by Amy Lane
Teague nodded, interested.
“Well Ray left his needle around, and Mitch was using, so suddenly Mitch is furry, and Renny followed him, and Max followed Renny, and now I’m in an SUV with a cop who can’t touch a silver bullet.”
“I love you too, bitchy-pooh,” Max muttered, and Cory patted his shoulder in a sisterly fashion that made Teague smile.
“So we shelter them. But sometimes, even if they’re sheltered, they get stressed or freaked out, or…well…subjected to…”
“Sexual nuclear meltdowns,” Nicky inserted, his own cross splintering his words, and Cory sent a look of apology to him over the back of the seat.
“Yeah—those—and the thing is, a strong wash of emotion or magic can set off your wolf. Max here got bit and changed all in the same night—Renny planned it that way, and I shudder to ask if it was good for him…”
“It was,” Max murmured mildly, staring into the night with a pleased expression.
Cory ignored him. “I don’t think it will happen—not tonight. You’ve done this thing before, Green says you’re good at it—you know how to handle yourself. But if you get caught in a wash of my power, or start panicking about something, and you find yourself starting to change?”
Teague nodded, knowing his eyes were going wide and realizing she’d hit on the biggest fear that he’d never known he had.
“Anyway, if that happens, don’t sweat it. If that happens, you go with the change, and you’ve just become our first priority. Fuck this other thing, fuck this other guy, we’ve got your back, you hear?”
Teague blinked. “So I’m suddenly the asshole who got in the way of the job?” he asked, appalled.
“No,” she frowned. “No—you’re the family member who needs us more than the rest of the fucking world. This isn’t our only shot at getting this guy. You—we’ve only got one you. We’d like to keep you.”
She shrugged then at his jaw-dropped silence. “Besides, now that your beloved’s at home, I don’t think you’ll panic, right?”
“Right,” Teague nodded, stunned all over again.
“Just remember—we’re taking you out in the month before the change—if we’re pressing you too hard, it’s our fault.”
He didn’t have a chance to reply then, because Cory called to the front, “Hey, Bracken, I like this song—could you crank it up?”
There were groans, but that didn’t stop the whole hunting party from belting out ‘Finnegan’s Ball’ at the top of their lungs, right along with the Dropkick Murphy’s.
When they got to Discovery Park, Cory had to shoot some magic through the lock to get it to open. Teague, getting a look at the casual way she touched the lock and sent a little bolt of something to melt the insides until it clicked—finally had an idea of where she must have gotten enough self-possession to lead a car full of men—all of whom appeared to be older than she was—on a mission like this.
He was impressed with her all over again, and not in a way that suggested sex. He just seemed to like to follow her orders. She reminded him of a queen from some of Jacky’s stories—the ones Jack had learned about in school and told him about sometimes on stakeouts. Cory was just the kind of woman that knights would die for, that’s all.
Once the car pulled in, they parked in a far corner of the lot, and the whole car unloaded into the shadows and waited for Cory to trot up to them. It was dark and cold and damp—no rain and not quite a mist, but obviously November. The vampires took a look at her and nodded, lifting into the sky like gigantic bats, their black trench coats helping the illusion.
Cory raised her face to the sky and watched them until they disappeared into the dark, and Bracken caught her eye with a teasing smile.
“It just looks cool,” she defended, and the brawny, dark-haired sidhe nodded in agreement.
“That it does,” he murmured. “Now hand Nicky your gun—I’m going to kiss you and hold you before this starts, and you don’t get to bitch at me for it.”
Cory nodded, and Nicky reached out his hand, coming to stand by Teague and Max as they embraced—the sight was intimate enough to make watching uncomfortable but too magnetic to look away. Max lifted an eyebrow and Nicky shrugged.
“Green…he was in the car for a second—I don’t know what he told her, but I’m betting that…”
Max swore. “Adrian was in the garden.”
Nicky nodded and pointedly didn’t look at Teague. “Something must have made her think of him.”
Max rolled his eyes. “Subtle, bird-man. Real subtle.”
Teague shook his head, remembering one more time why he didn’t like high school. “What are you two not saying?”
Nicky sighed, and then looked at Cory’s pale face in the darkness, almost as bright as Bracken’s as it gleamed by the waning moon.
“She’s lost weight since you’ve got here, Teague—she only does that when she worries. You and Jack…whatever it is you’re doing, it’s obvious you’re not…not content. Not entirely happy.”
Teague grimaced. “So she’s pining over me?” That was unlikely, and Max and Nicky both grimaced. Max tried again, shaking the dark hair out of his eyes. He really did look like a shorter, grimmer Jacky.
“You’ve got to understand—Green’s Hill ain’t a democracy. It’s a monarchy. And she’s the Queen. The only way that place functions is if eighty-five percent of us are happy—seriously, if we’re not happily mated, happily getting busy, there is a serious power fluctuation. Green and Cory can…they’re so attuned to it that they can feel it, especially if they’ve taken an interest in you.”
Teague screwed up his face in honest disbelief. “Are you saying she’s interested in me?”
Before Nicky and Max could voice the “Oh hell no!” that was obviously written on their faces, Cory came up, rolling her eyes.
“You guys are going to make him think I’m hot for his bod. No, Teague—I just want you to be happy, that’s all—and yes, your happiness is of interest to more than just you and Jack—get used to it. Are you going to fly, now, Nicky, or did you and Max want to do make-up and hairstyles?”
Nicky cast her an evil look, but when she caught his hand and kissed his cheek, he leaned into the kiss, and turned his head and gave her a brief, hard kiss on the mouth that she returned.
Then he gave her back her gun and in a brief warp of flesh and space, turned into a giant hawk and flew into the sky after the two vampires.
Cory turned to Teague and jerked her chin in the direction of the bike trail. “I’ll take the right, you take the left—Phillip will follow you, Marcus will follow me, I’ve got Max in the shadows, you’ve got Bracken…”
“I’ve got Bracken?” He saw that kiss, he thought wretchedly. How did he rate Bracken?
“Dude, I’ve got the sexual-powered-nuclear-fusion-ray-gun-and-shield—you may be the Alpha werewolf, but I’m still hotter shit than you!” She smiled then, and winked, and he watched her turn to the right and walk downstream as though she were a college co-ed in broad daylight without a care in the world.
He went his way, and his hyper-dog hearing perked up right before she was out of sight. He turned, and almost began running back when he saw the group of young men in full colors, surrounding her like beaus at a cotillion. He didn’t have to be a werewolf to hear the banter around her.
“Hey, mommy—whatchu doin’ here? Come our way, pretty lady…c’mon, cuz, we won’t hurtchu…”
He’d already taken two steps in her direction when Bracken’s voice from the shadows stopped him in his tracks. “Take it easy,” he murmured. “Take it easy and watch her work.”
Flat as an anvil, her voice smacked through the misty dark. “I’m not your ‘cuz’ asshole. Touch me again and you’ll be sorry you ever weren’t sorry.”
There was laughter, and Teague’s breathing caught as he saw two of them reaching for pieces stuffed in the back of their baggy jeans, and then he felt Bracken’s hand on his wrist. He heard her voice again through the dark,
but with Bracken’s touch vibrating through him, he could see the sound glow.
“All right, children,” she murmured sweetly, “since you’re all trying so hard to be jerk-offs, I want you to go into the bushes—those with the poison oak, yup—drop your trousers, and jerk-off. Make sure you laugh at each other’s little teeny wieners when you go!”
With that she waved gaily, her dull-red ponytail bobbing and a “thank-you-buh-buhay” smile on her face. And as a whole, the young men—there were at least six of them—turned dumbly and walked towards the poison-oak covered section of the park.
Teague blew out a sigh of relief and Bracken let go of his arm and chuckled.
“That was awesome,” Teague breathed, and Bracken ‘hm-mmd’ in agreement.
“She doesn’t usually do that—she hates using power in her voice, calls it ‘mindfucking’-- but a fight would scare off our guy.” On that note, he faded back into the trees without a sound, and Teague resumed his solitary walk on the thin black ribbon of bike trail.
It was a pretty walk—willow, oak, and beech trees arched over the river on his right, and bushes lined the levee to his left. Recent storms had beaten the last of the leaves off of the seasonal trees, and their naked branches reached restlessly for the misty sky. The I-5 above the other side of the riverbank lit the fog and provided enough ambient light to see—although Teague amused himself for a few moments playing with his new night vision. The view in front of him went from all shadows and starlight to a sort of gray-scale two-D map of the landscape, and then, with a blink, it was back to shadows and starlight again.
He decided he liked it—and then decided it was probably good that he liked it, since it didn’t seem like the werewolf thing was going away.
It was about then that he smelled something that took the werewolf thing from a perk to a liability. It was…acrid, foul, like a human who hadn’t bathed for days, except at least that was an animal smell.
This was…supernatural in a way, and Teague realized that he could smell the supernatural—that he had been, in fact, because he recognized the undertones of this smell from sitting at the dinner table with the other were-creatures, and from sleeping with his nose buried in Jacky’s hair.
But where those smells had been comforting, this was not. This was like supernatural salad, covered in bacon grease and left in the sun to rot, and he crinkled his nose up against it.
His night vision went to two-D landscape, and a flat human form popped up even as he blinked and tried to see how deep the new werewolf was in the shadows.
“Hello, brother…” the voice emerged from the darkness. It was amused. “Are you hunting too?”
“Hunting you, mostly,” Teague replied, getting a bead on the guy—he was closer than Teague had thought. “You’ve sort of been pissing in our pond.”
“Our?” Oh, a wealth of meaning in that word!
“We’re Green’s people—and we don’t kill the humans,” Teague said implacably. It used to be I work for Green; now it was We’re Green’s people. A small change. A huge change. A good feeling all around.
“So what?” The new werewolf was close enough to see with human sight. He was old, was Teague’s first thought, and then he realized that he wasn’t old, he was used. Teague knew that look—it was a junkie’s look, a street person’s look. The look of too many days and nights in the weather, too long without a bath. Had he been changed on the street? Had someone tried to save him the way Katy had been saved? There was a faint accent—SoCal, maybe—and Teague wondered where this guy had come from. There was something decidedly…off about the way he kept fingering his dirty-blonde dreadlocks, the way his eyes wandered towards the moon.
“We need you to lay off, that’s all,” Teague murmured, but he was actually more intent on where his backup was. Bracken was moving too fast to smell, the vampires were too high up to sense, and Cory and Max were downwind. For a moment, just a moment, he felt extremely exposed and he fought the urge to reach behind him and get the 9mm jammed in the back of his pants.
“What—you all alone? You’re here like Clint Eastwood, the werewolf lawman come to town?” The rogue giggled a little and twirled his dreads, looking at the cookie-bit of a moon in the sky as though it were singing to him.
“Why now?” Teague asked, not wanting to give away how many of them there actually were. “Why at a three-quarter moon?”
“Oh…” Teague was abruptly the focus of the rogue’s attention. “It’s the fifteenth, mostly…you know, when the handouts get fat for a bit…and I eat and I’m still…hungry…”
There was a sudden flutter to Teague’s left, and as quickly as that, Teague wasn’t alone anymore.
“Brother,” Cory said, her voice gentle, but her hands locked around the gun held firmly pointed downwards, “we can feed you. We can feed you and house you every day, but you can’t go hunting anymore, not like this.”
The werewolf didn’t even blink at the blind appearance of a small woman and a big scary vampire behind her. She nodded to Phillip and he took off, and she shifted her stance to a more serious, grounded stand and leaned a little to their distracted, wandering enemy. That weathered, dirty, brick-red face turned a little towards her, and the werewolf closed his eyes and inhaled.
When he opened his eyes and smiled, he was partially changed. His rheumy brownish eyes were wolf-blue and his mouth was partially extended with fangs and a snout.
“Pretty cunt…” he murmured, his syllables lisping through his distorted mouth. “I wants it.”
“What’s your name, brother,” Cory asked, her voice cold.
“Ames, pretty cunt…let me smell you…”
Cory muttered under her breath, something that sounded like I hate that fucking word, but when she spoke again her voice was level.
“Where are you from, Ames. Who turned you?” Her muscles were tense with the urge to hold the gun level, and Teague knew suddenly why she was asking the questions. Ames was a dead man. Whatever was left of his mind was not enough to save, and not enough to risk more lives to keep him alive. She wanted to know what made him, so she could make sure nobody made another like him.
“The ocean, pretty cunt…I miss the ocean. I fell asleep by the ocean, and I woke up being chewed on by a dog. And then I woke up and I did the chewing.” A predatory, smile then, one almost childish in its glee. “I like the chewing.”
“Warm ocean, Ames, or cold ocean?” Cory asked. Northern California or Southern California—an important distinction. Nor Cal was run by Green, So Cal was a free-for-all of tiny, three person packs with no ruling body. However Ames had made it to Sacramento, it would be good to know if he came from the werewolf morass of So Cal or if someone had gotten stupid in Green’s territory.
“Warm ocean, pretty cunt…so warm. I don’t like this nasty cold river. But I swims in it anyway. Do you want to swim in it with me, girl?” His body was changing, slowly, dreamily, almost painfully, and abruptly Cory’s gun was leveled and Teague’s with it. Ames was about five feet away with two guns loaded with silver shot, and all he could do was close his eyes and let Cory’s smell draw the wolf from him.
Bracken was suddenly between them, and Teague, remembering Cory’s stricture about cold iron, shifted sideways a little and so did Cory, and that motion alone was enough to set Ames lunging for Cory’s throat.
Cory and Teague leveled their guns and fired three times a piece and Bracken held out his hand made a sound like a man pulling a rope with a car attached to it. The body of the morphing werewolf blew back from the force of the shots, and then seemed to suspend itself in the air as another force drew it towards them. Underneath the sharp retorts of the guns there was a sickening ‘plop’ sound, and then Teague’s vision in his left eye was violently spattered with red.
Cory said, “Oh, ewww, ick!” And then, “Oh fuck!”
Without warning Teague was being shoved by a little woman with surprising force of will, across the bike path and down the river embankment and with a b
ig splash they both ‘kerplunked’ into the shallows of the American River in November.
Even Teague’s new and improved metabolism couldn’t make that water warm. He flailed seriously, making contact with Cory’s jaw when she grabbed him by the back of the neck and gave his head a shove under.
She grunted but managed to dunk him anyway and then let go. He was struggling to his feet, too stunned to even say “What in the fuck?” when she barked at him.
“Hold still—I washed the blood off but I need to treat your face!”
And suddenly his higher brain function kicked in and he knew that she’d possibly just saved his useless life—or at least a lot of fucking pain. He was abruptly still, and she fumbled for a moment in the pocket of her sodden pea coat and then came up with the little bottle of wash she’d used before, when she touched Bracken.
“This is p…pretty p…potent, and it’s going to sting your eye like a s…s…sonovabitch,” she chattered, smearing it along his cheek, forehead, and neck.
She was right, it did sting his eye, but after a short bark of a swear word, he kept the pain to himself and tried to keep his footing. It wasn’t easy—Cory didn’t have the hyped up body temperature he was developing and her hands were shaking like spiderwebs in the wind. One particular flinch sent his feet skating out from under him and he kicked her feet out from under her on accident and the two of them went bobbing down the river, floundering and sputtering and (in Cory’s case) shrieking breathlessly.
There was a sudden clatter from above, and Phillip and Marcus dropped from the sky, splashing into the river next to them, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. Since they didn’t actually need to breathe, it meant the two men simply convulsed silently, caught up in their clothes and not even bothering to surface.
Bracken blurred down the riverbank and then stopped and hollered and brought some sanity to the situation, because just when Teague thought he was going to have to morph into a werewolf after all and dogpaddle to shore, the vampires lifted out of the water. One of them seized him by the armpits and they were both hauled back over the bike trail in the frigid November air.