Bait and Bleed

by Elizabeth Blake

  “Svetlana,” Peter said. “What Erik says makes sense. Imagine—”

  She put up her hand. “Let me think, Peter. These ideas excite me too much.”

  She looked exhausted. Maybe she truly didn't need us. Erik could be replaced. We all could. She walked absently over the detritus of my destroyed wall and crawled back into bed. I looked at Peter. “What do you think she'll do?”

  He shrugged, staring at me, accepting Svetlana's decision. If it was me who loved her, I would have chased her down. If it was me, I wouldn't let her go.

  I followed her scent, trailed her to the bed, and slipped under the covers. The others left us alone, and I pondered her fantastic perfume, her smooth skin, the bulk of her shape next to mine. She hadn't reminded me of the sex we had before the abduction. She hadn't tried to kiss me. Was my scent unwelcoming now that I was L-pos? How selfish of me to want attention after everything.

  Eyes closed, she turned her head and breathed deep. Her nostrils flared as she scented me, and then she pressed lips against my forehead. Her warmth and pulse filled me to the absolute brink. I smelled the hot, hollow waves of her need, a desperate need to love us, to be with us. Her eyes shone bright with a mixture of molten gold and caramel. Her warm, savory milk scent, rent open with longing, filled my nostrils and turned my heart. I held her hip, and she clasped my ribs.

  She pulled blankets up and was asleep before I could wrestle more covers for myself. I rolled into the ambrosial scent of her, into the smell of sweet, honey milk. I wanted to call it mine, to declare her a part of my life, but I didn't want the fight that came with it. And with Svetlana, there would always be a fight. We were both scary bitches.

  Sensing—smelling—my nearness, she tipped her head a bit. Her forehead touching mine. She mumbled something about pink bunny rabbits and continued sleeping. Weird.

  I slept.

  Chapter 40

  Clifford

  Her house reeked with the familiar combination of mint vapor from her electric smoker and the bleach her housekeeper employed in dizzying quantities.

  My spine felt hollow, as if it was missing some magic. As if my wolf ran out of energy trying to heal me. I could barely walk without limping from the massive beating. I didn’t think I could shed if my life depended on it. My torso still burned where ribs had stabbed through.

  The housekeeper opened the door, having spotted me in the camera and recognized me despite the fact that I hadn’t visited in four years. Wordlessly, she escorted me inside.

  I inhaled another odor: balsamic vinaigrette. My brother used to tease Mother about the quantity of salads she consumed daily (five) and that she’d turn green and pickle herself with all the vinegar-coated spinach.

  He had been the one who could joke with her and even make her smile.

  I followed the trail of her expensive, complicated chemical perfume, the scent of which struck me as odious and bitter. Plumes of it, all around, concentrated in her office which she called ‘the veranda’ even though it wasn’t. The closer I came to her door, the more my heart stuttered. This was a dreadful idea. Nothing in the world could be worse than facing her again. Couldn’t believe I had come here voluntarily.

  No family portraits on the walls. She had never been the sentimental type. I wonder how she managed to do any mothering at all, given her predisposition to professional aloofness which recently served her so well.

  The house displayed how she struggled with her growing wealth. My mother, who never cared for possessions, art, or things she called “trifles,” had gathered a fair representation of useless, pretty knickknacks in so many disharmonious styles I suspected they came as gifts from suitors, both romantic and political.

  As if she’d ever been one for romance.

  My heart pounded like a seven year-old who received a poor grade on a report card. The childish trepidation made me feel silly. I was a grown man, and she was still my mother.

  A fact I resented more than anything in the world.

  She wasn’t an awful person, but she was a great politician.

  And a Devoted disciple, apparently. A huge religious cross with an ankh’s head hung on the door, which I opened as quietly and gently as I could manage.

  She didn’t see me. Completely unaware and basking in her work, she failed to notice my entrance. Her pantsuit was apricot, wrinkle-free, and her sensible pumps were the same pearly white of her pearl necklace. Class, all Jackie Kennedy, fabricated from a picture she found in her youth featuring the First Lady riding shotgun beside the soon-to-be-dead president.

  I always wondered why the image struck her. Maybe she saw beauty standing near catastrophe and wanted to be the one in the chaos. Her black hair, dark as obsidian, fell in a classic bob. Her face didn’t show her age. No wrinkle, sunspot, or blemish. A mouth so flat and lithe she could articulate entire speeches with minimal movement.

  Her hands, however, showed her age. Her mortality. Plump veins pressed against the time-softened skin on the back of her hands.

  Who was this woman?

  “Mother.” I came to stand in the room and stare across the way, watching her stand with impeccable posture as she read a stack of papers an inch thick.

  She fell still, freeze-frame, and waited a whole five agonizing seconds before she looked at me. Her expression felt practiced: the appropriate mixture of patience and irritation at having been interrupted. A “this better be good” expression. Within the perfect mask, her pupils engorged. Dilated. She didn’t put the papers down. She didn’t come any closer. She did nothing but wait for me. When I proved to be tongue-tied, she said, “Clifford.”

  Her singular tone triggered old wounds. I wanted to rage, scream, and run away. Would it kill her to hug me? Say something nice? At least smile?

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of Kaidlyn’s boyfriend’s jeans.

  “Mother,” I finally articulated, feeling as dumb as shit.

  “Yes?”

  As if I was an assistant seeking a raise.

  “We need to talk.” Lame. “Do you have a moment?”

  “That is something you should have inquired about before you arrived, I imagine.” She plopped the report on the desk and stared at my pants. The shirt, belonging to Kaidlyn, stretched around my shoulders tight enough to pop the seams. Mother saw my muscles, which she commonly referred to as vulgar and pedestrian. She was mortified that her son could pass as a day laborer.

  “I need to speak with you.”

  “Seeing as you’re already here.” She entwined her fingers and stood at ease, the way she posed on stages if another politician bothered to talk.

  “We haven’t seen each other in a long time.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “I have already had my morning cup.”

  As if the extra dash of caffeine might kill her poker face. The woman was a wall, five feet and two inches of immobile stone.

  “I saw the cross on the foyer. I didn’t realize you had become religious.”

  “The Devoted are quite popular.”

  “I bet that’s good for votes,” I joked.

  “It is.”

  I gave up with any attempt at small talk. “My life has changed a lot recently. The dojo, well, it’s gone. It burned to the ground.”

  I planned to talk about myself but discussed the gym instead. She hated my place, and I certainly wasn’t inciting pity or compassion. What was I doing here? She didn’t want anything from me. This couldn’t possibly do me any good.

  “I’ve been watching you on television.” A flat out lie. I couldn’t bear to see her performances. She was the cold, solid, stoic professional politician people craved in this era. In fact, she’d done a lot to encourage movement away from rambunctious, preacher-type politicians to the cold fish bureaucrats who were unimpressed by the apocalypse. She promised the city nonplussed peace and an unwrinkled human experience where all the violence, poverty, and monsters couldn’t hurt anyone. Certa
inly couldn’t inconvenience anyone. She directly supported and financed the FBHS, putting silver in Kaidlyn’s Durant’s gun.

  Oh, the irony.

  She waited, poised, and growing less impressed by the second. So much for my education. I couldn’t even form a complete sentence.

  “I ran into some trouble recently.”

  Without comment, she reached for the checkbook.

  “God, Mother, that isn’t why I’m here.”

  “I can’t imagine why you came. Simply tell me.”

  “What I am about to say is highly personal and very sensitive.”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said.”

  “Probably not, but I plan to say it anyway.” Eventually. “I seem to have come down with something akin to…well, I am L-positive.”

  No break in demeanor. She took the news the same way she could withstand a competitor’s devastating rhetoric. Although I couldn’t see it happen, I knew she was breaking the information into tiny pieces and playing it against other semantic bits and scraps of rhetoric rolling around in her mind.

  “I have been L-pos for—”

  “No,” she said, calmly, the same way she declined a cup of tea.

  “Pretty sure.”

  Her hands fell from their poised clasp. I watched them slowly clench into fists, two tiny hands like birds’ eggs that I could cup in my palm.

  “I won’t accept it.”

  “This has nothing to do with what you are willing to accept. Mother, I am contaminated, and that is a fact.”

  Her face fell with utter disappointment.

  “How could my last son do this to me?” she said. In one question, I heard all of her disdain and mourning for him, her loss and anger, all wrapped up. I wanted to strangle her. Blood rose throughout my body, as if rage pushed everything to the forefront.

  Finally, it sank in. Her face paled as blood retreated from the surface of her skin. Panic hormones tagged her scent. Hatred rushed up, nipping at fear’s heels.

  “Mother,” I said. Maybe the rage changed my features because she froze. Aghast. Then she trembled, hating me. Fearing me. Terror pulsed through her neck, blood thundered from her tripping heart, and she stood before me, outraged, victimized, hands shaking with injustice.

  “I’m going to be okay,” I said, although deep down I knew this wasn’t her concern.

  “What if someone discovers you?”

  “I can handle myself, but I wanted you to know.”

  “Why? Why would you put me through this?”

  As if everything was about her. As if I had deliberately sabotaged her next campaign.

  “I don’t know what you expect from me,” she said.

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing. Jesus. I thought you should know.”

  “No civilized person comes out and says such things. It’s rude.”

  “Oh, is it? How uncouth of me.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, young man.”

  Her words were flat, her voice almost benign, worse than an epitaph. And she, so good at working through problems and packing chaos into manageable issues, stood waiting for me to say something better, to take it back and pretend we’d never spoken.

  Next, she said: “Who knows you’re diseased?”

  “How is that important?”

  “You come to me after all this time, confessing to your filth, making me complicit to your disease, and I want to know why. Why? Whenever a man wants to confess, it’s about death or a woman. Did you kill someone?”

  “No, I—”

  “There’s a girl, isn’t there? Someone infected your mind, and now you want me to condone your sickness. Well, I won’t do it.”

  “This has nothing to do with anyone.”

  “Understand you are endangering her as well as me. Both of us could be black-bagged for this conversation. Would you do that to her? To me? How dare you be so selfish? What do you expect? Forgiveness? Salvation?”

  “Don’t be contrived.”

  “Oh, now I am being lectured for my behavior, as if I deserve any blame!”

  “Mother—”

  “Don’t ‘mother’ me. Don’t you dare! I have lost my last son today.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. I am standing right here. All you have to do is look at me. Stop and look at me, and tell me we can talk about this.”

  She stopped. She looked at me. She said, “We have nothing to talk about.”

  “Despite disowning him, you love him and support him from afar. I mean, that’s what the Devoted cross is really about, isn’t it? Can’t you try to consider what I’m going through? Mother.”

  “It’s not the same. Go away. Get out of here.” Her authoritarian voice held no remorse and certainly no wiggle-room. She had made up her mind. Couldn’t imagine what I expected of her. And he, wherever he was, remained the beloved son, while I proved worse than a nuisance: I was inconvenient.

  I turned and left, dragging ass down the steps, thinking about how dumb I was. Incredibly, incurably stupid. So stupid, in fact, that I failed to think about the true enormity of my unsalvageable mistake.

  I made it about two blocks before they descended.

  Chapter 41

  Kaidlyn

  I woke. No dreams. The room was dark and my veins were hot. I was a mutt nearing a shed, a disaster waiting to happen. All those years avoiding the disease and somehow emerging unscathed from the fray, and Svetlana gave it to me as easily as if it was the common cold. She ruined everything, and she didn't care.

  A bloody mutt.

  This was the end of my life, the roadblock in my career, the guillotine dropping on everything I ever had. Lycanthropy proved the end of me, the murderer of who I was. I would never have another normal moment. I cried fat hot tears of self-pity, tears so monstrous and angry they would have cap-sized Noah's ark and ended the world. Every mutt-massacre I'd ever seen rolled through my head, only this time I had caused the gore. I was the one who couldn't cut it, couldn’t bear the burden of a disease destined to ruin lives and destroy families.

  I was never, ever going to get out of bed. As soon as Svetlana woke and left my side in the morning, I would kill myself. There would be a backup Glock under the bed. I always kept a weapon within arm’s reach of my pillow. A silver bullet was already in the chamber. Muzzle in my mouth, metal taste like blood on my tongue, silver ejaculating through my brain. Then again, Kliment had shot himself in the head and survived, saved by the wolf inside him. I needed to know it would be final. No putting me back together again.

  I should tape a hand grenade to my throat, pull the pin, and use the gun before it detonated. Safer for everyone. My brain splatter was the honorable way to keep everyone safe.

  I could not live as a hazard to the people I loved. I knew myself, my weakness, my temper; I was a walking minefield. I should probably do it now, before someone figures it out or wonders why I'm digging out my stash of explosives.

  I opened wet eyes and saw Svetlana watching me. Moonlight dripped down her cheeks. Her eyes glowed like molten honey. She gave a warm, honest smile.

  “Come with me,” she whispered. Her eyes twinkled with pleasant mischief, and I didn't ask questions. She pulled me out of bed, stole some of my clothes, and took my keys. I didn't complain. I was too tired to make trouble. We tiptoed past sleeping werewolves. There was zero likelihood they didn’t notice our escape, but no one protested. Svetlana and I got into my truck.

  My neighborhood slumbered peacefully. Zelda's garden appeared dark and mysterious, like a great place to roll around and take a nap, if it weren't for all those pesky cats.

  Svetlana drove while I stared into the night. Rain began splattering against the windows, and I fell asleep to the sound of it on the glass. I woke when she stopped driving. The sky was mostly dark with tinges of silver and pink on the skyline. She had driven to the woods at a higher elevation where the air sat fifteen degrees cooler. We both got out of the truck. I stretched, and my body loved it.

  She started to
undress. I watched, of course, my pulse clamoring and my mind oddly at peace. Her flesh was more alive than anything I'd ever seen. I smiled and followed suit. The chill tightened my body with goosebumps. I threw my clothes in the truck bed, and my boots clanged.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Run.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged, a smile breaking joyfully over her face. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes darkening. “Run.” Unable to explain what I felt, I laughed. The sound rose in me like a great torrent breaking free. She turned and trotted away, looking over her shoulder to see if I'd follow. Laughing, I charged after her. The stony earth scratched at my feet, the cold air threatened to freeze my lungs, but a heat pushed through me and surged up into my skin.

  I never knew such joy.

  Chapter 42

  Clifford

  Metal groaned beneath me. Iron scratched at my throat. The irritation wasn’t enough to distract me from the rank stench of a hundred corpses, a dozen expiring bodies, and a putrid, sour stink of wolf gone mad. Burning meat. Diesel fuel and blood baked into brown clay. All around me was dust, dirt, feces, the fear-stink of sour urine. Bodies sprawled around me, limbs all tangled up and sweaty, skittish: L-pos and human alike, packed like sardines into a cargo hold. Their heartbeats echoed my own hyperventilating organ.

  She did this to me.

  Iron on my wrists, cutting deep, silver burning at the cuffs. The collar jabbed at my skin as inward facing spikes dug into my swelling flesh. The truck heaved, hydraulics whirred, and it dumped us out like trash. Sunlight burned my face, scorching me with light and absurdly impartial warmth.

  Creeping my eyes open, I blinked to clear blood from my eyelids. Cement walls towered around me, topped with a forest of curling razor wire, glinting in the sun. Limbs bumped and battered me as the cluster of prisoners writhed like a mass grave unfurling into bits of ribbon.