Shifters After Dark Box Set

by S M Reine et al.

  “And who’s gonna do that, exactly? He’s stronger than I am. He has the whole pack paranoid and terrorized so we won’t turn on him. His own kid sister is afraid to tease him anymore. Even the neighboring packs want nothing to do with us until Luke burns himself out. He’s just too unpredictable.”

  “What does that mean, ‘burns himself out’?”

  There is a long silence, but the call is still active. “Kelly?” I insist.

  “Listen,” Kelly says, his voice lowered, “eventually Luke’s gonna lose it, and do something messy. Maybe it’ll be a founding, or maybe Astrid, although God knows that woman’s stronger than any of us. When that happens, the vampires will step in and take him out. They’ve got resources we don’t.”

  Before I can think of a response, Kelly continues, “I’m going to do you a favor, Sashi. As long as he doesn’t ask me direct, I’m not gonna tell him about this call. Just lay low. It’s the best thing for everyone.”

  He hangs up.

  I’m not satisfied with the “let Luke burn himself out” solution, but I don’t know what else to do. I keep turning the problem over in my mind, but I have no ideas and soon time starts to pass. Every morning I drag myself out of bed and drive to the clinic for two hours of reading and magic. Even though Mum says it’s a waste of gas and parking money, I drive myself in my own car. The lectures dry up after a while, but I don’t know if it’s because she gives up, or if she knows I cry all the way home.

  I keep catching myself thinking about Will, peeking at the post-it note until I’ve got it memorized. Then I get nervous that I’ll give in and call him, so I start going out with some of my casual friends from high school. Rochester isn’t exactly the club center of the universe, but there are a few cool places, and before long I am going out more nights than not, drinking and dancing until the bars close at 2:30. I’m tired and hungover for most of my volunteer shifts, but it doesn’t matter: the kids can’t tell, and hangovers have no affect on my magic.

  Owen, the little boy I visited on my first day, becomes a favorite of mine, mostly because he always begs for the His Dark Materials trilogy. We finish The Golden Compass and its two sequels by mid-July, and he begs me to start them all over again. I would, except he is doing so well by then that he’s going home. I don’t entirely understand his treatment plan, but I can feel how well his body is doing from our frequent interactions. It has fought back the cancer, and my communications with it have become a pleasure. The body is almost…proud of itself, in a childlike, optimistic way, and I smile whenever I touch Owen’s arm and check on it.

  Before his last day at the Mayo Clinic I go to the bookstore and buy him his own set of the His Dark Materials books, and a set of Tolkien to go with it. I leave the gifts with one of the nurses to give to Owen before he checks out. I don’t want him to thank me or ask me for my address so he can mail me letters and pictures. And I sure as hell don’t want a big emotional goodbye. If there’s one thing my mother has taught me about thaumaturgy, it’s that I can’t allow myself to get too attached to cancer patients. Still, I am happy for Owen.

  Mum and I don’t hear anything from the werewolves for the July full moon. I worry about Astrid, and sometimes I am tempted to text her just to check in. After the conversation with Kelly, though, I know that contact from me might just get her into more trouble with Luke, so I stay away.

  Before I know it, August arrives, hot and humid. Between the drinking and the heat, I begin to exist in a state of dreamy nausea, always either a little bit drunk or a little bit sick. Everything tunnels down to just getting through the day, then the week. I am counting the days until I can go back to school, where at least I’ll have classes to distract me. I am blowing through my savings—a modest account my father set up when I was a kid, for my college education—about twice as fast as planned, but I can’t seem to care.

  If Mum notices my drinking spiral, she doesn’t say anything, maybe because I am still pulling my shit together for two hours a day at the Mayo. The patients’ families rave about me to Juan-Carlos, who praises me to my mum (“Of course, I’d expect nothing less from your daughter, Dr. Noring”), which gives me carte blanche for whatever else I want to do with my time. I barely see Mum anymore, which really does wonders for how well we get along. Possibly as a reward for dumping Will and sticking with my volunteer shifts, she doesn’t mention setting me up with a thaumaturge again. I’m pathetically grateful for this, because I’m so lonely I might just take her up on it.

  Two days before the full moon in August, Luke calls Mum for a “consultation,” but I am at dinner with my friends and she doesn’t call me home. When I get back, she is on her hands and knees in the garage, scrubbing blood off the concrete from where it leaked out of a dirty tarp on the ground. Mum glares at me. “You reek of alcohol,” she complains. “Did you drive?”

  I’m insulted. Even I’m not that reckless and stupid. “Yeah, but don’t worry, I don’t think it was my car,” I say solemnly. I reach down and start picking up the supplies.

  “Ha-ha.”

  “What happened here?” I ask, balling up the used tarp. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “It was just a simple stitching job,” she sniffs. “I didn’t need assistance.”

  “Who was it?” I ask, trying to keep my tone offhand. I am worried for Astrid.

  “Caroline Brooks, Luke’s sister.”

  This surprises me. I’ve met Caroline, who’s chaperoned a couple of injured wolves to our house over the years. I don’t know much about the pack, but I figured Caroline had some sort of protected status because she’s the alpha’s sister.

  “Do you know what happened?” I ask Mum.

  “No, and I don’t want to know.”

  I figure that’s it for the werewolves this summer, and I am torn between guilt and relief. I don’t want to worry about Astrid, about what Luke might be doing to her. I don’t want to feel this crush of responsibility for someone I barely know.

  12. Astrid

  By the end of August I have had enough.

  I am done with this goddamned life: done with hauling boxes around during my early-morning shift at Target, done with having all the women in the pack hate and fear me because I won’t submit, done with crying myself to sleep because the pain of healing so quickly overwhelms me. Mostly, though, I am done with Luke, with the violence and the pleading, the attempts to own me and the entreaties for me to roll over and show him my belly. I have lasted as long as I could, but werewolves live a long time, and I can’t spend the next eighty or ninety years getting shredded by a demented alpha werewolf.

  I decide to kill Luke or die trying.

  I have fought him before, of course, and I know that he is bigger, faster, and stronger than me. But every time we fought, I was on the defense—usually in human form, but occasionally in wolf form too. If I ambush him, maybe there’s a chance I can win.

  I want to hedge my bets, though, so one afternoon I drive to Minneapolis and start hitting pawn shops until I find what I want: an eight-inch letter opener plated in silver. I buy it and keep going, stopping at more pawn shops until I find a second, mismatched one, nearly six inches from point to hilt. I want a backup, just in case.

  Using silver against another werewolf is considered the equivalent of putting poison in your best friend’s coffee: it’s sneaky, disgraceful, and cowardly, but I am way past caring about any of that. I’m not trying to take over the pack, or win the approval of my packmates. All I care about is surviving.

  I buy thick leather gloves on the way home from the Cities and spend hours honing the edges of the two letter openers until they are both sharp enough to cut through a loaf of bread without squashing it. I hide one in a metal vase of silk flowers in the entryway, and the other above the ceiling tiles in my living room. Now all I have to do is wait for Luke to make one of his surprise visits.

  It doesn’t take long: the very next night I hear Luke’s car in the driveway shortly after sundown. My duplex isn’t ai
r-conditioned, so I am panting in the heat as I run to get the letter opener from the vase, taking my position right next to the door frame. I’ve rehearsed this in my head, and I know I have maybe one good thrust before he realizes what I’m doing, so I plan to aim the letter opener straight up his gut, going for the heart under his ribcage. If I can pierce the heart or even just keep the blade in long enough for the silver to do its work, I’m home free. If he gets the blade away from me, I’ll retreat to the living room, get the second blade, and try again.

  It’s not a foolproof plan by any means, but it is the best I can do with the resources I have. The element of surprise is my best and only option.

  But Luke doesn’t burst through the door, as I’d imagined. Maybe he senses something in the air, or maybe it’s just the paranoia and edginess cluing him in. But he comes through the door warily, at a quarter of the speed I was expecting. He has all the time in the world to see me coming.

  13. Sashi

  It’s a Thursday night at the end of August and I’m doing laundry, already starting to pack for school. Mum has been making noise about getting me an internship at a Chicago hospital so I can continue my work with cancer patients. Since I broke things off with Will, she has been more hell-bent than ever on me following her plans, like acknowledging that the Old World is too dangerous for me to date humans is the same thing as filling out a med school application. Nothing I say or do seems to dissuade her from this viewpoint, and I am tired of arguing

  I am still showing up for my volunteer shifts, but the pain of talking to so many sick bodies isn’t getting any better. If anything, it’s deadening me, numbing my emotions. I’m starting to worry that I’m going to lose my ability to feel things at all. If that happens, will I lose my healing power? If I lose my healing power, will I go back to feeling things? And is this why my mum seems so distant and haughty? Did this happen to her?

  I’ve tried to explain this to her, but it never works, and I come off sounding like a petulant child. Now I am considering going back to Northwestern two weeks early, before my apartment is even available, just to get away from this cycle of thoughts and anguish and fighting.

  And from the guilt, because I could do nothing for Astrid.

  Mum is out tonight, at some kind of conference event at the Clinic, so I have the house to myself. I considered inviting my friends over for some drinks, but I’m growing tired of them. I just want to try to focus on getting back to school, back to my safer life.

  At nine o’clock my cell phone buzzes on the dresser. I almost ignore it, certain it’s one of my drinking companions. I’m wearing yoga pants and my mum’s ancient Johns Hopkins T-shirt, and I have no intention of putting on lipstick anytime soon.

  But curiosity gets the better of me, so I go over and pick up the phone, surprised to see Astrid’s name on the caller ID screen.

  I push the button to take the call. “Astrid?” I say cautiously.

  “Please…” her voice is faint, but so anguished I spring to my feet before she can get the next word out. “Come,” she mumbles.

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yuh…yeah.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I say, turning around in a panic until I spot my keys on the bedside table. “Hang on, okay?”

  There’s no answer.

  I grab Mum’s first aid suitcase and nearly fly out to my car, grateful that I haven’t had anything to drink tonight. I call Mum in the car, nearly plowing into a stop sign in the process, but her phone must be off for the presentation. Fuck.

  I only visited Astrid’s duplex that one time, more than two months ago, but after a couple of false starts I manage to find it. I lug the suitcase up the walkway to the porch steps…and nearly drop it with surprise.

  There’s just a big dark void where the front door is supposed to go. It’s been ripped off its hinges.

  I rush up the front steps and dart into the entryway, heedless of the fact that Luke could damn well be lying in wait for me. “Astrid?” I call tentatively. There’s not much light coming in off the street, so I feel around on the wall until I find a switch.

  “Oh my God…” I whisper.

  The walls catch my eye first. They are splattered with bright red blood, and there are long, jagged tears in the cheap plaster where fingernails or claws raked against them. My eyes travel down to the debris on the floor. I don’t remember Astrid having much stuff in her place, certainly not enough to create a carpet of shards and wood splinters. Some of it has been crushed almost to a fine powder.

  There is a long, thin trail of blood through the detritus, and I follow it cautiously into the small living room that Astrid led me through the last time I was here. The couch in the living room has been moved—no, not moved, thrown. Into the opposite wall.

  I forget all about that, however, because in the light from the entryway I can just make out Astrid’s bloodstained leg lying on a pile of rubble. I bolt forward, nearly slipping on the remains of a side table, and find the living room light switch.

  I have to push down my scream.

  She is lying mostly on her side, with her left arm broken and at a grotesque angle behind her. The cell phone is lying next to her right hand—she must have dragged herself over to where it lay on the floor. Her lips are swollen to the size of bratwurst, and her two black eyes are so puffy that they are just slits that crack open as I make my noisy approach.

  I drop to my knees beside her, my hands hovering over her. I don’t know where I can even touch her without causing more pain. Whatever she was wearing has been reduced to a few dark red strips still clinging at her hips and shoulders. It leaves most of her skin exposed, and nearly everything I can see has been transformed from Scandinavian paleness to a red-purple so dark that at first I think it she is covered in burns. When I get closer, though, I can see that it’s bruising.

  I’ve been around hospitals my whole life, but I’ve never seen contusions so extensive or deep. If Astrid were human, she would already have died from internal bleeding by now. The bruises are long, relatively thin, and so gruesome that I have to look away for a moment. As my eyes absently scan the floor, avoiding the sight of all that bruising, I see a metal doorknob lying among the wreckage on the floor and finally put it together.

  The door. He nearly beat her to death with the front door.

  I force my eyes back to Astrid and see that her hands are slightly elongated, her mouth just starting to push out a little. She must have tried to shift at some point in order to heal herself, but she either didn’t have the strength or was in too much pain to complete it. Her werewolf healing has closed any open wounds—I see plenty of dried blood and scratches but no major cuts—but now the magic seems to have stalled out.

  “It’s okay,” I murmur, but my voice is trembling. “I’m going to help.” I find a spot of skin on her upper arm with no bruising and gently rest my fingertips on it, closing my eyes. I reach out to Astrid’s body, expecting to find it screaming, just as it was back in June.

  I meet only silence. So I send the same inquiry I always start with, the one that just asks, “How are you?”

  Nothing happens. I can feel the open line of communication between Astrid’s body and me, but it’s not answering. I frown. I’ve never tried to contact a body without getting a response. I try a different message.

  Ally // here // help

  There is nothing for a long moment, but I wait, focusing as much energy and attention as I can on the connection. I can sense her body struggling to rouse itself, like it’s trying to fight off sedation. When the response finally comes, it is weak and sort of scattered, like it couldn’t quite pull together a message.

  Ally // champion?

  Ally // champion, I assure it. Calm // relief // ease

  I can feel it drifting away from me, unable to keep itself together.

  Fading // dying

  A chill of fear rushes through me, and as hard as I can, I push, NO // live // please

  Dying // better // saf
e

  “Goddammit, Astrid, you are not going to do this to me,” I say out loud, and saltwater runs into my mouth. I realize that tears have been streaming down my face for a while now. I am starting to understand what’s happening: Astrid’s injuries overpowered her magic’s ability to heal her body. I’ve never even heard of that happening, but as I sit there feeling her body’s shock and pain, I hypothesize that maybe werewolf magic is like a well, fed by an underground stream. If you pump the well dry, the body can no longer heal itself, but maybe if she can hang on long enough, the stream will feed in more water .

  I have to make her hang on. I try to think of the words—well, the concepts, really—to send to Astrid’s body to convince it to keep going. Every argument I can think of is too complex and scattered. Finally I try, Stay // fight // revenge

  Not my most noble argument, but it actually piques the body’s interest. Quickly, I add Relief // heal // fight and when I feel it lingering, hesitating, I send the message again and again:

  Relief // heal // fight

  Relief // heal // fight

  Relief // heal // fight

  Relief // heal // fight

  Finally the body responds, a little stronger than before: Protect?

  Without hesitation, I reply. Protect.

  I never do learn.

  I tuck Astrid’s broken arm down next to her body and slowly, carefully roll her onto her back, lining up the broken limbs so she’ll be as comfortable as possible. Then I stretch out next to her and slide my palm under the broken fingers on her right hand as gently as I can. Eventually I’ll need to do something about them, but I need to make sure she’ll survive before I worry about her fractures.

  I lay still, pushing hope and encouragement into Astrid’s body. I tell it to fight, tell it to keep living, assure it that I am here and will stay here. The body is at least listening to me, and that might be the only thing keeping it from shutting down, so I keep talking.