Emily looks askance at me, but does not say anything. She knows by now to trust me when it comes to dealing with such creatures.
Finally, the little imp can take my nonchalance no longer, and it cautiously emerges from the focus.
I speak several syllables it would be impossible to render in any human alphabet, and that are best not described to people who do not know how to shield themselves from infernal energies. The imp responds with a lengthy spill of similar sounds that do not carry the same intense force as when they are spoken in my voice.
I ask it a few questions, and it hurriedly chatters its answers at me, as if suddenly becoming very aware of how quickly it wants to be anywhere but in front of me. I am reminding it that when we had set the focus, I had clearly stated that Emily spoke with the same authority as me regarding its task. The foolish imp decided to play around with the meaning of my words. I share with it a bit of knowledge, the names of a few other imps that have crossed me, and suggest that it do better in its next dealings with Emily.
With the imp’s full report given to me, and us having a renewed understanding of its relationship with Emily, I release it to retreat back into the focus until the next time a vampire comes up on one of the trails over the house.
“As with last time, the hunter came up here with infrared and optical equipment, and spent some time looking over the grounds. She is now also armed against both vampires and werewolves, and had some sort of attachment for her binoculars that seemed intended to specifically look for evidence of a werewolf’s presence. The vampire clans have had glass for a few years now that can pick up traces of a vampire’s passage. It appears they are now experimenting with the same for lycanthropes. If I am remembering Ben’s recent history correctly, he has been in hiding long enough that he may not know of the existence of either type of glass.”
“Carl is here all the time. If this stuff works, will the hunter be able to tell that?”
“I do not know,” I tell Emily. “The vampire glass is not very reliable, and gives very little information currently. A vampire has to spend a significant amount of time in a place to leave enough essence around. I do not know if the lycanthrope glass is any more reliable.”
“What else?” she asks me.
“The imp says she was frustrated again to find nobody home, but had not gone any closer to the house. Once she came up here, the imp remained with her until she was off the property. So thus far, we have no proof that she has come any closer than this spot.”
“So is it safe to assume she knows nothing about the circles?” Emily asks, pointing to the woods beyond the house on the other side of the property.
“I would cautiously say so, but not positively. We know for sure she has been here, but we have no idea if she has been over there. Neither you nor I have seen any sign, but remember, she is very good at evading physical detection.”
“At least I’ve been able to keep any rumors from floating around town.”
“You and Ivy have been stellar on that count. Even Carl does not know.”
“Carl’s training was extremely focused,” Emily reminds me.
He had been raised from birth to kill vampires, and nothing else. It would not surprise me there were not so much as an allusion to witches in his training, as well as no mention of creatures like myself.
“I should get back to Carl’s place,” I tell Emily. “I have not noticed any evidence of the hunter near there, but I do suspect she will be there soon enough. The imp told me he did detect better weapons for fighting lycanthropes in her possession, so she is prepared for an encounter, whether she initiates it or finds herself in it.”
“He’s pretty conflicted on his feelings about Ivy lately. Fortunately, he’s not mad at her, upset at the situation more. But he needs to be receptive to her when he finally does see her again. Her feelings for him have been changing lately, and she’s going to surprise him very soon. If you can make sure to keep nudging him away from being mad at her if you see him drifting that way, it would be good.”
“Are you coming perilously close to sharing the prophecy about Ivy with me?” I ask her, stepping away, turning my back on her even as I start to walk down the hill back toward the house.
“I am giving you only one small part, that does not say anything about your future that will bring the inevitable to pass with the least amount of damage.”
“Please, do not,” I tell her. “Fate must run its own course, without my hand guiding anything. I want no knowledge about what you know. None!” That last bit comes out both sharper than I intend it, and not as strong as I would like it to be. Even if I am angry with Emily for laying that information upon me, for the risk to my well-being it creates, I do not wish to end our conversation on me snapping at her.
“Your forgiveness, please,” I say. “Just remember that I have made it clear that if I am bound up in Ivy’s fate, let the winds blow me as they will. The outcome for Ivy will still be as you’ve foreseen, and I will come to and cause less harm on the way.”
“This prophecy…” Emily starts.
“Please,” I say. “Respect my wishes on this count. If Carl or Ivy needs guidance, getting me involved will not actually help. All of history backs me up.”
Emily touches my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says. “The future always seems much more uncertain when it’s one of your own.”
“So do the wise thing, old wise woman. Let fate fall as it will from this starting point until the end. Changing the starting point does not change the end. It never has and never will. You yourself have given that counsel. Heed it now.”
Emily laughs, bitterly. “My words never sound so wise in my own ears as I think they do coming out of your mouth.”
“Tricky thing about wisdom, that is,” I say. “I will be in touch tomorrow.”
“I will make sure Carl comes over after school tomorrow, so you can take an evening off from watching him. I’m sure you have other things to do.”
The next day, I struggle to pay attention to anything at school, with the hunter on my mind, and with Carl still being so close to losing control all of the time. I get caught up afterwards helping Kate study, and doing my best to keep her from going to Emily’s house to give her a piece of her mind about hiding where Ivy is. Almost all of the time, the loyalty that Ivy’s friends have for her is a powerful asset. Right now, it seems half of the town is on edge and wanting to go out and overturn every rock within a hundred miles looking for her. At least this is creating a background of chaos around Ivy that will impede the hunter’s work at finding her by trying to glean information from the locals.
A little bit after seven, Emily calls me to say Carl has left her house, and is quite angry. He had promised he would go directly home, but she is concerned that his agitation will drive him to break that promise. She says she can tell where he is at any time that he is in human form, but if the wolf comes out, she is powerless to keep track of him.
I am certain that Ben and Ivy are way too far away for Carl to pursue without driving, so I try to assure her things are well, but she still asks that I keep an eye on him for the night. I do my best to politely finish up with Kate and head over to Carl’s house.
I stop a good deal down the road from his house, park, and find a very discrete place to rid myself of my mortal weight. I take to the air and allow light to pass through me as effortless as I pass through the wind. I want to get a good look around as much of Carl’s property as I can, and with dusk approaching, it is not too much of a drain on me to both fly and remain hidden from physical sight. As soon as I get into the air, I see the hunter’s motorcycle, concealed not too far from where I had hidden my car. The hunter is not on it, but the engine is still very warm, as if she had just shut it off within the past few minutes. I do not see her on the road to Carl’s place, so I must have just missed her getting there. I immediately turn my attention to his house. I detect body heat inside, but it is definitely not Carl – I have watched him this way enou
gh to know the shape of his warmth as well as I know the shape of his face. His car is not in the garage, either, but Emily has not called to tell me he had gone anywhere. I can only assume now that whatever means she was using to track him, he has eluded it.
I turn my attention back out from the house again, seeking the hunter. I finally find her, in the woods well behind Carl’s house. She is barely warmer than her surroundings – how judiciously she must feed that she has been so cold every time I have seen her – but I can see the heat of a phone in her hand. Looking back to Carl’s house, at the body heat of whomever is inside, I see they also have a phone in operation. Seems our little hunter has worked around the prohibition against entering a home uninvited by sending somebody in for her. A search up and down the block shows a warm car, three houses down, in the opposite direction of the hunter’s motorcycle. I assume that she is working with a known associate of hers. It takes skill to break into a house and search for things on behalf of someone else; it is not something that a mortal can be compelled to do competently.
I let myself slowly alight on the roof, so I can feel around a little more to see if I can determine what the mortal inside is doing. I have been inside the house enough to know its layout very well. Right now, the spy is in Carl’s bedroom, going through his dresser. Since he is present in the home, I can tell where he has been, and he is on a very methodical search of the place, lingering anywhere Carl keeps things that appear important. This person seems to be very professional at their task. Finding out more about him seems to be a wise idea.
I am very unhappy to have her helper inside of Carl’s house, though. Carl is a young lycanthrope, trained from birth for a war that ended before he got thrown into it. He has never faced down a vampire in a fight. I do not know if the hunter will be able to ascertain that from her proxy search of his home, what information different clues may give her. But if she is as skilled as I think she is, it is possible that she could find a way to eliminate him without vampiric involvement being known. The only werewolves that really know much of Carl are the foster parents that abandoned him. Everybody else was just a cohort at one short training camp or another. When the werewolves had to adapt to traveling in smaller and less centralized and controlled packs, they started to raise their pups without much true and deep attachment to each other. Teach them that pack was who you were with today, not who you were with yesterday. It was a security measure then – if a lycanthrope truly knows nothing important about any other lycanthrope, they cannot give any meaningful information away. Now it is a liability, as young men and women like Carl live often in isolation from their kind, bearing their secrets alone, having nobody that understands intimately what it is like to have a hungry wolf inside of them.
If this hunter, a Negre, realizes she can kill Carl without risking the Truce at all, I fear his days are severely numbered. And here is where I curse Emily five ways from the dark moon. My own sense of the future tells me this hunter needs to remain alive for some time. Emily tells me Carl must be reunited with Ivy, on ‘receptive’ terms. How do I meet the demands of both futures? A day ago, I would have made the decision to leave the hunter alive, and leave it to Carl’s fate whether the hunter takes his pelt. Now, I know that I have to keep both of them alive. I am obligated to protect both of them, which means starting to actively manipulate their movements to keep them apart from each other.
I decide to take a chance, a calculated risk which only barely gives me a number I like. What if I can get her and her associate away from the house before she gets a critical amount of information on Carl?
If the hunter’s motorcycle has trackers on it so her movements can be reconstructed by the Negre later if they need, she certainly has something simple on her phone that would tell her if it is moving without her on it. I land on her bike, use my telekinesis to turn the ignition without the key, and switch back to my mortal shape.
An hour later, the machine is just about out of fuel, and I am seventy miles, straight line, away from Carl’s house, but there are nearly a hundred fresh miles on the odometer, with all of the switchbacks and curves I take coming down from the ridge into the river valley. I make a partial transformation, pulling out my wings, so I can fly free after I gun the engine at a switchback, and the motorcycle launches itself off the road and down a ravine.
I do not know for sure if the hunter did indeed have some means of knowing that I had ridden off with her transportation, or if she had even left Carl’s house as I did so, but at this moment, she is most certainly inconvenienced. That is enough for me. I keep to the air and start to fly back toward where my car is parked, on Carl’s road.
Chapter Twenty-One
Carl Wilson
All my life, I have had to lie about my true nature to protect myself and so many others like me, which is a lie that I’m usually comfortable with. At the back of my mind, though, I have always wondered what it would be like if Ivy and I ever had gotten together. I can’t imagine that I would have been able to keep that secret from her for long. For starters, I’m not sure how I would ever explain a cage in a soundproofed cell in the basement for when I needed to rage out.
Kate’s interest in me has brought those thoughts to the fore again. I can tell by her scent every time I’m near her that a kiss is mine for the taking. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Honestly, I’m still hurting about Ivy, but more of it is that I can’t bring myself to pursue something with her while I’m lying to her about her best friend. And then, I have to decide what to do about the wolf. There are just too many things going on, too much I have to hide right now. For all that she’s teased me over the time we’ve known each other, she still deserves to have me as straight and honest with her as I can actually be.
It’s been more than a week now that I’ve been covering for Ivy and Ben. It’s starting to wear on me, beyond my budding feelings for Kate. Every day, I slip one falsehood or another a dozen times or more, as people ask me if I’ve heard anything from them or from Grandma. I am still doing my best to trust her that she truly is safe, but it’s hard.
Grandma and I haven’t seen each other since we met at the truck stop. I know she’s been back home for a couple of days, but we haven’t been in touch. Also her idea, part of her drive to keep me as far from Ivy as possible. The one thing that lets me keep all of this anger and frustration under control is Ben’s warning that the Negre would find her through me if I didn’t back off. I know there’s absolutely no way Grandma would be conspiring with Ben to deceive me, so the fact that both of them independently have warned me off of her trail is a truth that I must grudgingly accept.
But I am also incapable of inaction. For the past three nights, I have gone down to the cage and let the wolf out, because he is running so hot and so close to the surface. By the time I leave school every day, I swear that if one more person asks me about Ivy, the wolf is going to go for their throat.
As a compromise with myself, after school I drive to Ivy’s house. Grandma is deep in the engine block of her semi taking care of something. “Grab a couple of cold ones for us,” she says as I approach, without extracting herself from her work. “And that spare pair of coveralls from the garage.”
I grab a couple of beers from the fridge in the kitchen, and put the coveralls on over my school clothes. I open a bottle and set it on the step of the truck next to Grandma.
“I’ve already got the clean side,” she says, finally pulling her head out of the engine. “Guess what that means?”
I know exactly what that means. I pull the creeper over and lay down on it, wheeling myself underneath the truck.
“I knew I should have called you before I started on this,” she says.
Once I’m down there, I know exactly why. There’s a bolt she needs to loosen to adjust the timing belt that is in a truly awkward place. The easiest way to get to it is to have one person underneath the engine guide the socket, on a long extension rod, to the bolt, while somebody else turns the ratchet from above.
There is already one socket on the ground next to me, and I can see the bright chrome of another one glinting at me from the top of the oil pan. Once I’m in position, she starts to snake a third socket down toward me. I guide it to the bolt and hold it in place while she cranks.
I’m still pretty clean, just a little bit of grime and dirt shook free while we got the bolt loosened. The dirty part comes when Grandma starts the truck. More of the gunk the truck picks up on its thousand-mile days rattles free while the engine shakes from so many moving parts being out of synch with each other. Since I’ve got a shorter reach to the adjustment screw for the timing gear, it’s up to me to shoot a strobe light up at the belt and slowly turn the screw, tightening and loosening in increasingly small increments, until a couple of indicator lines synchronize perfectly with the flashing light. The light makes it easier to figure out which way to adjust the timing initially, but the final setting is done completely by feel. As I zero in on perfect synchronization, the engine stops vibrating and shaking things into my face, and instead starts to hum like a purring kitten.
“Nice work,” Grandma says, and starts to thread the socket down to me so she can tighten the one difficult bolt. “Took you longer than usual, though,” she says.
She won’t admit it, but there is one bracket attached to the engine that’s worn out and needs to be replaced. That bracket is the reason we have to adjust the timing belt every couple of months.
“You know I’m less than relaxed these days,” I tell her, turning the adjustment screw a tiny bit to compensate for the bolt she just tightened.
“Yeah. You’re keeping everybody off her trail, though, right?”
“I am, Grandma,” I say.
She finishes tightening the bolt, and I gently release the socket so she can move on to the two bolts that she can reach easily from the top of the engine.
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