“It’s nice to be on the same team,” I blurt when we get to Gram’s truck.
He nods and does this little half-smile thing. “Yeah. I figure there are bigger things going on here than our romantic issues and, um, my ego.”
“And my ego.”
“More my ego.” He laughs. He runs a hand through his perpetually messed-up hair.
“I think so too,” I quickly correct myself. “I think we need to focus on saving the world, getting things safe, you know?”
“I know.” He looks around.
“But maybe after this, maybe we can figure things out again. Make it so you can talk to me?” I hate how my voice lifts up at the end of that. I sound so weak.
“Maybe. Yeah.” He shakes his head. “But we are talking now, Zara.”
“Oh. True.” But it isn’t the same. I wave good-bye and then I open up the door, turn on the truck, and drive away.
I drive past the Y, and the tow-truck place where the guy puts anti-government stuff on his signs, the old school that’s now a daycare center, and the lawyers’ offices. I look for pixies and a tiger grandmother the entire time. It’s late in the day. We aren’t as active in the daytime because, like most predators, we like night. Still, I look for them and her, for signs of the apocalypse. And the signs are hard to see. You could fool yourself into thinking this is just any regular smallish Maine town in the winter. Houses line up in spaced-out rows along the three main streets. Sidewalks are shoveled or plowed. It looks so normal. Cold but normal.
Slush kicks up beneath my tires. The wipers slowly move back and forth across my windshield, pushing the snowflakes off the truck and back into the air, free for another second before they fall to the ground.
I stop at the red light, watch an oil truck slide through the intersection, think about my grandmother out there attacking pixies, out of her head with grief because of Mrs. Nix’s death. The tip said that they saw her by the river, and they weren’t wrong. As I drive into the harbor parking lot, she comes into view, prowling back and forth in a straight line by the metal docks. One lobsterman in a heavy gray coat and hat is stalled out in a dinghy that floats halfway between the land and a lobster boat. The little white boat bobs as he frantically tries to restart the outboard engine. The poor man probably thinks he’s had so much coffee brandy that he’s hallucinating a tiger.
I yank a blanket out of the truck.
“Gram?” I make my voice as nonconfrontational as possible, creeping forward across the snow.
Her tiger self turns and faces me, teeth bared, ears back. She doesn’t recognize me, maybe? Maybe she’s so far gone she doesn’t recognize anyone? For a second I’m more scared than happy to see her. I feel like a corpse, just flesh and bone, waiting to be mauled by tiger teeth. But she’s not just a tiger. She’s my grandmother.
“It’s me, Zara,” I say, taking a tiny step forward. “I’ve brought a blanket.”
I hold it in front of me.
“You must be kind of cold?” I add. “Plus, if you want to be human, I thought you’d rather not be naked out here where people could see you—like the lobster guy.”
She sniffs the air. The dinghy’s engine starts on the water. She does not look happy. She makes a little noise as her ears move forward into a slightly less confrontational stance.
“Right. That’s right. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I say.
Her muscles are rigid and tight, ready to pounce or run away.
“I’m your granddaughter. Um … I love you?”
The silence between us is like a broken chicken bone, jagged and thin. I am scared and tired and love her so terribly much, this massive predator of a grandmother. Her sorrow is my fault, because I wanted so badly to retrieve Nick that we fell into a trap. And Mrs. Nix died because of it.
“Please, Betty,” I whisper her name. I squat down low, making myself small. The blanket twitches in my hands.
She lifts her head to stare into my eyes. I try to remember if I’m supposed to stare back or not, wondering what big cat behavior protocol is. I decide to screw that and just do what Zara behavior dictates; I stare back into her big, amazingly brown eyes. As I do, the pupils dilate, shifting into circles. This always happens when she’s about to change. I stay in my squat but shuffle-turn and give her privacy. After a moment a hand reaches over my shoulder and yanks the blanket away.
“Good of you to bring a damn blanket. Nobody’s going to want to see my ugly old ass,” she says gruffly.
I give her a second, which is as long as I can manage, and turn around.
“Gram?”
No answer.
I try again, say the words that are the most important. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know.” She doesn’t meet my eyes, but I don’t care.
I hug her anyway.
“I missed you so much.” I almost sob it out because it’s so true.
She nods really quickly. The movement of her face against mine feels familiar and good. “I know. Missed you too.”
After a couple of moments, I pull away to look at her. Her face is worn and tired and her eyes are dull, not half as spunky as normal. She smells of wood and blood and death. She turns away and watches the lobsterman’s dinghy slowly move across the water.
Out of nowhere she says, “This is bigger than us. There is a giant out there against us, a literal giant, Zara.”
Betty closes her eyes. I tuck the blanket around her a little more tightly. Her shoulders are gaunt now, not so ruggedly muscled.
“I brought your boots. Well, they were in the truck. Hold on. You have bare feet in the cold,” I tell her as if she didn’t know it. I jog to the truck, pull out the boots, and bring them back over, the whole time thinking, “Do not disappear again. Do not disappear again.”
As soon as I put the boots on the ground, she slips each of her feet inside, not bothering to lace them up. She stands up again, but her posture isn’t as straight as it’s always been. Her shoulders aren’t squared against the world.
Snow falls onto the harbor. Only a couple of lobster boats are still moored. Even the harbormaster’s boat has been hauled out and put into dry dock, which is a trailer in the parking lot by his office.
Betty’s voice flattens, cold as the blending snow. “Too many people, good people, have died.”
She shudders, and Betty is not the kind of person who shudders, and I would bet a million dollars that she’s remembering what happened here—how Mrs. Nix died in an explosion—how the grief and pain made Betty turn tiger, devour a pixie, and then disappear for days and days.
We stand there for another minute, even though she’s shivering. And I tell her everything that’s happened since she’s turned. She knows some things already because she witnessed them while she was in tiger form. She knows that I got Nick back. She knows that my mom is gone again. I tell her the rest of it too, about how Nick is being a jerk a lot of the time, about Cassidy’s visions, about the army we’re trying to build. I expect her to argue with me about that one because she’s always been pro-secrecy when it comes to regular people knowing about pixies and weres, but she just listens and takes it all in. She gives none of her wisdom, none of her sarcastic comments.
While I talk, the lobsterman ties the dinghy to his real boat, climbs aboard, and starts the engine. It sputters out. His swearing echoes across the water. Betty smiles at it.
“Some things don’t change,” she says. “When he does finally get that motor on, he’ll have to run it a couple minutes so it doesn’t keep stalling out.”
I nod even though I’m not all that concerned with the lobsterman. Instead, I tighten my arm around Betty’s waist.
“You can’t leave again,” I tell her.
She opens her mouth to say something, but an ambulance roars into the parking lot, lights on, no sirens though. Keith jumps out of the driver’s seat.
“Betty!” He smiles and hollers but his eyes are concerned. “Betty! Holy God! What happened to you?”
She shoos him away. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve been missing for days! You’re at the city harbor, buck naked except for a blanket. You are hardly fine!” He insists that she sit in the back of the ambulance and she asks him why he’s even here. He stares at her for a second while giving her another blanket and wrapping a blood-pressure cuff around her arm. “That guy on the lobster boat reported a tiger in the parking lot. Josie thought he was probably 10-44.”
I must look confused, because Betty sighs out, “10-44 is the code for crazy person.”
Dispatchers use “10” codes to talk on the radio to the cops and ambulance drivers.
“The cops are looking for a big cat,” I say. “I, um, Keith, you must know that.”
He just gives me a quick look and a nod while the boat tugs away, heading toward the bay. I can see it through the open door of the ambulance.
“Your vitals look good.” Keith breathes deeply for a second, sits back on one of the built-in benches, and says, “Where the hell were you, Betty?”
She meets his eyes and lies without twitching. “I don’t remember.”
There’s a pause. The sounds of the boat’s motor fade.
“Nothing?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Nothing. Just came to in the harbor, naked as the day as I was born.”
“And you?” he asks me.
“Zara had a hunch,” Betty says. “She’s like that. Cop gut on that one. She’s all instincts.”
Keith shuts the door of the ambulance, closing out the cold, and gives Betty his own straight-on glare. His buzz cut is covered by a knit hat, but he has the attitude of a guy who has had enough. He says, “You are going to tell me and you are going to tell me right now, Betty White.”
“Tell you what?” she asks, all innocent, crossing her arms in front of her.
“You’re the damn tiger, aren’t you?” he says. He actually points his finger at her.
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I’m a hamster.”
He says it so deadpan that I don’t know what to think. I have no idea if he’s kidding or not, and neither does Gram, I don’t think, because she snatches his sleeve and barks out, “Don’t you mock me.”
“Just tell me you aren’t the one making all the kids go missing.” He crosses his arms in front of his chest.
“You know that’s not me,” she snaps back. “I was with you when that call on the Sumner bus came in.”
You can tell that she wants to call him an idiot, but she’s holding back. Keith’s focus seems to turn inward. The “accident” was really a pixie attack on a bus full of Sumner High School band kids. It was a blood bath.
“You’re right,” Keith finally says. “But I still think you’re that tiger.”
“You’re crazy,” Betty retorts, adjusting her blanket. “Zara, tell the man he’s crazy.”
“You’re crazy,” I say in a computerized, flat voice that hopefully shows I’m not supporting either side.
“I don’t think so.” He hands Betty another blanket. “You were standing out there buck naked in the cold. Your core temperature is still in normal range when you should be hypothermic. Your feet should be blue. You have been missing for days. You should have frostbite. Yet you’re only shivering and only a tiny bit. That’s not normal human behavior.”
“So you think I’m a tiger.”
“No, I know you’re a tiger.”
“And how do you know that, Mr. Delusional?” Betty asks.
He opens the ambulance door and points up at a telephone pole. “There’s a camera there now, Betty. Josie monitors it at dispatch. It caught you turning back.”
“Crap,” Betty says, noticeably upset, which is unusual for her, but what’s also unusual is how calm and accepting Keith is being, given the fact that his partner is a human who morphs into a large feline. Props to him. He’s not even batting an eyelash.
“It’s okay, Gram,” I say, trying to soothe her by petting her knee. “It’s just Josie and Keith. They’re your friends. They won’t tell anyone they saw you.”
I fix Keith with a death glare, which hopefully conveys how I will kill him if he loses his mellow about this and tells.
“Ah, I know that, Zara. I’m not worried about that.” She puts her head in her hands.
“Then what are you worried about?” Keith asks.
“That everyone saw me naked.”
Keith mutters a curse and shuts the ambulance door, shaking his head like she’s nuts, which maybe she is. Maybe we all are, but when Betty lifts up her head and starts laughing, Keith and I start laughing too.
Betty takes a long shower and I order pizza, which we gulp down in two bites. It’s so good to have her back, even if her eyes are haunted and she seems older, more fragile.
“Why didn’t you come back, Gram?” I whisper. We’re sitting together on the couch, an empty pizza box in front of us.
Tears form at the edge of her eyes. After a few moments she turns and looks at me. “I thought I’d do more good killing than riding around in an ambulance most of the time. I don’t know. I just … When she died … You have no idea how hard it was not staying tiger,” she says. “I just wanted to stay feral and kill and not think. Still want to.”
Sighing, I close the pizza box. “Not thinking sounds very nice.”
“Not thinking is for wimps,” she says after a moment. “I was a wimp.”
“You were in pain.”
She scoffs. “You’re supposed to battle through it, not give in.”
“Maybe that’s how you had to battle through it,” I say. “It wasn’t the right way or the wrong way, just the Betty White way.”
That’s enough emotion for the both of us. Nick and I are scheduled to canvas again tonight, but he’s not at the house at six, so I plow the driveway and shovel the steps for the eight thousandth time and head out alone. Then all hell breaks loose. Literally. It starts when I smell that same horrible smell—rotting and death. And it continues with a fist to my head and a fall into the snow.
FBI INTERNAL MEMO
The incidences of lost children seem to coincide with an influx of visitors to the town. All hotels are filled to capacity, which I have been assured is highly unusual for the month of December. Are these two things related? —AGENT WILLIS
“Get up!”
Broken and silent, I’ve fallen onto the snow, knocked down onto the ground between the tall pine trees. My vision blurs and shifts, but if I squint really hard I can see a half-rotting human foot as it gets ready to place another kick.
It smells of death.
It smells of vanilla.
This is what’s been following me, and this is not a pixie. This? I have no idea how to fight this. I don’t know what this thing is and I don’t have time to wonder about it because one more kick might kill me, break me forever. Blood gushes out of a cut on the back of my head, pooling into the snow. That’s where it struck first. That’s what knocked me down. It was a surprise attack. I must have twisted as I fell, because even in the moonlight, I can make out the rotting skin. The monstrous thing is standing on two legs, barefoot in the snow. It pulls the other foot back to kick me again. This foot isn’t rotting at all. It looks female somehow. Maybe it’s the black toenail polish and slender toes.
“You need to fear!” it/she roars at me. “How can I tell what you’re made of if you are not afraid?”
I roll to the side. There’s been another blow to my stomach. The knot of it slows me down. I lift my head an inch as the next kick goes just shy of my ribs. I have to get up. I have to …
Another kick knocks my breath away. I am dying. I must be. In the distance, a squirrel chatters its horror at the scene. The world smells of decay and pine, snow and blood. From somewhere far away comes the sound of a heavy animal running on the crisp snow.
I need to breathe, to live, to figure out what is happening, but I don’t know how.
The creature pulls back her foot again, then pauses. I
f I could focus, I would maybe know what has caught her attention. I shift my gaze sideways. She is giant sized and definitely female, the kind of female that would star on naked Web sites if half of her body wasn’t rotting like she was some sort of zombie. To make it weirder, half of her is pale and half is dark like she’s two different races.
I must gasp or recoil or something, because her expression changes.
“I know. Not very attractive,” she says.
I struggle, trying to get up while she snorts her disdain.
“You are so weak. Hardly a worthy opponent at all.”
“Just kill me then,” I mutter, and fall back into the snow, too tired to move, too tired to care.
She crouches down, stares into my face. Her eyes are a mere three inches from my own. The wind rushes by both of us, lifting a patch of skin from her cheek. “I do not want to kill you.”
I swallow hard. “Just toy with me? Nice.”
“Not toy with you. Test you.” She sniffs the air. “You are destined to be part of the end, or perhaps you can stop it. You can end up with me in Hel or with them in Valhalla. When so much rests on the fate of one girl, how can I not test you?”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about,” I manage to say.
The snow has turned to icy pellets. They hit against both of us like weapons, reminders of the pain that exists.
She smiles, revealing broken teeth and perfect teeth, half and half. “Our destinies choose us. I was not always this way, Zara of the White. Destiny shaped me into a woman, half rotting, half whole. Despite the prophecy, perhaps, we can change what we will become? Who knows? Your cavalry arrives, lucky little queen. I must go. It was nice to meet you.”
Nice to meet me?
Hope fills me even though I’m totally confused. If she goes I might be able to sit up, to smell something that isn’t rotting skin and vanilla-bean intestines, to figure out what she’s talking about, but then she leans in and whispers one last thing. “Do not let him out. No matter what they say, I want this end no more than you do.”
“Wh-what?” My head swirls with confusion and she rushes off just as I manage to sit up. My eyes focus enough to see a large tiger, stripes standing out in relief against its pale fur, howl and race after her. The world shakes beneath their running feet. She roars.