“I know you will,” I’d replied, and I believed her.
“I will do what I must do.”
“I know you will,” I’d repeated, and that I had believed, too—completely. If she had to kill me to get back in the good graces of the Kin, she would. If she could do the same without killing me, she would do that. Until the actual moment came, I had no idea what she would do. That was life.
Possibly death too.
I closed the door behind me and spotted Nik over at his car, having breakfast while sitting in the lotus position on the hood. He wasn’t alone. There was a man with shaggy auburn hair sitting beside him, but with legs hanging over the grille and a large reddish wolf at his feet: Rafferty and Catcher—finally. “Rafferty, you son of a bitch. Where the hell have you been?” I said as I walked toward them.
He turned his head and frowned at me. I didn’t take it personally. For a healer, his bedside manner was all but nonexistent. He was the guy who would tell you that you deserved the heart attack and why not eat some more pork and cheese while you were at it, you fat bastard. Try blocking up another artery. Not a great lover of his patients in general—of anybody in fact, outside of Catcher.
“None of your business,” he grunted. He had angular features and hadn’t bothered to shave in a day or two. A nod to the June humidity, he was wearing a T-shirt in the same faded condition as the one I was wearing that said GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, BUT GOOD AIM WILL EVERY TIME. He was also wearing a pair of equally faded jeans, and they weren’t fashionably faded. They had Goodwill written all over them. Rafferty didn’t give a damn how he looked or whether people liked what he said or how he said it. He couldn’t give a flying shit. I liked that about him. It reminded me of myself, minus my new discovery about traveling’s effect on me. Thanks to Niko, the happy-go-lucky, high-as-a-kite happiness didn’t last anyway. He didn’t think it was natural. He might be right, but I wasn’t sure I cared. To have my Auphe blood benefit me instead of curse me for once . . . I’d take that.
As for that Auphe in me . . .
When we first met Rafferty and Catcher a few years ago, I’d smelled the difference in them . . . werewolves . . . and they’d smelled the difference in me. Rafferty hadn’t known what the difference was at the time, or so I’d thought, because then I didn’t genuinely know what the Auphe were. Now I knew that Rafferty had known all along but hadn’t said anything. Either he didn’t want to be involved with an Auphe half-breed—couldn’t blame him there—or figured it was none of his business. I wasn’t foaming at the mouth or eating the pigeons and squirrels running around. That was good enough for him.
We’d met only in passing the first time in Central Park. Rafferty was tossing a Frisbee and Catcher was bounding into the air for it. Even then he’d been stuck in wolf form, with Rafferty, his cousin, doing his damnedest to get him back to a werewolf’s changeability. After an exchange of wary sniffs, Rafferty fished around in the pocket of his baggy cargo pants, then passed over a rumpled card. It had the letters RJ on it—for Rafferty Jeftichew—as well as that snake and staff sign doctors had plastered around and a phone number. “Here,” he’d grunted, handing it to Niko. “You might need a healer someday.” Then he looked over at me, his straight slash of eyebrows lowered. “In fact, I can guarantee it. And this one can’t go to a doctor or, hell, worse yet, a hospital, or it’ll probably be alien autopsy for you.”
Niko and he had talked some more. I thought they related. One with a sick cousin and one with a brother who might be considered a little worse than sick. Catcher and I went off and played more Frisbee. That had been three years ago. Rafferty had been right. We’d ended up needing a healer. He’d saved my life, but he wasn’t any closer to his goal.
Now Catcher gave me the second sign he was still sick. He lifted his upper lip to reveal an impressive show of large white teeth and growled. The look in his yellow eyes, many shades lighter than Delilah’s, was feral and suspicious. Catcher had been frozen a long time as a wolf. Maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad, but little by little he was losing the human intelligence werewolves kept when they shifted from skin to fur. One day he’d be wolf and nothing but wolf. I had no idea how that felt to him. No idea what it was like to be only wolf . . . like he was wolf now as he growled at me.
Rafferty rested a battered sneaker on top of Catcher’s head and rubbed. “It’s okay, Catch,” he said gruffly. “It’s just Cal. Half- Auphe. Possessed. So annoying his own brother stabbed him. No big deal.”
Confusion clouded the wolf’s eyes for a moment. Then they cleared and he snorted a spray of fine white mist—the leftover of a vanilla shake, from the smell of it. Just like that, the intelligence was back—human intelligence bright and sharp in wolf eyes. He yawned, recognition and dismissal all in one, and rolled onto his back for a furry nap. I knew what it was to lose myself. I hoped it was less painful for him . . . if not for Rafferty.
I leaned against the car. “You survived the night,” I said to Nik.
“Barely.” He continued eating a sandwich of sprouts, sprouts, sprouts, and some liquid slop to keep them on the bread—well, slop and a tangibly foul mood. “Robin and Ishiah had phone sex last night . . . until I cut the line. Then Goodfellow used his cell phone. I broke it, quite, quite thoroughly. When he finally went to bed, in less than five minutes he was asleep and having what I guessed from the moaning to be a dream of the nocturnal emissions kind. I slept in the bathtub with a knife wedging the bathroom door closed.”
“Gotta walk it off, Nik.” I grinned. “It’s a dangerous world.” I bit my tongue at his glare and didn’t go any further with it, not having much of a desire to be wearing that sprout sandwich.
“Ass,” he said without any surprise at the fact. He finished the sandwich and studied me with a look unreadable to anyone but me, commenting, “You survived as well.”
“Barely,” I echoed smugly. My stomach began to growl as Rafferty finished up a bear claw. “Get me one, Jeftichew?”
“Yeah, I hauled ass from Wyoming, driving all night drinking bad coffee, to bring you a damn doughnut.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “Doing your job and keeping the world from being wiped out by a psychotic Marcus Welby from Hell isn’t enough. What was I thinking?”
I scowled. “You might’ve saved my life, Rafferty, but that doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass, furry or not.” Now that was the normal me.
“Yeah, I smell you’re into walking on the Wolf side now.” His eyes, reddish brown, went a much paler amber. “Don’t think that means you can give me shit. Going wolf is the least I could do to you. Want to piss pure liquid fire for the rest of your life? Better yet, want to piss your pants right now?”
“Because you can do what Suyolak can do. Like when you once stopped Cal’s heart,” Niko said quietly, not particularly concerned about my urinary tract from what I could tell.
“I can.” He finished wiping his hands. “But I don’t. Usually. I have to have one damn good reason or I wouldn’t be a healer. I’d be nothing but an executioner with a hard-on for genocide like Suyolak. Healers have that code precisely because of him. Do no harm.” His eyes paled further to Catcher yellow. “Unless you can’t avoid it. When you’re a healer and a Wolf, there are caveats.”
I, not wanting to have a urinary tract infection for the rest of my life or to piss my pants in a cheap motel parking lot, eased up. Rafferty and I were two of a kind: asses. Except that he healed and I killed. He was also having a helluva bad time with his cousin. He had shit enough in his life. He didn’t need more from me. “Speaking of Suyolak. He paid me a visit in one of my dreams. Said he could make me all Auphe. He can’t do that.” I hesitated, shifting against the metal of the car. “Right?”
He looked down at Catcher who was already kicking a back leg in his sleep. When he looked back, his eyes had reverted to their normal color. “If the Auphe were shapechangers like wolves, then, yeah, maybe. But they weren’t, so, no. He can’t make you Auphe, and I can’t make you human.” He
shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “Sorry.”
“Eh, I’m over it.”
His eyebrows shot skyward at my offhand dismissal. Niko wasn’t so quick to give up on the subject, although he approached it from a different angle—sneaky bastard. “So why can’t you change Catcher back if he’s a shapechanger?” he asked. “You say you can’t change Cal. I understand that, but what of Catcher? If that’s true, from what you told us, that doesn’t make sense. You should be able to cure him.”
Rafferty threw the wadded paper napkin as far across the parking lot as it would go. It was impressively far. “I’d tell you again it’s none of your business, but hell.” He rubbed at bloodshot, tired eyes. “I did cure him. Five years ago Catcher was off at some damn college retreat in the Amazon. He loved crap like that. Save the planet. Whatever. He’s Wolf and wolf—Were and not; guess he comes by it naturally. He’d been gone almost a year. Long time.” He leaned down and rubbed Catcher’s stomach. “We’re the only family left, except for some Kin uncle.” He curled his lip. “Thieves and murderers.”
“Catcher?” Niko prodded.
Rafferty exhaled and pushed the hair from his eyes. He was long overdue for a haircut. I don’t think he noticed. I know he didn’t care. “He came back with leukemia. ALL: acute lymphoblastic leukemia. We Wolves heal fast and we rarely get sick, but we do get sick. Once in a blue moon.” The grim joke flashed across his lean face and was gone. “By the time he got home and was just starting to show symptoms, it was too late. He’d had it for at least eight months. You know what the average survival rate is even with treatment? Not good. I thought he’d have a better chance of being healed in wolf form. We’re stronger then. But as good as I am, and I’m fucking good, don’t you ever doubt it,” he said matter-of-factly, “it wasn’t enough. He was slipping away and—shit. He’s my cousin, my only damn family. I couldn’t let him go. So I went deeper . . . to the genetic level . . . where healers aren’t meant to go.”
“And?” I said when he went quiet.
“And that’s where I fucked up,” he responded flatly. “I healed him. I healed him like no other werewolf has ever been healed. Did you think we were like vampires—a pasty anemic branch that split off from the human race? Did you think we were extra- hairy humans and along the way developed a mutation that allowed us to change to wolves?” He shook his head. “We were wolves first. We started that way. We evolved as wolves and along the way a mutation did occur. We did split from the primary race . . . but that primary race was wolf.”
“Then you’re not werewolves; you’re were people?” I asked with a healthy dose of skepticism.
He rotated his head and massaged the back of his neck. “Why do you think some werewolves want to get back to wolf, and nothing but wolf? It’s how we began, fifty, sixty million years ago. I did cure Catcher of the leukemia by mucking around with his DNA. Only trouble is I cured him too well. I cured the mutation. I can’t cure him now because he’s not sick. He’s how we were meant to be. And I can’t go the Suyolak way. I can’t force him to mutate. I might get a werewolf back, but it wouldn’t be Catcher. His brain would be altered—his personality. I don’t think he’d ever be fully human again when he changed. I’m good. Goddamnit, I’m the fucking best, but I did too good a job the first time and there’s no undoing it now. I’ve looked everywhere. Talked to everyone. No fucking undoing it. At least that’s what they say. I don’t have the power. I need more.” He propped an elbow on his knee and rested his forehead in his hand. “Somehow I have to prove them wrong,” he muttered so low that I barely caught the words.
Catcher slept on and for once I managed to keep my mouth shut. Rafferty had to know that no one could restore Catcher if he couldn’t, but he wasn’t able to admit it. He’d traveled the country, looking for a nonexistent cure and watching every day as bit by bit his cousin slipped away. One day he would look into the passenger seat and see nothing but wolf eyes looking back; no human intelligence; no memories of their past. Still, they were family. That they would never lose, but his cousin would be gone and an instinct-driven animal left in his place—an animal that thought, but certainly not in the same way humans thought.
He’d never remember the ski trip.
I’d never known Catcher as anything but wolf, but I’d seen a picture in their house of Raff and him on the ski slope. He looked like a good guy. A prankster. I’d bet Rafferty’s skis had disconnected from his boots halfway down one of the difficult slopes—Black Diamond all the way. I’d seen that glitter in Catcher’s eye in the photo. He was someone I might have liked . . . a rare finding; someone I might’ve trusted . . . especially rare. But I wouldn’t know now, and that was one damn shame.
“You.” It was breathed in a tangle of worship and disbelief, distracting me from my thoughts of skis, snow, and a guy who was already on his way to being half gone. “You are true. You are right. You are Wolf.”
Delilah came across the asphalt, wrapped in an orange and green polyester bedspread that did nothing to distract from her tumble of pale hair and warm glow of skin or the tattoo of Celtic knots, curves, and wolf eyes that circled her neck. It was art. She was art. But none of that was aimed in my direction. She crouched beside Catcher and began to sniff the fur on Catcher’s chest, neck, and behind his ears. Then she was nuzzling deeply. Catcher’s eyes had opened, luckily human in their awareness. They rolled up to his cousin in question. You could all but see the Uh, hello? Then again, they were wolves. Maybe it was more like Mmm, nice, but you need to get her to move a little farther down.
“This.” Delilah looked up, her eyes brighter and more intense than the rising sun. “This is what we want. This is what we were. What we want to be again. I didn’t think it could be done. I thought the All Wolf hopeless. But it can be done. We can. How? How does this happen? Tell me!”
“By accident, and it’s not going to happen again,” Rafferty snapped. “You and the other Jurassic wannabes can look somewhere else for somebody to rip your intelligence out by the roots, because I am not doing that shit. Not again.”
“Actually, it was the Pleistocene era, not Jurassic, but point taken,” Niko said, spreading knowledge far and wide. My brother, he simply could not help it. He was more helpful when he snagged Delilah’s makeshift toga and pulled her up and off Catcher. Catcher shook himself, stood, shook again, and sat down at his cousin’s feet. Then he gave Delilah a wolf grin. I recognized that grin. Human, wolf, puck. “Hey, baby” transcended all languages and all species.
“ ‘Jurassic’ sounds better and, hell, no.” Rafferty knocked on the top of Catcher’s furry head. “Don’t you even think about it, Cuz.”
There was a throaty mixed rumble and snarl from Catcher. I added, “Especially not in front of me, fuzz-butt. I might not be good enough to officially date a Kin and she’s her own Wolf, but it doesn’t mean the pride wouldn’t take a hit seeing you two go at it in front of me.”
Niko gave Delilah a push back toward her room. “Not to mention in a parking lot that’s overlooked by the interstate. Jeftichew, why don’t you get Catcher in the car. He’ll look slightly more inconspicuous.” With the top on the convertible already down, Catcher gave the rrrowrr rrowrr that was a wolf’s complaint and jumped in without waiting for Rafferty to speak up, demonstrating in his good moments he knew exactly what was going on. The baring of the teeth said, “Don’t talk about me like I’m a damn Labrador.” The humiliation of being all there and other times completely gone—lost in the wilderness of his own unpredictable brain—had to suck.
“I apologize, Catcher,” Niko said, bowing his head in realization of how the Wolf felt. Catcher sighed and lay down on the backseat, averting his eyes from all of us. Anything else we could’ve said would’ve only made it worse.
Several parking spaces away, the Rom’s RV pink door popped open and Abelia- Roo peered around the edge, smacking toothless gums in disgust. “Two more dogs. I am underwhelmed with confidence. Useless gadje. Worthless as humans, worthless as monst
ers. If we are to save the world, we do not do it by forming a circus train, collecting a flea-bitten zoo.” The door slammed behind her as she turned and went back inside. “Gunoi grast!” That made it through the door without trouble and I might not know Rom, but once again, some things transcend. Filthy language is one of these things and a personal favorite.
Delilah disappeared with another door slam at the same time Robin weaved out of his and Niko’s room, Salome winding through his legs causing the half stumble. “And who do we have here?” He smiled . . . yeah, that same “Hey, baby” smile . . . at Rafferty. Then the smile disappeared. “Oh Zeus, it’s you. The Hippocratic ass.”
“You still hanging around, Curly?” Rafferty drawled. Robin had been there when Rafferty had healed my stab wound and hadn’t gotten far with him then either.
“Some appreciate my grandeur and glory, you spiteful bastard.” He straightened his already immaculate silk shirt with one hand and carefully tousled his hair with the other. “And it’s Robin Goodfellow. Pan. Puck. Goblin of the Hob. Your superior by name and measurement of any other kind.”
“Is that what you think, you horny goat?” Rafferty snorted. “How would you like my foot up your grand and glorious . . . holy hell, what is that?”
That was Salome jumping up on the trunk of the car.
Then it was Salome and Catcher trying to eat each other in the back of Niko’s car. Catcher might fool some nosy human into thinking he was a harmless, good-natured husky mix when he was grinning and pawing the air for a treat—he had to hate the mortification of that—but in full fight: he was wolf, all wolf, and you couldn’t fool anyone into thinking anything else.