Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “What sort of procedures?”

  “Come on, Valcheck. Tomorrow night’s the last one before the full moon. You’re going to go from a two-legged animal to a four-legged one. You’re going to have to learn a whole new set of skills, and it’s not like there’s a manual available online. That phrase you heard, sange ucenicie? Its literal translation is ‘blood apprenticeship.’ It means that since I’m the one who infected you, I have an obligation—a duty—to show you the ropes. So to speak.”

  “Right. So I’m what, your intern now? You whistle, I fetch? I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not paying attention. This is magic, all right? You don’t have a choice. Like I said, there are rules—and one of them is No killing the teacher. Assassination and learning just don’t play well together.”

  “Neither do I and escaped convicts. If I can’t shoot you, I’ll just have to let someone else do it.” I pull out my phone.

  He knocks it out of my hand with a swipe that’s almost too fast to see. “No one likes a tattletale, either. Are you ready for your first lesson, or do I have to spank you?”

  I glare at him. I have the overwhelming urge to put my fist through his face, or maybe rip his throat out with my bare teeth. I could try, but I’m pretty sure all that would happen is a great deal of frustration and a lot of swearing. Leo wouldn’t appreciate that; there are kids in earshot.

  “What’s this all about, Tair? You almost kill me, you partner with a Mob boss who’s off his rocker, then show up and start playing high school guidance counselor? What the hell’s your game?”

  The look he gives me is hard to read: some mixture of uncomfortable, irritated, maybe even a little guilt. “Look, Valchek, I know this might be hard for you to process, but there’s more to who I am than ‘Dr. Pete good, Tair bad.’ I’m not some cartoon villain made of pure evil. I had the same family, the same friends growing up as the man you knew. Everyone has darkness in their heart, Valchek, and me and Dr. Pete had exactly the same amount in ours. Only difference between us is I actually did the things he was always capable of.”

  “Dr. Pete dedicated himself to saving lives. You take them.”

  He sighs. “So do you, Agent Valchek, so do you. And you do it for a paycheck, same as me.”

  “I don’t kill unless I have to—”

  “Neither do I. I just have to more often than you.”

  “Did you have to murder those bodyguards at the Slaughterhouse?”

  “Let’s keep this on track, shall we? This is about you, not me.”

  “Really? Because a second ago you were getting all emo about how you’re misunderstood and that you’re really a nice psychopath once people get to know you—”

  “Well, I am.” He smiles at me, quite disarmingly. “And believe it or not, I do have a certain sense of responsibility. Yes, I put your life at risk—though I was pretty sure that guard would choose to save you—and yes, I made you a lycanthrope against your will. I regret that, but circumstances forced my hand and I can’t undo it. So—despite the fact that you want to erase me from the face of the Earth, despite the fact that you’re currently leading a manhunt to throw me back in prison, despite the fact that the smart move would be to stay as far away from you as possible, I’m still going to try to prepare you for life as a thrope. Whether you want me to or not.”

  For a moment I almost believe it. Then I remember how good Tair is at manipulation, and how he never does anything without his own best interests at heart. “Yeah, sure. How selfless and noble of you. Tell me, this whole teacher/student/thrope thing—how’s it work once I’m comfy with my new all-body hairstyle? Does the mystical link stay in place afterward? Is there some kind of animal dominance instinct that gets ingrained, so after this I’ll always be Scrappy-Doo to your Scooby? Because if that’s the case, no thanks.”

  He gets to his feet, slowly. He looks at me with resignation. “No, Jace. That’s not it at all. Once I’m through teaching you what you need to know, we’re done. No strings—or leashes—attached. Not that you’ll ever believe me.”

  “Sure I will. As soon as the Tooth Fairy verifies your story, we’re good to go—”

  And then, with no warning, his hands are around my throat.

  I can’t breathe. All my FBI training, every martial arts move I ever studied, it all gets shoved out of my brain in a surge of primal instincts that are equal parts panic and rage. I flail, I claw, I kick—I’d bite if I could, but I can’t reach anything with my teeth.

  He ignores it all. His eyes are locked on my own as he methodically chokes the life from me, his face as serious and intent as a man performing surgery.

  The world goes gray. His eyes, boring into mine, are shifting to a feral yellow. The rest of the universe fades away at the edges, until all I can see are those two glowing golden eyes.

  And then I can’t see or hear or feel anything at all.

  FOURTEEN

  The afterlife isn’t like anything I imagined.

  I’m on a bus. I’m sitting next to a chubby, almost-bald black guy who looks kind of familiar. “Lot of different ways to prepare kangaroo,” he says.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Kangaroo steak, kangaroo casserole, kangaroo fricassee, kangaroo consommé—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “—kangaroo omelet, kangaroo shish kebab, kangaroo stir-fry—”

  “Look, I refuse to believe that what’s waiting in the Great Beyond is a Forrest Gump rip-off.”

  “Kangaroo ’n’ rice, kangaroo ’n’ taters, kangaroo ’n’ dumplings—”

  I look around. “Hello? Driver? You can let me off here, please. I don’t need to hear the whole menu.”

  “—kangaroo sushi, kangaroo ice cream, kangaroo à la king—”

  And then everything gets all swirly the way things do when you’ve combined too much tequila with not enough food, and the bus and Kangaroo Guy fall away like a dream when you’re not quite awake yet; when you realize that hey, that wasn’t real at all, I was asleep and now I’m waking up and opening my eyes and—

  And this isn’t what’s supposed to happen when you wake up.

  I’m a wolf.

  Of all the senses, the one we most take for granted is kinesthesia. That’s the sense of our own body, the overall, constant feeling of simply existing in a container made of flesh and blood and bone. It’s constantly telling us that we still have a head, a torso, and the appropriate number of limbs.

  Right now, my kinesthesia is telling me something very different.

  Everybody knows what a wolf looks like, so I won’t go through a laundry list of body parts. You’d think the weirdest thing would be having a tail, but it isn’t; that comes in second, with number three being the ability to consciously move my ears.

  Number one? I now have junk.

  Male junk, I mean. Bald dude in a turtleneck, kielbasa, Mister Boing Boing. I could go on—the only word with more euphemisms is drunk—but that’s not going to make it go away. It may be hairy, it may be lupine, but it’s dangling between my legs and it wasn’t there when I woke up this morning.

  I blurt out the equivalent of “What the goddamn—” and naturally, it comes out as a high-pitched whine. I’m frozen in place, too freaked out to move—I’m not sure I even know how—and then I realize that what I’m staring at is worse.

  I’m looking at my own body, lying sprawled in a boneless heap on the grass. Its eyes are open, and the same blazing yellow that Tair’s were as he—

  As he killed me.

  “You’re not dead, Valchek,” Tair says. The voice is inside my head, and sounds just a little tired. “This is part of the process. Call it a test drive—a little time behind the wheel before you get your license.”

  I’ve had some experience with magical telepathy, so I know how to respond. “And you had to throttle me to do this?”

  “Technically, no. We could have used meditation to get you into the right frame of mind, or I could have done it as you were fal
ling asleep—really, anything that put you into a half-conscious state would have worked. But all of those things require your cooperation, and I just don’t have the time to get it.”

  “So you—you evicted me?”

  “It’s temporary, believe me. You think I want you in my head?”

  “You arrogant piece of—of all the things you’ve done, this has to be the—”

  “SHUT UP!”

  The roar is so loud, so all-encompassing, that it’s more than just sound; it’s pure fury, a blast of anger like opening a door to a room that’s on fire. All my new senses go away, leaving me alone and stunned in a void with his words echoing in my nonexistent ears.

  I shut up.

  When he speaks again, I can still hear the anger in his voice, but at least he’s not bellowing anymore. “I know you don’t want this. That’s hard for me to accept—but back when I was a resident, I studied cases of human beings born deaf who, when the technology to give them hearing was developed, decided they didn’t want it. That fascinated me. I thought at first that they were rejecting something new out of fear, but that wasn’t the case. It was because they realized that in many ways our limitations define us—not because of what we can’t do, but because of how we respond to those limitations. Deaf people responded by creating a language, a culture of their own, and that was what they were trying to protect. Have you ever seen deaf people communicate? They use facial expression as much as hand movement, something thropes can’t duplicate—our faces just aren’t as expressive. It’s—it’s a wonderful thing to see. It was one of the things that made me want to study human medicine.

  “So I understand that you have valid reasons for wanting to stay human. But Jace—that’s just not an option, not anymore. No matter how much you hate me, no matter how scared you are, you have to face that fact.

  “You’re a smart woman—don’t you want to learn about this? Don’t you want to be prepared? Because what’s happening to you is not going to be like anything you’ve ever known. In the old days, before these protocols were established, people would go insane from the experience. They’d slaughter their own kind, give in to their darkest impulses and go on wild killing sprees. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  And then, silence.

  I think about what he’s just said. Really think about, not just react emotionally, which is what I’ve been doing since I got on this lycanthro-go-round. While I’m volatile at the best of times, I’m not a flake; when I do something really stupid, it’s usually after careful consideration.

  So I consider. And come to the same conclusion I would have reached earlier, if my head hadn’t been overloaded with pre-full-moon jitters plus two kinds of supernatural viruses locked in a struggle to the undeath.

  “Uh—thanks?” I say—or think, I guess.

  “Let’s just do this, all right?”

  “Do what, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “This.”

  The world comes back, and it’s moving. Really moving, zipping past in a blur, and I realize it’s because I’m running.

  No. Not running. If that feeble, two-legged totter I used to do was running, then this is something entirely different. This is as far past that as ballet is past the hokey-pokey. This is a four-stroke engine operating at peak efficiency, a smooth never-ending cycle of impact and motion, pure kinetic elegance. It’s like all the hyperbole of every car commercial in the world come to life and injected into my bloodstream.

  “Wha-ha,” I manage.

  “Shhh.”

  We must have left the Adams yard and gone into the woods at the edge of the property. Northwest rainforest streams past, towering firs and pines, gigantic primeval ferns, thickets of blackberry bushes twice the height of a man and as dense and thorny as a Hollywood contract. Smells flood into my nose, too: aromatic conifers, damp earth, rotting tree stumps, animal musk, moss.

  It takes me a moment to realize that even though I’m experiencing it, I’m not actually doing it; I’m a passenger, not the driver. “Uh, this is great,” I think carefully. “But when do I get to—you know—”

  We skid to a stop in a slide of wet leaves. “Take over? Congratulations, Valchek—you lasted all of a minute before your natural tendencies kicked in.”

  “Well, you did say this was about me learning—”

  His chuckle inside my head sounds just like it does on the outside. “Relax. We’ll get to it, all right? But I wanted us to be in a good location.”

  And then, just like that, I’m in charge.

  I fall down.

  Tair bursts out laughing. I’d scowl if I knew how to work a muzzle properly.

  “Take it slowly,” he says. “The instincts are there. You had four legs yourself once, way back in your evolutionary history. Just let them do their job.”

  I try. I lie still, feeling my legs quiver, then just think about being on all fours without focusing on how to get there.

  To my surprise, it works. I’m standing on my own four feet. Swaying like a milk-drunk toddler, but still upright.

  Walking is harder. It takes a few attempts before I can relax enough to let my hindbrain control the process without thinking about it, but it feels amazingly natural once I get the rhythm.

  “Okay,” Tair says. “Let’s go for a run.”

  “What? I just learned how to walk—”

  He sounds amused. “Agent Valchek, are you backing down from a challenge?”

  I growl, both in my head and my throat. It feels good.

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t worry—I’ll start you off.”

  Then he’s the one at the controls again, and we’re off.

  Bounding, bounding, over the forest green … we build up to a good clip, not as fast as we were moving before but still pretty quick.

  “Ready?”

  I feel like a teenager riding shotgun in a race car; we’re heading into the first big curve, going a hundred miles an hour, and the driver just took his hands off the wheel.

  I grab it.

  And then I’m running, really running, for the first time in my life.

  Afterward, I collapse on a bed of moss with my paws up in the air, panting. “Wow,” I manage. Even my thoughts are out of breath. “That was amazing.”

  “Well, you didn’t run into any trees.”

  “What? Come on, I did great.”

  His tone is grudging, but I think I hear some pride in it, too. “You did okay. At least you’ll be able to move without losing control.”

  No, it’s not pride I’m hearing—it’s pride I’m feeling. I’m in Tair’s mind as well as his body, after all—and if my experience with Cassius is any indication, then spillover of emotions while we’re linked like this is inevitable. Emotions, and maybe more.

  I might never get another chance like this. I have to take it.

  I reach out with my own thoughts, my own sense of self. Finding his equivalent isn’t difficult; it’s the center I’m currently wrapped around, the landlord on the main floor of the house I’m visiting. I probe gently, cautiously, searching for an opening—

  “Valchek? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I murmur. “Just looking around.”

  There. A chink in the armor, a soft spot that yields when I push. I slip inside—

  It’s not what I expect.

  Cassius manifested as a crimson web, an immense and intricate structure representing his many centuries of existence. I thought being inside Tair’s mind would be similar, but it’s not.

  It’s a multicolored sphere, pulsing like a planet-size heart. Below me are continents of verdant green, rivers of blazing orange, oceans of deepest purple: Google Earth on serious drugs. Everything’s shifting, moving, all at different speeds. A snaking line of yellow writhes frantically over a slowly morphing black mass, something blue and amoeba-like bulges and contracts near the equator, waves of pink shimmer in concentric rings from the poles. It’s beautiful and hypnotic and almost makes sense.
>
  My attention is drawn to one particular feature, a large circle midway between the equator and the North Pole. It’s the only element that isn’t in constant motion, and it’s a clean, pristine white. My instincts—which, at the moment, are pumped higher than they’ve ever been—tell me it’s important.

  I touch it.

  I’m only in contact for a second before Tair violently ejects me. I’m thrown out of his mind and into a scary, gray nothingness for an agonizing moment before some kind of psychic gravity kicks in and sucks me back into Tair’s brain where I was before.

  But that was long enough.

  What I saw there, what I experienced, was love.

  A true psychopath is incapable of feeling love. That requires empathy, compassion, the ability to connect with other people on a deep level. Psychopaths lack those abilities, which makes them view other people largely as objects. The best definition of love I’ve ever heard is that someone else’s happiness becomes more important to you than your own; since to a psycho other people aren’t completely real, the concept of someone else’s happiness is meaningless to him—let alone the possibility of it having more value than satisfying his own needs.

  That’s not what I experienced. I only touched it for the briefest instant, but there was no mistaking what I encountered. I’d seen behind the mask of his public persona, and what was there was deep and genuine and very carefully hidden.

  “Tair” is an act.

  “You do not have my permission to do that,” he growls.

  “Do what? I was just trying to get a feel for my surroundings—”

  “Your surroundings aren’t my frontal lobe.”

  “Is that what that was? I was gonna go with amygdala, maybe the hippocampus.”

  “I think this lesson is over.”

  He heads toward our starting point at a quick pace, firmly in control, yours truly relegated to the backseat. He could put me in the metaphysical equivalent of the trunk—like he did when he was yelling at me—but for some reason he doesn’t. I decide to take advantage of it while I can.