Dried aconite. Powdered silver nitrate. Liquid mercury, heavy and poisonously lovely. A jar of rowan ash, burnt so fine that it looked almost volcanic. Another jar, this one filled with unicorn water. There were no unicorns in Australia; unless they had a native purifier I didn’t know about, I was going to need to measure what I had down to the drop.
“You’re going to tell me what all these things are, yeah?” asked Cooper. His dog had followed him inside; its pointed black ears appeared above the edge of the table, quivering as it listened to the noises I was making.
“I’ll walk you through the whole process,” I promised. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Jett,” said Cooper. He smiled down at the dog, an expression of absolute fondness on his face. “She’s my good girl, aren’t you, Jett?”
Jett emitted that high, piercing bark again, as if to say that yes, she was absolutely a good girl, and she didn’t understand why it was even being questioned. There should be no room for debate. In the Good Girl Olympics, Jett was clearly taking home the gold, and might be shooting to bring back the silver and the bronze as well, just for the sake of having a complete set.
“Well, I think she’s lovely, and I hate to ask, but is she all right with loud noises and strange smells? This stuff isn’t exactly what I’d call sunshine and roses when it’s being mixed.”
Cooper’s look of fondness twisted into a scowl—although oddly, it didn’t come with a renewed freeze. Apparently, he couldn’t go completely cold while he was talking about his dog, even if the topic at hand was “do we need to put her outside.” “She’s come with me to the range,” he said. “If she can sit through a bunch of men shooting holes in things not ten yards away, she’ll be fine for whatever witch’s brew you’re planning to make.”
“All right,” I said. I picked up the jar of dried aconite, frowning at it, before looking back up at Cooper. “You said imported aconite had gone endemic in this country. Is there any chance we could find some growing near here? The tincture will work a lot better if I can make it with fresh flowers, rather than relying on the dried stuff.”
“Yeah, this is good country for the nasty weeds. I’ve seen them growing near here. Pretty sure I can shake us out a patch pretty quick.” Cooper stooped to pat Jett on the head. “You’re going to stay here, girl, and guard this place for us? We’ll be back to you shortly.”
Jett barked again, presumably agreeing to stay and guard, or maybe just acknowledging that her human was making sounds with his flappy face hole. It was difficult to tell, with dogs. I’d never had the experience that might have made it easier.
“There’s some nasty stuff in the wood around here,” Cooper explained, straightening up again. “This is bunyip territory. Better if she stays behind where she won’t get eaten.”
“Ah,” I said, stretching out the syllable until it was several times its original length. “Shelby didn’t say anything about there being bunyip around here.”
“She probably didn’t think of it.” Cooper started for the door. “Do you say something when there’s a possibility of bears in the area? Or d’you just assume that everyone knows bears are a thing that can happen, and will plan accordingly?”
I slung my now-empty bag over my shoulder before snagging a pair of latex gloves from the box I’d brought with me and stuffing them into my pocket. It would be best if I didn’t touch the plants with my bare hands. “Actually, yes, I would say something like ‘there may be bears here.’ Bears are not a pleasant surprise for most people.”
“Most people are pretty damn dull.” Cooper opened the door and stepped outside. Jett moved to follow. He clucked his tongue and pointed to the corner. To my surprise, the little black dog stopped immediately, her head drooping, and gave him one last plaintive look before she slunk back to the indicated spot on the floor and lay down, curling so that her nose was pointing straight at her deceitful deserter of a master.
“I can’t argue with that,” I said, and followed him out.
Walking into the woods of Australia was no more or less alien than walking into the woods of Ohio had been when I was trying to adjust to the differences between oaks and alders and the evergreens of home. This forest consisted of eucalyptus, and of trees I didn’t recognize, but the theory was the same. The forest floor was a mass of fallen leaves, decaying bark, and unusual bushes, some of which were infested with large, spade-shaped beetles. Something rustled in the brush to one side. I fought the impulse, ingrained in me since birth, to find out what it was. With my luck, it would be some sort of large and extremely venomous snake—and while that would normally be my equivalent of Christmas, I didn’t want to explain to the Tanners why I’d gone and gotten myself bitten on my second day in the country. The black snakes and taipans would have to wait a little longer.
Cooper had thawed still further since we got out into the woods, although he had become even less conversational, choosing instead to focus on what was happening around us. I wanted to pepper him with a constant stream of questions, asking him to identify every bird and flower. I kept my mouth shut and stuck close behind, choosing to show restraint. When Shelby and her father returned from their patrol, they would find the tinctures mixed and my skin fully intact.
I was feeling so pious about my commitment to safety that the end of the trees caught me by surprise. One moment we were walking through a thick stand of healthy eucalyptus, and the next, we were stepping out into a shallow bowl of a meadow, thick with deep purple aconite flowers. A flat sheet of water stretched out on the other side of the meadow, studded with dead trees and delicate water weeds and something that looked like a log, but which I suspected of being a sleeping crocodile. There was a stand of tall, thin-trunked trees growing straight out of the watery area, so densely pressed together that anything inside their little copse was completely hidden.
“Is that . . . ?” I asked, pointing at the “log” in question.
Cooper followed the angle of my finger. Then, much to my surprise, he grinned. “You have an excellent eye for an American,” he said. “That’s a croc, all right. Looks like a pretty small one, too. Why, did you want to go for some authentic Australian crocodile wrestling while you were here?”
I eyed him sidelong. “You know, that’s the same tone Shelby uses when she’s talking about playing up the ‘Crocodile Hunter’ routine for the people at our zoo. I think I’ll pass.”
“And here I was looking forward to giving you back to them without a foot.” He paused for a beat before saying, “It’s not a crocodile. We don’t get them this far south. Not every Australian log is going to be a crocodile.” Cooper gestured to the flowers. “Is this what you needed?”
“Yes.” I produced the gloves from my pocket and pulled them on. “I don’t know what’s around here that might try to eat us, apart from the bunyip. Can you keep watch while I gather flowers?”
“Already on it,” said Cooper.
That seemed to be his final word on the subject, and so I turned my attention to what needed doing: picking wildflowers. Dangerous, invasive, incredibly toxic wildflowers that doubtless felt right at home in Australia, the continent where everything could kill you. It seemed almost like an oversight on the part of Nature that aconite wasn’t native. They probably had something worse. Maybe a cousin of the vegetable lamb that had fangs and venom sacs instead of blunt herbivore’s teeth . . .
I pulled aconite plants up by their roots as I contemplated Australia’s potential for deadly vegetation, pausing to shake the worst of the dirt and bugs off each handful before shoving it into my bag. The flowers would retain their potency for three to five days. We could gather more after that, if we needed them. That was the nice thing about invasive plants: since they grew like weeds, there was a virtually inexhaustible supply. Even wilted, these would be a hundred times more effective than my dried flowers. They would—
The sound of a low growl coming f
rom the direction of the pond brought my head up, fingers tightening on my handful of aconite stems. “Cooper?” I had to fight to keep the quaver out of my voice. “Is that what a bunyip sounds like?”
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted him to say yes or no, but I knew I didn’t want the answer that I got: “I don’t know what that is,” he said, stepping closer to me. He was suddenly holding a pistol; he must have produced it from inside his lambskin coat, but he’d moved fast enough that I hadn’t seen him draw. “I’ve never heard that before. Do you have enough damn weeds?”
“I do.” I stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Cooper took a step backward, toward me, his gun still aimed at the water. There was a momentary silence, like the world was holding its breath.
The werewolf burst out of the trees that were growing in the pond. It was fully transformed, maybe two hundred pounds of hair and muscle and hatred, and it was coming straight toward us.
Cooper shouted something. I heard his gun go off three times. Everything seemed to slow down, the way it does when everything is going wrong. I dropped the bag of aconite, pulling the pistol from my belt and taking careful aim on the charging beast. I should have woken up earlier. I might have remembered to swap my bullets for silver rounds, I thought, and then, Too late now, and then the shot was perfect, the shot was as close to ideal as you could get outside the range, and I was pulling the trigger with frantic speed, trying to cluster my bullets on the center of the werewolf’s forehead.
Silver does the best job of killing werewolves. It does something we don’t fully understand to their central nervous systems, disrupting the connection between the therianthropic virus that gives them the power to shapeshift and the body’s normal, static state. Lead doesn’t come with any such bonuses. But if you hit anything hard enough, fast enough, it’s going to fall down.
That’s what happened with our werewolf. Cooper poured bullets into it, and so did I, and midway across the meadow it collapsed, yelping as it fell. I took a step closer, just to adjust my aim, and kept firing until the magazine clicked empty. When that happened, I opened the chamber, coolly reloaded, and then resumed firing.
“Son, I think it’s dead,” said Cooper, between shots.
I fired one more bullet into the werewolf’s head. “Any werewolf that can still be identified via dental records isn’t dead enough for me,” I said.
“You really hate the bastards, don’t you?” He sounded remarkably unshaken for a man who’d just been attacked by a werewolf in an open field. I frowned as I turned to face him. He’d been the one to tell me about the aconite. He’d known I wouldn’t be able to resist getting access to fresher flowers. What if this had been a trap?
Looking at his face removed any doubt. He was pale and shaking, with white patches beneath his eyes that spoke of ensuing shock. “Yes, I hate them,” I said, moving to pick up my bag. “I was raised never to hate anything, because everything has a purpose, but there’s no purpose to waheela rabies getting into the human population like this. It was just a shitty spillover event, and we’re going to be dealing with it forever. I hate them so much. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that I hate more.”
Cooper nodded. “That’s something I can understand. Come on, boy. Let’s get back to work.” He turned to head back into the woods, and toward the safety of the medical station on the other side. I moved to follow.
Something slammed into me from behind, so fast and hard that I didn’t have the chance to turn and see what it was before I landed face-first in the aconite, so hard that the air was knocked out of me. Then teeth like knives were driven into my upper arm, the impact slamming my head against the dirt, and a wave of pain and agonized understanding took everything else away.
Seven
“We can plan and plan, we can scheme and scheme, but in the end, a single second has the power to change everything.”
—Alexander Healy
Facedown in a field of aconite in Queensland, Australia, in one hell of a lot of trouble
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED RELUCTANTLY, like a student creeping into class on the first day of finals. I allowed it in with equal reluctance. If the world was the student afraid of being graded, I was the grad student terrified of being trusted with the responsibility of giving the grades. Or maybe I was the professor overseeing the class, or the classroom, or . . . the metaphor began to crumble, taking the last comforting shards of nothingness with it. It was time for me to wake up.
It was time for me to wake up.
It was time—
I opened my eyes with a gasp, and discovered that I was sprawled face down in a muddy field of trampled aconite flowers. Everything smelled of blood. I pushed myself upright, spitting and clawing the muck from my glasses. The motion pulled at the bite wound, sending pain shooting through my entire body. I convulsed but didn’t scream. Not screaming was one of the first lessons I’d learned as a child, when it became evident that dangerous situations would be a part of my life until they inevitably brought it to an end. If you scream, whatever caused your injuries might come back for a second helping. Swallow the pain, swallow the fear that comes with it, and keep moving. Movement is the only thing that can save you.
Movement was complicated by the fact that everything was slippery with mud and water and crushed flowers, which added a nasty, sludgy sliminess to the whole situation. I couldn’t put any weight on my left arm, either; even the slightest flex of my triceps sent another wave of pain crashing through me. Eventually, I managed to half roll, half stagger to my feet, looking around the decimated field with dazed eyes.
The mud on my glasses gave everything a brownish cast, making it impossible to make out any details. I made the tactical decision to risk another attack in my moment of blindness and took them off, wiping them as clean as possible on the inside of my shirt, where the mud hadn’t quite penetrated. Putting them back on, I took another look around the field. Nothing moved except the flowers, which swayed in the breeze that was blowing across the water.
Nothing—oh, fuck. “Cooper?” There was no response. I pitched my voice a little louder, not quite shouting, and called again, “Cooper? Cooper, can you hear me? Answer if you can hear me.”
There was no response. I took a deep breath through my nose, held it for a few counts, and started scanning the field for signs of a struggle. The purple aconite flowers did a good job of camouflaging the blood, but it stood out well against the leaves. There; that was where I’d fallen, and the drag marks showed where the—where the thing had dragged me through the field like an old rag doll. I knew what had bitten me, I had seen it, but my mind still shied away from forming the word, like thinking it would grant it a reality that it otherwise wouldn’t possess.
Wishing a thing away doesn’t make it not have happened, I thought, half-nonsensically, and started wading through the wreckage of the flowers toward the place where I’d been attacked. That was where I found Cooper, sprawled among the crushed vegetation with his eyes closed and his face turned toward the empty sky. The—the thing had bitten him several times, once on the shoulder, twice on the right arm. All three wounds were still leaking blood. I crouched down, reaching out to feel for a pulse.
It was there. Weak and thready, but there. He wasn’t gone yet, although he would be soon if I didn’t get him some medical care—and that didn’t even touch on the fact that he’d been bitten. He could be a dead man walking.
That could be true for both of us.
“Time to move.” The sound of my own voice startled me. I shied away from it, looking anxiously around to see whether I had attracted any unwanted attention. As before, nothing moved, and I finally realized what else was wrong with this scene:
The thing, the werewolf—I couldn’t avoid the word forever, no matter how much I desperately wanted to—was gone. There was a crushed patch in the aconite where its body had
landed, but there was no sign of the body itself. Massive footprints that were half human and half lupine led away from the crushed flowers. Which meant that either a) the werewolf hadn’t been dead, which seemed unlikely, given how many bullets I had put into its head; or b) the thing that bit us had been a second werewolf, and it had been large enough to pick up its pack mate and carry it away.
Either way, there was a live werewolf in the area. I didn’t want to be here anymore, and Cooper couldn’t afford to be. That didn’t mean I could run off without the things I needed to finish my work.
I moved away from Cooper, scanning the ground until I spotted the strap of my work bag. I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder before I resumed scanning. My pistol was harder to find, being small and darkly colored, but I eventually found the stock poking out from under a thick tangle of aconite flowers. I wiped the mud off the stock and jammed the barrel into my belt, and only then did I go back to hoist Cooper off the ground, bracing him into a fireman’s carry despite the pain the action awoke in my injured arm.
“I’m really glad you’re not Riley’s size,” I muttered, through gritted teeth. “I think I’d have to leave you here to bleed out.” That wasn’t true: I would at least try to improvise a travois before I’d leave a man behind. But the image was ludicrous enough to take my mind off the pain for an instant, and that was all I really wanted. This was going to be difficult. Anything that made it the slightest bit easier was to be grasped and clung to with both hands.
Cooper was a dead weight as I shuffled out of the meadow and into the woods. I must have looked like I was drunk, staggering from side to side, unbalanced and uncertain of myself. Every sound I heard signaled danger to my shock-addled mind, until I found myself flinching at birdsong. I didn’t know the environment here. I didn’t know what to listen for.