by Rob Thurman
She looked at us closer, studying—smelling. “Cousins. Tame cousins. Suburban Wolves,” she said with not a hint, but a good helping of scorn. In the Kin’s eyes, there were Kin and there was everybody else. If you didn’t rob, kill, run drugs, pimp succubi, and do other things not worth knowing, you weren’t a predator. You weren’t a Wolf. You were just a dog playing dress-up. But Delilah didn’t seem to mind, just as she didn’t mind Cal . . . aside from the possible killing- him prospect. Of course Delilah didn’t mind us because of the All Wolf. If she could get Rafferty to do to them what he’d done to me, it was like standing on the mountaintop with your poisoned Kool-Aid and the alien mothership actually swooping in to pick you up: the ultimate reward to them, but an abomination to my cousin. He would never do it. She could talk forever.
I rested my head on the front seat and grinned at her, with the kind of grin that gave her the indication of where my brain, which I still had for the moment, was right now—definitely not in my head. Rafferty might not like her, but I didn’t care what she said. She could’ve asked me to let little children ride me like a pony around the parking lot. She could’ve read the back of a cereal box. As long as I was able to be this close to her, smell her, stick a nose in those long strands of hair, I was good. Happy happy happy. If Algernon had gotten any, he might’ve lasted longer; that was my theory. Poor mouse. Poor janitor. Poor me.
I turned my head further and pawed delicately at Delilah’s hair, radiating that “poor me” scent until I’d flooded the car with it. I don’t know if she’d have fallen for it or not. Rafferty was too quick to grab me by the scruff and pull me back. “She’s Kin,” he snapped. “And she’s a crazy All Wolf. You don’t want that; I don’t care how horny you are.”
“So judgmental.” She crossed her arms along the back of the seat I’d just been yanked from and rested her chin on that sunset skin. She’d left her motorcycle leather top elsewhere and was wearing only a tank top now. It showed a lot of skin, but, truthfully, skin or fur, I didn’t care. It was nice—very nice. A strong hand untangled itself and she cupped my muzzle firmly. “But you . . . so beautiful. So all that is right. All that is true. We could be as you. Whole. Wolf as Wolf is meant to be.”
This was America, land of religious freedom. She could’ve wanted to ascend to the higher being of a fire hydrant for all I cared. My only concern was about getting some. All right, I wasn’t proud, but I wasn’t ashamed either. It had been a long time. It could be a longer time and by then the Catcher part of me wouldn’t be around to appreciate it. No, there was no shame as I vaulted the seat and landed on top of her. I might’ve howled in glee. I know she howled back. But before she could go wolf, we were interrupted—by my cousin and by Cal, who, to give him credit, didn’t try to shoot me.
Rafferty pulled me back over the seat and Cal pulled Delilah out of the car altogether. He must’ve been furious, although again, nice enough not to shoot me. Then he avoided a punch from Delilah that would’ve broken his nose if it had connected—dodged quick, more than human-quick—and he looked at me. For a brief second, maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw a red gleam in the gray of his eyes: Auphe red.
I decided I wasn’t horny anymore. I further decided it might be a good time for a bathroom break, hooked my paw around the door handle, yanked and pushed the door open with my shoulder. If I hit the asphalt running, it was because I really had to piss—no other reason. I heard Rafferty following after me. I could’ve gone back for the laptop to ask if he’d seen it too or sensed it as a healer, but I didn’t want to know, just as people didn’t want to know years ago when I’d had to tell them I had leukemia, that I was going to die. You could see it in their faces. . . . Take it back. Rewind a few minutes. Make that conversation never have happened. Sometimes it was for me, the not wanting to know. They didn’t want to lose me. They didn’t want me to suffer. But sometimes it was for themselves, not me. Don’t put that on me. Don’t make me carry the burden of your being sick . . . your dying. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to deal with it.
With Cal, I was even worse, because I felt them both. Sorrow and fear . . . for an Auphe.
“Damn it, Catcher, wait. Your collar.”
I stopped with an internal and external groan and glumly stood still as Rafferty slipped it over my head. It wasn’t as if Raff wanted to put a collar on me, the most humiliating thing you could do to a werewolf, but it lessened the incidents like we’d had with the truckers the day before. That was why it was bright green with butterflies on it. Butterflies. I couldn’t even have a butch collar with skulls and crossbones or just a plain-colored one. No, I had to have the girly collar to make me look as harmless as possible. He’d tried to put a pink one on me first and that had led to the destruction of a motel room. There was a lot I was willing to do to make things easier on my cousin, but I wasn’t going pink.
I sat down on my haunches and took a look around, trying to ignore the sounds of my tags jangling against each other. One was shaped like a bone. Wasn’t that cute? Wasn’t that sweet? I moaned again and Raff said quietly, “I hear you, Cuz.” He did. It was the only thing that made that thing around my neck bearable.
I leaned against his leg and took in our surroundings. This was a busier exit than the usual ones where we’d been stopping. Several fast-food restaurants, truck stops, gas stations, and the pervasive, big generic food-clothes-auto-electronics-banking-coffee-stand-photo-vision- salon-and-have-surgery-while-you-wait stores you saw everywhere now. “Goodfellow and Niko are in there buying clothes.” He didn’t smile often, my cousin, but he absolutely smirked when he said that, a smirk that dripped with pure evil.
I smirked back, my tongue lolling. Goodfellow buying clothes at the equivalent of Wal- Mart; it was worth the car getting blown up to see that. I wondered if polyester would actually burn his skin or simply jump off his body and scoot away. We’d walked to the McDonald’s curb and Rafferty sat down on it. My eyes drifted back to the car where Cal and Delilah were arguing. It was too far for a human to hear, but for a Wolf, I might as well have been a foot from them.
“I don’t give a damn who you sleep with,” Cal was saying, his tone sharp but cold too. Ice-cold. I’d seen Cal only a few times in my life, but I knew what he was capable of. I wondered if Delilah did or only thought she did. “This isn’t Weres and Vamps 90210. We’re not going fucking steady. You can go bang the bag boy at the goddamn grocery store if you want, but leave Catcher and Rafferty alone. And when you do screw the bag boy, have the damn decency not to do it in the car where I can smell it all day long.” Cal pretended he didn’t care that Delilah might try to kill him, but he cared—too much. But it wasn’t making him reckless; it was making him . . . less. Less of what he was and more of what he wasn’t—or what he didn’t want to be.
“Told you will do as I want,” Delilah countered. “What I want is not to kill. Not you.” I could smell it on her, the truth and the lie. She might not want to, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t if it were her only resort. “The Kin can say, but I am Kin too. Better Kin. I do as I please,” she said. Cal looked as if he wanted to believe it, and he didn’t have any reason not to. Her words rang with truth. She was a good liar and when it was only half a lie, it was even easier to be convincing. Cal wasn’t a Wolf. His sense of smell was Auphe, but they hadn’t been able to smell the emotions of truth or honesty; only fear—the dark, sharp scent of a prey’s terror. He had to trust his instincts. I was glad I wasn’t human. It would be like being half blind, depending on only what you could see and hear, on the human oddity of subtext. How they managed to get anything accomplished amazed me.
Cal bowed his head. He had yanked Delilah out of the car either because she let him—human strength was less than werewolf strength—or because of that concept I didn’t want to consider, that thing I didn’t want to know—the other half of Cal that was growing, spreading. I shifted my weight on my paws and Rafferty murmured, “I know.” But knowing and being able to do something about it
weren’t always the same.
Now Cal had her backed against the car, and Delilah, being who she’d shown herself to be, was enjoying it. He wasn’t. His fists were clenched, knuckles white. “Then don’t ignore me either. Change your mind and do your best to kill me, but don’t fucking ignore me. I’ve been happy, except for that damn Suyolak, for the first time in my life. The Auphe are gone. I’m free. Don’t ruin it, got it? Don’t goddamn ruin it.”
Cal was human, Cal was Auphe, but Cal might have the spirit of the wolf in him too. Being dead, being killed in battle, being seen; it was better than being nothing. It was better than nonexistence or the wrong kind of existence. Cal knew that.
“Happy,” Rafferty murmured at my ear. “He has been less moody than the other times I’d seen him.” Happy? Okay, everything is relative. What I paid attention to was that an upbeat Cal equaled a downbeat cousin, but Raff didn’t elaborate on why it did. We both already knew. As I’d thought, as I’d seen, as I’d smelled, the Auphe in him was growing.
“Puppy!”
I turned my head just in time to have a McNugget shoved up my left nostril—or at least a good attempt at it. A toddler with a dandelion fluff of wispy blond hair was trying to pet me with one small hand and gift me with questionable chicken parts with the other. Puppy he knew; the difference between a nose and a mouth, not so much.
I loved little kids: manic balls of energy with four limbs waving like drunken windmills. They always were up for Frisbee, grabbing their bikes and going, running and shouting, racing, playing hide-and-seek. They were just like wolves, except at the end of hide- and-seek they didn’t eat what they caught. They lived in the moment—not yesterday or tomorrow or even the next minute. It was a good philosophy, especially for my life now.
I opened my mouth and patiently let him stuff the food down around my tonsils while he giggled and his mother looked horrified, frozen, clutching several paper bags. I waited until the little boy withdrew his hand; then I swallowed the chicken and held out a polite paw to the mom. See how harmless? Shake the doggy’s paw. See what a good doggy?
She didn’t take it, but only grabbed the child and swept him up with one spare arm to bolt to her car. “You should have that thing on a leash,” she told Rafferty in the most righteous of tones over her shoulder.
“Humans,” he muttered, and looped an arm over the barrel of my body.
I chuffed in agreement to make him feel better, but actually I didn’t mind humans. I’d dated enough of them in college. It was true that most of them started out fine, but some usually went wrong and lost their sense of play. Those you just ignored. I’d long since stopped taking it personally when I’d gotten locked in the fur coat. If I hadn’t, I would’ve eaten someone and been in my right mind when I did it. I had to let it go, and I did. Bad emotions will eat you up as fast as any cancer. I saw that in Rafferty every day as another tiny piece of him was gobbled up by guilt and despair. But no matter what I said or did, I hadn’t been able to change it. That was who he was, spending his life trying to stop the unstoppable, with me and every other patient he took on. In the end, he would always lose. For a Wolf and a healer, he was remarkably blind about death—stubborn to his lupine bones, denying nature itself, and he’d never be any different.
I would’ve given anything to hear him laugh.
Niko—another one who didn’t do much laughing, not on the outside anyway, although I could often smell the silent humor on him—walked up to us across the Wal-Mart parking lot while carrying a bag in each hand. He looked down at us with a neutral gray gaze. “Have you seen—” Interrupted by the ring of his cell phone, he switched one bag to his other hand and answered it. “Yes, Ishiah?”
I’d never liked caller ID. It took the surprise out of life, and life could use all the surprises it could get as far as I was concerned—good ones at least. Of course, with the way things were going, this wasn’t a good one. But I didn’t know that yet.
A Wolf’s hearing is more than exceptional and I had no ethical problems listening to Ishiah’s side of the conversation. I wasn’t entirely the goody-goody suburban Wolf Delilah labeled me. No Wolf alive was. And, hey, I was nosy. My life had been limited for a long time. Eavesdropping was a minor sin for a little entertainment value.
This Ishiah, the monogamy quandary—or victim, depending on your opinion of Goodfellow—didn’t waste time on pleasantries. “Where’s Robin?”
There was a thrum under the voice that vibrated the air in a way a human couldn’t hear—in a very unique, deep, and musical way. A peri. A puck and a peri: That had my eyes crossing. The profane and the pure. It wasn’t precisely a Match dot com dream come true.
“I was about to ask my traveling companions the same thing. Still in the store, I was assuming.” Niko looked over his shoulder back at the building. “Although considering the type of store it is, I would’ve thought he would have been in and out in five minutes.”
“He just called me and he doesn’t sound . . . himself. He sounds drunk and confused. You need to find him. Now.” All right, a righteous and pure peri, but a pissed-off one. And worried too.
“Now,” Niko confirmed, flipping the cell shut with a brisk snap that showed how concerned he was. “It has to be Suyolak. Robin certainly wouldn’t drink any alcohol he could purchase from liter bottles in that store. Rafferty, Catcher, can you find him?”
I was already on my feet, nose in the air. Thousands upon thousands of scents, but a puck was easy to pick out, a piece of bright green yarn in a mass of bland tan ones. Rafferty was most likely feeling for him with his healing talent as well as following with his own nose, but four legs were faster than two, and I streaked through the parking lot with my cousin and Niko behind me. I had Goodfellow’s scent off the bat. There were many scents actually: several kinds of cologne; silk; shampoo that cost more than the car we’d been riding in. He did like the finer things in life.
A few people shouted as I ran past them, but I was so quick that most were left gaping, mouths opening and closing like brain-damaged goldfish. I didn’t care. I was running, I was tracking, and while I was apprehensive about Goodfellow, I was also doing what wolves did best . . . besides kill. I couldn’t help but enjoy the adrenaline.
To run is to live and I was living.
I left the parking lot, ran through grass, passed Goodfellow’s dropped phone, and vaulted a massive drainage ditch as if it were a puddle. He’d walked around it. I passed over it as if I had wings, and I caught him. I caught the puck a split second before he stepped into the first lane of four lanes of busy, extremely fast- moving traffic that ran in front of the shopping center. I snagged the back of his expensive if now-dusty and sweat-stained shirt and yanked him backward hard. He hit the grass and rolled several times back down into the graveled ditch. If it had been a cartoon, you would’ve heard the splat. In the real world it was more of a combination of a thunk and thud.
Whoops.
I jumped down beside him as he lay spread-eagle on the dried, cracked mud. His eyes were half open, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was talking, but it was all Greek to me . . . literally. And I took Russian and Japanese in college, so I didn’t have a clue. I licked a broad tongue across his face, figuring that would disgust him so much he would have to come around. He didn’t.
Rafferty, Niko, and Cal came sliding down beside us, the latter wasn’t going to let us go tearing off without following us. “What’s wrong with him?” Cal demanded.
“He looks like he was sleepwalking. With Suyolak, that’s certainly an option,” Niko said.
“And into traffic to be run down—what a damn fun party trick that would be to him. The bastard,” Cal muttered. “What’s he saying?”
“You don’t want to know,” his brother answered dryly but disquieted as well. Worried. “Rafferty?”
Rafferty was kneeling beside Goodfellow, his hand resting on the puck’s head with the brown curls springing between his fingers. “Huh. Never thought I’d actually get to diagnose
the good old ‘dead in a ditch’ in my lifetime.”
Cal snapped, “Rafferty, he’s our friend, all right? So don’t fuck around. Fix him.” Fix him, because Cal didn’t seem to have too many friends and he didn’t want to lose those he did have. Being half Auphe wasn’t going to make for the most popular kid on the playground. Poor guy. Although even if he hadn’t been half Auphe, I still wasn’t sure he’d win any congeniality contests. Like my cousin, he had a temper.
Snorting, unimpressed by his cranky counterpart, Rafferty took a more serious tone, “He’s asleep, like Niko said, and thanks to Catcher’s quick and heroic action, he also has a concussion.”
I laid back my ears and growled. Rafferty used his free hand to shake my ruff. “Kidding, Cuz. A concussion is better than his ending up as roadkill.” He closed his eyes. “Niko, Cal, go scare off the rubberneckers up there and I’ll work on the concussion and then wake him up.”
It didn’t take long. The pale face regained a healthy color, the blood seeping out on the gravel beneath Goodfellow’s head stopped flowing, and after five or so minutes, the puck’s eyes cleared and he blinked dazedly for a second before his gaze sharpened. “Where am I and what is that I feel on the back of my shirt?”
That would be a little bit of good honest Wolf saliva, but I looked away and pretended an interest in a lethargic frog hopping down the ditch away from us. Just as I liked kids, I liked frogs too. A biologist couldn’t not like frogs. They were fascinating. They came in all colors; some were poisonous; some could switch sexes. Amazing.
By the time it had hopped out of sight, Goodfellow was sitting up and talking to the peri on his phone either Niko or Cal had retrieved for him. “I’m fine, Ish. Lassie helped me out somewhat. What happened? Ahhh . . . some sleepwalking. Not anything to worry about. Didn’t I say Lassie saved me? So how much danger could I have been in really? Other than falling down a well or getting trapped in the ‘old mine’?” I bared my teeth and Goodfellow bared his back at me. Not only did he speak Greek, but he spoke Wolf fairly fluently as well. “No. You don’t need to come. Our doggy healer can handle it, he’s quite sure. Oh, and anything I might have said while asleep that was of a sexual nature I promise to back up when I get home. No, back up was not a euphemism. I don’t use euphemisms. If I meant that, then that’s what I would’ve said. I am sitting in a filthy ditch at the moment, but if you want to discuss details right now, we can.” Apparently Ishiah, thank Fenris and all that runs with fur, didn’t. He was far more interested in the issue of Goodfellow’s safety.
