Leader Of The Pack

by Karen McInerney

  “Wonderful,” I said faintly as she plopped the bag down on the table and pulled out a box of syringes, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a bag of cotton balls, and a box of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies. “What are the cookies for?” I asked.

  “For after you give blood, silly. Just like at the blood bank. I thought about Chips Ahoy, but these were on sale. Now,” she said, consulting her notes, “According to Tom, we need to transfer at least a hundred milliliters of blood, but more would be better—up to about five hundred milliliters.”

  “How much is five hundred milliliters?” I asked.

  “About a cup,” Heath said.

  I eyed the box of syringes. “And how much does each of those hold?”

  “About sixty milllileters,” Lindsey said.

  Only sixty? To me, the syringes looked like sharp nails attached to gallon jugs. Then again, I’ve never been a big fan of needles in general. “How about we stick to the low end?” I asked. “Otherwise, we’re going to look like pincushions.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Now, let me think. Do you have any rubber bands in here?”

  “In my top drawer,” Heath said, walking over to his desk and pulling out a handful of brown rubber bands. “What do you need them for?”

  “To make one of those tourniquet thingies, like they do at the blood bank.” She grabbed two thick ones, doubled them up, and turned to face me. “Ready, Sophie?”

  “Does it matter?” I asked, holding out my arm and feeling like I was about to face an executioner. Which is how my father would feel shortly if I didn’t find a way to free him, I realized.

  I closed my eyes as Lindsey slid the two rubber bands up my arm, to just above the elbow. “It’s not as tight as they make it, but it will do,” she said.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I said.

  “It’ll be a cinch, Sophie. Now, alcohol first,” she said, ripping open the bag of cotton balls and dousing a few with alcohol, which she then applied to my arms. “And we’re supposed to look for a vein. Heath, what do you think?”

  My ex-boyfriend peered down at my exposed arm. “That looks like a big one there, don’t you think?” he asked, pointing to a small blue blotch on my inner elbow.

  “Great. Hand me the syringe, will you?” she said. Heath passed her a plastic syringe with what looked like a six-inch needle on it. She popped the cap, and I closed my eyes tightly. God, this was so not a good idea.

  “Am I supposed to push the needle in straight down, or slide it in sideways?” Lindsey asked.

  “I think they kind of go in sideways,” Heath said, “but I usually don’t watch.”

  “Well, let’s try it that way, then,” she said. “This will only hurt a bit, Sophie,” she said, and then plunged the thing into my arm, missing the vein by a mile.

  “Drat,” she said, and I yelped as she stabbed me again. And again, and again, and again.

  “This is a lot harder than it looks,” Lindsey complained after what seemed like the thirty-ninth jab, and I was about to grab the syringe and tell her to try a kitchen knife instead when she gave a sharp exclamation and I felt an unpleasant pulling sensation. “We got it!”

  “Here’s the second syringe,” Heath said, and a moment later there was a second jab, and then a third, until I started feeling light-headed.

  Finally, instead of the pricking sensation, I felt cool pressure, and opened my eyes to see Lindsey pressing a cotton ball to my arm. Lined up on the table were six syringes filled with my blood. The cotton ball was rapidly turning red, as well.

  “Lorna Doone?” she asked brightly.

  I took a cookie grudgingly. “Whatever you do,” I said “I’d recommend you steer clear of the health professions, Lindsey.”

  “Oh, come on. I didn’t do too badly for the first time out! I’ve heard they usually practice on oranges first.”

  “I can understand why,” I said, lifting the cotton ball and peering at my hole-riddled arm.

  Lindsey ignored me and turned to Heath. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” he said, rolling up his sleeve. As Lindsey dabbed him with alcohol and raised the syringe, he looked at me. “What does it feel like?”

  “What does what feel like? If you mean having Lindsey poke a needle into you, imagine pissing off an entire hive of African bees.”

  “Not that,” he said. “I mean changing. Becoming a werewolf.”

  “The change to werewolf form?” I thought about it for a moment. “It’s an amazing sensation, really. Like coming to life in a new way.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Lindsey staring at me with hunger in her eyes. “But I’ve always been a werewolf,” I said, “so I don’t know what it’s like receiving werewolf blood for the first time. Did it say anything in the Codex?”

  “No,” he said. “It didn’t.”

  “Well, then. I guess we’ll have to find out,” Lindsey said. “Ready?”

  “I guess so,” he said, sucking in his breath as Lindsey plunged the first needle into his arm. I watched as she emptied first one, then two, then three syringes into him.

  Then she stood back and looked at him. “That’s one hundred and eighty milliliters, which should be more than enough, according to Tom.”

  “Feel anything?” I asked.

  He shook his head, and for the next twenty minutes, we just sat there, waiting. I was about to suggest we abandon the project and run through the defense Heath had come up with, just in case I had to present it myself, when he gave a little grunt.

  Lindsey was on her feet in a flash, peering at Heath as if he were a laboratory mouse. “What is it?” she asked breathlessly.

  “I thought I felt something,” he said, and a moment later a growl erupted from him.

  “Is it just me, or are his hands getting hairy?” Lindsey asked.

  “It’s not just you,” I said. Heath was changing; his chocolaty eyes had taken on an iridescent shimmer, and his body was responding to the call of the almost-full moon. I had been through it often enough to recognize it, but it was jarring to watch someone else transforming. Particularly when it was Heath who was doing it.

  “Get his shirt off, so he doesn’t destroy it,” I told Lindsey as I leapt to my feet to help, feeling a little dizzy from the lack of blood. Between us, we managed to get his tie, shirt, and pants off before the change finished rippling through him.

  Then we sat back in quiet astonishment. Where my ex-boyfriend had stood a moment before was a dark brown wolf with shimmery brown eyes, dressed in a pair of red-striped boxer shorts.

  “Heath?” Lindsey whispered.

  He growled a little, low in his throat, and then he dropped his nose to the floor, snuffling the carpet.

  “Heath,” I said, but he was engrossed in an olfactory examination of the room around him, and didn’t look up. “Heath,” I repeated, trying to catch his attention. “We’ll have plenty of time to try out the werewolf thing if you want to, but can we do it later?”

  He took another long sniff of the baseboard and looked up at me.

  “Can you change back now?” I asked. But nothing happened.

  “What do we do if we can’t get him back?” Lindsey asked. “We’re at his office! How are we going to explain that there’s a wolf in the building?”

  “We’ll get him back,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “It’s close to the full moon is the problem.” Not only was Heath unfamiliar with controlling his animal impulses, but he hadn’t had any wolfsbane to assist him. “Can you go get me a cup of hot water?”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and vanished out the door, leaving me alone with Heath, who had gone back to sniffing things again.

  “I know you can’t answer me right now,” I said, “but when she gets back, I’m going to have you drink some wolfsbane tea. And then you’re going to concentrate on your human form until you transform back.”

  He gave me a little bark, which I interpreted as assent, and continued doing his r
ounds of the room, tail poking out of the leg of his boxer shorts. He was a good-looking man, and it translated to his wolf form, I noticed. Maybe I had made a mistake in hiding my wolfie nature from him. What if I’d told him from the outset? We could have had romantic full-moon weekends together, and raised our pups together.

  But as I watched the chocolate-brown wolf pad through his office, I realized that ultimately, it wouldn’t have lasted. Even though Heath was a werewolf now, he wasn’t of the same magnitude, I guess you’d call it, as Tom. There was something mysterious about Tom, something alluring that I couldn’t quite pin down. Maybe it was that he’d been around for 600 years, and knew so much more than I did. Maybe it was his faint European accent, or his tall, broad-shouldered Viking frame. Or maybe it was the look I’d caught in his shimmery eyes once or twice—a look that sparked a longing in me so intense I hadn’t known what to do with it but ignore it.

  But it didn’t matter. He and Lindsey were already an item, and I would never betray my best friend. And in any case, my romantic life—or what was left of it, after last night’s fiasco with Mark—wasn’t the top priority right now. I hadn’t turned Heath into a werewolf to date him. I’d done it so he could help save my father.

  My ex-boyfriend was snuffling his leather chair and I was flipping through the xeroxed Codex, looking for something we could use in my father’s defense, when Lindsey slipped through the door again with a mug of hot water.

  “Great,” I said, fishing two wolfsbane teabags out of my purse. “We’ll let these steep for a couple of minutes. Once it’s strong enough, Heath can drink it down and think human thoughts, and we’ll be back on track.”

  After a bit of coaxing, we finally managed to get Heath to slurp down eight ounces of double-strength tea, and although he wrinkled his nose a bit at the smell—and the taste—after much coaching from yours truly, he was back in human form, the boxer shorts still in place.

  “What was it like?” Lindsey asked breathlessly as he flopped into one of his chairs, breathing hard.

  “It was incredible,” he said, turning to look at me. “Sophie. I had no idea the world could be so … intense! The smells! There are billions of them, and the colors are so bright… it’s amazing.”

  “So you don’t mind the extra fur and the tail?” I asked.

  “It just felt so … natural, somehow. Like I said, it was an incredible experience.”

  Lindsey’s eyes strayed to the three remaining syringes on the table, then to me.

  “You really want to try it, don’t you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “It’s not all great smells and colors, you know. I know Heath said it was incredible, but it can also be a royal pain in the ass.” Like when you were trying to schedule meetings around moon phases.

  “Tom will change me back if I decide I don’t want it,” she said.

  “I won’t stand in your way, then.” Before the words had left my mouth, she was already dabbing her arm with a cotton ball and grabbing the closest syringe. Her eyes were bright with excitement, and she licked her lips as the needle bit through her skin.

  “I’d better get some more hot water,” I said wearily, slipping through the door and closing it behind me just as Lindsey injected herself with the second syringe. Twenty minutes later, yet another sleek wolf was standing in Heath’s office, her fur a golden brown and her eyes silvery gray.

  It was a good thing I’d tucked some extra wolfsbane tea into my purse before leaving Sit A Spell that morning.

  It took almost an hour for me to get everyone off the thrill of discovery and back to the subject at hand, namely, finding a way to get my father out of werewolf jail. Once everyone was human again, dressed, and no longer sniffing the carpet, I reviewed everything I knew about the case for Heath and asked him what the plan was.

  “Well, I looked for a loophole, but the rules governing the proscribed time are pretty strict,” Heath said as I sipped my wolfsbane tea. He and Lindsey were abstaining for now; Tom had warned Lindsey not to have more than four cups a day, since made werewolves are more susceptible to its rather lethal side effects, and the transformation was still pretty recent. Even so, after years of keeping my tea habit undercover, it was strange being so open about everything and fielding all kinds of questions, from average hair-growth rates to my favorite hunting spots.

  “Are there any other loopholes?” I asked, glad to be back on topic. “Like special circumstances for traitors or something?”

  Heath shook his head. “If we were in France, on your father’s home territory, perhaps. But here? He’s in hostile territory.”

  “So what do we base the defense on?”

  “We can’t prove your father wasn’t there,” Heath said. “A witness places him there, there was a scratch on his cheek, and he certainly had motivation.”

  “The fact that Charles double-crossed him?”

  “Exactly.” He looked at me over steepled fingers; once we started talking law, he easily slipped right back into lawyer mode, which was very comforting. “A witness placed him at the scene, but no one actually saw the murder. And I think we can demonstrate that other werewolves had a reason to want Charles, and your father, out of the way.”

  “So we’re looking to establish reasonable doubt,” Lindsey said. “And that Sophie’s father wasn’t the only one who wanted Luc dead.”

  Heath nodded. “I don’t know if that’s enough to get your father off in the werewolf world—like I said, it’s a bit sketchy, and there’s nothing in the Code indicating that reasonable doubt is at all a factor in these trials—but we’ll give it a shot.” He grabbed a legal pad from his desk and turned to me. “Just to make sure we’re ready, let’s go through it one last time.”

  For the next few hours, I ran through everything I had learned as Heath crafted his defense.

  Finally, at three-fifteen, Heath flipped his legal pad closed and looked at me. “I think we’ve done all we can do here,” he said.

  “You think?” To me, the defense sounded far from ironclad—in fact, it was about as substantial as dryer lint—but if Heath thought we had done our best, who was I to say otherwise? Besides, we were out of time.

  “I guess we’d better head over to Sit A Spell,” Lindsey said, standing up and smoothing down her dress.

  “What do we do if Boris doesn’t show up?” I asked, voicing the fear that had hounded me all afternoon. Without Boris to back the assertion that Charles Grenier had been in Elena’s room that evening, and that Elena was plotting against Wolfgang, we didn’t have much of a case.

  Heath looked at me. “I don’t know. Wing it, I suppose.”

  I tried to respond, but the lump in my throat had grown so big I couldn’t.

  When we pulled up outside Sit A Spell at just a few minutes before four, Tom was waiting on the front porch, dressed in faded jeans and his black leather jacket and oozing werewolf masculinity. The afternoon sun gleamed on his gold hair, which was slicked back in a ponytail, and made his amber eyes glow.

  Heath, in contrast, had a masculinity of his own, but despite his dark hair, athletic frame, and the excellent cut of his Brooks Brothers suit, he didn’t even seem to be in the same species as Tom. Even though, now, technically, he was—if werewolves can be called a species, that is.

  We headed up the walk to the porch, where the two men shook hands; I could almost see the tension crackling in the air between them.

  “It looks like the transformation went all right,” Tom said, giving Lindsey a light kiss on the forehead. “The shimmery eyes are nice. Is it as wonderful as you hoped?”

  “I think so,” she said. “But I haven’t had much chance to find out. We’ve been a bit busy with legalese this afternoon.”

  My mother met us at the door draped in her customary flowing silks. I was still in the jeans I had worn last night, dirt smudges at all. My mother gave me a huge hug, then drew me aside and began telling me what to do if I was having trouble with demons.

  “Mom,
I’m going to a werewolf tribunal, not the seventh level of hell,” I said. Not that there was a big difference, actually.

  “You can never be too safe,” she said. “And something tells me we haven’t seen the last of… him.”

  “You mean …”

  “Don’t say his name,” she said, holding up a hand. “Never invoke his name.”

  Goose bumps rose on my arm. I glanced down at the ring on my hand, which had flashed hot several times that day, and thought with a hint of dread that she was probably right. “But the salt worked fine yesterday.”

  “It wasn’t enough to drive him off so completely,” she said. “I doubt he’ll give up that easily. Demons can be quite persistent, you know. And crafty. A lot of people think they’re stupid, but they’re anything but.”

  “Just what I need,” I said.

  “I wish I could come with you,” my mother said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “But you’re not a werewolf.” And unlike Lindsey, she thankfully had no interest in becoming one.

  “Be safe, darling. It’s hard enough losing one of you,” she said, and there was a note of fear in her voice I hadn’t heard before. “I couldn’t bear to lose both.”

  “Mom…” I began.

  She seemed to shake off her thoughts. “Now then,” she said. “This is oil of frankincense. It will help repel him.” As I stood there, she anointed my forehead, neck, and arms with the stinky stuff. “I’ve made you a salt amulet to wear, and here is a bag of things to take with you, just in case. I don’t know if they’ll help, but better safe than sorry.”

  I opened the mouth of the cloth bag she had given me and pulled out a crucifix. “You’re kidding me. A crucifix?” Since my mother favored pentacles, it was a bit of a surprise.

  “I know it’s unorthodox, but I’m not sure what will work with this one, so better safe than sorry, darling. I’ve got a vial of holy water in there, too.”

  I looked up at my mother, who to my certain knowledge had never before darkened the doorstep of a church. “Holy water? Where the heck did you get that?”