I growled again, because I was having trouble sorting through all my reactions. Part of me just wanted to lick Emmet’s big, work-roughened hands. Part of me wanted to beat a hasty retreat.
“But if you bit someone, it was self-defense.” I realized there was something foreign about the sheriff’s intonation, less than an accent, just the trace of something that told me English was not his first language. He reached into his jacket and produced another piece of jerky. As I grabbed it, I realized that I was no longer fully in wolf form. On second thought, maybe I hadn’t been completely lupine to begin with, because I hadn’t lost as much of my human consciousness as I had in the past. Maybe this was a result of changing before the full moon, or maybe it was something else.
“Want a drink?” Emmet passed me a bottle of ice-blue Gatorade and I drank it down, using my half-transformed hands. I’d never tasted Gatorade before, and was surprised at the taste—sweet and yet bitter, and so cold it numbed the back of my throat. As the cold burn of the liquid spread through my body, I felt calmer, more lucid—more human. Maybe it wasn’t Gatorade. Maybe Northside sheriffs carried magic potions the way ordinary sheriffs carried guns.
At the thought of some unknown substance working in my body, I shivered with anxiety. I’m not exactly a casual drug user; aside from the one time I’d smoked a joint with Red last year, I never touched anything stronger than wine. I even debated long and hard before taking an aspirin. Red wasn’t a big marijuana smoker, although he did use it ritually at the solstices—outside, where the smoke wouldn’t affect me. I still wasn’t sure why I’d decided to get high with Red that one time, back when he and Jackie had come to have dinner with Hunter and me. It still amazed me that I’d done it.
“Stop fretting,” said the sheriff, capping the bottle and putting it back in a pack slung over his chest. “I didn’t dope you up, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I nodded, to show I’d understood, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well, there was a drop of wormwood in there, just to take the edge off you. In the jerky, too.”
I turned to him, alarmed. Wormwood, wasn’t that the substance that made absinthe so lethal?
“It’s in vermouth, too, and you don’t see people dying from martinis.” The sheriff’s mouth remained unsmiling, but I sensed that he was amused. “Besides, you don’t feel so much like biting me in the arm now, do you? Wormwood’s a cerebral stimulant—your man Red taught me that.”
I had to admit, he had a point. In addition to my thoughts, my hands had become more human, hours and hours before I would ordinarily shift back. Well, now I had something else to worry about: whether or not I’d stop changing before I lost all my fur. I didn’t feel like being naked with the sheriff, and besides, it was cold outside.
As if reading my mind, Emmet nodded. “Snow’s coming,” he said, almost to himself. Then he looked at me as if I were a person and not a wolf and said, “I can give you a ride home, Dr. Barrow.”
Something about the way he was deliberately looking me in the eye made me look down at myself. I squeaked, crossing my arms over my breasts, which were visible, though a fair bit furrier than usual.
“Here.” Emmet shrugged off his jacket and handed it to me. “Go on and wear that.”
“Thanks,” I said, but it came out as a soft woof. His jacket came down to my knees and smelled of moist earth, a smell of spring in winter. My gaze flew up to his face.
“Come,” he ordered, and I followed him obediently into the car.
* * *
As we drove, I checked myself out in the passenger’s side mirror. I looked like a circus freak—Abra the wolf girl. I ran a furry finger down the bridge of my nose, feeling as self-conscious as an adolescent. And in a way, being caught midtransition was like adolescence: I never knew what new variation of me I would have to present to the world.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, but my muzzle wasn’t built for speaking.
“Want some music?” Not taking his eyes off the road, the sheriff opened the top of his right armrest and pulled out a CD. Outside, the snow had begun to fall steadily, and some optical trick of the headlights made it appear as though we were driving into a tunnel of light. “You up to something a little different than you’re used to?”
I nodded, and Emmet turned on a CD that wailed sonorously to an unfamiliar rhythm. I couldn’t tell if the nasal singer was male or female, or whether the song was about the glory of God or the glory of some elusive lover, but clearly this was not an easy relationship, as the chorus was a prolonged moan.
“You want me to turn it off?”
I shook my head. Actually, the tune was beginning to grow on me, and I had to fight the urge to howl along. Glancing at the sheriff’s swarthy, saturnine face, I realized that he probably wasn’t Native American, as I’d assumed.
Maybe he was an Arab. I’d heard an NPR radio program about Lebanese and Syrians who had settled in the American west a hundred years earlier, becoming peddlers or opening restaurants that sold kibbe and shawarma along with Texas barbecue. Then I glanced up at the amulet hanging from the rearview mirror, emblazoned with the Star of David.
Suddenly I made the connection. That tattoo I’d glimpsed on the sheriff’s forehead—those were Hebrew letters. The skin on the back of my neck crawled, because I had just remembered that one of my best friends in high school had told me that it was against Jewish law to get a tattoo. And Emmet’s tattoos had a tribal look. Someone had gouged a deep channel with a rough tool before applying dye.
There was something very strange about the sheriff, even by Northside standards.
“Open that,” said Emmet, indicating the glove compartment in front of me.
Half holding my breath, I did as he said. There, wrapped in a white, bloodstained cloth, was a bundle about five inches long and two inches wide.
“Take it.” The sheriff’s voice was uninflected, without censure or compassion. “I found it on the ground next to those boys.”
Oh, God. A confused memory of flesh and blood flashed through my mind. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I had done what the memory implied, and I didn’t want to know.
“Go on. It’s yours.”
I understood: What I did in wolf form was still my responsibility when I was human. Hands trembling, I glanced over at the sheriff’s stony face and then unwrapped the bundle. My new glasses spilled out onto my lap, and I gasped.
The statuelike man beside me made a strange, gravelly sound deep in the back of his throat. It took me a moment, and then comprehension dawned. He was laughing. Not funny, I thought, glaring at the sheriff as I wiped the glasses clean with the cloth.
Emmet gave another dry chuckle as he turned onto the road leading to Red’s and my cabin. After that, I felt almost relaxed with the seven-foot sheriff. Having a sense of humor, even a poor one, humanized him.
Emmet parked on the road, not wanting to get stuck, and as we walked toward the cabin, our footsteps were instantly covered by the rapidly falling snow. Up to four feet was predicted in the higher elevations, according to Emmet, but he said he wouldn’t be surprised if it was more like six feet. Red wasn’t home—no surprise, really, given the pull of the nearly full moon—and Emmet helped me light the kerosene lamps. After that, he set about building a fire in the fireplace with his dinner plate-sized hands, hunching over to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling beams. He did not, I noticed, remove his cowboy hat.
When I was dressed in sweatpants and a flannel shirt, I handed Emmet back his jacket. With clothes on my body and glasses on my face, I had pushed the change back enough to speak. “Thanks,” I said, the words still a little hard to form. I ran my tongue over my canines, which were sticking up a bit too far.
“Just doing my job, ma’am.” He tipped the brim of his hat, and I caught the glint of humor in his half-hidden eyes. As Emmet walked to the door in his peculiar, listing gait, I realized that the sheriff of Northside was doi
ng a very passable John Wayne imitation, from the unusual, clipped cadence of his speech to the slightly unbalanced rhythm of his walk.
But it was only after he scraped the snow from his squad car and drove off that I realized the strangest thing of all about the sheriff. He hadn’t reacted at all to the estrus pheromones that had been turning all the other men I met into slavering beasts. Which meant that he was either profoundly gay, or something else entirely.
SEVENTEEN
After an hour, I faced it: I wasn’t going to sleep. My body felt exhausted and restless, and my mind kept racing from one conundrum to another. Lying with my eyes closed, I had spent nearly forty minutes worrying about free-roaming manitous the way I used to worry about nuclear meltdowns at the Indian Point power plant. Trying to think about something else, I’d fretted about how close I’d come to being raped, and then agonized about how close I’d come to killing someone. From there it was a short jump to questioning whether I was in control of my hormones, which led me to pondering the state of my relationship with Red. At this point, I would have given anything to just go wolf and stop thinking, but whatever the good sheriff had given me had inhibited the change. It had also taken the edge off my desire, but it hadn’t taken it away completely. Which made me think that what I really needed was some mindless activity to soothe my nerves and quiet my brain.
If Red did walk through the door, I thought, I was going to rip his clothes off first, and ask questions later.
Throwing off the covers, I sighed and reached for my glasses. There were times when I really missed having a television set. You could live a fairly modern life without electricity—as Red pointed out, most people in Ireland and Wales and parts of England had been doing without it until long after World War II. But you couldn’t watch television, and at the moment, I wanted the distraction of talking heads.
I picked up the biography of Jane Goodall that I was currently reading, but couldn’t focus on the words. Throwing the thick hardcover onto the bed, I paced restlessly from one side of the cabin to the other, wondering where Red was, and what he was doing out on a cold Friday evening in January. Rocky the raccoon was missing, too, but of course, I’d been expecting that.
Knowing it was futile, I still checked all of Rocky’s hiding places—in between the sheets and blankets in the armoire, in the cupboard with the good plates, in the bed next to my pillow. But he was gone, and there was no recent scent of him. Maybe, I thought, he’d run into the woods that night and just never returned. Maybe he’d found an older raccoon to mentor him.
Or maybe Red had caught and killed him for a late-night snack. Which made me wonder, once again: Where the hell was he?
From her perch atop the armoire, Ladyhawke watched me with one golden eye. For the first time since she’d come home, she didn’t attempt to pull out my hair when I passed by, and when I glanced up at her, she cocked her head in a way that seemed almost endearing.
“Do you want me to pet you?” I’d seen Red do it, but hadn’t dared attempt it myself. Yet suddenly, I felt sure that all I had ever needed to do was approach the bird without fear or hesitation. And after my night of misadventures, I felt in need of a little creature comfort. Well, what I really needed was to be held and stroked until my nerves stopped jangling, but even a soft touch would be soothing. Reaching up to scratch the one-eyed raptor’s chest, I said, “You’re really quite a lovely bird,” just as her beak closed on my finger. We both screamed at each other, and there was a little explosion of feathers as I took a swing at her.
“That does it,” I snarled. “Out! Out!” I opened the front door, and a gust of wind blew in a dusting of snow. “Go on! Fly on out!” I held the door open, but Ladyhawke just gave an aggrieved shake of her feathers and then hunkered down into herself. I took a broom from the closet and tried to shoo her off her perch, but Ladyhawke just retreated, squawking furiously.
“Fine,” I said, glaring at the puffed up bird, who glared back at me just as fiercely. I closed the door on the swirling snow. “But you come near me, and I’ll twist your birdbrain head off.”
Ladyhawke squawked shrilly, causing me to think unkind thoughts about my absent lover. If he’d had to turn feral and kill one of our house animals, the least he could have done was go for the annoying one.
Still cursing the bird, I ran some cold water on my finger and wrapped it in a wet washcloth. Luckily, the skin hadn’t been broken.
Collapsing back onto the bed, I wondered what Lilliana had wound up doing. Heading back to the city, presumably, wishing she’d never gotten herself involved in my problems. I thought about calling her, but realized that my cell phone was still in my purse, which was still in the limo, along with my new clothes.
Oh, well. At least we wouldn’t lack for things to talk about when we got together again.
Reaching over, I looked through the other books on my bedside table. I always liked to have three books going at once, and in addition to the Jane Goodall I was reading Middlemarch and an erotic thriller that involved the Russian mafia and a lot of flimsily justified bondage. Opening up the thriller, I started to read a scene in which the anguished heroine is tied to a beam by the moody hero, who mistakenly believes she is working with the bad guys.
Impatient, I flipped back to a previous scene, burrowing under the covers as the hero dragged the heroine into a bedroom with a hidden camera. Slipping my hand under the waistband of my sweatpants, I tried to relieve some of my tension, with no success. I didn’t want to be touching myself, I wanted to be touched. I didn’t want the gentle knowledge of my own fingers, I wanted to surrender myself to somebody else’s hands.
Maybe if I just slipped off the sweatpants. Perspiring with the effort, I managed to get myself even more wound up, but release remained tantalizingly out of reach.
Closing my eyes, I found the right rhythm and was just closing my eyes when someone pounded on the front door. My first thought was that it was Red, and my heart began pounding in excitement and trepidation. And then, as I hastily pulled my sweatpants right side out and shoved my legs back inside, I realized that Red would have had a key.
“Who is it?” The reply was muffled by the wind, but my hearing was still more acute than usual, so I knew the answer.
It was Hunter. My almost ex-husband.
I pressed my hand against the wood of the door, torn with indecision. I hadn’t been alone with Hunter in over a year, and part of me wanted to speak to him again. We had dated in college, drifted apart, become friends and roommates and finally married, and nothing in our long, amicable history had prepared me for becoming adversaries. Sometimes, in my fantasies, I asked Hunter how we had come to this. In some versions, I imagined that we managed one last transformation and became friends again.
But the reality was that there was no explaining away Hunter’s betrayal, and no possible reconciliation. With Magda by his side, Hunter had broken into my mother’s home and hurt her. If I hadn’t prevented them from taking it further, I don’t believe they would have stopped themselves. Hunter might blame his behavior on the disease—it wasn’t me, honey, it was the beast talking—but I knew that he’d never liked my mother. Maybe you never really knew a man until you’d met his wolf.
From the other side of the door, I heard Hunter’s voice calling my name again. “Abra, I know you can hear me.”
“What do you want?”
There was no reply, and against all my better judgment, I opened the door a crack. “Hunter? What is it? Why did you come here?” Then I saw why he wasn’t responding.
His sharply handsome features bestial with the nearness of the change, Hunter gazed up at me with pain-dulled eyes. He was slumped awkwardly on the ground as white flakes of snow settled on his dark head. Despite the cold, I could smell blood, thick and fresh, the blood of something wounded but not yet dead.
Crap. Just what I needed on the night my hormones went into overdrive: my lying, cheating, seductive bastard of an almost ex-husband. “So,” Hunter said, “are
you going to let me in, or watch me bleed to death out here?”
Red always says that when someone offers you two unpleasant choices, select a third. But the wind was whipping up the snow as it fell, obscuring the line of trees just twenty feet away, and I couldn’t come up with any other options. Not bothering to hide my irritation, I dragged my former husband over the threshold.
EIGHTEEN
“Abra.” Hunter’s voice was rough with pain, but he gave me a weak smile.
“What were you doing out there?” I hadn’t been able to haul him into a chair, so he was lying on the braided rug by the fireplace, shivering with cold and, I suspected, shock. He’d stopped making snarky comments, I noticed as I laid a blanket over the lower half of his body. Christ, trust Hunter to wear Italian leather in a blizzard. “No wonder you’re freezing. Don’t tell me. You decided to go out for an after-dinner stroll.”
“Attacked.” He could hardly get the word out through his chattering teeth.
“Where are you injured?”
“R … right arm. I th-think … it’s bad.”
It had been a long time since I’d tended Hunter, I thought as I took out a heavy scissors and began cutting through the leather of his coat. He didn’t say anything; he just closed his eyes, as if keeping them open were too much effort. His skin was bone white. I snapped into medical mode, trying not to think about what kind of injury lay under his sleeve.
At one time, caring for Hunter had almost been a habit. In college, he’d come down with mono, and refused to stay in the infirmary for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. His mother was dead, he said, and there was no one else at home to take care of him. Another time, years later, he came back from a trip to Africa with a combination of malaria and parasites that had nearly killed him.
I had loved him then, with a fierceness that made me queasy when he suffered. And there was my triumph in his recovery, when he was too weak to do anything but look up at me with love and devotion.
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