“Damn,” I whispered. “You poor bastard.”
“What happened?” Shelby’s voice was gentle.
I turned back to her. “We went to the aconite field to gather flowers,” I said. “There was this flat pond . . .”
“A billabong,” said Shelby. “I know the one. There’s bunyip down there.”
“Cooper seemed to think he could handle them.” And maybe he could have. Bunyip were business as usual for him: they existed in the environment they were made for.
“But that wasn’t what attacked you, was it, Alex?”
Her tone was low and even: that, and the use of my name at the end, actually made me smile. “You’re talking to me like a victim,” I said. “That’s good technique. Really soothing. You’ve been working on your people skills.”
“I’ll work on them even harder if you’ll tell me what attacked you.” She was smiling, but I could see the concern reflected in her eyes, and the hands that held me upright were trembling faintly. She was terrified.
She was right to be. I pulled away, shifting my balance to my own two feet, and much to my relief, she let me go. “We were ambushed by werewolves.” I looked to Riley, who was standing stone-faced in the doorway, blocking all hope of escape. “I think there were two of them, both in wolf form. One attacked. We filled it with bullets. We didn’t expect the second one. It came out of nowhere.”
“How are you so sure there were two?” asked Riley.
I shook my head. “We shot the shit out of the first one, if you’ll pardon my French. I never even saw the second one coming . . .” I closed my eyes. I couldn’t help myself. The image of a wolf rising from the flowers was there, waiting for me, and I was suddenly glad I couldn’t remember any dreams I’d had while I was unconscious. I shuddered, trying to shake off the thought, and opened my eyes as I repeated, “It came out of nowhere. There was no time for us to run. It bit me, and savaged Cooper. When I came to, I carried Cooper back here and bound his wounds. You can see what I did . . . I don’t think I made things any worse. I did the best I could.” My cheeks were wet. I was crying. That wasn’t really a surprise, although I wished I could have held back the tears until Riley was no longer looking at me with those cold, judgmental eyes.
“What about your own wounds?” Shelby asked.
“I wasn’t bleeding that badly, and I was afraid I’d make things worse,” I said. “Cooper was out cold, he couldn’t help me take care of myself. I figured it was better to stop his bleeding and get the tincture mixed up—we’ve both been exposed, Shelby. He’s dead, but I could still be infected. You should get away from me.” It would be weeks before I was capable of passing the infection on, but at that moment, rational thought was taking a backseat to the instinctive need to protect her.
“Not too likely, but thanks for trying to shove me out as soon as things went sour,” she said amiably. She looked back to her father. “Can we call Mum, get some reinforcements and a cleanup crew out here?”
“A lot of people are going to find it suspicious that Cooper died as soon as we left him alone with your American,” said Riley. “You should be prepared for that.”
“And I would’ve found it suspicious if Alex had died when he was left alone with Cooper, except for the part where no, Daddy, that’s not how this works,” Shelby said, all traces of amiableness gone. She glared daggers at her father. “We’re doing a dangerous job, in a dangerous place, and you want to stand there looking at a man with this sort of wound in his arm, implying foul play? If there was foul play, it’s on us. We’re the ones who left them here.”
Riley stood there for a moment, expression not changing. Finally, he said, “I’ll call your mother,” and left the station.
The room lightened as the sun was allowed to flood back in. “You know, I’m starting to get the feeling your father doesn’t like me,” I said. Something brushed against my leg. I looked down. Jett was leaning against me, her ears pressed flat and her tail tucked between her legs. “Poor little thing. She doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“She’ll be taken care of,” said Shelby. “We’re good about taking care of our own. Now come and lean against the counter, I want to get a look at your arm.”
“Not if there’s even the slightest infection risk, I’m not—”
“The risk is minimal for me, but it’s getting higher for you with every minute that passes without cleaning this thing out. Don’t argue with me, Alex. Please.” Her tone made me wince. It was agonized, full of longing and dismay and six different flavors of misery.
“Hey.” I raised my right hand and peeled off my glove before touching her cheek gently with the back of my fingers. “This isn’t your fault, you know. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.”
Shelby looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. “You wouldn’t be in Australia if not for me insisting that we needed help. You’d be safe at home, playing with the things that want to turn you into stone. Take off your coat.”
I shrugged out of my jacket, only wincing a little as the shreds of fabric that had been driven into my wounds by the werewolf’s teeth pulled free. My shirt was going to hurt a lot more to remove. “And I wouldn’t be playing with the things that want to turn me into stone if my parents hadn’t raised me to be fascinated by the fringes of the scientific world. We can play the blame game as long as you want. It’s not going to change anything.”
“It never does,” said Shelby bitterly. She leaned closer, studying the tears in my shirt. “This is ruined. Can I cut off the sleeve?”
“Scissors are on the table.”
She nodded curtly and turned away. While I couldn’t see her face, she said, “My dad doesn’t like you. He’s not going to, either. Apart from the whole ‘I’m supposed to have been back in Australia by now’ nonsense, I told him about your family when I was still trying to save you from them.”
“Ah.” Understanding suddenly dawned, no less painful for being so clear.
The human side of my family was known throughout the cryptozoological world for being defectors from the Covenant of St. George. That made us potentially untrustworthy, since we’d already proven that we’d betray our allies if we ceased agreeing with them. It also made us useful. But the cryptid side of my family consisted partially of cuckoos. Like werewolves, they weren’t native to Australia. The Thirty-Six Society had never been forced to learn to cope with them. Which was why, a few years before Shelby and I met, a group of cuckoos had been able to infiltrate the Society and start killing people.
I still didn’t have all the details—I might never have them, given Shelby’s reluctance to discuss what had happened—but I knew that a lot of people had died, and that one of them had been Shelby’s older brother, Jack.
“He knows I’m human, right?” It was an indelicate question, and even needing to ask it made me feel faintly speciesist. Why was human better than any of the other options? My grandparents and my cousins are wonderful people, and their various species of origin had never done anything to impact my opinions of them. But Shelby was a human girl, from a human family, and no matter how much some people try to say that species doesn’t matter, it does. It always does.
“Makes you worse in his eyes.” She started gingerly cutting away my shirtsleeve, moving with the sort of exaggerated care that she usually brought to working with her cats. “Now you’re not driven by instinct or different neural programming. You’re a human. You should be siding with your own species against the world, not coddling the sort of folks who think exploding other people’s brains is fun.”
“It sounds like he would have fit in well with the Covenant.” I gritted my teeth as her tugging separated the shirt from my skin. She was only tugging on the edges of the wound, not working at the places where the fabric had been driven well and truly into the surface of the musculature, and the pain was already bad enough to make me feel nauseous.
“Let??
?s talk about this later, yeah?” The question was forcedly light. “Alex, this is pretty bad under here. I’m going to need to dig a bunch of bits out of your skin before I can really see the wound. Are you . . . are you all right for that?”
“It’s going to hurt like hell, and I may pass out, but I’m okay,” I said, bracing myself against the counter. “If I throw up, I’ll try not to throw up on you.”
“You’re so sweet,” she said.
“I try,” I said, and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her looking at me like that—and if the moment came where concern turned to pity, I didn’t want to see that either. “I anticipated the possibility of cuts and burns during the manufacture of our remedy. If you look in my supplies, you’ll find some sealed vials of cuckoo blood. You can use those as a topical antibiotic.”
“Oh, brilliant. That makes things much easier.” Her lips brushed my cheek in a dry, almost perfunctory kiss, and she moved away. I listened to her footsteps, keeping my eyes closed. It would be better if I didn’t have to see her face.
My parents raised me with the idea that species didn’t matter: people were people, no matter what other attributes they possessed. It was a fine ideal to put forward, and for the most part, it managed to stick. It can be hard to get used to the idea that some people photosynthesize, while others eat their prey alive, but given enough time, the mind can adapt to anything. And it was easy for me to say all that, because at the end of the day, I was human: I was a member of the current dominant species, king of the trash heap, and apex predator to the stars. We’d killed off everything that might threaten our supremacy, and now we had the freedom to sit around saying that everybody was equal.
You want to talk true equality? Talk about a spillover virus with the power to change everything you’ve ever known or cared about. In the eyes of that virus, everything mammalian really was equal.
“This is going to sting,” cautioned Shelby. I hadn’t heard her come back.
“Okay,” I said, gripping the counter hard with both hands. “I’ll do my best not to scream.”
“I’ll still love you if you do,” she said, and got to work.
If the pain of the werewolf biting me had been unbelievable, the pain of my girlfriend trying to repair the damage was worse. She had produced a pair of tweezers from the first aid kit, and she used them to dig every scrap of cloth and piece of crushed aconite plant out of my wounds, setting me to bleeding again. I could feel it running down my arm, and I welcomed it. Part of what made lycanthropy-w so difficult to catch was the way victims of werewolf attacks tended to bleed all over everything. Our own bodies washed half of the danger away before it could get into our systems.
“Oh, my poor boy,” she murmured. There was a clink as she put the tweezers down, and the next thing I felt was a damp washcloth being pressed against my skin. That was nice, for half a second. Then the peroxide she’d used to soak the fabric reached my nerve endings, and I bit my lip with the effort of keeping silent.
Shelby must have known how much this was hurting me, but she kept working, not slowing down or allowing her hands to shake. I kept my eyes closed until I felt her thumb against my chin, and then I opened them, raising my head just enough to meet her worried gaze.
“This bite needs stitches,” she said. “Can I . . . ?”
“No stitches,” I replied. “Cuckoo blood and gauze, butterfly clasps if you have to, but no stitches. We’re going to want to cauterize the wounds with silver nitrate as soon as we’re ready for me to take the tincture, and stitches would just get in the way.”
Now she looked alarmed. “Cauterize—but Alex, that’s going to scar something awful.”
“Better scarred than a werewolf,” I said. “I never much liked wearing tank tops anyway. They make my shoulders look all funny. Can you stop the bleeding?”
“I already mostly have,” she said, alarm still evident. “I really don’t like this, Alex.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Neither do I.”
“What in the blue suffering fuck have you people done to the place?” demanded a female voice from the doorway.
Shelby winced. “Hi, Mum,” she called. “Sorry about all the blood.” She didn’t move away from me. I couldn’t tell whether that was because she was still concerned, or because she was trying to stay between me and her mother. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted it to be.
“This is worse than your father said it would be.” Charlotte Tanner strode quickly across the medical station to where Shelby and I were standing. She stomped through the puddles of blood in her path, not seeming to care about the fact that she was leaving bloody footprints across the very few swaths of clean floor remaining. “Cooper’s dead. How do you take a man on a basic forest recon and wind up bringing him home dead?” Her words were callous, but her tone wasn’t: she sounded like a woman who was grasping desperately for sense, because the alternatives were too terrible to be borne.
“It turns out to be pretty easy,” I said. “Hello, Ms. Tanner.”
“Hello, Alex,” she said, distracted momentarily by the instinct toward politeness. Her eyes went to my wounded shoulder. She grimaced. “That looks fairly awful. How does it feel?”
“Worse than it looks,” I said. “As for the elephant in the room, yes, it was a werewolf that killed Cooper, and it was the same werewolf that bit me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it had been waiting there for us.”
Charlotte nodded slowly. “Why do you know better?”
“What?”
“You said if you didn’t know better. Why do you know better? Kangaroos can lay ambushes. So can most predators. Why can’t werewolves?”
“Like I said before, the change makes most of them mentally unstable. They have impulse control issues, usually even when they return to their original forms. A fully transformed werewolf isn’t thinking like any creature that arises in nature. They can’t plan.” And that, right there, was the source of my terror. Becoming a cuckoo like Sarah, or a gorgon like Dee, was biologically impossible, but it wouldn’t have driven me into a quivering ball of fear. Lycanthropy was different. It not only stole your form, it stole your mind.
Science had been the one thing that got me through all the troubles and pains of my life. Science couldn’t save me when I no longer had the mind to understand that it existed.
Charlotte nodded once, before asking, “How are you so sure?”
“What?”
“How are you so sure? Have you been a werewolf? Interviewed one? ‘Excuse me, Mr. Big Bad Wolf, but when you ate all those people, were you in your right mind, or were you overcome with animal passions?’ Maybe werewolves are smarter than we give them credit for being, and just don’t want to tell you.”
I stared at her. “I . . . I don’t know. Werewolves are one of the only things we’ve never tried to make peace with. They’re a disease. Diseases have to be wiped out, for the sake of everyone they might infect.”
“I suppose so. Still, it’s a very Covenant way of looking at the world—we show our roots in our own ways, don’t we?” Her eyes dipped to the wound in my shoulder before moving to Shelby, who was standing red-cheeked and anxious between us. “How likely is it that you’ve been infected, Alex?”
Just like that, everything about her—her stance, her pointed questions, even her seeming lack of concern over Cooper’s death—fell into place. “I have as much of a chance of being infected as anyone else who’s been exposed,” I said. “I have a fresh batch of antiserum. Now that you’re here, we can move Cooper out of the chair and I can sit down long enough for the first stage of treatment. After that, we’ll have twenty-eight days before we know one way or another. If I have been infected, and can’t stop that infection before it fully takes hold, you’ll have to put me down.”
“No,” said Shelby. “Shan’t. Find another solution.”
“Yes, shall,” I said firml
y. “Shelby, if I start to change, I won’t be on your side anymore. I’ll be a danger. To everyone, and to everything.”
“Unless you manage somehow to prove that werewolves can think,” said Charlotte. “Wouldn’t that be a scientific achievement?”
“You know, a few seconds ago I was sure you were trying to convince me to kill myself,” I said. “Can you please pick a line of argument and stick with it? Lots of good people have been bitten by werewolves over the years. Doctors and wildlife conservationists and yes, members of the Covenant who would’ve died before they’d allow themselves to become monsters. Not one of those people ever stood up and said ‘hey, I’m a werewolf that thinks, let’s not eat people.’ They all became killers. I would be a killer. If I go werewolf, we have to stop me from hurting people.”
“Good,” said Charlotte, with a decisive nod. “You may continue to breathe for now, Mr. Price. Shelby, do whatever you have to in order to get him ready to travel. I brought the rescue truck, so we’ll be able to lock him in the back where he can’t hurt anyone. Your sisters are helping your father look for signs of the werewolf. I’m going to stay here and hold a gun on you both, to make sure your boyfriend doesn’t try anything funny. Understood?”
“Yes, Mum,” said Shelby.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. And Alex?”
“Yes?”
Charlotte smiled sadly, her eyes reflecting an infinity of regret. “I’m really sorry it had to be like this.”
“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, trying not to wince when it pulled on the wound in my shoulder. “I always knew that it was dangerous to come to Australia.”
Eight
“Transformation doesn’t always happen in an instant. Sometimes it comes slowly, infecting the body and the brain until you wake up and realize that you’ve been completely remade in something else’s image. Only pray that whatever infects you will leave you better than you were.”
—Thomas Price