Stronger Than Blood

by Genevieve J. Griffin

  We stared at each other across the room before she stalked the rest of the way in and dropped the pile of folded costumes beside me.

  “So,” she said. “Planning on making this make any sense?”

  I turned the little wolf over and over in my hands. My heart was seizing up at the very idea of explaining everything to her, but this had to get said. “I can tell you what’s going on, but it’s going to sound like I’m a total crazy person, and you’ll have to promise to hear me out before you, y’know, try to dump me in the lake.”

  She took that in, arched an eyebrow, and made no promises whatsoever.

  “I meant what I said last night about your brother,” she said instead. “I went to see him yesterday.”

  Balloon, meet thumbtack. I deflated. “You were at my house?”

  “He’s just…brooding. He’s saying a lot of things that don’t make sense. Something about you going off with your own kind. What was he talking about?”

  I opened my mouth, but again was overruled.

  “I mean, I know you’re friends now with Pandora and Ayu, considering you crashed the party with them—”

  “You invited me.”

  “Before,” she said coldly, and I shut up. “I just want to know… How are they considered your own kind? What is going on, B?”

  I gave up. “We’re werewolves,” I said, as simply as that. The conversation dropped into dead silence.

  Finally, without any interruptions, I told her the whole story. Me getting bitten, a lifetime of changes, my family falling apart, discovering the other werewolves in town—all of it. I kept eyeing the front door, waiting for Dan to appear and haul me off to be installed as my mother’s newest neighbor, but no one stopped me. Lacey just went paler, saying nothing at all.

  “So that’s what he meant, We’re all werewolves. Me, Pan, Ayu…Brandon…” My voice hitched on those two syllables. “Ilsa. Brandon’s brother…was.”

  “Was?”

  “Kane’s dead,” I said. She looked so shocked that all I could do was drop my head into one hand. “So much has happened, Cee.”

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, her voice weak. “You’re a werewolf. And so is the man who attacked us in town weeks ago.”

  “Brandon’s father. He died, too.”

  “What are you people doing, attacking half the town?”

  I didn’t have the heart to argue that. “Call it a battle for succession. The Elder’s ill, and everyone’s jostling for control, and it’s a giant, giant mess, Cee. And I don’t want you or Grey or anybody caught up in it. I had to leave. I’m not supposed to be in town at all anymore. But I owed you an explanation. I just wanted to tell you, and get my things, and go.”

  “You’re crazy,” she breathed.

  “Quite possibly. But I’m not lying.” She stood and walked off to the lake-facing windows, but I kept talking. “I can prove it.”

  “B, please…”

  I got up. “I told you I’d explain myself, and that’s what I’m doing.”

  “And how do you expect me to believe you?” she said, her voice cracking. She waved one hand at my steady legs. “I mean, nothing about you feels real right now. You’ve obviously been lying through your teeth about being sick.”

  “That’s another long story.”

  She laughed cynically. “Oh, I bet it is.”

  “Lacey. No matter what you think of me right now, I can prove what I am.”

  She still looked disbelieving. But then I let my right hand change.

  I guess when Ilsa did this weeks ago, it wasn’t that hard after all. The hand, which still held that little crystal wolf, morphed from human into a hybrid shape, long-fingered but clawed, furred in mottled black and silver. Lacey gave a little strangled scream. Then I clenched my hand tight, and the wolf shattered. When I unclenched my fist, letting it slide back into human shape, a cascade of bloody shards fell across the perfect white carpet.

  Then I held my breath, wiped the mess off against my borrowed jeans—Ayu was going to kill me—and held my palm out while the skin knit back together. When the pain ebbed, I was left entirely without scars. Again.

  Lacey slowly slid against the glass until she was sitting on the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees. Tears streaked down both cheeks.

  “Get out,” she said, trembling all over. “Please. Go.”

  I didn’t make her ask again. I turned around, picked up the stack of clothes, and left that perfect house before anyone could stop me.

  And no matter how much it hurt, I ran all the way back.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I was kneeling over Brandon’s cellar door when I heard the news.

  That run home—if “home” was what you could call it—took out of me what the emotional clobbering hadn’t. I stopped by the door and went to the ground, gulping in breaths. I also accidentally dropped the borrowed clothes into the dirt. They were, from the looks of it, a lost cause now. One more for the Ayu’s-going-to-kill-me column.

  Somehow, that felt like the least of my problems.

  I stared at the cellar door. The silence below was grim. I wondered, in a fragmented sort of way, if Brandon was feeling just as overwhelmed as I was. I still shuddered every time I thought of him, but I knew what it was like in there, being locked away. I knew what his aura should feel like, but it was too quiet in there. Too dull and gray.

  I actually felt sorry for him.

  I have no idea if he sensed my presence too, or what he thought of me if he did. I just sat there, aching and tired, and forced myself to breathe.

  Finally I heard Ilsa. Her summons was almost wordless, but the call to all of us was undeniable.

  We all gathered in the main house: Ayu, Pandora, Raoul and me. Then there was Ilsa, reed-thin and pale as paper, but her eyes were so sharp it was impossible to look away. And what she said made a distressing amount of sense.

  “We’ve put this off for days, but it’s come time to decide. The pack can’t enter the city again. We’re only going to get into further trouble”—she glanced, ever so slightly, toward the cellar—“if we stay. But…”

  The silence was deliberate. Pandora took the bait and asked, “What?”

  “I can continue to get the medicines we need. But you each have to make a choice. Either you come with me, or we break apart. I can’t help you if you leave. And you cannot stay here.”

  We looked at each other. We all knew what happened to werewolves who went off the reservation, and it wasn’t pretty. But the alternative was accepting everything she’d done.

  Or, I thought grimly, I had that tenuous, terrible guess about who that doctor of Ilsa’s actually was. I just wasn’t sure I dared confront him if I was wrong. Was I really willing to get him into the middle of this mess? Or worse, spill too many details to a doctor, who really could lock me up or pull me to pieces if he saw the need? Not that I really believed he had it in him, but—

  I stopped. I couldn’t even think too loudly about it, with Ilsa so intent upon all of us. As Raoul peered at me, obviously wondering about my silence, I pushed everything to the back of my head, willing myself to feel as blank and overwhelmed and empty as I could.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t that hard.

  “What about the Elder?” I asked at last, my voice dull. “Can we get him out, too?”

  “He only has days to live. I don’t think he’ll last out the moon.”

  Ilsa sounded so regretful. I couldn’t believe it, though. She’d be all too glad to have him gone.

  Raoul reached for my hand. For his sake as much as mine, I took it.

  “If I’m wrong, you may stay with him and find us when the time comes. I’d understand.” She heaved a sigh. “The bigger question is Brandon.”

  We all went quiet. Considering he was right below us, I’m not sure we were being quiet enough, but maybe Ilsa wanted him to overhear. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  “He’s overstepped his bounds. Either he chooses to make amends
, or he won’t be welcome with us. And we cannot leave a rogue werewolf behind us again.” Her eyes caught mine. “B, you have every right to call challenge against him.”

  I didn’t know where to begin. Brandon wanted me to call challenge against Ilsa, and she wanted me to call challenge against him. Which scenario was worse? Couldn’t I just put the two together in a blender and let them work it out amongst themselves?

  Maybe she heard some of that, or maybe she just had a twisted sense of irony, because she fixed me with an awful stare and whispered, I can guarantee he’d lose.

  Oh, God.

  I got roughly to my feet, which were still protesting, and now my hips were joining the argument. My hands were mostly okay. I flung them into the air in desperation. “I can’t.”

  “No. You can’t make an important decision in such haste.” Ilsa, conversely, sat down, looking disturbingly at ease. “But you should decide before the new moon. On that day, well… it’s murderously difficult to change.”

  What a word to choose. I glared daggers at her and left the room.

  Raoul followed me out.

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t even really know where I was going, but we ended up on the trail to the vantage point. Neither of us spoke until we got there. The cold air rasped through my throat, making it difficult to speak.

  “She’s going to cheat,” I breathed. “Any which way we do this, she’ll cheat.”

  Raoul tried to calm me with a hand on my arm. My face crumpled, and I blurted, “Raoul, everything I’ve tried has gone wrong. I keep trying again, and it ends in disaster or somebody’s dead or…God, it’s such a mess.”

  “We have to keep trying. Together. There’s nothing else.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I whispered. “I’ve got guesses and bad ideas, and that’s about it. I don’t want to get anyone else hurt because I’ve screwed up. I need something more to go on, here.”

  “I know. And I don’t have much, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Something you should know. That night I was supposed to be watching Brandon…” He swallowed, knowing how well that had ended. “The Elder tried to show me what Ilsa’s been doing to him.”

  “Tried?”

  “It wasn’t clear. But he tried to get my attention. Tried to give me a memory.”

  If it was anything like the memory the Elder had given me, I could only imagine the mess it was. Raoul leaned in. “I know how awful the last one was for you. But maybe between the two of us, we could make better sense of it. We ought at least to try.”

  It was a possibility. The last time I’d shared a memory with Raoul, though…

  I glanced involuntarily at his mouth. Raoul looked away. He was actually blushing.

  “We don’t have to kiss again,” he said, nicking a small cut into his thumb. “Plain contact does just as well. Last time, I may have just—”

  “Wanted to?” I said softly.

  The set of his mouth softened. I almost leaned closer, but he gestured at my hand, looking awkward. “It’ll heal up in a second,” he reminded me.

  Right. Werewolf healing. I sighed, made the cut, and braced myself, then pressed my thumb against his. There was a moment of quiet before I felt Raoul focus.

  Neither the age of the memory nor the place was clear. I tasted it first, like acid and sickness beneath something dizzyingly sweet. Then I saw the bottle in the Elder’s clawed hand. He hurled it at the wall, breaking it into amber-tinted shards. The whole world swirled around me until he was outside, the air roaring with the slightest breeze. Every hint of life out there glowed, vivid and tantalizing. I groaned. His senses were sharper than mine had ever been. I was so hungry—

  “B,” Raoul whispered. “Focus.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, seizing his hand. In my head, the Elder’s memory was still unfolding.

  He was opening a door. The memory cracked, went out of sequence. There were people yelling, Ilsa crushing something into powder, a flash of a small orange container, Kane shielding Ilsa—I nearly screamed when I saw his face, so terribly alive again—and Ilsa thrusting that little orange thing into a hiding place with others of its kind, under a pile of furs, some kind of bed.

  “That one is his,” Ilsa said. Her voice was warped through the unstable memory, yet still unmistakable. “Only for him. Don’t you touch it.” Then there was Kane’s voice, furious and powerful, telling the Elder to forget, forget, forget…

  He wasn’t quite powerful enough, though, to make the command stick.

  The Elder didn’t forget. And he was outside under the shivering sky, murmuring, This is yours now. Find it. Find yourselves.

  I snapped out of the memory, wobbling until Raoul reached up to support me. I stood there a long while before he said anything.

  “Shit,” I whispered. Raoul looked like he agreed.

  “Those things she’s hiding,” he said. “I didn’t quite understand what I saw.”

  “Was that her room?”

  “Yes, but…the orange thing…”

  “A pill bottle,” I said without thinking. Raoul blinked at me. It didn’t occur until then that he’d probably never seen one. “Medicines usually come in little orange bottles like that.”

  “So that’s what she’s giving us. And that’s where she’s hiding it.” Raoul’s eyes went even more intent. “It should have a label, shouldn’t it? Proof of what it is.”

  And proof of whether it really is Dr. FitzP behind this, I thought, feeling queasy. I still couldn’t get the image of Marcus in town, running towards my old clinic, out of my head.

  And that fight, how it ended, the blood in the river…

  I jolted myself out of the memory with force. Raoul watched me, frowning.

  “I said I had an awful guess,” I said distantly, wondering how much of that he’d just overheard. “But we need proof first.”

  He nodded slowly. “So we need to find those bottles. There were two. One for him and another for the rest of us. But what’s the difference?”

  I took in a slow breath and wiped my nose. I’d started getting teary-eyed without even noticing. “You saw me when I drank his brandy. I felt brilliant. Giddy. But I went running barefoot and hurt myself, and I didn’t even notice. I was all disconnected. If I’d kept going, I really would have wrecked myself. It’s like…”

  It hit us both at the same time. “What happened to Marcus,” Raoul breathed. “She’s been giving Father the old formula.”

  It made a horrible sort of sense. After years of continual, sneaky doses, eventually even the burn-and-purge mechanics of werewolf metabolism couldn’t keep up. The Elder was succumbing to years of subtle decay. By now he was as dependent on it as he was broken down by it—because it did help, in part. But to stay on it for so long was destroying him.

  And Ilsa knew it.

  Raoul radiated anger and pain, but above all, determination. “This has to stop. We find her supplies, and we lay everything out for everyone to see. Not just what she chooses to tell us. With that kind of treason proven…she’ll have to submit.”

  I nodded, and he closed his eyes, letting out a long, relieved breath. “Thank you. I didn’t want to do this alone.”

  “I know,” I said softly. “Neither did I.”

  We stood together. I didn’t want to say it, but it would be easy for this to go dreadfully wrong. So I looked up through my hair again and said, “Just—one thing, first.”

  “What?”

  “I want to square things with my brother.”

  He sobered, but said nothing.

  “I had an idea, if you’re willing to help me. And I want to do it first, in case”—I cleared my throat—“in case anything gets too complicated.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I know.”

  He tilted my chin up. He still looked troubled, but he agreed. “All right.”

  As if to seal the deal, he kissed me lightly on the forehead—not quite a real kiss, but ju
st enough to matter. Despite my lingering wariness, despite all my worries, I hung on to that for all it was worth.

  *

  At some point, halfway or so up the wall we were scaling, I began to wonder several things. Amongst them: how did this become my life, exactly? What would the police do if we slipped up and got caught? And most importantly, if “important” means “frivolous and insane”: if you’re a werewolf, are you even allowed to call yourself a cat burglar? Or do you have to be a dog burglar instead?

  What I should have been thinking about was how not to get myself killed by falling off this ledge, but funny things cross your mind, I guess, when you’re trying to break into your own school at three in the morning.

  It was almost entirely dark. The security floodlights were on, but not at this corner of the building. Raoul had launched a well-placed rock at the nearest lamp, and in the same toss managed to knock the security camera askew. It now had a lovely view of the greenhouse my old Advanced Bio class was maintaining. I felt briefly nostalgic for my even briefer high school career, then pushed it aside.

  I had more important things to do.

  After all, I was balancing on a half-inch ridge of brick one story up, which served more as a design element than a climbing aid. I was holding myself in place with one hand, and trying to pry the window open with the other. Shattering it would have been easier, but I didn’t want to make any more noise than necessary. I just wanted to…borrow something, for my brother’s sake.

  I just hoped I’d gotten enough of Ilsa’s special recipe over the last couple of days to get me through this without collapsing, and earning the World’s Worst Timing award. Posthumously.

  You all right up there? Raoul asked me silently.

  I’m not planning on falling just to give you something to do, I told him. I could sense him smile, just as I wrenched the window open. A couple of screws flew loose. That just plain figured.

  I guess I’m in. Just…give me a sec.

  Don’t take too long.

  I nodded and clambered in to look.

  The room was surreal in the dark, with shadowed shapes everywhere: some of them gracefully curved, some hidden in boxes, and some looking oddly human in silhouette. I touched the neck of one of them, remembering.