by Lynn Red
His seriousness caught me a little off guard. I cocked an eyebrow, not really sure why he turned so quickly. “All I meant was that you had to think of other people.”
He snarled, pulling his lips back over his teeth and giving me one hell of a charge. “No,” he growled, “I don’t. I don’t have to care one bit about what anyone else thinks. I am in charge.”
I watched Erik’s face for a second. He was chewing hard on the inside of his mouth. There was something deeper going on than just some dumb Jamesburg politics, which Erik always had a dismissive attitude about.
“You’re scared they’re going to throw you out, aren’t you?” I clapped my hand over my mouth as soon as I spoke. Not out of fear or anything, but because it was actually meant to be a thought for the inside of my head, not something to air.
Erik’s response was a glare. “Where did that come from?”
“I... I mean, why hide it? You’re worried that if you come out with this relationship that we both obviously get so much out of, that they’ll suddenly see you as... I don’t know, half an alpha or something, right? They’ll think you’re too weak to resist a stupid human?”
He grunted a laugh. “They’d like to have the balls to try to go at me.”
“Well what is it then? Why is it that every time someone challenges you, you tighten up your lips and start frowning? Why can’t you answer me with a straight face and not go off on some tangent about how great and powerful you are? You were elected, Erik, you know—”
“Chosen,” he said softly. “We call it choosing, not electing.”
I shot him a side-long glare.
“Sorry,” he said.
“If you have a problem, why can’t you talk about it with me? That’s what relationships are, Erik. If you think that what you want is a serious... anything with me, then you need to wrap your head around that.”
I sat down, hard, and drank some coffee that was really old. “This coffee is disgusting, and the way you’re acting right now it’s really hard not to call you a baby.”
“You don’t understand,” Erik said. “You don’t know how this place works. Alphas don’t just get up and quit. We don’t just resign when we get caught in a sex scandal. If you’re an alpha, you’re an alpha for life, even after your term is over, you—”
“What really happened to Atlas?” I asked.
Erik fell dead silent.
“What happened?” I prodded. “You said he went crazy like werebears do, and then after his mate stole all the money and left he jumped off a building. There’s more to it, even if you don’t know what it is, there’s more to the story.”
I took another drink of the old coffee and immediately wished I hadn’t, though it kept my hands busy.
Erik shook his head again, and shrugged. “That’s all I know. All anyone knows.”
Outside the window, a couple of cars stopped at the light honked their horns, and someone started shouting. It was so quiet in the apartment that it almost felt like we’d been invaded. And then, of course, I realized that we had, in a way, and we were just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You can tell me anything, Erik,” I said. “We have to trust each other, you know?”
“I know,” he said in a quiet grumble. “It’s just... how can I? I mean... no wait, I said that wrong.”
I was already on my feet by the time he finished. “To take a phrase from you,” I said, “what is that supposed to mean? For all your stuff about love and everything, you doubt me too, don’t you? Underneath it all, that’s what it comes down to, huh? You’re scared of trusting me.”
“No,” Erik said. He stuck his hand out and I dodged again. “That’s not what I meant, Izzy, I’m just flustered and confused and irritated and... what are you doing?”
“You keep making all these promises, Erik,” I said. “You’ve been telling me for a year and a half that you were going to come up with some way to make the whole town feel comfortable with us being together – with you having a pureblood human for a mate. Over and over, you say the same thing, and now you’re... you’re acting like you agree with all their unease over me. Like you’re not sure I’m who you think I am.”
Erik reached out and grabbed my shoulders. “Isabel, listen to me,” he said. His voice was tight in his throat. I hit a nerve. “I just don’t know what to do. Atlas coming back, even if it’s a complete non-issue, has brought all this old prejudice back to the surface. What he did, or rather what his mate did, is on the front of everyone’s mind now. Can’t you see that?”
I took a deep breath, steadying myself. One after the other, I took Erik’s hands and removed them from my shoulders. “What I see,” I paused, considering my words carefully for a moment. “What I see is that you don’t have the courage to stand up for me. I have to believe that’s it. You know why? Because the only other alternative is that I have to believe the man who keeps telling me we’re meant to be and all this... I have to believe he thinks I’m a thief.”
“Izzy, no!” Erik stuck out his hand again, but I twisted away.
“I’m leaving,” I said. I grabbed my purse off the table and stuck my phone, my notepad, and almost dumped that raunchy cup of coffee into it. “I’m leaving. I’m done. If you are so worried about me stealing a bunch of money from Jamesburg, then fine. I’ll make this whole thing easy on you. All right? Goodbye.”
“Wait!” Erik called after me, but I wasn’t hearing any of it.
I strode right to the door, grabbed the handle, and felt a stab in my heart the second I turned the door. How did this whole day – this whole life – turn around in the blink of an eye? And it wasn’t even zombie alphas I was worried about... hell, that hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about.
But I’d been down this road one too many times.
I’d had too many men give me the love run around when the reality was, they were perfectly happy to sleep with me, but weren’t going to admit it to their friends. This was the exact same thing, just on a whole other level. And of all the things I didn’t know, the one I did know is that I wasn’t going to put up with having my heart broken again. Not a chance.
If my heart was going to break, I thought as I closed my eyes to blot out his protesting and the sounds of his boots clomping after me, I was going to be the one who did the breaking.
Bandages don’t hurt unless you pull ‘em real slow.
This one, I ripped.
-5-
Jenga
“How do you drink so much? You’re big though, I’ll give you that.”
Jenga Cranston approached a rickety shelf that lay fifteen feet inside his rickety door. The door was nearly always open, even when it was cold or raining. The only time he bothered to close it was when a particularly exciting frog or fly or some other sort of vermin, wandered in and he didn’t want it to get out.
“Hnnnng.”
“That’s all you ever say, Atlas,” Jenga’s one slumped shoulder shook with laughter. “It’s almost like I forgot to attach your tongue.”
Glancing through a jar in which floated a newt, Jenga watched the golem of Jamesburg’s former alpha. He never got tired of how still Atlas was. As his shoulder twitched and one of his knees ached, Jenga vaguely wished he could be that motionless for any length of time.
“Ah, here it is,” he sighed as he pulled a choice jar from the rack. “Two bats, one rattlesnake. I imagine they’ve been sitting in this vodka for six... seven years by now. Should be nice and strong.”
He poured the foul looking, and even worse smelling, liquid into a large paper cup and half expected it to melt the bottom. Satisfied the concoction wasn’t going to melt his rickety table Jenga shuffled across the room and set the cup in front of Atlas.
With a groan of effort, the old bear turned his head. What would have taken most people a quarter second took him about four times as long.
Jenga tapped his fingernails on the top of the table. “Any day now,” he said. “You drink enough of this and I thin
k you’ll be as good as new. Oh, hum,” he reached out and plucked a worm from Atlas’s ear. “Must’ve missed that one somehow.”
“Hnnnnng.”
“Yes, yes,” Jenga said. He deposited the worm in the cup full of liquor and then lifted it to Atlas’s lips. Jenga’s hands trembled as he poured the liquid down Atlas’s throat. Only a little went dripped over his chin. “Feel better, old friend?”
“Hnnng?”
“Oh good,” Jenga said. “I hear some inflection.”
He grinned widely, his beard heavy and jingling with chicken feet, dried up lizards, and countless other gris-gris he’d plucked from the swamp behind his house. Across his one-room abode, a loud noise from the television startled the crotchety old swamp-dwelling witchdoctor.
“They’ll never figure it out. Ancient astronauts, aliens from space,” his voice was rattling and loose, just like the junk hanging in a pile around his neck. “Didn’t this channel used to show nothing but programs about people in pawn shops? Those were better days.”
Atlas parted his lips in something that would have resembled a smile ten years ago.
“Is that... oh good!” Jenga switched off the television and came back to see Atlas still grinning. “I had a feeling that elixir would get you cranked up. Can you talk yet? Or is it still just the—”
“Hnnnnng.”
“Right, well, can’t win ‘em all. At least you’re moving. That’s better than I managed last time I got you out of the dirt. How are those new legs working? Can you stand?”
Wordlessly, the enormous werebear stood.
“Fine, fine,” the old man said. “Looks like we might be on the right track.”
He poured another cup full of horror. That time, half a bat fell into it from somewhere up above. Atlas didn’t seem to notice.
“You do it yourself this time,” Jenga said. He began tapping his fingers on the side of his rickety book case, which was completely devoid of any books from the last century, before consciously stopping himself. “Take... take your time, yes... yes like that, pick it up and...”
Deliberately, slowly, but surely, Atlas bent from the waist just enough to wrap his massive hand around the little paper cup. He brought it to his lips, drank, and then chewed.
“What are you chewing?” Jenga shook his head. “Best not to know,” he said. “More?”
Atlas grunted and then spat out something that resembled chewing gum, but black. Jenga scooped it up into a little vial and shook it under a ceiling fan that didn’t work, except for the light. Whatever his old zombie friend spat out had a bunch of legs – none of them working very well anymore – and some kind of shiny shell.
Placing it on the end of one of his many workbenches, the overhead light flickered and died. Just afterwards, a loud banging sound from behind his house signaled the last of his backup generator’s energy.
Jenga’s face went gray.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he said. “I wanted to have a nice long chat, fill you up with liquor. But here we are. Ill-gotten gains bought me this place, got the lights, got the power and even this cable run all the way out here from town.”
“Hnnng?”
“Yes, you remember?” Jenga’s eyes lit up as he reminisced. “You were much more convincing in those days. I doubt anyone would take you for being alive anymore. Well, regular alive. I suppose you’re... animated? I don’t know quite what the right word is. The Eastern Witchdoctors Conference says zombies are alive only insofar as they can think. And you, well, I’m not sure where you fall on that scale.”
Atlas arched his eyebrows, slowly, and let out a long, low groan.
“I’m glad for one thing, old friend,” Jenga said as he ran his shaking fingers along a cut circling one of Atlas’s fingers. “I’m certainly glad you decided to begin falling apart before we started in with our new plan. Gave me time to patch you up. And honestly? I think you’re better than before.”
“Unng.”
“How good! How wonderful!” Jenga was almost jumping with excitement. “That was a new word! Before long you’ll be speaking, albeit slowly and in halting, confused sentences. But it’ll be almost like old times. You’ve never been exactly eloquent. Won’t that be wonderful? And then we can get you back to town and we can start paying the bills again.”
“Ung.” Atlas’s eyes turned downward. Very slowly, he shook his head.
“I know, I know, old friend,” Jenga said, patting Atlas’s giant shoulder. “I don’t like it any better than you do – the stealing and the sneaking. But the fact is that I have no choice. I’m so old, and there’s so very little to actually do in Jamesburg, that I can hardly get a job. And, after what happened last time I had an open medical practice, I don’t think selling tonics is an especially good idea.”
For a moment the two of them sat silent, Atlas staring at his feet.
“Well,” Jenga said, breaking the silence, “there’s no reason to feel down, is there? Nothing terrible happened when we did this before.”
“You.” Atlas said.
Jenga nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right – and glad to have you talking, by the way – I suppose you don’t have much to do with all this. It was a different time, too. But! There’s no reason to be down. We’ll get what we need and be on our way.”
Jenga poured another slug of junk, and pushed the cup toward Atlas who just stared at it without moving.
“You need your strength,” Jenga said. “Drink up, only a little more until you’ve had the last of it.”
Atlas just stared.
“Come on now,” Jenga said, putting his hands on his hips. “I really don’t want to have to act the part of a puppet master, but I will if you make me.” He scratched at his chin through his beard, which sent the knotted mass to jingling and jangling. “I know you don’t want to do this, but I’ve got no choice Atlas. It’s either we steal, or we give up all of this luxury.”
Looking around his house, he gazed fondly at a blender with one working motor out of two, the light dangling over his head, and then let his eyes fall on the thing he valued most – a seventy-two inch plasma television.
“Move?” Atlas groaned.
“Me? Move? To town?” Jenga waved his hand dramatically over his head, which irritated a lizard that had settled in his hat. “I’m so very happy you’re talking by the way, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. There’s no nature there, there’s no pretty things like this,” he snatched the scurrying lizard. “No, I just couldn’t. I don’t fit in there, I’m just a broken down old witchdoctor looking to enjoy my retirement. These old bones don’t have the energy for—”
“Jenga?” a woman’s voice from down by the road – some thirty feet from Jenga’s rickety door – startled him. She was quite excited.
“Jenga! Are you there! Where are you?” She was ruffling up the path, and Jenga was rubbing his temples.
“I don’t have energy for this, for her, not now. Can’t you do something, Atlas?” Jenga groaned massaging his nose. “Just I don’t know, hold her down or—”
“There you are!” Mary was a shrieking, wild-eyed, holy mess of a woman. Old doesn’t begin to describe her leathery skin, or her knobby, root-like fingers. “I’ve been asking after you from the road! Why are you not talking? Why are you so rude? Why won’t you say anything? Why won’t you talk? Atlas? I’m so tired of these zombies, Jenga, I’m sick of it.”
Moving his eyes around behind his closed lids, Jenga let out another impatient groan. “I’m not answering,” he said, “because you won’t let me get a word in. And what business is it of yours what I do with my time? Zombies weren’t illegal last I checked the ordinances.”
“No,” Mary said. “No, they’re not, but theft is! Scaring people isn’t but horrifying drunks and taking their money is illegal, Jenga! Doesn’t matter anyway, I’m fed up with your smells and the smoke and the noises, I told the Alpha!”
Jenga’s drooping eyelids shot open. “You did what? What did you tell him? I have
n’t done anything.”
“I think I told him anyway. It might’ve been someone else. I think I told Leon, actually. Or maybe...”
“Mary!” Jenga shouted, grabbing the ancient woman’s shoulders. “Who did you tell what?”
“That you were going to rob the bank again. Like you did last time. Only I’m not sure I told anyone about that. And if I did they hardly believe anything I say on account of... well, I’m not quite certain why no one believes me. It’s my birthday after all, but no one believes me.”
“So you told... Leon? About my plan? How did you know about it?” Jenga started pacing, nervously, along the back of his dilapidated couch.
She shrugged. “I didn’t, I made it up. The smell is so awful with whatever you do all the time that I made it up to get you in trouble. I figured you did it once so you’d probably try it again. Only thing I didn’t figure on is you doing it the exact same way. So I guess I was right after all.”
Before he really knew what he was doing, Jenga backed Mary to the front door and distracted her for long enough that she forgot what she was talking about. As soon as she began wandering down the path back to her tree house, Jenga closed the door, turned and rested his back against the aged oak.
“I think,” he took a deep breath as Atlas turned his head and stared. He even stared slowly. “That this just got a lot more complicated.”
-6-
The walk from my apartment to the courthouse, and then to my little office across from Erik’s took about ten minutes, but that afternoon it felt like ten hours.
My feet felt so heavy, that they matched my heart. I never thought this would happen, never in a million years. Everything was going so well, so perfectly, and I thought I’d finally gotten myself to a place with people who were just weird enough that I didn’t have to worry about who I was anymore.
But of course, who I was didn’t matter.
In the end, it was just what I was that was most important. Two years of making friends, making love, finding myself... all gone, and for what? Because I was born a human? Because I couldn’t turn into a peacock or a duck or, the way I felt right then, a jellyfish? I guess maybe I was blind or naive or something, because it came on so fast.
