“Sounds like everyone wins, then,” I said. “How much do you know about the lycanthropy family?”
“Nasty business, related to rabies, and this is the first major outbreak I’ve heard of on this continent,” she said. “We’ve had some issues with a few nasty strains in India, but I’ve never been there, so I don’t have frontline experience.”
“Right. Everything we have says that once someone is infected and capable of transforming, they’re not really rational anymore—that they’re essentially beasts in their transformed state. But the werewolves we’re dealing with here are showing complex planning behaviors while transformed. They’re capable of lying in wait while they let their targets get into position. It doesn’t feel right somehow. It doesn’t mesh with what we know about this disease.”
Helen took a swig of her ginger beer, expression going thoughtful. “Didn’t this start off as spillover from the therianthropes?” she asked. “It was their disease first.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We think it originated with either the wulver or the faoladh. We’ve never really spent the time or resources to try to nail down the origins of the infection. Most of the likely origin points are firmly within Covenant territory, and knowing where rabies lurks naturally hasn’t enabled us to cure it.”
“Right. See, here’s the thing. I’ve never met whatever that second one you said was, but I’ve met wulver. They’re perfectly nice people, and they’re not ravening beasts when they’re transformed. A little impulsive, sure, and really offended if you try to play fetch with them—mostly because they will play fetch, and then they feel bad about letting their instincts take over—but still people. They’re just people who look different.”
“That doesn’t match the data we have on werewolves,” I said, a sick feeling starting to form in the pit of my stomach. “I think we’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“What’s that?” Shelby sounded weary. I turned to see her standing behind us. She had replaced her bloodstained shirt with one pilfered from the clothing we’d moved into my temporary room. It hung around her like a shroud, save where it caught on the slope of her breasts and became slightly, distractingly too small. She smelled like strawberry shampoo and industrial soap.
“How’s your father?” I asked.
“Stable. He’s kicked everyone out of the room except for Mum, and they’re having a serious talk. There’s going to be a flood of people through here as soon as everyone finishes regrouping. Raina’s locked herself in the hall toilet. I think Gabby wants to do the same, except there’s only one hall toilet. We still don’t know who sent us to the meadow, and now everyone’s so upset that I don’t see how I’ll be able to get them asking again, which puts it all on me.” Shelby shook her head. “It’s a mess, Alex, it’s a stupid, horrible mess, and I don’t know how we’re going to clean it up. What was the terrible mistake?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Just as I came out here you said that we’d made a terrible mistake, and I know you’re not as dumb as you sometimes want people to think you are, so whatever it was, it’s something you don’t want to say in front of me.” Shelby wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to ward off a chill, even though it was a pleasant, even balmy night. “What mistake? What did we get wrong?”
“Ah.” I put my ginger beer aside and stood, trying to collect my thoughts. I would have had to tell her what I’d realized eventually: that was the nature of both our work and our relationship. Secrets get people killed. But I’d been hoping, on some level, to have a few minutes to work things through on my own. “Remember when I said that most werewolves were killed within the first month after their infection, when we followed the trail of carnage back to their lairs and put them down for their own sake?”
Shelby’s expression hardened. “Yes,” she said coldly, and I immediately regretted my words. Until we knew whether Riley was going to successfully fight off the infection, talking about werewolves in such absolutist terms was going to be a minefield.
“Helen just pointed something out to me. Lycanthropy began as a therianthrope disease, and therianthropes aren’t beasts when transformed. They may have different instincts—the mind is to some degree a plaything of the body—but they’re still people.” What I was about to say went against everything I had been raised to believe, and I had to wonder on some level whether my grandfather had known. Grandma Alice always said Grandpa Thomas was the smartest man she’d ever met, and he was the one who’d written most of our response plans for werewolf attacks. He’d also known, by then, that we were morally opposed as a family to anything that smacked of killing people for the crime of being dangerous.
Had he understood that werewolves were too dangerous to coexist with humans, thanks to the disease that made them, and written his instructions accordingly? He’d married into the family. He’d helped to shape it, both with his genes and with his teachings. But he’d never quite embraced the Healy line’s odd form of pacifism.
“What are you saying?” asked Shelby slowly.
“I’m saying that therianthropes are people when they’re transformed because they were people to begin with. We’ve always believed that werewolves became animals when they transformed, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the problem is that we’ve always been dealing with new werewolves, who were still disoriented and panicked by their own transformations, and hence reacted like animals.” And then there were the actual animals to be considered. Turning into a wolf didn’t make a sheep or a cow any smarter—and once they had reached the stage of fully transforming, we wouldn’t be able to tell them from a werewolf that started out as a human being. All werewolves looked essentially the same in their lupine forms, and they didn’t change back after they were killed. So every infected animal reinforced the idea that werewolves were irrational killing machines, and meanwhile, we continued to ignore the threat of werewolves that had originally belonged to sapient species. Their heads might be muddled when they first got sick, but after . . .
After, they would be able to plan, if they lived long enough. They would be able to consider their actions, and adjust their tactics according to the way the people around them reacted. They would learn. And through it all, they would be motivated by two desires: to survive, and to spread. We knew from our interactions with lycanthropes of all kinds that they shared that much at least, regardless of their starting species or how long they had been infected. All lycanthropes wanted to spread the disease that had created them.
“Wait,” said Shelby. “I thought you said werewolves couldn’t think. That they were just dumb, violent animals. That’s what you said.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “We know the disease makes them short-tempered and angry, and we know they want to spread their infection—that’s one of the major goals of any disease, and the various strains of lycanthropy are no different. But I think we can safely say, looking at what the werewolves here in Australia have been doing, that they’re not just dumb animals. They’re still capable of at least some degree of planning and tactical thinking while they’re in their lupine forms.”
“I’d guess the initial confusion probably lasts for two transformation cycles, maybe three,” said Helen.
“That would account for eighty percent of the people infected with lycanthropy. Most werewolves don’t make it past their first full cycle, much less two more,” I said grimly. “We kill them when they’re at their most bestial, and we never realize they could remember how to think. We’ve been winnowing out the most primitive werewolves from outbreak after outbreak, for centuries. How long had the outbreak been going on before we got here?”
“At least a month,” said Shelby slowly. “We don’t know when it started. It’s not like the werewolves sent a card to let anyone know that they’d arrived in Australia.”
A slow, sick certainty was beginning to gather in the pit of my stomach, too concentrated??
?too right—to be ignored. “The infection had time to become established, even if it didn’t have time to spread very far,” I said. “Members of the Society are trained to deal with various types of bite. You told me so yourself. What happens if someone gets bitten by something they don’t believe is venomous?”
“Flush the wound, monitor it for signs of infection,” said Shelby. “Most wouldn’t even seek medical care. That’s a silly thing to involve anyone else over.”
“Which means a member of the Society could easily have been bitten and infected before anyone even knew that was a risk. Werewolves are infectious even when not transformed. Whoever it was treated their own wound and didn’t tell anyone, because who wants to report being nipped by a sheep or a collie when they have bigger things to worry about?” The more I talked, the more reasonable this all felt, like this was exactly what had happened. It made sense; it matched up with all the facts we had. “Then, when their twenty-eight-day incubation was up . . .”
“If they were on patrol, they might not have been near anyone when they turned,” said Shelby. “There’s a lot of unpopulated land in Australia. If something got into the sheep, everyone would assume it was a dingo or a wild dog. Nobody jumps straight to ‘werewolf.’ That would just be silly.”
“So our werewolf turned for the first time where there was no one around to hurt, woke up the next morning and . . . what? Just decided to keep it a secret?” I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t make sense to you, Alex. You were raised to think of monsters as if they were people,” said Shelby, sounding frustrated. She glanced to Helen. “Sorry. No offense meant.”
“Offense taken,” said Helen, in unknowing echo of myself right after the incident in the sheep meadow. It would have been amusing under other circumstances. In the moment, it was just one more layer of tension on what was already an unbearable mound of discomfort and dismay. “I am not a monster. I am not a mammal, and maybe that’s a problem for some people, but it doesn’t make me a monster.”
“I know,” said Shelby. “I’m sorry, I’m a little stressed right now. Things aren’t coming out like I mean them. I know you’re not a monster. I’ve met your cousin, and her daughter, and they’re very nice people. I’ve even met her husband, and while it’s a little harder for me to think of him as a person—what with him being a giant snake and all—he was perfectly pleasant and didn’t pump me full of hemolytic venom even a little bit. But I was raised with the word ‘monster’ on heavy rotation, and it’s difficult to just cut it from my vocabulary overnight.”
“Try,” suggested Helen pleasantly.
“I will,” said Shelby. She looked back to me. “If you got bit and turned into a werewolf, you’d go to your family, right? Tell them ‘we have a problem,’ and set up some sort of containment plan, something to keep you safe. They’d still look at you as if you were a person, because you’d still be a person to them. Your essential personhood isn’t tied up in what species you are.”
“But it doesn’t work that way here,” I said. More pieces were falling into place. “Someone gets bitten, not knowing they’ve been exposed to lycanthropy-w, transforms for the first time under conditions that don’t lead to any homicides, turns back, and says ‘well, I’m still the same person. I can’t let those assholes back at home put a silver bullet in my head just because I went and caught a therianthropic cold.’”
“Lycanthropy acts on the brain the same way rabies does,” said Helen. “They’d become paranoid, suspicious, violent, all without losing their original intelligence.”
“All while surrounded by people who throw around the word ‘monster’ like it isn’t a racial slur,” I said. “That’s basically a recipe for convincing a werewolf not to turn him or herself in.”
“I’ll take it one step worse for you,” said Charlotte, emerging from the quarantine house. It wasn’t clear how long she’d been standing inside and listening to our conversation. Long enough, judging by the pinched expression on her face. “If I were bitten by a werewolf, and I wanted to be able to keep myself safe from the people who’d been my allies, I’d start recruiting. After all, I’d know the selling points of the infection—all assuming I’d need them. Once someone’s been bitten, they’re probably a lot more willing to listen to a sales pitch that doesn’t end in a shallow grave.”
Graves. I stiffened, looking from Charlotte to Shelby and back again before I asked the question that was going to make me the least popular person on the porch—and that included Helen, who was still viewed as less than a person by most of the Society. “What did we do with Cooper’s body?”
Charlotte stared at me, an expression of dawning horror on her face. “This way,” she said, and started for the steps. The rest of us followed her, again, including Helen. Under the circumstances, she may have thought that staying with the group was the best way to stay alive. Honestly, I couldn’t have advised her one way or another.
Given everything else the Thirty-Six Society had on the property, I had halfway been expecting them to have a proper morgue, complete with stainless steel storage drawers for the bodies of their fallen comrades and a convenient drain in the middle of the floor. It was almost a relief when Charlotte led our makeshift posse to a tin storage shed that looked like it had been purchased from a mail order catalog.
Helen was less reassured. “You keep dead bodies in here?” she demanded, gesturing to the shed doors with a sweep of one hand. “Actual dead humans? The sort you’re not intending to eat later?”
“See, things like that are why some people have a less than positive view of nonhumans,” said Shelby. Helen glared at her. Shelby shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
“We can’t afford the sort of refrigeration units that would keep bodies better preserved, and it’s not like we ever keep them for long anyway,” said Charlotte, undoing the padlock on the door. “As soon as we’re sure the coast is clear, we’ll take him out into the nearest billabong and feed him to the crocs.” She was clearly hoping the body was still there. I shared the sentiment.
“What about his family?” Helen sounded scandalized.
“Cooper didn’t have any family left, and if he had, they would have been allowed to come with us for the feeding.” Charlotte swung the doors open. I tensed, waiting for the smell of rotting flesh to come wafting out. It didn’t. Human bodies decay fast when they’re actually dead. The absence of the stench was . . . well, it wasn’t a good thing.
Charlotte took a step forward, squinting into the gloom. Then she stopped, and sighed, and said, “The rest of you ought to come and take a look at this. I think we have a problem.”
“That’s good,” I muttered. “We needed a problem tonight. Everything was going far too smoothly, so it’s obvious that we were people in need of a problem.” I stepped up behind her.
Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise when I saw the hole that had been ripped in the shed’s rear wall. Whatever had made the opening had peeled the tin back like they were opening a can of sardines. I frowned at the jagged tears in the metal and stepped inside, ignoring the vague protests and exclamations of distress from my companions. The danger was past. Our werewolf had long since fled for more welcoming climes.
“Didn’t any of you think to check for a pulse?” asked Helen. “I’d have thought that was basic logic.”
“I checked,” I said. “But I was bleeding out at the time. Did anyone else check?”
“Riley did,” said Charlotte. She hesitated before adding, “Through gloves and a plastic sheet. We were taking precautions against infection, and you’d already said that he was dead.”
“Again, bleeding out at the time,” I said, turning back to face them. “There’s no tearing from the outside. Cooper must have woken up once he’d recovered from his blood loss—and that’s a good trick, really, I would have thought the amount of blood he’d lost would keep him out of commissi
on for at least a little bit longer, even if it didn’t kill him—and then torn his way out, rather than risking being caught here. Is there any way to unlock the door from the inside?”
“Why in the world would there be? No one ever gets stuck in there,” said Charlotte. She sounded affronted, like I had just accused her of locking her children in the shed. That hadn’t been my intention, but this didn’t seem like the time or the place to get embroiled into another “what I actually meant was . . .” conversation. Speaking a common language didn’t do much good when there were cultural and societal gulfs between you. “The door is always locked from the outside.”
“Right. Then he would have had to tear his way out, even if he was trying not to be noticed.” I snapped my fingers. “The ruckus when we got back from the meadow run. Everyone was there, ready and eager to accuse us of things, and it made so much noise that a little tin being torn on an isolated part of the property wouldn’t even have been noticed. We know he has at least one accomplice. They could have whipped everyone into a frenzy.”
Shelby leveled a flat look on me, eyebrows raised. I blinked.
“What?” I asked.
“If he had an accomplice capable of getting everyone all worked up and mad, why not ask that same accomplice to open the padlock from the outside?” she asked. “Much easier. No need to rend metal for no good reason, less chance that someone’s going to take a wrong turn and see the great gaping hole you’ve ripped in things.”
“Yeah, but this was a fair scare, wasn’t it?” asked Helen. We all turned to look at her. She shrugged. “I’m just saying. You open a door you thought was safely keeping things inside, and what you find is that a dead man has come back to life and ripped his way out through a wall. So now he’s terrifying.”