Through with games, An Rógaire stalked up the path between the buildings and straight to the way left open for him. He went alone, unwilling to risk the Rom in this private battle. Though he envied them the promise of death they and all mortals held, he would not be the cause of them embracing that state before they must. They’d trailed him anyway, he could tell by their scent on the air, but for now they hid themselves among the surrounding buildings. It galled him that he could not stop them, but he found it a comfort as well.
As he walked past a bunch of brambles closest to his target, La-La’s voice whispered from the brush, “No fear, Lorcan. No matter what happens, the bastard won’t walk away from this with your spire.” Her vow touched him, as did her insistence on acknowledging his former self, but he could not let that distract him from his purpose.
“Go conquer your demon and when you’re done you will return to the Clan so we may heal your hurts. You and your friend.” He shook off her words and kept walking, but nonetheless they warmed his heart. The Kalderãs Clan might not be his own, but their solidarity lent him strength…and hope, misplaced as it was. An Rógaire wasn’t really concerned about walking away tonight, as long as Jeger didn’t either, but to know Charlie had a place to be safe. He nearly reeled with the relief he felt at that.
La-La must have Sensed his thoughts. She called after him in a low whisper, only loud enough to reach his sensitive ears. “I mean it, Lorcan. There is one who has joined the Clan who might heal even the most grievous of your wounds. You might recognize her name. She is called Anu...”
Anu? Surely he had not heard La-La correctly. A healer who bore the name of the Mother Goddess…? Powerful enough to restore him? His chest tightened as he longed to believe.
Forgetting the wisdom of silence, he pivoted to meet La-La’s gaze. “What?!”
She nodded, but said nothing, as she drew back into her sheltering spot. He read the belief in her bright eyes before she fluttered her hands at him, shooing him toward the building. He continued forward, burying the seed of hope La-La had planted before it could distract him further.
As he drew closer to the warehouse the stench of old ash and moldering concrete assaulted his senses, overlaid by a heavy odor of industrial chemicals he could not identify either by origin or source. He marveled at the strength of it after all this time.
Huffing out his breath in an effort to clear the scents from his head, An climbed through the gap in the wall only to be assaulted by the odors ten-fold. How could they still be so strong? As he struggled against the overload, he was unsurprised to discover Den Jeger waiting for him. He locked gazes with the hunter and saw a mad glint in the man’s eyes. Concerned, An resisted the urge to glance toward Charlie, slumped and bound to a chair in the middle of the vacant warehouse.
“Took you long enough to show up,” Jeger said with a sneer. “I thought I’d have to try sheep next if neither girls nor boys served to lure you.”
For a moment An was puzzled until he realized Jeger thought Charlie a boy. Puzzled enough that he almost missed the insult. An curled his lip in response, but he did not otherwise acknowledge Jeger’s barb.
“You have something that is mine,” An said, his voice freely channeling his wrath for the first time since the cleaving.
Jeger’s hand moved over the ivory spire sheathed at his hip, as if that was all that could possibly matter here. “Come closer, hellspawn. I’d be glad to give it back to you.”
An could imagine all too well Jeger’s meaning, envisioning his severed horn resheathed in his own chest, as it had once nestled among the ribs of this man’s brother. That image haunted An. Alicorn were meant to heal, not harm, yet in his fear and his thrashing An had impaled the mortal intent on harvesting the very horn that ended him. And yet, Jeger’s brother had not failed. Already partially hewn away, An’s spire had snapped beneath the corpse’s weight to become Jeger’s trophy.
It would crush Jeger to know the death he dreamt of dealing this day was doomed to fail if the only weapon he’d armed himself with was the spire. The thought almost amused An, until the hunter interrupted.
“Time to pay for my brother’s death, beast.”
“There is no payment due, the thief owns the risk when he steals what is not his.”
Jeger answered him with a rage-filled scream as he drew the spire and lunged forward. An nearly answered him, but Charlie’s safety was dependent on An keeping his head. He flowed away from the path of attack with an echo of the grace he’d once had, barely resisting the instinctual urge to reach out and steady the man attacking him. How ironic, were Den Jeger to impale himself. But no, the hunter pivoted and lashed out again, grazing An’s arm. In an instant the wound healed, leaving a rent in An’s sleeve, and nothing more, not even a crimson stain. The sensation of magic’s caress nearly sent An to his knees as the blow itself had not.
“For you?!” Jeger spat, nearly foaming in his rage. “It still works for you?”
It was true. Once one, always one. Severed or not, the one person the spire would always heal was the one it had been cleaved from, of anything short of restoring the cleaved horn itself. Still, An was not about to try and explain the principle of sympathetic magic to his attacker. They were both haunted by the memory of that same horn jutting from the half-healed wound in the chest of Jeger’s brother. The moment it broke free from An, it had lost its ability to heal as far as others were concerned.
He shrugged now, knowing it would infuriate the hunter, make him sloppy. “Maybe it was for old time’s sake.” In a calculated move, An held out his hand, palm up. “Come on, it is useless to you...”
“But not to you, which means I am all the more inclined to keep it.” Hatred burned in Den Jeger’s gaze. “Of course, there is one condition under which I would gladly return it to you.” The hunter lunged and thrust once again. Even knowing it would fail to slay him, for an instant An felt the urge to fling his arms wide and bare his chest to Jeger’s thrust. Shoving down that madness—more his personal demon than Jeger could ever be—An backed away, slowly circling. He focused every effort on drawing the hunter away from Charlie, who had come to and was working free of her bonds. As he carefully made his way through the wreckage left by the fire, fresh bursts of the earlier stench assaulted him. He glanced down and nearly stumbled as his gaze took in darkened concrete and glistening wood. Glancing back up, he saw two things that chilled him: Den Jeger, lost to madness, clutching a newly struck match; and Charlie, creeping up behind the hunter, hand reached out to snatch An’s spire.
In that moment, with La-La’s words echoing in his memory, An Rógaire…no…Lorcan understood he had no more desire for death.
His or anyone else’s…not even Den Jeger.
Leaping forward he grabbed for the match.
Startled, Jeger jerked back, his chemical-spattered clothes going up like a torch.
“No...” Lorcan barely murmured, anguish thickening his cry. “Charlie! RUN!”
She didn’t hesitate. Even as Jeger shrieked in agony, with the kind of speed only a kid living on the streets possessed, Charlie snatched the spire from the hunter’s grasp and shoved off in the other direction. But even she was not fast enough. An heard her hiss as she stopped short.
Already the fire had spread to every puddle and soaked surface until it crackled and snapped and roared at them from all sides. Charlie turned to An, eyes at once both panicked and trusting. He spied a patch of red, angry skin on her cheek where a bit of flame had licked too close. Crouching, coughing, he dove through the flames to reach her. Tucking her beneath the scant protection of his body, Lor searched for some way out.
He searched in vain.
And then he felt it. On his arm, where the spire Charlie still clutched brushed his skin, magic cascaded across his burns, healing them even as falling embers created more.
Once one, always one.
Dare he hope? Dare he not?
Unable to talk for the coughing, he reached out and took the spi
re from her hand and found the raw edge by touch. With a prayer to the Mother Goddess, he lifted the horn to his head, nestled it perfectly in place. Everywhere it touched, it tingled like crazy, but he knew it would not stay, and if it would not stay, this would not work. He could not take his true form and still hold the spire in place, assuming this was even possible at all.
Lorcan gathered his courage and vowed to live.
“Charlie…listen...” he lost his words in another coughing fit as the smoke grew thicker and the heat seized his throat. He shielded his face and tried once more. “Up on my back. Hold this in place and no matter what don’t let go.” He helped her clamber up as he choked out his commands, trusting she would either listen, or they would die.
She clung to him, trembling and crying silent tears, but with her hand steadfast as she held the spire to its base.
Lor closed his eyes against the sting of chemical-laden smoke and prayed again with every bit of faith he could muster.
The tingle became a burn of a different sort as magic flooded through him and Lorcan instantly transformed, tail flagged and mane thrashing, muzzle long and teeth bared as he challenged death with a defiant scream. Bunching his muscular hindquarters, he charged the flaming beast, his hooves ringing like steel on the concrete as they carried them through the open gap where he’d entered out into the cool night air to land among the Rom, who had swarmed the building and looked ready to charge the blaze.
For a brief instant Lorcan was whole again.
And then he was not, as Charlie slid half-conscious from his singed back. Lorcan collapsed beside her, coughing great hacking coughs as he took on his human seeming once more. But, as he reached out a hand to cradle his dropped spire, Lor did not despair.
Because they were alive, and there was hope.
THE FIVE BEAN SOLUTION
Jean Marie Ward
Jack Tibbert opened the door to his dorm room and found an opossum wearing his roommate’s polo shirt. Since a full October moon rode high in the sky, and blood-streaked ichor reeking of fear sweat and opossum funk oozed from the sleeves of the shirt and the bottoms of the pressed and belted jeans splayed across the bed, there could be only one explanation. Eugene Peterson Braen, the most tight-assed, twenty-something, college freshman ever, was a were-opossum.
This didn’t bother Jack as much as it might some people. As a half-breed, biracial cat shifter who’d been adopted by a family of overachieving, shapeshifting foxes, he was used to weird. But why did his roommate have to get were-ed the night before an exam? How was Jack supposed to study, much less sleep, with that thing in the room?
Squealing like a rusty hinge, ‘Possum Gene thrashed inside the thick fabric, trying to claw his way out, but his shoulders were stuck in the collar. As usual, Gene had buttoned his shirt all the way to the top. His polo shirt!
Jack shut the door and dumped his backpack on his bed. “It’s your own fault. Didn’t you ever see The Wolfman? There’s an order to these things. Get naked, then shift. Pillage, then burn. But nooo, you’re too much of a brain to watch horror movies. You’re lucky I’m a nice guy.”
Up close, the stench was eye-watering. Gritting his teeth, Jack yanked the shirt off the bed. Gene tumbled out the bottom, onto the sodden bedcovers, and kept rolling. He landed with a splat on the carpet next to a page of laser-printed photos, righted himself and waddled toward the door.
A flash of silver in one of the pictures caught Jack’s eye. The object curved like the top of a strapless party dress. He snatched the paper off the floor.
Jack had a picture of his adoptive sister Rika Nakamura wearing a silver dress like that. She looked like a star, and she was smiling at him. No, better than smiling—her face glowed like she’d won the lottery and he was the prize. He kept the photo on his phone. How did Gene get it?
He hadn’t. The gray thing wasn’t a dress. It wasn’t even a person. It was a weird silver beehive in a flash-strobed glass case. Jack’s secret crush was safe.
He checked the other photos. The biggest one showed the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the super-sized church overlooking the Catholic University of America. The remaining pictures featured a black metal rose on a wood plaque, and a silver sculpture of a veiled woman’s head.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
Gene growled in response. Jack whirled. The opossum’s head butted the door. His paws tore into the carpet like he planned to dig through the floor.
“Stop it!” Jack lunged across the room and grabbed the opossum by the scruff.
Gene hissed and snapped. Were-spit flew from the corners of his mouth. Jack jerked his hand away. Gene bounced against the door and slid bonelessly to the floor.
“Sorry, man. But were-spit’s contagious.” To humans. Jack wasn’t sure about half-breeds like himself, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Gene didn’t respond. He lay on the carpet like a giant hairball. He didn’t appear injured, but his jaw hung slack, and his ribs weren’t moving. Green fluid bubbled from under his tail. The fetid odor of overflowing restaurant dumpsters filled the room.
“No!” Jack dropped to his knees. “Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead!”
He prodded Gene’s chest. The Nakamuras insisted all their kits, including Jack, learn first aid. But none of his ABC moves worked, and he wasn’t putting his face anywhere near a were’s teeth—even if they did belong to his roommate. His roommate who wasn’t breathing.
He grabbed his phone. There was only one person who could help. Rika was training to become an exo-med—a doctor to the fae and other sapients not covered in the standard medical texts. In addition to studying Pre-Med across town at Georgetown University, she was enrolled in a number of specialized courses not recognized by the American Medical Association. If she couldn’t save Gene...
He couldn’t think about that.
She picked up on the first ring. Her light, musical voice caroled: “This better be good, Cat Boy. I’ve got lab and lecture midterms in Biology tomorrow, and less than ninety minutes of me time before my roommate gets back.”
“Rika, I think I killed my roommate!”
“Oh, Jack,” she gasped. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“It’s not my fault! It was an accident! I picked him up. He spit at me, and I dropped him. Now he’s not moving. He smells dead!”
“Jesus, Jack, I knew you didn’t like him, but murder...” She stopped. “Wait, you picked him up? Gene’s six-two and ripped. You’re barely five-eight on a tall day. That doesn’t compute.”
“Short jokes, now? Really? He’s a were-opossum. Of course I picked him up. He was wrecking the carpet”
“A were-what?”
“Opossum—you know, pointy face, beady eyes, gray fur, naked tail, looks like Jurassic rat. And not breathing. What do I do?”
“Um, wait for him to wake up.”
Jack opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“Look, you said he’s a were-opossum. He shifted at moonrise, right?”
“I guess. He was human this afternoon.”
“What does he look like now?” Rika asked patiently.
“Like a dead opossum.”
“Uh huh. Say it with me. What do weres do when they die? They...”
“Change back to human. Oh.” And he’d watched all The Wolfman movies a dozen times.
“It’s called playing opossum,” Rika continued.
This was why he kept his crush secret.
“Geez, Jack, you lived in Holcomb Park for months. You never saw an opossum faint?”
“Not close up. Have you seen the teeth on those things?”
“Well, he’s not using them now. Dump him in the shower and close the door. I’ll see what I can find for the smell.” The patter of rapid keystrokes echoed in his ear. “Nothing for opossum, but for skunk you mix a quart of peroxide, a quarter cup of baking soda and a teaspoon of liquid soap. It’s worth a shot.”
This was why he couldn’t let
it go. Where would he find a woman who understood how much a part-time cat hated bad smells and immediately help? But before he had a chance to thank her, the opossum’s ribs heaved. He sneezed, blinked, rolled over and resumed digging.
“Gene!”
“He’s up?” Rika yelped. “Already? Then again, he’s a were-opossum. He could be super hungry from the change. Try distracting him with food. Opossums’ll eat anything.”
Not this opossum. Jack tried Gene’s protein bars and his veggies. He tried potato chips. He even tried the slice of pizza he’d been saving for breakfast. Nothing worked.
“Maybe he wants to go somewhere!” She made it sound better than chocolate.
“Ya think,” Jack snarled.
The ghost of his cat tail twitched irritably at the base of his spine. Tonight was everything he hated about college—test stress on top of dick roommate stress compounded by the prospect of extra work and more stress. It wouldn’t be so bad if he could figure out Gene’s problem and save at least part of their security deposit. Then it hit him.
“Crap. The stench is rotting my brain. The Shrine! There was a paper with photos of the Shrine and a bunch of other stuff on the floor by the bed.”
“What kind of photos? Were there any notes? Never mind. I’ll see for myself. See you and Gene at Visitors Parking in thirty. Bring the papers. It’s a clue,” she warbled. “This is going to be fun!”
Fun? Fun! Phantom cat ears pricked. Fun with him?! Jack’s inner tomcat roused and stretched. Suddenly the evening glittered with possibilities. The Shrine and the lecture halls facing it were closed for the night. Between exams and the raw evening breeze, the university mall would be deserted. But he and Rika wouldn’t feel the cold. They’d be snug inside in her clean, warm car—her clean, warm car with the backseat that folded down—all alone.
Grunting in marsupial frustration, Gene tore through another chunk of carpet. Yeah, all alone with a crazy were-opossum. Hell no.
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