by Alice Degan
“The fucking kid had a mobile!” Jake had picked up the phone and was holding it in the hand that was not occupied with his crossbow. “And he called someone, too—but it wasn’t the cops.”
“Where is he?”
“Down there.” Jake gestured with the crossbow. “Dropped his coat, for some reason, and kept running. Laurence followed him down, to make sure he doesn’t get out the other end. The punters are down around the corner there.”
They were standing in front of the physics building, looking down a narrow, enclosed stretch between two buildings, hidden from the street on both sides. There were raised walkways along the edges, beside the buildings, and between them an artfully landscaped strip, now crusted with snow, looking like a small piece of fake tundra. Nick’s jacket lay flopped on the frozen grass halfway down. At the far end was a snow-filled fountain basin and a sculpture made of tall poles that glowed mauve at the top. For a moment it was very quiet.
Then there was a noise of running feet and excited shouts from around the far corner of the physics building, and a lean, silver-grey wolf shot out from among the poles of the sculpture to leap over the snow-filled fountain. The clients came storming delightedly after it, brandishing their own crossbows. Laurence jogged casually out after them.
“That was fucking awesome!” the son was yelling. “That was better than CGI! Did you see that?”
“I guess they got to see him change form,” said Jake, hefting his crossbow into position. “Whatever.”
The wolf came racing down the strip of fake tundra, but drew up short at a couple of warning shots from Jake. It stood there, ears laid back, tail between its legs. Clare could hear it whimpering. It was pretty in a way that Clare had not at all expected. Its fur was glossy and soft-looking, and quite white on its throat and down its legs. Its eyes were a pale yellow-green. She couldn’t remember what colour Nick’s eyes had been.
The wolf made a move to spring past Jake, but Clare stepped in its path. It stopped, growling slightly. Then it turned and fled.
The clients had got over their excitement at really seeing a werewolf transform and begun shooting in earnest at their prey; but they were both bad shots, and neither knew how to use the crossbows. They chased the wolf up and down the strip of fake tundra, the son running on the walkway by the side of the physics building, the father striding over the frozen grass below. The wolf was very fast, and very agile, and the men were no match for it. But it was trapped in the hunting ground where they had driven it, and it was too scared to make an effective escape. As far as Clare could tell, the hunt was a disaster. There was no way the clients were going to be satisfied, even if they did kill the target. She just wanted it to be over. Finally Laurence, trying to stop the wolf from fleeing past him, either accidentally or deliberately put a bolt into one of its paws. It tried to keep running, but it couldn’t. It lay down in the snow. Clare shut her eyes.
Crossbows are quiet; that was why Stake used them. It could have been over already, and she wouldn’t know. She kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to know. Only that wasn’t true. She wanted it to be too late; she wanted Nick to be dead, because then she could stop thinking about what she wasn’t doing to prevent that.
Her eyes snapped open.
“Stop! Stop!” It was the other Clare, who had pushed violently out from somewhere inside her. She was a moment too late to make a difference.
“Holy shit!” came the voice of one of the clients. “What was that?”
The prone body of the wolf was surrounded by blue flame, not as if it were burning, but as if it were enclosed in a flickering blue vessel of fire. As she watched, a bolt from someone’s crossbow dissolved into the flame as it reached it. Then she looked up, and saw something dark crouching on top of the glowing mauve sculpture.
It sprang from its perch with the speed of a missile and a dark flutter that was not wings, and it fell upon the younger of the two clients. He gave a choked shriek, and then there was a horrible noise of ripping, and his crossbow fell over the railing with part of his arm still attached to it. The rest of him subsided, groaning, on the walkway, and the thing stood up. It had long claws that caught the moonlight. It leapt over the railing and took down the second client. It evidently had teeth, too. It stood up again, wiping its mouth on the back of its hand. Laurence was feverishly pumping crossbow bolts at it, but they melted into blue flame in the air as they approached.
The thing looked at Laurence, then down at Jake and Clare. It had fiercely yellow eyes, the pupils closed to slits even in the moonlight. Blood dripped from its claws, and it licked its fangs. It was barefoot in the snow, and what had fluttered as it leapt from the top of the sculpture was its long black hair and the black-and-white kimono thing that it was wearing.
“You should have hunted me,” it said, in a deep voice with a Japanese accent. “I make a good prey for stupid humans. You could have chased me for a very long time. But not now. You hunted my friend. You will not hunt again.”
He sprang at Laurence, batting his crossbow aside as if it were a toy, and caught him by the throat, lifting him off his feet. He drove two claws of his other hand into one eye and then the other, and he dropped Laurence in a heap in the snow. He sprang down the length of the fake tundra to land in front of Jake. He fanned out his fingers in a delicate motion in front of Jake’s face. Blue flame sprang out of his palm, and Jake screamed and fell, clutching his eyes.
Takehiko—who was still somehow, horribly, the beautiful teenager from Seven C—looked at Clare.
“I did not trust you to begin with,” he said. “But I did not think you are so stupid. Do you think that anyone would go to the trouble to seal up a harmless human in a painting for four hundred years?”
And suddenly she understood something about him.
“I know you want to kill me,” she said rapidly. Her voice sounded low and husky and not like her voice at all. “And you’re right—I’m pretty sure I deserve it. But I think you’re going to leave me alive. I think you’re going to let me call an ambulance for the others so they don’t bleed to death, either. I think you’re going to do it because you’ve got used to living with harmless humans, and you don’t want to go back to being what you were before. I think you want to be like them.”
Them, she’d said. Them. Not us.
He looked at her a moment longer, and then he flashed his teeth in a snarl, and turned away.
• • •
In the hospital waiting room, Clare listened to Seevers, who had arrived not long after the ambulance, gabbling into his phone about waivers and insurance premiums. This was going to be a disaster for Stake, and she was going to be held responsible. It wasn’t fair. She had only ever gone along with the others. She had just been trying to get ahead. It wasn’t as if any of this had ever really been her idea. If people wanted to hunt innocent kids who turned into wolves, that wasn’t her fault.
She fell asleep in a waiting-room chair, and woke cramped and hungry. She had dreamt of something unsettling, and tried to remember what it was. But no, it hadn’t been a dream. She had really done that. She had stood there and waited for Nick to be dead.
But what else was she supposed to have done? If she hadn’t been going to do that, why had she done all the work leading up to that hunt? Why had she taken the job with Stake at all?
Threats, she’d said. Supernatural Threats. Nick wasn’t a Threat, but Takehiko was, that was for damn sure. Compared to him, the vampires that Stake’s customers usually hunted were just a minor nuisance, about as dangerous as racoons.
And Nick lived with that thing. Nick made fun of his accent and called him Tacky; Nick had tried to smother him with a pillow. Nick was probably, Clare thought, one of the bravest people she had ever met. And she had tried to lead him to his death, for sport—no, for profit, so that she could profit from someone else’s sport, so that she could impress her colleagues and get ahead. And the monster, the real one, had accepted her explanation of his motives—had reco
gnized that she understood him, and left her alive.
In a panic to do something, it didn’t matter what, to escape from her thoughts, she reached for her purse on the chair beside her. She remembered the box of buns inside. They would be stale by now. They wouldn’t taste the way she remembered that gingerbread, anyway; there was no reason why they should.
She pulled out the box. It was squashed and greasy. Maybe she should eat one, she thought. It would taste like ashes, and that would prove something. She picked out the most squashed, stale-looking bun and bit into it. It was delicious.
• • •
It took her two weeks to work up the courage to make the call, and as soon as she hung up she was sure it had been a mistake. She almost called back immediately to cancel the order, afraid that this was the successful Clare somehow getting the upper hand again. She spent the evening pacing her apartment, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Finally it did, and acting according to the plan that she had worked out beforehand, she ducked into the kitchen and called out, “Come in!”
She heard the front door open.
“Hello?”
She came out of the kitchen, pretty sure from the voice that it was Nick.
It was him, the box of buns she had ordered in his right hand. His left hand was still bandaged where the crossbow arrow had gone through the wolf’s paw. He stood frozen inside the door, wide-eyed and white-faced as he realized what he had just walked into.
She held out her hands so that he could see that they were empty, and said quickly, “I want to talk to you. This was the best way I could think of. I had the box with the bakery’s number on it.”
“Smart,” he admitted. He let the door close behind him, wary but not, she realized, actually terrified.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said again. “But you go first.”
His chin went up defiantly, and she reminded herself that he was brave, that it was taking bravery for him to face her just then. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“No?” She tried not to sound defiant herself. She wanted to confess, to explain things—but she realized that could easily come out sounding self-indulgent. She wanted him to ask first.
“Well … ” His eyes flicked tensely around her living room, then came back to rest on her. “I guess maybe I do. How did you find Heaven and Earth? That’s what we haven’t been able to figure out. You didn’t just come in by accident, did you?”
“No. We’ve got—Stake has got an iPhone app. I don’t know who designed it for them, but I know it wasn’t done in-house.”
He goggled at her. “An iPhone app? That does what?”
“Maps out locations in the city where … uh … I don’t know, magic? Where there’s a high concentration of magic, or something. I mean paranormal, um … ” she trailed off, embarrassed.
“Yeah, I get it.”
“I don’t have the phone here—it’s a company phone, so … ”
“You don’t work for them any more?” He sounded hopeful.
She gave a noncommittal wiggle of her head, neither yes nor no. She wanted to be quite honest with him. “I’m on a leave of absence. It’s their policy when a hunt goes bad.”
“Uh huh. I heard they were basically shutting down.”
“No. They’re scaling back, but they’re not shutting down—they won’t be stopping the hunts. But that’s not necessarily anything for you to worry about. They’re not likely to come after you again, not after the disaster that … Most of them—you’ve got to understand, most of the hunts are fake. Actors and fake blood, and nobody actually gets killed, unless it’s by accident. That’s what I was hired to do, organize fake vampire hunts. ‘Urban adventures.’ They’d been doing it since the eighties. It wasn’t until six months ago, when I was promoted, that I found out they did real ones too. And not just vampires—well, you know. Whatever they can find. But until last month, until they got the app, the real hunts were super hard to put together, because they didn’t really know where … you … where you guys hang out. And I know the reason they promoted me is because they’d figured out I had what it takes—they knew I’d be good at tracking you down. But why is that?” Here she got to the real reason why she had called the bakery. “What am I?”
He didn’t need long to consider that one. “I don’t know—maybe you’re just a sociopath.”
“That’s what I’ve always thought,” she said seriously. “When I think about it. But it’s not just the lack of empathy. Not everyone can smell … paranormal … uh … magic.”
His eyebrows went up. “Yeah, no. That’s true. What does it smell like?”
“But surely you can smell it yourself?”
“No, when I’m human I’m just … human. And when I’m a wolf I’m just a wolf. It’s actually pretty straightforward.” He shifted from one foot to the other. He had started to look intrigued in spite of himself. “You might be … some people have sensitivities. Like … Some humans, I mean.”
“Like Rose. That’s what you’re trying not to say. Like your employer. That’s what she is—just human, but with some kind of empathy or sensitivity. That’s how she bakes the way she does.”
He looked at her like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “You do get why I don’t really feel like giving you too much information, right? Because the last time we had a nice frank conversation where I was trying to help you, it ended up with me running away from fucking tourists with crossbows?”
“Yes! I do understand that. That’s why I’m trying—that’s why I need information. But I do understand. You’re right not to trust me.”
“Damn straight.”
“So that’s it. You think I’m just human.”
He looked at her for a long moment, appraisingly. “I actually don’t,” he said finally. “You’re probably half human. If I had to guess, I’d say you were probably half fay. That’s definitely a thing. And the fay can be pretty sociopathic.”
“Half what?”
“Fay. You know. Fairies.”
She stared. “You’re kidding, right? I’m not a fairy—I’m a monster, some kind of monster. I transform. Like Takehiko. What’s he? He’s not a fairy.”
“He’s a yokai. A Japanese demon. And he’s way outta your league. You just forget about him.”
“Sure.” She actually took a step back. For a moment there he had looked quite fierce. “I didn’t mean … ”
He shook himself a little, looking embarrassed by his outburst. “Do you know both your parents?”
“No—my mother left home when I was little, and my father never talks about her.”
“Yep, well, I think we solved that one.” He put the box of buns down, finally, on the side table by her couch, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Look. You … you’re not a sociopath. You don’t have to be. You didn’t let them kill me in the end, and that’s great, I’m really grateful. But you were going to, you know? I’m just not ready to be friends right now. Uh … I mean … ” He winced. “Not that you necessarily want friends … ”
“I do. I want to know other people like me.” Even though other people like me might be terrifying.
He shrugged, and turned toward the door. “Well, I guess you’ve got the number for the bakery. You can always try asking for me.”
About the Author
Alice Degan is an academic and novelist (who also sometimes writes short stories). She lives in Toronto, in a weird house in an alley, where the rooms do in fact stay where you left them.
“The Tenants of 7C” is the first story in a series. To get the rest, follow this link:
http://www.alicedegan.com/my-books/
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