The room was small but cool, done in faded beige, twin beds with twin lamps and an aged watercolor on the wall above the headboards. Through threadbare curtains, muted sunlight washed the room in shades of dark sepia. Emma made a beeline for the bathroom, and when she’d finished and stepped out into the room again, Anton and Telly were checking window latches and making sure the curtains were drawn all the way.
The three men turned in unison and looked at her, and there was just enough shadow and just enough light to turn their eyes to shining disks. Cats eyes, reflective in the dark; not even Bruce’s mismatched eyes shone in such a way. The tall mutt slunk over to the door and lay down in front of it, nose to the gap at the bottom. Guard dog. Emma closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose — and then Ricky took a hold of her arm just in time for her to realize she’d been about to faint.
Goddamn it. She did not faint. Must have been that long sleep in the truck on the way here, she’d gotten up and moved around too fast. Dehydration. Not enough food. Maybe it was a magic hangover. Understandable — but she was still not going to faint.
She took a deep breath and willed strength into her legs. “Don’t stare at me, guys. It’s weird.” She patted Ricky’s hand and removed it from her arm, and stepped back into the bathroom. She flicked the light on and turned around to find all three of them still staring at her.“Guys .” Even Ricky was starting to creep her out; he wasn’t so much staring at her as looking from her to Anton to Telly and then to her again, with furtive little glances that suggested he didn’t know what all the staring was about but suspected it was something meaningful.
“Fine,” she said. “Ricky, come in here.” He started like he’d been caught doing something naughty, and gave her a look that was less jaguar and more rabbit in headlights. “Come on,” she said, waving a hand at him.
He came to stand in the bathroom doorway, obscuring the rest of the room. She waved him over to sit on the toilet seat lid. “Your stitches need to come out, or you’ll heal too much and we’ll have to dig for them.” Ricky winced as Emma pulled a travel size manicure kit from her handbag, extracting a pair of nail scissors. She never bothered with manicures herself; the kit was for instances like this.
He sat on the lid. Her back itched, right between the shoulder blades, and she resisted the urge to turn around and see if Anton and Telly were staring at her. They probably were. She concentrated on Ricky’s wound, peeling the bandage off, snipping the surgical thread in a few places. Then the yucky work of tugging the stitches out with a pair of tweezers. His flesh hadn’t healed completely; if it had, the thread would simply break off at the surface of his skin, leaving the rest embedded in the deeper tissue. The flesh would work the foreign object out in time, or when he next changed, whichever came first, but it was uncomfortable while it was in there. Better to get them out as soon as possible.
She finished and brushed her hand through Ricky’s thick hair. “All done. Now lose the shirt so I can take a look at your back.”
He looked up at her, amber eyes wet, and caught her wrist. “I’m sorry,” he said into the silence, his voice pitched low for her ears even though the other two would still be able to hear.
“What for?” Emma managed to push the flatness out of those two words, so they actually came out a question, instead of a blunt expression of exhaustion. But Ricky knew her.
“For everything. For all of this.” He looked past her and seemed about to say something else, and she watched a funny bunch of expressions chase across his face, but he didn’t finish.
“It’s not your fault, you heard Anton before. It’s me they’re after.” Ricky’s gaze flickered to her, and there was guilt in it. She sighed. “I don’t blame you for all this. I wish you’d told me, but I don’t know how it would have changed anything.”
Anton made a rude, disbelieving sound, and Emma turned to look at him sharply. His green eyes were narrow and glinting, but he looked at Ricky.
“Maybe if he hadn’t been such a coward, he could have changed things,” Anton said hotly.
Defensive anger flared behind Emma’s breastbone, pushed heat into her cheeks. She straightened, hands on her hips. “What is your problem?”
Anton took a step into the bathroom, ignoring her, and her apprehension level climbed a big fat notch. She glanced past him; Telly was framed in the doorway, face unreadable, and no help at all.
Anton made a disgusted sound. “Did you lie to yourself, Ricky, when you realized what she was? Or did you just not care?”
Emma’s gaze shot back to Anton. Sonofabitch. She looked at Ricky, words stuck in her throat. Ricky brought his gaze from the floor to Anton’s face. His eyes sparked with something heavier than anger; there was a deep, curdled fury in the look he turned on his brother now. His jaw twitched, shuddered as though his bones shook.
Except Emma knew his bones really were shaking. She knew, too, the way the skin around his hairline and his collarbone darkened in patches was not just a trick of the light.
“What would you have done?” Ricky’s voice was too deep, like his chest had suddenly become a cavern for his voice to bubble up from. Alarm skittered up Emma’s spine, and she forced herself not to back away. “Would you have left her,” Ricky said to Anton, “knowing they might find her anyway? Would you have taken her away from everything she knew? You would have,” he snarled. “But I decided when I left I would not be that kind of man.” He bit each word off like a physical thing he had to get past his teeth. “There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t take her. You wouldn’t understand.”
Anton’s voice was soft and dangerous. “And later, Ricky? Did you think they wouldn’t come for her?”
Ricky was silent a long time, his amber eyes burning, luminous like honey and lit from the inside. He held his brother’s eyes with his own and vibrated, visibly, with the effort of holding himself inside his skin.
“Later,” Ricky said, his voice thick now not just with the weight of metamorphic magic but with emotion. “Later, then I lied to myself. Told myself she couldn’t possibly be the one. Told myself so often I almost started to believe it.”
Very slowly, he began to cry, and with the tears went the hold he had on the change.
7
Ricky shouted as the change seized him, and fell forward onto the gray bathroom linoleum, eyes squeezed shut. His shout melted into a long keening growl that rattled and climbed in pitch like the whistle of an old kettle. The skin of his neck and his forearms and his face turned dark and mottled like inkblots, like bruises, like smoke crawling across the surface of his skin. His back arched; he clawed at the floor with fingers that were thick and short and not human. From the motel room, the dog barked once, sharp and questioning.
Time seemed to slow down as Ricky tried to come to his knees, tried to get his forehead up from the floor; horror bloomed in Emma’s gut as she realized something was fatally wrong, even as her mind marveled at the golden tinge seeping up through the smoky mottle of Ricky’s skin, the color of fur like a living tattoo. Then some part of her recognized the smell of blood alongside the watery taste of ozone on the back of her tongue, and she dropped to her knees beside him, saw what she couldn’t have seen standing up: the inside of Ricky’s mouth was coated with blood. Panic opened its wings inside Emma’s stomach as she watched a red string of the stuff trickle out of the corner of his mouth and slide from his chin to the linoleum.
Telly pushed past Anton and came to his knees in front of Ricky, brow furrowed and mouth grim. Ricky opened eyes that had lost their whites and stared at him, then rolled those impossible eyes to Emma, the look in them wild and hopeless. Ricky was someplace she had never been, but his eyes called out to where she was — even if they were now not his eyes at all.
She swallowed past the taste of rising bile. “What’s wrong with him, what do we do?” Even as she spoke she watched his skin darken even further, the smoky pigment beginning to solidify and resolve itself into splotchy rose
ttes, the markings of a jaguar with none of the fur, none of the shape, damn it, where was his shape?
“He can’t make it,” said Telly. “He can’t make the change. It’s started without him, but he can’t finish it.”
“I can see that!” Emma tore her eyes from Ricky long enough to give Telly a look that might have withered him if he hadn’t been what he was, whatever he was. “Why?” She ground the word out between clenched teeth.
Anton spoke from where he still stood in the bathroom doorway. “Do you have any idea when he last changed?” His voice was flat and harsh, but his eyes screamed, full of glassy terror.
She thought furiously; she knew when she’d last seen him change, but not when he’d last done it. It wasn’t like he gave her a schedule. “I don’t know. Does that matter?”
Anton’s face closed down. “The only way this could happen is if he’s been refusing to call the change.”
Well, that was just fucking great. Emma gritted her teeth: there were questions, they could wait. Only one thing mattered right now. “How do we fix it?”
Ricky screamed. His face contorted as the sound ripped from between his straining jaws. Shock seized Emma — tears sprang to her eyes and rolled hot down her cheeks and all she could do was sit there, staring, Ricky’s screams smashing through her. Blood welled up out of Ricky’s mouth and fell in a wet, red sheet, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the agony.
Emma’s stomach quivered. Black dots swarmed her vision. She’d seen some awful, gory things and been trained to be perfectly okay with them, but seeing Ricky’s insides coming out in a bloody flood was not on her list of things she could handle with detached professionalism.
“His king could fix him,” said Anton, voice hollow. “I could maybe fix him, if we hadn’t been apart so many years, but that connection’s gone.” Emma watched Anton’s face draw down on itself, pain folding his handsome features into harsh lines. So he did care about his brother; fat lot of good it would do them now.
“The king,” said Telly, “is not here. There is only you.” He turned to Emma, glacial gray eyes full of fierce light. “And me.”
Emma’s mouth went dry. There was something seriously wrong with Telly, whoever he was. Whatever he was. “What do you mean?”
Telly seemed oblivious to the effect he had on her. “We can fix him.”
As if to contest this, Ricky lost the fight against gravity, and the rest of him followed his forehead to the floor, his body hitting the linoleum as though he’d fallen feet instead of inches, as though he somehow weighed more than he should. He grunted with the impact, and coughed a fine scarlet spray across the floor.
Emma clamped a lid on the part of her that wanted to start screaming, and said, “Tell me how.”
But she was looking at Ricky, and totally unprepared for the feel of Telly’s hand on her left wrist. She jumped in spite of herself, in spite of everything.
“Can’t tell you,” he said, sounding far away. “Have to show you, let you feel.”
Emma had less than a second to get a very bad feeling about that, before Telly put his forehead to hers and did his thing.
Holy mother of — coherent thought dissolved. So cold her eyes stung. Her skin broke out in gooseflesh so violently she felt she was on fire, plunged into icewater, like what she’d felt in her apartment that morning, just before Anton showed up and changed her world, and then again just before they ran.
She jerked away and looked straight into Telly’s eyes — and fell. Fell forever, into the bleached blue void of his gaze, the sand of his skin, the scent of hot, dry death filling her nose and throat; she heard howling wind on rocks as she watched his face turn into something animal with a poorly shaped human merely stretched over the top. His eyes narrowed, tilting up; his face thinned; his thick hair bristled in a wind that wasn’t there, and the look that filled his eyes like cold, dark water made Emma feel like she was drowning. Drowning in a wasteland. There was something in Telly that was not human, never had been, would never be tame like Ricky, and it was not a thing that would hesitate or know the meaning of mercy or see any reason for it even if it did.
Not like Ricky. Not like Anton. For all their wildness, it was still the kind of wild you found in yourself if you dug deep enough. But Telly was the kind of wild you found on an endless stretch of road at the end of time, the kind that came for you when you stumbled. The knowledge filled her up like a scream —
But then she was blind. The world went white behind her eyelids, and when she opened them, it was still white, and a warm shape loomed over her too close for comfort. Her head swam, and she would have fallen if she hadn’t already been on her knees, though the floor beneath her felt a world away — there was only the white, and the pressure in her head, booming in her ears. She brought her hands to her ears but couldn’t block it out, it was inside her head, and it wasn’t a sound — it was something else, something massive and vast as the sky.
And just when she thought it might shake the world to pieces, it started to fade. Just pulsed down, slackened, like somebody turned the volume down.
Then she became aware once more of Telly’s forehead against her own. The heat of him spread down, warming the rest of her, calmed her crawling skin, though she still felt the aftershocks of that first, brutal hot-cold fever flush and the hollow, echoing ringing in her ears. When Telly moved away from her, she felt it like cold loss in her bones, but her skin stayed quiet.
She opened her eyes, surprised to find she had closed them again, even more surprised to find the world no longer made of white mist but whole and clear, clearer than it had ever been, dizzying in its richness — and horrific.
Ricky lay before her, curled on his side, his chestnut curls damp, his eyes wide and gleaming and blank with the effort of breathing through the pain. Blood coated his chin and the upper half of his body. His right foot jerked against the base of the toilet bowl.
Emma must have made some sound, because Ricky’s gaze flicked to her and focused. He watched her with fear and despair in his animal eyes, with just enough Ricky intact inside the agony and the instinct to know her and to know he might be dying, but maybe nothing else. Maybe he couldn’t think past the right now , and the right now was very, very bad.
Telly tightened his hold on Emma’s wrist and pulled her towards Ricky. It brought her gaze from Ricky to him, and his eyes locked on hers, but there was none of the fear she’d felt moments ago looking into his face. None of the other thing. He looked human, or close enough. Still just as fearsome as ever, but there was something else there, something she could use, something meant for her.
Telly wanted to help her, needed her to help him, and help was something she knew how to do. She didn’t know how to do this, but she knew what Telly wanted. Maybe he would simply do the rest. She breathed in deep, smelled dust and engine oil and something muskier — Telly’s scent — and turned to Ricky.
She touched his arm and all of a sudden felt it. The thing Telly wanted her to feel — whatever it was, it was there, undeniable. And it vibrated, not beneath her hand but inside her, rattled her ribcage, shook her sternum, steady like an engine that might run forever.
Startled, she took her hand from Ricky’s arm, and it stopped. Ricky stared up at her; for all she could tell, he’d felt nothing. Telly made a noise as though he’d say something, and vaguely Emma heard herself tell him to hush. She was concentrating.
She placed her hand against Ricky’s arm again, this time moving the other hand to rest on his shoulder. There .
Like putting your hand on the hood of a very big truck and feeling the thrum not with your hand but with your heart. And somehow, within each beat, each purr, something else moved and beat like another heart, and within it another, and she might go on chasing the shape of each forever. But steadily, she became more aware of the feel of Ricky’s skin beneath hers, the thin fabric of his shirt doing nothing to mute the furnace heat of him, or the fine, rippling, prickling sensation that marched up and
down his skin in tangible waves.
She cocked her head, her eyes on Ricky but her gaze turned inward. She lost all awareness of Telly and Anton; there was only Ricky, and the engine that could only be his life force, or if not that then nothing she knew how to name. Only that, and the marching, prickling feel of something radiating up out of him, off him, across the surface of his skin — rushing invisibly over her hands in waves. But there was a rhythm in those waves.
Her frown deepened. Ricky quivered beneath her, and she watched without really seeing as he craned his head around to look at her. His breath came faster now, she could hear it from somewhere very far away — but the force that swarmed along his skin and rolled out of it, the stinging thing with a weight of its own, was slowing its beat.
Ricky shuddered harder, and Emma understood. She couldn’t have put it into words, but she had the shape of the thing in her mind, she was certain. Her hands tightened on Ricky, fingers digging in. A groan escaped his lips as she pressed into his burning flesh. Anton whispered to Telly in Spanish, fast, but it sounded far away; all her attention narrowed down to the ebbing pulse of Ricky’s Change.
That pulse was losing its momentum, like a wheel, like a stream drying up, and if it stopped, he would die.
Without knowing how she did so, she caught it, caught it like a breath or a dance step on the right beat of a song, caught it and willed it to run. For a heartbeat, just one of her own, it faltered; and then it swelled with her, riding her pulse, rushing like water over her fingers. It raced; it brought her breath fast and shallow from her lungs, made her think of flying, made her stomach turn over, made her think this must be what love is like or —
Ricky shouted, raw surprise. She opened her eyes — hadn’t realized she’d closed them — Ricky writhed beneath her but the look on his face was wonder and fierce joy. Then the jaguar chased the human from his face like a golden shadow, and faster than she could follow with her eyes, faster than her heart could follow with its beat, the change took Ricky in a flash of white light and whiter heat. Jaguar seemed to crawl out of him, over him; it wrapped him up and he bucked with the final throe of it, a final eruption of change flashing fire over Emma’s hands.
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