by JL Merrow
Silke broke off from rubbing noses with her fellow wolf to whine softly. The strange wolf took a step toward Flashlight Guy, its tail stiff and its ears high.
A muscle twitched in Flashlight Guy’s jaw. “I apologize,” he forced out stiffly. You could have fit the amount of sincerity in his voice on the head of a pin and still had room for an army of angels to get their groove on, but it was enough to pacify my inner beast. I breathed a little easier.
“Leon, we should go now,” Christoph said, and I had to agree. I just didn’t like leaving Silke there with these guys.
“Silke?” I said, and she turned her muzzle to look at me. I crouched down, and she came to me. As if in this form, she wasn’t afraid anymore. “Are you okay with this?”
She turned to look at Christoph, and he nodded. Her tail wagged softly as she padded back to Flashlight Guy and the strange wolf. I felt cheated—was that any sort of answer? Shit, she was still just doing what she was told. “What about Jon?” I asked, and she whined, her head low. I felt like a bastard.
“Come,” Christoph said. Flashlight Guy and the wolves stood aside to let us pass.
I went. What the hell else could I do?
“I’ve planned this for a long time,” Christoph said as we walked toward the exit, a big, fancy archway flanked by stone elephants. I jumped every time a camera whirred, proof that back at wolf central, they were making damn sure we didn’t get any ideas about hanging around.
When we got to the heavy gates that were supposed to stop people like us from getting in here after hours, another guy in a security uniform came out of the gatehouse and unlocked it for us, then stood back to let us pass. All without saying a word, like those scenes in old Cold War movies when they used to do spy swaps at Checkpoint Charlie. The ones where the camera tracks the good guy as he makes the long, slow walk to freedom, and all the time you’re waiting on the edge of your seat for some asshole to shoot him in the back.
“Why?” I asked bitterly as the space between my shoulder blades itched so bad it hurt. “Why the hell couldn’t she have just stayed with us?” Shit, what was I going to say to Jon? Oops, sorry, seem to have mislaid your girlfriend. Yeah, that’s right, we sent her off with a couple of scary dudes none of us had ever met before. You got a problem with that?
Christoph was silent a moment. I turned away from the lights of the human city to look at him. I had time to notice his scars were looking a hell of a lot older than they’d done only hours earlier, as if maybe changing form had helped them heal, somehow. The raised, unstitched edges didn’t look a hell of a lot prettier, though, and now it was way too late to do anything about them.
Finally he spoke. “Because she’s been brainwashed all her life into thinking she’s of no account, a mistake, an abomination. She needs to be with her own kind. To learn to be proud of what she is.” He paused. “And because I’m going to kill her father.”
The sun had started to come up by the time we made it back to Kreuzberg, but then we weren’t exactly hurrying. It was too early for anyone to be at work apart from night-shift workers who’d be on their way home soon, but there were a few groups of partygoers who’d stayed out all night, lurching home and blinking at the daylight like hordes of the undead. A tired-looking hooker in gold hot pants called out something from a street corner, then gave us the finger when we didn’t answer. I didn’t bother going over to explain we weren’t exactly her target audience. One of those little street-cleaning wagons with the rotating brushes rumbled past, picking up cigarette butts and leaving a damp trail behind it. Sanitizing the city for the daytime people. When I first got to Germany, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Canada, the streets were so frickin’ clean.
“You want to see if there’s anywhere open we could grab a coffee?” I asked. My voice sounded rusty. Christoph had been giving me the silent treatment since we’d left the zoo. Left Silke.
He glanced at me for a moment, then looked away. I was struck again by how perfect, how unblemished, the right side of his face was. “This isn’t going to get any easier.”
“If you ask me, most things are easier after your first cup of coffee.” Or your first shot of bourbon, but I figured it was a little early in the day to be seeking out that kind of comfort. Maybe not too early to earn a buck; there was an old homeless guy picking up used beer bottles from around a trash can to take back to a supermarket for the deposit. Most people don’t throw their bottles in the trash around here, just leave them standing next to it out of consideration for the Flaschensammler. “Hey, there’s a cafe over there that looks like it’s open.”
Christoph half smiled. “We don’t have any money, remember?”
“Shit!” I stopped dead in the street as a hollow feeling opened up inside of me.
“What is it?”
“Jon was supposed to be getting us some money, remember? Just how fucking keen do you think he’s going to be to help us out now? Shit, couldn’t you have kept Silke around for one more night?” The Flaschensammler turned around to gape at the loudmouthed American shouting at the disfigured man. I bared my teeth at him, and he stumbled backward, eyes wide—then turned to run down the street, his bags a cacophony of clinking glass, leaving a faint stench of rotting food and unwashed human behind him. A hand grabbed my arm, hard.
“Leon! You must control yourself!” Christoph hissed.
I damn near took a swing at him. I don’t know what stopped me. Made me lower my head and take a few deep breaths. “Sorry,” I said, surprising myself. Where the hell did that come from? But he was right—we were on a public street, for fuck’s sake.
We walked on, silent once more. It didn’t look like I’d be getting my coffee, and maybe not any breakfast either—hell, for all I knew, we could be looking for a new place to stay a half hour from now.
I just hoped Jon was going to take this better than I thought he would.
Jon didn’t take it any better than I thought he would.
He was asleep when we got back to the hostel. I was dog tired, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be getting to sleep after the night I’d had. Luckily the family who ran the place were early risers. We sat in their kitchen for an hour or more drinking sweet Turkish coffee while fat women in headscarves bustled around us. They clucked over Christoph’s face—God knows what the hell they thought had happened to it—and served us platefuls of eggs and spicy sliced sausage, cooked all together in a pan with about a gallon of oil. It was damn tasty, but it wasn’t like any breakfast I’d ever had in Turkey. Maybe it was some regional variation. Or maybe they were just trying to be Western about it for our sake.
We mopped up some of the grease with sour white bread. On top of what I’d eaten last night—shit, don’t think about the raw duck—as long as my stomach didn’t rebel and barf it all up, I’d be set up for about a week now. The women didn’t seem to know much German—at least, they could only speak it in one-word sentences—but even so, we didn’t talk much.
I guess we were both thinking about the guy upstairs. We hung around the kitchen as long as we could, but there came a point when, even with the language barrier, we could tell we were in danger of outstaying our welcome. Christoph touched me on the arm. “We should go and wake Jon.”
I felt like saying, “Hey, you go ahead, I’ll follow you up there,” and then making a run for it, but at the end of the day, Jon was my friend, not Christoph’s. I figured I should be the one to tell him Christoph had given away his girlfriend.
Like I said, he didn’t take it too well.
“What the hell? What do you mean, she’s not coming back? What have you done with her?” Jon flung himself out of bed and, wearing only his boxers, marched up to me until he was shouting in my face.
I could have told him that wouldn’t end well.
I didn’t realize I’d started to change until Jon’s eyes went wide and he backed off a step. “Dude, your face—what’s up with your face?”
Think human… I wrestled
my features into something approaching submission. “It’s a… Shit, Jon. Something happened to me.” Fucking Christoph happened to me. And I don’t mean that in the good way. “I just—sometimes I freak out a bit, now. Literally. Christoph too. Silke’s the same, only…kind of not.” My voice was getting thicker.
“What the hell is this? She’s like you, but she’s not like you? You mean, she’s got this…face thing too?” Jon was backing away hysterically. It didn’t make getting my shape under control any easier, that was for damn sure, and I could feel the hairs springing out all over my body. “What are you, anyhow?”
I tried to speak, but my mouth had gotten too damn distorted to form words and it came out as a growl. I thought Jon was going to piss himself. He stank of fear, which only fuelled the transformation. My claws slid out like they were itching to slash something.
“We are werewolves,” Christoph said curtly from behind me. “Leon, change back!”
I wasn’t any too happy about him snapping orders at me like that, but it seemed to do the trick. My teeth shrank, and my face morphed back to human.
Jon had his back against the wall, his mouth hanging wide open like his jaw had come unhinged. He was trembling. “It’s some sort of drugs, right? You gave me some bad shit, and that’s why I’m seeing things.”
“No,” I said hoarsely. “It’s real. We’re monsters.”
Jon slid around the room with his back to the wall until he reached the heap he’d left his clothes in last night. He kept his eyes on us all the time as he grabbed them with shaking hands and fumbled his way into them. “There’s no such thing as monsters,” he said like he was trying to convince himself.
Christoph cursed softly—and freaked out. Literally, I mean, not as in had a panic attack. It occurred to me that all through all the shit that had happened lately, the most agitated I’d ever seen him was the night we met. The night he made me a monster. I wondered if that was significant as he slowly let his inner wolf out to play, showing the kind of control I’d be willing to bite my own arm off to acquire.
Well, somebody’s arm, anyhow.
As Christoph morphed from freaky-looking human to full-on freak and then back again, the sound of breathing from across the room turned harsh and ragged. The stench of fear intensified. “I can’t… I can’t deal with this, man. I’m out of here.” Jon turned and fled from the room. When I looked out the window thirty seconds later, he was running down the street.
Shit. There went our chance of getting enough money to make it out of Berlin. I slumped down heavily on the bed Jon had just vacated.
Might as well finally get some sleep before they kicked us out of here.
Chapter Twelve
When I woke up, I felt fuzzy and disorientated. Daylight was coming in through the narrow window, but I didn’t have a clue what time of day it was. My mouth tasted foul, and the clothes I’d fallen asleep in were wrinkled, sweaty and uncomfortable.
And I hadn’t even had a single drink last night. Let alone gotten laid.
I was on my own in the room, I realized. My heart jumped. I tensed and scrambled out of Jon’s bed. Where the hell was Christoph? Shit, had he gone off to try to make good on that crazy threat to kill Schreiber? Did the guy have a death wish or something? We hadn’t talked about it—I mean, hell, I’d thought it was just one of those things guys say, like he was planning to do it someday. With someday meaning maybe around the time hell froze over or the head of the Westboro Baptists came out as queer.
If Christoph had left me all on my own with this goddamn curse and gone off to get himself killed—
The door opened, and my favorite freakazoid walked in. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.
“You were worried?” Christoph sounded amused. Fuck him. “I think I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah,” I snarled back at him. “I take one look at what used to be your face and I think, there goes a guy who can take care of himself.”
Christoph didn’t look like he was amused anymore. On the minus side, though, I felt like a total asshole. “I needed to think,” he muttered. “You were asleep, in any case.”
“Think about what?” I sat back down heavily on the bed, which creaked underneath me. I could still smell Jon on the sheets. Damn, I was hungry.
“Money.” Christoph flopped onto the other bed, the one that would’ve been Silke’s if we hadn’t left her with the wolves. Or maybe not—I wasn’t sure how far this trust thing she’d had going with Jon had gotten. “You were right. I should have considered your situation and waited to take Silke to the zoo.”
“Yeah. You should have,” I said, but it came out weak, like my voice figured my heart wasn’t really in it. “So what are you going to do about it?” I asked, managing to inject a little more aggression into my tone. I didn’t want him thinking I was letting him off the hook because of a half-assed apology like that.
He nodded. “There is a way. My credit card, my bank cards—they’re all back at the house. Except for one.”
“And where’s that?” I prompted after I’d gotten tired of waiting for him to finish.
“My desk drawer at work.”
“What? Why the hell didn’t you mention this before? You could have just walked in and picked it up the minute we got out of that place! Shit, all this time I’ve been worrying where our next meal’s coming from—all this time we’ve been hanging around Berlin waiting for Schreiber and the gang to come and wipe us out—” I stopped, breathing hard. I’d gotten up from the bed and was staring down at him, my fists clenched.
The bastard smiled. “You’re still human.”
“What the fuck?” I looked at my hands and I realized they were just that—hands. I hadn’t freaked out. It took the wind right out of my sails. I sat down heavily, glaring at him. “So why didn’t you mention this before? The credit card, I mean.”
Christoph looked away. It meant I got to see his bad side full-on. His scars looked almost healed now, without a trace of infection, thank God. “I…” He paused, then looked straight back at me. “I preferred not to let my colleagues see me like this,” he said, like he was daring me to call him a coward.
I felt hollow. Hunger again, I figured. “Christoph…” I swallowed. “You said you were planning on going back to your job, right? They’re going to have to see you like that sometime.” I pushed aside all the thoughts that came along with that, like how the hell he was going to go back to his job with Schreiber still gunning for him.
“You’re right.” That made it twice inside of five minutes. I started to wonder if Christoph was feeling okay. I stepped back from the bed as he pushed up into a sitting position, then swung his feet to the floor. “We will go now.”
Whoa. “Right now? What time is it, anyhow?”
“It’s almost four.”
Jeez. I’d slept most of the day. Again. No wonder I felt like crap. “Has Jon been back?” I asked, but I figured I already knew the answer.
Christoph confirmed it with a shake of his head that sent his long hair swinging to cover his scars for an instant.
They weren’t the only things around here that were better off hidden. “Shit. You think we’re safe here? I mean, do you think he’ll tell anyone about us?”
A shrug. “He’s your friend.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never broken the news to him I’m a freakin’ werewolf before.” He’d been fine about me being gay, but this was a way bigger deal. “I guess we shouldn’t stay here,” I admitted reluctantly. It wasn’t like I’d been planning on hanging around anyhow, but it would’ve been nice to feel safe for another night.
Christoph nodded. “You should bring your things.”
I guessed that was my cue to grab my backpack, so I shoved my feet back into my sneakers, crossed the landing to our room and swung it onto my shoulder. “How far is this place?” I asked as we headed back out into the hallway.
“Perhaps an hour’s walk from here,” Christoph said as if it was nothing.
<
br /> I made a snap decision and slung my stuff back where I’d found it. “I’ll fetch it later.” It’d be okay. The guys here seemed honest enough.
Christoph gave me a look, but he kept stumm.
As we beat our way down street after street, my head started to clear. I started to regret leaving my backpack, and wondered why I hadn’t suggested we take the subway. Yeah, it’d have cleaned us out, but we were on our way to get more funds, so why worry?
Hell, maybe Christoph wasn’t so big on confined spaces these days. The thought made me smile, in a grisly kind of way.
“Something funny?” Christoph snapped. The guy needed to chill.
“What, since I met you? Not so much.” Okay, so maybe I needed to chill too.
We walked on in silence for a while.
Our route took us through the Brandenburg gate. Back in the Cold War days, it was a symbol of a divided country, standing just to the East of the Wall and patrolled by guys with guns. A gate to nowhere. These days, you can walk right on through, although as we did so more than one tourist paused in the act of clicking a picture and waited, embarrassed, for the scenery to improve. Stupid fuckers.
“My mother always wanted to do this,” Christoph said, out of the blue. “But she never got the chance.”
I glanced over at him, but his face was as unreadable as ever. “She, uh, passed away?” I asked, feeling awkward.
Christoph just nodded.
“I guess you were pretty young, huh? I mean, if she died before the Wall came down.”
“I was nine. She lived to see the Wall come down, but she was too ill for the trip. My father kept promising her we would go when she was well again, but…” He shrugged stiffly.
I felt bad for this woman I’d never know, desperate to see her country united again. “How about your father? Is he still around?”
“He lives in Düsseldorf now.” Christoph caught me off guard with his next question. “You have family?”
“Uh, just my mom and dad. Well, you know, the usual aunts and cousins and all that crap, but we’re not that close.” Understatement of the year.