The stairs led us to a narrow hallway lined with doors, all firmly shut. Angelo stopped. I did the same. “There are four bedrooms on the second floor,” he said. “Two of them share the master bathroom. The other two have ensuite bathrooms of their own. We’re putting you in one of the ensuite rooms, which means you won’t have a tub, but you’ll be able to take a shower if you like.”
“Can I get some plastic sheeting to keep my injuries dry?” I asked.
Angelo nodded. “I’ll bring it right up. You’ll be locked in. The door is opened three times a day for the delivery of meals; I’ll knock thirty seconds before I open the door. I never come alone, and I always come armed, so please don’t get any funny ideas about rushing me. You don’t have a phone, but there is a cell you can ask to borrow, providing you’re willing to let one of us stay to monitor any calls you want to make. I’d normally say that we’ve removed everything sharp, but since you’ve got your share of sharp things, I don’t think we really need this disclaimer. Do you have any questions for me?”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly weary, looking at those four unmarked doors in this cheery, oddly distressing hallway and feeling like I was looking at my inevitable demise. “What happens when I tell Riley this isn’t the way to go about things? Quarantine is important, but this is overkill when you’re talking about a disease that can’t even be transmitted for the better part of a month.”
“If Riley hasn’t magically transformed into someone who takes advice from people who don’t belong to the Society? Nothing happens, except you piss him off. You stay in your room, we figure out a way to pick your brain without letting you anywhere near anyone that you might hurt. Come the end of the month, either you’re clean or you’re a monster. If you’re clean, we give you our apologies, maybe a fruit basket or something. If you’re a monster, we give you three silver bullets to the head and three more to the heart, and then we feed your body to the drop bears.”
“You realize that means you’ll run the risk of infecting the drop bears,” I said.
Angelo looked at me flatly.
I sighed. “Right. Okay, which room is mine?”
Angelo pointed to the first door on the left. I tapped my forehead with one finger in a quick semi-salute, walked over, and tried the knob. It was unlocked. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say, and so I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. The sound of a key turning in the lock followed only a few seconds later, sealing me inside.
I listened to his footsteps moving away in the hall outside my guest room-slash-prison before I finally allowed myself to sigh and relax. The tension I’d been carrying in my neck and shoulders didn’t drain away—I doubt anyone who’s just been bitten by a werewolf is capable of letting go that easily—but it did migrate down into my chest, where it formed an iron band around my lungs and heart. Breathe too deep and the whole thing might shatter. Rubbing my sternum with one hand in an effort to ease the constricted feeling, I took my first real look around the room.
If the guest room I’d been assigned before had been perfunctorily decorated, this one was positively Spartan. The walls were painted a soothing shade of beige that did nothing to make up for the bars on the windows or the cover bolted over the light bulb in the ceiling fixture. There was a bed: it had two thin pillows and what looked like a hotel duvet, the kind designed to be bleached to within an inch of its life. There was a dresser with four drawers. I walked over and opened them, driven more by dull curiosity than anything else. The top two were empty. The bottom two contained a spare set of sheets and a Bible, respectively. Despite Gabby’s joke about cable, there was no television, computer, or phone.
“This isn’t going to do at all,” I said, scowling. They could lock me in here at night, but during the day, I was going to need to be allowed out. I couldn’t do my research without a working Internet connection and access to my books; I couldn’t mix more of the only treatment that stood a chance of keeping me human without proper equipment. No matter how I looked at things, I couldn’t stay here.
The attached bathroom was as small as possible while still holding toilet, sink, and shower, and the shower left no room for me to keep my dressings dry. Angelo didn’t return with the promised plastic sheeting. I wasn’t really surprised.
In the end, I had to settle for a sponge bath at the sink. There was no mirror. Someone who wanted out of their situation could use broken glass as a weapon just as easily as they could use it as an instrument of suicide; it was too risky. I could understand every decision that had gone into preparing this facility, and I could even understand why they had continued to seem like good ideas after people began being bitten. But this simply would not stand. People who were locked up in conditions this tight for a disease with this long of an incubation period would worry themselves to death long before they showed a single symptom.
When I was clean enough that I was willing to live with myself, I returned to the main room and stretched out on the bed, resting my injured arm on my chest and tucking my right hand behind my head. War is war, no matter what form it takes, and when you’re at war, you get your sleep where you can find it. I closed my eyes and went under in a matter of minutes.
My dreams were full of teeth.
The sound of the door being unlocked jerked me out of my fitful doze. I sat up, my right hand going to the knife at my belt, and waited as the door swung open and Shelby stepped into the room. The mice riding on her shoulders gave a subdued cheer when they saw me.
“Brought you some visitors,” she said.
“Shelby.” I sat up straighter, letting go of my knife in order to run my fingers through my hair. It was still mud-caked, despite my attempts at a bath; I probably looked like some sort of horrifying genetic experiment involving a lab tech and a hedgehog. “I didn’t think they’d let you come to see me.”
“Oh, they weren’t going to,” she said, taking a step forward before crouching down to let the mice run off of her and onto the floor. “Dad came up with a good dozen reasons why I was never going to see you again, and Mum as good as said I’d let myself be swayed by emotion and let you out of here if I was the one to bring you the mice. It was a roaring argument; you should’ve been there with popcorn. Not that you would have enjoyed it much, since it was your fate we were mulling over, but at least you would’ve had popcorn.”
“HAIL!” cheered the mice, with more enthusiasm this time. They scampered across the floor and swarmed up my legs, running the length of my body to get to my shoulders, where they spread out like a tiny prison lineup. They managed to avoid stepping on any of my actual wounds, although two of the six ran down my arm to sniff at the gauze.
One of them squeaked something too shrill for me to understand. The other four went to join the investigation. That was . . . probably something I would need to worry about in a minute. I turned my attention back to Shelby, who was still in her crouch, looking nonplussed by the activity on my arm.
“What made them change their minds?” I asked.
“I pointed out that if I didn’t bring the mice, someone else would have to convince them to move,” she said.
“Hail the Unpredictable Priestess!” piped one of the mice, drawing a cheer from the others before they went back to studying my wounds.
Shelby blinked. “That’s a new one.”
“That’s . . . yeah.” I shook my head. “About what you said back at the med station—”
“Hold that thought: the mice weren’t the only reason I was allowed to come here.”
I swallowed a groan. “I should have known there was something else going on. What is it? Are you under orders to shoot me?”
“No. But I thought you might like to meet your doctor.” Shelby turned back to the door and called, “He’s decent, wearing trousers and everything. You can come on in.”
“Thank you for the confirmation of trousers,” said a mild female
voice. Its owner followed it into the room: a tall, slender woman of apparently Indian descent, dressed in tan slacks, sensible shoes, and a blue medical scrub top. Her long black hair was braided back from her face and tied off with a red hair tie, and if not for the way the mice stiffened as soon as she entered, I might have mistaken her for human. She smiled as she approached the bed where I sat, holding out her hand. “Dr. Helen Jalali, at your service. My cousin speaks well of you.”
“Is your cousin Kumari Sarpa, by any chance?” I asked, taking her hand and shaking it.
Her smile broadened, showing the oddly curved sides of her incisors. It was a minor physiological difference, easily overlooked—unless she decided to extend her fangs. “She is. However did you guess?” She had a strong Australian accent, confirming my suspicions that the wadjet had been unable to resist establishing a community here. It was perfect for them: no Covenant, lots of space, no native cobras to complicate the issue, and plenty of venomous snakes they could eat without feeling bad about their dietary choices. Australia and Arizona were the modern wadjet’s dream homes.
“I had a hunch.” I released her hand. “Did Shelby tell you what was going on?”
“Yes, and I was fascinated to hear that we have a lycanthropy-w outbreak in our own backyards.” Helen slanted a narrow-eyed glance at Shelby. “No one thought to notify the local cryptid populations. We don’t rank for ‘need to know’ information, it seems.”
Shelby held out her hands, palms facing Helen. “Don’t shoot the messenger, all right? I’ve been in America the last eighteen months. I haven’t been making any decisions about who tells what to who—and besides, I didn’t even know you were here.”
“No, but you were here before that, and you never came to tell us when there was a crisis,” Helen replied. She didn’t sound angry; just tired, like this was a conversation she had often had with herself, and now felt obligated to share with an actual person. “This place is less than four kilometers from my house. We weren’t hiding ourselves from you; you just didn’t care. I have kids, you know. They could’ve done with knowing that there was a group of rangers, however misguided, close enough to keep them safe.”
“I’m sorry,” said Shelby. “I’ll talk to the rest of the Society. We’ll try to be better.”
Helen blinked, nonplussed. Apparently, that wasn’t the reaction she’d been expecting. “Ah,” she said. “Well, thank you. Now, as for you, Mr. Price . . .” She turned back to me, attention going to my arm.
That was when one of the mice decided to speak up. “Not sick,” it pronounced.
Helen blinked. “Excuse me?”
“The God of Scales and Silences is not sick,” said the mouse. The others joined in with nods and sounds of rodent agreement. “He is damaged, yes, and will need Tender Care and perhaps Kisses for his Boo-Boos, but he is not sick.”
“I wouldn’t be sick yet, guys. Lycanthropy has a twenty-eight-day incubation period. It’ll be weeks before we know one way or the other.”
The mouse that had initially spoken turned and looked at me like I was being intentionally obtuse. “No,” it said. “We know right now. Today or twenty-eight days, it will make no difference, because you are not sick.”
“I don’t think you can—”
“Hold on,” said Helen. “The, ah, mouse may be on to something here. What are you, mouse?”
“Aeslin,” squeaked the mouse proudly. “We Stand in Service to the Gods.”
“Aeslin mice traditionally do,” said Helen. “Can you detect sickness?”
“Not all sickness,” said the mouse. “Some things smell wrong quickly, like flesh going sour, or breath going dank. If there were sickness here, we would know.”
“You can’t know,” I insisted. “Okay, yes, you’re pretty good at catching the early stages of a cold, and we’ve learned to listen to you when you say it’s soup and juice time, but you’ve never been around lycanthropy. Let Dr. Jalali do her job.”
The mouse looked at me, whiskers bristling. “The Spring was New, and the green leaves of the willow trees were coming into Bud,” it snapped, in the rapid singsong that meant a point of scripture was being made. “And lo, the Patient Priestess did come to the God of Uncommon Sense and say Dear, Something Is in the Sheep Flock, and We Should Investigate. Then did the God of Uncommon Sense call upon the Sitter of Babies—”
“Wait.” I held up a hand, cutting off the flood of rodent theology before it could build to an unstoppable pitch. “Are you saying that Great-Great-Grandpa Alexander and Great-Great-Grandma Enid took a member of the congregation with them to deal with werewolves?”
“He got all that from a mouse beginning a religious parable?” asked Helen, looking to Shelby incredulously. “How are these not the most protected species in the known universe? They ought to be everywhere.”
“But they’re not,” said Shelby, looking regretful. “As to the parable bit, yeah. They go on, and he translates. Unless we’re having sex at the time. Then I just chuck a pillow at them and tell him that noise was the wind.”
I rolled my eyes but otherwise ignored her. I had more important things to worry about, like the mouse clinging to my arm and looking at me with surpassing rodent smugness. “Not one member,” said the mouse. “A full dozen. We scattered through the grass and led them to the den, and oh! Such cheese! Such cake! We feasted well and thoroughly!”
“HAIL!” shouted the rest of the mice, exulting in the memory of a feast that happened generations before they were born.
“Hold on a moment.” Helen leaned closer to the mouse, which held its ground surprisingly well, considering that she was a giant cobra that just happened to look like a human woman. “Before they became extinct, Aeslin mice were renowned for their ability to preserve institutional knowledge. We know they pass their rituals from generation to generation. Why wouldn’t they also pass the descriptions of scents they wanted to catalog. Mouse?”
“Yes?” asked the mouse.
“What does lycanthropy smell like?”
For a moment, we all held our breath. The mouse didn’t seem to notice. Calmly, it replied, “Like rabies, but sweeter, the way a spider’s bite smells when it is fresh and hard to see. There is no smell of sweetness here, only torn flesh, and blood, and bruising. He is not sick.”
“Do you mind if I proceed with preventative care despite your no doubt excellent diagnosis? I’m sure you’re right—you’re talking mice, after all, and I honestly can’t think of any studies saying not to use talking mice as diagnostic engines—but it’s best if I do my job anyway.” She leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially, in a voice still loud enough for Shelby to hear, “The local humans get shirty when they think we silly monsters know more than they do.”
“Hey,” protested Shelby, without any real heat. She knew the local attitude toward human-form cryptids as well as I did, if not better: she had shared it, on some level, until she’d met my family and friends. It was hard to keep thinking of people who didn’t descend from monkeys as inferior when they were smarter than you were, or at least better read.
Helen looked at Shelby and shrugged. “Sorry, princess. I go with what I know, and what I know is that your people were going to let a werewolf run rampant through the state without telling anyone they didn’t feel protective toward. It makes a girl a little cranky. And you, sir.” She turned back to me as she stood, putting herself on higher ground. It was a snake instinct that the wadjet shared with their cobra cousins. Male wadjet sometimes used the females to become taller still, and if the sight of a woman in heels with a spectacled cobra balanced on her shoulder wouldn’t strike fear into your heart, then your heart is made of sterner stuff than mine. “I’m told you have a treatment. Is this correct?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, resisting the urge to stand and put myself on her level. It would just make her uncomfortable, and I needed her to stay in my corner, at le
ast long enough to prepare her report to the Society. “It’s in my bag. The nasty black sludge with the little sparkles in it.”
“I’ll get it,” said Shelby, sounding glad to be of use.
“Be careful,” I said, earning myself a sour look. I shook my head. “I mean it, Shelby. This stuff is incredibly toxic. If you get any of it on you, you could make yourself really sick.”
“And you’re going to swallow it anyway, aren’t you, you silly man?” She crossed the room to my field bag and rummaged through it for a moment before pulling out the jar of antiserum that I’d managed to mix before collapsing. “What do you want done with this?”
“I’ll take it,” said Helen, holding out her hand. “You don’t have to stay in here for the next part if you don’t want to. I know that seeing your mate in pain can be troublesome.”
“No,” said Shelby, in a flat tone devoid of the humor she had been forcing herself to project only seconds before. “I stay.”
“As you wish.” Helen took the jar from her and turned back to me. “Please remove your shirt and assume a neutral sitting position. If you make any hostile moves, I will strike. If I feel threatened in any way, I will strike. If you attempt to reach for a weapon, I will strike. Do you have any allergies I need to be aware of?”
The change in tenor between the portions of her speech was abrupt enough to leave me blinking as I unbuttoned my already-ruined shirt and stripped it off, exposing my bruised and bloodied chest. Shelby made a little hissing noise between her teeth as she saw the damage without anything to obscure it or make it look less bad than it really was. “I don’t intend to threaten you, but why did we just go from friendly to ‘I’m going to pump you full of venom’?”
“I’m about to start doing things that could cause you a great deal of pain.” Helen turned to Shelby. “I know you want to be here for his treatment, but I’m going to need that chair now.”