I turn in time to see the last rounds hit, just barely able to make out the shape of the old grey wolf spinning in the air, ragged pieces of fur and bone flying away from its side.
The animal hits the ground with a yelp, at the very same second that Bob yanks my collar against my throat and heaves me into the back of the jeep. The two younger Vargas brothers are reeling me in, holding me down into the seat as Bob clambers for a hold on the car. Jed is half-out of the car, reaching for him. I throw my own hand out and catch Bob’s fingers just as the mass of villagers presses down on top of him. They’re climbing over him, grabbing at the three of us in the back.
Jed is out of the jeep and swinging. “Bob!”
Fists flying left and right at his friends and neighbours. “Goddammmit, you let go of him!”
Bob is being pulled under. I can’t hold him. I’m losing my grip.
Jed stomps a boot down on the mindless zombies clinging to Bob’s back, and his fingers are gone.
I hop out, kicking and screaming, Jed and I both pulling bodies off from the pile, while shrugging off clawing hands and grappling arms. A huge arm flies past my head. I turn and come face to mangled face with the bartender from the Victory. He’s wearing the same torn Dead Kennedys shirt and is still seven feet of bad news. His eyes are misted with grey, and the snarl that contorts his face makes the scarred and paralyzed half of his head even more terrifying. His giant hands find my throat and heave me into the air, my feet dangling and kicking at nothing.
I feel the blood trapped in my head. He’s going to pop me like an overgrown zit. My vision is swimming, and I’m struggling to stay awake, let alone alive. My feeble swats at his tree-trunk arms accomplish nothing. I catch something moving far off in my periphery, something that’s not moving like a shambling meat-puppet. I put all of my strength into one hard twist, and I swing my legs out, catching the momentum at the top of the swing and reversing, heaving just far enough to pull the big biker off balance and move him two steps to the right, just as the bullet that was meant for my head explodes in a cascade of hot blood, bone, and soft, pink meat. His vice grip releases and we crumple together. I can hear McQueen cursing in the gloom, trying to reload his empty gun.
Jonah is screaming, “Go! Go! Go!”, and I struggle to my feet. We each grab handfuls of buckskin and pull. I collapse into the jeep, still hanging on to Bob’s shirt as I hack and cough, my throat raw and ragged and struggling to reopen itself. The jeep spits gravel as the tires find purchase, and Bob’s feet drag behind us for the five seconds it takes us to haul him in like a big leather-clad tuna.
Jed and Jonah watch in disbelief as Main Street disappears into the wall of dust behind us.
Bob slumps beside me. “Holy shit.” He pats me down, puts a finger to the blood on my face where Mary-Ellen Troll Doll had gouged and carved me. “You all right, kid?”
“Arthur,” I say in disbelief. “He shot Arthur.”
Bob looks at me with wet eyes and says nothing. He just pats a hand on my leg, but I can feel the hitch in his chest as he fights back his own tears.
I hang my head and stare in disbelief at the silver-headed cane lying at my feet.
32
EACH OF THE brothers grabs a bag from the back, as we all pile out of the jeep and stumble into the garage. Bob tells them to hole up and wait out the storm. He’s limping on his left leg, and one side of his face is swollen and purple. I ask him if he’s okay.
“Blood’s on the inside, right?” he says. “Most of it.”
I’m guessing that Magus will only have control as long as he stays in town. “He’ll assume we’re already headed for Bensonhall, and he’ll want to cut us off at the pass.”
“You’re going to need help,” Jonah says, stuffing bullets into rifles as his brothers pull the tow trucks up in front of the bay doors, locking the place down.
“So will everybody in town, your mom is out there. She might be hurt,” Bob says. “I’ll go with Finn. This ain’t your fight.”
“Bob is right,” Jerry says, rushing in from the side door. “Whatever that guy did out there, it’s almost cleared. If what Bob and Finn says is true, there’s going to be a lot of confused, hurt, and pissed-off people over on Main Street.”
I shake each of their hands as we leave, Jerry pulling me in close, strong arms around me, and his brothers follow suit, all three of them huddling in on me.
“You go kick that wizard’s ass,” Jed says, handing me a thermos. “All that was left.”
MAYBE FIVE MINUTES have passed since we escaped Main Street. I’m behind the wheel, and Bob is in the back of the jeep, digging through duffel bags of ammo and guns, matching up what he can, loading and checking weapons as if he’d been doing it all his life.
“You said the Vargas boys’ mother was back there?”
“Mary-Ellen. Runs the diner. I think I hit her with the rifle . . . by accident. Wasn’t gonna tell them that.”
A momentary whiff of raisin pie hits me. Jesus.
Bob lifts a complicated-looking death machine in his hands, twists some knobs and cranks that part underneath like he’s Steven fucking Seagal.
“Did you learn that watching movies too?” I holler back to him.
He gives me a sly smile from the side of his face that doesn’t look like he went three rounds with a Mack truck.
“I told you. Navy SEALs.”
I watch him in the rear-view as we kick and bounce up the dirt road through the trees.
“There’s no Navy SEALs in Canada. Is there?”
He winks at me.
“Shoot to kill, shoot to thrill, baby.”
BOB TAPS MY shoulder and points where he wants me to go.
I pull the jeep in at the house in the woods. My father’s house. My house. I rumble the thing around the back where the clothesline is still rusting in the yard. Bob hops out on his good leg and hobbles around the house, swinging his rifle in wide, slow arcs as he goes. Seeing the calm intensity, the eagle-eyed calculation, and the way he holds the gun, it’s obvious that he wasn’t kidding. Bob Dylan was a goddamn Navy SEAL, or whatever the Canadian equivalent is.
He makes with the hand signals again, two fingers to the eyes, then sweeps them across the perimeter. The fingers go to his chest, then point at the house. He does all this as his eyes are elsewhere, scanning every possible hiding place in the surrounding brush and forest. Bob climbs the back steps, lifts the gun in one hand, pointing to the sky, and tests the knob. As it turns, Bob freezes, stiffens, then catapults himself over the railing into the grass as the top half of the door explodes in a hail of splintering wood.
“Run, Finn!” he shouts and dives for the treeline.
McQueen is standing on the other side of the ruined door, a wide, wild-eyed grin on his face.
“Welcome home, little Finn!” he calls, levelling the shotgun from his hip and racking another load into the chamber.
I dive left as the ground explodes on my right. McQueen steps out into the light, racking the gun again.
“You stole my jeep, you mutt-dingo bastard. Putting up a good fight though. I do love me a challenge.”
He steps out into the grass, his foul reek mixing with the smell of gunpowder to overpower the smell of the mouldering autumn forest.
“Your old man never had this kind of spirit, Finn. You know how he died?”
I’m scrabbling backwards in the grass, kicking the work boots off of my feet. I’m almost to the trees, wondering at the chances that I have enough time to change and make the leap to safe cover. Maybe I jump the other way. Rip this bastard’s throat out and shut his mouth for good.
“You know that old joke about the bear taking a shit in the woods?” he says, creeping up. “I caught your daddy all alone with his pants down. I put a bullet right between his fuckin’ eyes.”
He lifts the shotgun and takes aim. I’m pulling at the buttons on the coveralls. The smoke is swirling, and my bones are twisting. The sky swims in circles. My feet are under me and my
senses keened, just as the blast crashes through the air. It shatters a tree far to the left of me.
I turn with wolf eyes and watch Bob grappling with McQueen in the long grass. Bob has the shotgun pressed against McQueen’s throat, pinning him to the ground. McQueen struggles and squirms, fighting to keep the hot metal off of his neck
“Go, goddammit! Raigan’s! Go to Raigan’s!”
I lunge forward, ready to tear McQueen to pieces. There’s a fury behind my bloodlust. Something I don’t quite fathom in this form, but I understand Bob’s words.
Go. Raigan.
Run.
I PICK MY way through the trees, through the underbrush, until I catch the scent of the trail I’d run with the two little wolves. I run, leaping and bounding, faster and faster, green and orange and brown blurring in my eyes. I smell the stream at the top of the cliff, I hear the water rushing down. The familiar tang of apples, cinnamon, rich spices.
I splash across the stream and heel at the edge of the woods. The charms are gone, the trees scorched as if some strange flame had licked just this spot. There’s no fire burning. No smell of charcoal and ash.
The unmistakable scent of sulfur and ammonia. Dead fish. Rotting oceans. Nothing that should be here.
I step carefully into the black remains of the little yard in front of Raigan’s cabin. There is a tiny sound of life, somewhere inside. Ragged breathing and almost inaudible moans. If I had human ears I’d never hear it.
I sniff at the air inside the cabin. The evil stops at the door. The inside of the cabin is untouched, aside from a chair lying across the floor, a smashed cup in a puddle of brown tea, and the old woman dying in the corner.
I can smell the death on her. It’s coming soon. Raigan is scorched like the outside of her house, hair singed away, skin mottled and flayed, black at the edges of a dozen oozing red patches that cover the majority of her face. I nudge her with my snout, and she cries out, a garbled mess of sound, more anguish than pain. She reaches a blistered hand to touch me behind the ears, running broken, gnarled fingers through my fur. It seems to calm her. She takes a shuddering breath in through what’s left of her nose and coughs.
“Finn? Thank the mother!” The words sputter and fade as they leave her lips. She has minutes, maybe less. I will myself back into being, the room spinning out of focus and then clearing, the ghost of transformation seeping out of me and then sucked inside as my skin swallows up the fur, and I’m Finn again.
“Raigan,” I say softly. “You’re going to be okay.” The panicked words of someone with no idea what else to say. I know she’s dying. She knows it too.
A curdled laugh chokes out of her throat, and she clasps her ruined hands on mine.
“We both know that’s not to be.”
“What happened? Magus?”
“Julia brought him here. Took the boys. I tried . . .”
“They took the boys? Jules let him take them?” A red fever swells up into my eyes, and my head is pounding with blood. Panic and doubt are eclipsed by absolute fury. My hands tighten around hers, and she winces.
“How do I stop him?”
She coughs again, a red foam of spittle catching at the edges of her mouth.
“I felt his power, Finn. He’s not ancient, but he has stolen so much power that is. He is death for the Strong Wolves.”
A sliver of despair lodges in my heart like a knife, cold and hard.
“No. There has to be something. Some way. We can’t all die for nothing.”
She coughs again, and the blood comes thick and black, filling her mouth and drooling out into a pool beneath her. She spasms, tightening the grip on my hands. Her milky eyes widen and bulge.
“The secret! He wants the secret!” she shouts, her words gurgling and spitting from deep in her throat.
I pull her up from the floor, hoping to stem the choking gouts of blood that seem to be drowning her.
“Strong wolves!” she screams. “Strong. Wolves. Dressed of fur.”
She grips my arm so hard that the bare tendons pop.
“Fierce of teeth!”
Aunty Raigan coughs once more, the black blood pooling at her lips, stagnant.
One more maiden lost athwart the gloom.
33
I LIFT RAIGAN from the floor and lay her across the thin mattress in one corner of her cottage. I drape her with a long knit afghan.
I sit, exhausted, defeated. Raigan is dead. Arthur is dead. Kevin and Jamie on their way to their doom, if they’re not already dead too. Jules lost to the enemy. Bob left behind to fight the hunter. Sacrificing himself, for what? So I could come here and watch another one of us die. Emma . . .
Emma.
What had Magus said? She belongs to me. But there was something else, something lost in the nightmare of that storm that swallowed them all whole.
I close my eyes, see him floating over me, tumbling the world around us like a snowglobe. The winds swirling dust in every direction. A cyclone of confusion and noise. Brought here to stud. That’s what he’d said. One of my pets. She belongs to me.
Impregnated.
Mated.
I CLOSE MY eyes again, reach out into the ether and try to find the third eye Raigan spoke of, the thing that connects me to Emma, the thing we share in our dreams. A window opens in my mind, a room cascading with white, echoes all around. Music. Not the light, airy tinkling of Arthur’s playing. Loud, angry chords, hammering down, with a manic tinkling. I’ve heard it before. Russian. Something scary from a marionette show when I was little. A girl who dances herself to death. The Rites of Spring.
I step out into the dusk, running to the edge of the cliff, pink fading to purple above me, and I train my ears on the valley below. I hear it still, now a rolling procession of notes with a steady thump-thump-thump behind it. They’re in the big house. In Arthur’s parlour. Emma is there, right now.
One breath as I turn, and the change is already upon me. My body changes as I move, the smoke of one body trailing after me as I bound down the trail in the other. My legs carry me fast, charging down the cliff face, across the woods, and to the edge of the clearing. The music growing louder and more terrible as I get closer. A madman’s terrifying interpretation of something beautiful. It hurts my ears, and I want to yowl out against it, but I stay quiet and low to the ground, creeping around to the furthest cabin, the cabin where Kevin and Jamie live, sniffing at the air for some trace of them. There is nothing but the faded remnants of their presence. The next cabin yields the same results, the vague remembrance of Jules, but no sign of life.
I feel my hackles rise as I step carefully past McQueen’s cabin, the stench of him filling my nostrils, but a stale version of it that tells me he’s no longer there either. Which leaves only one place for me to go. The big house.
I steal in from behind the house, past the mechanical shed, the ammonia and machine-oil smell making me swing wide into the trees. I come to the back wall with my eyes up to the open window of the parlour, the strange and unpleasant hammering of piano keys still filling the night around me.
The side of the house is dark and quiet. I step carefully from the shadows, testing the air for the foul odours of either of my enemies. Soft-padded paws climb the steps onto the wide porch, but it’s human hands that open the door, and I step into the dim expanse of the front foyer naked and unprotected. I catch the faintest whiff of McQueen, hidden under layers of chemical.
He hits me full force from behind, and I’m caught, breath forced out in a blast underneath the weight of him.
I struggle to free my arms enough to reach him, his knee in the middle of my back, strong arms twisting my own behind me. He pins them with his knees and twists his weight to dig his kneecap as far into my spine as possible.
“Didn’t see that coming? Oldest trick in the book, mate. Give you my scent, let you get used to it, set it in your tiny little dog-brain, then I cover it up with something stronger, and you couldn’t sniff me out if I was right on top of you.” He l
aughs. “Which I fucking am!”
I groan and squirm, but he has me. I will myself to smoke and hope the change will let me slip out from under him. The pain in my shoulders comes in blasts of hot fear, the arms twisted away from the sockets, tendons and ligaments screaming. I can’t focus. I close my eyes and pray for the smoke to swallow me up and set me free.
“Not this time!” He spits and shoves my face into the floor, his other hand deftly sliding under my throat. A hot band of thick leather closes around my neck with a snap, and my will to fight is gone.
McQueen is up on his feet. I see his legs in front of me and, deep inside, I want to attack. I want to turn and sink my teeth into them, twist and feel the bones snap, see the red burst forth as the jagged splinters tear through the skin. The thoughts are far off and fuzzy, like trying to remember a dream. The inside of my head is filled with grey mist. It clouds everything. I just want to close my eyes against it—not move, not think—just close my eyes and sleep.
“Get up, you fucking mutt,” McQueen snarls. He swings his foot back and drives it straight into my belly. I feel the impact, feel myself lift up off of the floor and fall hard back against the wood of the floor. I feel my stomach lurch. I feel the bile burn up through my throat and explode out of my mouth. I can feel it, wet, on the side of my face. I can smell it, acid and old blood. I lay in it. Broken.
There’s a tug at the back of my neck, the leather band pulls tight at my throat, and I obey. I climb to my feet, stand, and wait for McQueen to show me the way. Inside I’m screaming. Wailing. Thrashing my fists against the walls.
Kill him! Tear him to pieces!
What are you waiting for?
My feet, my legs, they move all on their own, against every impulse I’m sending from my own brain.
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