by DD Barant
“So—where’s the Don, Tair?”
“Leave the Don out of this. This is between you and me.”
“Yeah, wish I could. But the Falzo family has other ideas, as does the NSA. Anyway, you’re the one who started this hairball rolling.”
Greenery blurs past. We bound off boulders, under fallen logs, over bushes. I’m already missing it.
“And I’ll stop it, too. But you have to stay out of my way.”
“Why should I? Because you gave me a little how-to lesson after slashing my leg open in the first place? Yeah, I’m so grateful.”
“I wasn’t lying when I said I owed Arturo. What he’s going through right now …” I feel the mental equivalent of a head-shake. “He needs my help. It’s a very personal debt of honor, Jace. I can’t explain any more than that.”
“Then tell me one thing, Tair. How is helping a crazy werewolf kill people making anything better?”
There’s a long pause. “I won’t defend his actions, Jace. I can’t justify any of it. All I can say is that whatever Arturo is doing, I have to look after him. No matter what the cost is.”
“You owe him, I get that. But it’s my job to bring him in, Tair. To bring both of you in.”
No response.
He doesn’t say anything else until we get back, and then he stops at the edge of the yard. My body isn’t where I left it, but it hasn’t gone far; it’s back in the lawn chair, head lolling to the side like a passed-out partygoer.
The person who no doubt put it there is sitting in the other chair. Xandra.
She knows we’re there. She meets my eyes, but it isn’t me she sees. It isn’t me that’s putting that stricken look on her face.
“Uncle Pete?” she says. It’s the voice of a little girl.
And then there’s this tremendous whoosh and everything turns topsy-turvy and I’m plummeting at about a thousand miles an hour. Luckily, my skull breaks my fall—my own skull, the one I’ve been pouring scotch, caffeine, and bad decisions into for most of my life.
I blink and straighten up in my seat. I can still see the outline of Tair’s shape in the shadows, yellow eyes gleaming—and then he’s gone.
“Uncle Pete!” Xandra wails, and dives out of her chair. She’s in half-were form before she hits the ground, and full wolf by the time she reaches the trees.
“Xandra!” I call after her, but it’s too late. She hasn’t seen or talked to her uncle since she visited him in the hospital, and he was pretty banged up then. All she’s had since he was replaced has been secondhand reports, filtered through older relatives and the NSA. No matter how grown-up Xandra thinks she is, she was close to Dr. Pete, and on some level she feels betrayed and abandoned. I can’t blame her for going after him, but I hope he gives her the slip. I don’t know what it would do to her to find out what he’s become.
Then I think about what I discovered today, and realize I don’t know exactly what he is, either.
I’m chilled to the bone, but I don’t want to leave until Xandra gets back. I go up to the house, where I’m let in by a yawning six-year-old still in his pajamas. I find Leo in the kitchen, and he pours me a large mug of freshly brewed coffee without being asked. The rest of the house seems strangely silent, as if someone turned the rambunctious knob down from its usual eleven to three and a half. Everyone from kids to grannies seem to be avoiding catching my eye, and Leo and I have the kitchen all to ourselves.
“So,” Leo says. “Are you all right? Did he—behave?” He sounds a little anxious and a little angry, a doting father dying to know about his daughter’s first date but afraid to ask for details.
“No, Leo. He took me out to the woods and made me do terrible, terrible things. And—and I liked it.” I wipe a mock tear from my eye. “And then he pulled out this bag of chipmunks—”
I’ve met some champion glarers in my time, but Leo’s got the kind of eyebrows that can turn a glower into a lethal weapon. “Jace Valchek! This is—you shouldn’t—I was so worried!”
“Yeah? Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you threw me to the wolf, Leo. Even if he was family.”
Now Leo looks miserable. “I’m sorry, Jace. I didn’t want to, I truly didn’t. But he invoked an old and very powerful ritual, one that’s written on our very genes. I could no more deny him than I could resist transforming under a full moon. But he is bound by the same pact, the same ancient rules—I knew he wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I’m glad you had such confidence. Me, I would have appreciated a heads-up.”
“Again, I am so, so sorry. I never dreamed he would come near you, let alone invoke the sange ucenicie.”
“Yeah, well, he did. And while he told me what it is and how it came about, he was a little skimpy on details. Fill me in, Leo.”
Leo takes a long sip of his own coffee, and then nods. “Very well. The sange ucenicie is a sorcerous pact, one inscribed into our very blood; it ensures that no new lycanthrope will be turned and then abandoned. Hardly relevant today, but a few hundred years ago it was necessary.”
“Tair covered that. Makes sense—better to have a new thrope prepared than have them run wild. It’s very … civilized, actually.”
Leo chuckles. “Yes—hardly the image of our kind that was widespread at the time. But that image was exactly our problem: There were far too many people who still regarded us as murderous beasts, unable to control our savage impulses. The sange ucenicie was supposed to help fix that.”
I finish my coffee and get up to pour another. “So it’s a set of controls—a training program, hardwired in. Lets the teacher locate the student, stick her in a mental classroom, show her some basic skills.” I pace back and forth, restless, the mug in my hand. “What else?”
Leo glances at me, then away. “Dominance. The instruction must be mandatory, not a choice. You have to realize the sort of person this was designed for: uneducated, from a rural area, probably religious. They would initially react with terror and revulsion. The teacher had to be able to instruct his student without her running away or trying to kill him, so there’s a certain amount of coercion he can exert.”
“How much?”
Leo looks troubled, but not nearly as troubled as I feel. “You can’t harm him, but he can’t make you do something you normally wouldn’t. He can force you to listen to him, but what you take from the lesson is up to you. Ultimately, the exchange depends on will—yours, and his.”
“You said I can’t harm him. Can he harm me?”
“You’re his responsibility, Jace. He has rules he must obey as well. Once the sange ucenicie has been invoked, he’s compelled to instruct you as best he can. He can put you at risk, but only if it furthers your training. And all of this lasts only until the first full moon.”
The night after next. “And then?”
“Then the bond dissolves. You are free to do whatever you please. But—” He pauses. “Tomorrow night—the night before the full moon—is the most dangerous. It’s when he must evaluate you, decide whether or not you can survive in the wild. More important, he has to judge if you’re a danger to your own kind. If he honestly believes that to be true, he can harm you.” Leo meets my eyes. “In fact, he will have no choice. He will be forced to kill you—and he won’t need silver to do it, either. That last night, the sange ucenicie will let him use his teeth and claws.”
Sure. What’s the point of a course if there’s no downside to flunking out? You don’t earn your driver’s license, you don’t get to drive. You don’t earn your fangs and fur, you don’t get to use them. Or anything else, for that matter.
I stare out the kitchen window and try to collect my thoughts. Is Tair taking this as seriously as he seems, or is he playing another game? Why is he so intent on sticking by the Don, when the old wolf will probably wind up getting them both killed or incarcerated?
Those are things I should be thinking about, anyway. But what my mind keeps turning back to is how it felt to race through the forest on four legs, s
wift and sure and impossibly graceful …
And then I see Xandra stumble out of the woods.
She’s naked, of course, having run right out of her clothes; Leo’s spotted her, too, and is already shrugging off his bathrobe and handing it to me. I rush out of the house and meet her halfway across the yard, wrapping it around her. She’s crying so hard she can’t get any words out, so I just hug her—carefully, because she’s still got a double row of razor blades sticking out of her skull—and tell her everything will be okay. Sometimes, that’s all you can do, whether it’s true or not.
She finally calms down enough to talk, and by that time Leo’s showed up with a mug of something hot. Cocoa, from the smell. He hands it to her, pats her on the shoulder sadly, and tells her he’ll be inside if she wants to come in and talk. Then he leaves us alone; like any good patriarch, Leo knows that sometimes the best way to be supportive is to back off and let people have their space.
We sit down in the same lawn chairs. I can feel about a dozen pairs of eyes peering at us from windows—while the rest of the pack is keeping their distance, everybody’s intensely curious about all the drama.
Then I just wait. She sips her cocoa and sniffles, wipes her nose against the sleeve of the robe like a kid. She won’t meet my eyes.
“You know what the worst thing was?” she finally says. “He smelled like Uncle Pete. Exactly like him.”
“Whatever he did, whatever he said, that’s not your Uncle Pete.”
“I know. I know. But—I just miss him so much, Jace.”
“I do, too, sweetie. I do, too.”
“I couldn’t catch him. He was too fast.”
“Yeah. He sure can run, can’t he …”
FIFTEEN
I don’t have too much trouble sneaking back into my apartment the same way I’d left. Charlie’s good, but he’s only one guy—and he wasn’t expecting me to leave on my own.
The sun’s up, so Galahad should be in doggy form—but he doesn’t greet me at the door, which is what he usually does when he’s in four-legged mode. Odd. “Gally?” I call out.
He appears in the bedroom doorway, and I relax. “There you are. Everything okay?”
He looks at me uncertainly. He whines. And then he turns around and goes back in the bedroom.
Thinking something must be wrong, I follow him. Nothing amiss, nothing out of place. I don’t get the sense that anyone’s been here that shouldn’t. Gally goes to the farthest corner away from me and sits down with his back to the wall. His mouth is closed, his eyes worried.
Then I get it. I sink down on the bed. “Oh, Galahad. It’s me, okay? I might smell a little funky, but it’s still good old Jace—you know, the one that scritches that spot at the base of your tail? The one who feeds you bacon, even when I shouldn’t?”
And now he looks a little happier. His ears are too floppy to go up, but he sits a little straighter. His tail thumps on the floor, hesitantly.
I sigh. “Bacon.”
A few more thumps, louder and faster.
“Bacon bacon bacon.”
And then he’s jumped up on the bed and is slobbering all over me, his usual boisterous self. Ah, well—I may not have his undying loyalty, but at least I know it can be bought. I dig out the next best thing I have around, pork-flavored doggy treats, and give him a handful. He’ll have to wait until we hit a restaurant for the rest of his bribe.
I get undressed and get into bed. Sleep is a tiny little town in a faraway country that I can’t quite remember the name of. I do some tosssing. I do some turning. Gally endures it as long as he can and then abandons the bed with a reproachful look and pads out into the living room. I can hear him jump up on the sofa.
Too much to think about. Too many things I should be doing. Too many scents in the air. Not enough Jace to go around.
Not enough Jace, period.
I’ve always had a very strong sense of who I was, a secure self-image. That image changed as I got older, but there was always a core that stayed true. I knew what was important to me, I knew what I valued and what I didn’t.
For the first time in my life, I feel like that might be changing.
But if it is, it won’t be without a fight. I don’t meekly accept what life shoves at me. I don’t give up at the first sign of opposition. I hang on with a stubborn persistence that makes even my enemies grudgingly respect me.
But this is a different kind of battleground, and it’s got me worried. I need to stay in touch with that part of myself that I’ve always most taken for granted, the part that defines me as human. I’m not even sure what it is, let alone how to hang on to it.
But I think I know who might.
I finally give up, roll out of bed, and get dressed. Grab a leash and collar, get it on Gally. Take the elevator down into a way-too-bright day; I’m glad I thought to bring sunglasses.
Charlie rolls down his window when we walk up. “Morning,” he says.
“Morning. Can we skip the whole thing where I pretend I’m outraged that you were out here all night and go for breakfast instead?”
“Sure. Only thing I like better than missing sleep is watching you chew and swallow.”
“Ooh, someone’s a little cranky. How about we go for a stroll in the fresh air first?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
He gets out of the car, says his usual hello to Galahad, and off we go. It’s a cloudless day, and I find myself sticking to the shade whenever possible; it’s not the heat of the sun that’s bothering me, it’s the brightness. By the time we’ve gone around the block, my eyes ache and I’ve got the beginning of a migraine.
And I’m really, really thirsty.
We head to a local diner with outdoor tables. I get the breakfast special, order extra eggs, and feed my bacon to Galahad. I also go through three glasses of tomato juice and almost empty the saltshaker. Charlie watches all this without comment—but then, eating is a mystery to him, anyway. When we’re done I take Gally back home and get a baseball hat with a brim to further shade my eyes.
We get to the office around ten. Cassius and Gretch aren’t in yet—they work long hours, but they’re on a pire’s schedule and sleep at least part of the day. I sit down in my office and write up a formal report describing what happened between Tair and me—the sange ucenicie doesn’t seem to interfere with the passing along of information, for which I’m grateful. Being forced into a submissive role is bad enough, but having to keep my mouth shut would have made it much worse. I may be stubborn, but I don’t let pride get in the way of work; I recognize when I need help and have no problem in asking for it.
Except, you know, when I decide to sneak out in the middle of the night like a teenage girl and ditch my partner.
I take a deep breath, call Charlie in, and ’fess up. I blurt out the whole thing, trying desperately to justify myself by saying things like, “I didn’t plan on doing any of this, it just sort of happened,” and “I’m going through all of these changes and they’re affecting my judgment,” and the always useful “I’m really sorry and it won’t happen again please don’t hate me.”
He listens to all of this without saying a word. He considers me levelly for a full minute afterward, and I wonder if I’ve finally gone too far. How can you expect your partner to trust you when you do something like this? I feel terrible.
Finally, he reaches into his breast pocket, pulls something out, and hands it to me. For one awful second I think it’s his badge, but that’s not it at all.
It’s my cell phone.
“You must have dropped it someplace,” he says. “Just like you—not really paying attention.”
I stare down at the phone. The last time I had it was just before Tair swatted it out of my hand. But—
“Wait,” I say. “That’s—you—what?”
“That’s what I love about working with you, Valchek. Your eloquence.”
“But—but—but—”
“And your motorboat impressions.”
&nbs
p; “Charlie, if you were there, why didn’t you arrest him?”
“Thought about it. But you clearly had something going on that I didn’t want to mess up. Whatever the deal was, Leo seemed okay with it. So while you talked with Tair, I talked with Leo. He explained everything. I was going to see if I could nab Tair when you two got back, but he didn’t give me a chance. So I faded.”
“Why didn’t Leo tell me you were there?”
“I asked him not to. I know how cranky you get when you think someone’s reading over your shoulder.”
I’m speechless. I don’t know whether to be impressed, pissed off, or grateful. “You,” I finally say, “are one helluva partner, Charlie Aleph.”
“Yeah, I know. So now that you’ve gotten that off your chest and I don’t have to deal with guilt-laden, furtive glances all day, what are we gonna do about this guy?”
I slump back in my chair. “I don’t know. Wait for him to contact me again, I guess, and try to set a trap.”
“That what you want?”
The question surprises me. “What I want doesn’t matter, Charlie. He’s an escaped felon and a killer. Whatever happens to me, that doesn’t change.”
“So I should have grabbed him while I had the chance.”
“No. I mean—you did the best you could, under the circumstances. And even if you’d grabbed him then, we still wouldn’t have the Don. This way we can prepare, do it right.”
“Right meaning non-lethally.”
“If possible, yeah.”
What I don’t say is: I’m glad you didn’t try to arrest him when you had the chance, because then I’d never have gone for that amazing dash through the woods, and I’d never have gotten that look behind the mask of arrogance Tair puts on like a disguise. I don’t say any of that, because I’m not sure I’m willing to admit it even to myself.
But it’s true.
I know Cassius isn’t going to be happy about what happened with Tair, and I’m right.