Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1)

by Matthew Storm

  Tyler kneed the man violently in the groin and tossed him aside. “Get out of here!” he shouted down at Oliver. Then someone seized him from behind and dragged him out of Oliver’s sight.

  Jeffrey was at Oliver’s feet, watching the fight above them with interest. “Use your magic,” he urged Oliver.

  “I’m not a damn sorcerer!” Oliver insisted.

  “No? Then maybe you better start running,” Jeffrey suggested.

  Oliver heard more struggling from inside the house, another gunshot, and then a sickening crack. A long moment passed in silence, and then the front door opened and Tyler stepped outside. His Hawaiian shirt was badly torn and wet with blood. He had one hand pressed to his abdomen and was breathing heavily.

  “Are you all right?” Oliver asked. It occurred to him at once that this was a stupid question. Of course the man wasn’t all right.

  “Sure,” Tyler said, wincing. “No problem.”

  Oliver heard a screech of tires from down the street. A silver Miata was racing toward them. It pulled to a stop and Sally jumped out, silver pistols appearing in each hand.

  “It’s over,” Tyler told her.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Two lizards, three humans.”

  Oliver blinked. Tyler had just fought five people? At least one of whom had had a gun? And he’d won?

  “They played us,” Sally spat. “God damn it.”

  Oliver heard sirens approaching in the distance. “Thank god, the cops,” he said.

  Sally scowled at him. “You really want to explain this to the police?” she asked him, motioning with one pistol to the dead man lying on the pavement a few feet away.

  “Lizards,” Jeffrey said, looking up at the broken window. He sniffed the air. “That’s it. That’s why they smelled so strange to me. They’re lizards that look like people.”

  Tyler and Sally stared at the cat in shock. “Oh yeah,” Oliver said, realizing this part was new for them. “Guys, this is Jeffrey. Jeffrey, meet Tyler and Sally.” It occurred to him that he was introducing them to a cat. Maybe he’d already seen the doctor and had that brain scan. Maybe he was in a hospital somewhere right now, and this was all some kind of fever dream.

  “My name isn’t actually Jeffrey,” the cat pointed out. “But I’m not sure you could pronounce it.”

  “Wow,” Tyler groaned, still wincing. “You really did make a cat talk.”

  “See?” the cat said to Oliver. “It’s your fault. He gets it.”

  Oliver looked up the street. He could see flashing red lights now. In a moment the neighborhood would be swarming with police, maybe a SWAT team, and who knew what else.

  “Is Seven on that?” Tyler asked.

  “Yeah.” Sally frowned, fingering one of her pistols. “Taking his damn time about it.”

  Oliver wondered what that meant, but it became clear when the sirens abruptly stopped and the flashing lights disappeared. Oliver saw car headlights turning away. Nobody was coming now. The street was quiet again.

  “Huh,” said Jeffrey. “Would you look at that?”

  “I can’t believe you have a talking cat,” Sally said. “Artemis said there weren’t any.”

  “There aren’t,” Jeffrey pointed out. “Cats can’t talk. And I couldn’t do it either, until this guy up and put the whammy on me!”

  Tyler choked out a laugh. “Did you put the whammy on him?” he asked Oliver.

  “No!” Oliver insisted.

  “We can sort this out later,” Sally said. “Right now…” she stopped as Tyler suddenly staggered forward, dropping to one knee. “T.?”

  “Hey, he’s bleeding!” said Jeffrey.

  Sally bent down and ripped Tyler’s Hawaiian shirt open. Oliver gasped. Tyler had two bullet holes in his abdomen and was bleeding profusely from them.

  “Oh, shit,” Oliver said.

  “Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Tyler said. “It’s not bad. I’ll be fine.”

  “Dumbass,” Sally said softly. “Why didn’t you say you were hit? Can you stand?”

  “Sure.” Tyler strained for a moment but didn’t move. “Well, no, actually.”

  “We’ve got to get him to a hospital,” Oliver said.

  “Or a vet,” Jeffrey said. Oliver gave him a harsh look. “I told you he smells!” the cat complained.

  Sally had a dark expression. “There’s no time to take him anywhere,” she said quietly. “He’s bleeding out.” She put a hand gently on the man’s cheek. “T., I’m sorry. You’ve got to do it.”

  Tyler shook his head. “It’s not that bad.”

  “You’re not going to have a choice in a minute,” she said solemnly. “You have a better shot to stay in control if you do it before it takes you.”

  Jeffrey tilted his head and sniffed the air curiously. He looked at Tyler. “You smell even worse now,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Tyler nodded. “That happens.”

  “Hey,” the cat said to Oliver. “I think we had better get out of here.”

  “We can’t leave him,” Oliver snapped.

  “It’s all right,” Sally said to Tyler. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Fine,” the other man conceded, gritting his teeth. “Get Oliver out of here. Touch base with Artemis when you’re out of the city.” His breaths were short and shallow now, and increasing in speed. “Get going. I don’t think I’ve got much longer.”

  Sally squeezed his hand and then stood up. “Let’s go,” she said to Oliver.

  “Are you serious?” Oliver asked. They couldn’t abandon the man here.

  Tyler suddenly screamed, doubling over in pain. Oliver saw him shudder, and his muscles seemed to ripple. Was he having a seizure?

  Then there was a loud crack. Oliver gasped. One of Tyler’s bones had just snapped. It was quickly followed by another.

  “We have to go now,” Sally said, urgency in her voice. “He can usually control himself, but he’s in a lot of pain and I can’t be sure.”

  “Go,” Tyler urged through clenched teeth. Oliver stared at him in shock. Tyler’s eyes had been blue when they had met this morning. Oliver was sure of that. But now the irises were yellow, and they seemed to glow as if they were being lit by a candle from somewhere deep inside his skull.

  Oliver took a hesitant step back. He could hear more of Tyler’s bones cracking horribly now, his limbs twisting around as if he were some kind of bizarre marionette. Oliver quickly realized that the bones were not simply breaking; they were reforming. Tyler was changing into something else.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Oliver said.

  Sally and Oliver piled into the Miata. “Hey, wait!” Jeffrey yelled, jumping in after them. Sally put the car in gear and hit the accelerator. The tires screeched, and they pulled away from Oliver’s house as if the car had been shot out of a cannon. In the passenger side mirror Oliver could see Tyler climbing to his feet in the street behind them, but the shape of his body was bizarrely different now. His upper body was like that of a bodybuilder, massive and muscled. His arms were longer than they had been before, reaching nearly to his knees. Oliver knew that they would end in sharp claws, and that he wasn’t imagining the thick hair he thought he saw covering Tyler’s shirtless torso. Tyler turned to watch them as the car sped away and Oliver could just barely make out the man’s terrifying new face.

  “He’s a…” Oliver started. He knew the word he was looking for, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to say it. “He’s…”

  “He’s a freaking werewolf!” Jeffrey cried out from the back seat. “Who the hell are you people?”

  Sally turned the car north onto 19th Avenue. “Yes, he’s a werewolf. Well, not really, but close enough. He doesn’t flip out when there’s a full moon or anything.” She shrugged. “He can get a little testy, though.”

  “He’s a werewolf? What are you, then?” Oliver asked. “Another werewolf?”

  She glared at him. “Of course not.”

  “She smells weird, though,” Jeffr
ey said. His little eyes widened. “She’s a vampire! A dark fiend of the night!”

  Sally glared at the cat in the rear view mirror. “I didn’t teach him that,” Oliver offered.

  “I’m not a vampire,” Sally told the cat. “Although that does give me an idea.”

  “What idea?” Oliver asked.

  “Never mind. We’re getting you out of the city.” She looked at the cat. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but do you want to stay with us or go?” she asked the cat.

  “I’m staying with him until he turns me back to normal,” Jeffrey said.

  “Whatever,” Sally said. “But if you call me a ‘dark fiend’ again, little cat, I’m putting you through the window.”

  Jeffrey opened his mouth to say something, hesitated, and then shut it.

  “Good call,” Oliver said.

  “Sorcerer,” the cat muttered.

  Chapter 11

  Sally called Artemis just after they crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge. She stayed on the line long enough to tell the girl what had happened and where they had left Tyler. Oliver couldn’t make out what Artemis was saying in response, but he could pick up enough of her tone of voice to tell the girl was not at all pleased.

  Sally shook her head as she hung up the phone. “That went well.”

  “Is she mad?”

  “As mad as she ever gets.”

  “I didn’t realize she cared so much about what happens to me.”

  Sally shook her head. “It’s more that she felt responsible for your safety after we intervened for you this morning. You were under her protection. And then she was fooled into thinking you were safe, when you were actually being set up. She’s taking this personally now. That’s lucky for you.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Artemis is a good person to have on your side. She won’t stop now until this is over, one way or the other.”

  That sounded a bit ominous to Oliver, but he decided to leave it alone. “So what are we going to do now?”

  “Get you far away from here. Someplace safe.”

  “And that would be…”

  “Stop talking now,” Sally snapped. “I need to think.”

  Oliver shut his mouth. He didn’t need to antagonize her. More questions could wait for a little while, when she seemed more receptive. But then again, she had yet to seem receptive to much of anything.

  They drove in silence through Sausalito and then into San Rafael. Just north of the city Sally stopped for gas at a small Tesoro station. She went inside to pay with cash and returned with two bottles of diet soda. To Oliver’s surprise, she offered him one. It was almost like a peace offering, he thought.

  “I don’t get anything?” Jeffrey asked.

  Sally shrugged. “He’s your cat,” she said to Oliver.

  “No, I’m not,” Jeffrey corrected her. “You do get that cats aren’t possessions, right? We’re people, too.” He paused. “That didn’t sound right at all,” he said thoughtfully. “Okay, not people, per se, but…”

  “Enough,” Sally said. “You’re not his. Fine.”

  “Thanks,” said Jeffrey. “Hey, can I borrow five bucks?” he asked Oliver. “I’ll just go in there and buy myself a water, since nobody else here is going to do it. If anyone inside thinks that’s unusual, I’ll tell them to come out here and ask the sorcerer about it.”

  “I say we leave him here,” Sally said to Oliver.

  “No,” Oliver said. “Whatever is going on with him, I’m starting to think I’m responsible for it.”

  “Damn right you are,” Jeffrey said.

  Oliver sighed. “Wait here.” He went inside the store and bought a bottle of water and a set of cheap paper bowls. After a moment’s thought, he picked up a package of ready-made tuna salad and crackers. Jeffrey probably wouldn’t eat the crackers, but he might like the tuna.

  Sally was hanging up her phone when Oliver returned. He was about to ask who she had been talking to when Jeffrey started dancing around his ankles.

  “That’s the stuff,” Jeffrey said. “Hey, wait, is that fish?”

  “Yes,” Oliver said, feeling pleased with himself.

  “Oh,” the cat said.

  Oliver paused. “You don’t like fish? It’s tuna.”

  “Fish is all right,” said Jeffrey. “I like other things better, though.”

  Sally laughed. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave him here?” she asked Oliver.

  “What do you want to eat?” Oliver asked the cat.

  “I like Thai food,” Jeffrey said. “Those little spicy shrimps you get sometimes, those are nice.”

  “Well, I don’t have any Thai food,” said Oliver, beginning to feel exasperated. “Do you want the tuna or not?”

  “I guess,” said Jeffrey.

  A few minutes later they were back on the freeway, Jeffrey sitting on Oliver’s lap. Oliver was spreading spoonfuls of tuna salad on a cracker, which Jeffrey used as a kind of makeshift plate. If he didn’t like tuna, the cat wasn’t complaining now. He was eating with considerable enthusiasm.

  Oliver decided this might be a good time to try his luck talking to Sally again. “You were going to tell me about the people who are after me,” he began.

  “No, I wasn’t,” Sally said.

  “Please?” Oliver asked.

  “Oh, come on,” Jeffrey urged. “Throw the man a bone. He bought me tuna.”

  Sally sighed. “I don’t know that much, to be honest. The Kalatari don’t exist where I’m from.”

  “Where are you from?” Oliver asked. The way she had said that, Oliver got the idea that it must be quite some distance away.

  Sally ignored the question. “They’re humanoid, but reptilian. They share a common ancestor with humans a billion years ago or something.”

  “A billion years?” Oliver asked skeptically. “Before the dinosaurs?”

  “Okay, not a billion years,” Sally snapped. “You want the science of it, you have to ask someone else.”

  “It’s all right,” said Oliver. Nailing down the origin of the species wasn’t the most important thing on the agenda right now.

  “There aren’t a lot of them left,” Sally continued. “They killed off most of their breeding stock in their last civil war.”

  “That’s depressing,” Oliver said. “Isn’t there anything they can do about that?”

  “They’ve tried breeding with humans, but I don’t think it’s going well,” Sally said casually. “Only a few of the offspring have survived, and none of the mothers, as far as I know.”

  “Who on earth would…” Oliver began to ask as Jeffrey retched.

  “They have human servants,” Sally explained. “You saw one of them. That dead guy on your sidewalk.”

  “They’re servants? Like slaves?”

  “No, followers would be a better word. They worship the Kalatari like gods, and do…whatever they’re told, I guess. Errands, I don’t know.”

  “That explains why you never see lizard people at Safeway,” Jeffrey noted.

  “Yes,” Sally agreed.

  “Or why they don’t need jobs,” the cat continued. “You’d think they’d have some trouble during the interview. ‘Hi, I’m here about the job.’ ‘But aren’t you a talking lizard?’ ‘Oh yeah, I forgot!’” The cat let out a high-pitched cackle, clearly amused with himself.

  Sally looked over at him. “You done? That window opens, you know.”

  “He’s done,” said Oliver, giving the cat a warning glance. “So there are lizard people. Fine. I’ve seen weirder things today. What does any of this have to do with me?”

  Sally shrugged. “No idea. They all take orders from a matriarch, who is also some kind of high priestess. What she wants with you I don’t know. Artemis is working on it.”

  They continued north for another twenty minutes, until Sally eased the Miata onto Highway 37, which led due east. “Vallejo?” Oliver asked, trying to guess their destination. There wasn’t much else in this direction.
/>   “Sonoma,” Sally said.

  “What’s in Sonoma?”

  “A place that you’ll be safe for a while.”

  “Which is?”

  “Enough,” Sally said. Question time was over, apparently.

  They drove on in silence, eventually turning onto a narrow two-lane road that led them deep into wine country. Oliver had only been up here once before, on a company outing. They’d visited several small wineries in a minibus and Oliver had permitted himself to drink two entire glasses of wine, stopping immediately when he felt himself getting tipsy. He was worried he might say something foolish, like telling his department head that he thought the man was hopelessly incompetent and deserved to be fired ten times over. His department head, meanwhile, had gotten so drunk that he’d told one of the secretaries how much he looked forward to seeing her breasts every morning when he got to work. A week later the HR department decreed that all employees were now required to take mandatory sexual harassment training classes as part of a new policy. The employees were also told that the timing of the new policy’s implementation was just a coincidence, completely unrelated to the very recent and sudden firing of Oliver’s former department head just after the company outing the week before.

  After half an hour of driving through increasingly winding and treacherous roads, Sally turned onto a driveway that led to a tall, imposing metal gate. In the distance, Oliver could see a large white house that he probably would have described as a palatial mansion, if he had been a little more sure about what the word palatial meant.

  A security guard in a dark suit stepped out of a small guardhouse, holding a clipboard at his side. He wore sunglasses in spite of the fact that it was dark out. Oliver could see that his clipboard had no paper or anything else attached to it. It was just for show, then? That seemed unusual.

  Sally rolled down the window. “What do you want?” the guard asked coldly.

  “I’m here to see your boss.”

  The man looked at the empty clipboard. “You aren’t on the list.”

  “Even if there was a list I wouldn’t be on it.”

  The security guard smirked at her. “Go away, little girl.”

  Sally looked at him curiously. “Do you know who I am?”