by Carol Wolf
I moved quietly along an uneven brick walkway, skirted some spindly trees, crossed a bare patch of weeds that had once been a garden, and reached the lambing pen. I opened the first gate wide, then hurried down to the next field. I was in human form, and I’d come from the house, so the border collies, who must have seen me by now, were not barking. Yet. I opened the next gate. It wanted to swing shut so I propped it with a rock so it wouldn’t close.
I hurried to the next gate, stepping long on my good leg, and favoring my ankle, hoping my bruised hip would warm up again soon. It hurt, but not as much as it had last night. I reached the big field, and dragged wide the double gates. They opened into the rutted lane I was following. Beyond the lane on the left a huge field had been cut to stubble after the last harvest of alfalfa. Far across it, up the hillside a ways, behind the fences of the next farm, dogs were barking.
I reached the farthest gate and opened it wide. The sheep, who had been fed and settled for the night, watched me incuriously. That was about to change. I looked back at Sarah's house and barn. I’d gone about a quarter of a mile. This next part needed to be fast, or it was going to end badly. If I did it right, there was going to be a whole lot of distraction working in my favor.
CHAPTER FOUR
I changed. I leaped into the sheep field at a bound—and almost crumpled. I’d gotten used to favoring my ankle. I’d forgotten about my foreleg. I started forward more tentatively, but the hysterical barking of the border collies across the way reminded me that what I did next needed to be done as fast as possible.
I loped across the field toward the house, and the sheep, sweet, beautiful sheep, high-tailed it away from me. I sent them bounding toward the double gates, and they galloped out, charging off in a panic into the dark, empty field beyond. I got to the second sheep field, and charged across it as well, and all the ewes and their little lambs ran out into the night. Most of the lambs ran at their moms’ heels, but of course a bunch of them were slow to get up, or facing the wrong way, or ran into the fence instead of the gate, and were left behind. They trotted around, crying pitifully like the babies they were, but the moms didn’t stop. It might have been a hundred generations since they’d caught the scent, but they remembered, and they knew what it meant when a wolf was in the pen. Ewes with newborn lambs, penned in squares of hay bales, found it in them to leap straight out and follow the herd, leaving their little lambs bawling behind them. I nearly tripped over one of the little sweeties, who banged his head into my leg, and nosed around, crying and looking for mom, and milk, and comfort. He smelled so good, I could have just eaten him up. But I couldn’t stop yet.
I almost crawled over the fence into the lambing pen, where the heavy ewes rolled their eyes and jounced toward the gate and off into the lane. I followed them, and oh, how they ran. You wouldn’t think anything so big and encumbered could lumber so fast.
The border collies were barking hysterically; Sarah and Elaine emerged from the barn. Sarah ran for the house and after a minute returned to the yard with a shotgun—I knew there would be a shotgun! I ducked around the house, and came out behind them, just off the porch, in the shadows by the cars.
“What is it?” Elaine called. “What's out there?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said, sounding deadly from behind her gun. “But I’m going to find out.”
Sarah ran for the kennels. I thought that's what she’d do. I sloped across the yard behind the trucks so I could watch from the far side of the barn. Sarah let out the first dog, and before she gave him a command he went charging toward the open field where the sheep had scattered and were only now beginning to slow down. She whistled at him and he stopped and lay down, trembling. She let out the pair that shared one kennel, and then sent all three of them to make a huge loop around the field, two going one way, one going the other. The fourth dog yelped and whined at her.
“Get down, Polly, you’re not going.” Sarah patted the fence and then told her sharply to be quiet. I was close enough then, and on the right side of the wind, to know why this dog was locked up by herself. She was in heat.
Elaine came over to the kennels with the flashlight.
“Did you see anything?” Sarah asked her.
“Just the sheep. I don’t see any down.”
“Spook and Joe will bring them back,” Sarah said.
“Why’d you let Tally out?” Elaine asked. They were walking away from me, toward the field where the dogs had circled out after the sheep and were gathering them up.
“Might as well give him a run,” Sarah said. “He won’t do any harm.”
When they crossed the lane, I changed to my human form and slipped up to the last kennel. Polly didn’t seem very interested in killing me. She stared out at the moving herd in the distance, caterwauling, her voice rising and falling in excitement and frustration. I opened the latch on her kennel.
“Go get ‘em, Polly!”
Polly shot out of there, leaped over the fence into the lambing pen, and took off across the field. I closed the latch on her kennel and ducked behind the barn just as I heard Sarah shouting. “Polly! Leave it! Come! No, no, Joe, get out of there, Spook, lie down LIE DOWN! Polly! Polly, come here right now you god-damn idiot bitch!”
I grinned. In six weeks, there were going to be unlawful puppies.
When I rounded the back of the barn, I saw the flashlight bobbing in the big open field, and heard Sarah yelling and whistling to her dogs. I started to limp across the yard back to the house when another border collie came out of the barn. I stopped. He stopped. If he barked, Sarah would head back here with her shotgun, and I would be in big trouble. If he attacked me, it might slow me down enough to attract attention. I gathered myself to change, leap on him, grab him by the neck, when the border collie dropped to the ground and rolled over, sticking his tongue out between his lips. Oh. That border collie. Baz was almost all black with a silly white blaze in the form of a crescent across his face, white stockings, and a white tip on his tail, which he wagged hopefully, just a tiny bit. Good dog.
“Get in the barn, Baz,” I said. Then I changed to my wolf form, and he was gone. There is great satisfaction in a job done well. Respect is an important lesson.
I limped heavily on both bad legs over to the house. They hurt like hell. I was not going to be able to run or even walk much farther tonight. I had to avoid the dogs, and I had to get out of here. I looked out across the field where the mass of sheep were being trotted back toward the gates to their pens, hurried on their way by one of the dogs. No sign of the other three. Ha. Sarah was still going to have quite a time getting the sheep back in the right paddocks, with the correct lambs. I had to get out of sight before she got back. But first, I needed some supplies.
I changed again as I reached for the doorknob and went into the house. I grabbed the sweats I’d put aside earlier and pulled them on. I swiped a bandana out of the same drawer. I stopped in the bathroom to drink as much as I could hold. I went out the front door, since Sarah didn’t use it much, and most of the light was in back.
At the side of the house I tucked the bandana into the pocket of my sweats where it would probably stay, and changed to my wolf form again. I gathered myself and unleashed my fear, my pain and my anger all at once, making myself big enough to leap onto the roof. I nosed around and found the little silver hooks in the leather bracelets, still smelling of my blood and pus, where I’d tossed them the previous night. Up on the roof, the dogs wouldn’t find them. I figured it wasn’t likely that tonight they’d find me there either.
I changed to my human form, retrieved the bandana and used it to wrap up the bracelets, wire, and hooks. I didn’t want them in my pocket. Our clothes go with us when we make the change from human to wolf and back. We don’t usually lose things out of our pockets, though it's been known to happen. But I was not going to risk having those bespelled hooks near my body when I changed. For all I knew, one of them could end up in my brain. I let myself get small again, leaching out
my passion and fear. I lay down on the roof to enjoy the show.
I must have dozed off, out of relief at being in one form at a time, out of exhaustion from the trek I’d made on my damaged legs. Sarah woke me, shouting and carrying on in all directions down in the yard, about Polly being out—she was still out—the sheep being all mixed up, and me being gone, and yelling that I had to be responsible. Well, she got that right. She came up on the porch with the dog Spook, and one of my bandages, told him to “find” and sent him off into the dark. I’d been looking forward to this. He nosed around the yard, circled the barn, went into the barn, and came back to the porch. Yup. That's where I’d gone in my human form. She must have given him the gauze from my right wrist. Elaine came out next with the other gauze, and they had an argument over whether it would make a difference—Sarah outshouted her, but Elaine was right. Of course it would make a difference! Wolves smell different from humans. Really, they do.
“Sarah, please, just try it. What harm can it do?”
“Harm? What are you talking about? Do you know how many lambs I’ve lost tonight?”
She hadn’t lost any, so far as I knew, but it was fun to lie there and listen to her carry on about it.
Sarah talked herself around after awhile, and gave the other border collie, Joe, the scent of the other piece of gauze. Joe took off across the lambing pen, hopped over into the next pen, hopped into the big field and ran almost to the end of it. I lay there grinning. Sarah must have thought for a few moments that Joe was after me, and would catch me, just before he came through the gate, ran down the lane, and back to the house. He was tracking me backward.
There's no way to tell which way your prey went from a scent trail. You have to figure out in the first place if they were coming or going, before you go after them. I’d gone in a circle. That's always fun. Back home, when I was a kid, my brothers and cousins and I used to play hide and seek. One game could take hours, as our range included a seventy-mile valley, two ridges of mountains, and a long black beach. Those were the days. And that was not quite two years ago, before my dad disappeared. But that's another story.
Sarah put one of her dogs back in the kennel, went back into the house, and then back out to the field to try and pair up the right ewes with the right lambs, before the little critters cried themselves sick or starved to death. I made use of her absence. Elaine came out of the house in tight-lipped fury, opened the cab door, and tossed her vet bag onto the front seat. She came back, hoisted the big live-animal cage that had been my prison into the back of the truck and climbed into the cab. Sarah hadn’t done much to make her feel friendly. Funny, I felt the same way. Elaine drove off very fast down the drive. And that was fine with me because by that time, I was in the backseat of her big truck. Trusting soul, she’d left the door unlocked.
We bounced down the gravel road, climbed the far ridge, got on to blacktop and sped down the hill in the darkness. Elaine's bulky jacket didn’t disguise her thin shoulders. Her boots smelled of dirt and sheep muck, of course. Her jeans smelled of—camel? She turned on her CD player and yelled along with the singer who also had someone who’d done her wrong and gotten her mad and needed shooting right now. She trapped her long braid against the seat to keep it from swinging around as she rocked the music.
I sat curled up in the footwell behind the driver's seat, which is the least likely place for her to notice me if she happened to glance in the back. A gun case lay on the back seat, on top of a hairy old blanket that smelled of all kinds of critters recently, and one old dog from a long time ago. When I found the small plastic box in the other footwell, I was pretty sure I knew what was going to be in it.
The truck slowed, made a sliding California stop, and turned right. Then it gathered speed, the interior lit now and then by street lights. We were closing in on civilization, and I didn’t want to do that yet.
I sat up, poking my head between the two front seats. “Hi!” I said. “Do I know you?”
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God!” Elaine jerked, the truck swerved, and the left front tire smacked up onto the median.
“Hey! Careful!”
“Oh God oh God oh God—” Elaine swung the wheel wide to avoid driving right over the median, and plowed across two lanes. What a good thing there wasn’t any traffic just then.
“Watch out! I couldn’t find the seatbelt back here.”
Elaine held the wheel in a death grip. “Help me please—”
“Turn off that noise!” I told her.
Hand shaking, Elaine turned off the CD player. “—please please please please help me—”
She wasn’t asking me, I was pretty sure of that. “Pull to the right,” I said. We were on a big wide street, two lanes each way with a median strip planted with bushes. On either side, housing developments rose above the ramparts of their sound walls, their security gates, and the landscaped slopes of their future mudslides.
The car kept going straight. Elaine's mouth was open, but she wasn’t yelling anymore. Her eyes rolled my way, her round glasses glinting in the light reflected from the street lamps, and she put her foot down. The car leaped forward. I touched the point of one of the darts from the plastic case to her neck. Elaine gasped and lifted her chin. “Do you know what this is?” I asked, but obviously, she knew exactly what it was. She lifted her foot from the gas pedal.
“Slow down, and pull over.”
I could read the tension in her arms, in her jaw, like a newspaper. “Vet Crashes Truck After Late Night Sheep Riot!” I leaned in to speak into her ear. “Do you know how much it hurts to have one of these things stab into you? Go on, ask me how I know.” The truck slowed a little more. “That's right, because I’m going to hold this dart right here and not move until the truck is stopped. So, it would be good if we didn’t hit any bumps or anything.”
She drew in her breath, as though she’d been holding it for a minute. “What do you want?”
“What I want is to have the last five days of my life back. Any chance of that?”
“I didn’t—I mean, we weren’t—”
“And,” I added, since there was no limit on what I could wish for, “I’d also like it a whole lot if I didn’t have a dart wound in my hip, and if my wrist and ankle weren’t still bleeding, and they didn’t all hurt so damn much!”
She winced away from my voice, and the truck swerved again. “I—”
“Yes. That is what I want to talk about.” Just ahead a narrow road met our thruway on the right, leading up a barren hillside where development had not yet been committed. “Turn right there,” I told her. “Not too hard, because you don’t want to jerk my hand or anything.” She made the turn as gently as that big truck could.
“Where are we going?” Her voice was not quite steady. In a rising tone, she asked, “What do you want? What are you going to do?”
I couldn’t help it. I grinned. “I’m so hungry. I’m going to eat you for dinner, my little pumpkin!”
Okay, the screams were fun, but the truck weaving out of control, not so much. I was careful not to poke her with the dart, because I really did want to have a conversation, not watch her bleed all over the place. And again, it was lucky for us there was no traffic on that lane going either way because we would have nailed them all. I slipped into the front passenger seat and put a hand on the wheel to steady the truck. Her screams rose into hysteria. Then she got a good look at me, and they began to taper off.
I made myself look small. There are times when wearing the aspect of your second nature like a spirit superimposed over your head, or changing to a wolf so large she hardly fits in the room, and her head looks big enough to swallow someone whole, can go a long way to focusing a conversation. But just now, I didn’t need Elaine any more crazy, and I knew that making myself small didn’t mean I was any less dangerous. It just allowed her to believe it. For the moment. She stopped screaming and stared at me.
“But—you’re just a kid!”
“Yes,” I said. “I’
m the kid that you shot the other night. Pull over here.”
She pulled into a wide place in the road and stopped. I reached for the keys, turned off the engine, and pocketed them.
“Now,” I said, and I let myself grow larger. “You get to explain why you shot me.”
She leaned away from me until her back was to the door. I thought she was going to grab the door handle and make a run for it into the night—and I have to say that the thought of running her down in my wolf nature made me forget, just for a moment, the towering pain in my wrist and ankle, which meant all I could have done was hobble after her anyway. But she didn’t run. Her right hand groped for the end of her braid. I wondered if she had some kind of weapon stashed there. All I could see was a small dark metal clasp. She grabbed it, held it up to me, and made a warding sign with her other hand. “Avaunt ye, demon! Begone!”
I heard a sound like a marshmallow popping, and felt a tiny rush of air. She shook the clasp at me. “Thing of darkness! I command you to depart!”
“Um. No.”
“You—demon—begone!”
“I’m not a demon.”
“You’re…” Behind her specs I saw her blink. “You are a demon. I saw you.” She shook the little charm at me. “This should be working.”
I plucked the clasp from her fingers and leaned forward to examine it. She didn’t try to stop me. She just leaned away as far as her braid would let her. The clasp was a Celtic knot, cast in bronze. I could feel the twinge of a ward there, but it wasn’t very strong. This was supposed to dismiss a demon? Richard wouldn’t have bothered to swat it aside, even before he got his powers back.