Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

  I gave my order without looking at Kayla, and she left without her usual display of dimples and cleavage.

  “You know, she feels real bad about how she was with you,” Red said. “She told me to tell you that.”

  “Go on with your other story,” I replied, stone-faced.

  “People can change, you know.”

  I glared at him. “Not for the better.”

  Red rolled his shoulders as if he’d taken a punch, but he didn’t argue. “So,” he said, “I head on over to this big-ass house and the owner’s shaking all over, telling me about something huge living down in his basement, going on and on about how he keeps hearing these terrible scraping sounds and once he saw these red glowing eyes.”

  “And you go down and find a squirrel,” said a heavyset, bearded man sitting at the next table. In his red-checked flannel shirt, Jerome looked like the genial next-door neighbor from Little House on the Prairie, a look he cultivated; he had been a Wall Street big shot back in Manhattan. “Sorry, Red,” he said, “couldn’t help but overhear. It was a squirrel, right?”

  “No, Jerome, but you’re right, I was expecting to find a squirrel. Maybe a raccoon—they’re a lot bigger than most city folk expect.”

  Like so many converts, Jerome was extremely prejudiced against the group he had left. A lot of people, I had learned, came to Northside completely unaware that it was to the realm of the supernatural what Saratoga Springs was to the world of horse racing. But after a few years in Northside, even nonmagical people soaked up some of the local culture. “So,” Jerome said, hooking his fingers into the loops of his belt, “what did you find in the guy’s basement, Red?”

  “Well, I head downstairs to check out the crawl space in the basement, and sure enough, there was something in the shadows, staring out at me with glowing red eyes. I knew straight off that it was an Old One. Still on the small side, and more shadow than substance, but old as the hills and twice as powerful.”

  I tore a bread roll in half, feeling a bit awkward having this discussion in front of Jerome and Malachy. This wasn’t the first time Red had encountered the kind of beastie that you don’t find in a field guide, but up until now, he had only acknowledged this aspect of his work with me and Jackie, his ex-girlfriend, who lived in a trailer some two miles farther up the road. Malachy might be prepared to believe in bizarre viruses and three-eyed reptiles, but those were basically scientific phenomena disguised as myth. As for Jerome, well, he probably just thought his adopted town was a little weird. But what Red was talking about was weird in the original sense of the word—uncanny, preternatural, not of this world.

  Yet to my complete surprise, neither man blinked an eyelash.

  “You know, I thought I saw something peculiar running across my front lawn just the other night,” Jerome said. “Thought I was losing my mind, because I couldn’t figure if it was human or animal.”

  “Surely, that could just have been a therian,” said Malachy to the older man. Red raised his eyebrows inquiringly, so Mal elaborated, “a shapeshifter?”

  Jerome pulled himself up in his chair. “Don’t you think I know what a shapeshifter looks like? What am I, a greenhorn? It wasn’t one thing or the other.” Kayla came by with his check and he pulled out his wallet.

  “Shifters and wereanimals have a fair amount of human in them. I don’t think that what I saw had much human about it,” Red said. “But I do think it was dual-natured. Like one of those inkblots you look at, and one way it’s a fox, and the other way it’s a man.”

  “Like a Rorschach test? But if it was a spirit shadow thing, how did it do this?” I pointed at the wound I’d just bandaged shut, and Red hesitated.

  “It’s only a spirit thing in the spirit world,” said Red. “It’s in our world now.” Red absently peeled the label off his beer. “And there’s a lot more where that one came from.”

  I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

  “Those new houses up on Old Scolder Mountain cut across a sacred hunting ground. For as long as anyone can remember, there’s been no man-made roads up there—only animal trails, and spirit pathways. You know what happens when you build a road over a corridor that animals use on their migrations?”

  Jerome stood up and put Kayla’s tip on the table. “Sure. You get a lot of moose and bear coming into town.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what we’re going to get. Except it won’t be a moose. It’ll be the great-granddaddy of all mooses.”

  I resisted the urge to tell him that the correct plural of moose is moose. At that moment, Jerome said good-bye and Kayla arrived with our dinners, and there was a pause in the conversation as she served each of us.

  “Just let me know if there’s anything you want,” she said, looking at me.

  Red reassured her that we would and she finally left us in peace.

  “You know, Doc, that girl wants to be your friend,” he said, picking up his burger.

  “Don’t even go there.” I stabbed a piece of pasta, and looked up. “And don’t make this about me being the bad guy.”

  “Of course you aren’t the bad guy, but what I can’t figure is why you seem more riled up about her than about Magda. I mean—” He broke off when I pointed the tines of my fork at him.

  “Red? Drop it. Unless you have some special reason for caring about Kayla so much.” There was no way I could explain my antipathy for Kayla. Maybe the problem was that she reminded me of every popular girl who had ever made my life hell back in high school and college. Or possibly it was just safer to dislike her than it was Magda, since she didn’t have the ability to tear my throat out. In any case, I didn’t feel like examining it too closely.

  “Hang on a moment, Doc, all I was saying was—”

  “I suggest you do as Abra suggests,” Malachy interrupted, “or you’ll wind up with a set of fork punctures to go with your bite marks.” Taking out his little vial of mystery pills, Mal reached for a glass of water. “Now, you said before that the animals in the old Native American stories were really manitous, correct?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, as I recall, Raven and Bear and Coyote and the others were always hungry.” Malachy shook two capsules out onto his palm. “If that turns out to be accurate, then what do spiritual beings eat when they visit the physical world?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that, but Red did. “Sacrifice,” he said simply.

  Sometimes I forget that Red isn’t just a simple, good old boy—that’s one of his guises, but not the only one.

  None of us was terribly hungry after that. Kayla asked us if anything was wrong when she took our plates away, and I let Red assure her that the food had been delicious.

  I did give her my best attempt at a smile, however, and added an extra five percent to the tip to make up for wishing that she’d break out in boils.

  SIX

  Before I moved to the country, I used to think there were man-made things, like skyscrapers and cars and paved roads, and there was nature, which basically meant anyplace that had grass and a few trees. Red’s ex-girlfriend, Jackie, was the one who had set me straight.

  “This country around here’s about as natural as my hair,” she’d explained, pointing at her poor, frazzled, overprocessed blond head. “It’s been used and abused by people for the past four hundred years or so, and now the only thing it needs is about four hundred years to recover. Like my hair.”

  But nature can reclaim a landscape, if left to her own devices. And that was what Jackie was doing with her land—leaving it to grow wild and unruly. Which is why I was muttering a little prayer as I changed into first gear for the long, steep drive up Jackie’s unpaved road. About three quarters of the way up, the dirt turned to ice; at this elevation, the ice and snow never melted completely until late April or early May.

  By the time I got to the top of the mountain, Jackie’s mixed breed wolfdogs had gathered into a growling, snarling pack around her trailer’s front door. They didn’t bark—there w
as too much wolf in them for that. And they wouldn’t attack me, because although I wasn’t quite pack, I wasn’t a complete stranger, either.

  “You planning on staying in there all day?” Jackie grinned at my startled reaction, resting her handax on her shoulder. She was dressed in a down parka and Wrangler jeans, and her windblown blond hair had oxidized to an unfortunate shade of apricot that clashed with her chapped, red cheeks. The wolfdogs gathered around her as if she were their queen.

  “I like for you to be around before I go walking up to their den,” I said, honestly. As I stepped out of the car, I caught the smell of wood smoke and resin.

  Jackie propped the ax against a respectable woodpile. “That’s a bit chickenshit, considering that you can change into a wolf.”

  “It’s not my time of the month. Besides, I only turn into one wolf, so I’d still be outnumbered.” Jackie had known about my lycanthropy for longer than I had; Red had confided his suspicions to her from the beginning. She had a kind of easy, pragmatic acceptance of all things supernatural, as if shapeshifters and werewolves were no stranger than horoscopes and lucky numbers. She believed in those as well.

  “You don’t need to worry. My babies aren’t vicious to people or dogs,” Jackie said.

  “I know.” I held out my gloved hands so Jackie’s wolf hybrids could sniff me. One or two, the ones with more dog in them, warily wagged a tail. The others, more skittish, danced away from me every time I moved. People buy wolf hybrids expecting some kind of savage überdog. What they get, nine times out of ten, is an animal as timid and wary as a rabbit. Wolves don’t survive in the wild by being indiscriminately savage. They survive by being cautious and fierce. Of course, the distinction can seem moot if the animal winds up clamping its teeth on your forearm.

  “So,” Jackie said, “how’s my girl doing at work?” Before Malachy had turned her human, Pia had been Jackie’s favorite, her furry daughter, allowed in the house and on the bed. As a young woman, Pia still lived with Jackie, but these days, she doted on Malachy.

  “Pia’s great,” I said. “When does she get home?”

  Jackie checked her watch. “In an hour or so. The loop bus drops her off at the base of the mountain, and she hikes the rest of the way.” Jackie paused a moment. “But these days, she’s leaving work later and later. I think she’s angling for Malachy to give her a ride home—or better yet, to let her stay over at his place.”

  Malachy lived in an apartment over the offices. “Really? That’s funny, because she’s so jumpy when he’s around. I was under the impression that he intimidated her a bit.”

  Jackie looked at me as if I were a little slow, then gathered up an armful of wood. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know that my girl has a woman-sized crush on that old stick of a boss.” Carrying the wood over to the side of the trailer, she dropped it in a large metal basket, then crouched to stack the wood more evenly. “Good lord,” Jackie said, as I added a much smaller armful of wood to her pile, “you’re as bad as she is. Pia’s missed out on about twenty-eight years of human courting etiquette, so it’s all I can do to stop her from lying on her back and waving all four legs in the air. And you haven’t noticed?”

  I shrugged, embarrassed by my lack of social acumen. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think Malachy’s noticed, either. He thinks of her as a kid.”

  “Does he?” Jackie’s eyes were shrewd. “I wonder.”

  I went back for another load of logs; Jackie was the sort of person you impressed with actions, not words. Besides, there was something satisfying about performing a basic, physical task like gathering wood. I could feel the cold through my leather gloves, and my fingertips would probably be numb when I went inside, but for now I was enjoying the soft rose glow of the sunset between the bare trees in the west, the shadowing of the valley below into soft mauve and indigo, the smell of wood smoke. A few of Jackie’s wolfdogs were trotting by my heels, but when I looked at them they broke away, loping toward the forest. At the edge of the clearing, they sat and whined, and one or two pointed their noses to the tree line and sang out a soft howl of greeting.

  Pia came out of the forest wearing a gray sweatshirt, a down vest, jeans, and sneakers, and unless you looked closely, you might have mistaken her for a high school boy. Except that she wasn’t carrying a backpack; Pia had never gotten into the human habit of carrying things with her. As she came closer, I saw that her cheeks were flushed, and I noticed that she hadn’t taken the path up the mountain.

  The other dogs whined and laid their ears flat as she walked up to them, beating their tails slowly from side to side. Clearly, they loved her, but there was something confused and tentative about their posture. Pia looked miserable as she crouched down to bump noses with them.

  “Pia,” Jackie said, “I wasn’t expecting you for another hour.”

  Pia rested her head against one of the other dogs; Patsy, I think. “Malachy said I should go before it got dark.” Pia was attempting to sound matter-of-fact, but she looked as though she were reciting a list of casualties of war. She stood up, blinking back tears as she added, “He says my hours have to change until it’s spring.”

  Jackie put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and Pia cringed. Crossing another’s body meant dominance to canines; Jackie still hadn’t figured out how to touch a human child with wolfish instincts. Pulling back, Jackie sighed. “Ah, well, honey, he’s looking out for your welfare.” Then Jackie noticed her foster daughter’s cold, bare hands. “Sweetheart, you forgot to wear mittens again.”

  “Did I?” Pia looked down at her fingers. “I didn’t notice.”

  I was clearly the most clueless woman of all time. Now that I knew, it was painfully apparent that Pia was infatuated with our boss. After all, he was emotionally unavailable, autocratic, condescending, and critical. What woman could resist? “Hey, Pia,” I said.

  “Oh, hi, Dr. Barrow.”

  “Abra. Call me Abra.”

  Pia met my eyes with difficulty. She had been a submissive wolfdog, and now she was a diffident woman. “Sure … Abra.” She attempted a smile, but it came out crooked.

  “Why don’t you go inside and grab a bite to eat?” Jackie smiled. “I bought some cookies, and you can help us give the other guys their shots.”

  Pia shook her head, looking at the other dogs. One or two whined, and then broke off and moved up alongside me. I patted one absently, wondering why I was suddenly so popular with Jackie’s dogs.

  Pia must have been wondering the same thing. Her soft gold eyes, so like Red’s, filled with tears. “Actually,” she said to Jackie, “if you don’t mind, I’d rather just go for a quick run.”

  “It’s getting dark, and I need to keep the others with me, to get their shots,” Jackie said.

  “That’s all right. I’m used to being alone.” With a short bark, Pia told her former packmates to stay. Then, with a glance at Jackie and me, she held up her palm. “Stay,” she repeated in English. And then she broke off into an awkward run, as if she still had forgotten for a second that she couldn’t just throw her body forward. With an embarrassed glance over her shoulder, Pia found her rhythm and then was swallowed up by the woods.

  “Come back before full dark,” Jackie called, then turned back to me. Still looking after her, she said, “Since you didn’t know about her feelings about Malachy, you might not realize, but she’s jealous of you.”

  “Of me? Why?” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew. “Oh, Christ on a crutch,” I said, almost pleading with Jackie. “Malachy has no interest in me as a woman. As far as I know, he doesn’t want anybody in that way.”

  “I know, I know,” said Jackie, looking tired. “But you’re his peer and he respects you, and she thinks you’re the other woman.” I had to wonder how much Jackie had to do with that misperception. “Come on, Abra, let’s get on with tending the dogs.”

  I went back to my car and grabbed my medical bag, the male hybrids following me like an honor guard.
The sun was lower on the horizon now, and shadows were chasing what remained of the light. It was still prime hunting time, though when I glanced down at the dogs, they were utterly focused on me. Two of them kept circling round and sniffing at my legs with rising levels of excitement. For a moment, I wondered if they were planning an attack. “Hey, Jackie? Just keep reminding them I’m an invited guest. Where do you want me to give them the vaccines?”

  Jackie gestured at her trailer, which looked even more forlorn in the winter than it had in the autumn. “Set up on my kitchen table. I’ll bring them in one by one.” To my surprise, the dogs continued to follow me as I opened the trailer door.

  “Come on, boys,” Jackie said, pushing the dogs away from me. “Give her some room to move.” As she opened the door, she said, “They’re a bit nervous these days. Some city idiot is busy knocking down trees about a mile away. And there’s another bulldozer starting in down that way.” In a softer tone of voice, Jackie addressed the dogs who were scrambling to get in through the door in a giant, furry pack.

  I laughed, because I’d never seen them so eager to be examined. “Jeez, one at a time, I can’t even get in the door.”

  “Now, stop it, boys,” Jackie said, a bit more sharply, “you can’t all come in at once. I want the Doc to see Patsy’s dewclaw first.” Jackie shooed the dogs away, although one, a large husky mix, seemed intent on sticking his muzzle in my crotch. I managed to get myself over the threshold as Jackie stood in the doorway, berating her pack with mock sternness.

  “Jeez, you guys, lay off her. And where’s Patsy and Miyax? How come it’s just you boys dogging her? Huh? Huh?” The wolfdogs whined and looked abashed.

  I turned and looked for a place to set up my medical kit. There was a coffee cup filled with old cigarette ashes on the kitchen table, which I moved into the pile of dishes in the sink. The trailer stank of Marlboro Reds and wet dog, and by comparison, Red’s cabin was roomy and luxurious.

  Thumbtacked on the walls were various photographs of the wolves, along with a snapshot of a much younger Red, holding a wolf cub on his lap. There was also a picture of Red and Jackie together, on the back of a dogsled. Like everything else in the trailer, these were covered by a fine coating of dust. I wondered if Jackie had cleaned the place at all since the last time I’d been here. That had been last year, and I’d been hiking, miserable about the state of my marriage but still in denial about what was happening to Hunter. Jackie had told me that she knew that Red and I were going to get together, but even though she’d accepted it, it had been clear she wasn’t exactly happy. It wasn’t jealousy; at the time, they were no longer a couple. But Jackie had worried that I was going to end up bringing Red more pain than happiness.