by Rob Thurman
“I’m me.” I gave a wide and happy grin. “I’m me and I can talk. No stupid computer, which you skimped on, by the way. You couldn’t fork out the big bucks for a Dell? This one takes an entire century to reboot. And don’t get me started on Windows Vista. That’s what demons pass when they get the Tijuana Trots. And—”
I was silenced as Rafferty tackled me and hugged me so tightly, my imaginary breath whooshed out of my imaginary lungs and I almost slipped and fell down in the equally imaginary snow. It was unexpected, although we Wolves were more touchy- feely than humans tended to be. But Rafferty had been born a grump, not that I didn’t love the hell out of the guy. I did, but it didn’t change the fact this was unexpected. It was even a little bit shocking and it was great. I was me and it was just . . . great.
“I wish I’d figured this out without copying it from Suyolak,” Rafferty said gruffly at my ear. “We would never have needed a computer. We could’ve talked . . . even if you talk too much and carry on about the plight of the whales and shit. But we could’ve actually talked and you could’ve been the other part of yourself, if only in your head. I screwed up and I’m sorry.”
I stepped back out of the hug. Since Rafferty was not the hugging type, that meant he felt guilty, he was scared, and he needed some good down- home counsel—pack style. He’d tackled me with the hug. I tackled him to the ground and rubbed snow in his face. “Awww, you’re so sweet. You’re like Lassie or Lady. Maybe we can find Tramp for you and you can share spaghetti and meet in the middle. Very cute.”
Jumping up before he could kick me off, I continued. “We’re here now. We’re Wolves, Rafferty. We might fool ourselves by running around half the time looking like humans and buying houses, cars, going to college, but the bottom line is we’re Wolves. And being only in the here and now is what we were in the beginning. I’m not saying let’s go crazy and join the cult of All Wolf like Delilah, but we can’t forget either that ‘now’ isn’t so bad.” I reached down and grabbed the hand he wasn’t using to wipe snow from his face and pulled him to his feet. “And right here, right now”—I grinned again at the play on words—“is the best.”
“It is pretty good,” he admitted, and nailed me in the hair with the snow he’d scraped from his face and balled up in his other hand.
And it truly was the best. I hadn’t had a better moment since before getting sick, but Rafferty was driving and how he was managing that and this at the same time was anyone’s guess. Then there was Suyolak.
“You can’t take him.” I brushed nonexistent snow from my hair and went on with some trepidation. I didn’t want to make things worse for Rafferty with doubt. “That’s what you said. If that’s true, then we should get out of here. Saving the world is never a bad thing, don’t get me wrong—I had my car bumper covered with stickers that said the same thing—but if you can’t take him, I don’t want you dying for no reason. The world will have to find a different solution.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t take him.” He scowled automatically at being told there was anything he couldn’t do, the cocky SOB, but he sobered. “I said he was better than me. You’ve played blackjack with me. Football at Thanksgiving in your parents’ yard back in high school. You’ve fought me roughhousing around during hunts. You know me. Being better than me doesn’t mean someone can take me.”
He was right. He . . . I . . . we all thought he was the king when it came to healing, but I was smart, in math and physics as well as biology. I could count cards; learned it second semester of college. That didn’t stop him from beating me in games of drunken twenty-one in the dorm laundry room while we waited for our clothes to dry. I was a little bit bigger, faster, and stronger than he was as a wolf too, but he still kicked my tail more often than not.
Stubborn, ruthless, would cheat in a heartbeat, and was sneaky as hell; it usually gave him the advantage over me. It might do the same for him with Suyolak. In my heart, though, I was as tame as Delilah mocked me for being. Rafferty while in human form was a healer, first, last, and always, but as a wolf, he was Wolf. He hunted with no regret and killed enemies with a double helping of glee. He wasn’t ashamed of it either. He was who he was . . . to the brink and beyond. He simply happened to be two widely different creatures.
As a healer, he healed and he didn’t ask if you deserved to be made whole. As a wolf, he killed and whether you’d deserved it or not, I didn’t ask. Because he was the normal Wolf, the predator. I was the one in the butterfly collar and if I hadn’t been sick and stuck, I might have merited the ridiculous thing regardless.
“Not better than him, but you can take him.” I nodded before having my last look at the trees, the snow, the blue sky that was a different blue to human eyes than wolf ones. I had already studied my hands; now I felt my face. Stubble, lean jaw, thick eyebrows. I’d missed this face. It was only half of the whole of me, but I’d missed it.
“I can take him.”
“Okay, then. You can,” I agreed with the same confidence Rafferty was putting out there, then smiled. It was the moment I never thought we’d get. If he took down that ancient Rom and cured me, it would be good. But if he took Suyolak and couldn’t make me what I was, it would still be good, because I was able to say a real good-bye, one that, at the end of the road, had nothing to do with whether he could take Suyolak or not; one that was for him and me and our past wandering years.
Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.
“By the way, in college? I slept with that girl you were sleeping with junior year.” Good-byes shouldn’t be melancholy. They should be until we meet again. They also shouldn’t include getting the crap knocked out of you on the memory of a snow slope, so I ran the last bit together a little hurriedly. “But you weren’t actually dating, so it didn’t count.” I gave him a quick happy- go-lucky, life-is-good smile, the one my parents had said I’d had since the day I was born—a grinning golden retriever born of Wolves. “Be seeing you.”
I opened my eyes quickly and was back in the car. There was no snow or the smell of pine. There was the smell of old vinyl, the faint scent of ancient baby food and dirty diapers, pot, cedar chips, and a long-gone hamster, and a puck and two humans or semihumans who hadn’t had a chance to bathe in a while. The mummy cat smelled almost like gingerbread cookies, the kind Mom had made at Christmas, and I smelled like fries.
Rafferty just smelled pissed. “Goodfellow, where’s the damn water bottle you spray your cat with? I have some serious behavior modification to do.” To me, he accused, “You slept with Natalya? She was six feet tall, a model, and a Wolf. Orthodox. My mom, if she were alive, would’ve loved her. I might’ve dated her. I thought about dating her. You son of a bitch.”
I grinned and panted in the fine spray aimed at my face. Ah, refreshing. Mummy cats were pussies, literally, if that slowed them down. I kept on grinning as we chased Suyolak until he went to ground like all prey. I could do that, because it was all about the here and now. My cousin cursing at the wheel. Left-over fries to munch. A tug-of-war as a sex-starved puck unsuccessfully tried to steal my racy calendars while desperately declaring monogamy and celibacy as the number one killer, miles ahead of heart disease. Then, when he lost the tug-of-war, pulling out a white and gold peri feather to slowly run through his fingers—a sensation he seemed to be memorizing. There was also the Auphe unconsciously humming under his breath along with Barry Manilow on the radio, the sunglasses beginning to slide down his nose as he seemed to find a meditation groove—no matter how evil and unnatural Manilow was. The ninja/ samurai/assassin-could-be if didn’t-wannabe glancing sideways at his brother as if slicing his throat to stop the non-melody was out of the question, but the fantasy of it not completely so.
It was good, all of it. The future was a myth, the past as lost as the innocence that falls away with a baby’s first breath. The here and now . . .
It was what made life worth living.
15
Cal
We ended up back in Wyoming at
Yellowstone Park right before twilight. I’d never been there before. Rangers wouldn’t let Sophia scam the tourists, so no parks for us as kids, but I damn sure knew a lot of red-light districts like the back of my hand. Then when Niko and I were on the run from the Auphe, hoping to hide as best as we could, wide-open spaces made up of thousands of acres weren’t what we were looking for. That was a Where’s Waldo? freebie right there.
Rafferty parked past the West Entrance just as most people were leaving, trickling out in carloads. We wouldn’t have made it in if the park ranger at the station hadn’t decided to keel over almost face- first into his beef stew. Luckily, he barely missed it and began snoring loudly enough that I hoped a passing lonely bear didn’t molest him. With an irritable healer along for the ride, who needed Obi-Wan and his hoodoo protection for what I’d always strongly suspected were his love droids?
Yeah, I almost jumped in with Robin to fight for Catcher’s calendars, but who could blame me? Delilah and I hadn’t had a whole lot of alone time on the trip and that had nothing to do with her possibly having orders to kill me. When you weighed possible death against certain sex, I was the same as any other guy—I was willing to toss those dice. But time hadn’t been kind to Cal junior. It wasn’t the best road trip I could’ve imagined—in that or any respect. Surrounded by death and very little sex, I could’ve gotten the same if I were a hundred and stuck in a nursing home—if there were nursing homes for Auphe. What a way to spend the prime of my life: all but celibate, attacked daily, more Auphe than I’d ever been, and with all the porn hogged by a monster-sized wolf in a butterfly collar.
Life pissed me the fuck off.
We drove to the first parking area we could find. It was empty by the time we arrived . . . except for a certain black truck. They said Death rode a pale horse. In fiction maybe, but in the real world, Death rode in a coffin in the back of a very plain, unnoticeable black truck. I was out of the car and at the back of that truck in seconds. Rafferty didn’t say anything to stop my progress, which was a good-enough go-ahead for me. If Suyolak had been there, I’d have been on the asphalt with a healer footprint on my back. Rafferty wasn’t letting anyone get ahead of him on this guy.
The doors were unlocked, which meant only one thing, but I opened them warily all the same. I’d seen what this guy could do. I’d felt what he could do. I’d nearly lost my life because of him and the twisted virus he’d turned loose at the hotel.
Dying was inevitable. You came into this world with an expiration date and there wasn’t much you could do about that. Like Rafferty had said, your heart has only so many beats in it. There were the unexpected ones too, like milk going bad a week early. It came with the territory when you fought for a living. I didn’t mind dying, the same way I didn’t mind winter. Both were coming, one way or the other. However, if I curdled early, I wanted to go out fighting all the way. I didn’t want to have some bubonic-plague-spreading asshole pointing a finger at me, and like that sour milk being poured down a drain, so I’d go—without landing a blow. Someday someone or something would kill me. Fact. But I wanted them to see the scars of that encounter every time they looked in a mirror.
Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.
The doors didn’t creak spookily. No reality show ghost hunters/plumbers jumped out to wave idiotic electronic toys to either detect those passed on or snake your sink. As if when you died and there was life after death, which I highly doubted, you’d hang around the place where you took the big dirt nap. Get thee to a beach and haunt it if you have no place better to go. People—stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.
But this was no illusion of a haunting. It wasn’t the site of a vengeful mass murderer lying in wait either. It was only a truck . . . with a coffin in the back, a coffin made of metal and with the lid pushed to one side. “The seals are broken.”
I could’ve jumped at the deeply somber voice right at my ear. Instead, I chose to give my balls a moment to descend and crabbed over my shoulder, “Do you want me to piss my pants, Nik? Seriously? Isn’t the car a little fragrant enough at this point?”
“As entertaining a story as that would be to tell, you’re correct. I apologize.” He rested a hand on my shoulder and hoisted himself up into the truck, not that he needed the support. Then again, maybe we both needed it in the coming battle. Rafferty had said it himself: Suyolak was better than he was. If he went down, we would have to step up, very probably only to follow the healer right back down. Fighting a losing battle is one thing. Fighting an absolutely hopeless battle is a different thing altogether. It certainly made catchy slogans harder to come up with. “I’ll be back.” Well, no, I won’t. “Yippe ki yay, motherfucker.” Too upbeat. “Hasta la vista, baby.” Too temporary and so idiotically clichéd. “I regret I have but one life to give. . . .” Okay, that I could see. I did regret I had but the one life and that it wasn’t enough to kill the bastard. When you were Auphe and that wasn’t enough to kill something, damn if you weren’t having a seriously bad day.
I followed my brother. There was grit under the soles of my shoes, lots of it—probably what was left of those seals Abelia-Roo hadn’t kept up to OSHA standards, thanks to that overblown ego of hers. I should’ve known that from the first second she spoke to us. Abelia was many things, bad ones, familiar ones from my childhood, but she was also sharp as they came. Sometimes sharp wasn’t enough, though. She had a heart on its last legs, but she wasn’t anywhere close to senile. She did think a lot of herself, however, a damn lot, more than Goodfellow did of himself, if possible. The seals had failed because, unlike Rafferty, she thought she was better than Suyolak. If she’d thought less of herself, tried harder and stayed on top of her duty, the seals, and the iron coffin would’ve been sealed tight as it had been all those generations before.
But now we were left with an empty metal box filled with dust and a smell like a cobwebbed attic that hung in your nose and lingered on the back of your tongue. “I’ve always enjoyed a challenge,” Niko remarked, sifting through the powder to lift something out. “I think perhaps there are other things I could enjoy instead. Bonsai trees, painting, forging my own weapons. The opportunities are endless.” He opened his hand to show me the small braid of several yellowed hairs. “Voodoo.”
“Think it would work?” I perked up. Killing from a distance wasn’t usually my thing, but in this case, I’d make an exception.
“Unfortunately, no.” He dropped the braid and dusted mote-sized bits of Suyolak off his hands. Horton wasn’t hearing a Who on any of those—not unless it was a frothing rabid killer Who—and he wouldn’t want to listen to one of those anyway if he was smart.
“The driver’s dead,” Robin said a few feet below us. He was catless. Salome was not only not with him; she wasn’t in the car either. She’d jumped out of the window onto the top of another car that we’d passed at the ranger station going in the opposite direction. She must’ve decided, with whatever filled the empty space between her pierced ears, that not only was the station as far as she cared to go, but that, in fact, she would like to travel in a direction far from us. I thought her tail waved a cheerful good-bye, but it could’ve also been feline for Screw you and your little werewolves too. What did I know? It was a cat. Live ones were a mystery and dead ones . . . way out of the ball field.
“Great.” Although truthfully, I didn’t care one way or the other. Kirkland started this mess. Yes, to save his wife, and, yes, back me into a corner and I could say without a doubt I would’ve done it for Nik. But it wasn’t me. This wasn’t a hypothetical coulda woulda shoulda. Suyolak was gone and my empathy had gone with him, so the hell with the dead guy.
Niko jumped down and started toward the front of the truck, with me behind him. “Rafferty can’t save him? Bring him back?”
Robin snorted. “Jesus fresh off his Lazarus Tour couldn’t do a thing with this one.”
Both Niko and I still took a look for ourselves. The driver’s door was open, thanks to
Rafferty or Robin. I was going with Rafferty, because I’d seen roadkill that was more photogenic than the late professor, and I couldn’t see Robin panting in anticipation for a closer look. Kirkland could’ve been a corpse that had lain under the desert sun for months. Dried skin shrunken to frame the skeleton, coarse short hair drained of moisture and color that had fallen away from the scalp in patches. Eyes turned to raisins in the hollow of his skull. He was a long-dead spider found under your refrigerator. A husk.
He looked quite a bit like Suyolak had in my head.
“Mihai, Yoska,” said Abelia, a still-scuttling spider chock-full of poison, standing behind us. “I might find a use for bits and pieces of him later. If nothing else, he’ll be a good attraction for the marks. Mummy man, cursed to death by the hand of the Rom.”
“You are a shame on any people, including the Rom,” Niko retorted, but he stepped out of the path of the two men. It was simpler. An empty truck was easier for cops to overlook in their files than an empty truck with a dead man in it. The other two Rom stood to one side and respectfully behind Abelia while their brethren hauled the husk of Professor Kirkland over to the RV and stashed him away. The parking lot was empty by then. No one saw and if they had, they would’ve passed it off as a Halloween prop.
“Shame.” She spat on the asphalt. She did have a thing for the liquid expression of her emotions. “It is you who are the shame and your own blood the monster. Now let us find the other monster and end this business.”
“For the betterment of humanity and the improvement of the present company by your removal, I’m forced to agree with you.” Nik did have a way with an insult—a way that sometimes required a dictionary, but a way all the same. He turned his back on Abelia, another insult but more pointed, and shut the door of the truck. “Rafferty?”
