I tapped our friendly meth- head on the shoulder with the barrel of the shotgun when it looked as if he’d gathered enough courage together to get back up. “What do we want? You don’t listen, do you? The phone. Just the phone . . . oh, and the gun. Or if you have a problem with that, we might also want to bang your head against the floor until it splits like a melon. Up to you. I’m flexible. You choose.”
He picked not having his head treated like a basketball. Some guys are no fun. Seemingly. But he pleasantly surprised me by yanking a bowie knife, or an el cheapo knock-off version he’d picked up at a swap meet, from beneath the couch cushion. Niko had taught me many disciplines of thought when it came to knife fighting, and there were many, although they all seemed to come down to two options: “You’re going to get cut, but suck it up and take the bastard down” versus “I will not be cut and dispose of my opponent like a child armed with a plastic picnic knife.” The second option was mostly held by those living in a fantasy world where they whacked off to martial arts magazines and Chuck Norris movies.
But there were times your opponent was so pathetic that you could actually get away without a nick. Our meth buddy was one of those. He may as well have been a poodle with a switchblade—a hyped-up poodle, but still a poodle. He wasn’t worth it. He definitely wouldn’t provide any entertainment or further my education in knife fighting. Instead, I kept my distance from his desperately jagged slashes and smacked him with the barrel of the shotgun again, this time on top of his head. He went facedown into some truly nasty carpet or the flat nap that was left of it.
Over the next forty minutes he occasionally got to his hands and knees, felt around with a floppy, uncoordinated hand for the knife while dripping a good dose of drool. I’d wait until he got the knife in his hand—he looked so proud at the accomplishment, like a kid graduating from kindergarten—and then I’d whack him over the head again. After two times, Rafferty stuck his head inside the door and told me to stop playing with my food and either fish or cut bait.
I almost protested that’s not what I was doing, but it would have been pointless. On the subject of food and playing with it, a Wolf would know.
Niko, while he wasn’t cutting the phone line, didn’t step up to defend me, which meant I probably was in the wrong and enjoying playing Whac-A-Mole a little too much. It was a boring forty minutes, the guy was stubborn, and I . . . I enjoyed my work. Just because he was human didn’t mean he wasn’t a monster that preyed on the weak. He deserved a whack or three, but to keep the peace with Niko and not annoy Rafferty, which more and more seemed like a bad idea, I hit the guy extra hard the last time. He’d stay down until long after we left.
We left behind us a nonfunctioning phone, not that that ass was in any position to call the cops. We also left that same ass unconscious on the floor. Maybe if we were lucky, his dog would come back and eat him. It was a happy dog, but happy dogs get hungry too. And an hour later we were back at the exit that had taken us on our side trip to Candy Land gone horribly wrong. We were all sprawled in Abelia- Roo’s RV. Catcher, Rafferty, and I were sprawled anyway. Robin was sitting perfectly upright, touching as little of the cushions as he could for fear the eye-searing pink roses would jump from the upholstered bench seat to taint his clothing beyond redemption. “Is there no limit to what you will do to disarm your marks?” He sneered at Abelia who sat in the kitchen booth.
She sneered back. “This from a trickster. I take that as the finest of compliments, goat.”
The old woman had answered Niko’s call and come back to pick us up. Branje had suggested she and the others go back to the exit while he went to the house to make sure we were doing our job. Waiting on gadje was no task for a queen like Abelia. It was the perfect line for Abelia- Roo and the only one she would’ve bought. Maybe because she did buy it helped her to blame us for his death. Suyolak had done the damage, but we had a healer. We could’ve saved him. Hell, I didn’t know. Maybe Rafferty could have, but Salome saw someone trying to kill us and she took care of the situation. Diplomacy and client relations weren’t concepts in her pickled little brain—if she had a brain. Didn’t they remove them during mummification?
It was not a subject I wanted to dwell on. One of the four men left was driving. He slowed at that same four-way stop I’d been so unimpressed with before. There was no way I’d be forgetting it now. “Should I stop, Bara?” he asked.
“Bah. Fool. Do you see any cars here to steal?” She tossed a bony finger at the window at the only building around: the post office. “Should they steal a mailman’s truck? Such a fool. You shame me. Go to the next exit. Perhaps there will be better pickings there.”
“And a computer,” Rafferty added. “We need a laptop. As soon as possible.” He looked down at Catcher who was sleeping. Unable to communicate on an in-depth level, there wasn’t much else he could do—sleep or gnaw on those ugly cushions.
Brilliant white, store-bought teeth—those were new—bared in a smile of the haggling kind. “Perhaps this I can help you with, doctor dog. You could not do for Branje, but you can do something for me.”
It wasn’t at the next exit but the one after that that we found a car. We didn’t steal it as Abelia suggested. We had more than enough of her money to pay for it, although with Robin, trickster and used car salesman, on our side in the negotiations, the guy we bought it from had to feel like he had been not only robbed, but mugged in an alley, then lost his retirement in a Ponzi scheme. We left him stunned with the key to the tiny car lot dangling from his hand, trying to get up the energy to close up. Goodfellow was smugly satisfied, Niko had another giant, ancient car, and I had air-conditioning. Genuine making-life-worth-living air-conditioning. It was almost worth the loss of my guns.
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the cool air in my face. Beside me was the clicking of a car lot ink pen against a keyboard—Catcher’s new laptop. There hadn’t been an exchange of money for it. From the looks of Rafferty and the car he’d left behind, he didn’t have much to spend. But there was no way Abelia- Roo would give anyone anything for free. “What’d she want?” I asked. “For the computer?” I wasn’t surprised she had one to trade in the RV. I’d bet the old witch had more stock than Kmart in there.
“She has a bad heart.” I heard the rustle of cloth as Rafferty shifted position and I opened my eyes to see him lean and read Catcher’s typing. He snorted in agreement, “Yeah, full of bitchiness too, but that I can’t cure.”
“So you could fix her heart?” I was surprised she had one at all.
“I improved the function some, but you can’t cure old.” Unless you were willing to do things only Suyolak would do. “Every heart has only so many beats in it. I gave her the maximum hers has. Another month more than she would’ve had—maybe. Not that I told her it was that little. We wolves can do creative bargaining ourselves; we just call it what it is: lying.”
“Well, it’s a month more than she deserves,” I said under my breath as I used my cell to finally call Delilah and fill her in on what had happened, now that I knew she wasn’t behind what had happened. She was still angry. I’d known that or she would’ve come looking for us. She would’ve sniffed us out, found us, made things considerably easier on our twenty-mile trek. But she hadn’t. In some ways that was almost worse than her possibly considering killing me. Killing me was an intimate thing; it was personal. Being ignored . . . that was like not existing at all. That wasn’t Delilah-like; it wasn’t even Wolf-like. Ninety-nine point nine percent of Wolves regarded me with loathing, fear, and murderous fury. Rafferty and Catcher had given me the benefit of the doubt years ago, because one was a healer and one was different himself; at least that was my best guess. I could’ve been wrong. Who really knew? Rafferty might be a healer, but he wasn’t handing out smiles and lollipops after exams in the surgery room of his house.
Delilah—I knew I didn’t know her inside out either. She was a different species. She was a killer, although she claimed not to kill humans because it wasn?
??t enough of a challenge. She was a career criminal and enjoyed it. But she also liked me, gifted me with pretty fucking amazing sex, and treated me as nothing particularly special. When those in the preternatural world who could tell what fathered you were either terrified of you or wanted to kill you, and then someone came along who treated you as just a guy, nothing out of the ordinary, it was . . . good. It was damn good.
I closed the cell after she disconnected wordlessly after my explanation. This though—this wasn’t good at all. If she was going to try to kill me, I wished she’d do it already. That I could handle. This sucked. This made me want to kill someone. Hell, this wasn’t a new feeling for me—just a new feeling for me with Delilah. And the feeling lasted well into the next moment, although it shifted to someone specific, because he was back.
The goddamn Plague of the World.
“The sun has fallen; the moon will soon be a cradle for newborn babes rocked to gentle sleep.”
He was sitting between Niko and Robin this time, up front, on the old bench seat. There was room enough for a hide-covered skeleton. I saw the line of the pointed jaw in the dark as the head turned to look from one side; then from the other; then the glimpse of a marbleized eye as Suyolak shifted his gaze back to Rafferty specifically. “But not all babes, my carnivorous friend, yes? Not all babes.”
There was more than Catcher’s snarl this time. There was his, his cousin’s, the yowl of Salome, and my own incoherent growl. If only I knew where he was, if only I’d seen it, I’d have traveled there in a heartbeat despite what Niko thought about gates. But I hadn’t, and I couldn’t go where I didn’t know the way. It didn’t stop me from lunging at the image, my hands passing through where his neck would’ve been under all those tangled hanks of hair. The bone-gleam of a grin was there and gone as he disappeared, popping out of existence like a soap bubble . . . like a magic trick. When you wanted to strangle someone, magic tricks weren’t what you wanted to see.
The snarling beside me continued, from human and wolf throats. I wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated. “Monogamy, the Plague, and killer babies,” Robin said blackly as Salome tried to crawl up the inside of his shirt. “This is officially the worst road trip in history.”
“It’s not your fault, Rafferty,” Niko said, ignoring the puck and addressing what needed to be said. That’s what he had always done for me. Now he did it for our ally. “It’s far easier to destroy than rebuild. There’s nothing you could’ve done and we know that. And Suyolak knows it as well. He’s pushing your buttons. Don’t let him.”
The healer snapped his mouth shut on the next snarl and turned to look out the window at passing lights . . . the night . . . or nothing. Any of those would’ve been better than looking at the inside of his own head. I could see that blood-splattered nursery in IMAX fucking vibrancy on the inside of mine, and I could’ve done without it. And I wasn’t the one whose specialty was doing something about things like that. I was more like Suyolak. Killing was about all I was good at; killing and being a smart-ass. Neither of those should’ve done any good in that baby’s room, but the only good Rafferty had been able to do was the same, which had to make him feel like utter shit.
He wasn’t alone. We had known there would be civilian deaths and accepted it. There was nothing else we could do about it and stopping to try to help would only make things worse and give Suyolak more power over us. We hadn’t gone faster because we had to meet up with Rafferty. There was nothing we could do and nothing we had done—not one damn thing. We all felt like shit.
And there was still nothing we could do . . . except this time go faster.
11
Catcher
I was running. I loved to run. All my life, I’d loved it.
“Catcher, wake up.”
Through the grass and into the trees, under a sky bluer than those of the best hundred summer vacations combined.
Running and running, trying to catch something, but I didn’t know what. It felt like something already gone, but it didn’t keep me from chasing behind it. Running and running . . .
“Catcher, you’re having a dream.” A hand thumped my ribs and I jerked awake with a snap and a snarl. A familiar scent was there, but it was surrounded by thousands of unfamiliar ones—unfamiliar smells, things, and shapes. Where? Who? My panic peaked sharply . . . what was . . . who was . . .
It had happened before. It had. I closed my eyes against the confusion and the unknown. I closed my eyes and concentrated hard. Hard. Hard? Right before the word lost its meaning, before I lost meaning, it all came back. It felt like a muscle cramp that unbunches and finally loosens, but in my brain. I’d stood on the edge, but this time I hadn’t fallen.
My name is Catcher.
I hadn’t fallen. No, not this time—but lots of times before.
My name is Catcher, and I am fine. Just fine.
I exhaled harshly in a hacking morning cough that sprayed saliva, opened my eyes, and smacked Rafferty in the head with a saucer-sized paw. Then I yawned elaborately to show I was still tired. There was nothing wrong with me, so let me dream already.
He knew better. I wished I could’ve fooled him, but I couldn’t, not a healer and not my cousin. It wasn’t like the good old days when I’d once swiped his wallet and his keys, taken his Mustang, and traded it in for one of those Volkswagen Rabbits from the eighties. We looked enough alike that I could pass for his license photo when I signed over the pink slip. He’d given serious thought to killing me and did kick my butt Wolf-to-Wolf, but to see a Wolf driving around in a Rabbit, it was worth it. Was it ever worth it. Our local pack laughed its collective furry butt off at the sight for weeks.
I pulled more than a few good ones on him back then. I’d thought he was too serious. I’d thought it was my job to lighten him up, to show him what a ride life could be. It turned out I had. Only he’d been the one who was right. Life was serious and not a ride anyone could count on. You could get a bullet train rush of speed and an amusement park picture at the end with your hair on end or you could get a rickety wooden roller coaster that crumbled, spilling you into the river far below. There was no way you knew what you’d get when you bought the ticket. It was the luck of the draw.
“You’re moping. Stop moping and eat your damn fries.” Rafferty shoved a bag of fresh, hot, salty-as-the-sea fries under my nose and I brightened. Okay, maybe the ride wasn’t perfect and I was on the downhill slide into the end of it, but going up that roller coaster hill had been great. Family, friends, college, good movies, better food, lots of sex, and running under the skies of every season as human and wolf. I’d had a good life, and it still had high points: family, movies, my head out of the car window grinning in the wind, and fries. Who didn’t love fries? I stuck my muzzle in the white paper bag and went to work on about half a pound of them.
So I had a little hiccup of the brain this morning, and it was morning—after ten if McDonald’s was serving fries, which meant late morning but still morning. I could tell by the smell of the air, the color of the sky, the position of the sun when I peered out the window, and I could also read the digital clock of the bank across the street from where we were parked. I grinned to myself in satisfaction. Just a hiccup and I’d plenty of those. I was still here, all of me, and that’s what counted.
When I did go . . . if I did go, Rafferty had firmly amended before telling me with a reluctance he’d never shown any other of his patients, it would be one big hiccup. I’d go wolf in thought, as I had many times before, but that time . . . the last time, I’d never come back to Catcher again. No Flowers for Algernon for me. No gradual loss of intellect or changing bit by bit until my mind wasn’t mine anymore. No, the hiccups would get closer and closer together, as they had, and when it happened, it would be all at once. I’d never know I was going; never know I was gone. I tried to be philosophical about it. After all, chances were I’d be a happy wolf. I was a happy werewolf. I simply wouldn’t be me anymore—not the Catcher me, but a simpler version o
f me, maybe. I hoped.
I dived back in the bag for more fries. I was lucky. I’d gotten to be me longer than I would have if Rafferty had let me die. I dropped a mouthful of soggy fries in his lap and gave him a more cheerful grin this time. My ride had been good, great even, just short. Rafferty’s was long and, if he didn’t let go of his guilt, miserable. The very least I could do for him was not add to that with any gloom-and-doom brooding. And I really was done with it. Resigned, no, not resigned . . . I was at peace with my fate. If only Rafferty could be too and stop fighting it like the stubborn bastard he was; stop looking for the Cure, the impossible C. Fries couldn’t fix that, though, as much as I wished they could.
“Thanks.” Picking up one fry to watch saliva drip from it, he said what he always said. “You’re a pal. We’re in Utah now. We stopped for gas, if you’re curious.”
I snorted, indicating I was more than capable of smelling gasoline. Even a human could smell that. I could smell something else too: Delilah, and she smelled better than the fries by a long shot. She might be out to kill him, but Cal was still one lucky son of a bitch in my opinion. I gave my cousin a questioning woo and turned to look out each back window for a glimpse of her.
“Jesus, just don’t hump the seat, okay?” He sighed. “I’ll never live that one down.”
“Cheerful one.” Delilah slid into the empty front seat. Niko, Robin, and that naked cat, Cal, they were all off somewhere. “Litter mate? You all the fun, he with none?” she went on, her smile bright and wicked.
She was stunning. Not beautiful, no, but something beyond beautiful. Something wild and dangerous even to another Wolf. Her eyes were naturally amber, not wolf amber, with skin to match and that silver blond hair that still mixed up snow and sex in one happy bundle in my thoughts. I tossed my head to the side, pulling out of range—either a refusal or a negative in wolf-talk. And I definitely didn’t mean it as a refusal.