“But that’s not all, is it?” Shelby frowned. “You’ve been prickly since I got home. What’s wrong, Raina?”
“Are you home for good or not?”
The question seemed to come completely out of left field. Shelby blinked at her sister. I did much the same. Raina looked at us both and groaned, shaking her head.
“You don’t even get it a little, do you? She—” She stabbed a finger at Shelby, whose look of profound confusion deepened, “—was supposed to go to America, learn about manticores, and head straight back here. Instead, she sent a bunch of notes explaining how to deal with the problem, and she stayed gone. It took werewolves to bring her home, and she hasn’t said word one about whether it’s for keeps. You weren’t supposed to leave us!” She whirled to her sister on the last sentence, making it clear that she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Jack left, and he was going to be Dad’s replacement one day, so with him gone, all that fell to you. But you just had to go, too, didn’t you? You weren’t supposed to go.”
“Oh, Raina.” Shelby pulled her hand from mine. I let her go without hesitation, and even took a step back to place myself firmly out of the scene as the sisters embraced, holding each other so tightly that there was no space between them.
Something nudged my hip. I looked down to see Jett pressed against my leg, her ears forward, watching the two. I rested my hand on the top of her head, and we stood there silently, four lost souls, waiting for the future to arrive.
Ten
“A life that is lived carefully, calmly, with thorough preparation and sufficient resources, is likely to be healthy, long, and incredibly boring. Fortunately, I have never been in danger of living that particular life.”
—Jonathan Healy
Tromping through the brush in Queensland, Australia, looking for signs of werewolves, which is a genuinely terrible idea
ONCE THE THIRTY-SIX SOCIETY decided on something, they didn’t stand around talking about whether or not they’d made the right call. They barreled forward with little concern for the potential damage; it was like meeting a group with an institutional policy of “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” And that explains how, less than two hours after I’d been cleared to return to the field, on the same day I’d been bitten by a werewolf, and less than an hour after putting in a call in to Helen to ask her to come back and begin treating the Thirty-Sixers, I found myself walking into yet another unfamiliar forest.
Shelby was nearby, tromping gamely through the brush and offering helpful tips like, “Don’t step on the anthill,” and “There may have been a snake just now, I’m not sure, but if there is, try not to piss it off.” Raina was a little farther ahead, with Jett tagging at her heels like a small black shadow. There had been no discussion of leaving the dog behind when we took off on this latest fool’s errand: she was trained to help Cooper in the field, and that made her useful for our purposes, as long as we didn’t mind the fact that she’d take off running if she saw a bat that needed snapping at.
I had asked why, if Jett was field-trained, Cooper had left her behind when we went to gather aconite. No one had been able to give me an answer for that.
Charlotte, Riley, and Gabby were farther along, having driven another two miles up the road before getting out and starting through the wood. We were all supposed to wind up in the same place: a sheep meadow that had already been the site of two suspected werewolf attacks. The hope was that we would arrive right around the time the moon finished rising, and—if the werewolves were really responsible for the carnage the shepherds had been reporting—catch the werewolves in the act. Their transformations weren’t actually tied to the moonrise, but as most human werewolves believed that they were, they were more likely to subconsciously trigger the change when they saw the moon. The mind was a powerful thing. Sometimes dismayingly so.
(I had attempted to point out, several times, that this plan was predicated in part on our sharing a meadow with multiple werewolves, after just one had managed to wound me and kill Cooper. Of the Tanners, only Gabby seemed inclined to see this as a bad thing, and she had been voted down by the rest of her family. Of such democracies are horror movies born. Suggesting that we not split the party had been met with even more disdain. Two groups covered twice as much ground, and we were all armed. Discussion over. I would have stayed home and skipped the whole thing, but Shelby was going, and I’d be damned if I was going to let her walk into a massacre without me.)
Shelby fell into step beside me. “Raina’s up ahead,” she said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“That’s good,” I said. “It’s always nice to get torn apart in the open, as opposed to getting torn apart in the shelter of the trees.”
“That’s the spirit.” She bumped me gently with her shoulder. “It’ll be all right. There’s more of us this time. You’re not getting bit again on my watch.”
“The last werewolf kept coming until I’d almost run out of bullets,” I said.
“You weren’t packing silver then,” said Shelby, entirely too reasonably. “You are now. It’ll be fine, as long as you don’t switch back to lead ammunition for a laugh.”
“Right,” I grumbled. Then I paused, giving her a sidelong look. “You know, I’d been hoping for the chance to talk to you without the rest of your family around.”
“Yeah?” She sounded innocent, which meant that—knowing Shelby—she knew what I was about to ask.
“Why are you telling your father I’m your fiancé? I sort of thought one of us had to propose for that.”
“Well, first, because he needed to see you as something I was properly attached to, not some summer fling. ‘Fiancé’ has more weight than ‘boyfriend’ when you’re asking someone not be put down for the crime of getting bit by a werewolf,” she said, again sounding entirely too reasonable. “Aside from that, you did propose. It just took me a while to sort out what my answer was going to be. Once I did, I figured I could go ahead and jump straight to fiancé. Was that wrong?”
“What?” I sputtered. “I didn’t propose.”
“Did so,” she said. “In the woods, between the gorgon encampment and their farming community, after I killed that poor lindworm. You said ‘marry me.’ I’m saying yes.”
I stopped walking. Shelby continued for a few more feet before she stopped and looked over her shoulder at me, raising her eyebrows.
“Well?” she said.
“You’re saying yes,” I said flatly. “It’s been months. That was on a different continent, during a completely different life-threatening situation. And you’re saying yes now.”
“What?” She walked back over to stop in front of me, spreading her hands as she asked, “Do you not want to marry me?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I want to marry you.”
“Did you not propose?”
“Yes,” I admitted, before adding sheepishly, “But I didn’t think you’d noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed.” She leaned in to give me a chaste kiss on the cheek—an annoying but necessary observation of the “no fluid transfer” rule that was going to be in effect until I received my final clean bill of health, at the end of the twenty-eight-day latency period. “You can’t blame a girl for thinking long and hard before she agreed to marry a Price, now can you?”
“Most of the girls I know on more than a superficial level are Price girls, so that question is a little unfair,” I said. “I don’t have a ring for you or anything. I was sort of not expecting this right now.”
Shelby’s smile was bright enough to light up all the forests of Australia. “That’s all right. We can go to the jeweler’s after all this is taken care of. Nothing says ‘hooray, we didn’t die’ like watching the salespeople crawl all over themselves trying to convince you to buy expensive rocks you don’t really want.”
I blinked at her. Then, slowly, I began to smile, until my expression mirro
red hers. “We’re getting married.”
“Well, sure we are, silly,” said Shelby, before turning and sauntering off in the direction we’d been heading previously. “Won’t you at least try to keep up?”
I tried.
We walked almost a mile before we came out of the woods atop a ridge overlooking a broad green meadow that looked almost artificial in its pastoral sweetness, like someone had transplanted it from a movie set in New Zealand. Fluffy clouds of sheep dotted the green, and we were far enough away that they looked a little dingy but not filthy—a beautiful trick of distance. (Sheep are some of the nastiest creatures in the world. They’re smelly, stupid things that have been bred to have way too much hair, meaning that all their bodily fluids and drippings get felted right into the wool. If not for bleach, we’d all walk around covered in sheep shit all the time. Agriculture is not a pretty thing.)
Raina was already on the ridge, having beat us out of the woods by at least fifteen minutes. She had managed to find a stick somewhere, and was throwing it for Jett over and over again. The dog seemed willing to continue this game indefinitely, but Raina reclaimed the stick and didn’t throw it again when she saw us come walking out of the tree line.
“I was starting to think you’d been eaten,” she accused, although she didn’t come anywhere near her previously acerbic tone. She still didn’t strike me as one of the world’s warmest people, but whatever had been broken between her and her sister was no longer festering. “There are drop bears around here, you know. Unless you’ve forgotten how bad an idea it is to mess with those?”
“Didn’t see any,” Shelby said brightly. “Needed to chat with Alex for a minute or two before we had to get back to business. Any sign of Gabby and the folks?”
“Not yet, but they had a bit more of a hike, so I’m not worried.” Raina threw the stick again, sending Jett flying after it in an ecstasy of canine delight.
“I know this is a really awkward, ugly American sort of question, but do Australians not like roads that actually go where you’re trying to go?” I asked. “We seem to do a lot of walking through woods and fields and swampy bits, and maybe it’s me, but I’d expect the roads to take us to those places. It would be a lot easier to run away if we didn’t have to navigate half a mile of hostile forest before we could get to the car.”
“Car’s two kilometers that way,” said Raina, pointing across the meadow. “If we need to run away, we’ll be getting our cardio for the week.”
“Right,” I said, putting a hand over my face. “I’m in a country full of Shelbys.”
“I resent that,” said Shelby. “I’m unique, thank you. It’s not my fault if you’ve no appreciation for our culture.”
I lowered my hand and gave her my best pleading look. It seemed to do at least a little good: she huffed, looking amused, and exchanged a quick glance with her sister, who snorted and flung the stick again.
“What she means by ‘appreciation for our culture’ is ‘you have to understand how much conservation work we do.’ A lot of the land around here is privately owned, and at least partially dedicated to preservation. This is sheep grazing land, yeah, but it’s interspersed with billabongs and isolate tree patches, which provide habitat for a lot of endangered wildlife. Including drop bears.” Jett brought back the stick. Raina threw it again. “So there are no roads because either the roads belong to people we don’t feel like explaining ourselves to—like the rancher who owns this particular patch—or because running a road in would mess things up for the creatures who already live here.”
“Ah,” I said. “I should have thought of that. I just have trouble matching the care you take with the native animals with the disregard you have for the other native sapients.”
Raina frowned at me before giving her sister a questioning look.
“Alex doesn’t understand how we can be so good to the drop bears and bunyip and such when we don’t have good relations with our nonhuman neighbors,” translated Shelby. “Honestly, after spending the last year with his family, I have to ask the same question. We’ve been falling down when it comes to getting on with the other people who live in this country. We ought to be better.”
“Tell it to the werewolves,” said Riley. We turned to see him ascending the ridge, with Charlotte and Gabby close behind. Gabby looked anxious. She was darting glances up at the sky, watching as the sun sank slowly toward the horizon. Charlotte, in contrast, looked perfectly serene and fresh as a daisy, and not at all like a woman who had just hiked a mile through dense forest. “Animals are animals, no matter what they look like. They have instincts, and we can’t blame them for that. People are different. People have to learn to control themselves. Any person who can’t may as well be considered a monster.”
I frowned. “So are you saying that any thinking cryptid that doesn’t ‘control themselves’ into acting like a human being may as well be a monster?”
Riley shrugged, massive shoulders rolling under his shirtsleeves until I was afraid he was going to bust a seam. “You said it, not me,” he said. “Raina, Shelly, you’re with me. We need to set a line around the flock. Gabby, you stay here with your mum. Keep an eye on our ‘guest.’” He turned and went tromping back down the hill. Shelby cast me an apologetic glance as she followed him. Raina didn’t even do that.
“That could have gone better,” I muttered, watching them go.
“That isn’t likely,” said Charlotte brightly. “Have you got a weapon?”
I turned to give her a blank look before reaching into my jacket and producing my backup handgun. It was small and compact enough that it didn’t change the line of my clothing, which was important when there was a chance I’d be interacting with noncombatants, and it was loaded with silver bullets. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew,” I said. “Shelby and I were discussing ammunition in the car.”
“I wasn’t sure whether that meant you were borrowing one of her guns, or whether you had one of your own,” she said, not missing a beat. “Sometimes Gabby forgets to pack a pistol when she doesn’t really want to be coming along on a hunt.”
“Mum!” protested Gabby.
“It’s true,” said Charlotte. She turned to survey the flock, and the rest of her family. Riley was moving Raina and Shelby into position on the far side of the massed sheep. Either there wasn’t a sheepdog working the field, or the Tanners were a familiar enough sight that the dog wasn’t going on alert. Jett was a black speck bouncing along at Raina’s heels. “Looks like we’re good to move. Are you both clear on your orders?”
“Yes,” said Gabby.
“No,” I said.
“Good,” said Charlotte. “Move out.” She started loping down the side of the hill, moving with a speed and grace that spoke of absolute familiarity with the terrain. The sun, having dipped down to taste the horizon and found it good, was now descending almost as fast as Charlotte Tanner, dropping the visibility on the field more with every second. I exchanged a glance with Gabby. Then, without another word spoken, the two of us took off after Charlotte.
Gabby, like her mother, was graceful and gliding on the uneven ground, even though she never quite approached Charlotte’s speed. Charlotte ran like a six year old, or an Olympian in training, and somehow managed to do both at the same time: every leap was perfectly planned and executed, every step found solid ground. I, on the other hand, fumbled along behind them like the tourist I was. The quality of the soil was unfamiliar to me, turning every footfall into something potentially treacherous. Only the mild but constant fear of the things that lurked among the Australian underbrush kept me from taking a header into the grass.
It says something when you’re more afraid of falling down and maybe meeting a spider than you are of breaking an ankle, providing that broken ankle doesn’t dump you on your ass.
The sheep were agitated when we reached the bottom of the ridge. They danced from one foot to anothe
r, heads up, ears flat, bleating into the twilight. Riley was a hulking shape on the other side of the flock, and I allowed myself a moment to wonder whether he might not be the problem. Sheep may be stupid, but they can sense hostility, and Riley had hostility to spare.
Then one of the rams reared up onto its hind legs, gave a low, bleating moan, like an animal in excruciating pain, and turned inside out.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, and started shooting.
The most common comparison for the lycanthropy family of viruses is rabies. They cause a lot of similar symptoms in the people they infect, which is why we go back to rabies again and again when talking about anyone infected with lycanthropy. The uninformed might even start to think that a werewolf was just a person with a bad case of rabies, someone who turned almost animalistic in their rages. There’s a reason we explain it like that. It’s easier on everyone if we never couch things in more honest terms.
The ram—a big boy, maybe three hundred pounds of mutton on the hoof—shrieked as its skin warped and twisted, woolly coat being expelled from the skin with a speed that left it raw and bleeding, hence the appearance of having been turned inside out. The bones were distending and transforming so fast that I could hear them crackle and snap inside its body. Its flesh was changing too, shifting composition from marbled, fatty softness to rock-hard, combat-ready muscle. The ram bellowed again as our bullets bit into its midsection. This time, it sounded less like a bleat, and more like a howl of protest against the world. How dare this reality exist? How dare we shoot at the ram, which was meant to be king of the newly born night?
I stopped firing wildly, forcing myself to take a breath and steady my hands. Then, barely pausing to aim, I raised my gun again and fired at the werewolf, which showed virtually no signs of its ovine origins.