Ishmael replied with a disconcerted grunt. He gave up on the rest of his dinner. It was indigestible, even for a shape-shifter.
Once the Padre came back from the bathroom, Bridget laid her credit card on the bill, and the girl came by with a receipt to sign. After that, they left Thunder Bay by way of a truck stop gas station.
“Straight on to Halo County then?” Ishmael asked, as he buckled into the front passenger seat.
“Straight on ’til morning,” Bridget answered. “We can probably make it as far as Wawa before the next fill, especially if this tail wind keeps up.” She sipped her coffee. If it was bad, she didn’t complain about it.
“Stop when you need to,” Ishmael said. “I don’t mind. I can sleep in daylight.”
The cut of Bridget’s horseshoe jaw told him she was completely focused on the task at hand. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to drive, and she wanted to listen to her music. Granted, her passengers could survive any crash injury up to decapitation, but walking the last 1300 kilometres to Halo County was an unappealing prospect, so she wanted to stay alert enough to navigate the roller coaster twists of the Trans-Canada Highway, especially now that those hairpin turns were only visible as far ahead as the high beams would shine. One-handed, she turned on her iPod and jammed in one headphone, either so she could play her music as loudly as possible without waking the others, or so she could tune out any snoring that might tempt her to drowse behind the wheel.
Ishmael reclined as far as the seat would go. The Padre was on the rear bench, stretched out with his feet on the back window. Holly was on the middle bench, curled up on her side with her hands and sweater under her cheek. She smiled at him.
“You should get some sleep,” Ishmael said, just loud enough to be heard over the road noise.
Her smile faltered and died. “I’m afraid to.”
“I’ll be here. You’re safe. No nightmares this time,” he promised.
“Sleeping’s not the problem. It’s the waking up.”
He sneered mildly. “Come on. You’ve faced scarier things than this. Six years—”
“It’s not cannibals I’m afraid of,” she said. “There’s a mystery to be solved. And there’s nothing more she loves better than a mystery.”
Ishmael raised his forefinger against his lips. Discretion was the better part of valour, and he couldn’t completely trust Bridget. Like Angie Burley, Bridget had kept a hell of a lot secrets from Ishmael, including and especially the Wyndham Farms quarantine.
“There’s going to be a fight on our hands,” Ishmael said softly. “Lycanthropes versus Lost Ones, with thousands of lives at stake. And there’s nothing Holly Foster loves more than a good, healthy fight.”
Holly smiled at that.
“You’re safe here,” Ishmael said. “Get some sleep.”
With all his heart, he hoped she wouldn’t change, especially not in the car. He didn’t relish the idea of seeing Eva Foster again, and he certainly didn’t like the idea of her change pheromones flooding the cabin of the truck, or else there’d be one infuriated Foster hanging upside down in an overturned vehicle in the company of three angry and disoriented therianthropes.
Holly closed her eyes, snuggled into her balled-up sweater and tried to relax. Ishmael watched the ceiling of the van. He should have been sleeping, too. Instead, he was mentally reviewing that video, frame by frame, looking for tell-tale signs of digital manipulation. He closed his eyes for a good twenty minutes, settling into a state of deep physical relaxation, even though sleep remained out of reach. He gave up and checked the time. It wasn’t quite midnight yet. Holly was fast asleep, and the Padre snored a steady, rhythmic, high-pitched snore.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” Bridget asked. He could hear thin strains of music through her unused ear bud. She put the iPod on pause.
“Sure,” Ishmael said. His voice was thick, as if he’d been sleeping after all. “I’d like to tell you that, in my heart, you’ll always be my very first work-wife. Even though I have to divorce you now and hook up with a younger, hotter concubine, you’ll always be my number one.”
“Oh, you cad,” Claire Bambridge said, through Bridget’s unsmiling face. “About Holly.”
“Nothing I’d mention in polite society,” Ishmael said. He dropped his forearm over his eyes, pretending to be too tired to carry on a conversation.
“Ishmael,” she said. He was “Shmiley” when she needed something, “Ish” at nearly all other times, but when he was bad, she brought out his full name. It was akin to a mother using both first and middle names when her son was in deep trouble.
Ishmael lifted his arm. By the dim glow of the dashboard, he could see Holly was frowning and twitching in her sleep. “It’s complicated.”
“No shit. Do tell.”
“I mean that in the most scientific and biological manner possible,” he insisted. And I don’t know how much I trust you. “Besides, it’s not my secret to tell.”
You did save my ass, I’ll give you that. You literally went under fire to save me—to save us. But you were also deployed on Wyndham Farm missions for six years without telling me once about it. Hell, you hand-delivered me into Wyndham Farms yourself!
“I’ll bet that if you ask Holly directly, she’d give you an honest answer,” he added. And if you asked Eva . . . well, then you’d have your answer.
“Dude, I love you like a brother, but I want to throat punch you. Did you cross-infect her too?”
“No,” he said. “She didn’t need it.”
“What? You mean, she didn’t turn out like Grey’s other victims? He perfected the treatment?”
“No, I mean, she was never one of his patients. She’s not second or third generation either.”
“Then what the hell is she?”
“All natural lycanthrope,” Ishmael said. “Wolf-type, bit bigger than Jay, big bushy tail. And she can talk when she’s in cycle, if you can believe it. Never seen anything like her.”
“She’s one of us?”
“She was never a member of Wyrd, if that’s what you mean. Hers is one gigantic case of mistaken identity.” Which was utterly and painfully true. It just wasn’t the full truth.
Before his incarceration, Ishmael wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing Bridget in on the secret. Now, whenever he looked at her, he remembered the angry paramilitary officer chasing after him, the day she threw him into quarantine and left him for dead.
Bridget laughed softly. “Shit. Now I owe Two-Trees fifty bucks! He told me something like that was bound to happen.” She grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t have fallen for some deform . . .” She dropped the smile. “Never mind.”
Ishmael decided the safest way out of the awkward conversation was with abrupt redirection. “Nose . . . what did he mean by a nose?”
Bridget seemed to appreciate the quick topic change. “If they have suspects in jail, and if they’re lycanthropes, then God knows how long before they break out in hair. In custody. On camera.”
Ishmael nodded. “Yeah, but if they’re second generation victims, they’d be in pretty bad shape, physically. We wouldn’t need any noses.”
She agreed on that point. “But if they’re standard issue lycanthropes, like your sweetheart back there, then we have the same problem. They’re going to change eventually. We need to get in there, somehow, and identify them before they make themselves known.”
“Easy peasy,” he said, threading his fingers together behind his head. “Call Harvey. Get him to bring up his dogs.”
Specially trained dogs could pass as service animals in public and do what human-shaped Wyrd agents couldn’t: dogs could sniff out rogue lycanthropes in their human form.
“There’s a problem with Harvey,” Bridget said.
“And what’s Harvey’s problem this time?”
“You,” she replied. “He’s the one who found that video of the kittens and turned you in. He’s the reason you went to Wyndham Farms.”
He stared at the truck cab ceiling.
“But you knew already,” Bridget guessed.
“Gil told me.” He needed a backup plan, but all he could think about was how perfect a solution Harvey and his dogs would have been. He did have one other idea, but he doubted the Padre would go for it. “You’ll have to convince Harvey that there are bigger issues at hand.”
“Eight brand new kittens are a big issue at hand,” Bridget reminded him. “He’s been onto you since Moldova. You’ve been under investigation for the last seven years, and he’s been leading the charge since day one, and then one day he stumbles across that video. Hell, everyone’s been giving you the evil eye since Moldova, including me.” Her jaw flexed. “He’s not going to drop everything and come to your rescue just because you asked for help.”
“Then you ask for help.”
“He won’t talk to me either, dumbass. I’m the one who broke you out of prison, remember? He doesn’t trust me any more than . . .” She muttered under her breath. “Never mind.”
“No more than you trust me,” he said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“Do I what?”
“Do you trust me?”
She ground her teeth. “Do we have to talk about this now?”
“We could talk about the weather for the next . . .” He checked his watch. “Fourteen hours.”
“No,” she said. “Yes, and no. Yes, I trust you with the matter at hand, because I think you want to get to the bottom of this as fast as I do, and yes, I trust you to find this sicko and put him down.”
“And no, because . . . ?”
“Because of Moldova.”
Ishmael nodded. He’d suspected as much. The Moldova Incident had occurred only a few months before quarantine began. The only thing that seemed strange was how long it took for the Wyrd Council to finally drop the hammer and toss him into quarantine, too. “What do you know about the incident?”
“I know enough,” she answered tersely.
“What facts? Who said what?”
“What do you mean, facts? Hell, Ishmael, I was there when you got back! I saw the . . .” She shuddered. “The refrigerator.”
He inclined his head and muttered. “Not my most shining moment.”
“You and Jay killed almost three hundred people,” Bridget said. “That’s when I stopped trusting you. You save the likes of me, but you go over there and kill a hundred and fifty people?”
“So the story goes.”
“You brought back body parts as trophies, Ishmael. You brought them back and dropped them right there in the god damned Wyrd Council boardroom.”
“Well, so did Jay. Except he was a bit of a one-trick pony. He only brought back the heads.”
“Seriously? You make a joke about it?”
“You thought you knew me,” Ishmael murmured. He was soul-tired.
“I thought I knew you!” Bridget said, straining to keep from shouting. “You saved me! You’ve saved countless others. What was so different about Moldova that you had to slaughter a small town?”
“Orders,” Ishmael said. “That’s what was different.”
“The Wyrd Council ordered you and Jay to go abroad and kill three hundred people.”
“Yes, they did.”
“And that’s what you did.”
“So it would seem.” He began cracking his knuckles. On the plus side, though, the fever had abated, and aside from an unnerving buzz in his legs and fingertips, he was more or less comfortable. “Did you believe I did it?”
Bridget drew a deep breath. “Yes.”
“And now?”
She let the breath go. “I don’t know. No.” She glanced at him briefly. “They assigned me to your case a few months after you got back. When I looked through your travel records, you always came back from a mission by way of Bucharest, Odessa, and Varna, half a dozen East European cities, all of them within driving distance to Moldova. I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I saw the refrigerator. But if you’d shed that much blood, you wouldn’t go back so often.”
“All above-board business trips I could prove with receipts. Those corporations I set up abroad account for almost twenty percent of Wyrd’s annual income.”
“And when we had someone look into Wyrd bank records—and yours—we found out that you were overcharging mission expenses by thousands of dollars. Traveling without orders, and embezzlement! I have the proof, Ishmael. You stole from Wyrd and you’ve been going behind the Council’s back for years.”
“Okay, that’s about eighty percent true. Maybe seventy-five.”
“And then along comes the video, right in the middle of the whole quarantine mess.”
Ishmael picked at dirt under his nails.
“You’re the best damned tracker we’ve got,” she said. “We could have had those patients locked up months sooner, and with a hell of a lot fewer dead bodies to clean up. But they cut you out. Why? Because they didn’t trust you, and they had a damned good reason to stop trusting you.”
Outside the front passenger’s window, a long, wide hill sloped out of sight, revealing a moonlit valley lake nestled between ancient, worn-down mountains.
Ishmael cracked open a bottle of water and drank from it.
“It does have something to do with the Moldova Incident, doesn’t it?” Bridget asked.
“I think it has everything to do with the Moldova Incident.”
“Look, I could believe that you faked their deaths. But then you brought back body parts to prove what you’d done!”
Ishmael tipped the bottle in her direction, as a kind of salute. “That much is true. I did bring back a lot of body parts.”
“What the hell, dude. Seriously. I’m sitting with a serial killer. Even Chloe says you killed them all, and she hates you for it.”
He grinned, conscious of his fangs but not caring. It was a dark night and an empty road. “Is that what she said? That she hates me?”
Chloe Anderson was the vice-chair of the Wyrd Council, second in power only to Haberman, and was one hundred and twenty years old if a day. She had a series of birth certificates and photographs to prove it too, if anyone ever called her a liar. But she lacked the one thing Haberman had in spades: charisma. So whatever Haberman said was law, and to hell with merciful objection.
“She said she wanted to build a shelter for the Moldovan outbreak,” Bridget said. “Not kill them.”
“It was a bad outbreak,” Ishmael said. “No signs of stopping, and there were some very bad apples in that bushel. Local militia had a few victims in custody. Shit was about to hit the fan. And Chloe wanted to put all of the victims into one spot? Where one frightened lycanthrope could send change pheromones through the whole Pack of three hundred strong?”
She didn’t respond.
“Inevitable bloodshed aside, there’s no way even a former Communist country can keep a secret that big covered up. Bridget, the term ‘Werewolf Apocalypse’ comes to mind.”
“So you killed them all,” Bridget said.
“Seems that way,” he said again.
“And both you and Jay had to outdo each other by bringing home the most gruesome of body parts, to prove you did a good job.”
“Funny thing about that,” Ishmael said. “You know, Gil ran DNA tests on every single one of those body parts. Wyrd told him to do it.”
“Haberman?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? To prove they were all lycanthropes?”
“For one thing, yeah,” Ishmael said. “To be fair, I’m sure the eleven humans Jay killed would have been infected sooner or later.”
She snorted. “And your accuracy?”
“Hundred percent.”
“Well congracha-shit-u-lations.”
“The other reason why Gil was told to run DNA tests was to prove that all the body parts came from different individuals, because Jay said I was double-counting. A hundred and fifty-two body parts, sure, b
ut they might have been from only thirty victims. A couple of ears, some half-human hands, a clawed foot, one heart, two brains . . . All could have come from a handful of individuals.”
“But every trophy came from a different victim, I suppose.”
“Absolutely.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“Yep,” he said. “Funny how easy it is to adapt to life without a left foot.”
She seemed to inflate with pride. “You son of a bitch!” Her smile widened. “I knew it!”
“Yeah. In some cases, the ears grew back after one or two cycles. And what’s a foot to a guy who can sit and work as an accountant? What if you could set him up to work from home?”
“And the . . . heart? The brains?”
He rolled the water bottle between his hands. “Those were necessary. Recruiters. Domestic terrorists. Basically, people who enjoyed infection too much and made every effort to stay in cycle. You know, the ones Wyrd should be culling.”
Bridget puffed a quiet laugh and shook her head. “The embezzled funds—”
He shrugged. “It costs a lot of money to set up an enclave. Housing. Bribes. Forged identification. Capital to start-up a local telecom, two factories, a large web-design firm, a farm, a small chain of grocery stores, one lawyer, a clinic . . . At first, that capital came from my own holdings, which Wyrd knows nothing about, but I started running low, and I had to get creative. Now they make so much money I’ve replaced the embezzled funds six times over.”
Bridget’s eyes gleamed in the dashboard lights.
“Chloe says she hates me because Chloe has to keep up the act,” Ishmael said. “One slip, and Wyrd goes back to finish the job I started. But she knows. I told her, and then Anders confirmed it for her. Anders has spent years with them, ensuring that their population gets richer, not bigger.”
“Anders Jewell Anderson?” Bridget said, mystified. “I thought he went rogue years ago.”
“He did, sort of. Broke from the Council when Haberman was elected chair. But he’s more freelance than rogue.” He grunted. “I wonder if anyone told him about quarantine.”
Road noise filled the thoughtful silence between them.
“Chloe says Haberman had four reasons to issue a death warrant for them,” Ishmael continued, shifting to get cozier in his seat. “For one, as humans, they were Gypsies. Two, as animals, they weren’t wolf-like enough. Three, because there were so many of them, it would be nearly impossible to keep them all secret and hidden. And four, because they were from the old Communist countries, he said, they were uneducated, unmotivated—un-profitable. So, since they were a physical and financial liability, they had to die.”
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 10