The story was about a young girl who was shunned by her people for having white hair, and about a boyish trickster named Wenabozho. In an earlier book, she’d been very sad that she was the only person in her band who had no colour. The Trickster, feeling sorry for her, gave her a gift of magic paints, so instead of having no colour, she now had them all. She didn’t need any solid surface to paint on, either; she could even paint in the air. On page 4, she painted a butterfly and it came to life. On page 5, she painted a bird in one panel, and in the next panel, the bird was perched on her paintbrush, singing. The creatures were only shimmering illusions, but they seemed as alive as the real thing.
One spring, according to Red Cloud’s story, Sister Whitehair’s village was plagued by a hungry demon with a bone flute. He’d sit outside someone’s wiigiwaam and play, making the sleepers inside come out and dance all night long, while he went in and ate all their food. The sleepers would dance all the following day, too, until the victim collapsed of hunger. This happened night after night for so long, that the band was famished. They were so hungry their legs were like sticks, and their arms were like reeds. The chief called the young men together and sent out his fastest warrior to fight the evil spirit where it lived beside the lake, but that young man was gobbled up before he could reach the shore. Then the chief called the strongest warrior, but he was gobbled up before he made it halfway down the forest path. Finally the chief called forward his bravest warrior of all, but as soon as he’d told the young man what to do, the evil spirit came to the chief’s tent and gobbled up the warrior right before their eyes.
The people of the village said it was because Sister Whitehair was a witch, and evil spirits came to her because they were in love with her. They begged the Chief to do something about Sister Whitehair and her family. The Chief agreed and made plans to bind up Sister Whitehair and her whole family and throw them into the lake to drown, to appease the good spirits and to ward off the bad.
Sister Whitehair begged the Trickster to help her village fight the monster, or to make their warriors stronger and faster, like Bear or Wolf. So the Trickster came to the village to talk to the chief and the elders. “You must help us kill the Dancing Spirit,” they said. The Trickster laughed. “That old spirit? He’s harmless. Why, even the least of you could defeat him, if she put her mind to it.”
The elders turned to the chief. “He means that we have to send Sister Whitehair. She doesn’t stand a chance! This is our opportunity to get rid of her once and for all!” So the elders dressed her up like a little warrior and sent her to the edge of the lake, where the evil monster lived. Thinking only about the safety of her people, the little girl marched off to certain doom.
Ishmael read all of this with a growing smile.
“So that makes you what, a hundred and two?” Bridget asked.
Ishmael’s attention wandered.
“A hundred and two years since full infection,” Foster answered. “We have no idea how old we were when we were infected. For all I know, we could have been ninety-nine human years old, and had the odometer reset back to nineteen, post-infection.”
If Anders Jewell Anderson is older than A. Hab, why does he look younger? The question was still bothering him: why was Haberman bald? Was he shaving his head, like he said, or did he simply stop growing hair? Which is the antithesis of being a lycanthrope. No matter what variant you’ve got, growing hair is the hallmark of the condition.
Another question came to mind, one that Angie Burley had asked him. You ever seen him in his furry pyjamas? Haberman was an intensely private man when it came to anything bodily-related. He had a private washroom, soundproofed, far at the back of the house. He never left his room without donning a three piece suit, no matter the weather. Shorts were an abomination, no matter who wore them. He was the Old World Gentleman Soldier, and the New World CEO.
Ishmael had confronted Haberman once, a year after Bridget was brought over. He’d been at his wits’ end, and he was tired of Haberman demanding answers. Who was the rogue hyena? Where was he? Six victims in as many months, all on Canadian soil. Why couldn’t Jay catch him? Why couldn’t Ishmael? Two of Wyrd’s best trackers, months of intensive hunting, a hundred thousand dollars spent in bribes and travel expenses, and the hyena aberration was still on the loose. Ishmael, who’d never seen Haberman in his “furry pyjamas”, asked if Haberman was the aberration in question. He’d lost a tooth in that fight. Haberman didn’t need to change; he had a way of knocking a therianthrope out cold before he even thought to change skins. If not for Harvey and his dogs, Ishmael would never have believed Haberman was a lycanthrope at all. But it was Chloe who confirmed it. Haberman was a classic type, brown and black with no seasonal changes in coat, bipedal and tailed, with yellow eyes and hairy palms, the whole nine yards. She’d dated him during the Edwardian period, before Haberman met his beloved wife, who died a few years later from the Spanish Flu, presumably before the lycanthropy kicked in.
And what has any of this got to do with Halo County?
“Dep came to me a couple of days before we left,” Bridget said. “Looking for advice on women.”
“Really,” Foster asked. “Even during his false starts?”
“I figure because of his false starts.” She asked for a six. Foster didn’t have one. “You ever wonder why I remembered my kids? Why I remember so much of my pre-infection life?”
Foster said she hadn’t given it much thought.
“It was Ishmael’s idea,” Bridget said, as if Ishmael wasn’t in the room. “He knew I’d lose my memories, my . . . me-ness. So he set me up in this camper way out the middle of nowhere, where I could change and scream and rage and hunt. But first, he had me record a videotaped message of myself, and keep a mirror near the TV. Every time I started having a little change, I was supposed to play the tape, listen to the sound of my own voice, see how my face was changing, remember why I was changing, and why I wanted to change. Live, so I could wreak vengeance on the man who turned me, that kind of thing.” She shrugged. “And it worked. Sort of. Toward the end, I didn’t feel like Claire—uh, the old me. I’d become my own sister, just like my cover story would say. He built me a history, electronically, gave me a new diploma, a certificate of adoption, the names of adoptive parents, everything. And he kept tabs on my kids for me while I was . . . indisposed.”
Foster was looking at him, Ishmael could feel it. He busied himself even farther away.
“So when Dep started feeling like he was losing something—honest to God, I didn’t think he was having his false starts yet—I got out my phone and made him record a message to himself, and then made a copy that he could watch whenever he wanted,” Bridget said.
“Is that where he runs off to?” Ishmael asked. “Grey said he’d bugger off and no one would be able to find him.”
“Sure. I set it up on my DVD player in the garage, in that little office space you built for me. He goes in there, sits himself down, and his lips move and his head nods like he’s reading along with his favourite bedtime story.” She turned in her seat, one hand on her generous, muscular thigh. “Don’t know why you didn’t suggest it to him yourself, since you did it for me.”
Ishmael was inspecting a smoke-coloured glass bowl, bevelled, and well used for holding candles. “Because I didn’t want him to remember what you did to him and his family.”
Bridget’s face went pale. She turned around in her seat and paid more attention to Foster, who was uncharacteristically reticent.
God, I can’t stay here another second.
Foster and Bridget played cards in silence and without much enthusiasm. Ishmael wanted to go outside and hit things. He needed to be in town. He needed to be digitally connected. He needed to know if his message to his London friends had gone through.
“So, does he have to change his name or something?” Foster said.
“What do you mean, change his name?” Bridget asked. “As far as I knew, there weren’t any missing persons reports
out on Andre Boucher-Veneur.”
“No, not him.”
The Padre shoved open the splintered door. Ishmael came over to help him with the fuel he’d managed to find. At least the fireplace was still in good working order, once the Padre took a stout branch, climbed the roof, naked, and knocked down the birds’ nest in the chimney. It would be even warmer once Two-Trees returned with fuel for the generator.
“You know, when he gets infected,” Foster asked.
Bridget stared at her. “Who, Two-Trees?”
“Yeah. You said all human Wyrd agents were named after types of trees. Sumac, Larch, Pine, Maple . . . That’s why you call him Two-Trees, right? I always thought that was a cruel joke,” Foster said. “Sure, they’re strong and flexible, but dogs piss on them, day in and day out.”
“All human Wyrd agents are named after types of trees, yes, and when they’re successfully infected, we give them new call signs, yes,” Bridget said. “They’re all named after trees in honour of Red Cloud, George, and Hector Two-Trees. Grandfather, father, son. Red Cloud was one of the first human agents in Wyrd. Certainly the best, until the end.”
“I didn’t know that,” Ishmael said. He helped the Padre hunt down matches and tinder.
“Red Cloud Two-Trees was one of the founding members of Wyrd, supposedly,” Bridget said. “And yes, some agents have been brought over and renamed, accidentally or on purpose. One of the women I hired to staff the quarantine guard’s camp—she spent a full year up there, perfect record, hard worker. On my recommendation and her request, she was deliberately infected. Wolf-type, her choice. We call her Anye now.” She asked for an ace. Foster didn’t have one.
The Padre pointed to the kitchen cupboards and asked for a boost over the gaping hole in the floor, to see if he could find matches. Ishmael looked around for a ladder, anything that could keep the Padre from falling into the cellar and breaking his neck.
“But not Two-Trees,” Foster said. “You won’t . . . infect him.”
“No, not Hector. He’s on the Do Not Promote list. Gil tested his blood. Like his father George, he carries the recessive genetic markers for Cystic Fibrosis. If he’s infected, that disease will develop and kill him inside a year.”
Foster sighed. “Just like Gil, only a shorter deadline. Someone tried to turn him, too.”
Bridget glanced up at Ishmael, sad but accusing. Foster sat up straighter, turning in surprise to Ishmael. The Padre had let fall whatever he was picking up.
There were at least six new lycanthropes in Halo County alone, there were eight new kittens prowling around, and yet Gil was dying, a carrier but never successfully infected.
“But I thought you said you never turned anyone,” the Padre said softly.
“I didn’t,” Ishmael growled. He left the way the Padre had come in.
ISHMAEL STOOD ON the moss, listening to a raven in the trees, thinking about Wyndham Farms—wistfully, even. There, everyone responsible for their own lives. Survive or die. Nothing in between.
He could still hear Foster and Bridget chatting by the window. The encroaching forest was silent, and Ishmael’s ears were nearly as acute as when they were fully feline. Foster was asking why Two-Trees never married or ever had kids to carry on such a worthy bloodline.
A car was coming up the path. Branches hung so low that they slapped the roof of Buckle’s car. Buckle was driving slowly and carefully.
“Then why does Hector risk it?” Foster asked. “One bite, and it’s a death sentence.”
After a long moment, Bridget answered. “He does it for the same reason I do.”
Buckle’s car parked, and Two-Trees got out of the passenger’s side. Buckle turned off the engine, but he wouldn’t move.
“Hey,” Two-Trees said.
He does it for the same reason she does.
“Hey,” Ishmael replied.
Revenge.
“So we lost the hotel rooms,” Two-Trees said. “All the luggage was waiting downstairs for us.”
“Because of the credit cards?” Ishmael asked.
Two-Trees nodded. “Tried my personal credit card. Same idea. They say the card was shut down because of suspected fraud. Go figure, eh?” He handed Ishmael a plastic bag. “Take a whiff before you put them on.”
“New?”
Two-Trees gave him a receipt. “When we’re done here,” Two-Trees said, “I want you to give that man a good job and a hell of a salary. He paid for all these out of his own back pocket.”
“You talked him into joining?”
Two-Trees shook his head slowly. “Ishmael, there is no more Wyrd for him to join.”
“You tried calling Gil?”
“Number’s disconnected.”
“What?”
“Tried every Wyrd extension. Nothing. Wyrd has gone dark.”
“Are you safe?” Ishmael had asked, and Gil had said “No” and hung up.
Dep. Helen. Gil. Oh, God, Gil . . . hang on. We’re coming.
“We’re far up shit creek,” Two-Trees said, “and still miles to go before we find the source.”
Ishmael opened the bag and took a whiff. He felt no effect.
“We went almost to Sudbury to find a shop run entirely by old men,” Two-Trees said. “I hope you like Polo shirts.”
He closed the bag and asked if he’d bought anything for the Padre. Two-Trees had. He also had shoes and groceries in the trunk. Ishmael thanked him. His feet were red from the cold.
“And what about him?” Ishmael asked, chucking his chin at the car parked at the corner of the tumbledown shack. “He knows now.”
Two-Trees was staring at the ground between them.
“You know the rules,” Ishmael said. “No, screw the rules. Whether Wyrd still exists or not, we’re not welcome. But you know the consequences of him seeing—”
“Don’t preach, Ishmael.” He had his free hand resting on the hilt of one of his knives.
This man has been with Wyrd for nearly as long as I have been, and he’s as human as the day he was born. How the hell has he managed?
“It’s his decision now,” Two-Trees said. “Get dressed. Talk to him. But if he chooses—”
“I’ll make it quick.”
Two-Trees caught him by the arm. “I . . .” He locked eyes with him. “I’ll make it quick.”
Ishmael had only meant that he would make it a quick conversation, and let Buckle have some time alone to think it through, but Two-Trees, clearly, took his job way more seriously than Ishmael did.
“And I’ll make it clean,” Two-Trees said.
He thanked Two-Trees quietly for the clothes, and he went to sit in Buckle’s car, because Ishmael, for one, didn’t think a witness had to die, even if he was a threat.
There were enough lives lost already.
Buckle still had his hands on the steering wheel. Cords of muscle and vein stood out in his face and neck. He breathed shallowly through his nose.
Ishmael let the passenger’s seat slide back on the rails and put on one of the new shirts. It was a size too small, but it would have to do. “You know, you look like a Mesquite kind of guy to me. Ever consider a change of careers?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
FOSTER SAT IN the front passenger’s seat of Ishmael’s truck. Ishmael rode in the backseat while Buckle drove them into town. Two-Trees followed in his own truck with Bridget and the Padre. No one was happy about the arrangement, but Bridget had convinced them. If they walked into one of the many “trigger buildings”, they’d need their so-called cadaver dog to pick up the trail from there. And at least doglike, no one could arrest the Padre on suspicion of murder.
“There’s a slim chance that one or both of the Reid brothers infected someone in Halo County,” Foster began to explain, the moment she’d fastened her seatbelt. “If that person then infected someone else, they could spread it around—and so on, and so on—It’s really just your basic epidemiology.”
Buckle drove in silence. Ishmael could empathize. It
was a lot of information to take in.
“I’m familiar enough with the virus,” Foster said, “that I should be able to extract it from the plasma and identify it more or less at a glance with the proper . . .”
Ishmael looked up when her voice trailed off. She turned in her seat, facing him.
“What do we know about the other Reid? His alternate form?” she asked. “All along, I’ve been operating under the assumption that twin brothers would have the same reaction—the same alternate body type, quadrupedal, coyote-like . . . When we know very well that Grey’s treatments were incomplete and had wildly different effects on every patient—”
“Treatments?” Buckle asked. It was the first word he’d said since “I need time to process this,” and that had been nearly thirty minutes earlier.
Foster looked from Ishmael to Buckle and back again, as if unsure how much more she should say. Ishmael shook his head.
“Dr. Grey was trying to find a cure,” she said, and left it at that. Buckle’s face relaxed a little. Ishmael hoped Buckle had assumed “a cure . . . for lycanthropy.” What Grey had been trying to cure was death itself, and he’d reinvented lycanthropy instead. “Anyways, like sire like pup, right? Bitten by the Padre, you end up looking like the Padre. Get bitten by Ishmael, you—”
“Foster,” Ishmael sighed. She was doing wonderful things for his headache.
“The point is, if one of the Reids did infect someone, we should be able to tell pretty quickly whether the Padre was responsible or his brother was. If the victim looks like a four-legged coyote, we can smack the Padre on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.”
Ishmael was glad the Padre was riding in the other vehicle. “If one of the Reids did infect someone,” he said, “they’d be dead by now. You know that. I’ve seen what becomes of them.”
Every night before he fell asleep, he saw Icepick standing on a broken road in quarantine, with his half-made arm hanging by his side, and a grenade primed in his other hand, while a dozen Lost Ones pawed at his face, hands, and chest. Every night since quarantine, rubbing his fiery arm, Ishmael knew what would become of himself.
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 31