by Rob Thurman
“And old and something the world had never seen before. Yeah, been there, heard that,” I snapped, turning back, and this time I had something for the Eagle. I aimed and when the ground came up to smack me in the face, I was more than a little disappointed. Not surprised, no, that Suyolak had given me an invisible swat, but there was a complete lack of satisfaction, no doubt about it.
I heard Delilah’s growl, but it wasn’t her normal one . . . human or wolf. It was frightened—Delilah, who was never scared, who wasn’t just borderline suicidal against an enemy, but flat-out ecstatic kamikaze all the way. She didn’t fear pain or death. I thought she didn’t fear anything, but I was wrong. I wasn’t the only one. “He is wrong,” she snarled. “Unnatural. Unclean.”
I could smell it, what she smelled. Even on my stomach, facedown in the dirt, I could smell it. It had lingered around the coffin, but his odor this close . . . It could choke you. It was rotting flesh and disease and mass graves sweltering under a hot sun, but beyond that—beyond who he was to what he was, it was alien. Delilah was right. He was wrong and unnatural. Even the Auphe, twisted monsters that they were, had belonged here. They’d died elsewhere, but they’d risen from this earth. As much as you wanted to deny they were natural, they were actually nature at its most effective. Suyolak was outside nature; a mistake that could destroy what had accidentally spawned a creature it had no hold over. Nature had been an ant creating the foot that would crush it.
I had no idea what was in the dirt I was inhaling, but it must’ve been some potent stuff. Philosophical thoughts in a not-so-philosophical situation by the farthest thing from a philosopher as you could fucking find. Suyolak was one huge-ass mistake. Didn’t need to say more than that. I got my hands under me and started to push up as I felt a hand tangle in the back of my jacket and pull me the rest of the way. Not to my feet, which was asking a little much right then, but to my knees. “What . . . the hell . . . was that?” I tasted blood in my mouth and I was hoping it was from a split lip or broken nose, because both of those were better than nearly anything Suyolak could dream up.
Niko decided that if I could talk, I could stand after all and finished the job by pulling me to my feet. He was right. I weaved, even with his hand still holding me up, but I did stay up. Niko was the rock that at times held me up and at other times could take me down as efficiently as Suyolak had—which reminded me. “What was that?” I repeated, wiping dirt and blood from my face.
“A distraction,” Rafferty answered, his shaggy hair tangling in the wind.
A distraction could be good. If I’d distracted Suyolak enough that he’d swatted me with his antihealer mojo, then Rafferty might have been able to swat him right back—only harder. I looked past him. Shit. Suyolak was still standing, still grinning, looking so much the cheerful Rom, so like our mother, he could’ve been her slightly more sociopathic cousin. With hair grown long in the coffin and a face that was meant to attract the unwary, to anyone but us he would look like a god come to Earth. To me, he looked like a trap. One thing he didn’t look was one bit distracted, which meant I was the one distracting Rafferty, not Suyolak—and that wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
“Why the hell didn’t you take him while he was doing the same to me?” I held on to my gun stubbornly. I might be the fly and Suyolak the swatter, but that didn’t mean I was going to be flattened without getting off at least one round—not next time.
“Probably because if he had, you’d have done more than hit the ground. You wouldn’t have gotten back up again,” Niko said as he steadied me.
“I took only one or two beats of your heart.” Suyolak raised his voice over the growling that was still coming from Delilah and had been joined by those of Catcher. “You do not miss them now, do you? One or two seconds of your life. Believe me, by the time I am finished here, you’ll be glad to die those few seconds sooner than the rest.”
Now Rafferty did split enough of his attention to the nearest warm body. It happened to be Goodfellow. He took his arm and pushed him toward Catcher. “Hang on to him. You might need some help, but do it. He’s okay now, but that could change when it all starts. It could flip a switch and I don’t want him any closer to Suyolak.” He took Catcher’s face, gripping the fur on both sides, focusing on him. “I’ve got one chance at this, Catch. I can do this, but not if you go Cujo on me, okay?” The growling and snarling had stopped and Catcher regarded him with an eerie silence before pressing his nose into his cousin’s hair, snuffling, and then blowing out air in an aggrieved sigh. But he stayed put, aggrieved meaning agreeing if not particularly liking it.
“Good.” Rafferty straightened. “The rest of you stay back and out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do for me. I’ve got more power up between you and him. Hopefully he won’t get through again if you don’t give him reason to. He wants me first.” With that, he moved toward Suyolak and away from us. Ill- tempered and bossy to the end, that’s who he was. Cranky I could understand, but telling me what to do, that wasn’t going to fly. Like him, I’d gone up against creatures better than I was, and I’d survived, but that was only because I’d always had help. Without the last, I still would’ve gotten the job done, but I wouldn’t have walked away to tell the tale. We’d gotten Rafferty into this. It would be a piss-poor partnership if we didn’t help him to live to pass through and see the other side of it.
The hand that had been holding me up now moved to my shoulder to hold me back. “Wait,” Niko ordered.
I hadn’t moved. There was a time to make your move. If you were good, you knew it when it came. There were many things I wasn’t especially good at in life: handling customer relations, dealing with relations of any kind, keeping the smart-ass in check, not recognizing addiction when it bit me and everyone around me in the ass. But one thing I did know was the right time. The shot I’d tried to take at Suyolak hadn’t been it. That had been the first punch in the first round. That wasn’t the moment I was talking about. Our moment in this game now was the last ditch, now-or-never-again time that you had to take or you wouldn’t live to take anything else. I knew it because Nik had taught me to know it . . . and being half predator—more than half, whichever—that didn’t hurt either.
We were waiting for the end of the line, and we weren’t there yet. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other kids, Mom,” I grumbled.
“I feel for you,” he commented wryly. But he let his hand drop away, because he trusted me. It was impossible to fathom how he kept that trust day after day when my subconscious was determined to do everything it could to deserve anything except that trust—or maybe it wasn’t so much trust as acceptance, unconditional and never-ending. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought I hadn’t felt lucky since I was five. I should’ve felt lucky every single day of my life.
“I wish someone felt for me,” Robin complained with a sneeze. He was crouched beside Catcher with one arm hooked around the Wolf’s neck. “Felt for me, felt of me. Anything at this time would be welcome, because I had much higher hopes of this ending with me not dead. So any fondling or groping would be welcome.” Catcher turned and gave him one broad lick across the mouth and nose before going back to snarling and staring at the two healers approaching each other. “Not what I had in mind, but the effort is . . . ah . . . appreciated, thank you.” Goodfellow scrubbed his face with his sleeve.
“You should’ve said more in your call to Ishiah,” Niko said, moving to stand beside me now that I could actually stand on my own. “If you can actually consider monogamy, then you owed Ishiah more than a weak excuse for a good-bye.” Niko, like me, did understand the impossible nature of a good-bye, but unlike me, had the balls and the spine to tell someone else to go above and beyond.
“Your brother might need a mommy, but I do not,” Robin shot back stiffly, still hanging on to Catcher. He didn’t need a mommy, but it looked as if he had one huge teddy bear. “When I tell Ishiah . . . Whatever I plan on telling him, it won’t be only because I
don’t think I’ll be around later for the consequences. He deserves better than that.”
“Not soap opera. Battle. Be ready,” Delilah contributed with an impatient toss of white hair and a deep rumble in her throat that outdid Catcher’s. “Humans, pucks, even Auphe. Hopeless all.” Delilah, who didn’t trust anyone but herself and didn’t want to; whole and complete within herself, that’s what she thought. She was the unlucky one, but I didn’t think she’d ever know it.
Catcher moaned. He knew what it was to be lucky, to have someone—family or otherwise—and that meant what he was now seeing had to be his worst nightmare: Rafferty and Suyolak coming together.
The moon had risen behind the antihealer. It was the same moon from my dream. Huge and orange, shedding the light of a forest fire down on us. It hardly ever looked like that in summer. I took it as a sign that fate was feeling particularly bitchy, giving a nightmare-perfect background to another nightmare, the one we were facing. Suyolak spread his arms under it. “So long has it been since I’ve seen the sky. So long has it been that I walked in a world that had never seen my like”—he lowered his arms and finished lazily—“and is now seeing it again, Wolf.”
Rafferty staggered. I smelled the blood he spat on the ground in front of him, but he didn’t fall. He wiped his mouth. I saw the dark stain on his hand. He spat again. More blood.
“It was called consumption in my day. Now you call it”—Suyolak tipped his head to one side as if listening, picking the term from a mind—“tuberculosis. It is an ugly word for such an elegant process that eats your lungs small bite by bite. A tiny predator ranging wild within. Marvel at the beauty of it.”
Marvel. Jesus.
Straightening, Rafferty said, “We cured that a long time ago, asshole. And you talk too much.” His voice was clear, not thick and choking, and the rest of us weren’t dead on the ground. That meant he was holding his own. “Here’s something new for you.”
This time Suyolak was the one to stumble. It was only a few inches back and he stayed on his feet, but the blood that poured from his nose and mouth cheered me up some. He coughed, holding up a hand toward us, palm out. Whatever was behind that hand stopped Rafferty after a single step, one he’d been quick to take. He was a healer, but he was a Wolf too. He could kill with his mind and he could kill with his hands. With Suyolak he’d use whichever one would do the job.
“Ah, this . . . one.” Suyolak lifted his head to grin with teeth now coated black in the moonlight. “This one is a thing of magnificence.” The blood stopped. “What do you call this then? Ebola? Hemorrhagic fever? A fitting name for a glory I’d not even dreamed of.” The grin widened. “I approve.” This time Rafferty didn’t just stagger; he almost fell, and I didn’t want to even guess what kind of god-awful disease he was fighting. Leprosy. Smallpox. Suyolak’s blue plate special, the plague.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered. “Why doesn’t he just go for the heart like he did to me?”
“I imagine that’s quite thoroughly protected as Rafferty is protecting his and ours. They most likely have only the tiniest cracks that are weak enough to attack.”
Niko’s comment didn’t satisfy Delilah. “No manner to fight.” She paced the area behind us. “Throwing germs.” There was a righteous disgust in her voice. “It is wrong. To stand aside. Wrong. Want to fight. Want to bite. Want to kill.” Catcher was picking up on her blood-lust, his growls growing wilder.
I grabbed Delilah’s arm as she passed to yank her to a stop. “Quit it. If you send Catcher off the deep end, you might distract Rafferty, and then we’ll all be spreading the news about how festive Ebola is. If we survive this, you’ll have plenty of other things to kill.” One of them might be me, but there was a time and a place to worry about that. It wasn’t now.
She threw my arm off. “It is not just the kill. It is the battle. The fight. I am Wolf, not sheep. I do not stand. I do not wait. I fight.”
“Then look over your shoulder,” Robin said, hanging on to Catcher for all he was worth. “You’re about to get ten years of birthday wishes all in one. And thanks so very much by the way. It’s just what we needed on top of the oh-so-entertaining parade of diseases throughout history.”
Too agitated to pick up their scent or unable to detect it over Suyolak’s own, Delilah hadn’t smelled them coming—neither she nor Catcher. The Ördögs were back. Or since we’d killed all of the others that had come out of the truck the day before . . . hell, not the day before . . . this morning. It had been this morning. Talk about one long damn day. Time was so raveled in knots, I honestly couldn’t tell one day from the next, but it had been this morning. It had been today—the day that I’d argued with Delilah, eaten a Big Mac, then a deer, lost a piece of what humanity I had left, and now it was time to fight for my life . . . again. The army thought they did more before nine a.m. than most do all day. Well, they could get in line.
No, these Ördögs weren’t from the truck or the creek where we’d killed the others. There were more this time and they looked . . . full . . . their sunken bellies now bulging with food. From their appearance, they’d had at least the entire day to hunt for prey and that would only make them quicker and stronger than the last. Suyolak hadn’t chosen this place at random. Whether he’d gotten the location from the dead professor’s mind or just felt the huge area teeming with life, he had picked the park; he had the Ördögs waiting. I thought he’d underestimated the seals, as Abelia had overestimated herself, and had the truck pass it by until he could get out of the coffin.
Or, out of the kindness of his heart, he’d waited to wreak death and destruction until the noncamping areas of the park were empty. That, I sincerely doubted. We used to have a neighbor when I was ten, for a few months before we moved again as we always did. She was pear shaped, her hair always in rollers, and she had a mouth so small and pursed, she could’ve doubled as a nickel slot machine. She’d once told me, as she crushed a cigarette under one large rubber flip- flop, that I was no better than I had to be. I hadn’t gotten that as a kid, and Niko for once hadn’t felt the need to explain it to me. No better than I had to be; seriously, what did that mean? I’d long since learned what it meant, and I knew Suyolak was no better than he had to be either, certainly no kinder than he had to be.
And that wasn’t kind at all. We were lucky we weren’t hip deep in tourist corpses—instead of being hip deep in all-too-alive Ördögs. But better than all that, just too fucking good to be true, were the Wolves behind them. Ten of them: nine in lupine form and one still wearing his human suit in the midst of them all.
“Cabal,” Delilah announced with a mixture of disdain and what sounded like reluctant pride. “Pack leader. Mine.”
I understood the emotions then. Disdain because traditionally Alphas were male and that was not a tradition Delilah embraced. She wanted to be Alpha and, despite not being male or a high breed, and being a believer in the All Wolf on top of it all, I’d have put my money on her. That was before I’d come into the picture, and, it being a particular talent of mine, I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A female, maybe; an All Wolf, chances were slim. Screwed an Auphe—if that wasn’t the sole reason the dictionary had the word anathema in it, you’d have to show me proof otherwise.
As for the pride part of her emotion, she might want to kill him and take his place, prove herself worthy, but if you were a Wolf, your pride also rested in your Alpha. He represented your pack. He was your pack. Every day was the day you hoped to end his reign and begin yours, but until then he was as the world saw you—the Wolf world. He was you.
“You called them here,” Niko said to Delilah, not as an accusation but as a fact.
“Yeah, she did.” I wasn’t any more surprised than he was. I wasn’t disappointed either. I wasn’t hypocrite enough to let myself be. I’d known all along what she was, and I’d known this was more than likely coming. But I thought it would be Delilah herself. Death was personal to her and a thrill she wouldn’t care to share with any
one but her victim.
But I was wrong; right and wrong, but wrong in a way that didn’t necessarily help me out.
“Yes. I call.” She cupped my cheek. “I told them you too much for me.” Her smile was bright and mocking. “They believed. They believe anyone too much for me, then they deserve to die. I call twice a day as Cabal orders. I call and they follow. I do this because I know, you are too much for them. My duty to my pack complete and you still live. It is a good plan.”
It was a good one. If we fought off her pack and, more ideally, her Alpha, Delilah was free and clear. I felt a relief I didn’t want to admit to, but admit it I did. I had too few people in my life. I didn’t want to lose one. Delilah had done as her Alpha had asked: She had delivered me up, and if he and the pack couldn’t manage to chew me up and swallow me down, then maybe they should start hunting little furry bunnies or the ferocious squirrel. She’d be happy to tell the survivors so—if she spared any. Werewolves, like ordinary wolves, were pack creatures. They were drawn to one another, the majority of them, but there were always exceptions—lone wolves. Delilah was a loner through and through. She was only pack as a career choice. She was Kin before she was Wolf; she was Kin before she was anything.
Yeah, it was a good plan, a perfectly Kin plan.
If it had been her only plan, things could’ve ended better.
Cabal didn’t waste any words. Raising his hand, he motioned imperiously for Delilah to join them. He was in his mid- thirties with what was probably thick silver hair, wolf silver, shorn short. In the moonlight, it, like everything, had an orange tint. He had a thick build, with broad shoulders, and large hands that could strangle the life out of two people at once without changing form. I couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but as I didn’t plan on staring into them soulfully and asking him on a date, that didn’t much matter. In spite of his build, he looked as if he’d be quick—quick and lethal. That wasn’t a guess. It was a fact. He wouldn’t be Alpha if he weren’t. But he wouldn’t be the first Alpha I’d had a hand in killing and that Alpha, Cerberus, could’ve eaten this guy in three bites with one head while conducting Kin business with the other. You really hadn’t seen anything until you’d seen a two-headed Wolf.
