Hunger Makes the Wolf

by Alex Wells

  The Bone Collector’s eyes narrowed. “There was a time when I never thought I’d hear you say that something was too late, or a problem too large for you to handle.”

  “I grew up.” Nick laughed humorlessly. “Killed a lot of good people figurin’ it out.”

  “You cannot turn your back on these people. Or on me.”

  “Why the fuck not? What’d they ever fuckin’ do for me? For us? Threw us some scraps if we went and fuckin’ bled for them. I don’t owe them jack shit.” He curled his lip. “And say I do decide I want to be a hero, at my advanced age? What are the chances of survival then? Tell me what the future holds, since you always seem to know. Am I gonna just waste more Wolves on a problem that we can’t handle? I owe them better than that.”

  The Bone Collector shook his head. “There are too many possibilities.”

  “I’m startin’ to think that’s your speak for, ‘yeah, it’s gonna be bad.’”

  “Nothing of the sort. It’s too complicated to see through. There are too many things that I don’t know.”

  “If we stick together, we’ll be safer than apart.”

  The Bone Collector looked away. “That’s no longer good enough.” One hand ghosted over his pocket. “The townsfolk are in this as well, whether they know it or not.”

  “Tough shit for them. I gave all I got to give. I gotta think of me and mine first.”

  “I believe you when you say that.” The Bone Collector sighed, shoulders bowing. “Goodbye, my friend. I don’t think we will meet again.”

  “Wait…” Nick croaked. The words caught in his throat as the pale man walked away, and he didn’t have the strength to chase him – not that it was possible to catch the Bone Collector if he didn’t want to be caught. It was a punch to the gut, the look he’d seen in that man’s eyes: worse disappointment than he’d ever seen on Phil’s face, and Nick had been a powerful disappointment at times.

  * * *

  The Bone Collector had him spooked enough that as soon as he’d settled back into his bed like he never left, he sent for the young Wolves. Couldn’t even really tell himself why, maybe he just needed the reassurance that those precious idiots were still in one piece.

  Hob came in like one of those rare seasonal storms, about to spit lightning and soak everything around her with acid piss.

  “There you are, girl. Took you damn long enough,” he said.

  “You can’t stay abed forever. I’m tired of playing secretary for you.”

  “Leadin’ a group of roughnecks into battle’s a dangerous job, girly. But look at me. I’m going to be the first Ravani to die in bed in three hundred years.” Nick grinned. “I mean to enjoy it.”

  “It’s always one damn joke after another with you.”

  “Where are Freki and Geri? I sent for them, too.”

  “They’re out to town, looking for a dice game most like. Bored out of their damn skulls, just like everyone else,” Hob growled.

  “Right.” He smiled. Yeah, that was her through and through, damn little hellcat he’d hauled out of a drift of sand a decade ago. Best mistake he’d ever made in his life. She was too damn like him. “Where’re your guns? Shouldn’t get caught naked, you know.”

  “Your office. I was cleaning ’em. Didn’t come here aimin’ to shoot you.”

  “Ah, I see.” Nick reached over one hand so thin he barely recognized it as his own and patted his gun belt, hanging over the chair next to him. “Take mine and clean ’em too, while you’re at it.”

  “Never get tired of this game, do ya.” Still, she took them up just as reverently as the first time he’d given that order weeks ago. “Shouldn’t keep letting these out of your sight, should ya?” A time or two she’d let slip silently by, since it was probably just Nick being a bastard. But this was turning into a habit, now.

  “I don’t expect to get haunted over it,” Old Nick said calmly. They were important, those pistols, more than she guessed, even. A straight line back to the first man who’d ever worn the Ravani name, passed from one to another like father to son, only it was a closer bond than just shared blood. “Never figured you for the superstitious type.”

  “I come by it honestly,” she snapped.

  “But it was fun, wasn’t it,” he said, breathing the words out like a sigh. He sank a bit lower against the pillows. He’d messed with her good and proper, growing up. Taught her not to trust anything, not even him. “Had some laughs.”

  “You spend your whole damn life laughing at me.”

  “Why you in such a pissy mood, girl? You on the rag?”

  Hob bared her teeth. “Best hope I’m not.” Pistols held gingerly, she went back to the window. “You seen to me bein’ restless, with your damn files.”

  He chuckled. “Ain’t fun, but it needs to be done. I trust you with it more’n the boys.” She was the only one who could do it. Who could do half of what he’d done. She had the fire in her belly, the hunger, like he’d had more than forty years ago when another wicked old man had torn his scraggly ass out of the dunes.

  She gave him a sharp glance over her shoulder. “Thanks, old man.”

  “Keep callin’ me that, and I ain’t so sick that I can’t come up to clip your ears.”

  “I’m countin’ on it. And countin’ that I can still run faster scared.”

  Old Nick grinned. “Age wins, girl. When you’re old, you know how to wait.”

  She said the words like they were a slip, a thing she hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “Just don’t you go waitin’ too long.”

  “What would you do in my shoes, girl? Shit’s gotten downright deadly out there.”

  “You want a real answer?”

  “Grace me with it, please.” He didn’t bother disguising the sarcasm in his voice. Needling her was the only fun he got any more. No one else fought back half as much, not with Makaya gone.

  “Times’re changin’. We gotta change with ’em if we want to survive.” She crossed her arms, pistols cradled in one elbow. “I seen all the flimsies comin’ in. Don’t know what the company’s up to, but people are gettin’ scared. We can ride it, or we can get mowed down by it. So get your ass out of that bed, and get us ridin’.”

  Old Nick stared at her for a long time, then coughed, loud and theatrical. “Ain’t a half bad answer, but there you go, tirin’ me out. Get. I expect to see my reflection in those pistols when you’re done.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll bring ’em back presently.” She headed for the door.

  “Oh, Hob?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have ’em send up another book and some whiskey. Just about done with this one.”

  “Yeah, will do,” Hob said. She shut the door behind her, not nearly as hard as he expected.

  Nick remained thoughtful and quiet long after she’d left. One of the low men in the pack – Conall, that was right, decent shot and a quiet sort, always staring off like he was daydreaming – brought him a bottle of whiskey and some battered novel with a plain cover, which he accepted with only a grunt. Out of habit, he cracked the book open to reveal crooked printing on crinkled, reused plastic flimsies – probably one of Hati’s hobbyist efforts from the overblown title, The Murder That Shook the Canyonlands to Gravel. He poured three fingers of whiskey into a glass and took a sniff, but didn’t drink.

  The girl was right, he thought, then: she ain’t “the girl” any more, ain’t been for a while. Hob had grown into her name; he might not have paid attention at the time to how she handled herself during the escape from Rouse, but Coyote had made it his business to fill Nick’s ears with the story over and over again, in that pointed, prissy little accent of his. Hob was also right: things were changing. He’d kicked the change off two months ago, thrown them in a direction they couldn’t backtrack with his temper. But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if their invasion of Rouse was really the trigger, or if it was part of something so big he’d never have the full shape of it, a fault line that ran through the entire
world.

  It was too damn complicated, and he was too damn old and sick with black fibers of drug-resistant, alien cancer strangling his lungs – a little gift from his time in the mines before he’d been put on the blacklist.

  It’d be better to give Hob her head. Any direction she’d go would likely be better than sitting in place too scared to move, if she could scam the rest into following her – and he had no doubt she could. But she wouldn’t be able to do it with him hanging over her shoulder like a rook of doom. Everyone would be looking at him, waiting for him to caw and flap his wings and tell them what he thought, instead of looking at Hob. And Hob would be looking over her shoulder too.

  The thing that had struck him about her, right from the start, was the way that angry little girl had marched off into the desert without so much as a backward glance. She’d had enough of a chip on her shoulder for five men, and he’d pushed to turn her hard instead of cruel, because that was the only way he knew to survive. Phil had always said he was too tough on her, that it was no way to treat a girl that might as well be his daughter, Phil’s niece. Maybe he’d been right. But from where he sat, listening to the unsteady beat of his heart and the wheeze of his own lungs, he thought he’d done all right. He’d pushed her and pushed her, and she hadn’t broken; even when the blood had run and she’d ripped out her own heart rather than turn traitor, she’d gone hard and strong and straight in the back, and she’d earned her damn name ten times over even if part of the game was him never admitting it out loud: Hob Ravani.

  The Ghost Wolves were a pack first and foremost, and that made them a family, for all their bellyaching and squabbles. And the head of that family had always, always, from the first days been named Ravani. Even then he’d known, when that ratty little girl had threatened to bite him if he didn’t let go of her hand, the hand she’d been trying to pick his pocket with, right fucking now. Even then, he’d known, when she wanted fire of her own more than she wanted safety.

  He sighed, and dug a little tin from his pocket, shaking out its entire load of pills. Before he had a chance to change his mind, he threw the bitter handful into his mouth and washed it down with the whiskey. Then he quickly poured another measure. He might as well enjoy as much of the bottle as he could before he finally drifted off.

  He smiled and raised his glass, silently toasting the Bone Collector. He probably should have told the girl what he’d said, about the witch hunt, but it was too late now. No doubt she’d go to him soon enough on her own anyway, and find out then. Or the Bone Collector would find her. The two of them had kept crashing into each other in the most eerie way through the years, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he’d been able to do to stop it.

  He finished the glass, rolling the smoky flavor across a tongue beginning to go strange. Unsteadily, he poured himself another refill, and sank lower in the pillows.

  First Ravani to die abed in centuries indeed.

  * * *

  The Bone Collector was older, far older than he looked, perhaps because he spent so many years asleep as living stone. He’d seen the previous witch hunt and the one before, the proto-witch hunt that had come with the industrial development of the planet just a hundred years ago. They’d come with their sparking, dying equipment, with their factories, then with their endless stream of workers – because blood and sweat could do what frail machines could not on his beautiful world – and they’d tried to excise everyone who could hear like a cancer.

  He had been just as helpless every time because what he could do wasn’t enough, or wasn’t the right sort of power. Futures and stone and tunneling through the ground was nothing that could stand against Weathermen who got stronger with each generation.

  Even that abomination was not the true issue. If it were only one entity, he could move around it, find other ways to fight it that didn’t require direct conflict. But these hunts were all the same, planned by the company for a specific purpose: in the first few towns, they would find those that had evolved into something better, and they would round them up and take their families besides. After those few examples, in the outlying towns people would turn on their own, preferring to burn them cleanly instead of risking themselves in a purge.

  He’d seen it three times. He had no stomach to see it a fourth. But there was little he could do if he couldn’t even withstand the touch of an unnatural thing that had been brought from off world.

  In the mine near Pictou, the Bone Collector dug his hand into the stone of one wall and drew out the little burlap sample bag that Hob had given him, so many weeks ago.

  He’d always shared a special sort of bond, a resonance with the world that had given him birth, sounding for his ears alone like unending music. The Bone Collector held the bag up to his ear, eyes half closed. The tiny crystals sang as well, but there was something clearer to that song, purer; beautiful in a way that ached at the back of his throat. Perhaps it meant nothing. But it might mean everything, might be a path to something stronger, a deeper connection.

  Not knowing anything more about the crystals, he couldn’t even begin to see the possibilities. Strength, nothing, or death: those were the major branches. The one thing he could see clearly was that if he did nothing, he would eventually die at the hands of the Weatherman, and not a clean death. The monster would suck out his heart through his mouth, taking in everything that made him whole.

  Nick Ravani had proven unhelpful, unexpectedly so. Perhaps he should have watched the futures more closely, but Nick had seemed a constant, a rock of his own sort. A rock that had inexplicably crumbled at the worst possible moment. He had few options left, now.

  One of those potential paths had led him to plant the seed of an idea in Nick Ravani. Part of him hoped that it took, because it provided the best possible path from this tangle, the branch that provided the most options to the future. Yet part of him in opposition hoped that Nick would ignore him, would make good with his words and take his people to ground. Because for all his frustrations, Nick had been his friend first and always, since the day he’d found him crazed with thirst in the desert.

  Sacrifices had to be made. Friendship was a fitting thing to lay bloody at the feet of fate.

  The Bone Collector passed one hand in front of his eyes, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor. He drew a short, bone-handled knife from the sheath at his waist and made a deep cut from his wrist halfway to his elbow. Blood came, hot and immediate.

  He dropped the knife on the ground and took up the little sample bag, carefully pouring the crystals onto the blood that covered his arm. When the bag was empty, he used his other hand to press them in more deeply, into the raw flesh, the vein he had severed.

  Something beyond melody, beyond music, beyond all description burst through his mind as the crystals melted into his blood. He felt the world breathe, felt her heart beat, and knew her to be alive. He fell to his side, arms jerking, head whipping back and forth. The last sound that came from his mouth was a cry of exultation, because for these few breaths he could hear something far more powerful than the rumble of rock and sand, calling out to him, beckoning him on, her voice echoing from a great distance.

  The sound froze into his throat as his skin flowed in to stone.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Hob’s shoulders were tense fit to snap and her eyes burned from deciphering Old Nick’s chicken scratchings by the time the paperwork was done. Still, she smiled and hummed to herself as she picked up the ancient pistols – her self-promised reward – and started cleaning them. She couldn’t help but imagine the history, the battles, all the stories of the men bearing the Ravani name for more than two hundred years, before TransRift, before the mining towns were even camps. Old Nick didn’t talk about the stories too much, but give Lobo a couple of shots of something with teeth and he wouldn’t ever shut up.

  Absorbed in her own thoughts, she didn’t notice the commotion at first, noise drifting in through the open window. It was all normal base chatter, men laughin
g and the soft hum of well-tuned engines. The alarm bell sounding jerked her back to the present as chattering turned to shouting.

  Hob lunged away from the desk to the window. “The hell’s going on?” she bellowed.

  The courtyard was full of men, with more tumbling in by the second. A cluster of dusty motorcycles stood at the center of the confusion; Freki and Geri, back from town, the towering figures of Dambala and Akela next to them, one-eared Bhima close behind, more joining them. “Hob!” Geri shouted up. “Old Nick’s dead!”

  Her hands went white-knuckled on the windowsill as shock stole her breath. That had to be impossible; she’d just been talking to him. He couldn’t be dead, not in a quiet instant.

  “Someone said you got his pistols. You bring ’em on down. We got a decision to make.”

  She felt lightheaded, unreal, but her voice was steady as she called down, “Be there in a moment.” She put the pistols back together with hands that shook, holstered them, and left the office with the belt pooled loosely in her hands.

  Everyone on base crowded into the square exercise yard. They parted ahead of her like water, making a path straight to where the twins stood. Geri’s foot jiggled impatiently against the ground. For a crazy moment, she wanted to drop the pistols, turn and run. All that stopped her was the men closing in behind, driving her forward.

  Geri smiled as she halted in front of him. “Hand ’em over, girl,” he said, one dark hand held out.

  “Don’t be gettin’ too ahead o’ yourself,” Dambala rumbled. His arms were crossed over his chest; Hob knew he didn’t want to step into Nick’s shoes. But others did.

  “We’ll decide,” Bhima said. “Men’ll pick who we follow.”

  It felt like her feet were a thousand kilometers away as she looked down at that hand. It was simple; give them over, let the others decide, and spend the rest of her life being called “girl” like Old Nick had done every day since he’d named her. Keep being the ass-end of the pack, dismissed and constantly questioned, keep reliving her mistake and doing her penance for a crime only a dead man knew. Dead or not, she could hear the old bastard laughing in the back of her head fit to choke on it. Like this was his last, grandest trick. What’s it gonna be, girl? Done rolling in ashes? You finally ready to fight?