“Excellent.” I scanned the room, taking note of the wide variety of people who had crammed themselves into the narrow space. I was most definitely the best dressed of the lot, or at least the only one who had bothered to coordinate my earrings with my vertically striped stockings.
Most waheela do not care for crowds. I do not care for crowds. But I am very fond of watching fashion trends, and this has required me to learn to be still even when surrounded. It was not an easy lesson.
One of the waitresses wove through the crowd with an easy grace that I admired, putting a small dessert pizza down between us. It was grated chocolate and sliced strawberries on cinnamon bread, and I appreciated the artistry of it, even as I felt no desire to continue eating.
“We didn’t order this,” said Ryan, sounding puzzled.
“Compliments of the chef,” said the waitress. “You’re tonight’s big eaters!” Her announcement drew a round of applause from the tables around us.
“Oh. Well, thanks.” Ryan looked back to me and shrugged. “I guess we should try it. To be polite.”
“Your weakness for chocolate will be your undoing one day,” I said, and sighed, and reached for the pizza. If there is one thing I have learned since leaving the cave of my fathers, it is how to be polite.
There was a bitter taste lurking beneath the sweetness of the treat, like bones sleeping under snow. I paused in the act of chewing my first mouthful, trying to figure out why I knew that flavor—and more, what it was doing in my food.
Then Ryan’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell, face-first, into his plate. I threw my slice of pizza aside, reaching for him. Someone in the crowd protested. I swallowed my half-chewed mouthful in order to snarl at her. The protests stopped.
My hand never reached my boyfriend’s shoulder. Cold swept over me like the cruel north wind, and I barely felt my own head hit the table.
***
I snapped awake. The pizza parlor was gone, replaced by a dark, cold room and a metal chair beneath me. Something held me in place. I tensed, testing my bonds. Metal chains, with a smell I did not recognize. No common alloy, then. They were wrapped around my body half a dozen times, holding me down, torso, arms, and legs. If I changed forms, and the chains did not snap…
I have seen stronger than I killed by their own foolish bravado, believing they could transform their way out of any trap or trouble. I calmed my breathing and was still.
The scent of Ryan hung in the room, but I did not know whether it meant my boyfriend was present or whether I was simply smelling my own clothing until he groaned off to my left, and said, “I don’t think that pizza was a good idea.”
“Shh,” I cautioned, despite my relief. “We are unlikely to be alone here.”
“I know, but they wouldn’t have put us together if they didn’t want us talking. Can you change?”
“The chains are too tight. I fear I would break myself. Can you?”
“No. Same.” Ryan sighed. “They’re too tight for me to get bigger, and too complicated for me to get smaller. Even if I shrank, I’d be all tangled up.”
“Ah.” Waheela have two shapes that we choose to wear: the one I was chained in, and my great-form, which was ten feet tall and difficult to buy shoes for. Tanuki have three common shapes—man, beast-man, and beast. It was a pity that none of them were currently available to us. “Is there a length of chain between your legs?”
“Yeah, and it’s, um, a little closer to the boys than I really appreciate.”
“Is there direct constriction of your testicles?”
I could virtually hear Ryan’s wince. “No, but it’s close.”
“Hmm.” I looked around the darkened room again. My eyes were adjusting to the dark, allowing me to pick out some small details, such as the location of the nearest walls. I considered rocking back and forth until I fell over, but dismissed the idea as impractical. I would injure myself well before I did anything to damage either the chains or the chair, and I would probably rip my stockings in the process. That was unacceptable.
“So honey? Do you smell anything that might tell us where we are?”
“I smell you. I smell metal. I smell cold. We are near something refrigerated. I do not smell anything that would indicate why we are here, or how we have been brought here.” As I said the last words, I froze. There was one thing that would explain how we had been brought here without our captors leaving any scent hanging in the air to warn me of their natures.
Ryan realized it, too. The silence stretched between us for what felt like an age before he said, “Waheela smell like cold.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We do.”
***
It is hard to be a predator in any world, but harder still in a world where all is ice and snow and cold, forever. The waheela grew large, to fight off all who would challenge us, and then, when that was not enough, we grew difficult to track, to confound those who we would hunt. The scent of a waheela in human form is indistinguishable from fresh-fallen snow. Even in our great hunting forms, we leave behind meaningful scent trails only when we are wounded. We had been taken; we were in a room where the only abiding smell was the smell of the cold. It was thus clear that we had been taken by waheela.
“Ryan?” My voice was suddenly brittle in the cold, dark air, like ice that was on the verge of breaking.
“Yeah, Istas?”
“I have been very fond of you, and am glad to have entered into a casual mating relationship, despite the differences in our species and cultural backgrounds. I hope that you have not regretted your time with me.”
“What? Of course not. Istas—” Confusion and burgeoning panic sharpened his voice to a killing edge.
In some stories of the waheela, we can grab the wind itself to use as a weapon, when the need is upon us. If only all stories were true. I sat up taller in my chair, as tall as the chains allowed, and wished that I had my parasol. I have always felt braver when properly accessorized.
“We are ready for you,” I said. “You have toyed with your prey sufficiently, don’t you think?”
A rectangle of light opened at the far end of the room, not so bright as to be blinding, but enough to sting my eyes, which had long since adjusted to the dark. Three figures made their way inside, and they smelled of nothing, nothing but the cold. Their steps were soft as they walked across the room; predator’s steps, designed to make as little noise as possible. I had stopped walking like a predator long ago, preferring shoes that politely announced my presence to the potential victims around me.
The three waheela walked until they had come to the very edge of where the light reached, and stopped, silently waiting to see what I would do next. They were all male, with dark hair and eyes, and brown skin. Waheela could pass for Canada’s First People, when we had to, and in a way, I suppose that was not a lie. We had been there longer than most after all, as cold and unchanging as the glaciers.
I cocked my head. “Hello, Father.”
The tallest of the three figures nodded in return. “Hello, eldest of my daughters.”
I was not the firstborn female of my litter, but the dead are not the family of the living. After my sister was eaten, I became eldest. I looked at the shadowed figures behind him, and asked, “Why have you come here with my brothers? Why have you followed me down into the human lands? I went into exile of my own volition.”
“Your mother is dead,” he said calmly. “You are the eldest of my daughters.”
In the land of the waheela, the words he had just uttered made perfect sense. But this was the land of the humans, and I had been living here for a very long time. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying, what the words really meant beyond the thin veneer of his civility. They would have been easier in great-form, where nothing has two meanings: everything is only ever what it is, as cold and unforgiving as the snow.
Clarity did not come easy, but it came. I stiffened in my chair. “No,” I said. “I refuse. I am in exile.”
&nb
sp; “You have exiled yourself.”
“But if Mother is dead, then I have the authority to exile myself. I am in exile. You must find another.”
My father growled. Even in man-form, it was a chilling, primal sound, commanding obedience from the tip of my head to the toes of my feet—my feet, which were still clad in my fine black boots with the heels that clattered when I walked. I rapped one of them against the floor, relishing the sound it made. I was Istas. I had run very far to become her, and I was not letting her go that easily.
“No,” I said, calmly. “I will not go with you.”
“Izzy?” Ryan sounded confused. I managed not to wince—showing weakness was beneath me, and here and now, I was my father’s daughter, whether I desired to be or not. “What’s going on?”
Even in the dark, I could see my father baring his teeth in a smile. “You refuse me, but you forget that you are not the only thing we hold. How loudly will your little toy scream, eldest daughter? How many limbs must we remove before you will see reason?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and then paused, rapping my heel against the floor again. It made a sharp, almost hollow sound. “Father, are we on the second floor?”
“Third,” he said smugly. “No one will overhear the screaming.”
“Ah. That is pleasing. Ryan?”
“Um, yeah, Izzy?”
“Are you ready to rock?”
Ryan’s surprised laugh was followed by the sound of a large, heavy object crashing through the wooden floorboards. My brothers shouted, rushing past me toward the hole that had suddenly opened up in the floor. My father snarled. I bared my teeth in a smile.
“I believe you have lost a prisoner,” I said. “Pity, that. Now what are you going to do to entice me?”
He grabbed the front of my dress, jerking me toward him until I heard the seams starting to give. Nose only inches from mine, he whispered, “I’ll think of something.”
This time, I couldn’t stop myself from flinching.
***
Waheela are not unthinking beasts, to be ruled by instinct. We are very thoughtful monsters, ruled by tradition, which is like instinct, only crueler. Once, it may have made sense for the eldest to rule in all things; once, it may have been fair to drag back runaway children and force them to rejoin a family they had chosen to leave. Those times are far behind us, lost in the distance of the past.
My father’s hand gripped my jaw, forcing me to look at him as he studied me. His lip curled in a sneer when he considered my ponytails. “You dress like a human,” he spat.
“You are wearing human clothing,” I countered. My brothers were gone, descending into the abandoned building as they searched for my missing boyfriend. I wished them all the luck in the world, including the greatest luck of all: if they were lucky, they would not find him. A fall from this height would doubtless have broken the chair that kept his chains in position. He would be loose. And most of all, he would be angry.
Tanuki are therianthropes, like waheela: shapeshifters whose power comes from within, unlike the poor, diseased wretches infected with lycanthropy. Ryan could transform his body in a variety of ways, including convincing his flesh that it was a type of stone far denser than lead. He could not move when in statue-form, but he could do a remarkable amount of damage to things like non-load-bearing floors.
“I am dressed for the sake of blending in,” said my father. “You are groomed. You have embraced the mockery they continue to pretend serves as a culture.”
I blinked at him, startled. And then I laughed. “Truly? You call human culture a mockery? Our culture is a hole in the ground! Our culture is your teeth in my sister’s throat! How did Mother die? Hunters? A blizzard? Or you, coming in the night with claws bared and temper blazing? We don’t have a culture, Father! We have a war that we’ve been fighting against our own kind for centuries, and there will never be a winner!”
His hand was hard against my cheek. I glared at him. He glared back, showing me his teeth.
“You will come home,” he said. “I do not care what you want. Desires are for the warm lands.”
“I left the cold.”
“The cold never leaves you.” This time, his hand against my cheek was a caress. “You are never going to be as warm as they are.”
I turned my head, fast as a striking snake, and sunk my teeth into his fingers. How he howled! And his blood was as warm as any mammal’s. There was nothing of the cold in him at all.
He yanked himself away from me, snarling. “Insolent bitch!”
“I told you, Father. I will not come home with you. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“So be it, then.” He primly removed his overcoat, tossing it off to the side. Then, without another word, he began to swell, human features first distorting, and finally vanishing beneath the onrushing force of the battle-form. He unfolded, shirt and trousers tearing away, until a great wolf-bear stood before me, fully eleven feet in height, with bearlike paws and claws the length of my palm. He roared, and it was the sound of an avalanche crashing down upon an empty valley. All the cold of Canada was in his bellowed declaration of dominance.
I looked at him calmly. “Yes,” I said. “I know. But what can you do?”
He stepped forward, barely bipedal, all-too-aware that the floor would barely support his weight; Ryan had made that very clear. Almost gentle now, he wrapped his paw around my chin, claws pricking the flesh of my cheek. He looked at me. I looked back.
“How did Mother die?” I asked.
His answer would no doubt have involved teeth and claws and a rather unpleasant death, both for me, and for my dress, which was not designed to deal with that much blood. Instead, he was hit from the side by a beast almost his size, differentiated only by paler fur and a long striped tail. Father roared. Ryan roared back.
I frowned. “This is very inconvenient.” I turned my head in the direction Ryan had arrived from. The younger of my brothers was standing where a door had not been previously, his shirt torn and stained with blood. “You. Release me. I am the eldest female now, and I command it.”
Instinct is weak where tradition is strong. My brother knew that I was to be chained, and that Father would be unhappy if I were free. But as Father was in the process of having his head slammed into the wall by an angry tanuki, I was the only eldest in our family currently in a position to give orders. He grabbed Father’s overcoat from the floor; as I expected, the key was in the pocket. What other reason would someone so dismissive of human culture have for being careful of his clothes?
My brother moved to kneel behind me, fumbling with the chains. When they fell away I stood, not thanking him, and began undoing the buttons on my dress as quickly as I could without damaging anything. It was time for this to end, and I was going to be the one to end it.
***
Waheela have two forms: man-form and great-form. Neither is superior to the other. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and if I miss the animal grace of my great-form when I am in man-form, I miss the thumbs and fashion opportunities of my man-form when I am in great-form. Still. Great-form is well-suited to anger, and as I stepped out of my stockings, I allowed my anger to run free.
Ryan looked up as I raced on all four paws toward the tangled mass of fur and teeth that was his clench with Father. He let go, rolling out of the way just before I slammed into my father’s chest, teeth seeking and finding his throat. He roared, claws scrabbling to find purchase on my back, but all he found was fur, thicker and more luxurious than any waheela who does not have regular access to quality hair care products could hope to grow.
I bit harder, slamming my father into the floor, and held him there, putting as much pressure as I could against his throat. Eventually, his thrashing stilled, and he lay limp.
Instinct told me to bite down, to end him. Tradition said the same. But I am stronger than both. I have learned to wear high-heeled shoes, and to walk among men without eating them. I released my hold, straightening and shrink
ing at the same time, until I was in my man-form once more.
“Izzy?”
“Did you kill my other brother?” I asked curiously, turning toward Ryan. He was naked, and had no doubt shredded his clothing when he transformed. No matter. We would take my father’s overcoat, and the taxi drivers of New York had seen stranger things.
Ryan shook his head. “I didn’t think you’d like that. He’s passed out in the basement.”
“Good.” I turned to my brother. He took a step backward. “I will not harm you, but I will not be so merciful a second time. Tell Father this is my territory. No waheela are welcome here; none save me. Come again, and I will kill you. Do you understand?”
“I do,” he said, and tilted his head back, showing me his throat.
I walked forward, resting my hand against the exposed skin. “Find a name, brother,” I murmured. “Find something stronger than tradition. And for the love of the north wind, find better trousers. Those are very unattractive.”
Then I gathered my clothing and my boyfriend, and left.
***
Ryan put Father’s overcoat on, shoving his hands into the pockets, and hung back while I flagged down a cab. By the time the driver realized he had picked up a half-naked man to go with the half-naked woman, it was already too late to drive past.
I snuggled against Ryan in the backseat, trying to finger-comb my hair back into a semblance of order.
“So,” he said finally. “That was your family.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Let’s meet your family next. I am sure it will be equally enlightening.” My stomach growled. I frowned. “But perhaps we should have more pizza first. I have burned a great many calories this evening.”
Ryan’s laughter had a hysterical edge to it. He kissed the top of my head, and said, “Let’s do that, honey.”
As he gave the address to the driver, I smiled. It had been a good night. I was stronger than tradition, stronger than the call of the cold.
Fiction River: Hex in the City Page 10
