Shelby scowled, but couldn’t deny the lack of seating in the room. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t start without me.” Then she was out of the room, heading into the hall with irritated quickness.
Helen turned to me immediately, dropping her voice to something more conspiratorial than her earlier staged whisper. “Are they holding you prisoner?” she asked. “My cousin vouched for you, and I am willing to get you out of here if that’s necessary. We can discuss payment later.”
I blinked at her. What tactics did the Thirty-Sixers use to keep the Covenant out of their continent? “No,” I said. “I’m here voluntarily, because they asked for help, and it seemed like a good idea to keep werewolves from getting established in Australia. Didn’t Kumari mention Shelby?”
“She said you traveled with a blonde girl from the Society, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.” She set the jar of black sludge on the bedside table, abandoning her hushed tone. “I don’t know how much you know about how things work here, but the Thirty-Six Society does not call in the local wadjet to play doctor.”
“Then they should,” I said. I moved into a sitting position as I spoke, sending the mice scattering for the relative safety of the bed, which at least wasn’t moving. “I asked them to call you. You can’t catch what I might have.”
“You are not sick,” squeaked the mouse who had diagnosed me, indignant. It took up a perch on my knee, wrapping its tail around its paws and fixing me with a stern eye. “You must learn to have Faith,” it chided.
“I do have faith,” I said. “I just have more faith in science than I do in, er, faith itself. It’s a God thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
All the mice made a low “ooo” noise, clearly enthralled by the idea of being in the presence of divine mysteries. I was going to pay for this later.
Helen looked amused. “Your life is one long theological argument, isn’t it?”
“You have no idea,” I said. “But my point stands. You can’t catch lycanthropy—which I do not have—” I added, before the mice could start objecting again, “but you understand human physiology and how to provide medical treatment. That makes you the best person for the job.”
“It’s nice of you to say so.” Helen turned as Shelby walked back into the room, now lugging a folding wooden chair. “Thank you. I apologize for sending you away before, but I needed to speak to my patient in private.”
“Gotcha,” said Shelby. She plunked the chair down next to Helen before looking at me. “You didn’t bite him. We’re fine. What do you want me to do now? I’m not leaving, so don’t even suggest that. Fighting isn’t fun when one of us is venomous and the other is heavily armed.”
“It’s just like being at home,” I said, garnering a cheer from the mice.
Helen didn’t rise to the bait, thankfully. We could be here all evening if she really got Shelby going. “If you’re not going to leave, you can help me with my equipment. I’d rather avoid any chance that you’re going to come into contact with his bodily fluids, just to be safe.”
The mouse on my knee made a small huffing noise, but otherwise didn’t argue.
“Right,” said Shelby. “I’ve already had two showers today, and I’d rather not take a third. I’m here for whatever you need.” She sat on the end of the bed, close enough to be reassuring, but far enough away to be out of the logical splash range for anything that happened to come out of me.
Helen sat down in the chair Shelby had provided, setting her medical bag on the floor between her and Shelby. She leaned over to dig around in it, producing a pair of thick-lensed glasses and a suture kit. “Now,” she said. “Let’s begin.”
I’ll spare you the process of having my wounds cleaned—again—cauterized with silver nitrate, and stitched by Helen, who had a steady hand but didn’t believe in painkillers. She was a general practitioner by trade, which meant she had an excellent grasp of human anatomy and where it differed from wadjet anatomy (like the part where I was a mammal, and not a big snake in an excellent human suit). She was a field doctor for cryptids by calling, and that meant that painkillers were something to be reserved for really serious accidents, the sort of thing where the person being worked on would be lucky to walk away, and thus didn’t need to keep their wits about them. Since I didn’t qualify as a severe trauma case, she just jumped right in and started searing my flesh.
There wasn’t much conversation during that part of the process. It wasn’t until she was putting in the stitches that she got chatty. “You’re sure this was a werewolf?” she asked, as she sewed up a long gash on the back of my arm.
It was all I could do not to jump, from the combination of the pain and the question. “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. “It looked like a werewolf, it moved like a werewolf, and it sure as hell wasn’t a dingo.”
“Dingos don’t look much like wolves, actually,” said Shelby, who was resolutely not watching as the needle darted in and out of my flesh. One corner of the room seemed to have become particularly fascinating to her, and she was staring at that instead of anything involving me, Helen, and the medical bag.
“That’s . . . odd,” said Helen, and tied off her sutures. “Werewolves aren’t supposed to be capable of thought once they’ve transformed, but whatever bit you did it like they knew exactly where to aim. None of the major arteries were involved, and while there’s muscle damage from the bite, it’s not severe enough to keep you out of commission.”
“Meaning that if the infection were to take, I’d be primed to do a lot of damage when the twenty-eight-day incubation was up,” I said slowly. “That’s . . . Shelby, do we have pictures of the other werewolf bites? I need to know whether this is coincidence or a pattern.” Once would be a lucky accident that had kept my injuries from becoming too severe. More than once would mean we might be dealing with something impossible, and terrifying.
A werewolf that remembered how to think.
Werewolves were capable of spreading the infection that made them at a fast and deadly rate without tying human intelligence to their rage. Give them the ability to think, to plan, to work on any level above “beast,” and we could be looking at the kind of outbreak the world had never seen before.
“I’ll get them for you,” said Shelby.
Helen picked up the jar of cuckoo blood—now more than half-empty—and began slathering it generously over my stitches. It would help keep the wound from becoming infected, since it would create a virtually anaerobic environment. Wherever cuckoos were from, it wasn’t a place where our native bacteria thrived. “Wouldn’t intelligent werewolves be a good thing?” she asked. “I mean, you could reason with them. Explain why their behavior is inappropriate, and convince them to stop.”
“Rabies attacks the brain and central nervous system,” I said. “People who become rabid have been known to kill their friends, their loved ones, even their own children. It’s not universal—most rabies victims die without hurting anyone—but it happens enough to be a common fear throughout the mammalian world. Lycanthropy is worse. No one has ever encountered a calm or passive werewolf, and before you say that’s Covenant teachings talking, I’d like to note that almost all werewolf killings can be classed as self-defense. The others have involved werewolves that have already attacked, more than once. We can’t assume that an intelligent werewolf would be friendly.”
“There are days when I am simply ecstatic to have come from a different branch of the evolutionary tree,” said Helen, packing her suture kit away. “Now, your antiserum. You really want to go through with this? Even with your mice saying that you’re clean?”
“My mice are, if they’ll forgive me for saying this, mice,” I said. “I have absolute faith in their teachings, and if they say I’m clean, I’m sure they’re right. But I need to be able to go to Shelby’s father and say I’ve done everything in my power to mak
e sure I can’t hurt anyone. That includes using the treatment I’m going to recommend for everyone else who’s been exposed.” Although I was also going to recommend the mice check everyone who was even suspected of harboring a lycanthropy-w infection. If they gave any result other than “clean,” we’d have something resembling proof that they could do what they said they could.
“It’s your funeral,” said Helen. “Lay back on the bed, open your mouth, and think about something more pleasant than what I’m about to do to you. Because . . .”
“I know,” I said, cutting her off. “This is going to hurt. Now do it.”
And she did.
Nine
“That probably wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve ever done. Points for style, I guess. Points off for being too stupid to live.”
—Kevin Price
Waiting in one of the quarantine rooms in a secluded guesthouse in Queensland, Australia
THE FEELING STARTED COMING back to my tongue an hour after Dr. Helen Jalali administered the werewolf antiserum. There was still a sharp, almost burning sensation at the root of it, and I couldn’t keep myself from drooling—not the best thing when you’re a) trying to present yourself as a professional and b) dealing with people who are terrified of accidental fluid transfer—but at least my temporary lisp was gone. That was a good thing, given the pitch I was about to make.
The door was closed, and had been closed since Shelby had walked the doctor back to her car. Helen had grumbled about blindfolds the whole time, which made me suspect that the Society still wasn’t playing nicely with the sapient locals. That was a bad sign. They needed all the help they could get to come through this reasonably intact—and that help included me.
I reached the wall, turned around, and paced back in the other direction. I was getting tired of waiting for Shelby to come back for me, and knew that I couldn’t move until she did. The inside of my mouth still tasted like aconite and ketamine, which accounted for the continued drooling. The body knows when it contains things that shouldn’t be there, and will try to flush them out through whatever means are necessary.
The mice were arrayed in a loose circle on the bed, watching me pace. Every fourth circuit around the room they shouted “HAIL!” for no clear reason. It seemed to be keeping them happy, and while I was sure they had some religious explanation for their behavior, I was equally sure I wouldn’t be able to get them to shut up about it if I made the mistake of asking. The last thing I wanted to do was have Riley walk in on the Aeslin mice in full-on religious ecstasy.
Although the look on his face might be worth the argument that would be sure to follow. I smiled a little at the thought, and was pleased to feel the muscles on either side of my mouth pull upward at the same time. Facial numbness and temporary paralysis were possible side effects of the antiserum. (They were among the milder, more desirable side effects, mind, since the others included fun things like “seizure,” “heart failure,” and “death.” Modern medicine is occasionally deadly, but there’s a lot to be said for having access to machines and lab technicians capable of refining deadly toxins to a slightly less deadly state.)
The mice cheered twice more in response to my circuits around the room, and I was beginning to give serious thought to asking them why they kept doing that—damn the consequences—when there was a knock at the door. I stopped dead, wiping the last of the drool from my chin as I called, “Yes?”
“Alex, it’s Shelby. I’ve got my dad with me, and he says he’ll only come in if you’ll sit on the bed and promise to stay sitting the whole time we’re in the room. Can you do that? Please?” There was a degree of anxiety in her voice that I very rarely heard from her.
I walked back to the bed, gesturing for the mice to get out of the way before I plopped down onto the mattress. Most of them ran behind the pillow. One—the one that had been the first to say I wasn’t sick after they’d checked my wound for signs of the lycanthropy-w virus—scampered onto my knee and sat, tail curled primly around paws. It looked up at me, silently asking for permission.
I nodded. It wasn’t like having the mouse there was going to hurt anything, and it might help, depending on how things went down. Besides, I appreciated the company. It made me feel a little less alone. “I’m sitting,” I called. “It’s safe to come in.”
The door swung open, and Shelby stepped into the room. Her face matched her voice: anxious and drawn, tight with worry. She held the door for her father as he entered after her. Riley Tanner didn’t look worried. He just looked angry.
“So quarantine is good enough for our people, but it’s not good enough for you, is that it, Price?” he demanded, not bothering with pleasantries. “I don’t see why you think you’re going to change my mind about basic protocol.”
“Hello, sir,” I said. “I’m fine, thank you for asking.”
He blinked, apparently taken aback. “I didn’t ask.”
“I noticed,” I said, in my best “I am a scientist, don’t fuck with me” tone. It was hard to fight the urge to stand and put myself on a level with him: like Dr. Jalali, he was using his height to assert dominance, towering over me because there was nothing I could do to stop him. And like Dr. Jalali, I needed to let him have that feeling of dominance. I had needed her to provide me with medical care without the risk of infection. I needed him to let me out of this room while I could still do some good. “As for why I’m asking you to change your mind . . . sir, I never said you had to quarantine your people, just monitor them closely. Keeping them—keeping us—isolated at night is a good idea for the sake of everyone’s peace of mind, but there’s no risk of transformation until twenty-eight days have passed. That’s twenty-eight days of backup you’re planning to waste, all because you don’t understand this disease.”
“You’re drooling, son,” said Riley. “Go ahead. Keep telling me you’re not sick.”
“This is a side effect of the mixture I ingested to make sure I wouldn’t get sick,” I said, fighting to keep my tone level. I wiped the side of my mouth with my hand. “It irritates the mouth, which can cause excessive salivation.”
“Well, you irritate me, so I guess you and your ‘cure’ have something in common.”
“Dad,” snapped Shelby. “You said you’d listen to him, not come in here trying to score points like this was some sort of . . . of sport. Why aren’t you listening to him?”
“I don’t know, honey, maybe because he was raised by Johrlac, nearly got you turned to stone, and got one of my best men killed within a day of showing up on this continent?” Riley wheeled on Shelby with unnerving speed. She felt it, too: she took a step back, letting go of the door. It swung shut. Riley didn’t appear to notice. “He’s been nothing but bad news since you got involved with him. I told you to cut ties as soon as you reported he had one of those heartless mind-suckers living with him, but you didn’t listen. You had to save your boyfriend. Now he’s here, wreaking havoc amongst the people who should be able to trust you to have their backs. So why don’t you tell me, daughter dear? Why are you listening to him at all?”
“Because he knows what he’s doing, and he’s not letting personal feelings interfere with his work,” she snapped, her normal temper surging back to the surface. “He’d do this job for anyone. That’s a thing you should be glad of, because if you were treating me the way you’re treating him, I’d sure as hell not be volunteering to help you with anything.”
Riley glared at her. Shelby glared back. I looked at the mouse on my knee. The mouse looked up at me.
“Sometimes I wish I had the ability to conjure popcorn from thin air,” I said.
The mouse flared its whiskers in amusement. “It is as in the teachings of the Noisy Priestess,” it squeaked. “Always should popcorn be eaten when people fight over foolish things.”
“Uh, Alex?” I looked up to see Shelby looking at me, a bewildered expression on her face. Her fath
er wore a virtually identical expression. “Are you having a chat with your mice while we’re arguing about whether or not to let you out of quarantine?”
“No,” I said, standing. I did it slowly enough that the mouse was able to run up my arm to my shoulder, where it perched, whiskers quivering. “I’m having a chat with my mice while you argue about whether or not there’s anything here to argue about. It seemed like less of a waste of time.”
“Son, you want to sit yourself back down before we have a problem,” said Riley. His tone was tight and cautioning.
“No, I don’t believe I do,” I said. “You’re not stupid, are you, Mr. Tanner? I don’t see how you could be. I’ve met your daughters, and intelligence is often partially genetic. More, I’ve met your people. The Thirty-Six Society doesn’t listen to you because you’re big, they listen to you because you’re smart. You know your country, you know your territory, you know your local cryptids. You’re the best man for the job you do.”
“Flattery isn’t going to make me stop telling you to sit down,” he said. There was a note of confusion in his voice, like he couldn’t quite figure out where I was going with this, and consequently didn’t know how to make me hurry it up.
“Sir, if you’re not stupid, why are you persisting in acting like you are?” It was hard to keep my tone level as I asked that question. Shelby’s alarmed expression and “cut it out” hand gestures weren’t helping.
Riley’s eyes narrowed. “All right, forget sitting down. It’ll be more fun to pound the stupid out of you while you’re standing up.”
“If I’m infected, you can’t risk fluid transfer.”
That stopped him. I smiled.
“So basically, if you ‘pound the stupid’ out of me, you’re admitting the treatment worked, and I’m not an infection risk. Normally, I wouldn’t endorse that, but with the mice also vouching for me, I think you’d be safe to take the risk. Or we can go ahead and try my plan, which involves less punching me in the face—disappointing, I know—but might have better long-term results.”