by Wen Spencer
He motioned for her to follow him out to the grill.
She was conditioned not to harm a living creature. The snitch seemed living enough that she flinched as he tore off the wings. He turned them this way and that so she could see that they were pages from a math book. Even detached, the wings continued to move feebly. He tossed them onto the white-hot coals.
"That's so weird. How is it..." She gasped as he ripped open the body to reveal the human eye. "Oh, God, tell me that isn't..."
"It is." He tossed everything on the fire. "Everything you think you know about the world isn't true. There is such a thing as magic. There are monsters and witches and warlocks. They killed someone to make that thing so it could spy on your family. They want to find Joshua. They'll take him if they find him."
She turned without a word and walked back into the kitchen.
Seth wished he had more experience with women. His exposure was limited to a handful of hours at school and those girls were from New York City high society. None of them would have attacked him with a bamboo sword. They'd have either ignored him like a crazy guy on the subway or barricaded themselves into the bathroom and called 911 or asked him out on a date. He could hear Joshua's sister running water in the kitchen, so it wasn't any of the above.
After attacking people, it turned out that Upstate New York girls offered their victims coffee, tea, water, soda, or whiskey combined with any of the above. Seth accepted a coffee and watched her mix herself an Irish coffee.
"What's your name?" He'd been spoiled by a week in Mexico. This coffee was horrible stale ground stuff out of a can.
"You break into my house and destroy my bedroom without knowing my name?"
"I know your last name." He doctored the coffee with the brown sugar and heavy cream that she'd gotten out to make her Irish coffee.
"Elizabeth." With her voice threatening to break, she added, "Joshua calls me Bethy." Her voice went back to annoyed steel. "Who the hell are you? And don't try to tell me that you're a friend of my brother's. Joshua doesn't know anyone who drives a Porsche, or dresses in hundred-dollar jeans, or talks with a Boston accent so thick you could cut it with a knife."
"My name is Seth. I'm Boston."
"Yeah, I got that." Actually, she hadn't got what he meant but he was glad she didn't understand. It made it more likely that her family were innocent dupes for Anastasia's killers.
She pointed toward the smoking grill. "What---what---what the hell is going on? Why would anyone want to kidnap my brother? He's a dork. I mean he's a good kid. Too good. It's like deep down he thinks if he's really, really good everyone in the family will finally accept him."
"They want to kidnap him because he's adopted."
She snorted into her coffee. "Really? How do they know? Most people don't. We used to live in Whitesboro when Joshua was little, so our neighbors here in Sauquoit don't know. We don't tell people. We haven't even told Joshua. He has no idea why half my family are total shits to him. Why our father's parents are paying for everyone's college education except his. He tries so hard to be perfect. I keep telling my mom that they're only hurting him. He should know that it's not him; it's our family who are a bunch of jerks. They're narrow-minded, racist assholes." She laughed bitterly. "You're not supposed to think that about your grandparents but there's no other words for it. It doesn't matter if was his mother was Latina, or if my parents found her broken down alongside the road too poor for a tow or that she basically sold Joshua to us. He was two weeks old! We're the only family he's ever known."
"And the worst of it?" she whispered. "I was a horrible spoiled brat when I was little. I was four and so happy to be the center of my parents' world. I didn't want him." She wiped at a tear. "I didn't understand. My mother nearly died having me. She couldn't have any more children, but she didn't want me to be an only child. She had a younger brother who had died. She would have given anything to have him back. She wanted that for me. But I didn't want a baby to take my place, so I was awful to Joshua, for a long, long time."
"Your parents didn't know Joshua's 'mother' before the day they gave her a tow?"
Bethy wouldn't be derailed. "My parents called me and told about the massacre and that Joshua was in the hospital hurt and they didn't know how bad. I should come home, just in case he didn't pull through. All I could think of was how many times I'd told him to drop dead."
Seth understood completely. He had hated being the oldest. He'd been forced to be endlessly patient with his baby brothers, to take responsibility for any fight even if he hadn't started it, and to hand over beloved toys without anger. He was going to be prince. More importantly, he was going to be a newborn werewolf while they were still vulnerable younglings. He needed to learn to never strike out in anger.
He'd thought being oldest was the worst.
The worst was actually losing his little brothers.
The pretense of coffee was abandoned. Bethy poured a straight shot of whiskey into her empty coffee cup. "The funerals start tomorrow. Someone came up with the bright idea of staggering them so the kids from Joshua's high school could go to them all. The stupid reporters are turning it into a media circus. If I had another microphone shoved in my face, I was going to lose it. Dad told me to go home before I hurt someone."
"Where do you think Joshua went?" Seth asked.
"I don't know!" Bethy started to cry. "He kept freaking out at the hospital so they'd given him a bunch of strong sedatives. They said he'd probably sleep all day. Mom and Dad brought him home from the hospital and he went straight to bed."
A newborn werewolf would burn through any sedative in minutes.
"Joshua broke the passenger door on Dad's pickup; he snapped it off at the hinge. They had to wire it into place to get home. Dad went to the junkyard to find a replacement. Mom had to take a dish to D.J.'s parents because he---he---he's dead, and I was supposed to stay with Joshua. He was asleep! I thought he would be fine. We didn't have anything to eat in the house. I thought I could run into town to the store. I was only gone for an hour. I came back and the house was a disaster zone and an ambulance had been here to take our neighbor to the hospital..."
Seth stomach knotted. "Your brother attacked your neighbor?"
"No! Mr. Buckley was electrocuted by the flood." She pointed at the blackened 220 outlet. "Joshua called 911 and did CPR until the paramedics showed up. He was here when they were here, but by the time I got home, he'd disappeared."
The truck door. The bathroom faucet. The next-door neighbor. Joshua was clever enough to realize that, as a newborn werewolf, he was dangerous to everyone around him.
"Where would he go to hide?" Seth said.
"Hide? You think he ran away?"
"I'm not saying he's a coward..."
"Oh, he would run if he was being chased! The track coach wanted him to go out for the hundred meters, but that would mean being naked in locker rooms with jocks. The idiots around here made Joshua's life living hell. My parents are so clueless that it always made me want to scream! My dad thinks because he was teased as a kid that he knows what Joshua is going through. My dad was always the tallest kid in his class and completely normal. Joshua has always been dorky. The only time he isn't doing all his weird fidgeting is when he's fighting."
"Weird fidgeting" was typical for their people. Younglings weren't directly connected to the Source but they were close enough to have their behavior influenced by it. It was one of the reasons why that his family maintained a private school where younglings would be sheltered from the public eye. Normally the more wolflike the youngling, the easier time they had controlling the wolf once they were transformed. It was good that Joshua "fidgeted."
"No, someone took him," Bethy stated firmly. "Someone had been here. They took stuff. Stupid stuff."
"Like his calculus book?" It sounded like Wickers had raided the house for material attuned to Joshua.
"Yes! I couldn't convince mom and dad that Joshua wouldn't take all that shit with him. Why
the hell would anyone take a twenty-pound jack-o-lantern with them? Someone was here and they took him!"
Seth eyed the kitchen. Yes, there'd been a flood, but there was no sign of a struggle. Joshua knew how to fight and now had werewolf strength to back it. "I think he took a motorcycle."
"What? Oh, he wouldn't...! We didn't think to look... That little..." Bethy charged out of the house.
Seth followed her to the garage. There was a digital keypad that he'd ignored earlier beside the big steel doors. She flipped up the cover and typed in the code.
"Oh, that little shit!" she cried once the door had rattled up high enough to reveal the empty space in the line of off-road vehicles. "That stupid little shit!" She turned in circles, hands in her hair, scanning the land around them. "I'm going to kill him! Where the hell would he go?"
That was what everyone wanted to know.
"Someplace he couldn't just walk to," Seth pointed out. "Is the bike street legal?"
"No! It's his Kawasaki. It's a dirt bike. Besides, he doesn't have a driver's license yet. But there's trails all over the county, he could be literally anywhere."
Anywhere covered a lot of ground. During the same time frame, Seth had traveled from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Utica. Since Joshua didn't have a passport or a driver's license, he was limited to dirt trails or public transportation.
Seth remembered the Amtrak schedule pinned up on the corkboard in Joshua's room. "How much money would he have on him?"
"How the hell would I know?" She stalked back to the house. "He normally works at my family's garage in Utica, but not this year. He found out that my folks could only afford to send him to the local community college. If he wants to go anywhere else, he needs a full scholarship. He spent most of the year studying and got a freaking amazing SAT score. At school this year, he's been doing all the club shit that colleges like you to do to prove you're a joiner. That's why he was at that stupid barn in the first place. Prom committee. And oh my god, if I hear one more 'at least he was supposed to be there' from someone, I'm going to slap them. I don't know why half the freaking football team was at the haunted house when it was supposed to be a prom committee event---maybe the football team was being nice for once---but don't you dare imply that any of them deserved to live more than my brother."
"So he had only a few hundred dollars?" Seth asked.
"You've never been broke?" she cried.
"I've never had money that was strictly mine. I'm not allowed to take a part-time job."
She glanced at the Porsche.
"It's my guardian's car," Seth said. "But, yes, I'm clueless. You said he can get anywhere on the dirt bike. Can he get to the train station?"
"Oh, that little shit!" She started for her car, a vintage black Mustang with a custom flame paint job.
Seth took that as a "yes." "How much would he have for a train ticket?"
She paused, door open, one foot in her car. "He wanted a laptop for school. Mom and Dad said they'd match half. They bought it in August, just before classes started. He had less than a hundred dollars left over."
Seth knew from experience that he could get from New York City to Boston for that amount. Joshua could easily reach Albany or Syracuse. How far would he run? Which direction?
Bethy slammed her car door and her Mustang rumbled to life.
"Where are you going?" Seth asked. Joshua had a full day's head start. He wasn't in Utica anymore.
"If he took the train, then he had to ditch his dirt bike someplace. I'm betting he put it in the storage shed at the garage. It's the only place in Utica where it would be safe and yet my folks wouldn't have noticed it by now."
11: Elise
There were no rooms in Utica. Not at the Super 8. Not at the Days Inn. Not at the Radisson. The female clerk at the Holiday Inn said, "It's the massacre. We've got all the people here for the funerals tomorrow, the out of town news crews and police helping with the manhunt and big game hunters..."
"Big game hunters?" Eloise had left Cabot in the car after the first strikeout. She glanced nervously out the lobby windows at her Jeep.
The clerk misunderstood her fear. "The wolf is dead. No one has seen hide or hair of a second animal. You don't have to worry."
"Look, I've been awake for nearly forty hours." Elise had tried to book online only to be told that Syracuse had the nearest opening. She was not going to drive another hour. She couldn't drive another hour, not without risk of falling asleep and going off the road. There was something about Cabot's deep breathing as he slept in the passenger seat that acted like a sedative on her. "I've been to most of the places in town, asking for a room. Please. I'll take anything."
"Hold on." The clerk took out her phone and texted someone. "My cousin just bought a bed and breakfast across town from this little old lady. It's a big mansion in the downtown historic district. The place has a lot of interesting history behind it. My cousin completely remodeled it, so it's all new inside. She hasn't got the online booking set up yet. She might have a room." She gave a slight laugh. "My cousin is asking if you're one of the heavily armed nutcases."
The clerk didn't actually ask Elise if she was. Elise volunteered nothing.
The clerk typed back something while explaining her cousin's fear. "She was in Starbucks when some out of state idiot walked in with an assault rifle. Scared the shit out of everybody. Okay, she says she has one room left. It's two hundred a night with breakfast included."
"I'll take it," Elise said.
She forgot to ask how many beds it had.
* * *
"Interesting history" meant that the Italianate mansion had at one time been a brothel. The hip new owners decided to take the ball and run with it. They remodeled to embrace all things hedonistic. They'd painted the walls a deep red. They'd furnished the room with a massive four-poster bed, a tufted fainting couch done in red velvet, dark stained wood floor, oriental rugs, and suggestive paintings.
"Not a word," Elise growled to Cabot, who leaned heavily on her.
"I'm not saying anything."
The only positive thing about the room was it had a private entrance in the back via a small covered porch. She was able to get Cabot inside without anyone seeing them. She guided him to the bed.
"I thought I'd recover faster than this," Cabot whispered.
"It's only been two hours since you washed the silver poison out of your wounds." She checked the time. "I'm starving. I need to get something to eat and then crash for a while."
"Food sounds wonderful." He unzipped the jumpsuit. Several seams had split during the trip. He skinned off the too tight shoulders. The sudden reveal of skin made Elise's breath catch in her chest. She looked down so all she could see was his feet. He slumped back to lie in the bed with an exhausted sigh.
"Clothes would be good too. Maybe some shoes." He wiggled his toes. How could even his feet seem sexy to her? Was it because they had no blemishes? No callouses. No dry skin. Just male strength contained within perfect skin.
She eyed the fainting couch. If she were five feet tall, she might consider sleeping on it. No, she was going to need to share the king-size bed with him.
This was going to put new meaning in the phrase "strange bedfellows."
* * *
She hit Utica's Kmart first to pick up clothes for Cabot.
Shoes, socks, underwear, jeans, shirt, jacket. She wasn't sure if he needed the last but it would help him maintain the illusion of being human. Everyone else in town wore multiple layers against the autumn chill. Elise wore hers to hide her weapons.
It surprised her how much stuff it took to clothe a human being despite wearing clothes every day of her life. She never saw it collected together. When she was eleven, she'd flown to Greece to train without any luggage. She returned to the United States with nothing more than her knives and guns. Her studio loft had a stacked washer and dryer; she did her laundry in small loads. Trips like this were never premeditated enough to allow packing.
The st
ore employees were changing out the Halloween items for the Christmas decorations sprinkled lightly with Thanksgiving baking. The candy had been picked over but she found packages of full-sized candy bars. She considered them insurance against having to deal with a hungry wolf.
Not for the first time in her life, she wondered how normal people lived.
A normal woman wouldn't be trolling through Kmart, buying clothes for a man that had been a wolf when they met. A normal woman spending a night with an impossibly sexy man wouldn't be considering candy bars for "protection."
Was it any wonder that she often felt lost?
Yes, her family had neat little blueprints on how to live the life of an angelic warrior, but it rarely dealt with all the quiet alone time between the hunting and the killing. She'd spent her childhood angry with her mother for spending so much time with Decker. Now that it was her turn, she was discovering that there was no one else. In Greece with her cousins, she couldn't imagine wanting the company of normal people. Moving to Boston had isolated her in ways that she hadn't imagined possible in a city full of people.
A flock of college students fluttered past her, intent on scoring cheap candy. They were an uneven number of boys and girls, weaving in and out of the displays. It was impossible to tell if any of them were paired up, what relationships tied them together, who was best friends with whom, and who had just tagged along. How did they do that? How did they become a group like that? How did you find people?
She'd tried and failed miserably. She didn't even know where to start looking.
Maybe her attraction to Cabot was because deep down she knew she wouldn't have to explain the knives and the guns and odd scars. That he could carry on a full conversation while making eye contact. That her reaching out to touch him wouldn't trigger a near-rapist response. (Her handful of attempts at dating had ended with broken jaws and black eyes.) That he was like Decker, only actually alive and breathing twenty-four-seven instead of dead half the time. (Okay, so Decker wasn't actually "dead" dead during the daytime but it was close enough in her book.)