Where the Wild Things Bite

by Molly Harper

  All except She-Hulk, who was charging at me like a linebacker.

  “You’re mine, you knock-kneed, wasp-flinging bitch!” she howled.

  I yelped, dodging out of the way when she lunged. At the last second, I dove to the ground and rolled out of the way. She wheeled around and ran at me again. I stood just in time to catch the strap of her sling, pivoting on the ball of my foot as I threw my weight back. The dramatic shift in weight slung her off course and sent her sprawling into the grass face-first.

  “Look, I get that you were just trying to help your family, which is why I didn’t take it personally when you tried to beat the hell out of me,” I told her as she writhed on the ground, clutching her shoulder.

  “You say that, and you still wouldn’t give us the damn book!” she growled.

  “Because it wasn’t mine to give!” I cried. “It’s Jane’s! But maybe if you would stop trying to steal it, she would share some of the information with you!”

  “Wha—what?”

  “Do you even know what’s in the book, information-wise?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, there have been rumors about it for hundreds of years. But no one knows for sure what’s in it. We just know that if it’s real, we want it. The shifters in my family, we’ve done well for ourselves, money-wise, but we struggle with our shifts. Sometimes we get . . . stuck . . . in our forms. My cousin Briar has been a panda-butterfly hybrid for a year now. It’s embarrassing. The poor kid was just screwing around, trying to keep his little sister entertained. And now he can’t go to school. He’s only sixteen. He doesn’t even want to come out of his room. We thought that if we had the book, we might be able to find something that could help make him normal again. Well, as normal as a sixteen-year-old willing to turn himself into a butterfly-panda could be.”

  “And I’m sure if you asked Jane, she would want to help you. You just have to ask.”

  She-Hulk blinked at me, dumbfounded.

  “Please tell me this isn’t the first time this occurred to you.”

  She-Hulk frowned. “Well, everybody in the shifter community is so secretive, and we’re not real popular with the vampires. We never thought Jameson would consider such a thing.”

  “Oh, my God.” I sighed. “Just talk to her.”

  Just then, a thick grayish shape stumbled into my peripheral vision. Ernie the pilot looked the worse for wear. While he’d changed out of his stained pilot’s uniform, his lips were red and cracked, and he had a nasty swath of blistering red welts sweeping across his face.

  It seemed that I had better forest-coping skills than I thought, at least by comparison. I would be proud of that later. Finn must have ditched the Croc Man, because he was at my side, trying and failing to shove me behind him. She-Hulk had run in the direction of her cousins.

  “You two,” Ernie growled, pointing a sharp stick the length of my leg at us. “You two assholes are more trouble than you’re worth. I swear to God, if it wasn’t for that stupid book, I would have just left your dumb asses to die in the woods.”

  “What are you even doing here?” I asked. “After you failed to kill us, I would have thought you’d run like hell so the shifters wouldn’t ask for a refund.”

  “No, I asked to be here, just so I could have the privilege of staking this guy,” Ernie grunted, waving his death stick at Finn. “I even told the Kelleys they wouldn’t have to pay me.”

  “How nice for you,” I said drily.

  “You think this has been fun for me? I’m from Brooklyn. I don’t camp. Not even when I was in basic.”

  Finn moved slowly between the two of us and the point of the makeshift spear, which I considered a bad move because of the whole “wooden object through the heart” thing.

  “You mean when you were in basic training?” I asked. “Meaning you were in the military?”

  Ernie scowled, but he nodded.

  “I got that right!” I exclaimed, pumping my fists in triumph, much to Finn’s chagrin. Ernie looked equally annoyed, so I crossed my arms over my chest. “I make my own fun.”

  “And you,” Ernie snarled at Finn. “It’s your fault I’m even out here. If you’d just done what the Kelleys hired you to do, we’d have been in and out, no problem. But you had to pull your stupid noble vampire bullshit to impress a hot piece of ass.”

  “Hey!” I exclaimed, pausing to think about that for a moment. “That . . . is more complimentary than I expected it to be.”

  “I tell you that you’re gorgeous, and you don’t believe me. He calls you a hot piece of ass, and you turn into a blushing schoolgirl,” Finn muttered.

  As we talked, Ernie’s body language changed from hateful and focused to just exasperated. His arms relaxed, and the target he seemed to be drawing with the spear point slacked. I glanced at Finn, who gave the tiniest of nods.

  Picking up on his goal, I shrugged. “He has no reason to lie.”

  “I have no reason to lie!” Finn exclaimed.

  “And yet you still do it, pretty regularly.” I snorted, crossing my arms over my chest.

  Finn threw his hands up in the air. “I said I was sorry. I’ve done everything I can to make sure you’re not touched by this. I did everything I could to keep you from getting hurt. I kept the shifters from finding you in the woods. I made sure Jane got her hands on the book before I stole it. I led the shifters to Jane’s backyard, so she’d be able to find us! I know I’ve screwed up, but I was trying to shield you.”

  I strayed closer to Ernie, giving Finn reason to get closer to Ernie, all while the frustrated pilot dropped his arms to his sides and rolled his eyes. “And yet, somehow, ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t quite cover me getting thrown out of a plane and stranded in Deliverance country for days! I guess I’m just an unforgiving bitch.”

  “Would you both just shut up,” Ernie groaned, flopping his head back like he was overseeing an argument between two teenagers.

  That was his mistake.

  Finn was so quick I didn’t even see him move. He lunged at Ernie, knocking the stick aside. Ernie swung out, punching at Finn but missing. Finn jerked him forward, his fangs in full play, and pulled Ernie’s head to the side. He reared his head back to strike, and I yelled, “Finn, don’t!”

  Finn stopped, mid-bite. But before I could provide my in-depth list of reasons I didn’t want to see him commit murder, even if the victim had crashed our plane, I saw Michael backing toward a BMW parked on the flatter, clearer side of the clearing. And he was sliding Friar Thomas’s book into his pretentious leather messenger bag.

  “Nope!” I cried, running after him. “Nope, nope, nope, nope!”

  “Anna, where are you going? Don’t go after him!” Finn cried, dropping Ernie to the ground.

  “Nope!” I yelled again, as my legs pumped.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do when I caught up to Michael. I just knew that I couldn’t let him get away with taking the book and acting like he hadn’t stolen my work. The more rational parts of my brain were still unsure of how this was going to work out even as I reached Michael’s car, lowered my shoulder, and tackled him around the waist, sending his messenger bag tumbling across the grass. Slamming him to the ground had far more to do with the fact that his left knee was bent than any force on my part, but still, he was down. And to my surprise, I wasn’t panicked or scared. I was angry. So very angry that—in my adrenaline-hazed brain—Michael didn’t pose much of a threat in comparison with vampires, killer pilots, and cantankerous innkeepers.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Michael cried, wheezing as I sat on his chest.

  “You are all that is wrong with academia!” I growled, rearing up so I was out of swinging range when he tried to punch me in the face. “You’re arrogant and lazy and careless, and you don’t even care about what you can learn, only what you can get. How did you even get involved in this?”

  Michael rolled, throwing me onto my side. “When people want an expert on supernatural texts, an expert who’s qu
alified, they call me.”

  “And how exactly did you get those ‘qualifications’? You’ve based your entire career on credit you took for my research,” I scoffed.

  “You never would have gone anywhere with it, and you know it!” he shot back. “You were too neurotic, too timid to teach a damn class, much less lecture at the higher levels. You didn’t have it in you to make a name for yourself in the field! You didn’t have to, you could just ride Daddy’s coattails to some nice, cushy community-college job until your crazy mother decided it was time for you to take up nursing duties for her and you died a dried-up old maid. I did you a favor, presenting your research, sharing your information with the world. You never would have done anything with it. You were too scared.”

  As hot as the words burned, I knew that Michael, to some extent, was right. The old Anna, the Anna who hadn’t quite come out from under her mother’s thumb, wouldn’t have been able to function as a faculty member at a top-tier university. I wouldn’t have been bold enough to get my work published in the more respected journals. I wouldn’t have risen as high in the academic echelons as my father hoped. And it was probably better that way. I felt far more fulfilled by the work I did for my clients than I would have teaching or lecturing.

  A little wound in my heart, a tear I hadn’t even realized was still open and festering, closed with a rush of exhilaration and acceptance. The pain I’d felt from disappointing my father, from failing to reach what was supposed to be my potential, faded away. I owed Michael a debt for helping me find some peace after all these years. But I would never tell him that . . . because he was still a remorseless, plagiarizing, knuckle-dragging Ken doll.

  Instead, I smiled nastily, leaning close enough that he shied away from me. “And how does it feel? Knowing your whole life is based on a lie? I mean, how did you even publish anything after your doctoral thesis without my research to prop you up?” He flinched, and my eyes went wide. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Shut up,” he growled.

  “You couldn’t get anything published, because you had nothing to back it up!” I cackled. “I bet the ‘publish or perish’ die-hards at the university loved that! Poor little Michael, suffering from academic erectile dysfunction. Is that why you got into ‘freelancing’? Because you didn’t get tenure? How much longer before you figure out you can’t fend for yourself out here in the real world?”

  At this point, I sounded more than a little hysterical, howling with laughter at Michael’s expense. Red-faced and livid, he roared, flipping us over and trying to pin me. But my right arm slipped out of his grip, and I snaked it up between us to poke him in the eye with my thumb. He yelped, letting go of me while we rolled. I skidded to a halt at his side, then threw my leg up. I brought my heel crashing down on his crotch with a satisfying thud.

  “Now you’re who they’ll call if they need an expert with a doctorate and no functioning testicles.”

  Keening, Michael shriveled into the fetal position, clutching at his injured junk.

  “And by the way, that’s not silk stitching on the cover, it’s cured catgut,” I said, scooping up his messenger bag from the ground and carefully extracting A Contemplation on Shifters, using one of his intellectual poseur scarves inside as a protective barrier between the book and my dirty hands. “And the author, Friar Thomas, used iron-based ink, not lead. And both of these characteristics and the aging can be pretty easily faked, so it’s hard to determine the age of a work unless you also look into the author’s history and tendencies. If you’d done the tiniest bit of research before declaring the book ‘the real deal,’ you’d know that.” I paused to shove him over with the toe of my boot. “Prick.”

  “Your trash talk is not like other people’s trash talk.” Finn was standing by Michael’s Beamer, completely free of his bungee restraints.

  “How did you get loose?” I asked, swinging at him. He ducked out of the way but kept me from falling into the car when my fist didn’t connect.

  “I have superhuman strength. You think I can be contained with a couple of bungee cords?”

  Michael stumbled to his feet. “You’re crazy,” he spat, his face nearly purple with rage. “I’m going to tell everybody worth anything that you’ve gone completely crazy. That you assaulted me and you used some sort of vampire gang to steal an antique from my paying clients.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I told him, waggling the book in my silk-covered hand. “I’ll mail you the scarf.”

  “Or I could deliver it personally,” Finn offered. His full-fanged, hateful smile made Michael recoil.

  “Stay away from me!” Michael squealed, in a high falsetto that may or may not have been connected with my footwork.

  “Let him go, Finn. I doubt very much he’s going to try to get tangled up in Council business or any direct contact with the supernatural world again,” I said, smirking at my former boyfriend, who had turned the color of overripe Brie. “He obviously doesn’t have the finesse required for it.”

  Suddenly, Michael’s knees gave out from under him, and he flopped down onto the ground face-first. He groaned.

  “Finn, I already kicked him in the balls. I don’t need you to hurt him further.”

  “That wasn’t me,” he scoffed, as Michael pushed to his feet.

  When he opened his car door, he misjudged the distance between his head and the window, smacking himself in the face.

  “That was me,” Finn admitted, the gray draining from his eyes as Michael tumbled into his car and peeled out across the grass. I watched his taillights disappear in the direction of a gravel road, smiling to myself. It probably said something terrible about me that taunting Michael and kicking him in the junk had given me such a sense of closure. But I felt better than I had in years, freer, lighter, as if I’d been wearing a lead suit since my grad-school days and had finally managed to shrug out of it.

  When I turned to Finn, he was looking at me, his face expectant. “So . . . this turned out better than I expected.”

  “So . . . you should probably go,” I told him, imitating his glib tone. “Jane is not going to be happy with you for switching the Bible out with the book. In fact, she said she was unhappy with you for switching the Bible out with the book.”

  “I meant what I said earlier. I am sorry that I took the book from Jane. I know that hurt you, and I told you that wouldn’t happen. My only defense is that I had to get the Kelleys the book to get them off my back. And you and Jane and the rest of the brute squad showed up right on time to get it back. It all worked out. Also, not to claim complete credit, but I did make sure you were able to turn the book over to Jane!” he exclaimed. “You completed your job. You got the book to Jane. It wasn’t your fault that Jane didn’t hold on to it.”

  “You know, somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “What’s it going to take to get you to trust me?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “When I realized you’d disappeared from the inn, that you’d taken the book after all we’d been through to get it to Jane, and left me alone holding the bag, it really hurt me. And not just in a ‘wounded pride’ sort of way. I thought I was building toward something with you, and you used me, and—what the hell is Jane doing?”

  The brawl between the various monsters raged on. The shifters were slowly losing their advantage. Sure, they had speed and strength, but they couldn’t keep up with highly trained werewolves and cranky vampires.

  Jane had a Cthulhu facedown on the ground, with his forelegs pinned behind his back, as she yelled, “Just call your family down so we can take you into custody and get out of these godforsaken woods!”

  “No!” the creature yelled back. “You vampires are so arrogant, you think you own everything! Well, that book belongs to the shifters! And we won’t stop.”

  “Why are shapeshifters so stubborn?” Jane growled, as she slipped some plastic zip-tie handcuffs around the Cthulhu’s webbed paws. “And
by the way, that book does belong to me. So your point is moot!”

  “Jane, I’ve got the book!” I yelled. “You can stop fighting now!”

  “Oh, great!” Jane beamed at me, her fangs shining bright in the headlights. “You see, Mr. Kelley. I have the book back. I have no reason to keep your family alive anymore. But if you stop resisting arrest, I will be far less annoyed with you, which will greatly decrease the chance of me killing you.”

  The Cthulhu, who I assumed was the Viking leader, groaned and dropped his face to the ground.

  “Fine, fine,” he growled. “Kelleys! Stand down! Stop fighting before somebody gets hurt.”

  There was a collective groan from the nonvampires, who transformed back into their blond human shapes. Except for the giant great white shark, who was running a victory lap around the clearing. In a move that did not look at all like pouting, the shifters dropped to the ground, on their butts, and allowed the vampires to handcuff them. Jane allowed the lead shifter to sit up in a more comfortable position.

  A black SUV rolled into the clearing. I turned to Jane, handing her the book. “Who’s that?”

  “I’ve called an undead emergency response team here, and they’ll take the book to the Council archives,” Jane said. “Frankly, I had them on standby the moment I realized Finn was involved. I knew we’d have to take someone into custody at some point.”

  Finn touched a hand to his heart and feigned injury. “I had all the best intentions. Why do you think I had the Kelleys meet me here? I was cooperating. Honestly, your lack of trust hurts me.”

  She glowered at him. “Not yet, it doesn’t. Also, how did you get off the hood of the truck? I was more comfortable when you were trussed to the hood of the truck.”

  Finn pouted, in a way that was more obvious than the shifters. Men in black SWAT gear poured out of the SUV. Finn held his hands out to Jane, palms up. “OK, Jane, I surrender.”

  My jaw dropped. “What?”