“I’d just like to see the dogs,” Kate said. “The different breeds. In case . . . you know.”
When Logan gave her another look, she said, “What? We could get puppies. Reese did. He said as long as you start when they’re little, they’ll get used to our scent.”
“Can we discuss this later?” I asked.
“That depends,” she said. “Is this your kind of discussing it later or Dad’s? Because yours means you’re hoping we’ll forget.”
Unfortunately true, though I was trying to break the habit, now that they were old enough to call me on it. “It’s your father’s kind. The honest one. Which doesn’t mean you can expect a puppy anytime soon but, yes, we can discuss—”
I stopped as I caught an unfamiliar scent. An animal zipped past us. It looked like a cross between a cat and a raccoon, and had an incredibly long tail, which kept going across the path even after the animal itself had disappeared.
As the creature flew up a tree, Kate darted forward to get a better look. Logan ran after her, and they both stood at the base of the tree, craning their necks as they squinted.
I hurried over in time to see that impossibly long tail through the leafless branches. When the creature sprang to the next tree, the kids and I followed on the ground, but the animal was faster, and soon disappeared.
“What was that?” Kate said. When even her brother shrugged, she fished the phone from my pocket.
“Umm . . .” I said. “You could ask to use that.”
“You could buy us cell phones.”
“We probably should have them,” Logan said. “For emergencies.”
“Like this,” Kate said. “It’s a curiosity emergency, which is the most important kind.”
She held up the phone and cursed under her breath. Then she stuffed it into her pocket and started scaling the nearest tree. Logan and I waited until she found a suitable branch, crawled out, held up the phone and gave a crow of victory. A few moments later she started coming down, calling, “Tailypo.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s a tailypo,” she said. “From American folklore. It’s believed to be the evolutionary link between raccoons and Maine Coon cats.” She paused. “Which I think is impossible.”
“It is,” Logan said as his sister seated herself on the lowest branch, her legs swinging. “As suggested by the ‘American folklore’ part. It’s a legend. In other words, not real.”
“Looked pretty real to me.”
He sighed and climbed up to sit beside her as she handed him the phone. “Yes,” he said finally. “It did resemble this, but there’s no such thing as a tailypo.”
“There’s no such thing as werewolves either,” she said.
He opened his mouth in a retort, but a voice cut him off. It was MaryAnne, coming down the trail with Charlene and their kids, swatting at mosquitoes.
“Did I hear someone talking about werewolves?” MaryAnne asked.
“Kate was saying they don’t exist,” Logan said as he hopped from the tree.
“Well, duh,” said one of their boys.
“Actually . . .” Kate jumped down beside her brother. “I’m pretty sure I just spotted one.” A sideways look at Logan and me. “Maybe more than one.”
“Oh, Kate,” MaryAnne said. “You really are something!”
“She sure is,” the boy muttered.
Kate flipped him the finger behind her brother’s back. I grabbed her hand before the boy noticed and said, “So, how are you guys doing?” and led the group off, but not before casting a slow look around the forest and mouthing to Kate that we’d come back, as soon as we ditched the muggles.
VERITY
Growing up in a private compound in the Oregon woods—with “private compound” being the polite way of saying “inside a big box of survivalist granola, complete with nuts, flakes, and the occasional Incubus”—had equipped me with the survival skills to handle basically anything the forests of North America could throw at me. I had bargained with Bigfoots, squabbled with Sasquatch, and run like hell when a herd of Peryton sniffed out my position. There was nothing in the woods that I was not prepared for.
Nothing save for the mosquitoes of New York, which had apparently been feeding on the blood of something giant, radioactive, and mutation-triggering. The damn things were big enough to bite through the fabric of my shirt, raising welts the size of pennies.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I swore as I scaled the nearest tree, taking refuge in juvenilia. It wasn’t making the mosquitoes stop biting, but it was making me feel better, if only because there was something satisfying about spoiling my day’s PG rating without getting naked. I had mosquito repellant in my pack. I just hadn’t been expecting to need it. Back home the mosquitoes mostly ignored me, probably because my brother was delicious, and I was too stringy to be worth biting.
The tree was silent as I hauled myself hand-over-hand into the branches and wedged myself into the highest spot that I could be sure was safe. That was the weirdest thing about this particular forest for me: no frickens. That probably explained a lot about the local mosquito population. Frogs did a lot to keep biting insects at bay. Frickens, with their stubby feathers and ability to glide short distances, did even more. A mosquito that escaped the ground-dwelling frogs might still find itself the victim of death from above when there were frickens around.
But there should have been frickens here. According to the field guides, this was prime territory; not too dry, not too wet, exactly suited to the life cycle of the world’s only remaining feathered amphibians. There hadn’t been any mass die-offs or new pollutants introduced to the water table; the local papers would have noticed. While dead frickens tended to get written off as sparrows or starlings or whatever the local L.B.B. (little brown bird) happened to be, they would have been noticed. And the area was replete enough with aging hippies and environmental crusaders that pollution would have been noticed even faster.
“What the hell is going on out here?” I muttered, digging the rosemary cream from my bag. Rosemary is one of the best mosquito repellants nature has going, and has the convenient added bonus of smelling like, well, a plant. Because it is a plant. It doesn’t disturb the wildlife the way chemical repellants can, and I’ve never heard of anyone being attacked by a bear because they smelled like a delicious casserole. (I have heard about some guy getting treed by wolves for wearing too much Axe body spray into the woods, which is proof that wolves have pretty good taste. Although I bet he didn’t taste very good.)
The tree didn’t answer me. I finished slathering the cream over my exposed skin and put the tube away before dropping soundlessly down to the ground and stalking deeper into the woods. I needed to find some mud.
Mud is one of those things that thrive in a good forest. Even when the area isn’t swampy—and too few areas are, which is a real pity; I love a good swamp like I love little else that doesn’t come with sequins—it’s usually possible to find someplace mucky and yucky and full of all the delightful things that live in soft earth.
I found what I was looking for about a quarter of a mile from the spot where I’d entered the woods. A stream cut through a clearing that was overhung with branches so that direct sunlight never reached the ground. The lack of light had kept the underbrush from getting a good rooting in the area, and the earth dissolved into glorious mud a few feet from the water. I squelched my way into the middle of it, letting the mud cake on my boots, and crouched down to start scanning the bank of the stream for holes.
There are a lot of things that like to burrow in mud. Venomous snakes, for example. Some species of frog. It’s never possible to be sure what made a given hole, since all holes look pretty much the same, but it’s possible to make an educated guess. I spotted a likely hole, leaned forward, and rammed my arm into it up to the elbow.
You don’t make it in my family if you’re squeamish about a little mud.
Feeling around in the sludge and sediment of the bank, my fingers h
it something slick and strong that felt like a length of intestine wrapped in sandpaper. I grabbed it and hauled, yanking until my arm popped back out of the bank, bringing a worm a foot and a half long along for the ride. It was flailing wildly, sawtoothed mouth gaping and making little sucking gestures, like it thought it could disgust its attacker away. I grabbed it just below the mouth with my free hand, keeping it from latching onto me. Bloodworms are relatively harmless, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be bitten by one if I could help it. Even harmless things can have a lot of teeth.
“Hello, new friend,” I said, leaning closer. “What can you tell me about the local ecosystem?”
The bloodworm hissed. Being non-sapient members of the family that gives us such natural wonders as “the leech” and “that other kind of leech, oh God, get it off me,” they tend not to be great conversationalists.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to say. The bloodworm’s skin was a smooth, rich shade of chocolatey brown under the mud, which meant it was getting plenty to eat; no malnourished limbless horrors here. Its teeth were sharp and unbroken, which meant it hadn’t been forced to go after prey beyond its usual assortment of fish, frogs, and the occasional foolish snake. A bloodworm that hadn’t been finding the right kind of food would attack just about anything, including cattle or hikers. That did a number on their teeth, since they weren’t really adapted to go after that sort of prey.
I flipped the squirming bloodworm upside down, giving its belly a critical look. The scaling there was as healthy and unbroken as the top had been, and its tiny, thorn-like claspers—an example of parallel evolution, since it shared that particular feature with snakes—were still intact. It was a breeding-age male, and had seen no environmental reason not to get on with the business of making more bloodworms.
“So there’s nothing in the water, and there’s nothing contaminating the ground,” I muttered, frowning at the still-squirming bloodworm. “There should be frickens here. Where the hell are all the frickens?”
The bloodworm hissed. I sighed.
“You’re right, this isn’t your problem. Sorry about that.” I lowered the bloodworm gently back to the mud and let go. It squirmed away, burrowing into the bank and disappearing. Bloodworms aren’t very smart; since I’d released it without eating it, it would assume it was safe now, and stay exactly where it was. I could come back for it later.
And that was why so many cryptozoologists used bloodworms as bait, and why only the fact that they bred like, well, bloodworms had kept the species from going extinct years ago. Bloodworms were incredibly talented when it came to making more bloodworms.
I’d known going in that someone was poaching tailypo from the local woods. That was the sort of thing that threw up a lot of red flags within the cryptid community, and hence within the cryptozoological community. But no one had noticed that someone was also taking the frickens. Frickens were small. Frickens only attracted attention in their absence, when they stopped singing from the trees.
Someone was out here harvesting supposedly impossible things and taking advantage of the fact that what wasn’t acknowledged by science wasn’t protected by the law, and while I didn’t know how long it had been going on, I knew that it was long enough for the frickens to have gone silent. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.
I was deep enough in the woods to be outside of Sarah’s normal broadcast range. Maybe if I’d been a cuckoo, too—but if I’d been a cuckoo, the odds were good that I would have been a serial killer who thought the suffering of others was funny, so it was probably for the best that I was human. Besides, humanity had something almost as good as telepathy. I wiped the mud off my hands onto my jeans before digging the cell phone out of my pocket.
“Take that, evolutionary lack of telepathy,” I said, raising the phone.
No service.
I blinked at the screen before standing up straight, as if a difference of a few feet would change anything. It did not, in fact, change anything. The phone remained stubbornly disconnected from the network, deadweight instead of a useful communications tool.
“This is why we do not taunt the universe,” I muttered, shoving the phone back into my pocket and turning to begin the long, irritating process of walking back to the hotel. Sarah would want to know that things were more complicated than we’d originally believed, and I was going to want her to come back into the woods with me. What was the point of having a telepath if you weren’t going to use it?
Here’s the thing about poachers, especially ones who aren’t overly concerned with whether their traps hurt somebody: they’re assholes, and like all assholes, they’re happy to cut corners. I worked my way out of the swamp and onto solid ground, crunching through the dead leaves and underbrush that had fallen to cover most of the forest floor. Maybe I should have been paying closer attention to the patterns the leaves made on the ground, but I was too busy looking at the trees, searching for a flash of feathers or for the long, stripy tail of a tailypo. The poachers couldn’t have captured them all, and these were the sorts of trees that tailypo preferred.
Halfway across a clearing, I finally spotted a flash of striped brown fur in the branches overhead, moving fast enough that it would have been impossible to tell tailypo from raccoon, if not for the meter-long tail that followed after the initial motion. I stopped, cupping my hands above my eyes like it would somehow enable me to see farther.
And the false ground beneath my feet gave way, dumping me ingloriously into the waiting pit trap.
ELENA
We ditched MaryAnne and the others easily enough. I may have slipped Kate’s blank scavenger hunt sheet from Logan’s pocket. I may have surreptitiously circled three of the thirty items. I may have then shown it to MaryAnne and said, “We’ve found these. How about you guys?” Kate may have piped in with, “We could team up. We’ll use your list.” That may have been the point at which they realized they’d already finished this area and had to skip over to another and they’d love to combine forces, but they really should let us finish this section on our own.
“That was pretty smart, Mom,” Kate said as they walked away.
I handed her back the sheet. “I didn’t make Alpha on my looks, you know.”
“No, you made it because no one else wanted the job.”
“We heard you say that to Dad once,” Logan said. “If you weren’t suitable as Alpha, though, Jeremy would never have stepped down. So it’s not entirely true.”
“Thank you. So much.” I ducked under a spiderweb strung across the path. “How many more items do we need to find?”
“We’ve completed the basic and the intermediary lists. The rest are bonus items, and we’ve found half of those.”
“We can keep looking,” I said. “Or cut out early and find food. I heard stomachs grumbling.”
Normally, the answer would be food. It was always food, especially with Kate. But she glanced into the forest and said, “I’d really like to get the bonus items,” and I knew what she meant was, “I’d really like to get another look at that creature.” I reached into my jacket and passed out granola bars.
“The list it is,” I said. “After dinner, we’ll—”
I stopped as a scent hit me. I tilted my head, teasing it out. The twins did the same. While only male children inherit a werewolf’s genes, both of our kids show secondary characteristics, like enhanced senses and strength, and they seem to have had them all their lives, which isn’t normal. But neither is having two bitten werewolves for parents.
The smell I picked up on the wind was human, and no one I recognized from the class. Before I could say anything, the breeze changed and brought a very different scent. We all looked up . . . to see the creature from earlier on a tree branch over our heads, its own nose working hard as it tried to figure out our scents.
No one moved. The twins didn’t even seem to be breathing. They stared. No, they studied, taking in every part of the creature they could see. Kate backed up for a
better look from a fresh angle, and the beast inched along the branch, following her. I zeroed in on its gaze as I watched for the slightest sign of imminent attack. It might look cute, but it was the size of a small dog, and those fangs told me it was no herbivore. It didn’t seem to be readying to spring, though, just following Kate, and as curious as she was.
She continued moving to the trunk of the tree. Then she put up one tentative hand to start climbing. The creature just watched her. She shimmied to the first branch, about three feet under the beast. Its muscles tensed, but seemingly for flight rather than attack. I got into position, though, ready to let out a snarl if it made any aggressive move. It didn’t. As Kate moved into a crouch, it leaned down until their heads were less than six inches apart. Then a noise startled it—the sound of someone moving through the forest.
The beast lifted its snout, sniffed, and took off, flying through the trees. Kate jumped down and followed on ground level, her brother at her side. After about ten running steps, I caught two human smells—one male and one female—from different directions.
I was about to call the kids back when a crash resounded through the forest, followed by a yelp and a thud, and I kicked it into high gear. Ahead, I saw what looked like a pit, partially covered in branches. A trap. I remembered that high-pitched yelp of surprise and raced toward it.
Logan stepped into my path, his arms out to stop me as he whispered, “We’re fine, Mom.”
I skidded to a halt as Kate joined him. I looked toward the trap and caught the same smell from a few minutes ago, that of the strange woman who was now at the bottom of the pit.
I motioned for the kids to stay where they were and coupled it with a look that said that wasn’t Mom giving the order—it was their Alpha. They understood that instinctively and stood their ground, not even craning for a better look. I eased forward until I could see the captive without being spotted. She was short, blonde, and dressed like a hunter, wearing almost as much mud as she did khaki.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 5
