“Not yet.”
“Okay. That’s good.” It might be the only good thing about this situation, but it was more than I’d been expecting to get: I would take it.
As the lycanthropy-w virus became entrenched in a population, the victims would begin to come together instinctively, forming a semi-lupine pack structure. I say “semi” because how genuinely wolflike the pack was would depend on the original species of the people or creatures forming it, and how many of them were far enough gone to have become fully feral. A pack consisting entirely of freshly infected humans would probably exhibit the stereotypical “alpha” behavior attributed (incorrectly) to wolves by generations of naturalists, and would be incredibly dangerous until they had further devolved into skittish, cooperative pack hunters. From there, it would be a matter of them versus their bodies: as their transformations became more frequent, the strain on their hearts would become more severe, until they couldn’t hold their original forms, and their systems collapsed under the strain. It could take six months. It could take six years. But it was how all werewolves ended up, if they didn’t meet the wrong end of a shotgun first.
You know it’s going to be a bad scene when your most fervent hope is that your opponents devolve into a mindless, primal, killing-machine state as quickly as possible.
“My folks have called my sisters in from the field. Raina’s going to meet us at the airport,” said Shelby, sipping from her own coffee before putting it down on the plate and leaning over to rest her head against the curve of my shoulder. “Everyone’s coming to help with this one. Even Gabby, and getting her away from school is a bit like pulling a crocodile’s teeth—borderline impossible and pretty damn dangerous.”
“What are people pulled off of?”
“Everything. Dad’s even bringing his head of security out of the field, and Cooper doesn’t come out of the field for anything. Thankfully. Man’s got the manners of a black snake.” She tilted her head back, looking up at me. “We’re leaving the rest of Australia defenseless to stop this. We can’t let lycanthropy get well and truly established on the island. We just can’t. Not if we want to stand a chance.”
Australia was an island: that meant we might still be able to wipe the virus out, the way we had in England, Japan, and Hawaii. No shared borders meant no place to hide. But no shared borders also meant no place to run. If the virus was able to become successfully established, it could finally turn Australia into the unwelcoming wasteland so many people already believed it to be.
I kissed Shelby’s forehead. It was the only thing I could think of to do. “It’s not going to happen,” I said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
“Are you lying to me?” The question was mildly asked, and there was no blame behind it: she clearly understood the impulse. She just wanted to know.
“I hope not,” I said, and put my arms around her, as much as the airline seats allowed. “I really do.”
The rest of the flight passed quickly, or as quickly as is possible for a fourteen-hour stretch spent confined in the belly of a single moving vehicle. We read, slept, researched, denuded the kitchenette, and enjoyed our surprisingly well-prepared business class food. And all the while, Australia grew closer, like a great beast lurking out of the west.
Shelby caught me staring pensively out the window as the flight attendants were moving through our cabin with customs forms. “It’s not that bad, you know,” she said, pressing a pencil into my hand. “Almost no one gets killed unless they do something stupid. You have to provoke the wildlife into taking you out. Or step on a funnelweb, but they’re mostly down in Sydney. We’ll have a whole different assortment of deadly things where we’re going.”
“It’s not the wildlife I’m worried about,” I admitted, twisting to face front and reaching for my customs form. “The werewolves scare the crap out of me, but they’re something I’m trained for. I can handle snakes, spiders, and soda made with sugar instead of corn syrup.”
There was a pause while Shelby cocked her head and squinted at me. Finally, she asked, “Is this about the part where my family is a little bigger than your average snake, spider, or can of Coke?”
“That would be the issue,” I said, and bent forward, trying to look like I was focusing hard on the difficult matter of falsifying my customs form. (I don’t recommend falsifying customs forms when traveling. For one thing, it’s illegal. For another thing, most of the “are you trying to smuggle this into our country?” questions are rooted in sound ecological reasons—no one really wants to be responsible for crashing the local ecosystem with an invasive weed or beetle. At the same time, since I was on the way to Australia to help keep them all from being eaten by werewolves, I felt like fudging the details of what I had in my bag was reasonable.)
“They’re really friendly, Alex.”
“I believe you.”
“They’re quite harmless, too.”
I put down my pencil and slowly turned to stare at her. Shelby had the good grace to look abashed. “Your family. Harmless. Shelby, I love you, but if you’re going to tell me lies, can you at least make them believable ones? I always try to sound believable when I lie to you.”
“See, this is the trouble with a relationship founded on lies,” she said. “Eventually, we stop believing each other.”
When Shelby and I first met, I didn’t tell her I was a Price, and she didn’t tell me she was a Thirty-Sixer. I guess I thought there had to be something wrong with her; that was the only way someone as amazing as Shelby Tanner would be interested in the bespectacled geek from the reptile house. Since “secretly a cryptozoologist who will understand everything about me, and actually appreciate the work I’ve dedicated my life to doing” was too good to be true, it never even occurred to me as a possibility—at least not until she came into my home and tried to shoot my cousin. To be fair, Sarah is a cuckoo, and cuckoos are incredibly dangerous, generically speaking. It’s not Shelby’s fault she tried to kill one of the only cuckoos in the world who would actually be missed.
I found out who Shelby really was. Shelby found out who I really was. Sarah didn’t get shot in the head. And we started over, trying to reconstruct an admittedly flawed relationship on a base of facts instead of fictions. It was still a work in progress. It might always be a work in progress. It was work that I was quite happy to spend the rest of my life doing, as long as that meant I got to spend the rest of my life with her.
Shelby was still looking at me, waiting for me to comment on the subject of her family. I sighed, checked the box on my form that indicated I wasn’t carrying any plants or plant products—lying again—and said, “I’m sure they’re nice, and I’m also sure that my current status as visiting werewolf expert means they probably won’t shoot me without good reason. It’s just that if they’re anything like my family, ‘he breathed’ might be considered a good reason.”
“Don’t worry so much.” She elbowed me amiably before going back to filling out her own customs form. “Besides, if they really get to be too much, you can always hide behind Gabby. She’s as bewildered by the lot of us as you are.”
“She’s the one who’s going to school to be an opera singer, right?”
Shelby nodded. “Right. See? You have a sister who’s a dancer, I have one who plans to be a singer. It’s going to be just like taking a nice long trip home.”
I sighed deeply. “That doesn’t make it any better. I’ve met my family.”
The sound of the engines roaring drowned out Shelby’s laughter. We were in our final descent, and one way or another, I was going to Australia.
Four
“I have never seen any place on Earth as beautiful, improbable, and beautifully ridiculous as Australia. Whatever god or devil first conceived of the place deserves some sort of award, and possibly a smack in the head.”
—Thomas Price
Brisbane Airport in Queen
sland, Australia, international arrivals terminal
SHELBY AND I WERE walking along the concourse toward customs—she looking tediously awake and alert, like she hadn’t just spent far too many hours in midair, me looking like a houseplant that hadn’t been watered in far too long and was thus on the verge of terminal wilt—when a short, tan, pleasantly plump woman with a riotous mop of red-and-brown curls darted out of a door marked “staff only” and cut us cleanly from the rest of the crowd.
“Hello hello hello,” she said brightly, her cheerful Australian voice cutting through the hubbub like a knife. Our fellow travelers picked up their step, getting away from what sounded like the start of something they didn’t want any part of. “What are you traveling for, then? Business or pleasure?”
“Bringing the bloke to meet the folks,” said Shelby airily. I gave her a sidelong look. “Bloke” might be the most common Australianism in American popular culture, but it wasn’t a word I heard Shelby use very often—or really ever, except when I dragged her to Outback and she returned from the bathrooms with a scathing critique of using “Blokes” and “Sheilas” to distinguish the genders. “There a problem, officer?”
“Could be, could be,” said the woman. “If you two would just come with me, I’m sure we can have it all cleared up in a jiffy. So if there’s nothing the two of you need before we see to the all-important business of keeping this grand nation safe from all threats foreign and national . . . ?”
It was like being confronted with a human border collie. I blinked, too disoriented from the flight and too well trained about making a fuss in airports to know what to do.
Fortunately, Shelby wasn’t so confused. “Lead the way: anything for Australia.”
“Anything?” asked the woman pointedly.
“Life, limb, and love.”
“Very good. Follow me.” She turned on her heel and stalked back to the staff door, clearly expecting that Shelby and I would follow her. Shelby did, and so I did the same, dragging my roller bag and praying the mice wouldn’t start cheering without getting permission from me first.
The door slammed shut behind us. Welcome to Australia.
The woman with the riotous hair led us down an empty hallway that could have been lifted out of any airport in the world—or any soundstage designed to look like an airport, for that matter. There’s something remarkably artificial about a certain type of bureaucratic sterility, like even it can’t make up its mind whether or not it actually exists. Her boots thudded against the tile floor like she was personally affronted by its reality, and punishing it one slammed-down heel at a time.
“We’ll be heading for one of the main screening rooms, where you and your belongings will be thoroughly reviewed,” she said, without looking back at me or Shelby. Her attention seemed to be reserved for the empty hall ahead, and while her voice remained too cheerful to be natural, it didn’t match her posture, which was tight, controlled, and bordering on hostile. “I do hope my men won’t find anything illicit. We’ve been cracking down on smugglers recently. You could find yourself banned from our country for the rest of your natural life, and wouldn’t that put a crimp in your honeymoon?”
“We’re not married, and I’d have at least called home if we were,” said Shelby mildly. She sounded almost amused by the situation. Well, that made one of us. “Come off it, all right? We’re in private now.”
“There is no privacy in an airport,” replied the border collie woman, a hint of a snarl creeping into her formerly jovial tone. She picked up the pace, forcing me and Shelby to do the same if we wanted to keep up with her. Between the jet lag, the general exhaustion engendered by spending over a dozen hours on a plane, and my growing fear that the mice were going to put in an appearance, my nerves were more than a little frayed.
Shelby rolled her eyes before shooting me what was probably meant to be a reassuring look. I frowned at her. I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark, and it was clear that whoever this woman was, Shelby knew and trusted her enough to let her cut us out of the main crowd. Without an introduction, I was flying blind. I didn’t like the feeling. It was really starting to sink in how isolated I was, and how isolated I was going to remain for as long as I was in Australia. Even if I needed them, my family couldn’t possibly get to me fast enough to provide backup. Not even Aunt Mary. She was dead, which usually meant she could travel great distances in the time it took to call her name, but most ghosts can’t cross saltwater, and I had the entire Pacific between me and the place where she died. I was on my own.
I struggled to keep my face neutral as we walked. If Shelby had felt like this during her stay in the United States, it was amazing that she’d remained as steady as she had. I hadn’t been on the ground an hour, and I was already fighting panic.
The border collie woman stopped at an unmarked door. Producing an old-fashioned key ring from her pocket, she unlocked it and waved us into a small, featureless room. Shelby went first. I followed close behind her, and the unnamed woman brought up the rear, closing the door behind herself with an ominous “click.”
“Now,” she said. “We should have a five-minute window before anyone realizes the camera feed from this room has failed. We’ve got Gabby and one of her American schoolmates clearing customs with dummy bags—they have valid passports that match the names you flew under, so we’ll have a clear record of your entering the country, and we have someone in the department ready to stamp your real passport when you fly back out again, assuming that you do. They’ll be catching a cab outside the airport, Gabby’s friend will be returning to Sydney via a flight later today, and Gabby should be home by this afternoon. Cooper’s driving her. Mum and Dad are going to have your hide for bringing your boyfriend with you and making us do all of this extra work. Are there any questions?”
“Yeah,” said Shelby. “Can I have a hug, Raina, or are you going to stand there being all pissy ‘I had to smuggle you into the country, how dare you inconvenience me so’ all day?”
The border collie woman—whose demeanor had changed completely since the door had closed, becoming dour and faintly irritated with everything around her—sighed and reached up to peel off her riotous mop of brown-and-red curls, revealing short-cut brown hair that had been rumpled by its time under the wig. She threw the wig at me, snapped, “You’re so demanding, Shelly,” and spread her arms as she stepped toward Shelby.
Any questions I might have had about how they knew each other were answered by that embrace: it was a hug between sisters, plain and simple. When they let each other go, Raina turned to look me up and down, taking her time with the gesture, so that it felt like the examination it was. Finally, she passed judgment:
“He’s short and scrawny,” she said. “I never thought you’d risk Dad’s wrath for the sake of coming home with a geek. I remember your college boyfriends. Most of them could have been used as architectural fixtures in a pinch.”
“I nearly got turned into a piece of lawn statuary, if that helps,” I said dryly, and thrust my hand out toward her. “Hello. I’m Alexander Price. It’s nice to meet you.”
Raina looked at my hand like it was a dead thing before looking back to my face and saying, “Raina Tanner. We didn’t invite you, we don’t need you, and we don’t want you here.”
“Raina!” Shelby cuffed her sister on the arm. “Be nice. Alex was willing to come with me to help, since he’s actually dealt with this sort of thing before, and we should treat him like the guest he is.”
“I am treating him like the guest he is,” Raina replied. “I didn’t shoot him on sight. Now come on. Mum’s waiting in the car, and you know how grumpy she gets when we make her wait.” She turned and stomped to the door in the opposite wall, leaving me holding her wig. She didn’t take any of the bags. Apparently, extracting us from the airport had been the whole of her service, and we could handle the rest by ourselves.
“One sister down, on
e to go,” said Shelby amiably, as she picked her bags back up again. “I think that went quite well, don’t you?”
“I have no words,” I said, and collected my things before following the Tanner girls out of the room.
The door opened on a short stretch of scrubland, all brown grass and stunted bushes straining their thorny limbs toward the sky. The air smelled like petrichor and growing things: I had just stepped into an Australian spring. Given that it was autumn at home, the change of seasons was almost as disconcerting as the change of scenery. Mountains ringed the far horizon. I didn’t recognize any of them. I didn’t recognize anything. For the first time, I found myself worried about just how helpful I could actually be. Sure, werewolves were from my world, but this was Shelby’s world. Could I really do anything they couldn’t have done on their own?
Shelby had known nothing about gorgons or cockatrice when she’d helped me to fight and defeat Lloyd. I couldn’t back out on her now. I took a deep breath of the spring-scented air and hurried across the empty field after her.
Raina was already almost to the street by the time I caught up with Shelby: she might have been short and irritable, but that woman could move when she wanted to. There was an SUV idling there. Raina pulled open the back driver’s-side door and disappeared into the vehicle.
“That’s not the sister who’s been away at opera school, right?” I asked, while Shelby and I had a few seconds of what could be charitably referred to as privacy. “Unless they do opera much more violently here.”
“No, Gabby’s the sister who’s been away at opera school, Raina’s the sister who got left behind with our parents and resents the rest of us for having grand adventures while she’s been stuck cleaning up after the drop bears.”