Free Stories 2015

by Baen Books

  This camping trip had struck me as a good idea when first I thought of it. My father needed a change of scenery from his trailer and the small, dusty plot of land surrounding it. I was eager to escape the Phoenix traffic and the perpetual cloud of brown smog that hung over the city. And as owner, president, and principal investigator for Justis Fearsson Investigations, Inc., I could take time off whenever I wanted. As long as I was willing to sacrifice the income. And I was; I needed a break. A few days in Sonoran Desert National Monument would do us both some good.

  I knew the risks when I made the arrangements. Only now, though, confronted with the reality of Dad in the midst of one of his unresponsive episodes, did I allow myself to contemplate what it might be like to be alone with him for two days if he spent the entire time halfway catatonic.

  My dad had been a burned-out old weremyste for about as long as I had been casting spells. For three nights out of every month, for upwards of fifty years, he had endured moon phasings, descending into psychosis even as his magic strengthened beyond his control. Each night of each phasing was both unnervingly unique—the pull of the moon fueling new delusions and hallucinations—and numbingly familiar. I knew this, because I had been enduring phasings of my own for more than fifteen years. And eventually they would leave me as addled and insane as they had my father.

  “How are you doing there, Pop?” I glanced his way, gauging his reaction. Not that there was much to gauge. He said nothing. His gaze didn’t waver from the rutted road. “You getting hungry?”

  A frown creased his brow, which was something at least. But he didn’t say a word, or nod or shake his head.

  Two days with the wooden man. Maybe I’d be better off turning around. I didn’t, of course. I’d made our plans; I was going to stick with them. We Fearsson men could be pretty stubborn. If my dad was going to sit there saying nothing, I was going to keep driving, no matter the consequences. Sometimes I questioned whether we really needed the phasings to make us nuts.

  We followed the road as far into the Maricopa Wilderness as it would take us before stopping at the base of gentle rise, its slopes covered with huge saguaro cacti, chain-fruit chollas, creosote and bursage and palo verde trees.

  “How does this look?” I asked.

  He still stared out the windshield, but he appeared more alert. He knew we were somewhere new. His eyes followed the flight of a red-tailed hawk as it glided along the ridge in front of us, and he flexed a hand, perhaps missing the pair of old Leica binoculars that usually rested in his lap.

  “This seem okay, Pop?”

  He dipped his chin once.

  I climbed out of the truck, watched as he did the same.

  I dug his binoculars out of his bag, pulled a folding chair from the back of the pickup, and set it angled southward so he could look toward the Southern Maricopas and Sand Tank Mountains. Late afternoon sun gilded the peaks and deepened the purple shadows in the clefts and crags of the rock faces.

  While he sat and watched for birds, I set up our tent and a table for the camp stove and water containers. Every now and then he’d call out the name of whatever bird crossed his line of sight.

  “Red-tail.”

  “Flicker.”

  “'Nother goddamned raven.”

  “Kestrel.”

  He did this all the time, even when he was out of it and totally uncommunicative in every other way. It was a verbal tic, something so deeply ingrained he didn’t even think about it, like scratching an itch. He wasn’t talking to me so much as he was merely talking. And yet I took comfort in the sound of his voice, in the reassuring certainty of his pronouncements.

  When he said “Eagle,” I paused in what I was doing to admire the enormous bird as it circled above us, its wings splayed, its tail twisting in the warm breeze.

  It soared overhead for some time before disappearing over the ridge. I glanced at my dad, but he was still watching the spot where he had last seen the bird.

  I went back to preparing our dinner. The air had already started to chill with the setting of the sun, but still the ice in our cooler would only last through tomorrow morning. So tonight we would feast: steaks, fresh tomatoes, cold beer. Tomorrow we’d make do with the prepackaged rice dishes and beef jerky.

  This night’s meal helped my father considerably, as food often did. After a few slices of tomato and a couple of bites of steak, he roused himself, reminding me of a dog waking up from a long nap.

  “I don’t remember getting here,” he said, swiveling in his chair, taking in our surroundings.

  “Yeah, you’ve been pretty much out of it all day.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  I lifted a shoulder, smiled. “You’re here now.”

  “Steak’s good. Tomatoes, too.” He sipped his beer. “And this. Thanks.”

  An owl hooted from nearby, low and resonant.

  “Great-horned.”

  “I knew that one.”

  And so it went. Neither of us said a lot, but when my dad spoke now it was to me rather than at me. He even helped me clean our plastic camping plates. But he went to bed early. Odd as it seemed, spending much of the day barely functional left him more exhausted than any normal day would. I stayed out by the table, reading by the fading glow of the twilight sky. As stars emerged, I retrieved a couple of candles from the truck, lit them, and stuck them to the table using a bit of melted wax. I would have preferred a campfire, but BLM regulations prohibited them in the monument.

  We had planned this trip with care, making sure it would coincide with the new moon, so as to be as removed from the influence of the full as possible. The sky darkened to black, and star glow suffused the night. I couldn’t see much beyond the circle of dancing light defined by the candles.

  But in the middle of reading, I simply stopped and peered out into the darkness. I couldn’t say why. I don’t think I heard or smelled anything unusual, nor did I sense the cool tingle of a spell on my skin.

  An instant after I looked up from my reading, the tent zipper trilled and my father crawled out, his hair sticking up, his eyes puffy. He’d been asleep.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking an uncertain step in the direction I’d been staring. “Do you feel it?”

  “I’m not sure what I feel. Something woke you?”

  “Yeah. Don’t know what.” He tried to smooth down his hair.

  A rustling in the creosote drew our gazes once more. I stepped away from the table—and the candles—trying to discern more in the darkness. My heart raced and I considered retrieving the handgun tucked under the front seat of the pickup.

  A shadow shifted, in front of me and slightly to the left. I retreated, ceding the step I had taken seconds before. The shape before me was large, low to the ground. My first thought was that it might be a mountain lion. I opened my mouth to tell my father to get in the truck, but even as I did, the shadow coalesced, padded closer.

  A wolf, female. Or else the largest coyote I’d ever seen. Yellow eyes, frosted fur of buff and rust. The ears were rounded, the snout blunt. Definitely a wolf. The federal and state fish and game services had been working to reestablish Mexican wolf populations in Arizona. Apparently they’d been more successful than I knew.

  “That’s a were,” my father said.

  Hearing this, I turned, though in my smarter moments I knew showing my back to any wild animal was an invitation to trouble. “How can you tell?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. It’s a were.”

  “A werewolf? Seriously?”

  He scowled. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

  I faced the wolf again. It remained exactly as it had been, eyes on me, shoulders hunched, one paw forward, as if caught in mid-stride.

  A were. Weres were a bit like weremystes, and yet nothing at all like us. They were subject to the phasings; every month on the full moon and on the nights immediately before and after, they shifted to their animal forms. But other than that, they possessed no magic. They couldn�
��t cast spells or see portents of the future or ward themselves from enemies. And mythology and Hollywood movies notwithstanding, they couldn’t taint others and make them into weres with a bite, anymore than I could force someone to become a sorcerer by sinking my teeth into him. That was what my father meant when he said “it doesn’t work that way.” Werewolves were no different from any other were. When in the form of their totem beasts, they behaved largely as those animals would, although maybe with a bit more intelligence. Or less, I suppose, depending on the person.

  I didn’t know a lot of weres personally; I wasn’t friends with any. But I had vague connections to plenty: friends of friends, weremystes with weres in their families. I’d heard of werecats, werecoyotes, wereowls, werebighorn, to name a few. But, perhaps ironically, I’d never encountered an actual werewolf, either in person or anecdotally. Until now, if my father was right.

  “Assuming this really is a were—”

  “It is,” he said.

  “Assuming it is,” I began again, “why would she have shifted tonight? There’s no moon, no phasing. If there was, you and I wouldn’t be out here.”

  Dad’s frown returned. Apparently I’d stumped him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a good question. A damn good one. But I swear to you this is a were.”

  I studied the animal, knowing of no way to determine from an animal’s appearance whether or not it was a were. But I couldn’t deny that both my father and I had been tuned to the wolf before she reached us, before we could even see her. Maybe that meant something. It also occurred to me that the wolves released into the wild by state and federal biologists had been equipped with radio collars. This animal didn’t wear one.

  I eased toward the truck, and the wolf followed me with her eyes, her massive head turning slowly. She growled low in her throat, but she didn’t raise her hackles or bare her teeth, which I took as a good sign.

  Reaching the pickup, I opened the door with care, found the food bag, and pulled out a strip of dried beef. Jerky wasn’t exactly health food for wolves, but I meant this more as a peace offering than anything else. I tossed it in the were’s direction, and it landed a few feet in front of her. She eyed it, regarded me again, then crept forward, her stare swinging from me to the food.

  When she was close enough, she took the beef in her teeth, appeared to decide that teriyaki flavored jerky was pretty darn tasty, and settled down on the dirt to gnaw on it.

  Still moving slowly, I walked back to the table and sat. My father joined me there.

  “Darnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “A wolf eating meat?”

  The look he gave me took me back twenty years, to when he was still a sane cop working for the Phoenix Police Department, and I was a smart-ass kid, on the leading edge of my teens.

  “You should be nicer to me. I’m not a well man.”

  “You seem well enough right now.”

  He nodded, watching the wolf. “Nothing like the arrival of a were to clear the mind.”

  “Why are you so convinced—”

  “I know weres.”

  He said it in a way that made me think there was more to this than an old sorcerer understanding a branch of runecrafting lore.

  “Tell me.”

  He huffed a breath, eyes still on the animal. “There was a guy I knew when I was I on the job.” He glanced my way. “You were just a kid, barely walking and talking. Your mom and I were still doing okay, and I was holding it together well enough. I’d convinced myself I could stay a cop for as long as I wanted. It never even occurred to me . . . all that would happen later.

  “Anyway, this guy—he was another detective. Johnny Paulson. Through everything, his name has stuck with me. He knew I was a weremyste, and he’d always say stuff to me. Cryptic stuff, like he wanted me to know that he knew, but wouldn’t let on to anyone else. So, for instance, the day after a phasing ended, he’d ask me about my days off in this knowing way. Or he’d send these weird looks my way whenever a group of us was discussing anything that was difficult to explain or even remotely related to magic. Stuff like that.

  “It bothered me at first. It was kind of creepy. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to blackmail me, or if he was some sort of runecrafting wannabe. 'Cause I couldn’t see any magic on him at all.

  “But then one morning, right after a phasing, he comes into work bearing the marks of a pretty severe beating. He’s limping, he has bruises and cuts all over his face and neck. He’s basically a mess. The other guys are giving him a hard time about it, asking if his old lady smacked him around, or if he got robbed and couldn’t find a real cop to help him out. Normal detective room razzing, you know? But the whole time, he’s watching me. Not in that knowing way this time, but scared, like he thinks I might say something to get him in trouble.

  “So when I can, I pull him aside and ask what the hell really happened to him, and that’s when he tells me: He’s a were. Every month he drives north into the mountains and transforms into a deer. Most times it goes fine, but this time he was nearly taken by a mountain lion. Hence the bruises and cuts.”

  “Geez,” I said, breathing the word and considering the wolf. She had finished her piece of jerky and was watching me, perhaps waiting for seconds. I walked back to the truck, retrieved another piece, and tossed it to her. She caught it on the fly and set to work on it.

  Standing beyond the light of the candles, I thought I could see lights moving in the distance to the east. Headlights perhaps. I was also able to make out the rumble of engines. More than one. I hoped they wouldn’t come too close.

  When I faced my dad and the were once again, I saw that the animal was staring eastward as well, her ears up. She growled again, her fur bristling.

  “So did you and this guy become friends?” I asked.

  “For a while, yeah. Once I understood how he knew I was a weremyste and why he was so interested in me, I wasn’t so suspicious of him. He was a loner—never married, didn’t have many friends, and I thought he was a little . . . off, if you know what I mean. So we weren’t close or anything. But we’d talk when we got the chance. And a couple of times he introduced me to other weres he knew. I’m really not sure why. Maybe he figured they must be as lonely as he was, and I might spend time talking to them, too. The truth is, that’s what happened. I hung out with all of them. Not a lot. But most months after the phasings we’d get together and talk. I learned a lot about what it means to be a were: the pain of their change, the frustration of being impacted by the moon that way, but not having spell magic. That sort of thing.

  “And I suppose somewhere along the way I got a feel for what they’re like and how to recognize them.” He raised his chin, indicating the wolf. “That’s how I know this one’s a were.”

  I gazed to the east again; those headlights and engines were drawing nearer, as unwelcome on this night as a monsoon rain. The were had gotten to her feet and was peering that way, too. She let out a low whine.

  “What happened to your friend?” I finally asked. “Paulson. He still around?”

  Dad shook his head. “No. He met the same fate as lots of weres who aren’t as lucky as our friend here, and aren’t at the top of the food chain. A few years after that first time he’d come back all bruised and cut, he didn’t come back from a phasing at all. The higher-ups in the department were pissed at him for missing work, but those of us who knew him were more scared than anything else. And with reason, it turned out. His body was found a few days later in some remote section of Prescott National Forest. He’d been badly mauled by a mountain lion. He was far from his campsite, and he had no clothes on, so the folks who found him didn’t quite know what to make of it. But those who knew him understood perfectly.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I don’t think he heard me. “What the hell is all that noise?” he said, climbing to his feet and peering after those engines.

  The vehicles were close now. I counted three of them
—Jeeps with lights mounted above their windshields. The wolf let out a high bark and growled again: a full growl this time, her hackles up and her teeth bared. I expected her to bolt at any moment.

  In addition to the headlights and windshield lights, the Jeeps all had spotlights mounted on them. And one had a three point buck roped to the hood.

  “I don’t like this, Justis.”

  “She doesn’t, either.”

  “Poachers from the look of them.” Dad eyed the wolf. “I wonder if they’ve been after this girl.”

  I nodded, agreeing that it was a possibility, and thinking as well that for a guy who’d been out of it earlier in the day, he sounded pretty lucid now.

  I hurried to the pickup and pulled out my weapon, a Glock 22 .40. While there, I also grabbed my scrying stone, a small slice of sea green agate that I usually used for divination spells. I tucked the pistol into the back of my jeans, palmed the stone, and hurried to my father’s side. I didn’t want a confrontation, and I had no intention of starting one by waving a firearm in front of these guys. But I also wasn’t going to face them unarmed.

  “You didn’t happen to bring an extra weapon along, did you?” Dad asked.

  “Only the one, and I was hoping I wouldn’t need it.”

  We didn’t have time to say more. The Jeeps pulled up to our campsite with a billowing cloud of dust that glowed red in the gleam of their headlights.

  The wolf bared her teeth again, her ears lying flat.

  I cast a warding over the three of us. Spells work best for me when I envision them in three elements, or sometimes seven. There’s power in numbers, three and seven in particular. For this spell, I used seven: our visitors, their rifles, which I could see outlined in the glare, the ammo in them, my father, the wolf, me, and a protective shield around us, keeping us safe in case they opened fire. The words themselves were unimportant. What mattered was my ability to visualize the conjuring and hold all the component parts in my mind.