by Sonja Bair
Tyler was smaller than most werewolves, similar to Rex, but without the bulk. I guessed in the dark he could be mistaken for a large dog, but his back still reached almost to my waist. His nose was to the ground, sniffing as he wandered in larger and larger circles around us. Mid-stride, he stopped, muscles tense and quivering. He glanced back at us and then focused all his attention forward. He had found Tasha’s scent.
“Splendid,” I muttered under my breath. “We shall get the glory of tracking down and detaining an insane killing machine.” I had been sincerely hoping the other groups would have found her, partially because I knew I was the weak link in this attack chain. My greatest weapon was that I could flap profusely large amounts of air at someone. Not a skill set of particular need for the Alpha Team, in my humble opinion. Squaring my shoulders, I reminded myself that I had taken down a mad werewolf the other day. “I have confidence in sunshine…” I started singing to myself as I ran after the other werewolves.
By the time I had sung the song through a second time, we had arrived at the Poly Village, a strange collection of architectural concept buildings created by students. Most of the buildings were more pieces of art than actual structures. In fact, anyone would be hard-pressed to spend a comfortable night in the twisted steel, concrete, and open spaces that made up the buildings. But something about it must have appealed to the crazy beast that was Tasha, since Tyler, in four-legged form, sprinted across the stone bridge that led to the Village.
We of the two legs followed Tyler at a jog. He led us past the geometric dome that looked, to be honest, more like playground equipment than a house, past a structure of steel and wire formed into a ship’s bow, and lastly up a steep hill and past a house that must have been constructed in the early 1980s, as it looked like a nearly exact replica of Luke Skywalker’s uncle’s house on the desert planet of Tatooine. All of us were huffing for breath by the time we reached the concrete adobe. Henry must have thinking the same thing as me because he whistled for Tyler to stop. If we were indeed closing in on Tasha, we would be too winded to capture her effectively. We paused with our hands on our knees.
“Freya, can’t you release your wings and scout from the air like you did at the ranch?” Gina asked between wheezes.
“This place isn’t always deserted at night,” I wheezed back. “There’s probably some college kids camping out here tonight.”
“Tyler,” Henry looked down at him, “is the scent strong here?”
Tyler whined and shifted his weight from foot to foot. His body language communicated that the scent must have been very strong.
“She’s probably hiding in one of the buildings then,” said Henry. “Stick close to each other and let’s work as a team. Tyler will probably get the first lunge at her, but then the rest of us werewolves will be responsible for pinning her down and securing her. Everyone else—try not to get in the way.”
I took a second to sigh and roll my eyes to the heavens. “Everyone else” consisted only of me. I was allowed to have doubts about my kickass-ness, but it was just plain rude of him to express his hesitations publicly. The hypocrisy, however, of coming up with the exact same plan myself a moment before was not lost on me.
The group was leaving me behind as they raced up the hill to the next structure, so I jogged along behind them. Perhaps because the others were too intent on following Tyler and the scent, I was the first to notice the reflection of a flashlight off a sleeping bag one hill away. I called softly, trying to get their attention, but no one looked back. Straining my eyes in the darkness, I could see only the single sleeping bag, but that was still one too many when there was a mad beast on the loose. Finding my second wind, I sprinted up the hill to rejoin the group. They were now scouting out a metal design that looked like a two-story condo that decided it only needed occasional walls and floors. By the way Tyler’s nose never left the ground when sniffing around the pylons, I guessed Tasha had spent some time in this spot, but she wasn’t there now.
“There’s a camper,” I whispered breathlessly to Henry, “sleeping down…” I raised my arm to indicate the spot, but before I could Tyler found an outgoing scent trail and sprinted off in the exact same direction.
I am not going to throw up. I am NOT going to throw up, I thought. And then I threw up. Again. Luckily, if one could find luck in this, I was at home retching into my own toilet. I had held off the vomiting until I was in the privacy of my own house, away from the rest of the Alphas, Elders, and werewolves. True, I had seen dead people before; I had even killed someone myself not too long ago. But somehow each of those cases seemed inevitable, or at least supernatural. Not that killing a supernatural was somehow better or more okay, but death, bloody death, seemed more commonplace when you mixed in non-traditional powers. The dead college student was not supernatural. He probably was some nature lover trying to get away from the maddening crowds of college, judging by the bloody copy of A Sand County Almanac lying next to his still body. A journal open to a blank page was on the other side of the sleeping bag. Pages that would always be blank. I vomited again.
And we had left the scene of the crime. We had left some student, some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old kid, ripped to bloody shreds, and we didn’t have enough humanity to stick around until his remains could be properly cared for. Instead, Tyler, still in werewolf form, only a few seconds after finding the body, had indicated that Tasha’s scent retreated further into the hills and the others started to follow after him. I had pleaded with them that we needed to report the death, but no one besides me seemed particularly concerned about the dead student.
“Freya,” Gina had said, “he’s dead. He’s not going to get any deader and he’s not going anywhere. We still need to go after Tasha before she kills again.”
I knew there was logic in her answer, but I couldn’t go on with the body of some poor kid hanging out for any scavenger to start picking at. And what if another student wandered back here and stumbled on him before the police came? I didn’t want to permanently scar another person with the sight of a body with its insides turned outside.
Gina sighed but reluctantly agreed to go back with me and call in the body. Since Tasha’s trail, and a trail of bloody chunks of human, veered away from the path we needed to take back to campus, we were most likely safe from her. I still sprinted the whole way back and didn’t stop shaking until I reached the lights of central campus. The shaking started again, however, as I called the police from a campus phone. Though the noble part of me wanted to give my name and the honest details of the attack, I knew deep down that the trouble I would cause the supernatural community wouldn’t be worth making myself feel like a decent human. Instead, I held the phone using my shirtsleeve to prevent fingerprints and left an anonymous tip. But I made Gina wait outside with me until I could hear sirens approaching before we headed home.
A knock on the bathroom door brought me back to the present.
“How you doing in there?” Gina called through the door.
“Fine, thank you. And you?” I called back, using the most sarcasm I could possibly muster at the moment.
The door creaked open and Gina slipped in. She sat on the bathtub edge and didn’t say anything. I laid my head down on the toilet seat, completely grossed out by touching my face to the toilet, but too tired to go anywhere else.
“That actually wasn’t the first human I’ve seen torn apart by a werewolf.”
Without moving my head, I glared in her direction. Was she actually brushing the death of this kid off? And he wasn’t much older than she was. Was she some heartless monster?
“It doesn’t make it any easier to see, though,” she continued. “Just a lot less shocking. Rex and I spent a year as Spanish exchange students a couple of years ago. European werewolves, you see, don’t have the same qualms about killing humans as we do. You might say America’s anti-human killing code is the unusual tradition. The Europeans mostly kill transients or homeless people. People that won’t be missed.” S
he waved her hand dismissively at me. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you are going to say. Nobody should be killed, nobody isn’t going to be missed. But, hey, it’s been part of werewolf culture for thousands of years. I dunno. Maybe it’s a natural part of our lives.”
She paused for a minute. I didn’t know if she expected me to reply, but I was fresh out of wisdom at the moment. The only thing in my brain was the image of the innocent college student’s face, ripped off. The skin actually had been torn off one half of his face so that it had flopped off to the side, like a sickening version of peek-a-boo that left bone and muscle showing. My stomach heaved, but at this point there was nothing left in it, so I didn’t even lift my head from the toilet seat.
“Anyway, David’s heading over to see how you are doing. I dunno if you want to make yourself pretty or anything. ‘Cause you look like shit right now.” With that encouragement, she left the bathroom.
Regardless of what a teenage girl might think, I couldn’t care less about being pretty at the moment. If David wanted to come, he was going to see pukey-horrified-soul-sick Freya. Take it or leave it.
A few minutes later, the bathroom door creaked open again. I had never noticed the creak before; maybe one day I would get around to oiling it. But probably not. Priorities and all.
Still not lifting my head from the toilet seat, I looked up at David. He smiled back grimly and sank down beside me. Rubbing my back, he didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either. After about five minutes of silence, he cleared his throat.
“Knock, knock.”
I grimaced at him, knowing where this was headed. After a moment of silence, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is where you say, ‘Who’s there?’”
My grimace deepened and I reluctantly ground out, “Who’s there?”
“Doorbell repair man.”
I tried. I tried really hard. But the snicker came out anyway. And I lifted my head from the toilet seat, sunk into David’s embrace, and then started to cry. He rocked me gently, his face buried in my hair, until I hiccupped to a stop. The disturbing thought occurred to me that after Jia had killed Meng and Wen, Alrik had comforted me in this exact same spot. Perhaps some girls cry nicely in their sunrooms and their men comfort them on a window seat or something. But it appeared that I sobbed in the bathroom and then cuddled with men after cozying up with the commode. Yup, I’m a keeper.
“I’ve been saving that joke for a while,” David muttered into my hair. “When I heard it, I thought it was a Freya joke. I didn’t think I would use it in a spot like this, but I’m glad it got a laugh. Do you want an update on the Tasha situation, or do you want more time?”
I straightened up, grabbed a big wad of toilet paper to wipe my face, and stood. “I want an update on the Tasha situation, please. But let’s get out of the bathroom.”
Gina joined us at the kitchen table. Rex was still healing in werewolf form, but he joined us, sprawled out on the kitchen floor.
David reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “The good news, I guess, is that Tasha was captured and brought back alive. She is now locked in a cage which we located in another wilderness area not too far from our conference site.”
“She’s still alive?” Gina hissed. “Are you kidding me? After what she did?”
“Although she is still in werewolf form, she is responding to commands and appears to be under control. Most likely, she will be sentenced to death tonight, but we need to deal with a few things first.”
“Like what?” I asked, not knowing what could be gained from prolonging everyone’s misery.
“According to the other Alphas, some things are different about this breakdown than other episodes. We need to get information about what happened before the consequence is dealt out.”
“So what was different?” I asked.
“I didn’t get much information, as the Maine Alphas were pretty much in crisis control mode, but when they found Tasha, she was still in wolf form but was stable and appeared to be waiting for people to find her and bring her in. This stabilizing has never happened without Alpha control. Alphas have always had to pour on dominance and physical restraint to wrestle the out-of-control werewolf back to sanity. Although her actions still necessitate a death sentence, Henry and Carole were hoping to figure out how Tasha regained control by herself.”
I straightened in my seat and put both hands on the table. “If there is something to be learned that could prevent this from happening again, I want to be part of the questioning. Let’s go.”
“Are you sure you are ready? This will probably be another very emotional scene. Tasha knows what’s coming.”
“I’m Alpha. I protect my pack. I will do whatever needs to be done to prevent this from happening to my family.”
“I’m going too.” Gina bounced out of her seat.
“No!” both David and I shouted at the same time.
She fell back into her seat at the power of our combined response.
“You are a bit of a wildcard,” I said in a more conciliatory tone. “Things happen when you are around, for better or worse. This needs to be handled by a smaller group of people.”
“Freya and I are the Alphas of this pack. You seem to forget this fact, Gina. So unless you are invited, you should assume that you are not coming on any and all higher level meetings. Try not to get in trouble while we are gone.”
A glance at David revealed his granite face was on. Something about Gina had triggered a big response from him. Later, I needed to ask him about what had happened. I knew him well enough to know that there was something bigger than just her assuming she was going with us. And I knew him well enough that “something bigger” probably had to do with the werewolf culture which he had forgotten to tell me.
“Fine. I’ll babysit poor little Rex-y while you guys save the world,” Gina muttered as she crossed her arms and slouched down in her seat.
Rex was immediately on all four feet, fur raised all the way down his back, and an impressive set of teeth bared.
“Stop it. Both of you,” I said, my temper barely in check. Glaring at them until the tension ratcheted down a couple levels, I added between clenched teeth, “Don’t kill each other while we are gone. And if you guys do kill each other while we’re gone, I will come back and will kill you both all over again.”
I grabbed my shoes and didn’t bother putting them on before I stomped out the back door. David followed two steps behind me to my car.
Slamming the Eagle door behind me, I repeatedly banged my head on the not-so-soft steering wheel. David didn’t say anything until I stopped inflicting myself with potential brain injuries.
“Are Gina and Rex getting worse with their squabbling or are they more comfortable around us now and letting their true selves out?” he asked.
“I don’t know. And although I told Alrik that Elin and I fought as kids, I honestly don’t think we picked on each other as much as they do. If they are both going to stick around, we need to do something about it.” Taking a deep breath, I started the Eagle. It sputtered, tried to turn over, and then stalled. I tried the ignition again, pushing on the accelerator to get some gas to the carburetor. A pained whine and gurgle was the only response.
“It appears that…” David said mildly. I spun in my seat to glare at him, visual daggers flying fast and furious.
“Don’t you dare trash talk the Eagle unless you want me to rip out your tongue and slap you with it until you start singing The Star Spangled Banner!” I shouted with all the frustration and anger that had been pent-up over the last few days.
He leaned away from me calmly while still maintaining eye contact. The corners of his mouth were pulled in and his eyebrows pinched together. Then his shoulders started to shake and then shake harder. Soon, he couldn’t take it anymore and a huge burst of laughter exploded from him.
“What? What’s so funny?” I tried to maintain the angry tone, but the intense emotions were rapidly draining away.
&n
bsp; “How…” he gasped between peals of laughter. “…how could I sing…” gasp “…The Star Spangled Banner…” another gasp “…without a tongue?”
A smile crept its way onto my face. “That’s the point, David. I would be whacking you so painfully hard that you would do anything to get me to stop.”
“Slapping me…” he wheezed, “with my own…” He couldn’t go on. The laughter was rolling out too hard and fast.
“Your. Own. Tongue.” I was snickering now too. “Come on; you’re an educated man. This is not a complicated plan.”
He was doubled over with laughter now.
I shook my head and tried the ignition again, but judging by the pathetic groans of the Eagle, it wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight.
“Fine. We’ll take your car.”
David gradually sat up straight and wiped away the tears that were flowing freely down his face.
“That’s all I was going to say before you threatened me with linguistic torture—It appears we have to take my car tonight.”
“Oh. Well, then. We are both on the same page.”
“I don’t know what page you are on, Freya. But it’s one hell of a book.”
Chapter 28
We were the last of the Alphas to show. None of the Elders were present. I wasn’t sure if they didn’t get the memo or they chose not to attend, but I was glad that the extra tension wasn’t present. All the werewolves were standing in a circle, glaring down at Tasha, still in four-legged form. She had shrunk as low as she could possibly get to the ground and had her ears pinned to the side of her head in utter submission. Carole and Henry were kneeling next to her.
