Barking

by Tom Holt

  Well, it had passed the time until the bell went, and a little pity and terror’s good for the soul. And besides, Duncan had told himself, it doesn’t matter if I don’t pay attention in class. It’s not as though I’ll ever need to know any of this stuff later on, in the real world.

  Indeed. Maths? Complete waste of time. Pythagoras. Quadratic equations. Pointless, meaningless garbage. I mean, when the hell are you ever going to need to calculate the volume of a cone, or use logarithms? Or transfer a bunch of numbers from Base Ten to Base Something Else . . .

  If only, Duncan thought as he trotted down a subway, it could’ve been something else, a different subject. Geography: he’d always been keen as mustard in geography. To this day he still knew all sorts of cool stuff about cumulo-nimbus and magma layers and ox-bow lakes and subsistence agriculture in Bhutan. Or chemistry: he’d learned loads of chemistry (mostly things you added to other things to make them blow up, but never mind). Or drama, even. He’d learned how to play poker, blackjack and pinochle in drama, and still got an A-star in his GCSE. But not maths. His worst subject. Now, of course, he knew why, but that didn’t make it any better. The fact remained that if only he’d paid attention the day they’d done Bases, he’d be laughing. A quiet room somewhere with no windows, a calculator and a pencil, and that’d be the end of Bowden Allshapes. A few calculations, some straightforward addition, the two bottom lines would balance and that’d be it. Accountancy as a lethal weapon; death by double entry. And then he’d be free.

  Duncan stopped in a doorway. Moonlight blanched the walls on either side of him to a pale dead grey. He sniffed. People about, but not many and not close. No trace that he could register of wolves, vampires, unicorns or formaldehyde. He had no idea what time it was.

  His first thought, of course, had been to leg it round to Crosswoods and bark and scratch at the door till they let him in. It hadn’t taken him long to see the folly in that. She’d have her people (if you could call them that) out in force, guarding every street corner for a square mile, waiting for him to trot tail-waggingly into the trap. The same went for Ferris and Loop. As for going home: highly unlikely that he still had one, after the unquantifiable but substantial amount of time he’d spent on the seventy-third floor. He relaxed his aching jaw muscles and let the file flop out of his mouth onto the pavement.

  Base Ten Point One, for crying out loud.

  And then there was the matter of the total lack of rescue attempts. He’d tried not dwelling on it, to the point where his mental rubber had worn a big rescue-attempt-sized hole in the page of his consciousness, but the moment he lowered his guard it came roaring back. They’d left him there, the bastards. Fine, so the vampires didn’t owe him anything (apart from the one whose life he’d saved; what’s-her-name, begins with a V), but what about Luke bloody Ferris and his other so-called friends? Even if decades-old loyalty and the brotherhood of the pack didn’t count for anything, that bastard Ferris had got him into this mess by poisoning Ver - thingummy, the girl whose name he couldn’t call to mind. If he had the faintest shred of decency he should be tearing himself apart with guilt, desperate for a chance to atone, even if it cost him his life. Instead, nothing. Not a bark, not a whimper. Times like these, you find out who your true friends are.

  A cloud drifted quickly over the moon and Duncan felt his shape relax its grip for a moment. It felt like that point in a dream where you know you’re about to wake up, and that the dream isn’t real. But he hadn’t woken up, and it was still bloody real, thank you very much. Inside him, the horrible reality growled, and he felt a strong urge to find something to chase and, if at all possible, kill - or at least bite. Times like these, you find out who your true friends are; namely, nobody at all. Being a wolf was, all things considered, a bad thing. Being a lone wolf was no fun at all. But, he considered as he lifted his head and sniffed, we aren’t put on this earth just to have fun. Mostly we’re here to make things as nasty as possible for those around us.

  He listened for the nearest main thoroughfare and followed the sound. No pedestrians: it was just an anonymous urban dual carriageway, amber-lit and concrete-bleak. He tucked himself into a shadow and waited for a little while, until a white Transit van appeared in the distance, coming towards him. He let his tongue loll, his best shot at a grin.

  To make it a little bit more interesting, he made himself wait until the van had passed him and gone on a good hundred yards or so. Then he let his mind relax and his legs take over. The rhythm of the run came back to him like a favourite tune. When he was close enough, he could see the vague shape of the driver’s head, reflected in his side-view mirror. He accelerated.

  There was always a moment when the drivers noticed you; at which point, the key thing was to close in. At first they think Oh look, a dog. Then it’s That’s a big dog, then That’s a very big dog, and then That very big dog’s following me. And then an instinct as old as the species kicks in and overrides centuries of safe, civilised complacency - the pedal hits the metal and the chase is on. At first, the driver only speeds up a bit because, after all, it’s just a dog and what can it do to you when you’re safe inside your sealed steel box? Just enough speed to shake the stupid thing off, therefore, except that the stupid thing turns out to be much faster and much more tenacious than any dog has a right to be. So the right foot goes down a little further, the frown in the mirror crinkles round the edges with the beginnings of actual fear, and the huge running dog with the big red eyes is still hardly more than cruising . . .

  The trick, Luke always said, was to know where the speed cameras were. On urban freeways heavily infested with the things, you could shred some poor bugger’s licence in ten minutes flat and he wouldn’t even realise it until days later, when the summons hit his doormat.

  Tonight, however, it wasn’t going to be just about driving licences. There were other games you could play, or so the lads had said; not the sort of activity the Ferris Gang went in for, because - well, they were werewolves but deliberately hurting people wasn’t really their style. There were other packs, though - the Esher Boys, or the Wealdstone Crew - and you heard things. Discussing them with your pack-mates you might pretend that you approved, at least of the ingenuity and the panache, but deep down where it mattered you knew that we don’t do that sort of thing, because fundamentally, staring red eyes, slavering jaws and inch-long fangs aside, we’re basically nice.

  But there were those other games; and although nobody had shown Duncan how to play them, he reckoned he’d heard enough about them to figure out the basic rules. There was the one where, instead of maintaining that precise, psychologically perfect distance behind the van, you zoomed up flat out, overtook and hurled yourself at the driver’s side door, snapping at the handle with your teeth. The scoring system the Esher pack used, rumour had it, was five points for a swerve into the crash barrier, ten points for sideswiping another car, five bonus points for every vehicle that joined the pile-up, double bonus for each one that flipped over. Subtler, according to received opinion, was the Greenford serial kamikaze dive: when you overtook, instead of attacking you shot out in front of the target to give yourself a lead of, say, ten yards, and then stopped dead. The mess your granite-hard invulnerable body made of the van’s front end was just the preliminary selection of poppadums and dips. The fun started when the driver got out and tottered back to inspect your flattened corpse, whereupon you got slowly to your feet, hackles up, and did the extra-special growl. Where the fun ended depended on how fit the driver was, and whether he had a latent predisposition to coronary disease. You actually lost points if you had to bite him to finish him off - hence, presumably, the reputation for subtlety.

  The van driver had seen him. Duncan speeded up to cover the slight acceleration. Because he knew the driver would be looking at him, he lifted his head and let his tongue loll stylishly. His nose caught a faint tint of human sweat in the slipstream, heralding the start of the That’s a very big dog phase. He speeded up just a little bit more
. Keeping station is one thing, but gaining on them accelerated the lurch into irrationality. There was another game the bad boys played that all depended on getting mental control of the quarry, so that he started paying too much attention to his mirror and not enough to the road ahead. It was a delicate variant, all to do with nuances of pace, instinct and body language, and you got a triple bonus score if they crossed the central reservation and hit something coming the other way.

  It was working. The van was swaying from side to side, setting up a feedback loop of panic and over-correction. Duncan lengthened his stride just a touch—

  The file.

  Well, it wasn’t in his mouth. He must have left it behind when he started the game, or else dropped it at some point. He knew that losing the file was terribly important somehow, but he couldn’t be bothered with all that now, not when his control over the prey was tightening with each spurt of acceleration, to the point where his nose could already anticipate the smells of spilled diesel and burning rubber. Bowden Allshapes and Luke and all that nonsense seemed hopelessly remote, in any case. He wasn’t doing this because he was the victim of some bizarre and complex conspiracy, or because his friends and the girl he loved had left him up there in that office and not even tried to get him out. He was doing it because he was a werewolf; a good werewolf, possibly even a great one. Because it was fun.

  Smells don’t carry upwind, so the first he knew of it was a large, solid body looming up on his left side. The collision winded him; he lost his footing, stumbled, felt the hard asphalt slam into his shoulder and squeeze out all the air. Then he was tumbling, head over paws; the tarmac kept punching him - head, ribs, elbows, head again - until something metal and a bit stretchy caught him like a net, and he stopped. When he opened his eyes and saw what a mess he’d made of the crash barrier, he couldn’t help feeling mildly impressed. Eighteen-wheeler artics didn’t usually do that much damage.

  He smelled Luke Ferris before he saw him. The Ferris sweat had a distinctive tang to it that he’d know anywhere. This, however, was the first time he’d smelled Luke’s blood. Also quite distinctive, and there was—

  - Rather a lot of it.

  Duncan picked himself up, gave himself a good all-over shake, and looked round. Luke was a long, splayed shape on the opposite carriageway: he’d burst clean through the barrier (typical Ferris, had to outdo everyone else) and was lying stretched out, as if frozen in the middle of a flying stride. For some reason, all Duncan’s anger evaporated. Something was wrong. A healthy werewolf wouldn’t be lying like that, not with that rather distinctive newly ironed look that you only get with fresh road kill.

  If he’d still been angry, he’d have jumped the barrier. Instead, he walked slowly through the gap Luke had torn in it - taking his time, he realised, because he was in no hurry to get there and see what he had to see.

  It’s marginally better to travel hopelessly than to arrive, but Duncan got there in the end. Luke was still breathing, but he was making a noise like someone filing the sharp edges off thin sheet metal. He opened one eye as Duncan sidled up to him and sniffed.

  ‘So there you are,’ Luke said, and Duncan realised he could hear him the usual way, rather than in his mind. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  A bit like a slap round the face with a handful of nettles. ‘You have?’

  ‘We all have.’ Luke tried to nod, but apparently it was too difficult. ‘I asked the vampires where that dreadful woman might’ve taken you, but they said they had no idea. I think they were lying.’

  ‘But she gave you the address. For delivering the file.’

  ‘Really?’ Luke coughed, and something dark red and thickly wet trickled down the side of his jaw. ‘Don’t think so. The address they gave us turned out to be a key-cutting place in one of those grotty little streets near Victoria. So we split up and went out looking for you. Every night, after work. Pure chance I happened to catch a whiff of you tonight - extreme range, eight miles away.’ He glanced down at his back legs. Human legs were supposed to bend that way, but not a wolf’s. ‘I suppose I just got lucky, wouldn’t you say?’

  Duncan opened his mouth to say something, but it evaporated along the way.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’re out now, so that’s all right. I’d love to hear all about it, but I get the feeling that I’m a bit pushed for time. You know,’ he went on, ‘I’d always wondered exactly how much punishment one of these bodies could take, and now I know. It’ll survive pretty much anything except a fifty-mile-an-hour collision with another werewolf. Only,’ he added, ‘you don’t seem too bad. Which is great,’ he said, ‘but curious. A mystery. Oh well.’

  ‘Luke,’ Duncan said. ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  That infuriating Ferris don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about stare; if Luke hadn’t been dying, Duncan would’ve smashed his face in. ‘Ram into me like that. Stop me—’

  A slight frown, if wolves can do that sort of thing. ‘You know perfectly well why,’ Luke replied. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what got into you, but I know precisely what you were trying to do, and no, sorry, we don’t do that. The Walthamstow mob yes, but not us. It’s what you might call a point of honour. If you happen to be a pompous git, I mean.’

  Duncan wasn’t sure where the anger came from, but there was plenty of it. ‘And you think that’s worth getting yourself smashed up for.’

  ‘Me? Not sure. It’s you I was thinking of. You’re the one who’d have to live with it, if you’d caught that van like you were trying to. Stupid bastard,’ he added, with a trace of a grin. ‘You could’ve killed somebody. Sorry, am I boring you?’

  Duncan lifted his head. Maybe Luke was too badly smashed up to notice it, but the smell was everywhere. ‘She’s here,’ he said.

  ‘She who? Clare Short?’

  ‘The unicorn.’

  Luke laughed, messily. ‘Then you’d better give her my regards, but she’s wasting her time. I won’t be chasing anybody tonight, that’s for sure. You’d better clear off, though. Go on, don’t mind me.’

  Duncan turned round slowly. There she was, the milk-white unicorn. If anything, she looked more beautiful than ever, a soft bright glow that was far more than just light. The moon flared on her hooves and horn, as though she was drawing it in.

  ‘You arsehole,’ she said. ‘You complete shit.’

  ‘Go away,’ Duncan said. ‘I’m busy.’

  ‘You dropped this.’ The Allshapes probate file materialised in the air just in front of his face and flopped to the ground. ‘It’s a miracle I just happened to trip over it. Do you realise what it’d have meant if you’d lost it? I’m very angry with you. In fact—’ She broke off, and her soft white nostrils twitched. Then, apparently for the first time, she noticed Luke. ‘Oh for pity’s sake, not another one.’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  She came closer, and her nose brushed Duncan’s shoulder as she lowered her head to look. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘Another rescue bid.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A long equine sigh. ‘I must say,’ she said, ‘I’m glad I’m your enemy, not your friend. You really are a bit hard on the people you like.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not to mention,’ she went on, ‘inconsiderate. If you think I’ve got nothing better to do than go around snatching your nearest and dearest from the jaws of death—’

  It was as though what she’d just said was a windscreen, and he was a little slow, soft-bodied fly. Impossible, he thought frantically. She can’t possibly save him now, he’s all smashed up. She could cure Veronica because all it took was stopping her dying of garlic, which is just supernatural rubbish. This is different, it’s splintered bones and ruptured spleens and punctured lungs. Real stuff. There’s no way anybody can—

  ‘You can do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She was managing to sound as though he’d phoned her at five twenty-nine, just as she was on her way out of the office.
‘Any time in the next two minutes. After that, no. At least,’ she added, with a twinkle in her voice that made Duncan want to growl, ‘not in the sense you mean. Though - no offence - he’s not quite the sort of person we’re recruiting right now, career opportunities-wise. A bit too boisterous and Tiggerish, to be perfectly honest with you.’

  ‘I see.’ Duncan looked her in the eyes. It was like trying to outstare a tunnel. ‘Same terms as last time, I take it.’

  ‘Basically,’ she said. ‘Except this time, we’re really going to have to put in some kind of guarantee clause, to stop you wandering off every five minutes. I do understand you wanting to stretch your legs now and again, but I’m afraid it’s not on. Not when you’ve got responsibilities.’

  ‘Guarantee clause,’ Duncan repeated.

  ‘Oh, nothing too blood-curdling,’ she said briskly. ‘All I was thinking of was planting a silver bullet in your chum’s chest. You know the sort of thing - like old soldiers who carry on quite cheerfully for years and years with huge great chunks of shrapnel still inside them after they got blown up in the war: so long as it stays put and doesn’t move about, no bother at all. Same idea. So long as you stay put and do your job, the bullet doesn’t move. It’s no trouble,’ she added, ‘I can pop it in now before I close him up. Well, is it a deal?’

  ‘Duncan, for God’s sake.’ The words came out of Luke’s throat like air from slow puncture. ‘Don’t listen to her, mate. Don’t do it. I’m not worth it, OK?’

  ‘Oh dear.’ The unicorn sighed wearily. ‘You were at school together and everything, and still you don’t know him half as well as I do, you silly man. Now please be quiet and don’t move around more than you can help. There’s enough wrong with you as it is.’

  Duncan frowned. All his life, the trend had been for things to get more and more complicated, each set of aggravations and encumbrances impacting on its predecessors and snagging in those that followed. But that was what he’d grown used to, his natural habitat. Moments of perfect simplicity disconcerted him, and he wasn’t quite sure how they worked. Still, he thought, I’ll just have to do my best and hope I get the hang of it as I go along.