Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘Enjoy.’ Pete stopped at the door. ‘See you at the run tonight.’

  Oh, that. He wasn’t in the mood; maybe he could make an excuse . . . And then he realised. It was still full moon. All that to go through, all over again—

  Well, his mother had been right all along. Never sticks to anything, gets bored so easily; one minute it’s model trains, then it’s computers, next week it’ll be something else. So: he was tired of being a werewolf, after so short a time. He didn’t want to play any more.

  No, he argued with himself, it’s not the magnificent heightened senses and superpowers and all that stuff. It’s not even the changing into an animal, because that’s great. It’s them: Luke, Pete, the bloody Ferris Gang. I was right to leave them and wrong to come back. If only I can get away from them for good; New Mexico—

  But that wouldn’t be possible, would it? Your wolf is first and foremost a pack animal. He’s part of a group. He belongs. Now, belonging is a wonderful thing, as opposed to being isolated and lonely and nobody in the world giving a damn. But like everything else, it depends. Above all, it depends on who you belong to.

  Duncan put his foot on the desk and pushed, driving his chair back until he could stretch his legs out comfortably. Let’s think about this, he decided. When I was a little kid, I belonged to my parents, which was fine. Then I belonged to the Ferris Gang: not so fine, but it kept me from getting beaten up in the playground. Then I belonged to Sally, even after she dumped me. Now I’m back with the old crowd, body and soul, and according to them for ever and ever. Now, wouldn’t it be fun, just for a change, to belong to me?

  Not possible. But, if what the pack wanted him to believe was true, neither was thinking so that they couldn’t hear him. Come to that: if he really belonged to them, even wanting not to wouldn’t be possible either. It’d be like those love potions in fairy stories: he’d be in love with the pack for ever and ever, whether he wanted to or not.

  He sat up. All right, then. New Mexico. Just reach for the phone - Directory Enquiries, travel agent, one-way trip. It was so easy, even humans could do it. Go away, don’t come back. Simple.

  He hadn’t moved. Why was that? Fear is always a good place to start. But he wasn’t afraid of Luke any more. If anything, it was the other way round; and although that was no guarantee that Luke wouldn’t try and tear him apart (quite the opposite), that thought didn’t reduce him to a cringing jelly, like it should have done. If he wasn’t afraid of Luke, he certainly wasn’t afraid of the others. In that case, it wasn’t fear.

  Inertia? So set in his ways he couldn’t make the effort? Definitely not. His whole life had changed completely over the last week or so. Ties, something holding him back? Family? Not likely. Couldn’t be that, then, since he didn’t have anybody else in the whole wide world . . .

  It’s like when you’re lost in some huge, complicated building. You wander up and down stairs, up and down corridors, trying to find the way out. There’s nobody around to ask, and your sense of direction’s completely shot. You find a door; it’s plainly marked This Way Out. You grab the handle. It’s locked.

  Sally, then. In spite of everything. But that was ridiculous; it’d been a long time since she’d dumped him, and had he gone around moping and pining, not sleeping, thinking about her night and day? Hell as like. It was only since all this werewolf stuff had happened - well, almost. Round about that time, anyway. And what about the crazy vampire business? Rather than try and get his head around that, he’d left it well alone. It had served a valuable function, in a way, because it made her even more unattainable than before. Their kind and our kind. A state of undeclared war between the bloodsuckers and the ambulance chasers. Simply not possible; like so many other things.

  So, Duncan said to himself, I’ll need to stick around for now, until I can sort that out. Once I’m free of her for good, I can get my US visa and slip quietly away into the desert, be a coyote instead. Until I’ve dealt with it, though, I’m wasting my time.

  He felt in his top pocket and found the folded yellow sticky. Her handwriting: he’d know it anywhere. Rounded, clear and inelegant; if letters could talk, her handwriting would be shouting all the time. What the hell was so special about her, anyway?

  He leaned forward to reach for the phone, but stopped himself. He’d had enough of Crosswoods’s receptionist to last him a lifetime. Getting past their front desk wasn’t an inviting prospect, either. He even toyed with the idea of trying to burst his way through - superhuman strength, after all, he wasn’t the weedy little nerk he still thought of himself as. But a whole office full of vampires made that a non-starter. In which case he’d have to be patient, and cunning.

  He told the little bald man in the front office that he was just nipping out for a packet of chocolate biscuits, and took a taxi to Crosswoods. The street was unusually empty, and he felt uncomfortably conspicuous standing in the middle of it as he tried to figure out a grand strategy. He’d hoped there’d be an alleyway or something that he could lurk in while he waited, but no such luck. The best the geography offered was the doorway of the next building but three on the right. The thick mat of cigarette butts he found there suggested that that was where the buildings’ smokers escaped to when the craving got too much to bear. In which case, the sight of a sad, hunched figure standing there looking furtive wouldn’t be anything unusual. Fine. He leaned against the doorway, adopting the guilty-casual crouch of the inveterate health-criminal. Perfect camouflage.

  He was in for a long wait, he knew that. To occupy his mind, he played at making up perfectly rational explanations for the bullet in the tape-measure that didn’t involve conspiracy, malice or the supernatural. As a form of mental exercise it was better than crosswords or sudoku, and some of the solutions he came up with were splendidly ingenious and almost plausible, but they didn’t convince him for a moment. It was like being an art forger in a picture gallery, looking at one of his own products hanging on the wall. Just because a hundred experts thought it was a genuine Vermeer didn’t change anything. From time to time, people came out of the door and stood next to him for a while, looking hunted and wreathing him in blue smoke.

  Quarter to six. By now, the Ferris Gang would’ve realised that Duncan was absent without leave. He’d taken the taxi in the hope that it’d mask his scent trail, though he wasn’t entirely sure it’d be enough. Would they figure out where he was likely to be and come looking for him? He considered the odds. More likely, if they were going to come after him, they’d try his flat first. Not enough daylight left for them to go out there, come back, come round here; and they wouldn’t split up to form separate search parties, not this evening. He didn’t feel like dwelling on what they were likely to be saying about him, and there was bound to be a certain degree of fun and games when he showed his face in the office tomorrow morning. He decided that he could cope with that.

  Quarter past six; half past. It was worryingly dark now, but mercifully the sky was overcast with heavy cloud. Nobody had come out of the Crosswoods building; clearly they worked late there. At Craven Ettins, timekeeping was a competitive sport, with every member of staff determined not to be the first to leave. On any given evening you could tour the offices and see solicitors doodling, phoning their relatives in Australia, playing Empire Builder on their PCs, reading the Bible, any damn thing rather than incur the shame of leaving the office while their rivals were still there. Colin Abrams in Conveyancing had been building a scale model of the Enterprise-D out of matchsticks when Duncan left; chances were he’d have finished it by now. Was it the same at Crosswoods, or were they actually doing paying work in there? Anything was possible.

  Quarter to seven, and Duncan started to worry. He hadn’t actually given much thought to what he was going to do later on; undergoing the change alone wasn’t something he wanted to think about, but he’d sort of assumed he could dash back to his flat, lock himself in and be very, very brave and self-controlled until dawn. He glanced nervously up at the sky; still
enough cloud, just about, but hardly a skyful. All it’d take would be one stray moonbeam, and he’d be screwed. He’d be safe on the Underground, of course, but there was the walk from the station to home. He’d be cutting it fine if he left now. If she didn’t show in the next five minutes—

  He’d always been able to spot her at long range, presumably because every detail of her was stored in his memory, a full biometric record, like an identity card: the ratio of height to shoulder width, the speed she walked at, everything that was slightly different about her. Therefore he knew, as soon as the glass door slid open, that she was there - her, not some irrelevant other person; her, the genuine article. The hunter’s instincts he’d acquired ordered him to stay still, keep quiet, let the quarry come to him. They were good instincts for the job in hand, but he resented them. Not cut out to be a predator, he admitted to himself; probably why he’d never really cut it as a lawyer, before Luke Ferris ram-raided his way back into his life. He watched as she came into sharper focus. At fifty yards he could make out the profiles and radii of her face; at twenty-five yards, the effects of light and shade on the curved planes of her cheeks. Subconsciously he ran a check of how she’d changed, how she’d stayed the same. Something had hardened her a little; he hadn’t really noticed it before, when he’d seen her in his flat. Maybe it was the difference between artificial light and daylight. Under the moonlight, now - things didn’t look the same at all by moonlight, not any more.

  When she was fifteen yards away, he got ready to move; at ten yards he straightened his back, balanced his weight on both feet, tried to find the right words—

  ‘Sally.’

  (Well, he’d tried; not his strongest suit.)

  She turned her head sharply and found him. ‘Duncan? What the hell are you doing here?’

  He was pleased, absurdly, to hear terror in her voice, rather than anger. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘It won’t take a moment.’

  She’d stopped. No more than twenty-four inches away. ‘Duncan, you fucking lunatic, do you know what time it is?’

  Yes indeed. He’d glanced up at the sky just before he moved out to meet her. Cutting it very fine indeed. ‘We can go somewhere if you’re worried about that,’ he said.

  ‘Are you out of your skull? In your condition?’

  He couldn’t help grinning at that; she wasn’t impressed. ‘So what’re you going to do?’ he said. ‘Call a policeman?’

  ‘No, I’m going back to the office. You can’t follow me there.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to try.’

  He shrugged. ‘Go on, then.’

  She looked at him. ‘The Underground,’ she said. ‘But you’re on your own after that.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She started to walk; he remembered that deceptively brisk pace. ‘You’re being incredibly stupid,’ she said, ‘you know that? Soon as you get out the other end, you’ll - it’ll happen, and then you’ll really be in the shit. They’ll kill you for it, you know that? When one of the pack goes rogue, it’s a sort of sacred duty. They hunt him down and—’

  ‘Balls,’ Duncan said. ‘Got to catch me first.’

  That made her stop dead. ‘You’ve left them, then.’

  Apparently he had. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  So it made a difference, did it? ‘I don’t like what it’s done to me,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want to be in their gang any more. Truth is, I never liked them much anyway.’

  They walked on in silence for a while, until they were in sight of the Tube station. As soon as they were underground, standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the platforms, she stopped and faced him. ‘You complete, utter shit,’ she said.

  Bit of a non sequitur. ‘Why?’

  ‘You know perfectly well why.’

  He couldn’t help sighing. ‘This isn’t another of those telepathy things, is it?’ he said. ‘You know, where I’ve done something wrong but you won’t tell me what it is so I’ve got to guess? I hate those. I thought that since we aren’t actually married any more—’

  ‘You do realise,’ Sally said, ‘how much trouble you’ve got me into?’

  Yes, one of those telepathy things. ‘What trouble?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid. They’ll have seen you come up to me, us walking away together. They’ll think I’m up to something; betraying them—’

  Big melodramatic word, betraying. Maybe these days he lived the sort of life where big melodramatic words were no big deal, tools you needed in your everyday work, like dynamite in a mining camp. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Now you’re being deliberately stupid. Because your lot and our lot—’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that, is it?’ The insight came to him as he said the words. She gave him a startled look, then frowned.

  ‘No.’

  Oh my God. He nodded, to give the impression he had some vague clue about what he was saying. ‘It’s about her, isn’t it?’

  Now he’d lost her again. ‘Her? Who are you—?’

  ‘The unicorn.’

  ‘Are you mental or something? There’s no such thing as—’

  ‘Bowden Allshapes.’

  He’d said the name without really thinking; thrown it at her, the way you’d throw mugs and boots and other small, handy items at a burglar. The effect was spectacular. She stopped doing everything, as though he’d switched her off.

  Then, ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Oh.

  Didn’t take her long to get going again. He’d always known she had her own independent power source. ‘How the hell did you find out about—?’

  Duncan laughed. Really, it was quite funny. ‘Bloody Bowden Allshapes,’ he said. ‘The hours I’ve spent, faffing around with two hundred quid here and nineteen pounds fifty there, just trying to get rid of it and get it out of the door, and now it turns out to be fucking important. Like, my whole bloody life—’ He pulled himself together. No good seizing the high ground if you trip and go sliding down the slope on your arse. ‘At Craven Ettins I handled the Allshapes probate file,’ he said. ‘Estate accounts. Never could get the rotten things to balance.’

  ‘Hang on.’ She was staring at him. ‘Estate accounts. That’s when someone’s died, right?’

  ‘Come on, Sally, you went to law school. It’s the final stage in winding up an estate, when you figure out—’

  ‘Bowden Allshapes isn’t dead.’

  Well, she must be, or we wouldn’t have been . . . He was about to say that, but he didn’t. It was like shrill white noise inside his head, drowning everything out. She’s right, he thought. Because if she’s right, it makes sense.

  ‘How would you know?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Because I spoke to her just this morning.’

  - Because if Bowden Allshapes was still alive, still spending her money - pair of tights here, loaf of bread and packet of ham there, nothing much, just a few quid now and then - it’d explain why the fucking accounts never stayed still from one day to the next. Not that that was possible; the banks and building societies and company registrars had closed all her accounts and transferred her shares into the names of the executors; nobody could touch a penny without Duncan Hughes, solicitor in charge of the file, knowing about it. And Duncan Hughes would know straight away, like a shot, because the accounts wouldn’t balance—

  ‘Shit,’ he said. Not anger or despair. More a kind of reverent awe, inspired by the majesty of his own stupidity. ‘But hold it a moment,’ he said, more to himself than her. ‘It doesn’t have to be her, it could just be the executors or someone fiddling the books. No,’ he corrected himself, ‘because all the money’s frozen in our client account, I’d have to sign a pink slip, so it can’t be that.’

  She was looking at him again. ‘Duncan,’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  Then his delayed-action memory finally clicked into place. ‘You saw her this morning?’<
br />
  ‘Yes. She’s Jacky Hogan’s client. Divorce. Messy. So she can’t be dead—’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a woman?’

  ‘Well, yes. Long hair, tits, the works. I notice stuff like that.’

  ‘Bowden Allshapes is dead.’ He waved a furious, ineffectual hand. ‘It says so on her death certificate.’

  ‘No, she isn’t.’

  My patience is infinite, he told himself, my patience is infinite, my patience . . . ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Are we talking about the same person?’

  Shrug. ‘I don’t know. You were the one who brought her up.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Then it can’t be the same person, can it?’

  Except - except that the unicorn had been female. No question about it. Female voice, big soft eyes, habit of buggering up people’s lives for them. Sally wasn’t the only one who noticed things. And now she was kebabbing him with her sharpest stare. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you know about Bowden Allshapes.’

  And why not? So he did; and people trying to get down to the platforms had to squeeze round them for quite a while. They muttered quite a lot, but went unheeded.

  He told her about the unicorn (single-handedly responsible for the extinction of British wolves) and how it was the only thing on earth that Luke Ferris was afraid of; how he’d met it twice, chased it, talked to it. He told her about the accounts that wouldn’t balance, and how Felicity Allshapes had come to see him in the office—

  ‘Describe her.’

  He thought. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not? Official Secrets Act? Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘Can’t remember what she looks like,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, all I can remember is she was quite nice-looking. But—’

  ‘That’s her, then. Same woman.’

  Much the same effect as a slap round the face with a mackerel. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s her,’ Sally repeated. ‘That’s Bowden Allshapes. You know it’s her because you can never remember what she looks like. Two minutes after she’s left the office, you can’t even say what colour her hair is, or her eyes, or anything. All you can say is, God, I wish I looked like that. But that’s all.’