by Amy Lane
“Don’t be embarrassed around me,” Suriel said, voice sober. “Especially not about being frightened.”
Harry swallowed hard. “I’m not frightened. He was a bogeyman from my childhood—”
“He was a terrible man, and he did terrible things to my boys.” Suriel’s bearing, which had been quizzical and curious since Harry had awakened in his arms, changed, so smoothly Harry could almost forget his delight at the watering hole. “I will not allow him to harm you or the others again.”
Oh. “I’m grown.” Harry tried to sound dignified. “If their fear conjured him up, then I’ll protect them.”
Suriel’s sorrow hit him like a hammer blow. “You are so sure it was their fear, Harry?”
He had nowhere to go. The circles of women were off-limits—a naked man was the thing they all hated and feared the most. His brothers wouldn’t believe him, and they certainly wouldn’t sympathize, not if he’d called this thing down upon their heads.
“I conquered this fear,” he said staunchly. “The others could scarcely turn human, and I ate dinner with Emma and Leonard every night for a year. I made them be human for our lessons. I learned hand-to-hand and weapons training so I could show them and we could fight. I fought this fear. I’m not the one who—”
Suriel’s fingers on his chin were so soft Harry couldn’t even jerk his head to turn away. “You’re so very brave, my black heart, but fighting a fear every day of your life doesn’t mean you’ve defeated it. It just means you build a shell around yourself so you don’t let any comfort in.”
Harry’s mouth fell open, and at that moment Edward approached with the clothes. He paused a moment to look at the two of them—Suriel wearing borrowed shorts with the belt taken way in, which meant they must have been Harry’s, as well as a T-shirt—and Harry standing nude and working hard not to be self-conscious.
“Swimming. Harry, seriously, didn’t you tell him you could have jumped in as cats and it all would have washed up when you were….” Edward took them in, standing intimately close together, Suriel with his fingers on Harry’s chin. “Oh.”
“He’s the smart one,” Harry said viciously, grabbing the clothes out of his hands.
“I’m smart enough to know why this didn’t happen a hundred years ago!” Edward snapped back. “And it has nothing to do with Suriel not wanting it!”
Harry dropped the last set of clothes in the dirt with a distracted curse and picked them up while muttering to himself. Edward crouched in the dirt next to him and handed him a folded pair of socks with a courteous flip of his hand.
“We need to go out on patrol,” Harry said. “I’m probably about twenty minutes ahead—”
“Did they know which direction? Suriel said he flew in a big circle.”
Harry closed his eyes and thought. “You’re right—but the campfires—”
“Mullins gave me a shielding spell,” Edward said blithely.
“I thought he wasn’t allowed to help us either!” Twenty years earlier, Mullins had stopped being called into their circle. Like Suriel, the cause had something to do with the conditions upon which he’d been allowed to join in the first place, but Edward had seemed angry about it, and they were scrupulous about not intruding. Too much time in each other’s heads, sleeping in piles of fur and muscle, being part of a hardworking team and family unit. Hell, they’d seen each other having sex plenty of times in the brothel. Staying out of each other’s business felt like they’d given each other their humanity back.
Harry wouldn’t ask about Mullins any more than Edward had asked about Suriel—until, apparently, they showed up naked together after a hunt.
“Well, he risked a hell of a lot to sneak into our campfire and give me this spell,” Edward said grimly. “Something must be up. So yeah, we’ll set patrols—but you have to promise to stay online and in our heads. Francis was freaking the hell out!”
Harry struggled for something to say. “I was rattled” came out at the last.
“I was there,” Edward growled. “Do you think I don’t know? Do you think you’re fooling anyone but yourself?”
Harry stood and handed him everything but the boxers, then slid those on first. “Can we not talk about this—”
“Sure, Harry, ’cause this has been festering like a boil in your soul for a hundred and forty years. Why would we want to talk about it now when it’s about ready to erupt in our faces!”
Edward was best at it, but they’d both trained in medicine for a number of years, and now they paused. “Ew,” Harry said.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Gross. But do you see my point here?”
A man’s voice, shouting an order, carried clearly through the night, and both of them stiffened and listened. “You take south, Francis takes east, and I’ll head straight down the middle. They can’t see me at night.” Harry had always been the best at strategy and the first to command.
“What shall I do?” Suriel asked, and Harry looked at him, miserable. How long did he have? How long did they have, to finish all the things they needed to say to one another before Suriel would go back to heaven forever and Harry would be stuck down on earth, as alone in his heart as he’d always been?
“Is the truck running?”
Suriel thought hard, and all three of them grimaced as the sound of grinding metal told them about instantaneous truck repair. “Sure.”
“Okay—gather the girls and the food and load them in it. Can you drive that thing?”
“Sure, Harry, if you’re behind the wheel operating the gears and controls.”
Harry stared, and Edward held back a snicker. “You heard him, Harry—he’s going nowhere without you. Gather everyone up, Suriel, and we’ll figure out how badly we’re screwed.”
Harry yanked his clothes on, glaring at Suriel the whole time. “You could have just said no,” he muttered as Edward turned cat and began to broadcast the plan to Francis.
“But then you might have run off into the night and gotten killed without me.” Suriel was all practicality. “I’d really rather be by your side.”
Harry finished with his clothes, uncertain of what to say.
Finally, only the truth would do.
“I wouldn’t mind that last thing,” he said wretchedly, and then he changed and darted back out into the night.
FRANCIS’S PALE fur should have glowed like the moon, attracting attention of man and beast as they all slid through the night, but something about Francis just didn’t allow that to happen. Instead, he was a patch of moonlight on the desert sand, the absence of a snake, the brighter shadow of a darker patch of tumbleweed.
Harry, smoky, furry black, was hardly a whisper as he found his way from shadow to shadow, like stepping stones across a pool.
No—Harry and Francis had always excelled at camouflage. It was Edward who couldn’t hide a piece of risotto in a rice bin.
That’s why Edward always hung back in the rear, so if they were doing recon and things went to shit, he could find a way to bail everybody’s ass out of the fire.
In this case, it saved their lives.
The three domestic house cats flitted from the flickering borders of the campfire circles to the shadows beyond. Harry looked behind him and—now that he knew it was there—could see Mullins’s dampening spell, fooling the unwary eye into just seeing more desert. He blinked once, and the women—refreshed now with some rest, some cooked deer, some water—were moving back into the truck with what looked to be hope.
Suriel, still bright and shining, a beacon of angelic light against the darkness, raised his hand and waved, as though he could see Harry as he skittered through the brush. Harry flicked his whiskers and then his tail in that direction, just in case he could.
Then Harry was all business, running point, directing the other two back in the direction from which danger threatened.
The click of ammunition and thump of combat boots alerted them first. All three of them found cover—in Harry’s case, another creosote bush—a
nd ducked behind it to listen for information.
“The truck was definitely heading north,” someone said. Harry thought it might have been the same man, small, wiry, and hunched, who had actually acknowledged that Suriel was an eagle.
“Doesn’t mean it’ll keep going that way in the desert.” This speaker, slightly taller, with a scraggly beard and missing teeth, fidgeted while he spoke, poking the shadows with his toes, tapping the brush with the end of his gun. “Hard to go in a straight line in the desert.”
A few others gathered with them, same five or so folks Harry had seen the first time, and like the first time, the next speaker set up an ice storm in Harry’s bowels.
“Yeah, but these boys—they’ve got a goal. You don’t steal a truckload of cattle without having a place to sell them or set them to graze free-range. They’ve got a plan.”
A bright red ball of hatred pushed against Harry’s brain, and he and Edward were suddenly all soothing blue. Francis, calm down. Chill, little brother—find your peace.
Cattle!
Bad guys!
Kill… kill kill kill….
Not yet!
Francis was fully capable of killing the soulless where they stood, but quick as he was, he would only take down one or two of them before their wicked-looking semiautomatics would gut him so badly not even Suriel could fix him. Bad guys didn’t often talk—which was, perhaps, why Francis had lived so long.
They had calmed Francis down into a not-quite-feral, hissing ball of hatred when Harry spotted the hulking shadow of his nightmares.
His breath caught in his throat, and his claws chewed at the earth.
But he must not, must not become Francis.
Do you see that? he demanded from Edward.
Right now I see your tail starting a sandstorm. Shut up for a second and let me listen.
“They went east,” Big Cass snarled. “I can smell their campfires. Now hurry, and let’s take ’em out before they get away with the damned cows that started this mess, yeah?”
Big Cass’s speech cadences were off—his accent spoke of a hundred years ago, on the dirty cobblestone streets next to a river that flooded every year.
Why doesn’t he speak modern? Harry asked, mostly to derail the seething ball of hate and rage that Francis was becoming.
I don’t give a shi—
We study, Harry, Edward said didactically. We immerse ourselves in this world for art and history and good. He just wants to know when his next shipment is coming in. We have bigger minds.
Francis, Harry added for good measure.
The seething went from danger red to cold and icy white, and Harry started to outline a plan.
It depended on the three of them and their gifts.
Francis was good with the confusion spell, and Edward was stealthy and good with fire spells. Harry was best with the frontal attack, and the one most practiced at killing when they needed to.
Harry could also turn from cat to human and back again so smoothly and so quickly, people frequently doubted they had seen a cat or a man.
We need to lure them into the desert, he began, but we don’t have much time. If we can get them lost, take one or two of them out—
Edward’s mental voice, sharp and panicked, jumped into their strategy meeting. There’s someone coming from this way!
“Did you find them?”
Harry left off his preoccupation with Big Cass for a more immediate fear.
“I can smell ’em,” Cass muttered. “But these clowns claim they can’t see nothin’.”
“You’d best listen to him, boys. He’s got the gift of smelling out escapees, you hear? It’s downright uncanny.”
Harry turned his head and saw a big man, bigger than Cass, older in appearance by a decade, but with a body fit and hard as granite.
“Aw, sweetheart.” Cass turned his head and spat. “You’re talkin’ so pretty I might have to blow you right here.”
“You’ll bend over and take it,” the newcomer snarled, and Cass gave him a look of desire and disgust that told Harry that yes—that was exactly the relationship the two of them had.
Harry’s fear lessened at the same time his hatred increased. These two men were all that Harry and his brothers had fought so hard to overcome in their long, long lifetime—they knew what pain, what poison they spread, and they did it anyway, for the joy of destruction.
“Yeah, sure, Oldham,” Cass spat, a cruel twist to his mouth. “I’ll take it—but first we gotsta get the cattle back. I’m not bendin’ over in the fuckin’ desert—too much sand.”
Oldham laughed. “Right—so which way did the bitches go?”
“East—I smell diesel that way, and a campfire and deer.” From Harry’s vantage point, he watched as Big Cass’s nose twitched, almost like a cat’s but missing that last bit of shifting ability that would have made it a solid part of his identity. “I smell cats too—smelled ’em the last time we lost a shipment, in Vegas. Thought it was an accident, but there’s somethin’ here.”
Oldham’s black eyebrows went up, striking in his otherwise pale face and bald pate. “Cats, like, pussycats?”
Big Cass bared his teeth. “Cats, like predators. Cats. I’m tellin’ ya, I smelled cat piss like this before—maybe they sell cats for coats, but it’s the same outfit.”
Oldham grunted. “You’re the only one that survived, Cass. I’m not gonna doubt you, but I don’t know what to do with the smell of cat piss and roast deer.”
Unexpectedly Cass burst out into raucous laughter. “Just follow me, gents. I got a whiff of something ripe and crispy.”
Francis, please tell me that’s you, Edward begged.
Francis’s response was unamused, and Harry twitched his tail in a cat version of a snicker.
C’mon, Edward—he doesn’t smell that bad.
Francis’s response was a silent feline hiss.
Seriously, Francis, Harry asked as the men started to move out. Is that your doing or should we try to stop them?
It’s me. I sent them southeast instead of northeast. But we’ve got to get out of here or he’ll smell us for real.
Freaky, that, Edward said, voicing it for all of them.
Harry grunted and took off toward the hunting party, thinking hard about the various weapons he’d seen as the men had gathered. He was particularly good at a spell that could make a gun fire without warning—but he needed to see it aimed in the right direction to provoke a fiasco like they’d caused in Colorado. It was only something one wanted to do with lots of empty land for miles around. The people they were up against were often not bright, nor were they particularly good shots, but it was best if Harry and his brothers were at maximum safe distance, and hopefully out of sight.
“Hey, where you assholes going?”
Bless me and sneeze, Harry—we’ve got a minion-come-lately.
“And where did the damned cats— Ouch! What in the fu—”
Jesus, Francis—we’ve got to help him!
Edward, who was usually their most solid thinker, had neglected to turn human and literally leaped up into the latecomer’s face and was fighting like a warrior—or a twenty-pound tomcat who thought he could fly.
Harry had to turn his back on Big Cass, Oldham, and the others and trust that they’d keep running into the desert as Francis had led them, following the imaginary smell of cat pee and burned deer. For the moment, his brother needed him.
Edward’s victim was trying to wrestle Edward like a man would wrestle a man, not a cat. Edward, Harry, and Francis had once brought down a wild boar when food was scarce. He knew how to dig in with his sharpened claws and rip at vulnerable places—the enemy’s eyes, his neck, his throat. The blood poured copiously, the spill of it made worse by Edward’s knowledge of medicine and some very dark magics that Mullins had no business teaching anybody, but Edward just suddenly knew one year after they’d all sustained some nasty wounds.
In the long term, the man would probably die, but he was de
sperate enough to start sweeping his locked semiauto along his back, and Edward got knocked off with a shrill howl of pain.
The man had time to pivot and aim before Harry leaped at him, turning human as he did. He knocked the gun out of the villain’s hand, and broke his jaw with one well-timed blow of his elbow.
The late-coming henchman staggered back, moaning and shouting, and Harry turned and kicked out precisely, dislocating his knee. He went down, and Harry took out his gonads with enough force to rupture and was going in to break his ribs and puncture his heart when Francis charged out of the night, leaped over the downed henchman, and disappeared in the direction they’d come from.
His mind radiated the distinct, acrid-smelling terror of Big Cass.
Now, Harry! Francis barked in his head, and Harry took off running, turning cat along the way and leaving the bleeding villain in the sand behind him. Hell—oh hell, hell, hell and damnation.
If the man lived, he’d talk about shapeshifting cats.
If he died, his corpse would tell a very peculiar tale of its own.
Francis! Harry called. Francis—let us catch up. I’m using the fog spell, dammit—you need to be in my radius!
Next to him, as Edward ran awkwardly, tucking his broken front leg against his chest, he felt the startlement and, yes, fear.
Harry hadn’t exactly mastered this spell the last time he’d tried it.
But dammit, he could hear the men behind them stumbling in the dark, and the minute they spied their downed companion, bullets would be careening after the three feline specters who had wrought so much havoc.
Francis! Harry roared and was rewarded by the hint of a ghostly tail. Francis had slowed down just enough for them to run together, and that’s all Harry needed.
Caligo pedibus felis parvae venit Caligo pedibus felis parvae venit Caligo pedibus felis parvae venit….
For spells, poetry was the best, and what was more arcane than Carl Sandburg?
Maybe it was the adrenaline boost from knowing Big Cass was behind them—maybe that’s what did it. But as Harry wrote the incantation in his mind—using a fiery brand against black, which seemed to work best for him—and the fog rolled in, churning, thick, and nearly sentient, it wasn’t fear in his heart. It was the idea of Suriel, sitting patient and stubborn in the uncomfortable vinyl seat of the semitruck.
