Wolf in League

by A. F. Henley

Matthew shook his head. Unless Gavin was tapping SOS, which Gavin wasn't (that one, at least, Matthew knew), he had no idea what Gavin was trying to tell him.

  Gavin blew out a breath. He nodded. He tapped the three short taps again. He waited.

  Was he trying to tap out SOS? For what purpose would that serve? Three short taps were the 'S,' yes. But—

  Gavin nodded quickly. He barely moved his head, but the exuberance was there. Whatever Gavin was trying to tell him, it started with 'S.'

  Against his thigh, Gavin made a fist. He waited to make sure Matthew was watching and then slowly began to open his hand, his fingers uncurling until he was holding them all out straight. Matthew looked up, confused. Five?

  Another head shake followed Matthew's thought. Gavin repeated the process, tapping out the 'S,' making a fist and slowly opening it. Then he pointed, just below the drapes at the floor.

  What? Matthew's frown deepened. It made his headache worse, but he couldn't help it. I don't understand? What started with 'S,' opened like a hand, and rested on the floor underneath the drapes—

  The sun. Matthew blinked. His head cleared. Sunlight?

  A grin broke out on Gavin's face. As if he were just changing position, Gavin lifted one foot and rested his ankle on his other leg. He sat back, and draped his hand over the propped leg. They both flinched when Mr. Nobody Important suddenly stood.

  "This is boring," Mr. NI grumbled. "I'm going to see what Arius and Dali are up to."

  Shorty gave Mr. NI a sharp look. "I wouldn't. If it's anything more interesting than counting bags of blood, Arius will lose his mind. I couldn't care less about you losing your head, but I'd prefer to face those fucking wolves with as many of us as we can."

  "You're too kind," Mr. NI told him with a sarcastic bow. "Maybe I'll read." He walked toward the couch, calling out, "Hey, Mattie, you got anything decent to read in here? Or do guys like you only invest in porn?"

  Matthew didn't answer. For one thing, nobody called him Mattie. For another, it wasn't like anything in the room was hidden. Mr. NI could find his own darn reading material.

  When Mr. NI was flipping through the magazines they kept on the coffee table, Shorty went back to peering into his phone. Matthew had seen the screen already. It showed changing views of their front door, the driveway, and a shot down the street towards the O'Connells'. Portable cameras, Matthew had to assume, although when and how they'd gone up, Matthew had no idea.

  From the corner of his eye, Matthew saw Gavin tap his shin. Once he had Matthew's attention, Gavin lifted two fingers of the hand he'd propped on his knee. Then slowly, too slowly to be casual, he set his other hand, once again in a fist, a few inches away from it. He spread his hand—the sun—and suddenly the two fingers of his other hand were writhing and dancing like he was trying to show Matthew bunny ears in a mad wind.

  A light went off in Matthew's head. He wants to use the sunlight... He turned his gaze from the wiggling fingers and looked at Gavin, who nodded fiercely.

  ... To kill the two vampires...

  Another furious nod.

  ... So we can get out of here!

  Yes! Gavin mouthed. He smiled, but it was a nervous, small smile.

  Matthew looked at the small sliver of sunlight on the floor of the living room and a flutter of hope began to rise in his chest. That could work, couldn't it? They hadn't taken any of the precautions that Matthew had seen Gavin take. Neither vampire wore dark glasses. Their faces and hands were exposed. Shorty even had bare arms.

  And that was when it hit him: the reason why that plan could never work.

  He'd been looking at the slice of light and now he raised his head. He stared at Gavin and shook his head. It could kill you.

  Gavin merely shrugged.

  No way. Matthew could feel his head sliding left to right without consciously making himself do it. His body was mirroring his thoughts. We can't. There has to be some other way.

  Gavin shook his head. He patted his forearm as if to indicate Arius's bite on Matthew's arm. Then he shook his head yet again.

  It was just a bite! Matthew thought as loud as he could imagine. I'm still alive! But you said that the sunlight could kill you. And not only would it kill you, it would do it in a way that was excruciatingly painful!

  "I don't care," Gavin whispered. His voice was so small that Matthew barely heard it. Shorty, however, must have heard it clearly.

  "Shut the fuck up," Shorty growled. He had no interest in why they were talking or what they were talking about, though. He was concentrating on the screen, standing, his eyes widening. "Arius! Arius, someone's coming. Someone's coming! From the house!"

  There were no footfalls to predict Arius's and Dali's reappearance. One second they weren't there, and the next second they were. Gavin and Matthew had no time to do anything except exchange troubled glances.

  Dali unlocked the front door, and then he and Shorty ducked behind the half-wall that ran between the front entrance and the living room. Mr. NI crouched beside the couch where Gavin sat. Arius, on the other hand, remained standing. And he stood directly behind Matthew, drawing his knife and pressing it to Matthew's throat. Matthew could hear the grin on his face when Arius spoke.

  "When they get to the door, call them in, Gavin. All nice and bright and happy, hm? Play along and be rewarded. Don't, and not only will those two men out there still die, but your little flutterfly as well."

  Gavin's eyes sought Matthew's. Their gazes caught. A set of knuckles fell on the front door.

  "Call them in," Arius prompted when Gavin didn't say anything.

  The phone that Shorty had been so intent on watching had been abandoned on the coffee table. For a second, Matthew wondered if they could get Randy to notice it, to wonder on the fact that there were cameras at all, and then he realized that Randy would just assume they belonged to the Center.

  Once again, the door was knocked on.

  "Call them in," Arius growled. The knife bit at Matthew's neck. He had no idea how much pressure it would take to cut him, and then he didn't have to wonder anymore. A drop traced down his neck, as hot and slow as the lick of a lover. "Now!"

  You have beautiful eyes, Matthew thought, staring so hard at Gavin that his own watered. It wasn't a ruse. He wasn't trying to get Gavin to follow through on Arius's demand. That was the last thing he wanted. No one would die for his sake. Ever. Not a man, not a vampire, not a wolf. But Gavin did have beautiful eyes, and he wanted Gavin to know that. To remember it. In case no one ever said that again. Thank you for showing me all of this. And thank you for thinking that you loved me.

  Gavin nodded. His throat bounced with a hard swallow.

  But don't you dare call those men in here.

  A short, hard laugh fell from Gavin's mouth, but it fell apart. Matthew heard Gavin catch the sob, even as Gavin lowered his head to avoid them. He lifted his hand, and he brushed at his cheek.

  Don't.

  A warm tear found its way out of Matthew's eye and rolled down the side of his face. Suddenly it felt as though his face was full of cotton. Throat, nose, mouth. Please don't do that, Matthew thought. Not for me.

  Gavin sniffed at his lap, his shoulders bounced with a series of stuttered breaths, and when he raised his head again, his eyes were brimming. In the lowered lighting, with the red hue behind the tears, it appeared as though they were full of blood.

  "Call them in," Arius insisted. "Before they walk away."

  The handle of the front door rattled in its setting. The front door began to open.

  Gavin shook his head. "Arius, I don't want to lose him. I don't want you to hurt him and I definitely don't want you to kill him. But if you think that I would let you kill those men in his place, then you're a fucking idiot."

  He spat the last two words and before Arius could react to what he was saying, Gavin snatched a picture off the coffee table. Their 'wedding' picture—Matthew had moved it there when the glass had been broken out of it after his confrontation with Randy a
t the front door—and threw it, Frisbee style, at Arius's head. He threw it with everything he had. Matthew could see that in the way Gavin's muscles bunched and tensed. In the way Gavin's teeth were bared and his forehead creased. It was a breathtaking sight.

  The moment that Arius lifted his arm to protect his face, using the hand that held the knife without even thinking of what he was doing, Matthew started screaming. "Randy, Henry, run! Don't come in! Run! R—"

  Two silhouettes—black surrounded by the aura of sunlight—stood in the doorway. One stepped right, one stepped left, but neither entered the house. Something between them did instead.

  It moved low to the ground, a blur of gray and brown, taking great leaping strides that ate up the porch steps in a single bound, the width of the porch and the entrance in another, and Gavin hollered, "Tuck your arm!"

  Matthew did it without hesitating, tucking his free arm against his body even as he felt the chair get walloped underneath him. Then he was falling, something was leaping over him, Arius was shrieking, and Gavin was running.

  Matthew hit the ground so hard his teeth clacked together. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth, but Matthew barely noticed the pain. A furry body fell alongside him, its teeth buried in the arm of a furious, flailing, falling Arius, and Matthew screamed. He heard snarls and snaps, the sound of fabric being torn. He dragged himself back, digging the hand of his free arm into the carpet and tugging, barely gaining any space between him and the furiously attacking wolf. The hallway tile clattered with the sound of claws as more rushing paws clambered across them and into the house. He dragged himself onto one elbow, his body twisting, his eyes searching desperately.

  The living room was chaos. Using the arm not being gripped by the wolf's jaws, Arius first caught the coffee table, sending it flying onto its side, and then regained his balance and slammed the table into the creature's side. His fangs were bared and his face a mask of fury.

  The wolf paid Arius's efforts little mind. It dug into the carpet as Matthew had done, but with four feet instead of one hand and whipped its head from side to side. Matthew could almost see Arius's forearm being torn off of his body. How anyone's body, vampire or not, could withstand it seemed impossible.

  One of the other wolves crashed into Shorty, dragged Shorty to the ground, and began to tear at Shorty's chest and shoulders. Matthew heard Vaughn's voice, hollering orders, but his mind couldn't turn the words into sentences.

  Then he noticed Gavin. Mr. NI had hold of Gavin's shirt, delivering blows to Gavin's back and kidneys with the speed of a prize fighter.

  Gavin didn't waste time trying to stop Mr. NI. He cast one quick glance at Matthew, mouthed, "I do love you," and whipped the heavy curtains open.

  Sunlight as bright as a nimbus around the head of God flooded into the living room. Underneath the wolf, Shorty wailed. Unable to tear his eyes away, Matthew watched the exposed skin on Shorty's body begin to darken, smoke, and then curl. The screams were deafening, but not enough to drown out Arius's yelling. Or Vaughn's cursing. He heard running and fighting and Gavin making sounds of distress. But he couldn't look at anything but the vampire being slowly cooked to death on their living room floor. The wolf on top of Shorty didn't give an inch, either. It held Shorty in place with what Matthew could only imagine was superior strength and the kind of hatred that Matthew wouldn't have been able to conjure up inside him even now.

  Strings of thick, putrid smoke rolled off the now still body. Flakes of char fell to the floor in smoldering piles, while bits of ash meandered into the air.

  A sudden weight fell on top of Matthew. His breath rushed out of his lungs, he saw stars explode in his head, and the wolf that had been fighting with Arius rolled off of him with a sharp whine. Matthew craned his neck, desperate to see what was happening.

  The wolf stood and whipped its head in Arius's direction. Arius hissed—a sound like a cat fighting with a rattler, both of them caught up in it at once—and Arius's hands fisted in pantomimed death grips. The wolf stopped still. It stood there for a fraction of a second, but in that space of time Matthew saw everything as if he was seeing it played on a movie screen. Not in slow motion, but rather a frame by frame still, up close and in Technicolor: the rage that flowed in the wolf's eyes, the spit that pooled in the corners of its mouth, the lift and accordion-like fold of its nose to bare its teeth. He saw ivory spikes underneath red gums, seeming to boil in a bed of froth. He saw a brilliant flare in each topaz-rimmed black pupil—the sunlight that poured through the unadorned window, that had reflected off the glass of the picture on the side table, and then been refracted yet again in the wolf's eyes. He saw the muscles in its haunches begin to bunch as it lowered itself with the kind of slow, calculated movement that reminded Matthew of jungle cats getting ready to attack.

  Matthew's breath was stuck in his throat. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as though he'd just run a marathon. He felt every thump of blood chug through his veins as though his body had become a pocket watch, gauging the moment when someone would finally tell both Arius and the wolf to get ready. Set. Go!

  The wolf's tail flicked, nothing more than a miniscule bounce that curled the end into the shape of an upside-down comma, and whatever that motion meant, whatever the message was that passed in silence between shifter and night-walker, it was enough for Arius. He leaned forward, screamed one last, long shriek directly into the wolf's face, and then was gone before Matthew could even register the sudden rush of wind from his departure.

  The wolf whined, its back paws scrabbled on the carpeting, and it lurched forward at the exact same time that Matthew heard Vaughn shout, "No!"

  Though the wolf stopped, it didn't appear as if it had any intention of staying stopped. It looked back over its shoulder toward the kitchen, back to Vaughn again, and moved a couple of inches forward without seeming to actually step. Nervous energy, clicking toenails, another low whine, and when it turned away from Vaughn and made to leap, Vaughn yelled again. "Lyle, no!"

  Lyle... Matthew craned his neck to look up, to associate the shape of the wolf with the shape of the man. Though he couldn't see any resemblance in Lyle's new face, he could see what he imagined to be a dozen different memories and the furious reactions to those memories in the wolf's gaze. Lyle wanted to go, to chase, be it for vengeance or a need to put the whole mess to rest once and for all. If that meant killing Arius, so be it. Better so, in fact. If it meant Lyle didn't come back himself, then that was just the way things would be. Why Matthew understood that, Matthew couldn't say. Matthew barely knew Lyle, had hardly talked to him, but the things they had exchanged, even those moments where Matthew had only seen him in recordings, had been clear and concise. There'd been an understanding between the two of them almost immediately. Maybe it was just the bond of a young man to another young man—or a son that knew what it meant to care about family.

  "Let him go," Vaughn said. He'd lowered both his voice and the stake he held in his hand. "The sunlight'll get him too. No need to go out there and risk yourself."

  Matthew would have loved to believe that Lyle thought so, too, but when that big head swiveled in Matthew's direction and those brilliant eyes bored into Matthew's, Matthew knew that it took everything human that Lyle had left in him to listen to his father and not go after Arius. There was guilt and shame in that stare, the kind of guilt and shame that a person could hear assurances on for the next several decades and still not believe. It wasn't your fault was never going to be a comment that this particular wolf would attend to. Not until things had been made right, anyway.

  It wasn't until later, when Matthew stopped to think, that he reconsidered that idea. It wasn't the human side of Lyle at all that had kept Lyle's paws planted on the floor—it was the wolf. The wolf had allowed the dominant member of its pack to command the action. The wolf had forced Lyle to take Vaughn's direction over its own drive to attack the creature that had threatened its family and its lover.

  If Lyle had been in human form
in that moment, Matthew was more than sure Vaughn would have never been able to hold him back.

  Gavin crouched in the corner of the living room with the drapery wrapped around him like a shroud. Matthew knew him by his bare feet. Matthew began to flump toward the huddled shape, uselessly humping his body up and down, side to side. "Gavin! Somebody, please! Gavin!"

  The wolves turned to stare at him, but it was Vaughn who moved to help. Vaughn drew the drapes back into place, held out his hand to Gavin, and muscled Gavin onto the couch. At the same time, a familiar clump, clump, thunk sounded above them. Matthew had heard that sound before. It was the sound of a body being dragged either down or into the hallway.

  "Wait!" someone screamed, and Matthew was pretty sure the voice belonged to Dali. His voice was so panicked that Matthew couldn't be completely certain. The despair in it was almost too thick to bear. "It's not my fault! I didn't want to do this! I didn't even want to be here!" The final word was shrieked—held for too long and it sounded absolutely terrified. When it finally stopped, it stopped too suddenly for it to have come to any good end.

  "Are you okay?" Vaughn asked Gavin, completely disregarding the vampire's final scream.

  Gavin nodded. On Gavin's left foot, the big toe and the two that followed were burned crisp. Matthew had no idea if that kind of damage regenerated. He hoped so.

  Though Gavin sat as directed, he didn't stay seated. He saw Matthew and immediately jumped up.

  From the corner of his eye, Matthew saw Randy and Henry poke their heads through the front door. "Okay?" Randy asked.

  Vaughn nodded. He also pushed Gavin back down on the couch. "I got him," Vaughn said. "You sit for a minute. Think about fixing those toes of yours."

  Matthew saw Gavin look down. When Gavin's eyes widened in shock and surprise, Matthew almost choked himself on a laugh. It was a hysterical bray, ridiculous even, and once started, Matthew couldn't stop. While Vaughn knelt and solemnly began to unwind the phone cord from Matthew's legs, as Randy came over and helped remove the shirt rope that held Matthew's right arm, Matthew coughed and gagged on his laughter. It took him several long moments sitting beside Gavin with Gavin's arm around him, and a couple of sips of the water that Henry brought him, for Matthew to stop. When he finally got a hold of himself, the laughter dissolved into tears.