I had cared before. I’d cared about the world and doing the right thing, but that was when I knew Raff could take down this Rom disease without breaking stride—because he was that good, my cousin. Then I’d heard Cal’s voice as he went from perfectly healthy to death’s door in seconds—a half Auphe taken out that quickly.
I cared about the world all right, but I cared about my cousin more. Besides, Niko and Cal just hadn’t looked hard enough for another healer. I knew about looking. One day didn’t count. Even if Rafferty was the only one who could take out Suyolak, that didn’t make it fair. I’d always thought life should be fair, whether wearing fur or skin. I knew it wasn’t—I wasn’t naïve, but it didn’t change my thinking it should be. Wolves didn’t actually see in black and white; we saw in blues and greens. Yet I saw in black and white when it came to my view of the world. Things were either fair or they weren’t, and this wasn’t.
No, I wasn’t happy about this whole thing, and my waking up with a dead cat curled on top of me didn’t improve my mood at all. I liked to think I was a good guy. I was going to help stop global warming when I was a student; that and save the rain forest. These days I avoided watering people’s prize rosebushes and put up with the humiliation of letting little old grannies pat me on the head while trying to shove dog biscuits down my throat. That was an effort, right? Considering the taste of dog biscuits, it was a big effort. But now . . . now this good guy bared his teeth at the cat before lifting his head to bare his teeth at everyone else around him. It was a good thing you could fit about fourteen people in an Eldorado—fourteen people or one human, a monster mix, a puck, two werewolves, and that damn dead cat. It was about equal comfortwise, but it was a tour I wished we hadn’t signed up for.
I glared at my faithful cousin who’d put me to sleep when I’d been fighting with a female feline with male pattern baldness and an advanced case of dead. I wasn’t sure if the battle had been an “episode” or just a general freak-out at the sight of a walking, grinning, tail-thrashing zombie cat. I’d seen a lot of things in my life; as a werewolf that’s a given, but that was a first. Another first was its nearly kicking my furry butt. I should be glad Rafferty had sent me to naptime. That way I could pretend it was a draw and save some of my fuzzy dignity.
The cat felt me move, yawned, and leaped up front with Niko and Goodfellow to curl up on the dashboard. Her toothy, fanged grin was smug, and I couldn’t help but bristle. I growled at her, then sat up to turn my head toward Rafferty and growled harder.
“She’s already dead,” he said in his defense. “I couldn’t put her to sleep. Suck the life force out of her and rekill her, yeah, but not put her to sleep. And Goodfellow, with his usual bad taste, seems to like her.”
I snorted and kept growling. That was no excuse and I let him know it. Niko was driving and I was between Cal and my cousin. We were on the road, the parking lot just a memory. That was odd. I gave up on the growling, and sneezed curiously. We’d left our car behind. I liked that car. I especially liked the catless atmosphere of it, and, sorry to say it about Cal, but he smelled of murder in the shadows. It wasn’t his fault. I imagined he’d suffered more than I could imagine from being what he was, suffered from prejudice, suffered from instinct, suffered by knowing he had been created to be nothing but a living weapon. I felt bad for him, I did . . . but he still smelled like he smelled: Auphe—unkillable monster; five times worse than a demon from Hell. Granted, most couldn’t smell him, but Wolves could. Couldn’t they at the very least hang a deodorizer off his ear out of common courtesy? Pine-fresh maybe? I could handle that. I was the accommodating kind.
I poked Rafferty’s shoulder once, then again urgently and almost instantly. “Okay. Christ. Give me a chance,” he grumbled as he reached down to the floorboards for my laptop. He pulled it out of the computer bag, opened it up, and set it on his lap, swiveling it in my direction; then he fished back in the bag for my pencil. Once it was set up and ready to go, I typed in a question.
He turned to read it, but not before Cal peered around me and read it out loud. “Where’s our car, General Jack-off? General Jack-off?”
Rafferty shook his head. “Don’t ask. It’s a theme. Although the cat thing apparently got me promoted. And I left the car, Catch. I stripped it of ID—the license plate was stolen anyway—in case it gets towed. I need to sleep. To rest up for Suyolak. I can’t drive and do that. And the last time I let you drive, I got my license pulled. And you ended up in the pound because your rabies tag was expired. Some cops, they can’t just let you go with a warning, huh?”
My cousin’s sense of humor aside—the best place for it—leaving the car did make sense. Or . . . or maybe it meant he thought he wasn’t going to walk away from his battle with Suyolak. Worse, maybe he didn’t want to. The guilt, the burden of me; it was more than anyone should have to carry, but Rafferty wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t give in. Anyone else would have. No Wolf alive would go on and on as he had, not even for family. They would’ve seen the sense long ago. Wolves prized family, prized pack, but we were also practical creatures.
Except for Rafferty. He hadn’t given me life to throw his own away, but what if I was gone? Before Suyolak, what if I fell into my wolf half and didn’t resurface? What happened if the next “episode” was the last episode? What would he do then? And how do you ask that? I hesitated, hit the CAPS LOCK for emphasis, then typed, HUNT NO MORE? And Cal, whose scent still had the hair along my spine bristling, faithfully repeated the three words. What was wrong with him anyway? Couldn’t he read without moving his lips? And Goodfellow, of course, jumped on the bandwagon. His mouth was faster than a speeding bullet, in all sorts of ways I didn’t want to think about, like all pucks, but definitely when it came to talking.
“Hunt no more? That’s dead for Wolves,” he pounced. “If you can’t take Suyolak, you’d better speak up so we can turn this parade around. I can think of better ways to die. Ten thousand at the very least.”
Rafferty ignored him, but this was a puck we were talking about. You couldn’t ignore one of them any more than you could a kindergarten class with each kid hyped up on five pounds of pure cane sugar. Goodfellow asked again . . . and again . . . and then again. That was when my cousin paralyzed the puck’s vocal cords. When Goodfellow turned in the seat and started to swing a quick and what looked like a lethal fist, Rafferty leaned out of reach and, unimpressed, said, “Keep it up and your hair will fall out, your eyes cross, and I’ll make you impotent for the rest of your long life.” His eyes flickered back and forth between the colors of a noontime sun and a setting one. “There’s immortal and there’s immortally limp dicked. Think about it. You’re asking me to kill a healer. ‘Do no harm’ has fallen by the wayside. Got it?”
He didn’t wait for the puck to ponder the pros and cons of yapping endlessly like a newborn cub versus being the bald, double-visioned actor on the erectile dysfunction drug commercials for the rest of eternity. Instead, Raff handed the computer to Cal, slid down, leaned against me, and went to sleep, but not before murmuring too low for human hearing, “I’m not leaving your furry ass, Catch. Got that? Never.”
I didn’t complain at his weight against me as he began to snore. He needed it. He’d been up all night driving, and I’d heard Cal’s call for help when Suyolak’s little present got him. I might have been getting my tail half chewed off by that mutant cat, but I could still hear. I rested my muzzle on top of Rafferty’s head, my fur mixing with his hair. He never had cared that much about getting haircuts in the old days . . . in high school or college. He was just that kind of guy who waited until his girlfriend dragged him to a barber. He didn’t think about it at all now; he just chopped at it with scissors when it got too long and hit the Salvation Army when his clothes wore out. That was his life now with me. I wanted it to be better when I was gone. I hoped he meant what he said, because I didn’t want him throwing that life away on Suyolak.
“Did healing you somehow infect him with your attitude?” Ro
bin frowned at Cal, his vocal cords working again as one hand checked his hair and the other checked his crotch. He gave a long exhalation of relief when he was assured he was as puckable as he ever was. I rolled my eyes. Pucks. They were enough to make a Wolf change his mind about the whole Humane Society’s neutering campaign.
“Half human, half monster, all attitude,” Cal replied mockingly. He had attitude all right, but he came by it honestly. I had my problems, but I wasn’t sure I would’ve exchanged them for his. Although his girlfriend . . . Kin or not, she was something. White fur—I’d always had a thing for white fur. It reminded me of snow, racing across it under the moon and stars, and having sex in the chill under a pine tree laden with icicles. Rafferty wasn’t the only one who needed to get laid.
“I’m starving. And if I’m starving, I know Delilah is,” Cal went on, idly searching my computer for games. I perked my ears up. Delilah, that was good; talk more about Delilah. “I can wait. Delilah probably could wait, but I doubt she will.”
A Wolf with appetites; I liked that. Of course at this point, any Wolf with a pulse was looking good. It had been a long, long time.
“That’s what drive-throughs and bad diners are made for, not to mention what you live for. I’ll stop at Omaha,” Niko said, not that concerned with his brother’s state of near starvation. “Did anyone—”
Cal interrupted him, “I was sick. I’m never sick. I could’ve died. I need to build my energy back up. At least—”
This time it was Niko’s turn to interrupt. A box of Twinkies was tossed over the top of the front seat to hit Cal squarely in the chest. That was a good interruption. Straight to the point. Niko was a man of few words and flying sugary snacks. I liked that in a human. “There,” he said sharply. “Happy? Convert your entire body to a Cal-shaped pile of sponge cake and crème. Now, may I continue?”
Cal immediately smelled contrite—more so than he would have for just annoying his brother. He’d said something to Niko that had sharply hit home, cut deeply to the bone. I didn’t know what it was, but he must’ve felt genuinely bad, because he let the Twinkies drop carelessly to the floorboards, which was a crime. I loved Twinkies. “Yeah, sorry. I was being a fucking idiot as usual. I’m listening now,” he responded quietly.
Okay, there was sorry and then there was stupid. He might not want a Twinkie, but I did. Before I could turn my head, though, and yip a protest, Niko exhaled and the scent of brooding worry faded to the more appropriate irritation. “Eat your Twinkies. You probably do need the energy.” He watched in the rearview mirror and waited while Cal unwrapped the first one, which I promptly snatched from his hand without disturbing Rafferty’s comfortable slump of sleep against me. Cal glared at me, which I ignored in crème- filled bliss, before he opened another. That was when Niko said, “Dr. Jones called again last night. Seattle professor Daniel Kirkland hasn’t been by his wife’s side for several days now, according to friends on the faculty, which is not just unusual. It’s unbelievable to them. They were the closest of couples. He has never given up hope and has never left her side since she slipped into a coma. They even said he typed on his computer with one hand while holding her hand with his other.” The computer he could’ve done his research on, found out the most likely location of Abelia-Roo’s clan . . . and Suyolak. “So there is a very good chance he is our man and our driver all in one. He might have hired men to do the stealing, but he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do the actual delivery.”
“And those guys killed Abelia’s men without thinking twice. Now he’s hauling Suyolak’s ass back home. Love can make you do some truly fucked-up shit.” Cal shook his head and looked like he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. I had the feeling everyone in this car, minus the cat, knew the last was truer than any of us cared to admit.
Niko cleared his throat and asked, “Did anyone have a Suyolak dream last night?”
Cal shook his head. “Like I said, I didn’t sleep much. I’m still waiting for one of you to have that fucking unparalleled joy.”
That’s right, I thought with a grumble to myself, rub it in. He might smell like Auphe, but he smelled like Delilah too under the soap of a morning shower. Goodfellow wasn’t happy either, muttering, “I had a dream or two, non-Suyolak related, and unfortunately for me, just dreams.”
“Yes, I and the long-suffering maid who will have to wash your sheets are more than aware,” Niko retorted. “So none of us dreamed of him?”
“One doesn’t have to sleep to dream. Life itself is only a dream, my brothers,” the nightmare spoke.
Rafferty’s head jerked up as he woke instantly. I growled and snapped, foam flying from my jaws. I couldn’t help it even though I knew he wasn’t really there. He had no scent. He wasn’t real. Suyolak—the nightmare that Niko and Cal had talked about. He wasn’t sitting cross-legged on the hood of the moving car, a skeleton covered with skin, pale moon eyes, and a gnarled mass of dusty dreadlocks that didn’t move in the rush of air that swept over the convertible. He wasn’t any of those things, although I saw him as he was. He made the dead cat look as normal and wholesome as our grandma Amelia’s apple and squirrel pie we’d eaten when we were cubs.
For a healer to appear in dreams was one thing. For a healer to appear as a hallucination in the brains of the conscious, that was another. That took the kind of healing power I didn’t want to think about. I remembered my thought that Rafferty was the best of this world and Suyolak the best of his. What if Suyolak was the best . . . period? What then?
“Don’t shoot, Cal,” Niko was saying. “He’s not actually there.”
“Yeah, I know.” But I saw that Cal’s trigger finger was having trouble catching up with his brain, same as my snapping jaws were with mine. “But wouldn’t it be better to double-check?”
“I don’t want to buy a new windshield because of this talking disease.” Niko kept driving. Yes, a human was unfazed enough by the so-called Plague of the World sitting on his ancient boat of a car to keep it at an even seventy down the Lincoln. He was brave. His balls might not have been furry, but he most definitely had them. I had to give credit where it was due. He’d have made a good Wolf.
“That’s what you are, Suyolak, a disease. You’re not human; you’re not a person; you never were. You were born a living disease, and as all diseases do, you have a cure,” Niko continued.
The cracked and shriveled lips parted in a grin. “Do you think you’re my cure, Vayash? Or do you think that mongrel behind you is? Is my equal? That a cur can face the man who reaped a continent? The Black Death himself?” The grin widened. “He is a jackal, only good for feeding on the dead that fall in my path.”
I moved to leap over the seat. Nobody talked about my cousin like that—nobody. I felt hands on me, Cal and my cousin holding me back. Suyolak raised his hands to seemingly hook withered fingers over the top of the windshield, his bleached eyes staring dead on into mine. “Why, look at you, brave dog. Look at what has been done to you,” he said with a gloating marvel. “Maybe I was wrong.” The eyes moved left, to Rafferty. “Maybe you will entertain me. I kill, but you took his mind. Which is worse? Which is more thrilling?” A bone-pale tongue tip touched the upper lip. “The taste of that, you left his life and took half his soul . . . well done, my Wolf brother. We are two of a kind after all.”
Then he was gone. The bastard was gone.
I settled back on my haunches. My teeth were still bared, as much at Niko and Cal as they were for Suyolak—for getting us into this. For getting Rafferty into this. Then I shook my head, fur flying, and turned to stick my nose directly in my cousin’s ear. He was frozen. It was more in the face of the accusation than in the hideously dessicated one of Suyolak, I knew. Suyolak had hit my cousin directly in a wound five years in the festering. He hurt him, like no one else could. And now I was the only one who could reach him. I blew through my nose hard, sending an ice-cold spray against his ear-drum. He jerked back to the here and now and away fr
om my muzzle. He scowled before saying with a sigh, “Yeah, yeah. I know.”
Not your fault. You did the best you could, the best any healer alive could. I said it silently and hoped he heard me, smelled it, that he really did know. It was the truth, but even if it weren’t, I would’ve said the same thing.
It was what family did.
9
Cal
You shouldn’t see things like that in daylight. You’d think it would be better . . . to see the yellowed spiral of a long nail scrape playfully down the windshield . . . in the sun. It would be less of a horror, less of an icicle stab to the heart. It wasn’t. It was worse in the day. It didn’t belong. Suyolak was wrong, but he was so much more wrong in the light than in the dark, because there was no way to deny it—to deny him. There was no way to say the nightmare was just that . . . only a nightmare. In our life, denial could get you killed, but a few seconds of it when the time was right could also keep you sane. Just like salt . . . A little made the bland taste a little better and a lot raised your blood pressure, dropped you with a massive stroke, and boom, you were dead. Denial and salt, not totally bad things on the surface of it, but in the end they both could equal death; who knew?
Lucky we had a healer with us.