Brave the Night: A Bully Boys Novel

by Cassandra Moore

  Why did I have to be the one who was safe from this shit? Greg and Erin deserved it more than I did. I was a fuckup until Greg set me straight, and Erin reminded me what’s worth fighting for. If anyone is a wolf at heart, it’s her.

  And there it was.

  “What about lycanthropy?” Shane said, heedless of Alok’s continued commentary.

  Quiet. Then, “What do you mean?”

  “You were talking about what kills the Beast Plague. Werewolves can’t get it. What would happen if you tried to pass the wolf on to someone who has the Beast Plague?”

  “If the host you are trying to turn into a werewolf has assimilated one of the strains fully, the usual transmission methods do not work. It has become too potent for small doses of lycanthropy to overcome. Larger doses have their own problems and were never tested.”

  “What about a host who hasn’t fully assimilated it?” Holly asked.

  “That was never tested, so I have no good answer.”

  “How about one good guess?” Shane said.

  “If this is my one good guess? I will say, this is the best idea I have in the very short time we possess. Lycanthropy is aggressive, it stimulates the immune and healing systems when it takes root, and if the hostile infection does not kill it, we will probably not mind if it stays in the host. You are going to try this?”

  Shane pulled his keys out of his pocket. “You have thirty seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t.”

  “Let me tell you instead to introduce as much lycanthropy into her system as you can. In an ideal situation, I would do a transfusion, but we are very far from ideal now.”

  “Not even in the same county.” Shane paused. “Thank you, Alok. I appreciate the help. Someday, we’re going to need to have a conversation about your part in this. Right now, being mad at you is the last thing I want, because you’re Holly’s friend and because you might have helped me save Erin.”

  “But what I did might have contributed to Erin’s death, if this does not work? I know. When we look backwards, we see all the mistakes we have made. I will pray this will work, Shane, and then, someday, we will have that conversation.”

  “The Beast Plague already killed my brother. If it kills Erin, you should probably include a few prayers for yourself.”

  Running. She had to run away, far away from the house before her mate tried to find her. Shane. His name is Shane. If he found her, he would make her stay, and then there would be more ghosts to haunt his home. It had grown too crowded with them already, and soon, no space would remain for the living.

  Dimly, she heard a voice come from the walkie-talkie, but it was hard to hear over the song that swelled throughout her head. It had sounded like howls once, wordless and without coherent intent, but that changed the more she listened to it now. Layers of meaning unfolded into her mind, a chorus of sounds that conveyed the pack’s present status, its various locations. Its questions.

  Running. He was running to the place where the trucks waited, a trembling, whimpering human in his arms. They had pulled him from another truck when he had stopped to relieve himself by the side of the road. He hadn’t had time to sheath his softer parts when they grabbed him, and he had wet himself down the front of his clothes. The Feral could smell the sour scent of it, with all its indications of a bad diet and not enough water to drink. Bringing this one into the pack would help him. Then he could have meat to eat, and water and blood to drink.

  Last night, they had enough drivers. Then one had tried to run, and the ones who guarded him had bitten him. The Feral could not blame them. The human had run, and a beast’s instinct to chase and to latch on with teeth could come on strong. But now the old driver could not remember how to work the controls, not well enough to ensure the truck would get where they needed it.

  The Feral knew the others of the Singing Pack counted on him. They had enough trouble with the trucks without missing drivers, too. Did the Fixer not know how they needed her? The one who led their song, who sat most closely in her thoughts, said she could hear them. She had to know they wanted to welcome her. To sing with her while she made sure the trucks would go. Why did she keep herself away from her family?

  Soon, the humans would lose the places here where they kept the packs at bay. They would lose their biggest dens, the ones where they kept their last footholds on the land. Where they planned to hurt the packs and tried to deny them the land they should have. The Bird of Fire, the Place of Bright Lights, the Laughing Desert Haven. All these would belong to the packs. Then the humans could no longer deny that the packs should be given respect.

  Soon. If they could make the trucks go. If the humans who drove them would stop doing stupid things. Too many steps. Too much to grind his teeth about. He just wanted to live and hunt and kill and sleep, maybe to mate if he grew strong enough. Would the females be impressed if his part in this plan worked? They would have to be. Maybe then they would not bite him.

  The trucks were close enough that he could hear the rumbles as they waited. One roared to life, loud and deep, and that meant they had fixed it again. Had the Fixer come? Had the Fixer—

  Erin ran into an oleander bush. The pain and startlement snapped her back to herself. Where she’d thought she was running across the desert, she had never even left Shane’s yard. But I was running. I was running and— It wasn’t me. It was one of the Ferals. They took a truck driver. They need him to drive one of the trucks to, um, places. What places? Come on, Fixer, think. Not Fixer. Erin.

  Her head ached. Thoughts thrashed about in the confines of her skull like frantic rodents forced to swim through pudding. Remembering the images from the Feral’s song hurt her, confused her until she wanted to wrap her arms around her head and crush the pain out of it. The loud motor noise didn’t help as it reverberated through the song and into her mind.

  No. That isn’t a truck motor. That’s a motorcycle. My mate. Shane. I have to go.

  Then another wave of pain crashed through her, and the song of the Ferals screamed louder into the vaults of her consciousness, and she couldn’t force herself to get up at all. Only to curl up into a ball at the base of the oleander hedges and wish for the pain to end however it had to.

  Voices reached out to her in comfort. Desperate, she reached back.

  Is there pain in the Singing Pack?

  No, Fixer.

  Then sing to me. Please. I don’t want to hurt anymore.

  And they sang.

  Gravel and clods of dirt flew as Shane skidded into the driveway in front of his house. He didn’t even pull the key from the ignition, just turned the machine off and bolted toward the door. “Erin! Erin!”

  He’d heard her weak report as he’d jumped on his ride at Holly’s house. The sound of her voice, so strained and full of a pain he never hoped to hear from her, had galvanized him. Greg’s ride had never failed Shane in all the years he’d driven it, but today, Shane knew he had pushed the machine to its limit. Half-shifted to command the wolf’s reflexes so he could drive at speeds no human should ride, using his lupine strength to keep the massive bike on the road, he’d pushed himself to his limits, too.

  For her. For her, he had no limits.

  The door slammed against the foyer wall as he shoved through it. No Erin, though the scent of her lingered still despite the draft of fresh air. That, he followed through the house until he found the back door open. A beloved shape trembled on the ground, curled fetal near the oleander hedge the Ferals had crept through to attack his home.

  He would never forget that sight. As long as his heart beat, the ghost of that memory would haunt him. It would also remind him why he put one foot in front of the other, even when he wanted nothing more than to kneel in defeat.

  Kneeling beside her now, he refused to consider defeat a possibility. Her skin felt hot against his as he slipped one arm beneath her. “Erin, I’m here,” he said. “Can you hear me? I’m here. I told you I wouldn’t leave you alone.”

  “Shane?” The name sounded l
ike it cost her, forced out as it was between gritted teeth. One eye opened beneath a messy fall of hair. “The Ferals. Planning to— Bird of Fire. Place of Bright Lights. Laughing Desert Haven. Ngh. Can’t hold on. Calling me, singing, can’t hold on…”

  “Shh. Focus on me.” With his free hand, he stroked back the hair that covered her face. “Listen to my voice. You don’t have to fight them by yourself. You’re the mate of an alpha wolf. My mate. And I will never leave you to fight alone. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded, breaths coming harder as she did. “Yes. Mates. No takebacks.”

  His heart squeezed. “No takebacks. Tell me you trust me, my love. Tell me you trust me to take care of you.”

  Her eye unfocused for a span of seconds that felt like forever. Then it slid closed. “I trust you,” she murmured. “I love you.”

  “I love you. Fight until the wolf gets there to fight for you.” Shane held her up with care as he changed his position to sit on the ground, one leg tucked under him while the other pillowed her head. It freed up his right hand to reach into his pocket for the old pocketknife he never left home without.

  “Never be without a knife,” Greg said, as a newly thirteen-year-old Shane opened the layers of wrinkled wrapping paper. Greg had never caught the trick of neat packaging. That he’d wrapped it at all instead of stuffing the gift into a paper lunch bag said how much the present meant to him.

  Shane thought he had never seen a more beautiful knife. Bright steel contrasted with a dark wooden inlay on the handle. Not too big to fit in a pocket, not too small to use for most situations, it fit perfectly in Shane’s hand.

  Under the knife sat a shiny copper penny. Greg nodded to it. “Now, give me that penny. There’s an old superstition that, if you give a knife as a gift, it’s bad luck. It will sever the friendship between you and the person you gave it to. That doesn’t happen if they pay you for the knife. It cancels out the bad luck. So you give them a penny, and they give it back as payment. I want that knife to always bring you good luck. You never know what you’ll need it for.”

  Shane took the penny out of the box and handed it to Greg. “For the knife. So our friendship isn’t ever severed.”

  Not even in death. “Let’s have that good luck now,” he said under his breath as he flipped the knife open.

  Erin didn’t even flinch when he drew the blade across the skin of her forearm. Blood welled up, too sluggish for his liking, to dribble down her arm. The wolf within him howled, agitated at the wound and ready for a fight. That’s right. Get mad. Rage at what’s hurting her. Go save your mate.

  Then he cut his forearm open and pressed it tight against hers. Their skin had barely met before the shift took him, added muscle and mass and fur to his already large frame until both man and wolf cradled her against him. A clawed hand wrapped around her bicep to hold their wounds together while he threw back his head and howled his challenge into the darkening sky. If you want her, you will have to go through me.

  Shane was there, though he felt far away. His voice was a whisper against the choral swell of the Singing Pack’s voices as they drowned out all thoughts in her mind. They felt close, next to her, there waiting for her to reach out to touch them. The fight to remain apart had exhausted her. Worn down now, trapped in a body that failed her more with every surge of blood through her veins, she wondered how terrible it would be to let go.

  Fight until the wolf gets there to fight for you. But the wolf was far away. Too far to hear, too far to count upon. Why would the wolf charge in to fight for her? No one did. No one ever had. No one except the Singing Pack, who called her to them with singing just behind her ear.

  She barely felt the pain of the knife on her arm. Too many other sensations drowned out the sting of the blade for her to pay it more than a curious attention. The warmth of Shane’s arm against hers was all but lost in the wash of hurt and song.

  Then the wolf’s howl cut through it all, defiant and determined in its wrath. Talons of fire tore through her veins, relentless as they ripped through whatever got in their way. Again, the song rose, deafening and full of primal outrage at the sound that challenged it, and again, it found itself drowned out by the howl that would not be silenced.

  Perhaps she screamed. She thought she heard her own voice in the distance, a cry of purest agony as her entire body burned. A merciful darkness pulled her down into its embrace before she could do more than wonder if that raw wail was hers.

  Quiet. Then a point of ruddy, sanguine light spilled over a patch of hard-packed desert earth. A bloody trail of light led towards the horizon, where the last sliver of the setting sun shimmered and disappeared. Snarls and growled voices behind her directed barrels here, maps there. Human there, guarded so he would not run away. Then she knew she looked out through the eyes of the Feral. Her Feral, whose perceptions had crept into her dreams before.

  “We are family,” he said with a simple sadness Erin did not expect. “Why do you leave?”

  “Because you want me to be something I’m not,” she said. Her words came out from his misshapen lips, a growl in the cadence of her speech. “Staying with you would hurt me and make me into what you want me to be. Not what I want to be.”

  “You will always be family. Always be with us. We are in your blood. Our song is in your mind. The wolf cannot take the song away from you.”

  “No. But I can hear the song of the wolf now, and I can choose to sing with him instead. His pack is my family. He is my family.” She could see him now, in the back of her mind, a separate view than the one through the Feral’s eyes. A wolf in the darkness, waiting to guide her home again.

  The wolf had come for her. Looking into his eyes, she wondered how she could ever have doubted him.

  Her Feral took a deep breath. It smelled of dust, of gasoline and oil. Of fear and regret. “The wolves take more from us. More family. That is why we must fight.”

  “You take family from them. And that is why they must fight, too. Don’t do this tonight.”

  “You know what will become of us if we do not. Why should we be the ones to die? The Leader of All Packs is right, Fixer. We fight for our place or it will be lost to us. The humans will understand this when they are like us.”

  She had no reply for that. Instead, she drew away from the Feral, from the tiny, distant town in the unforgiving desert, and followed the wolf back out of the darkness that held her.

  Awareness returned in increments, a gradual return to her senses she had no desire to rush, since the soreness presented itself first among all sensations. Her body felt abused, like a riot of greedy children had used her as a piñata that wouldn’t break. Even her hair hurt, which impressed her even as she thought she might prefer never to feel it again. A sharp but bearable ache on her left forearm stood out over all the other pains, but it had already started to fade.

  Beyond the aches, she could feel Shane along her back and side, holding her against him with a fierce tenderness that defied anyone to take her away. One of his hands held tight to her upper arm, and his forearm rested against hers. Even the sticky, crusty itch along the skin there couldn’t dull the pleasure at waking up in his arms, though she decided she could do without that unpleasant detail in the future, too.

  Hesitant, afraid of the answer, she turned her thoughts inward to listen for the singing that had nearly claimed her. The song still threaded through her mind, an earworm she knew she would never quite shake until the last of the Singing Pack had returned to the dust, but quiet now. No louder than the day she had stood in front of Andy’s truck, his body at her feet, and wondered about the voices on the wind. The voice of the wolf who howled just for her was far louder, a warm presence in both her mind and her heart.

  She sighed with relief. Perhaps she would never be quite the same as she was before she’d contracted the virus. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be better than when she was just Erin, standing in a bus station alone and unsure of what the future held. That Erin hadn’t had a mate,
or a pack, or a family to call her own.

  “Erin?” Shane let go of her arm so he could stroke the side of her face. “Erin, can you hear me?”

  “Today sucks,” she croaked, voice dried out and mouth full of the taste of old socks.

  He barked a surprised chuckle then squeezed her hard. “Fucking thank God. I thought I might have lost you. You screamed, and I’m pretty sure you had a seizure. Then you were really still and I thought maybe you wouldn’t wake up. Except—”

  “Except you could feel me.” She pried her eyes open to look into his worried face. “Like a song you’re humming silently to yourself behind all your thoughts. Or a memory that’s stronger than the others, lurking quietly and keeping you company.”

  He blinked. His eyebrows knitted together. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “I can feel you, too. The wolf who came for me.” Ignoring the ache, she reached up to cup his cheek against her palm.

  Glossy tears swam in his eyes. Overcome, he leaned down to press his lips against her forehead. “I will always come for you.”

  “I know.” Knew it now, at least, and she would never doubt it again. “Um. Why is my arm gross?”

  “When you called me on the walkie-talkie, Holly was on the phone with the virologist she knows. We came up with the possibility that infecting you with my lycanthropy would kill the Feral virus. He said a bite wouldn’t do it.”

  “So you bled on me. We’re going to have to talk about these weird romantic gestures of yours.”

  Shane drew back so he could look at her in amusement. “Next, you’re going to tell me that bleeding on a girl is creepy.”

  “Yep. Almost as creepy as you get. Good job. You went for maximum creep out.” She grinned hard enough to wrinkle her nose.

  He melted into laughter again. “You are such a fucking ingrate. I made that blood just for you.”

  Now, she had to laugh, even if it jostled her sore muscles. “Oh, shit, that’s funny. That’s way funnier than it should be. Made it just for me. Thank you. Thank you for making it just for me. Thank you for saving me. Thank you.”