“I know,” he said because it seemed like she needed a response.
“There’s something—” she hesitated. “Look, this might not have been the best idea.”
He was losing her again. He had to breathe deeply to keep the panic from his voice. “Why don’t you tell me about it anyway? Do you have something better to do?”
“I remember that,” she said. “I remember you doing that with Mom. She’d be hysterical, throwing dishes or books, and you’d sit down and say, ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ ”
Did she want to talk about her mother now? About the one time he’d needed to be calm and failed? He hadn’t known he was a werewolf until it was too late. Until after he’d killed his wife and the lover she’d taken while David had been fighting for God and country, both of whom had forgotten him. She’d been waiting until he came home to tell him that she was leaving—it was a mistake she’d had no time to regret. He, on the other hand, might have forever to regret it for her.
He never spoke of it. Not to anyone. For Stella he’d do it, but she knew the story anyway. She’d been there.
“Do you want to talk about your mother?” he asked, his voice carrying into a lower timbre; as it did when the wolf was close.
“No. Not that,” she said hurriedly. “Nothing like that. I’m sorry. This isn’t a good idea.”
She was going to hang up. He drew on his hard-earned control and thought fast.
Forty years as a hunter and leader of men had given him a lot of practice reading between the lines. If he could put aside the fact that she was his daughter, maybe he could salvage this.
She’d told him she ran a foster agency like it was important to the rest of what she had to say.
“It’s about your work?” he asked, trying to figure out what a social worker would need with a werewolf. Oh. “Is there a—” His daughter preferred not to talk about werewolves, Clive had told him. So if there was something supernatural she was going to have to bring it up. “Is there someone bothering you?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. It’s one of my boys.”
Stella had never married, never had children of her own. Her brother said it was because she had all the people to take care of that she could handle.
“One of the foster kids.”
“Devonte Parish.”
“He one of your special ones?” he asked. His Stella had never seen a stray she hadn’t brought home, animal or human. Most she’d dusted off and sent home with a meal and bandages as needed—but some of them she’d kept.
She sighed. “Come and see him, would you? Tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there,” he promised. It would take him a few hours to set up permission from the packs in her area: travel was complicated for a werewolf. “Probably sometime in the afternoon. This the number I can find you at?”
Instead of taking a taxi from the airport, he rented a car. It might be harder to park, but it would give them mobility and privacy. If his daughter only needed this, if she didn’t want to smoke the peace pipe yet, then he didn’t need it witnessed by a cab driver. A witness would make it harder for him to control himself—and his little girl never needed to see him out of control ever again.
He called her before setting out, and he could tell that she’d had second and third thoughts.
“Look,” he finally told her. “I’m here now. Maybe we should go and talk to the boy. Where can I meet you?”
He’d have known her anywhere though he hadn’t, by her request, seen her since the night he’d killed his wife. She’d been twelve and now she was a grown woman with silver threads running through her kinky black hair. The last time he’d seen her she’d been still a little rounded and soft as most children are—and now there wasn’t an ounce of softness in her. She was muscular and lean—like him.
It had been a long time, but he’d never have mistaken her for anyone else: she had his eyes and her mother’s face.
He’d thought you had to be bleeding someplace to hurt this badly. The beast struggled within him, looking for an enemy. But he controlled and subdued it before he pulled the car to the curb and unlocked the automatic door.
She was wearing a brown wool suit that was several shades darker than the milk and coffee skin she’d gotten from her mother. His own skin was dark as the night and kept him safely hidden in the shadows where he and people like him belonged.
She opened the car door and got in. He waited until she’d fastened her seatbelt before pulling out from the curb. Slush splattered out from under his tires, but it was only a token. Once he was in the traffic lane the road was bare.
She didn’t say anything for a long time, so he just drove. He had no idea where he was going, but he figured she’d tell him when she was ready. He kept his eyes on traffic to give her time to get a good look at him.
“You look younger than I remember,” she said finally. “Younger than me.”
“I was thirty-five or thereabouts when I was Changed. Being a werewolf seems to settle physical age about twenty-five for most of us.” There it was out in the open and she could do with it as she pleased.
He could smell her fear of him spike and if he’d really been twenty-five, he thought he might have cried. Being this agitated wasn’t smart if you were a werewolf. He took a deep breath through his nose and tried to calm down—he’d earned her fear.
“Devonte won’t talk to me or anyone else,” she said, and then as if those words had been the key to the floodgate she kept going. “I wish you could have seen him when I first met him. He was ten going on forty. He’d just lost his grandmother, who had raised him. He looked me right in the eye, stuck his jaw out and told me that he needed a home where he would be clothed and fed so he could concentrate on school.”
“Smart boy?” he asked. She’d started in the middle of the story: he’d forgotten that habit of hers until just now.
“Very smart. Quiet. But funny, too.” She made a sad sound, and her sorrow overwhelmed her fear of him. “We screen the homes. We visit. But there’s never enough of us—and some of the horrible ones can put on a good show for a long time. It takes a while, too, before you get a feel for the bad ones. If he could have stayed with his first family, everything would have been fine. He stayed with them for six years. But this fall she unexpectedly got pregnant and her husband got a job transfer . . . ”
They’d abandoned the boy like he was an old couch that was too awkward to move, David thought. He felt a flash of anger for this boy he’d never met. He swallowed the emotion quickly; he could do that these days. For a while. He was going to have to take that run when he got back home.
“I was tied up in court cases and someone else moved him to his next family,” Stella continued, staring at her hands, which were clenched on a manila folder. “It shouldn’t have been a problem. This was a family who already has fostered several children—and Devonte was a good kid, not the kind to give anyone problems.”
“But something happened?” he suggested.
“His foster mother says that he just went wild, throwing furniture, breaking things. When he threatened her, his foster father stepped in and knocked him out. Devonte’s in the hospital with a broken wrist and two broken ribs and he won’t talk.”
“You don’t believe the foster family.”
She gave an indignant huff. “The Linnfords look like Mr. and Mrs. Brady. She smiles and nods when he speaks and he is all charm and concern.” She huffed again and spoke very precisely, “I wouldn’t believe them if all they were doing was giving me the time of day. And I know Devonte. He just wants to get through school and get a scholarship so he can go to college and take care of himself.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “So why did you call me?” He was willing to have a talk with the family, but he suspected if that was all she needed it would have been a cold day in hell before she called him—she had her brothers for that.
“Because of the photos.” She held up the folder in invitation.
&
nbsp; He had to drive a couple of blocks before he found a convenient parking place and pulled over, leaving the engine running.
He pulled six photos off a clip that attached them to the back of the folder she held and spread them out to look. Interest rose up and he wished he had something more than photos. It certainly looked like more damage than one lone boy could do: ten boys maybe, if they had sledge hammers. The holes in the walls were something anyone could have done. The holes in the ten foot ceiling, the executive desk on its side in three pieces and the antique oak chair broken to splinters and missing a leg were more interesting.
“The last time I saw something like that . . . ” Stella whispered.
It was probably a good thing she couldn’t bring herself to finish that sentence. He had to admit that all this scene was missing was blood and body parts.
“How old is Devonte?”
“Sixteen.”
“Can you get me in to look at the damage?”
“No, they had contractors in to fix it.”
His eyebrows raised. “How long has it been?”
“It was the twenty-first. Three days.” She waved a hand. “I know. Contractors are usually a month wait at least, but money talks. This guy has serious money.”
That sounded wrong. “Then why are they taking in a foster kid?”
She looked him in the eye for the first time and nodded at him as if he’d gotten something right. “If I’d been the one to vet them I’d have smelled a rat right there. Rich folk don’t want mongrel children who’ve had it rough. Or if they do, they go to China or Romania and adopt babies to coo over. They don’t take in foster kids, not without an agenda. But we’re desperate for foster homes . . . and it wasn’t me who approved them.”
“You said the boy wouldn’t talk. To you? Or to anybody?”
“To anybody. He hasn’t said a word since the incident. Won’t communicate at all.”
David considered that, running through possibilities. “Was anyone hurt except for the boy?”
“No.”
“Would you mind if I went to see him now?”
“Please.”
He followed her directions to the hospital. He parked the car, but before he could open the door she grabbed his arm. The first time she touched him.
“Could he be a werewolf?”
“Maybe,” he told her. “That kind of damage . . . ”
“It looked like our house,” she said, not looking at him, but not taking her hand off him either. “Like our house that night.”
“If he was a werewolf, I doubt your Mr. Linnford would have been about to knock him out without taking a lot of damage. Maybe Linnford is the werewolf.” That would fit, most of the werewolves he knew, if they survived, eventually became wealthy. Children were more difficult. Maybe that was why Linnford and his wife fostered children.
Stella jerked her chin up and down once. “That’s what I thought. That’s it. Linnford might be a werewolf. Could you tell?”
His chest felt tight. How very brave of her: she’d called the only monster she knew to deal with the other monsters. It reminded him of how she’d stood between him and the boys, protecting them the best that she could.
“Let me talk to Devonte,” he said trying to keep the growl out of his voice with only moderate success. “Then I can deal with Linnford.”
The hospital corridors were decorated with garland and green and red bulbs. Every year Christmas got more plastic and seemed farther and farther from the Christmases David had known as a child.
His daughter led him to the elevators without hesitation and exchanged nods with a few of the staff members who walked past. He hated the way his children aged every year. Hated the silver in their hair that was a constant reminder that eventually time would take them all away from him.
She kept as much distance between them as she could in the elevator. As if he were a stranger—or a monster. At least she wasn’t running from him screaming.
You can’t live with bitterness. He knew that. Bitterness, like most unpleasant emotions, made the wolf restless. Restless wolves were dangerous. The nurse at the station just outside the elevator knew Stella, too, and greeted her by name.
“That Mr. Linnford was here asking after Devonte. I told him that he wasn’t allowed to visit yet.” She gave Stella a disappointed look, clearly blaming her for putting Mr. Linnford to such bother. “What a nice man he is, looking after that boy after what he did to them.”
She handed Stella a clipboard and gave David a mildly curious look. He gave her his most harmless smile and she smiled back before glancing down at the clipboard Stella had returned.
David could read it from where he stood. Stella Christiansen and guest. Well, he told himself, she could hardly write down that he was her father when she looked older than he did.
“He may be a nice man,” Stella told the nurse with a thread of steel in her voice, “but you just keep him out until we know for sure what happened and why.”
She strode off toward a set of doors where a policeman sat in front of a desk, sitting on a wooden chair, and reading a worn paperback copy of Stephen King’s Cujo. “Jorge,” she said.
“Stella,” he buzzed the door and let them through.
“He’s in the secured wing,” she explained under her breath as she walked briskly down the hall. “Not that it’s all that secure. Jorge shouldn’t have let you through without checking your ID.”
Not that anyone would question his Stella, David thought. Even as a little girl, people did what she told them to do. He was careful not to smile at her; she wouldn’t understand it.
This part of the hospital smelled like blood, desperation, and disinfectant. Even though most of the scents were old, a new wolf penned up in this environment would cause a lot more excitement that he was seeing: and a sixteen-year-old could only be a new wolf. Any younger than that and they mostly didn’t survive the Change. Anyway, he’d have scented a wolf by now: their first conclusion was right—Stella’s boy was no werewolf.
“Any cameras in the rooms?” he asked in a low voice.
Her steady footfall paused. “No. That’s still on the list of advised improvements for the future.”
“All right. No one else here?”
“Not right now,” she said. “This hospital isn’t near gang territory and they put the adult offenders in a different section.” She entered one of the open doorways and he followed her in, shutting the door behind them.
It wasn’t a private room, but the first bed was empty. In the second bed was a boy staring at the wall—there were no windows. He was beaten up a bit and had a cast on one hand. The other hand was attached to a sturdy rail that stuck out of the bed on the side nearest the wall with a locking nylon strap—better than handcuffs, he thought, but not much. The boy didn’t look up as they came in.
Maybe it was the name, or maybe the image that “foster kid” brought to mind, but he’d expected Devonte to be black. Instead, the boy looked as if someone had taken half a dozen races and shook them up—Eurasian races, though, not from the Dark Continent. There was Native American or Oriental in the corners of his eyes—and he supposed that nose could be Jewish or Italian. His skin looked as if he had a deep suntan, but this time of year it was more likely the color was his own: Mexican, Greek or even Indian.
Not that it mattered. He’d found that the years were slowly completing the job that Vietnam had begun—race or religion mattered very little to him anymore. But even if it had mattered . . . Stella had asked him for help.
Stella glanced at her father. She didn’t know him, didn’t know if he’d see through Devonte’s defiant sullenness to the fear underneath. His expressionless face and upright military bearing gave her no clue. She could read people, but she didn’t know her father anymore, hadn’t seen him since . . . that night. Watching him made her uncomfortable, so she turned her attention to the other person in the room.
“Hey, kid.”
Devonte kept his gaze on the w
all.
“I brought someone to see you.”
Her father, after a keen look at the boy, lifted his head and sucked in air through his nose hard enough she could hear it.
“Where are the clothes he was wearing when they brought him in?” he asked.
That drew Devonte’s attention and satisfaction at his reaction slowed her answer. Her father’s eye fell on the locker and he stalked to it and opened the door. He took out the clear plastic bag of clothes and said, with studied casualness, “Linnford was here asking about you today.”
Devonte went still as a mouse.
Stella didn’t know where this was going, but pitched in to help. “The police informed me that Linnford’s decided not press assault charges. They should move you to a room with a view soon. I’m scheduled for a meeting tomorrow morning to decide what happens to you when you get out of here.”
Devonte opened his mouth, but then closed it resolutely.
Her father sniffed at the bag, then said softly, “Why do your clothes smell like vampire, boy?”
Devonte jumped, the whites of his eyes showing all the way round his irises. His mouth opened and this time Stella thought it might really be an inability to speak that kept him quiet. She was choking a bit on “vampire” herself. But she wouldn’t have believed in werewolves either, she supposed, if her father weren’t one.
“I didn’t introduce you,” she murmured. “Devonte, this is my father, I called him when I saw the crime scene photos. He’s a werewolf.” If he was having vampire problems, maybe a werewolf would look good.
The sad blue-gray chair with the ripped Naughahyde seat that had been sitting next to Devonte’s bed zipped past her and flung itself at her father—who caught it and gave the boy a curious half-smile. “Oh I bet you surprised it, didn’t you? Wizards aren’t exactly common.”
“Wizard?” Stella squeaked regrettably.
Her father’s smile widened just a little—a smile she remembered from her childhood when she or one of her brothers had done something particularly clever. This one was aimed at Devonte.
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