by L. E. Horn
A wall of muck engulfed us. Choking on filth, I released Sherman and scrambled backward, struggling to reverse my changes before anyone witnessed what I’d become. Sam dragged me to the fence and through it. As I lay in the bull-free zone, I saw that Darlene and Burt were across the paddock, also safe. Sherman flailed in the mud, getting himself onto his feet to shake his craggy head.
“Liam!” Darlene called out to me, hurrying toward us.
“Liam, change back.” Sam’s face was white as a sheet, and her gray eyes, human once more, were dark with raw emotion.
I curled so that my head rested on my knees, my arms tucked against me, fighting to revert the bones, muscles, and tendons to human. Blood dripped from my mouth—at some point, the big teeth had emerged from my gums.
The wulf did not want to go, and for the first time, I almost couldn’t force it to my will. My entire body shook and blackness fogged my vision. Dammit, can’t black out. I’m half wulf. I smelled him, seeping through my pores, the hairs thickening along my spine, the muscles rippling beneath my abdomen.
“Liam! Are you okay?”
I’d never heard such concern in Darlene’s voice and it almost made me look up, but she’d see the wulf in my eyes, and God—my jaw had started to lengthen.
“It’s okay.” Sam sounded calm—the enforcer in control. “He just had the wind knocked out of him. He’ll be fine in a minute.”
“Did you see what he did? He . . . he bulldogged a three-thousand-pound bull, for Chrissakes. How the hell did he do that?”
“I have no idea,” Sam said.
“He’s shaking,” Darlene stepped closer.
“Do you have a blanket in your truck?”
Her words seemed to snap Darlene back to her usual practical self. “Blanket. Yes. Good idea,” she muttered before turning and stomping away. Sam kneeled next to me.
“Okay, Liam, now breathe. In and out. Focus on Keen, think happy dog thoughts.”
Yeah, right. I breathed and concentrated, wincing when the fangs finally regressed into my gums. The claws receded from my fingers and the bones creaked as they shifted, sliding into place.
Darlene returned, squelching her way across the sodden ground, with Burt following her. A moment later a thick blanket dropped around my shoulders, disguising the last twitches of my shoulder blades.
“Can you stand?” Darlene asked, her voice unusually hoarse.
I nodded, not looking at her as they helped me to my feet. Beneath the blanket, the changes continued, and a few stray tufts of blond hair drifted out from under my shirt. I stiffened when Darlene glanced at them, but I realized that they looked a lot like the last vestiges of Sherman’s winter coat.
Keeping my gaze averted, I waited for the colors to change around me, knowing I would retain my wulf eyes to the very end. I could barely walk, the ground seemed to sway and tilt as we moved.
“Take him to the house,” Burt said. “His mouth is bleeding. I can call Selkirk emergency.”
“NO!” Sam and I said simultaneously.
“I’m fine,” I spoke into the shocked silence that followed. “Just bit my tongue. I need to go home to a hot shower.”
“You need a doctor,” Darlene said.
“I am a doctor. Sort of. I’ll be fine.”
“If he needs to go in, I’ll take him,” Sam promised, steering us toward Peter’s truck. Darlene helped fold me into the passenger seat and tucked the blanket in around me. I blinked at Sam as she slipped behind the wheel. The colors had returned to human by the time I smiled up at Darlene. “I’m fine. No biggie.”
“No biggie . . . Liam, you saved my skin. I don’t know how you did it. But, thank you.” And she hugged me.
Never in all our years of working together had I ever seen Darlene so raw. “Hey,” I said. “Really, not a big deal. Sam helped too. Luck was on our side.”
“I almost got you both killed.”
“No, that was Sherman.” I smiled. The truth was, you never knew with animals. The law of averages was created by long sequences of extremes in both directions and witnessing them could put you in serious trouble. It was impossible to foresee every contingency.
Darlene gave me a final pat on the hand before shutting the truck door. I sank back in the seat, arms wrapped in the blanket and locked around my abdomen. My entire body shook like I had the plague.
Sam drove sedately until we pulled onto the highway and out of sight of Burt and Darlene, then she floored it. Her face still hadn’t regained its color. She began to grope in the door’s side pocket.
“Check the glove compartment for anything edible,” she ordered.
Lifting my arms to open the damned thing seemed almost beyond me, but I managed to get it open. Nothing but a tire gauge, a pen, and an old greasy rag. It appeared Peter traveled light.
“Nothing. I’m not hungry, anyway.”
Sam shot me a look—her eyes were wild, glimmering silver. Wulf eyes.
I shifted beneath the blanket. “I’m okay. I’m in control.” Thoughts of mutant virus skittered through my brain, and I shivered. But I pushed it back. It was a battle, but I won.
“You tossed that bull like he weighed nothing,” Sam said, staring straight ahead.
“I bulldogged it. When you startled him, the momentum worked against him, and he lost his footing in the mud.”
“You bulldogged him. Three thousand pounds of charging bull.”
“Yeah. I always wanted to be a cowboy. Who guessed I’d be so good at it?”
“You did a partial. A goddamned partial, Liam. Even that doesn’t explain what I saw. No wulf I’ve ever seen could do what you just did.”
She sounded so freaked out. I didn’t think Sam ever sounded like that. Mischievous, high-spirited, feisty, angry, frustrated, spitting fire, all those things I had seen. But freaked out? She was an enforcer to the core. They didn’t do freaked out. Then I remembered Chris’s haunted expression. This virus has everyone pushed beyond their normal boundaries.
I sighed. All I wanted to do was sleep.
“Don’t you fall asleep on me!” Now she sounded frantic, and I squinted at her. If I weren’t so damned lethargic, I would’ve come up with something good to say. But my mind was filled with molasses.
I yawned. “I’m so tired.”
She leaned over, making the truck weave, and shook my arm. When my chin continued to drift toward my chest, her hand darted between the folds of blanket to squeeze a rather personal spot.
“Hey!” My body shot upright, hands reflexively grabbing hers, but her effort chased away the fog.
“Stay awake!”
“What’s your problem?” I said, my voice taking on the tones of a cranky child as she pulled her hand back. “If I tried that with you, you’d remove something permanently.”
“You bet. But I don’t go around throwing bulls over my shoulder.” She shot me a look, and her worry finally got through to me.
“Okay, I’m awake. Explain why I have to be?”
“Partials can be lethal, and not just if you can’t find your way to either form. Few wulfan are capable of them—I’ve never heard of a wulfleng doing them at all—and many wulfan have died when their bodies run out of the supplies they need, sometimes even if they manage to change back. When you drain yourself, your body takes resources from your vital organs and muscles. Unless those resources are replenished, you’ll slip into a coma.”
“I get it.”
“Do you? Do you realize how close to the edge you’re skating?”
“I had no problem this morning.”
“This morning? You did another partial earlier today?” She inhaled. “You did two partials in one day?” She sounded on the verge of totally losing it.
“The first was deliberate, but this one came at me fast. I had no time to prepare.”
Her jaw snapped shut, and I huddled in my blanket and shivered, feeling miserable as I fought back the waves of blackness threatening to overcome me. Maybe two partials in one day
wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had. But if I hadn’t done them, poor old Buster would be dead, and so, likely, would Darlene. Humans did not do well when bulldozed by three thousand pounds of angry bull.
“I didn’t understand about the depleted resources and how dangerous partials were,” I confessed. “But I don’t know that it would have mattered, even if I’d known. I saved lives today because of them.” I gritted my teeth as I rode through another bout of shivering. “But I should have paid more attention to eating afterward. Now I know.”
“Now you know.” She echoed me. “We have enough to worry about, with this damned viral thing. Trust you to come up with an entirely new problem.”
“Yeah, that’s me. Mister Innovation.” I sighed and scratched at loose fur inside my coverall, as a thought popped into my head. “Maybe it’s not entirely new. Maybe the two are related.”
She exhaled noisily. “Yeah. I was wondering that too.” The glance she shot me revealed a glimpse into her soul and the true depth of her worry.
Oddly the glimpse comforted me. If I was destined to go to hell, at least I had someone to hold my hand along the way.
21
It wasn’t until we drove into Beausejour that I realized we weren’t going back to Chris’s. I viewed our surroundings with surprise as Sam pulled the truck into the Co-op gas lot alongside Subway and parked it.
“Stay here. And stay awake.”
I nodded as she slid out of the truck and jogged toward Subway, then hunched into myself and concentrated on keeping my eyes open.
She returned at speed to shove a dozen cookies and a bag of chips into my hands. “Eat them all. More to follow.” She ran back into the restaurant.
I looked at the cookies and ripped the packaging with shaking hands. The moment the sugar hit my system, my shivering abated. The chips helped me prop open my eyes with more determination. By the time she returned, carrying multiple bags whose aroma made my stomach growl, I had polished off the lot. Next, she handed me a steak and cheese sub.
“We have steaks waiting at Chris’s,” I pointed out.
“We’re not going back there until you’ve cleaned up at home, changed, and eaten enough so you can stand on your own two feet. After that, we’ll go to Chris’s and eat our steaks like respectable people.”
I eyed the four wrapped footlongs beside her. “Is this part of your new weight gain program? Why aren’t we going to Chris’s?”
She took a deep breath. “Because if we go there with you like this, you’ll reek of wulf and you’ll have to tell them about the partials . . . and we aren’t going to tell them about the partials.”
“We aren’t?”
“Nope.” Her mouth straightened into a grim line as she started the truck and pulled out onto the main drag. “The board is already putting pressure on Chris to lock you up until they resolve this. All it’ll take is one more weird thing and the scales will tip. If Garrett hears about the partials, he might push for Chris to put you in the cage and leave you there. And if the board backs him, Chris will have no choice.” She glanced at me and gave me what I referred to as the Sam eye. “Eat,” she commanded.
I ate the steak and cheese as we drove through Beausejour. “You’re putting your career on the line for me, if they find out you’ve been hiding this from them.”
She shrugged and a corner of her mouth twitched. “You know how the saying goes. Better to beg forgiveness—”
“Than ask permission. Yeah. But the board might be right. What if I’m a danger to . . . everything?”
I caught a quick flash of pale eyes. “In order for that to be true, you’d have to be losing control over your wulf, and that isn’t what I saw today. Wulves don’t step between a human and a charging bull. The human in you used the wulf to save your friend. It was stupid, but brave.” She shook her head. “You deserve a chance to find answers, and I want to help you.”
I took a bite, chewed, and swallowed, the strength returning to my body and the clarity to my mind.
“Okay,” I said. “But if it looks like I’m losing it, promise to turn me in.”
She bit her lip but nodded.
“And my crotch is off limits, okay?”
That earned me a glimpse of her pearly whites. “Sorry,” she said with a snort. “I can’t give you that.”
* * *
After one shower, four footlongs, a plate of cookies, a bag of chips, and a second stern lecture, Sam and I pulled up into Chris’s driveway. The sun had set, it was time to run—though that held about as much appeal for me as going another round with Sherman.
The moment we stepped out of the truck, the dogs were on us. Their presence meant that the evening’s entertainment had yet to begin. Keen bounced all over me, radiating excitement that I’d returned, recrimination that I’d left, and relief that perhaps now we could abandon the annoying puppy with Josh and go home. The giant puppy in question almost flattened Sam before she growled at him, turning him into a quivering heap of obsequiousness. Once he behaved, she made much of him, stroking the big skull until he rolled on his back to offer his tummy.
“Sorry girl, you’re stuck with him for a bit yet,” I told Keen, tickling her all over. Considering the mess we were all in the middle of at the moment, I worried about both dogs. What would happen to Keen if we were infected with this virus? Keen had been abandoned once, and I couldn’t let that happen again.
“Doc Hayek’s here,” Sam said, gesturing to the doctor’s distinctive, older-model car parked on the other side of Garrett’s monster truck. As I followed her toward the house, I suspected this had something to do with why everyone had forgone the run, at least temporarily.
Subdued voices greeted us when we entered the kitchen. Supper had been cleared away, but only as far as the counter. Doc Hayek sat with the crew around the big table. When Sam and I arrived, the doc stood up.
“Liam, good, I need you to come with me.” He walked to the large cooler sitting along a wall and fetched a soft-sided bag from beside it.
The stab of pure panic that zipped through me offered insight into what an animal must experience when carted in to see me at the clinic. I braced myself for poking and prodding as I followed Hayek into the library, the room they seemed to use for all kinds of strange activities.
“Strip,” he told me.
“You know you werewolves have an unhealthy focus on nudity.”
“There’s no shame in living as nature intended,” he responded.
I realized I didn’t know the good doctor well enough to add any nuance to that remark. I sighed and slipped out of my clothes. I’d leave my underwear on unless otherwise instructed. He finished rooting around in his bag, turned toward me, and froze. I looked at myself and grimaced.
My entire body showed black bruising where various parts of Sherman had pummelled me, including a distinctively shaped crescent or two from his hooves.
“Good Lord,” Hayek exclaimed. “Did you get hit by a truck?”
“Uh, a bull, actually. That’s where I went tonight, to help a vet buddy. The critter proved tough to restrain.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of sedative?”
“Been there, done that; he still got me.”
Hayek shook his head as he examined the bruises. “You realize I have never seen you without some kind of injury.”
“The ribs healed,” I pointed out.
“I considered becoming a vet. There are times I’m glad I didn’t, although my present occupation straddles the line. At least I don’t get kicked and bitten.” He smiled wolfishly. “Well, not often, anyway.” Leaving me to my bruises, he set a series of Vacutainers on the desk, along with a syringe.
“All right,” he said. “Just so you know you’re not alone, I’ve already done this with Peter, Josh, and Chris.”
Chris? He took samples from Chris? Finally, my brain kicked in. Chris—who was intimate with Josh. My God, where will this end?
Hayek busied himself recording the date and my name on the V
acutainers before continuing. “I’ll take blood, tissue, saliva, urine, and semen samples to test for the virus.”
Reminders of all the potential manners in which the virus might be spread sobered me. No wonder the crowd outside was so grim.
“We have a wulfan on staff at the virology lab that will compare them against the regular strain of the virus, as well as the other samples taken from the bodies in Brandon.”
I didn’t ask what would happen if they came back positive with a link to a mutant virus. My heart pounded as he conducted a quick physical, so I was surprised when he told me my pulse and blood pressure were a little low. Suddenly, my brain kicked into gear—some of his tests might reveal my depleted state from the partials. “I haven’t eaten much over the last couple of days,” I said. It was true if you didn’t count what I’d inhaled recently.
“That’s not good,” Hayek said, fixing me with a stare, his mouth in a grim line. “If you try to shift in a weakened condition, you might die.” He paused as if to drive home his point.
Preaching to the converted, doc.
“Anyway, I’m recommending that all four of you not undergo shifts until we get these results back. Shifting might trigger the virus, and enhance its virulence,” Hayek continued. “Usually, the wulf gives you a week before getting restless, so bear with me.”
I nodded. Better a restless wulf than me locked in a cage.
The doc put aside his stethoscope and picked up the syringe. “Okay, here we go.”
After filling a series of Vacutainers with my red stuff, he froze a section of my thigh and removed a sliver of muscle tissue, preserving it in solution, and then took a saliva sample with two different swabs. Finally, he handed me containers.
“Urine,” he said, lifting one. “And semen.” He lifted the other.
With resignation, I sensed my face heat and saw the twinkle in his eye. He pointed down the hall. “Bathroom.”
Oh, man. The thought of doing this with a group of sharp-eared werewolves sitting just feet away, and within easy hearing of one small wulfan in particular, added to my state of embarrassment. The fact that three others had already gone this route before me did nothing to assuage me. I closed the bathroom door and leaned against it, debating using the facilities in the barn, but knowing that meant walking past said werewolves with sample containers in hand.