Roadkill

9

You shouldn’t see things like that in daylight. You’d think it would be better… to see the yellowed spiral of a long nail scrape playfully down the windshield… in the sun. It would be less of a horror, less of an icicle stab to the heart. It wasn’t. It was worse in the day. It didn’t belong. Suyolak was wrong, but he was so much more wrong in the light than in the dark, because there was no way to deny it-to deny him. There was no way to say the nightmare was just that… only a nightmare. In our life, denial could get you killed, but a few seconds of it when the time was right could also keep you sane. Just like salt… A little made the bland taste a little better and a lot raised your blood pressure, dropped you with a massive stroke, and boom, you were dead. Denial and salt, not totally bad things on the surface of it, but in the end they both could equal death; who knew?

Lucky we had a healer with us.

Although from the heat of the unblinking glower searing the side of my face, someone wished we didn’t. I’d gone back to poking around on the laptop after Suyolak disappeared. We didn’t all sit around and discuss the meaning of it. What’s to say? He knew we were coming-we already knew that. He wanted to kill us-still no news. He wasn’t impressed by Rafferty. He was an egomaniacal genocidal killer; impressed or not, he wouldn’t show it. Egomaniacal genocidal killers rarely did. If they did, they’d be sensible, modest genocidal killers, and those were fucking hard to come by.

So, no discussion needed. Niko drove on, leaving Illinois behind us as the Lincoln dipped south toward Omaha, Nebraska. Googled five dead there-same as what had hit me: viral pneumonia. I’d thought it before; I’d think it again, but, goddamnit, if he was doing all this now, what the hell would he do if he got out of that coffin? They were futile, poisonous thoughts and I gave up on them before they drove me nuts. Besides, I had a distraction to help me out there.

I had to make an effort not to raise a hand and feel the side of my face to make sure it wasn’t melting from the acid gaze. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned to face the yellow eyes, radioactive twin suns of absolutely nuclear pissiness aimed at me-which was unusual for Catcher. He was the happiest damn Wolf I’d ever run across. Lassie had nothing on him. He was happy, cheerful, probably a Boy Scout as a kid-well, considering what he was, a Cub Scout. But with the current situation, I could understand the change in mood. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? If he were my cousin, I’d be mad as hell that anyone got him involved in this mess too.” Rafferty was asleep again. He’d driven all night, healed me, and destroyed millions of hyperdeadly mutated germs floating in the parking lot and office. A helluva thing to see-that crimson explosion-but also a helluva drain on your resources, Wolf stamina or not.

But past all that, I could see he wasn’t the same as he’d been when I’d last seen him, years ago. There were lines that weren’t just weariness-permanent lines, years of disappointment. The last thing Rafferty and Catcher needed was us fucking up their already-fucked-up lives. That we didn’t have a choice didn’t make it any better. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but this son of a bitch Suyolak can take down the whole goddamn world. Frankly, I don’t give a shit about most of the world because it damn sure doesn’t seem to give a shit about me, but there are a few people in it whom I do care about. Even if we hadn’t called you, even if Rafferty hadn’t answered Nik-hadn’t felt that evil mojo tickle-once Suyolak got loose, eventually it would’ve become your problem too. A few hundred thousand dead people would have Rafferty after Suyolak sooner or later. He’s single-minded, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”

The dark brown lip that was peeled back to show Catcher’s dinnerware didn’t move at first, but after a few seconds it slowly lowered, but the eyes were no friendlier. They did look away, though, as he searched for his pencil on the floorboards. When he located it, he reached over with it to the laptop, switched to the window that held the Word document already up, and beneath the HUNT NO MORE, he typed, PAYMENT.

He had a point. We were getting fifty thousand for this. It wasn’t fair to expect them to put their lives on the line for nothing. Robin never took our money… He had more than we’d ever see in our lifetimes, but Rafferty and Catcher weren’t Kin or immortal con men. They worked for a living or had. I’d seen the tired, old ranch house they’d lived in. They could use the money, especially to keep their search for a cure going. “Yeah, that’s reasonable. How about half? Twenty-five thousand? Assuming you want a penny that Abelia-Roo has touched with her poisonous hands. Probably dusted it with arsenic powder, the bitch.”

The Wolf gave a shrug so subtle it didn’t move his cousin, again slouched against him, as if to say money was money, which was true enough. All money was touched by blood sometime or another-the way of the world. Clicking the caps lock off-assured I was paying proper attention-he typed again. Half and more. I want real payment. Not Alpo money, not a down payment on a timeshare, bucko. Real payment.

And I’d thought Suyolak was bizarre. Now here I was negotiating with a Wolf who typed at least twice as fast as I did and without having to use spell-check. If Lassie had had a laptop, Timmy could’ve cut his down-the-well time in half. “Okay,” I said dubiously, “what do you want?”

Taptaptaptaptap. When he was finished, the screen may as well have been a bloody strip of his soul plastered in light and pixels. I gave it the respect it deserved and read it in silence this time. It was what he wanted. Take care of him. I looked up and saw true emotion, raw and desperate, in eyes that hadn’t been human in a long time. I looked back at the computer. A strip of soul was better than the rest of the ragged wounded one revealed only inches away. I read on. When I’m gone, take care of him. Make him your family. Make him your cousin, your brother. He gave you back to Niko. He gave your brother his family back. You do the same for Rafferty. Without family, there is no life. Give him life.

Big order. Tall order. But he was right. Without Rafferty, I wouldn’t be sitting here. He’d saved me twice now. Without him, Niko would be without a brother and I’d have died at least two damn unpleasant deaths. We owed him and even if we didn’t, I knew what it was like to contemplate life without the only family you had. No one deserved that existence, definitely not the man who’d saved me and was now ready to try to save the world.

“All right,” I said, grim at the memories and the ever-shitty nature of what- ifs. “Hey, why not? Adoption’s the big thing in Hollywood right now. At least he’s already potty trained.” Up front, Robin started to open his mouth. Niko’s hand firmly cut off the interruption. He would’ve guessed what I’d promised. Robin would’ve guessed too if his mouth weren’t always a half second faster than his brain.

Catcher dipped his head, accepting my promise. I’d sounded like a smart-ass when I said it-I couldn’t help it. Smart-ass was my native tongue, but I meant it and he knew it. The yellow eyes were on mine again, holding me to the assurance. He managed to hide his soul this time.

I added, “But he’ll find a cure. Rafferty’s the most stubborn bastard I’ve met, aside from Niko.” The furry head nodded again, the eyes rolling in “Ain’t that the truth” acknowledgment before they blinked and the muzzle wrinkled. That’s when the wolf typed a PS:

BTW, could you get some cologne or Febreze or something? Sorry, Cal, but you’re killing me here. He gave me a sheepish, sideways grin, then added, Take it out of the twenty-five thousand. Fair’s fair.

“My smell? You’re bitching about how I smell?” I slammed the laptop shut. “Oh, you son of a bitch. Do I complain about the fur? Another fifty miles and I’ll be hacking up hairballs. Did I bitch when you ate half the Twinkies?” Actually I had, but they were my Twinkies. “And let’s talk about Delilah, not my girlfriend, but we are doing it, but do I ask you to make it harder for her to hit on you? Hell, no.” More like there was no point in asking. Delilah would do what Delilah would do, but damn it, I was pissed. And I’d never been one not to share my feelings, especially that one.

“I never would’ve thought I’d rather discuss a pestilence-spreading living corpse than listen any longer to this conversation,” Robin groaned from the passenger seat before reaching into his linen blazer-he was all dressed up for the road trip-and pulling out a slim roll of cloth. He untied it and with one quick flip, unrolled it down the back of the front bench seat like a professional assassin from a James Bond movie. It held about ten glass vials. “Choose your poison. From Bulgaria, Aqua at the top; Bijan and several others far too good for you in the middle; and the neutralizer that blocks one from any and every nose, including werewolves’, at the bottom. I sell that to Delilah by the gallon to keep her place Auphe-free and you a secret from the Kin. Up until recently, at least.”

“Forget it,” I snapped. “Einstein here can soak me up. I hope I get Auphe killer funk all over him. I hope…”

Niko bent his arm over the seat, took the last vial, and squirted me liberally, not once looking away from the road. Catcher grinned at me, tongue lolling, as a bead of the liquid rolled down the line of my nose, poised at the tip, then dropped off. Chuffing in amusement, the wolf fished around in the seat, finally raising his hindquarters to pull out one of my old T-shirts from beneath, and offered it to me with his muzzle.

At the volunteering of my shirt covered with his ass fur, I gave him a snarl every bit the equal of his earlier one. “Yeah, I’m wiping my face with that.”

He grinned and tossed it into the wind. It was up over our heads and then gone. Just because I didn’t want it then didn’t mean I didn’t want it at all. I could’ve washed it. “That’s coming out of your twenty-five thousand too,” I gritted. “That was worth at least three”-eyes slitted, I amended-“okay, two cans of Alpo, you mutt.” He didn’t seem to much care about my loss as he lifted his nose into that same wind and enjoyed the ride, all the while ignoring me. He was back to Catcher. Business taken care of and living in the moment, and that moment was flying in the wind-heaven for any canine-related creature.

By the time we reached Omaha, I’d given in to the boredom, the ultimate forgive-and-forget incentive, and was back on the laptop, playing hangman with Catcher. Not a very exciting game, especially when he won every time. It was beginning to be a trend-losing in Go Fish to a chupacabra and hangman to a Wolf. What the hell was a Paphiopedilum bellatulum anyway? An endangered orchid, Niko informed me. “What is wrong with you?” I asked the Wolf. “That’s what you learned in college? What about bonging beers? Banging sorority chicks? Road trips?” I caught myself. “Right. That’s what we’re on now. I can see why you skipped them.”

“Spring breaks.” Rafferty yawned, straightening from his nap. “The spring breaks were good, except this ass stole most of the girls.” Catcher was grinning again, which I took to be a smug agreement.

“Speaking of women,” Niko began, turning enough to flash a stern look at me. “ Cal?”

He was right. Catcher and Rafferty were in this. They needed to know all of the dangers, not just about Suyolak. I put the computer back in their bag and rested my hands on my knees. “Delilah,” I said matter-of-factly, “she’s going to try to kill me. I think. Hell, I don’t know. She might. She might not. But the Kin know about her and me. I have that from a reliable source-as reliable as a knife and an axe can make it anyway. She’ll have to do something.”

“What concerns me is not knowing what exactly that might be,” my brother added as he took the first exit in search of food. “With the Kin, options are limited. We assume she was offered the choice of execution by her Alpha or by her pack and her Alpha. I don’t underestimate her by any means in that regard. It would probably take them both. Her second option, the one I imagine she chose, would be killing Cal. They know he was involved in killing the Alpha Cerberus, and, amoral criminals that they are, they don’t consider him worthy of life even outside of that.” That was Niko’s polite way of saying they considered me an unnatural freak and ridding New York of me would make it an all-around better place to eat, sleep, and lift a leg.

“Our good friend Caliban was of the opinion that it would be fine entertainment to let her come along so that we might play a game of ‘Does Cal get screwed tonight or does Cal get screwed tonight?’ ” Goodfellow drawled. “The second ‘screwed’ being, of course, Delilah eating his liver with ‘some fava beans and a nice Chianti. ’ I’ve never been a fan of fava beans myself; a little too spicy. I like a calm stomach when killing or having sex or doing both simultaneously. The last,” he said pointedly to me, “is my bet on how Delilah will make her run at you. I recognize my own. She is a creature of very particular appetites.”

“You’re usually too lazy to kill unless you can’t avoid it,” I said. It was a way to escape the conversation for a few seconds, but it was also true. Robin had once done something similar to what he’d said to save a girl I’d known-and loved. He’d killed a succubus, and considering succubi were predators who killed with sex, I imagined he’d done it in the midst of the act. But I hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t told. He had done it for me and for the girl. There hadn’t been much more to say.

The puck was an unbelievable fighter with thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands, to sharpen his skills, but he didn’t much seek out battles anymore. He was satisfied with the good life unless, like now, we could use his help. Thanks to Niko and me, we’d brought him out of retirement, and while he was our friend-and as lonely as he’d been, had been desperate to be our friend, I still wasn’t sure we’d done him any favors.

“I’ve mellowed over the years,” Robin retorted. “And there were none that didn’t deserve what I gave them. At least from my point of view at the time.” His carelessly jaded smile reminded me of another puck who once had almost killed us all. It made me damn glad Robin was a friend-had fought so hard to make Niko and me accept him as one. And mellow was good. It didn’t make me like his cat any better, though.

“Anyway”-I rolled up an empty Twinkie wrapper and tossed it at him-“long story not short enough, Delilah will probably try to kill me, but I wanted to give her a choice.” That didn’t make me soft. It made me a guy who’d been given a lot of chances in my life when I’d done bad things… They could be blamed on a creature that had taken me over, blamed on genes that should never have existed, much less have been combined with human ones. It didn’t matter who or what was behind the things I’d done. What did matter was I’d been given chances to prove I was better than that. I’d be one damn big hypocrite if I denied Delilah the same.

“Very noble. Very giving and understanding. Very much reeking of bullshit.” Robin couldn’t read minds, but he didn’t have to. This was his field of expertise. “It’s the sex, Hugh Hefner. Intercourse, coitus, carnal knowledge… especially the way Wolves do it, but one thing it is not is philanthropy.”

“As if I could even touch the level of horndog you’ve reached in your life,” I snorted. “I’m surprised you have a dick left at all. That it’s not whittled down to a toothpick.”

“If this is the way it’s going to be the whole way, I’m going to get another car.” Rafferty rubbed his eyes and yawned. “This is why you meditate, Niko? To keep from ripping them to small-enough pieces that even I couldn’t put them back together? Not that I would bother to try without one helluva fee.”

“Let’s say it helps. Partially. At times. I’m looking into additional philosophies.” Niko parked at the first restaurant we spotted. A truck stop. “We should eat on the road. Except for the pneumonia in Omaha, there hasn’t been any more news of outbreaks. Suyolak could be pulling far ahead of us or have left the Lincoln altogether.”

“No. He’s still ahead of us and no farther away. He’s sucking energy from the driver, trying to get stronger, to break the seals entirely. That’s why we’re catching up to them despite their head start.” Rafferty didn’t make any move to get out of the car. “I’ve got the bastard’s trail now. I feel him. Hell, I can taste him… like that sweet-sour stench of roadkill on the back of my tongue. There isn’t a place on this earth that he could shake me. Not one goddamn place.”

“You’re positive?” Niko pulled off his sunglasses and slid them into a jacket that hid many other things, most far more lethal than eyeware.

“He’s my kind. Twisted and sick as an asylum full of sociopaths, but still my kind.” He brought out his own sunglasses and he slouched back. “Bring us four of the specials. We’ll wait for the Rom caravan and Delilah.” Catcher’s ears perked up as they did every time he heard the name. Speaking of horndogs, the fact she might try to kill me didn’t make much difference to him apparently. I let it go. The fact that he couldn’t even go into the restaurant was one more reminder in years of them that he was different now. Let him lust. Delilah was worth lusting over, and in the end, whether she tried to kill me or not, she was his kind.

Wolves were for Wolves and, temporary encounters with me aside, that wasn’t going to change.

“Four specials,” I agreed. “Still coming out of your share, Chewbacca.” He yipped an obvious “Like I haven’t heard that one before,” then focused on the entrance to the parking lot, waiting for Delilah.

Rafferty stayed in the car with him with the excuse of waiting for the Rom, but we knew better; all of us, even Catcher-especially Catcher, who hadn’t had a bad spell yet, but it was only a matter of time. Robin was bitching as usual about the quality of food coming our way. “I’ve been craving Mayan food. If we were near any place civilized, like New York, we could perhaps have that.” He then looked around, carefully noting any lack of what would pass for civility in his book. “But unless we rip the still-beating heart from our enemy and braise it over the engine block of Niko’s car, I’m thinking not.”

Niko was pinching the bridge of his nose. I fished a small bottle of Tylenol out of my jacket pocket and slid it into his. He was stubborn about taking medication… body, temple, and all that… but we’d had one hell of a ride so far. There was always room for exceptions.

The place wasn’t that crowded. The gas station had a few truckers, along with postcards, shiny Mylar balloons, and fried or jerked meat, depending on how you liked it. But it was in the restaurant part where we found out how Robin liked his. We sat at the counter to give our orders when he moaned, “Temptation, thy name is truck-stop hash slinger.”

It was a rusalka. I’d seen one only once before, but rusalki did give succubi a run for their money in the sexy department. Sunshine-bright hair with one pale streak of willow green that matched the eyes-pupilless eyes, not that any humans noticed. They might notice being shorted fifteen cents on their change or goggle her amazing breasts-and they were damn amazing-but a Russian water creature in Omaha… land of no water… that escaped them.

“Zdrastvutay, solnyshko moyo,” Robin said, green eyes meeting green as his smile began and widened to the size of the Big Bad Wolf, only without Granny’s best nightgown.

“Wasting your time, doll,” she replied with a midwestern accent that said she’d never seen Russia, much less drowned unwary travelers in its lakes and rivers. “Grandma was from the homeland. I was born in good old Omaha. But enough small talk. So… tell me now, what exactly can I get you?” She leaned toward us and her breasts leaned with her. The Russian might not have made an impression, but Robin himself did. Her smile was every bit as hungry as his. Niko and I might as well not have existed.

“I think that would be our cue.” Niko took my arm and we were up and back in the parking lot before I had time to grab frantically at the door handle of the bathroom, which I needed desperately.

“What the hell?” I protested. “I’m starving and unlike you, I can’t meditate my piss into good karma points.”

“Let him make his choice and then we’ll get you all the deep- fried everything you can swallow while still maintaining a continuous stream of constant complaint.” He folded his arms and stood at the curb like a statue nobly gazing into the west. Onward, wagons ho! I, on the other hand, leaned against the wall beside the glass doors. It didn’t turn out to be a wise decision. “I’ll even give you the Heimlich if the two activities conflict,” he continued.

Let him choose? I was not waiting for Robin to sort out his feelings about monogamy and hot rusalka waitresses that might drown you in a kitchen sink or a toilet if a dull moment or cultural nostalgia came along. My stomach and my bladder didn’t have that kind of time. Then again, this was Goodfellow we were talking about. He might think with his dick, but that thing must’ve had at least two hundred PhDs in field experience alone. If he was going to make up his mind, he’d be quick about-

The door swung open and I barely kept it from slamming me in the face as the puck stomped through before I had time to complete my thought. “She’s not my type. Order me the least offensive thing on the menu,” Robin snapped, and kept going. Not his type? Everyone and everything were his type.

“Monogamy,” Niko said, a hint of surprise in his voice… Niko who was never surprised. “He is actually considering it.”

I was more than surprised. I was utterly blown away in addition to nearly being flattened by the door. I felt my nose carefully, but it seemed unsquashed. “Holy crap,” I marveled, pushing the door back. “Goodfellow… Robin… just one person… monogamy?” Just one person in his life? He rarely screwed just one person in the same moment. He went through mattresses like most people went through Kleenex. “Even temporary monogamy? I think my brain just exploded.”

“Doubtful. I think you need at least two brain cells to rub together for combustion.” Nik gave me a light push. “And no matter which way he is leaning, it’s his choice. Not ours to push on him. Now, food. Bathroom. Go.”

By the time I got back to the car carrying eight or nine bags, I was in a better mood. They didn’t have a Merry Monogamy balloon in the gas station, just in case he did do something so unpucklike, but that wouldn’t stop me from having a little fun. Unfortunately, it ended up that the fun had to wait. Robin, Niko, who’d left me to do the food chore, and Salome were out of sight, which meant they were in Abelia-Roo’s RV parked on the far side of the lot. She would naturally have parked it there to limit the contamination as much as possible.

Near me-near Catcher and Rafferty, more precisely-were three truck drivers. As I dumped the bags in the front seat, one of the truckers, a brawny guy who hadn’t been on the road long enough to have made pear shape yet, said, “That ain’t no damn dog. I’ve been to zoos. I’ve seen wolves. That’s a wolf and that shit’s not legal.” The two guys with him were muttering agreement and about calling the cops and saving God’s blessed little children, like they really didn’t have anything better to do. They couldn’t go inside and eat a gallon of grease, buy some porn, and live and let live. They were the kind who could find trouble anywhere they went and make it out of thin air if it was scarce.

I knew Rafferty and Catcher didn’t need any help. Catcher could leap out of the backseat to tear out their throats in seconds. Raff wouldn’t have to move at all. He could have them gushing fluids from every orifice in their bodies with a thought… if he was in a good mood. If he wasn’t, hell, he might tie their balls in knots that no surgeon could untie. He wouldn’t, though, not really. He wasn’t Suyolak, as much as he threatened. But he was still a Wolf. Rafferty and Catcher could take care of themselves; I had no doubt. Or I could do them a favor because they were doing us a major one, what with the world saving and all.

I dropped the last bag and walked around to the back of the car as the lead sack of shit opened his mouth one more time. Maybe he was going to say he was calling the cops for sure or the dogcatcher. Maybe he was going to get his face in Catcher’s and get it ripped off, potato-shaped nose and all. I didn’t wait to see. I pulled my Desert Eagle from beneath my jacket and pressed the muzzle to his thigh where the car blocked it from sight of anyone in the restaurant. “Go away,” I said without emotion. I’d been in this situation too many times to bother to emote in Shakespearean style all over it. To shoot or not to shoot. To kill or not to kill. Whatever. I wasn’t Hamlet. I knew what I would do, and I wasn’t wringing my hands over it. “Go away now.”

Catcher’s teeth were bared, but Rafferty didn’t seem bothered, his arm stretched along the back of the seat. “Subtle’s not your middle name, is it, Cal?”

I bared my teeth along with Catcher. “Not lately. If I leave people alone, I expect the same in return. I also expect the same for my friends.” I focused on the trucker, his skin pale and sweating from the sight of the gun.

“You… you fellows from New York?” He must have seen the license plate.

“Bubba, you have no idea where we’re from. No… fucking… idea.” My grin twisted. “I wish I were carrying my Magnum. I love that flinch when I cock it. That’s damn good stuff. But, what the hell, this is fun too.” I couldn’t chamber a round. I lived with one in the pipe. Always. I could pull the trigger to the halfway position and savor the soft click, though. The trucker tried to swallow, couldn’t, then pissed himself. The wet patch was clear on his faded jeans and large, down to his knees at least. He must’ve had a Big Gulp not long ago. “Did I do that, Raff, or did you?” I asked lazily.

Rafferty leaned forward and took a few bags from the front seat. “Eh, does it matter?”

No, it didn’t. “I repeat,” I said softly, “one last time, and that’s one more time than I usually give any other piece of shit nosy-ass bastard like yourself. Go away now or go away permanently. I’m fucking peachy with either option.”

They left pretty damn quickly. Rafferty had unloaded his and Catcher’s food while I was just opening mine, when my brother and Goodfellow returned. “Good, you’re back,” the healer said around a mouthful of chicken-fried steak. “Your brother almost shot a few truckers, I had to muddle a few memories by frying a few brain cells that, trust me, couldn’t be spared, and Catcher doesn’t like liver and onions, so somebody swap with him.” He pointed the plastic fork at me. “Killing in broad daylight. Appreciate the sentiment, but would appreciate not being mobbed by the villagers more. Kill them in the dark.”

I swapped my lunch with Catcher. “I didn’t kill them.”

“But would you have?” That was Niko, a pissed Niko, and there was no lying to Niko, no matter what mood he was in. That mood, I was forced to admit, had been annoyed since day one of the trip and it was ninety-nine point nine percent my fault.

I exhaled. “No, and before you add the ‘but,’ yeah, I wanted to shoot him… just in the leg, though, which hardly counts. He was an ass. He was looking for trouble. I’m a nice guy.” And wasn’t I, though? “I like to give people what they want.”

I missed lunch.

Niko thought that if I had that much excess energy, not to mention excess stupidity, I needed a workout. Behind the truck stop we sparred hand to hand for about forty-five minutes until every part of me ached, sweat soaked my hair, and the only person I had a desire to shoot was myself to put myself out of my misery. Yet there was my brother, trying to ground me and giving the Plague of the World extra time up on us because he thought it was worth it-I was worth it. It was at times like this I almost wished he didn’t think I was. I groaned, “Sadist.”

Niko looked down at me as I lay on my back on the asphalt and gulped air. We’d had a ring of spectators for the first half-hour. More nosy bastards. Back in New York, no one would’ve given us a second look unless we were blocking the entrance to the Internet café or a bar. “A gun, a potential shooting, in broad daylight in a highly public area? You might pretend to be less intelligent than you really are, but this is not excusable. They were idiots and easily handled without a penknife, much less your gun du jour.”

“I know.” I pulled in more ragged breaths. It had been stupid and there’d been a hundred other ways to deal with the truckers than shooting them or even just threatening to shoot them. I knew that, but… “I was feeling on edge,” I admitted, wiping stinging sweat from my eyes. “Bottled up. I wanted to do something. Anything, The truckers were just in the right place at the right time”-or would’ve been if I’d actually gotten to shoot one-“to let off some steam.”

“In other words, you were feeling antsy,” Niko said, studying me, before holding down a hand to help me up. But he didn’t. He only gripped my hand and added, “It’s been almost a whole day since you gated. Your need for it is growing and that means it’s not harmless. It’s not the equivalent of exercise endorphins. It is not a good thing in any way. Do I need to point out this is a problem?”

“No,” I grunted as a boot rested in my gut, “but I have a feeling you will anyway.”

He put a little more weight on me. “Brotherly love. Embrace the concept, little brother. No more gates. No more potential mutilation of the public at large. The entire adult concept comes with responsibilities. We have a job to do. If you get antsy again…”

“Suck it up?”

“I was going to say meditate, but you can do both. Or I can stuff you in the trunk of the car and set my mind at ease. I saw you…” He stopped speaking and pulled me to my feet. But I knew how he would’ve finished it. I saw you die once. I don’t want to see it again. I didn’t think my traveling was near the threat he did, maybe because I didn’t want to believe, but he was my brother. He was about three Nobel Prize-winning scientists smarter than I, and… shit, again, he was my brother. Everything he’d done in his life for me had been for me, not to me.

It was why he didn’t speak Rom. Abelia- Roo could mock him all she wanted. I’d been there when we’d gone to our mother’s clan for help when she was killed. I hadn’t been in the best shape, but I remembered what had happened. It wasn’t something you tended to forget, no matter what shape you were in.

I’d been sixteen, but still felt fourteen-the two missing years of memories a nightmarish whirlpool of black nothingness striped with chaotic red emotion. Not talking to anyone but Nik and then only one or two words at best. I’d never let go of the knife under my jacket… Nik’s jacket. Mine didn’t fit anymore. And Nik… Nik touched me at all times, now that I could bear to let myself be touched again, to let me know I wasn’t alone. He had his hand resting on my shoulder, squeezing, and standing close enough that we cast one shadow. Fourteen, sixteen, sane, insane, human, monster; I hadn’t known which of those things I was, but I’d known Niko was there. Even when I’d shut my eyes against a sun that still seemed far too bright after a month of escaping the Auphe, I’d felt the warmth of his hand burning through to my skin.

Cal.

My eyes had snapped open when he spoke, my knife already pulled.

“No, Cal,” had come the reassuring reply. “No knife. We’re here for help, remember? This is Sophia’s clan. Our clan. Family.” And because Niko was a good man even at eighteen, he’d believed that or wanted to believe it.

It was one of the few times he’d been wrong.

They’d known what I was. Sophia had left the clan, but the clan had never left her. She was Vayash. Vayash never left Vayash. They’d watched, kept track, and consequently knew about the deal she’d made with the Auphe to produce me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have any say in the whole damn thing. The good people of the Vayash clan had spat on me, hid their children from the very sight of me, and they damn sure weren’t going to take an abomination like me under their protection. Niko… Niko was all Vayash, all human. Niko was welcome. He had only to cast me aside.

Or preferably kill me. After all, I was a monster, a thing, a rabid dog.

A man-eater, just not quite grown to full potential. Niko blamed them. Honestly, I didn’t.

Niko had turned his back on them, their life, their ways, their language, and hadn’t once looked back. They were as dead to him as we were to them. How do you deny someone who does that for you? You don’t. I pushed back sweat-soaked hair with an asphalt-scraped hand and gave his a tight squeeze with my other before I let go. “Sucking it up. Meditating. You got it.” I brushed dirt from my jeans. “So, did I do good? Workoutwise? Going to grade me?”

“I hear failing grades only discourage students. You’re progressing. Does that make you feel better?”

Considering Niko wouldn’t be happy unless I could protect myself with the lethal skill of a sixteen-foot-long great white, it was praise enough.

“Puppies done playing now?” Delilah purred from where she sat in a small patch of weeds several feet away. The remnants of her own lunch rested on a plate beside her, the bloody bones of what must’ve been two or three very rare T-bone steaks. Not one drop of red stained her leathers. “So cute. Like a bone as a reward?”

Niko wasn’t amused. He was a patient man, beyond patient, but that massive reserve was put aside for my smart-ass nature and our work in general. Right now he had little to spare for the Wolf who very probably was going to try to kill me. He didn’t like it when people and monsters and all that fell between made attempts on my life. I made my own decisions on where to sleep and whom to sleep with, but he didn’t have to like it and he didn’t have to show my possible assassin any faked appreciation of her humor.

Delilah tilted her head as she stood smoothly to move close to me, inhaling the smell of my sweat. “Wish to play more? Plague of the World can wait fifteen minutes more, yes?”

“No,” Niko said flatly. “The workout was delay enough.” He pointed at the employees’ bathrooms on the side of the building. “Clean up, Cal.” Because, of course, he didn’t have to. Sun, exertion, they were nothing. Me? I had to fucking man up, not melt into a puddle, walk away from a sure thing-sex or death-and go scrub down.

Delilah turned to look at Niko. I didn’t know if he smelled of suspicion or not. Surely even my brother couldn’t control his scent. But it didn’t matter. Delilah already knew I had my doubts, that we all did; she was a smart Wolf. She also knew a doubt wasn’t a sure thing. I was giving her a chance. Niko wasn’t feeling as cooperative at the moment. “You want to play?”

Niko didn’t pause to consider. Suspicion, distrust, it made her unworthy of sparring or conversation. And he was done with pretending. “ Cal.”

I went. He was right. The Plague of the World came first. Chances, for Delilah and me, came second.

When I made it back to the car, I had hair wet from water from a bathroom sink and smelled of industrial-strength soap good for ridding the restaurant workers of E. coli. It was good for sweat too. As I climbed into the back of the car, Catcher regarded me with a horror that had him nearly climbing into his cousin’s lap. Auphe combined with the smell of twenty lemon groves mixed with bleach must’ve been worse than straight Auphe. Before Rafferty could complain about it, I put out a hand to Robin and said disgruntledly, “Give me the spray. I can’t take the bitching.”

“Speaking of bitching”-Rafferty elbowed his cousin off him and back between us-“your friend Delilah, if you can call any Kin a friend, is getting on my last goddamn nerve. Our families cut ties with our Kin relatives before we were born. We don’t deal with the criminal trash we’re related to. Having to listen to one we don’t even share blood with is more of a pain in the ass than I’m willing to deal with. And I won’t have anything to do with her and her freak All Wolf.”

It was rare I heard the name of the cult, the All Wolf, the Wolves who bred for the recessive traits, hoping someday to get their descendants back to the very beginning. All wolf all the time, even in thought-wanting what Catcher was trying so desperately to get rid of. Up until Catcher in fact, Delilah had been sort of the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic when it came to the All Wolf. She might have had partial wolf vocal cords and who knew what else inside, but she was pure human on the outside. Her faith in the All Wolf was limited until she met Catcher. Then she was born again, raise your paws high, brothers and sisters.

“So get her to back off,” Rafferty added curtly, “or I’ll put her ass in a coma until this is all over with. Got it?” He was sounding more and more like Suyolak all the time… and, hell, maybe that was the way it had to be for him to win.

Catcher didn’t seem to agree, giving a mournful-sounding moan, but, yeah, I got it. Rafferty had enough to deal with. So did I, but I’d created the problem by letting Delilah come along, and I’d deal with it. I watched as Delilah rode out of the parking lot ahead of us. Later. I’d deal with it later.

But later turned out to be a little inconvenient.

It was around seven when Rafferty came out of another light doze. I was driving by now, spelling Nik. Robin and Salome were still up front. Everybody thought it best to avoid another Salome/Catcher throw down. Goodfellow, on the other hand, was in the middle of what looked like a mental meltdown. “She was comely,” he’d been muttering over and over, so many times I was tempted to slam my head against the steering wheel to knock myself unconscious. “Why did I deny her? Deny myself?” Then he would focus on me. “She was comely, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, her hair was nice, neat; she combed it a lot, but that wasn’t what I was really looking at,” I responded.

He’d regarded me with disbelief and turned his need for psychotherapy on Niko as I’d planned. I wasn’t going to make any great breakthroughs in science or literature or even in the field of hangman obviously, but I’d been homeschooled by Niko. I knew what the word “comely” meant. I just didn’t have to admit it. I was thinking how it was worth the revenge Nik was bound to visit upon me, when Rafferty woke up and said sharply, “The next exit. Take the next exit.”

“What? Our Suyolak- napper go off the beaten path?” I asked.

“Yes, damn it. Now take the exit!”

It was getting more than a little weird not being the only foulmouthed, grouchy ass around. Maybe that was a reminder to me not to travel, to build no more gates-so I could retain my title as chief asshole on this cross-country trek. No more good moods for me if I wanted to retain my title. “Taking it already, Fluffy. Don’t go frothing at the mouth. They shoot your type for that, you know.”

The next exit happened to be yet another tiny town over the state line into Wyoming. It had a four-way stop, a post office, and a Dairy Queen coming soon-the big time. I didn’t see a single reason for making a pit stop or detouring here unless your rent payment was massively overdue and you needed stamps. Or you were a vegan witch who wanted to salt the earth of the junk- food giant before it was built. Curse the land and save some cows.

But I didn’t believe in magic or that Suyolak and his driver were that desperate to mail anything. Neither did Niko. “Why here?” he said from the seat behind me. “It’s early to stop for the night. Even if Suyolak is draining his kidnapper of life bit by bit, I can’t see him stopping this soon.”

“I don’t know. All I do know is they came this way and I can smell the sickness ahead. Somewhere is Suyolak’s taint, and people are either dead or dying. The son of a bitch is here.”

He was the healer. “Which way?” I demanded.

It was left and through the four-way stop, the adrenaline of that world-drawing tourist attraction was killing me there. We then turned onto another road, another, and finally onto gravel followed by dirt. It had taken a good half hour, if not longer.

The rearview mirror was empty. Abelia and her buddies had stopped on the gravel at least a mile back, not that they couldn’t have gotten farther. They could have, but after the zombie amoebas, they were giving us more space. Abelia might have the biggest baddest ovaries around-probably shot them at her enemies like cannon balls, but her clan members weren’t as tough as she was, and if anyone died a gruesome death, she would most definitely prefer it was us. And Delilah was annoyed enough that she’d kept going when we’d gotten off the interstate. But that didn’t bother me. Just as her possibly trying to kill me didn’t bother me. She was Kin, doing what Kin did. I’d gone into this whole thing-sex, part-time relationship-with open eyes. I didn’t have much right to bitch, and I didn’t have to feel anything I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t. That was that. My story, write it down.

I parked the car in front of a house surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere. The driveway was packed dirt and longer than two city blocks. The whole thing should’ve been run-down and creepy, with broken windows, holes in the roof, a rotting clapboard, Halloween-style haunted house with a skeletal body or two down an abandoned well out back. It wasn’t. It was painted cheery yellow with pristine white shutters and some kind of flowers, blue and purple, surrounding the porch. There was even a rocking chair as immaculately painted as the shutters. I did not want to see Suyolak here, not in this impossibly cheerful house under an equally impossibly blue sky. I’d never be able to watch a Hallmark commercial again… because I spent so much time doing that anyway, but still. Nobody should be sick here. They should be gardening or some such shit. Playing with their golden retriever. Baking cookies. Washing their car. Not dying among the scent of blue and purple flowers.

But as grim as that might be, it wasn’t actually the point. “I don’t see a truck and I don’t see a coffin,” I said. As harsh as it was, we couldn’t stop every time Suyolak took a civilian down. If we did, we could lose him. If we did, he’d know, and he’d make sure we lost him by dropping everyone he could.

There was a rumbling growl behind me, throat vibrating and air ripping, and it wasn’t Catcher. “He’s here.” Rafferty vaulted over the door with wolf speed, but still in human form. Catcher was right behind him. Both hit the door at the same time and it went down in a shattered mess of wood and safety glass.

Salome was moving too-out of the car and then under it. Considering the number of revenants she’d taken down, that was not a good sign. I ignored it, though, and, with Niko and Robin, was on the porch and inside the house in seconds.

There was a neat and clean living room to the right, stairs leading up in the middle, and a dining room to the left. At the back of the dining room was an arched doorway to a sunny kitchen. There was a man on the black and white tiled floor in plain view. He wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t Suyolak. Sad to say, that made him a low priority. Niko was ahead of me on the stairs, Robin beside me, and Rafferty and Catcher already out of sight above us. That’s when I heard a howl loud enough you would’ve thought it would have blown off the roof. It wasn’t terrified, but it wasn’t a whoopee-here-comes-the-ice-cream-man yodel either. Catcher was not happy about something up there and a moment later I got to be unhappy about it too. We all did. There was enough unhappy about the situation to go around.

It was in the nursery-it and the mother, along with stuffed Pooh Bears and Tiggers here and there and more of them and their friends dancing in a mural painted on the wall behind the crib. It was just like the outside of the house-all too perfect; all too good to be true. That’s what you get for being happy and having it all. That’s what happens. Someone or something like Suyolak comes to take it away.

Or worse.

She sat in the rocking chair by the big, bright window. Her head was down, a long sweep of chestnut brown hair, gleaming and thick, hanging like a curtain over her face. I’d bet that the first thing her husband had noticed about her when they first met was that hair. It made you think of wild horses and beaches. Why? I don’t know. It just did.

Her hands cradled a large mound of stomach and she was singing… in Rom. I knew only the curse words. Sophia had been free with those, even if I didn’t know anything else, but I certainly recognized the language when I heard it or an archaic version of it.

It was a lullaby. Anyone, Rom or not, would’ve known that. The lilting harmony, the warm love and expectation… if only it hadn’t had to gurgle its way through a throat full of blood. She lifted her head to smile at us with red-coated teeth. “It’s a boy.” The red fluid trickled out of both sides of her mouth as she said it. “A boy.” One hand moved in a slow circle over her stomach. “Snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”

“Oh shit,” I muttered. I already had my gun out. She was sick, she was a victim, but she smelled so wrong, I didn’t know how Catcher and Rafferty were still in the room with her. There was decay and death and a smell of… hell… a human gone off. Like bad milk. It was the only way to describe it.

She coughed and scarlet sprayed into a fine mist in the air, but she was beyond noticing or caring. “My precious baby boy.” Her eyes were on us and the whites were pure blood. Proud. She looked so proud and so absolutely insane. “Here he comes.”

She was right. He did come or he tried. Under the swell of her stomach I saw movement. It looked like tiny fists pressed against the flesh from the inside. Whatever was trying to be born, I didn’t think was wanting to do it the old-fashioned way. I knew, knew that if it had its way, it would rip its way to freedom and blood would splatter on the highly polished wood floor that matched the too-good-to-be-true living room, the too-perfect-to-exist dining room one. The wood gleamed brilliantly enough, you could almost see your reflection. I would’ve rather looked at that than looked at her, which with my past mirror phobia was saying something. But I didn’t. I kept my eyes up, because as much as I didn’t want to look, I didn’t want to die from carelessness either.

The woman in the rocker didn’t move as her stomach rippled, didn’t cry out in pain; she only kept smiling a beautiful, peaceful smile of joyful motherhood.

“Rafferty,” Niko rapped as Robin crossed himself; Robin, who was not only not Christian but one of the original pagan tricksters-pre-Christian and then some. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t Christian either-I wasn’t anything, but if I’d known more than two lines of the Lord’s Prayer, I’d have been zipping right through it. Because this… this was horror-movie stuff where the devil was real, heads spun around, and Hell was just a zip code away.

“Do we kill it or not?” my brother demanded. His mouth was tight. He knew killing the baby-or what had been a baby-meant killing her as well, and he didn’t like it. But he would do it. Niko always did what he had to do, no matter the consequences to himself. He’d suffered enough consequences in his life for being a good man. If it came to that, I’d do it before I’d let him-but as it turned out, neither of us had to make the choice. Someone else did.

The healer shook his head and crouched a few feet away from her. His eyes unfocused and he shook his head again. “It’s not viable outside the womb, and she’s not viable for long either.”

No, she didn’t look it-twisted and warped, blood pouring out of her mouth, eyes, ears, dying from the poisonous thing inside her. And it was poisonous, as much as a truckload of cyanide. The Vayash had thought the same about me. If they hadn’t feared the Auphe so much, I was positive they would’ve dragged a pregnant Sophia off and made sure I never became a walking, talking reality. And I could understand that, believe it or not. If this was what they’d pictured, fuck… I wouldn’t have blamed them.

But I hadn’t turned out that way, so I still blamed them plenty, not for me, but for turning their backs on Niko. “You can’t heal her?” I asked, my gun still pointed. She was dying, a storybook mom in a fairy-tale house, and, damn, that sucked, but no way was I facing that thing inside her without a gun. I didn’t care what Rafferty said about its expiration date. If it got out… the last thing I wanted to face without a gun was a Suyolak mini-me.

“I could keep her alive, but I can’t heal her.” He ran a hand over his face hard enough to redden the skin, then reached over to touch her knee. Her eyes immediately went blank and she slumped forward limply. The thing inside of her still moved for a moment or two, distorting her stomach, but then it stilled too. Call me a chickenshit, but I was glad I hadn’t had to see it. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like now, but I was sure it was nothing like a newborn baby boy.

“What the hell kind of disease does this?” I dropped the muzzle of the gun to point at the blood splattered around her bare feet. There was a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, a color between red and pink. Rose-as rosy as her life had been before Suyolak had decided to play.

“Not a disease,” Rafferty responded as Niko ripped the sheer white curtains from the window and draped it over the woman’s still body. “Genes. Suyolak turned the fetus’s genes into a mirror image of his own.”

“Genetic tampering,” Nik said, turning to him. “You said he could do only so much in the coffin and that wasn’t much. Kill a few people with bacteria and viruses that already are available. Genetic manipulation is far beyond that.”

“He’s more than a thousand years old. How does he know about genes anyway?” I added, stepping back from the blood slowly pooling outward.

“First, genetic manipulation is assuming the patient lives. This… atrocity… never would’ve lived outside its mother and neither of them more than ten minutes. It was his mirror, to lure us here, and mirrors reflect, but mirrors don’t live or have the talent of what they imitate.”

“Easy to twist and destroy,” Robin said quietly. “Not so easy to remake a living creature and keep it that way.”

Catcher leaned against Rafferty’s leg as the healer said without emotion, “No. It’s not. As for genes, healers have known about genes since there were healers. Even if they didn’t know what to call them, they could still sense them, but there aren’t many strong enough to manipulate them.”

“Except for Suyolak?” Niko commented, leaving the “and you” silent. There was still another victim downstairs. Who the hell knew what he might do?

“Except for Suyolak… and right now all he can do is make a temporary mirror of himself to lure us off track and give his driver time to get farther away.” Rafferty’s eyes were lamps of gold now, rage directed at Suyolak, and I was thinking probably for him too. “The husband is dead. We need to go.”

“Is that your opinion, Hippocrates? Are you sure you wouldn’t want to wait around for monsters- made-from-scratch waiting to pop out just for the fun and distraction?” Robin asked acidly. Despite the fact he’d lived longer than we had and seen more than we ever would, he was still shaken. Hell, we all were, but Goodfellow was always the most vocal of us all. He had the guts to show what the rest of us hid. “Because this first was so enjoyable.”

“Shut up,” Raffety ground out between his teeth.

It didn’t stop Goodfellow. “The proud mother- to-be may have died a death from the most unsettling of horror movies, and the father is deceased on the kitchen floor, but that’s no reason we can’t stop, have an Irish coffee, and eat some cake on our way out. I’m quite sure she was a great cook. There’s bound to be sugar-and-butter-filled goodness somewhere in the refrigerator. We should enjoy. Because that would be more useful than anything you’ve done so far in this place.”

“Shut up.” This time it was me, saying it under my breath as I moved casually between the puck and the healer. “Really. Shut the hell up before he…” Well, there were so many things I could think of at the moment: pieces rotting and falling off; pieces I liked and preferred to keep. It didn’t pay to forget Rafferty was a healer, but he was a predator too-a carnivore; a massively pissed-off, guilting carnivore. Healer or predator, which came first? I preferred Suyolak found that out, not the rest of us.

“Shut up? You have the unmitigated gall to tell your elder and your superior in every way to shut up?” Robin was a predator too, only without the fur and fangs. We all were predators. But…

Niko finished my thought before I barely began it. “We are after Suyolak, not one another. I want civility, and I want it now. Do any disagree?” He didn’t idly swing his katana toward his feet as he normally did. Instead, he buried more than two inches of the blade into the bloody floor and didn’t look like he’d have a problem doing the same to flesh instead of wood. Rafferty and Goodfellow weren’t the only ones who were pissed. We all were: mad and more than a little rattled, not that we’d admit it. I’d seen a lot of killers in my day, some sane, some insane. I’d always thought the insane were the worst and we’d thought Suyolak the same way, but right now… Suyolak was too sane. Sociopathic, genocidal, but with a focus so crystal clear, it was like a laser. Burning. Blinding.

“Let’s go find this son of a bitch and do things to him that make this seem like a fucking baby shower,” I said with savage bite.

Robin exhaled and let his dissatisfaction with Rafferty go. “Fine. I refuse to admit I was out of line. I am never out of line. In fact, I created the line, but I will graciously skip the kitchen when we leave.”

That was the best we could hope for. Rafferty paid no attention to what was, for a puck, almost an apology, and headed for the stairs, Catcher at his heels. The rest of us turned to leave a nursery where Pooh had seen things no bear ever should. I grimaced and then gave Robin’s shoulder a light shove. “Which line did you come up with? The one you don’t cross or the one you jump over with both feet?” He glared back at me and his hand hovered near one of the daggers he kept tucked away.

“Naughty, naughty.” I gave him a dark grin.

Niko, behind me, said abruptly, “It wasn’t much of a distraction, however, was it? Horrifying, yes, but time-consuming? Not by as much as would be worth the trouble. Suyolak had us following his false shadow for an hour at the most. Why did he bother if he couldn’t slow us down more than this?”

As answers went, the one we received was immediate and succinct.

First the detached garage out back blew up, and seconds later Niko’s car followed it.

Timing, as with women, gambling, fighting, and massive fiery destruction, really is everything.