by Tommi Hayes
And also, of course, he knew the procedure before we even headed down here. It was carefully explained to him over wine, and a meal I'd tried to cook in the lavishly appointed kitchen set aside for our use. (I tried but he took over. He's a better cook than I am, yes. But also in there, the desire to coddle, to cherish, to take over and protect, look after. His wolf-nature already asserting itself, and perhaps more than that. Something of his original purely human self too.)
He knew, and was perfectly docile, even eager. Although there was something in his eyes, in his mein, that told me that docile wasn't perfectly the right word for it. He was unbroken, wholly so. It was unnerving, unreasonable, unprecedented. His will should have been gone. It should have been replaced by mine. That's not how the wolf bond exactly works, they say. But what a handler can do, even a regular one, seems stronger than that, and perhaps needs to be.
Raj, he's choosing to abide by my will, and I can tell it. (I shouldn't rejoice in it, shouldn't want him unbroken and unbound, not truly fit for the service of the Section and the State. But I do, in any case.)
Here we are, then. The floor is goddamn cold. I'm here by myself, or as near as I can get. I'm aware of the cameras on both of us, but they're disabled. The intercom, though, permanently on. But I forbade Jeff from detailing any of his officers to attend, or choosing to attend in person himself. And I'm running this show, and I get to have the final say. Whatever Jeff's disapproving advice. (He doesn't really think that Raj is going to turn rogue, break his way out of iron bars, attack me. But he doesn't like being cut out of the action, mostly, I think, his authority disrespected. It's pretty boring for the security force, up here just keeping an eye on the main show, the action. I hope they're getting some while they're here. I know some of the boys swing that way, and there are a few girls amongst them too. God knows I've been getting enough for an entire security unit. Or an army. Raj is relentless, insatiable.)
And he's smiling in the cell, like the idiot I know full well he's not, up against the bars and holding on to them. As close as he can get to me. "Will it hurt?" he asks, when he already knows the answer. But he doesn't wait for the answer anyway. That's because he's too busy, falling to his knees. It's been dark a couple of hours now. And through the bars of the window, the moon is half-hidden behind clouds. I can still see full well it's full, not that I need to. Here's the evidence.
"Ah," he says, panting, already fallen to all fours in his human form. “Scratch the question, forget it. Here it comes. I know the answer." Fuck, but it's hard to watch it happen. And it's always hard, but this is unbearable. Imagine if you broke your arm, and yes, fuck, it hurt in an unforgettable kind of way. But then the doc told you that that was going to happen every month. Not that someone was going to break it for you, nothing like that, but that he was just eerily prescient, a clairvoyant, and he could tell you, for sure, it was going to happen. Every month. Not just one bone, though. It would feel like every bone, pretty much, and every joint, and the surface of your skin cracking and your internal organs being rearranged.
I'm up against the bars crying and I don't even know how I got there, and Jeff is beeping and hollering through the intercom and swearing at me. Swearing at me to get back, threatening to send his guys in, and I drag hands through my hair where's it's knotted, where I've been stressing at its lank length since the onset of late afternoon. "Fuck you, Jeff," I rant, and it's hardly audible over Raj, over my love's howls. "Fuck you. I have absolute discretion here, this whole operation runs on my say-so till the final scan and fuck you, stay the fuck out, he's not going to hurt me and–" I give up and rip the wires out of the intercom.
It never bothers me this much. I mean it bothers me, because all appearances to the contrary, I'm still human. But it has to be different when it's someone you care about. It's different when it's someone you love.
He suffers, and in quite a short while he can't talk any more, and every bone in his body is an instrument of torture for him. By the end of it I'm lying face down on the floor and wailing, weeping, while he howls through the worst of it, a brutal anti-orgasm. And then he whines, whines, whines and sobs and whimpers into the last after-shocks, the ebbing tide of pain and burning, the rips of muscle that heal themselves and rip again a little and heal and rip and heal. When he's quiet again, finally, I know he's found his final form, and I mean to look up, to see that he's okay. But I'm limp as a rag, I can't move, dank with sweat and tears and halfway broken myself. This is not how I finish a transformation, though I always accompany them, watch over. I barred cameras, but still Jeff will have heard me clear enough. God knows what he's going to think. And I must do a better job of monitoring and controlling my behaviour in front of him. This won't do.
Flattened to the floor, I might as well be stuck there with wallpaper paste. The first thing I know is the wetness and warmth on my hand where it's flung up close to the bars, half-way through to them into Raj's temporary cold prison. Raj, licking my hand as if he was a Labrador.
When I look up, he's still beautiful, but in a different way. Black from his head to the tip of his tail, glinting black eyes too, huge and commanding and a little bit scary. They always are. Even when I have perfect control, I'm not sufficiently dumb to be unintimidated.
I know, with Raj, I don't have the perfect control I appear to have. The love, yes, that's real. But the control is the illusion he allows me, out of that love. (I don't know how exactly I know it, and God knows I can't prove it. I do know it though. It's there in the soft amusement of his eyes, watching me as I wake these past mornings. A tender indulgence, a waiting and dancing on my every whim. Not because he has to. Because he chooses to, to please me.)
So I don't have control, but I'm not scared. Now, when I really should be, I'm not scared when I pull the key-fob out of my pocket and open up, let him out. He pushes out immediately, into my legs, nosing at me everywhere, limbs and pits and crotch and feet. Checking that I'm whole, that I'm safe, then pushing his moist muzzle into the palm of my hand to sniff and nip at, so gentle.
"I'm here," is what he's saying. And normally I don't trouble to read their wolf-minds, because mood is sufficient. Even now with Raj there's no actual words to it. I'm translating a feeling, a bouncing alert jab and wave for my attention. But brighter, louder, stronger than normal, than I've ever felt with any of them. He's a force. He's strong, forceful, a natural leader. It's part of what they recruited him for, apart from the wolf power and the covert malevolence that's the justification.
Love pours through the bond, the simulated mate-pairing. And I let him lead me, push me, nudge me up to the ground floor, and from there outside, so that he can run, out in the snow in his wolf form. It's not a privilege I'd normally allow, but my discretion is absolute on this operation. And it's the only real freedom he's liable to get, again, ever, and I love him, and I can't deny him it.
***
Back in the city with the induction done, the Honeymoon underway, and Amisa calls me in. That's not usual, either. But then nothing about Raj is usual, nothing about this case has been normal, so why even start with that now?
Hurrying in, I have to leave our hotel suite to Raj's mumbling early-morning protests and tender nuzzles. He's nude and spooning me while walking up behind me all the while I try to make it out of there. He doesn't want to let me go though he knows I must, hangs on so I have to pull away laughing, as he lunges in for more kisses and sends jokey messages to my superiors. “Tell them how good it is when you give 'em it up the ass, from me! Say I say they should try you out! Send it with kisses!" It's certainly a joke, he'd want to kill anyone who actually touched me, and I can feel the fervent surge of heat in his mind as he thinks it. He doesn't care. We're still living inside the balloon where everything's perfect and nothing can touch us, no matter what. He doesn't know what's coming, that we're on a schedule and heading towards the oncoming train. Even I can put it out of my mind, for brief moments here and there.
He kisses my fingertips even as I clos
e the door, pushing him inside. The last he'll let me see of him is a kiss, after all the promises of a swift return, the admonitions to stay put, amuse himself, behave himself. Then I'm on my way, driver eyeing me through the partition as I throw myself into the back of the anonymous black saloon outside the hotel lobby. Maybe he's heard things. Maybe Jeff and the guys have put their reports in, maybe I'm going to be roasted for unorthodox induction methods that I can't back up with the manual.
Maybe Raj failed his final scan, and the thought freezes me with the chilliest terror. Suddenly I have my own thermal adjuster, my own personal air conditioning vent that's blowing right down the back of my shirt. But no. I have been so careful. I weeded and tended his mind, I guided him through the change, I have him bound to me with silken ropes and he's good as gold, will never stray or misbehave. Not on my watch, sir.
Or madam, because it's Amisa I'm called in to report to, at least. Only a level or two up from me, not the bigwigs, the ones with personal connections, with listening ears in the State itself. So I'm probably not really in trouble.
But when I'm sitting in that big leather visitors' chair, consciously not spinning, not fidgeting, not letting my eyes wander, it sure feels like trouble. And Amisa's not even looking at me, which with most higher-ups I would take as a bad sign. A power-play, a signal that I am so very unimportant that, even though I am in the deepest shit imaginable, the big boss person concerned simply cannot be assed to deal with me right at this moment. That she has a hundred and one other things of greater importance that she would sooner attend to first. While I wait, and sweat.
But this is Amisa, and she's a pretty casual chick, and if her attention's off and she's a little distracted, then all that means is that... she's a little off, and her attention's distracted. That's all. Maybe she has an issue with her manicure, or her boyfriend's getting busy with another girlie. Could be anything. She looks completely unconcerned, abstracted, and I relax a bit. At most, at worst, I'm getting a light supervisory smack-down for some minor infraction.
Then Amisa stills her head, where she's tinkering with knick-knacks on her decorative shelves. This place is a tart's boudoir, I think, pink and fluffy and more like a teenage girl's bedroom than a mid-level management office in a repressive State's most secret department. Amisa should really be a giddy shrieking young journalist on some teen girl's magazine or website, squealing about boys and lip-gloss and boy bands. It would fit her so much better.
So. She ceases in her inattention, and cocks her head to me, bird-headed, beadily attentive suddenly. And now I realise, yes, the pottering about and the fussing and the lack of close attention, yes, I am being disciplined with the elaborate unofficial rituals of discourtesy from a superior to a renegade junior officer.
“So. Honey," she says, comes over close and rests her hand on my shoulder. She leans up enough that her boobs and belly are pressing up against the side of the chair, hemming me in a little. Less sexual harassment, more inappropriate intimidation. Breathing over me in my personal space. "Getting hot and heavy with your boy? So I hear." And she lets silence hang, to give me rope and space and time to hang myself I guess.
"Jeff's been reporting back, then," I say, not meeting her eyes. And she laughs, and moves off, gives me some space.
"Unofficially. And officially, to some degree. But only the bare minimum. He's quite fond of you, you know. Doesn't really want to land you in it more than necessary."
So, is this a warning, or am I already in it, I wonder. And also, God bless Jeff, I suppose. The asshole, upright, full of rectitude and duty when it comes down to it. I can feel the rigidity of my body language, the stasis in my brain as I search for the right response, the one that'll get me out of this. Me and my darling both, safe. Safe and free and together would be nice, but right now I'll settle for safe. “The post-induction tests came up okay?" I ask. It's a misdirection, and it isn't. Maybe it'll shift the subject from how I'm fucking up, losing objectivity. And on the other hand, it points up that actually I haven't fucked up, according to the main correlate and measurement available, which is my man's mind. (And what I've done to it, what I've done to it. That's a sharp inhale, every time I think of it, a keen sharp well of tears and a shiv of pain in my own brain. And a reminder that it was the right thing to do, and the only thing. He's better off for it.)
“They're fine," she shrugs. "Nothing interesting going on. How'd it go, putting him through the washer?"
But I can't pay any attention, not the slightest, to what she's saying. It hits my inner ears and slides away unregarded. Because there's something else I'm listening to.
I'm listening to Raj's voice in my head. I have kept him on such a very long leash, I have striven to respect the sanctity of his mind since that egregious sin against it. I monitor him only for distress and sedition, both of which burn and flare bright enough that I barely need to skim the surface of his psyche, now that I love and know it. (They're never there. I'm carefully, barely aware of what is there. I respect the bubble, the actual narrative when I do dip cautiously just below the surface, looking for problems. A warm bubble of happiness, and no fiery knots of distress or resentment, and I whip quickly back out again. He knows, now, what I am, and how I do what I do. Although not everything that I've done. I know full well he'd willingly give me the keys to his mind, every inner sanctum, of his own free accord, and invite me in. He'd invite me in with his arms wide and a couple of glasses of wine poured, for us to clink glasses and toast our mutual residence inside his skull. He has not the goddamn sense to have an atom of self-preservation, not when it comes to anything concerning me.)
I'm careful with my answer, more than normally, and I'm normally pretty damn careful with anything I say to Amisa. For all her girly light-heartedness about the responsibilities of her job, she's a couple of pay-grades above me. (Not that that means much. It almost certainly doesn't mean she's literally paid more than me. If anything, the Section over-compensate us, to make up for the lack of liberty, the enforced duty to the State. The distasteful duties that they impose upon us, not that many seem to have any great objections. Also, perhaps, I think, they view it as insurance against espionage, against disloyalty. They fail to take into account the fact that there are more motives than common veniality, for betraying one's employer, one's humanity, one's State).
If you were terribly sentimental and old-fashioned and noble, you might take matters of right and wrong into your accounting. But then where would we be?
“There were no unusual issues," is what I say to her, cautious and measured. I am very careful to stick to the absolute truth, the facts that cannot be controverted. To lie is to risk getting caught out in a lie. I give her the absolute minimum that I can possibly wangle, reducing the truth down to a coulis, a brothy reduction. "In fact it was unusually easy. All the problem area in one place, no muss, no fuss..." I stop and ponder for a moment. That is in fact true. Raj is the most difficult, the most un-wrangleable, the most obstreperous subject I have ever had on my to-do list. (The most obstreperous, while also being the most submissive, the most adoring, the happiest to please me in any way I'd care to be pleased. That's the thing - it's all done by free will. It's all outward seeming. And I'm tantalised and rendered uneasy by the strong, sharp, fiercely gutting with alarm intuition that if he wanted to resist, to give the finger to me and my manipulations, then it would be the easiest thing in the world for him. When a whim takes him, just the same, he gives way to it. And that's a sign. They don't do that. They check in with me first. He has too much free will, and I adore that he has free will, and it could land me in an inquisition room with some very unhappy higher-ups, or the people they hire to do their dirty work.)
And Amisa is observing me carefully, much too carefully. She never normally looks at me this closely, because she's too busy checking her hair in the mirror or answering texts on her phone or any one of a dozen other minutiae quite unrelated to her duties. I feel as if I've missed a step, and yet I can't take a moment to
pay it the full attention it probably deserves. And that's because there's something else grabbing at my attention.
Jesus. Oh hell. It's, it's... Everything in my mind comes to a standstill.
I never make the attempt to scan Amisa, nor any other senior member of Sectional authority. Not that I'm not strong enough to do it. I am easily, so very easily strong enough. Frighteningly easily, actually. My unasked, sometimes almost unwanted gifts, have the capacity to scare me, at times. I also, almost certainly, have the subtlety to do it undetected. And I don't just mean by subjective analysis, by the careful but still fallible checks and balances of other telepaths. I mean even by what tech and systematic, reproducible rigour the Section, the Unit can bring to bear upon the sanctity of the minds of its senior enforcers. I could probably do it. I know the fine details, the raw power of my ability. But I don't care to risk it, ever. I know just how much I would be risking. If it was a matter of survival, of immediate emergency, then I would have to resort to it.
