Then that’s the role you have to play, said my mother’s voice. It’s your only advantage. And even though I had never tried to manipulate a man in my life, I realized that this really was the only way I’d get close enough to use my weapons. In a straight fight, Tall, Dark, and Hairy here was going to beat me.
By rights, I should have been able to go at least partially wolf, because the moon was still more than three quarters full. But something was wrong; either I was too nervous to access that part of me, or something else was interfering with the usual lunar cycle. But with the moonstone around my neck, I knew with certainty that there was almost nothing of wolf in me. I felt the way I did during the darkest day of the month, when the moon was entirely in shadow.
I was going to have to rely on my human talents, such as they were.
“I don’t think you really want to hurt me,” I said optimistically, as if I believed it.
“Of course I don’t want to hurt you,” said Knox. A wolfish dog made a sudden lunge for him, and he knocked it aside with a careless flick of his wrist, sending it crashing against the wall. “But, you see, I seems to lack a little fine motor control.”
Crap. He could lie in this form. That was one thing even half-formed lycanthropes couldn’t do: When the animal is predominant, it’s almost impossible to use language to describe things that are not true.
Scattering the remaining dogs with a glance, Knox turned back to me and asked, “How’s your threshold for pain, little girl?”
Forcing myself not to focus on the whimpering dog picking itself up and limping away, I met Knox’s gaze. His eyes were still green in this form, but they glowed with an odd, phosphorescent sheen, like something that lived in the darkness of the ocean depths, drawing its prey. “I might not mind a little pain, if there were pleasure with it.”
Knox cocked his great, shaggy head to one side, the gesture so familiar I had to remind myself that this was not truly him. “Go on,” he said.
“Well,” I began, and then he was across the room in a single bound, his great hand shot out, grabbing my ponytail and pulling until my head came back, baring my throat. “This, for example,” Knox said. “Is this what you calls pleasurable pain?”
“No,” I said, keeping calm, trying not to panic at the sheer size and strength of him. “There’s only one kind of stimulus going on, and nothing to make me recontextualize it as pleasure.”
There was a spark of something in the creature’s eyes, as if I had reached something within. “Explain.”
And then I knew exactly what to do. Because I’d watched this scene a hundred times, with my mother playing the mousy librarian turned sorceress. Hell, I’d been named for this character; it was the role I’d been born to play. “I need to feel you against my body,” I said. “Don’t let go of my hair, but don’t break my neck, either.”
Knox’s massive arms closed around me, lifting my feet clear off the floor as he lowered his mouth to mine. One hand still gripped my hair so tightly that my scalp burned, but now I could feel his rapid heartbeat against my breast, and feel the enormous length of his arousal pressed up against my belly. “Like this?”
“Uh huh.” The bonding mark wasn’t burning this time, probably because I would rather have been fondling a shark.
“You don’t smell like you like it,” said Knox.
I kept forgetting how much animal there was in him. I was going to have to lie with my body, or this wasn’t going to work. “Let’s try this,” I said, and kissed him with everything I had. Ignoring the strangeness of that great, shaggy form, the sharpness of the canines against my tongue, I conjured the memory of our other encounter, when I had sensed Malachy’s beast rising and felt desire for it, and him.
Wrapping arms and legs around Knox, pulling against the hand that held my hair, pressing myself against him while his hand came up to hold my rear.
I could feel his huge fingers cupping me, one finger stroking the crease between my buttocks. Don’t panic, I told myself. This is working. I reached my hand up, trying to reach one of the syringes.
“Boring,” said Knox, breaking free. “When do we get to the pain part?”
Okay, this was not working. And then it hit me: Malachy is inside there. This is a version of the man you know. “You tell me, Mal.”
“I already told you,” growled Knox, “not to call me that.”
“But that’s what I find stimulating,” I said. “The thought that my cool, aloof professor has finally unleashed his beast.”
The big hands dropped me so that I landed hard on my ass. “I ain’t nobody’s beast, woman. I’ve got nothing to do with that gormless weakling.”
“You don’t have his inhibitions,” I responded, standing up and brushing myself off. “But what about his intelligence?”
“There’s an idea,” said Knox. “Maybe I should perform one of his old experiments. He always wondered what would happen if he used a human instead of a monkey.”
“But I’m not purely human, any more than you are,” I said, making myself step closer. “Like you, I have a wild side.”
“Huh. If you do, I don’t see it,” said Knox. “You look like a plain old bit of fluff to me. Human. Timid. Nervous.” He put his face down, closer to mine. “Breakable.”
There was nothing I could do about the smell of fear coming off me. All I could do was stare into the eyes of the beast and say with utter conviction, “Look deeper. There’s more to me than meets the eye. I’ve got a lover who adores me, and I’m supposed to be bonded to him, but when we were in the cafe and you told me that you wanted me, Mal, I wondered what it would be like between us.”
Knox’s neck and shoulders tightened and his face turned almost purple with rage. “That sick limp-dicked fuck was not me!”
“The hell it wasn’t,” I retorted. “It was you,” I said, poking my finger into his chest, “Malachy Knox, doctor of veterinary medicine, and now that you’re not fucking impotent, don’t go telling me that it was someone else!”
“I’ll fucking sort you out,” said Knox, grabbing me around the throat.
“Because you’re too scared to admit that you want me,” I said, as calmly as if we were arguing a diagnosis. “Malachy.”
“Say it again and I’m not fucking responsible,” said Knox, his fingers tightening around my throat, pressing the moonstone into my skin.
Say it again, whispered the moonstone in my mind.
“Malachy,” I said, risking everything. “Mad Mal.”
With a roar, he was on me, and I couldn’t breathe because he was kissing me that hard, with desperation and a passion so fierce that it shook me. His hands crushed me against his massive chest, and he moved his mouth over mine like he meant to devour me. Air. I needed air. I pushed at him, trying to make some space between us.
He raised his head then. “Change your mind?” His green eyes were glowing more softly now, and his voice was a rasp, a whisper.
I took a deep breath, then pulled his head back down to mine. “No.”
With a low growl, Knox took one massive paw and closed it over my left breast. I gasped, steeling myself for a brutal squeeze, but instead, the creature touched me with surprising delicacy. “Your nipples are hard,” he said, sounding astonished. “I thought this was some kind of trick.”
“No trick, Mal.” This time, as he kissed me, there was something touchingly tentative about the way he explored the shape of my breast. Then, just as I arched my back in response to that maddeningly light caress, he pinched my nipple hard enough to make me gasp.
“Pain?”
I shook my head. “Pleasure.”
“Abra,” he said. I looked up and saw that Malachy’s eyes were no longer glowing, and the expression in them wasn’t sadistic or cold. In the midst of that harsh, stranger’s face, Malachy’s eyes were looking out at me with anguish and desire and something else that I could not quite put a name to. “I can … Christ, I can think again. I don’t know how long I can … if you don’t want to
do this, Abra …”
“Malachy,” I said, “look in my eyes. I want to do this.”
He looked in my eyes, and I shot him full of both syringes of phenobarbital.
THIRTY-TWO
I was lost. It was ridiculous, but I had to admit it; for the past half hour, I had been trying to get back to the Belle Savage Cafe, but either I was becoming disoriented, or the town was rearranging itself. There was a small field that had stretched between Orchard and Main, and I had made the mistake of cutting across it to avoid Jackie and her men. Granted, I’d never had much of a sense of direction, and I’d been known to get lost in November when the leaves fell off the trees. But this was ridiculous. None of the usual landmarks were visible. The earth was reclaiming the town. I wiped sweat from my forehead, wondering what to do next.
From here on in, I was using a car, even if I only had to move two steps from one store to another. There were worse things than becoming obese from not walking. Like dying in the wilderness just behind Orchard and Main.
Baby, the young black wolf that had been Marlene’s Pekingese, sat down and cocked her head at me as I tried to get my bearings. She and Hudson, the Lab, were sticking close by me. The other wolfish dogs were ranging on ahead, but I knew that they were within earshot. They weren’t quite a pack yet, and I wasn’t their leader, but they had a dim sense of me as alpha from their pre-transformation memories of the vet’s office. I wasn’t sure how long it would last, but I was glad of the company.
I tried not to think about Malachy, and what I had done to him. I tried even harder not to think about what he would do to me if he woke up before I got away.
I wiped my face on my arm, wishing I’d thought to bring a bottle of water with me. “I don’t suppose you can smell where we are, can you, Baby?”
Baby whined as I turned in a slow circle, trying to see past the rapid growth of trees and vines obscuring the street signs and hiding the houses and stores from view. At this rate, I’d be standing in the middle of a forest by nightfall.
There was a low, hoarse cough from somewhere in the distance, and then a sound like an old woman screaming. Great. Cougar. Knowing that there was no way to hide from a big cat, I figured I’d have to bluff this out. Throwing back my head, I howled for all I was worth, and after a moment, Baby and Hudson and the other dogs joined in. Bon Bon and the former shepherd appeared in the high grass, but some of the other dogs never showed. Maybe the former dachshund and pug hadn’t survived the full transition. Maybe they’d just gone off on their own. Or maybe they’d become cat food.
We howled a little while longer, and then Baby cocked one ear higher than the other, and I scratched her head. I couldn’t read the signs myself, but watching the others, I thought the cougar had moved off. In the wild, Red had taught me, most animals don’t go angling for championship matches.
He explained that people were always worrying that coyotes would attack them or their pets, but most of the time, they didn’t need to worry. Since small injuries can become serious without medical help, wild critters know that it pays to pick your battles carefully. They prey on the weak, but if the weak turns out to have a bunch of pals, they give it a pass. Most of the time, at any rate. The same goes for leadership challenges. Leaders are politicians, even if they go around on four legs. And no one with even a drop of political savvy wants to go head-to-head unless they’ve exhausted all the other options: making aggressive noises, narrowing eyes, frowning, baring teeth, using dominant body language.
With a little luck, Red had said with a smile, you get to figure out who’s tougher without actually tearing each other to shreds so that neither of you wins.
Oh, Red, I could sure use some advice right around now. I took out my cell phone again and tried his number, but as I suspected, he was still out of range. I touched the little scar on my arm, but it no longer tingled. I tried not to think about what that might mean. Had my fooling around with Malachy broken our bond, or was he injured, or worse?
He’s not dead, said my intuition.
All right, then. I checked that all my weapons were still in place and then whistled for the dogs. “Okay, guys,” I said, “let’s get going.” If I’d expected an eager response, I was sorely disappointed.
My ragtag pack of former lapdogs were already sniffing around, exploring the scents around them. As leader, it was up to me to pick a direction, but the others weren’t going to sit there, waiting for me to make up my mind. If I hesitated too long, they would follow their own instincts.
I held the moonstone, trying to get an intuitive hunch, but it didn’t seem to work as a compass. As I dithered, the grass continued to grow around my feet, the bushes filled out, and the weeds and puffballs sprang up until they obscured my view. Bees buzzed around the purple heads of clover, and the scent of honeysuckle was so intense that I felt as though I could get drunk off it.
Once, when I was in college, my mother told me not to hesitate too long over major life decisions. My roommates had nicknamed me “Our lady of perpetual fretting” because of my penchant for analyzing every option, and when it came time to declare my major, I became paralyzed with indecision.
When I called my mother for advice, all she said was, “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet.” Well, the grass was growing, all right, and if I didn’t walk, I was going to drown in it. And then I remembered that I could use the sun to orient myself. It was late in the afternoon now, and so the sun had to be dipping toward the east. The town’s center was east of our office; all I had to do was walk toward the sun.
“Baby! Bon Bon! Hudson! Come!” I couldn’t remember the shepherd’s name, so I just added, “Shep!” I broke out into a slow jog and the dogs fell in alongside, tails waving, tongues lolling.
I ran until the breath was sawing in and out of my chest, and the dogs started to give me funny sidelong glances, as in, Hey, remember, we’re not regular army. I had begun to worry that I’d screwed up somehow, but as I slowed to a walk and checked that all my hypodermics were still in place, I saw the familiar shape of the Stagecoach tavern. I’d overshot the cafe, but I didn’t care; at least I wasn’t lost.
As I walked past the tavern’s gray clapboard facade, I saw a white face peering out at me from a high window for a moment. Shivering, I quickened my pace, and then screamed and nearly jumped out of my skin when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” said the tapper, who was wearing chef’s whites. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I thought … thought you were someone else.” Like my boss, whom I just seduced and left unconscious on the floor of his office.
“I get a little nervous, too,” said the chef. At least I thought he was a chef, because of his outfit; on the other hand, he might have been on leave from a mental asylum. He had an anxious grimace of a smile, purple shadows under his eyes, a wild frizz of orange hair, and he looked as though he had recently lost a great deal of weight. Not exactly the man you wanted touching you without permission. “I just needed to ask you if you’d heard anything about a storm.”
“No, I’m sorry, what have you heard?”
“The others keep telling me that a storm is coming,” said the man, whom I now recognized as Abel Tasman, the mischievous Boston chef who had taken over after Pascal Lecroix had committed suicide last year. I’d eaten at the Stagecoach once, and he’d asked me how I liked the new menu. I had lied and said I liked it. I guess a lot of people must have lied to Abel, because he’d kept the same menu, even though fewer and fewer people actually ate there.
“The others?”
“Pascal and Gunther and Elias,” said Abel, glancing nervously at the wolfdogs. They looked spooked, and I didn’t blame them. I knew Pascal was dead, and I had my suspicions about the other two. “They say I should get down in the cellar,” Abel went on, “but I don’t like it there. Would you like to come with me?” He looked a bit more hopeful as he added, “I like to have other living people around me when I go down there, but latel
y none of the staff will keep me company. I’ll give you some wonderful chocolate and cactus soup, and some tomato and goat’s milk ice cream I just whipped up.”
With food like that, the place really didn’t need a curse. “Sorry,” I said, walking away as quickly as I could. “I have to get to the Belle Savage Cafe.”
“That’s what they all say,” muttered Abel as he looked after me. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw two pale figures by his side, one a hawk-faced man in an eighties baggy linen suit, the other a short, bald fellow in a Victorian frock coat.
I was casting anxious glances at the sky as I reached the cafe. Maybe Abel had no idea what normal people liked to eat, but he hadn’t been wrong about the storm: The clouds had spread into a solid layer and were darkening as though someone had left a deep bruise across the heavens.
“I think we made it just in time,” I told the dogs, and then realized that they couldn’t come inside with me. “Sorry, guys,” I said, and then my cell phone rang. I flipped it open. “Hello?”
“Hey, Doc.” It was Red. His voice sounded as though he were standing in the middle of a hurricane, or as if he were on the other end of the earth, instead of just a few miles away.
“Where are you? Are you all right?” I looked out at the town, and now the clouds were black and the wind had picked up, bending the trees back.
“I’m okay,” he replied, and then there was a burst of static, drowning out the rest of his words. “Red? Red? Talk louder, I can’t hear you.”
“Where are you?”
“In town,” I said, nearly shouting, as if that could make me hear him better. “I know about the animals going feral. And Pia stole Malachy’s medication, and he’s gone all Mr. Hyde.” I stopped talking and listened to the crackle on the other end. “Red?”
“Just listen.” The phone was going in and out, swallowing every other word. Stay. Don’t. Home.”
“Don’t come home?”
Another voice came on the line, and even though I’d only heard it once before, I didn’t have to ask who it was. “That’s enough,” Bruin said in his nasal Quebecker English.
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