the skin-wrapped bones of before. Blind eyes not an inch from mine, snapping stained teeth far from the brilliant white of before, his breath carrying the stench of the Black Death itself.
I yelped, eyes opening, and jerking back quickly enough to bang my head on the inside roof of the car. “What the hell?” Rafferty said. “Did you have a bad . . . shit, Suyolak.”
I’d had a bad Suyolak, no way around it. But he’d said we were going the wrong way and there was a way around that. I clamped my jaws around the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. I believed Suyolak wholeheartedly. He wanted to fight my cousin. He wanted us there when he got out of that coffin. He was getting out too. We wouldn’t be able to stop it. Destiny . . . fate. I hadn’t always believed in the theory, despite a different girlfriend than the Buddhist one. This one had played around with tarot cards. I’d thought she was a complete flake, although one with gorgeous legs and an amazing . . . All right, that was beside the point. But that’s what I’d believed in then, not fate. I believed now. This all felt designed: that I would be sick; that Rafferty would be this desperate; that Suyolak would choose this time to escape or that time had chosen it for him.
Whether you were a pawn or a king, everyone had a part to play in the world. It was time to play ours. I yanked at the wheel again, growling. “Will you quit it?” Rafferty said. “I’m pulling over already? See?” He pulled the car off the highway and slowed it to a crawl. “I smell Suyolak.” Not a genuine smell, but a healer sense, although Rafferty wouldn’t be caught dead saying the soppy, fake mystical “I sense. . . .” about anything. “He couldn’t hurt you. I have us all shielded.”
“He could speak to him, though,” Niko said from behind me, “as he spoke to Cal.”
“Through what I’ve got up?” Rafferty said dismissively. “No.” My cousin had never lacked in self-confidence. Not being able to heal me was the sole exception to that. It made him a formidable fighter when he had to be, an incredibly talented healer, and sometimes a giant know-it-all ass.
I put my muzzle next to his ear and growled again, one very serious growl rarely heard from the nonoctopuseating, almost-vegetarian, save-the-planet, mellow Wolf I was. Rafferty grimaced. “Okay, Christ. I can’t believe I ever bought you pancakes and had the cojones to ask for whipped cream on them. Don’t you forget that, because I’ll never be able to live it down.” He put on the brakes and brought the car to a complete stop. “Get your computer and tell me what is so damn important that . . .” He shut his mouth over the rest of the sentence before changing it to a quiet, “He’s turned around. The son of a bitch has turned around.”
“I thought you had him,” Goodfellow accused. “No possible way you could lose him, I believe you said.”
Sometimes you can concentrate too hard that you can’t see the flock for the sheep. It was an easy mistake to make, especially when you were as emotionally invested in all of this as my cousin was—the same cousin no one could get away with talking badly about, especially fast-talking pucks. I turned the snarl on Robin in the backseat, for the first time ignoring the demonic King Tut cat sitting on his shoulder.
“That is what I said.” Rafferty looked over his shoulder, then jerked the steering wheel and slammed his foot on the gas. The car tore through the dirt, across the asphalt of the road, and then more dirt that made up the median, and we were headed back the way we came. “When I thought I was better than he is.”
The snarl became a startled gurgle as I again turned my head. The set profile of my cousin was enough to disillusion me that I’d heard wrong. Another gurgle, this time from Goodfellow, was a distant Grand Canyon reflection of mine. “What did you just say? I know you did not say he is better than you. As much as I agree that your ego is as enormously inflated as your social skills are nonexistent, but you told us you could take Suyolak. You were to do the heavy lifting on this little escapade, because apart from having our hearts explode and our brains dribble out our ears, there isn’t much we can contribute to the campaign.”
“We took this job before we knew Rafferty would be available, so that’s not exactly fair,” Niko said. “Behave.”
The puck did not. I wasn’t in any way surprised. I’d only met two other pucks in my life and they had been noise pollution on the hoof. Goodfellow was no different.
“Only if you’re using ‘we’ with the broadest of definitions. He came aboard this ship of
death before I did. I expected him to be our lifeboat, our coast guard rescuer in a tight uniform. I dislike having my expectations, especially of living, shattered.” Goodfellow scowled, folded his arms, and slid down in the seat, but he didn’t tell Rafferty to stop the car and let him out. That was huge for a puck. Besides making a good deal of noise, they were accomplished fighters when they had to be, but they were equally accomplished at keeping themselves in one piece. It should’ve been surprising that there were so few of them left. Still, if you thought about it, as I had before of Robin, if you lived forever . . . did you really want to? They had far too much time on their hands, and it was likely I had too little. The world was funny that way.
I thought I’d picked up enough about Goodfellow from our first meeting and this road trip to know that he was being brave, not suicidal, though, but what about Suyolak? He was going to be more than happy to make sure none of us saw the dawn of the next day, much less forever, and I didn’t want my cousin giving up his life if he had no chance of stopping the bastard.
“Cuz.”
I rolled my eyes back and forth again, but no one was speaking, not the others, not Rafferty. No mouths were moving and it wasn’t my ears that had picked up the word. This was turning out to be the day of playing with my brain as if it were Play-Doh. Grumbling deep in my chest, I closed my eyes again. This time I didn’t see Suyolak. I saw Rafferty. I saw the world around Rafferty. It was from our college senior ski trip. The air wasn’t cold and the snow matted down in my ski boots wasn’t freezing my feet as it had back then, but the vision of it . . . It was the same as the framed picture on Rafferty’s guest room dresser. Rafferty could’ve stepped out of that picture himself. He was seven or eight years younger with hair that, while it still rivaled a well-worn janitor’s mop, wasn’t as unkempt as it was these days. I held out my hands, gloved and holding ski poles. Hands. I dropped the poles and stripped off the gloves. They were as I remembered: the scar across the back of my right one. Nails chewed short. I’d started gnawing at my paws when I was a cub and never stopped, as a wolf or a human. A plain ring of silver around my right ring finger . . . just because we Wolves loved to mock that whole silver legend.
