Or cat.
“What are you doing here, Hunter?”
The scream made me jump and turn, but Hunter simply raised the heavy French knife and sliced through a joint. “What was that?”
Hunter's eyes, when he looked up, were the ugliest shade of yellow I had ever seen. “That was a scream. As for what I'm doing here—well, I should have thought that was obvious. I'm making myself at home. This should have been my home, you know. And now it is.”
By now I'd had enough time to notice the furry striped pelt which had been stripped from the carcass. Time to take in the amount of blood staining the old wood. “You bastard,” I hissed. “Why are you doing this?”
The knife whacked off another joint. “Because you owe me.”
“I owe you?”
Hunter's smile was pure malice. “Yes, Abra, you owe me. For all the years my father subsidized your fucking education, while your mother pissed all her money away on sick cats. You owe me. For dragging me down year after fucking year into domestic fucking oblivion while you refused to make any of the changes that would have helped my life, my career.”
I was absolutely confused. What changes? What had Hunter ever wanted me to do that I had refused him? “Hunter,” I said, “I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you mean my not asking my mother for money?”
Hunter moved around the side table, and now there was nothing between him and me and the big knife in his hand as he approached. “Oh, baby, don't forget your father. Did you ever once consider asking your father if any of his connections could have helped with my career? Did you ever do a single thing to help me get to the top?”
“He didn't like you. My mother didn't like you. What was I supposed to—” The knife flew past my face and shuddered as it embedded itself in the plaster by my head. Hunter braced his arms against the wall, imprisoning me between them. Then he leaned in close, his spittle flying into my face as he spoke.
“Maybe you didn't defend me very well. Maybe it served you to have mummy and daddy on one side and me on the other. Or maybe you just never thought about anyone but yourself.”
This time the scream was cut off. I raised my knee up hard, jamming it between Hunter's legs, and then ducked under his arm as he crumpled. I took the stairs three at a time, stumbled, took them two at a time, and opened my mother's bedroom door so hard the knob slammed against the wall.
“Mom!” But it wasn't my mother. It was Magda, half dressed in a purple sequined Bob Mackie gown my mother had worn back in the early eighties. Her short dark hair, with its streak of white, looked oddly appropriate with the showy dress. She looked like a Disney villainess now, ready for her close-up.
“Oh, hello, Abra. Good—I needed someone to do up the back.” Magda turned to me and smiled, and I saw that there was lipstick smeared at the corner of her lovely mouth. No, not lipstick. Blood. She had prepared this for me, part of my brain registered. This was a theatrical setup, and she was the star.
“Where's my mother?”
“Oh, that heavyset dyed blonde was your mother? I'm afraid your boyfriend's eating her.” Magda gestured at the bed, where I could see what appeared to be a pile of discarded costumes. I looked harder and saw a mound of Piper LeFever's old movie star dresses lying in an ever-widening pool of blood.
“Where is she?”
“Some men just lose control when they change, haven't you noticed? Or are you so innocent that you thought it was just all fun and fucking?” Magda leaned in so close that I could smell the raw meat on her breath. I crouched there by the bed, hyperventilating, crying. “Hunter's gotten quite angry at you, hasn't he? The wolf in him has been waking up, bit by bit. And, guess what? Deep down, where instinct and passion rule, your husband has despised you for a very long time.” I was breathing too hard, almost whimpering, but behind my panic and shock, there was that sober little nun voice inside my head, detached and still functional. She's doing this on purpose, the voice said. This is a production, and it's for my benefit. I looked up at Magda through a veil of tears and hatred. “I'm asking you again, Magda. Where is my mother?”
“I don't know where your coyote dragged her off. Follow the blood trail, I suppose. Or doesn't your nose work that well yet?” Magda turned in front of the mirror, admiring the way the fabric hugged her breasts. “Do you think I could keep this? In Romania, we didn't have much need for dressing up, but I can see that your husband and I might enjoy going out while we're here.”
I looked at her and felt so much anger that my other senses kicked in. Suddenly I could smell the musk of her excitement. She wanted me to attack; she wanted to take me down. But I had caught the blood trail, and my sharpened vision caught the traces of blood on the dark wood and tile floor. My world had narrowed to the scent of my mother's injury, to the traces of dark blood splattered unevenly along the walls and floor.
I found my mother—lying naked on my bed, her skin far too pale—in my childhood room. Someone had tied a rough bandage around her right wrist, and my mother was cradling that hand to her chest. Red was huddled in the corner, as far from my mother as he could possibly get, incongruously draped in my mother's huge paisley caftan, a fringed bandanna wrapped around his head. Underneath her clothes he was clearly naked.
“Mom! Red! Oh, my God, what are you—”
“Abra.” My mother's voice was faded, weak, almost unrecognizable. “He tried. To help me.”
I turned to Red. “She's going into shock. Help me cover her and get her out of here.”
Red shook his head as if he were pushing something away. “Doc, she took my clothes. This place is thick with blood and I've already changed twice to night.”
“Red, you told me that you're a shapeshifter. You can control this. I need you to control this.”
“No. He can't.”
I went over to my mother, and for the first time in our lives, I knew she wasn't dramatizing what she was feeling. I put my finger over the thready pulse in her neck. “What do you mean, Mom?”
“He's not my lover and he's not my family. Right now, all I am to him is fresh meat, and if he stands up, you'll be fighting to keep him from finishing me off.”
I looked at Red, pale and trembling like a junkie. “Is this true?”
He smiled, and it was almost his old rueful grin. “Turns out your mother liked to research her roles. Knows a thing or two about wolves and men.”
“But you said you were a shapeshifter. You said the moon didn't control you.”
My mother lifted her good hand, and I could see the effort it cost her. “My daughter,” she said, “does not believe in half-truths.”
Red laughed, a hoarse little bark that turned into a cough. Or maybe it was the other way around. “They took my clothes and gave me a taste of your mother's blood, Doc. And locked us in here alone together. My control's good, but it's not perfect. Jesus,” he said, shaking a little harder. “It's goddamn hot in here.”
I watched in horror as he began shifting the dress farther down his shoulders. “You keep those clothes on!”
“I'm burning up.”
“Red, don't take that off. You'll start to shift.” Opening the door to my closet, I rummaged through a bag of old toys, throwing aside an old poster of Duran Duran and a pair of never-worn high-heeled boots.
“Abra,” my mother said tightly, “this is not the time to clean out your closet.”
“Oh, for God's sake, Mom.” I finally located the safe and worked the combination. “I'm looking for the Telazol. I keep it hidden and locked away.” With trembling fingers, I began mixing the powerful sedative.
“Typical. If you weren't so paranoid about drugs, you wouldn't have to waste all this time now—Abra, your friend here is taking off his clothes again.”
“Red, please.” I turned around, shaking the mixture in one hand while I tried to remove the cap from a hypodermic with my teeth.
“Don't worry, I'm fine now.” Half naked, hairier than I remembered him, Red sat with his chest heaving in an
d out, panting for air. “I just couldn't breathe for a minute. You know what? I'll just open the window a crack.”
“No! Abra,” my mother called, “you have to stop him!”
Too late. I'd barely had time to take a breath of cold morning air before I saw the waxing moon hanging low in the twilight sky. Moonlight. Shit. I turned to my mother, and what ever I was about to say lodged in my throat because in the next moment Red was on top of her. And he wasn't human anymore.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Panicked, I rushed forward, dropping the hypodermic. Cursing my own stupidity, I jammed my hand sideways into Red's mouth and for a moment there we all were, frozen in tableau: my mother silent and frighteningly cold underneath me, Red a hundred and seventy pounds of wolf above me. Then he twisted his neck to try to get free and I punched him so hard in the nose with my good hand that he rocked away from her and rolled off the bed and back onto all four feet in one smooth motion. For a second, I thought he was going to go for me, but there was something in his eyes, not so much recognition as lack of malice. He was like a dog on the scent of quarry, quivering with excitement and focused on one thing and one thing only.
Killing my mother.
I looked directly into Red's eyes, trying to challenge him, draw his attention back to me, when I heard them.
“Oh, look,” Hunter said, and of course I turned to see him. His mouth and beard were stained with blood. “It's little Red and the mother-in-law.”
Magda, still dressed in my mother's Bob Mackie, laughed that awful fake laugh women used to use with men, the kind you hear on old television shows. She turned and I saw that she had something in her arms, half hidden beneath the generous cleavage spilling out of the gown.
I had Red by the scruff of his neck, but his attention had caught on some new prey. Following the line of his vision, I saw what he was looking at: Pimpernell the Chihuahua, cradled like a baby in Magda's arms. Glad for the distraction, I managed to throw my mother's caftan over Red's back, and he shivered and changed. Trembling with reaction and paler than before, he remained crouched by my feet, a beaten man in a big dress.
“Red? Are you all right?” When I looked into his unfocused eyes, I could see they still gleamed a wolfish gold. “No, he's not all right, Abs.” Hunter smiled at me, enjoying himself. “He looks like a frowsy red-haired fortune teller, for one thing. And he's hungry. Blood-hungry.”
“Hunter, why are you doing this? If you wanted to leave me, then why didn't you just go? What does it gain you to be cruel?”
Hunter looked at me coldly. “Abs, you've spent the past ten years perfecting your little martyr act, but it's just not going to work anymore. My time with Magda helped me see your game. You pretended to be in de pen -dent and fine with my work, and I never understood this undercurrent of guilt I kept feeling. You were reeling me in, trying to tie me down to the kind of life I loathe. Even when I tried to explain that I couldn't live your way anymore, you kept clinging to me, making it impossible for me to make a clean break without being a shit.”
I could hear the echo of Magda's voice in this, and yet there was a strange, clunky ring of half-truth there, too. For the first time I understood that Hunter was filled with a kind of corrosive rage that had been eating away at what ever other feelings he might have once had for me. “So now you're okay with being a shit. Fine, Hunter. Great. But are you okay with being a murderer?”
“Don't be so melodramatic.” Magda shook her head, and for a moment seemed again a respectable European scientist. “As far as I can see, the only person in danger is your mother. And the one looking to murder her seems to be your boyfriend.” And that's when I looked up to see that Red had gotten right up close to my mother, and was sniffing her wrist.
“You've made your point by killing all the dogs, all right? So get him away from her.”
“We set the dogs free, and they attacked us. It was self-defense. As for the cats …” She shrugged. “I am not a cat person.”
“Are you willing to be an accessory to murder?” I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “You can't actually mean to let this happen, Magda.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the hypodermic that I had dropped earlier, lying half under the bed. I looked away, trying not to change my expression. “Back at the house, you said we were all civilized.”
Magda narrowed her eyes. “That was before you challenged me. But fine. You want to save your mother? Go ahead. We won't stop you.”
Red was kneeling by my mother and examining her wrist now. My mother made a low moaning sound.
“Hunter! Hunter, you can't let her do this!”
“Don't worry, Doc,” Red said from across the room, “I'm not losing control. I'm just checking the extent of your mother's injuries.”
My mother tried to raise her head. “What are you—Hey! Stop licking me. Stop …” Her voice trailed off as Red's eyes held hers, and she seemed to grow calmer. It reminded me of how wolves hypnotize their prey, giving some kind of predatory look that the wounded victim instinctively understands and accepts.
“It'll feel quite nice, actually,” he said as he bent over her.
“Don't interfere,” said Hunter, coming up behind me to grab my wrists. “I'm getting turned on.”
I struggled, but Hunter's grip was like steel. “Red! Red, stop this! Please, don't hurt her, don't—try to remember who you are. Try to remember that I'm her daughter. Please, Red, stop.”
Magda turned to Hunter. “Americans really love to talk everything to death, don't they? What a bore. Did she analyze your sex life, too?”
Hunter laughed. “She was too repressed.”
“Well, I'm not.” Magda lifted her chin and Hunter switched both my wrists to one hand and began kissing his lover openmouthed. The little dog whimpered as it found itself pressed between their two bodies.
And then everything seemed to happen at once.
Magda cried out, “Ouch, that little shit just bit me!” and dropped Pimpernell, who whimpered and then raced over to my mother. Bracing his little matchstick legs on her shoulder, he barked imperiously at Red.
I don't know what the little dog said, but it must have been convincing. The next thing I knew, there was a blur of reddish-brown fur as Red left my mother and his human form all in one lightning movement, launching himself onto Hunter with snarling jaws. For one wonderful moment, Hunter remained in human form and fell down. In that endless sixty seconds, I had time to dart forward and grab the hypodermic. And then Hunter changed and stood, a much bigger animal than Red, and far more aggressive. His hackles raised, and although Red did not back off, I could tell which was the more dominant animal.
“Don't forget me, Abra.” Magda smiled, and it was like a baboon's threat of teeth.
“How could I forget you—the biggest bitch in the room?”
“Careful, little girl—I might just have to discipline you.” I could hear the snarls and growls as the boys circled and lunged at each other. How long did I have before Hunter took Red out?
I stood up and could feel my mother watching me from the bed. Make a scene, I thought. Make one worthy of Piper LeFever and maybe you can act your way out of this. “Oh, you mean I shouldn't mention that you're a little long in the tooth to be playing dress-up? Not to mention a little too old for whelping lots of puppies.”
“I am fertile.”
And that was why we were all here, I realized. I remembered Red telling me that not everyone who got bitten by a lycanthrope became infected. You needed to have some kind of predisposition. Maybe Magda had been looking for a mate for a long time—her own personal breeding program to save her own endangered species. “Are you? For how long, Mags? You're forty-five, forty-six? Fine for a woman wanting one or two kids, but you're aiming a little higher, aren't you?”
“I do not think the world needs more nearsighted, bucktoothed, asthmatic children who are allergic to peanut butter and require pencil grips for their clumsy little hands.”
I moved closer to Magda. “G
ee, I don't know. I was a little nearsighted, bucktoothed child myself.”
“Precisely.”
“Don't you believe in penicillin, or should we just let the sick work it out for themselves?”
Her snort of laughter was the first unpremeditated sound I'd heard her make. “Penicillin has bred a generation of weaklings. I suppose in your work you would like to save little mutant runts like that bowl-headed excuse for a dog. Dogs must be fast enough and smart enough to hunt and kill, or they should be allowed to die. And, yes, people, too. We need to bring out the best in our children, not settle for defects of the heart, the eyes, the brain.”
“So you want to breed the strong, and I want to save the weak.”
“Yes. That is why I—”
My bitch slap caught her completely off guard. I hit her on the right cheek, then harder on the left, and while she was falling back, I jammed the hypodermic I'd been concealing into her neck.
“What have you done!”
“I had to put a dog to sleep to night,” I lied. “It's sodium hydrochloride.”
“How much?”
“Enough to put you down.”
“Hunter!” She fell to her knees. “Help me!”
But Hunter was a wolf, and he didn't quite understand that bad chemical smell, although it scared him. He growled, and Red lunged at him.
“No, Red, down!” Magda tried to take advantage of my momentary distraction, but wound up causing me to jerk my arm, depressing the plunger.
“Oh, my God,” she said. Her eyes were wide and terrified.
“Magda …” The syringe had actually contained only butorphinol, a sedative, and I wasn't sure how quickly it would take effect, or what kind of effect it would take.
“You are going to absolutely ruin the Unwolf species with your inferior genes,” she said, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She had passed out from fear, I thought, unable to believe my good luck.
“I happen to like your inferior genes, Doc,” said Red, who had changed form while I wasn't looking. “I'd be honored to mix them with my own.”
Sheckley, Alyssa - The Better to Hold You.html Page 26