Roadkill

14

Knock knock.

I’d said that to Cal, but I should’ve been saying it to myself too.

Knock knock. Who’s there?

Catcher… as I’d told myself a hundred times before. Catcher. I was Catcher, yes, now. But before? No. There wasn’t any point to lying to myself. I’d gone bye-bye. That was six times in the past month. I could blame what had happened earlier for my last trip if I wanted, but that was still the most times ever. I could only pin one of those on Cal.

I’d seen a different side to him with the Ördögs, his Auphe side, the one I’d tried to ignore at our McDonald’s McNugget-up-the-nose stop. There was no ignoring it at the creek. I’d been right there with him when we caught up with the truck traveling off the road and also caught up with Cal ’s own traveling. What he did, I couldn’t describe it to anyone else but a Wolf. Humans couldn’t see what we could. I’d been in human form and wolf form and although as a human I saw more colors, as a wolf I saw depths and textures humans couldn’t imagine. I saw reality bleeding around Cal every time he disappeared and reappeared. It was like a visual scream. The world was screaming.

I wasn’t sure if that’s what tipped me over into wolf and nothing but wolf. It could have been that or the battle. Sleek black shapes here, there, everywhere. There was flesh ripping under my teeth and the taste of blood. I wasn’t Kin. I was proof that all Wolves weren’t criminals and careless murderers. I’d been a biologist. My cousin was a healer. I didn’t go looking for trouble. Sometimes you couldn’t avoid it, no matter how hard you tried, not in our world where almost everyone was a predator-it was only a matter of big or little, slow or fast.

But me? I was a peaceful guy, laid back and fun loving. In the day, I could bong a beer and tutor you in anatomy. I’d pledged a frat… all the better to blend in, and, to my shame, get free beer. Once in a while in my past I’d run into those a little less nonviolent than I was. I’d tried to be reasonable, but there were those who wouldn’t listen to reason. Then there were the times you just had to go to the woods, the forest, the jungle-whatever was available-to run and hunt. We were Wolves, first and foremost, above all other things. It was natural, and there was no denying we were at our most wolf in the hunt.

Either Cal or the blood; it didn’t make a difference what had been the trigger. I remembered tearing into the Ördögs and then I remembered waking up in the car. In between were the dreams you forgot two seconds after waking up. You knew there’d been something and you had a sense of the emotion, even the happy, slow drift of colors, but anything tangible was gone. I woke up floating in blissful satisfaction and to a full stomach. Deer. I could still taste it. It was a familiar taste. It was what we “tame” suburban Wolves tended to hunt. The Kin would kill and usually eat their enemy. I couldn’t do that. If it talked, I couldn’t eat it. It could deserve to be eaten, but it didn’t make a difference. If it could talk, I couldn’t knosh down on it. I was a softy that way. I couldn’t eat octopus either. I’d done a study on them in college. Those things could open jars to get at food. Jars… with screw-top lids. That was smart. I didn’t remember how long it took me to figure out how to open jars when I was a kid. I knew it hadn’t been anywhere near as fast as an octopus and I’d gotten all gold stars in kindergarten.

Rafferty had once said I was the closest thing to a wolf vegetarian he’d ever seen. A tree- hugging, vegetarian wolf-worse yet, Wolf, and he was embarrassed to be seen with me. This from the guy who healed broken wings on birds and tossed them back, free, into the sky. “What?” he’d gruff. “I just ordered pizza. I’ll take pizza over blackbird any day.”

It was why he fought the Ördögs as wolf instead of killing them with a brush of his fingers. It was to give them a chance. It was what was right and fair. He’d only ever killed as a healer to give mercy, the way he had the pregnant woman Suyolak had corrupted beyond all hope of curing. That he was going to change that when he took on Suyolak wasn’t his fault. Only a healer could stop another healer as strong as Suyolak. Rafferty had to do it because that bastard had to die. I could live with that. Rafferty could too. I didn’t know if either of us could live with his doing it by draining Suyolak of a life force that was as tainted as a well poisoned with cyanide.

Whether or not using it could bring me back to what I once was wasn’t the issue. What was, was what would Rafferty be if he did. I’d give up my furry butt-no, I’d give up my life for my cousin, and I knew he’d do the same for me. While I didn’t want it to come to that, it was part and parcel of family, the right kind of family. What I couldn’t accept was his changing. Not the way I had changed, but like Cal had changed during the fight. I didn’t want to be whole and right again, only to look into my cousin’s eyes and see a shadow of Suyolak staring back at me. If he could pull it off and make me like I once was without darkening himself, that would be great. I’d pay for the party… buffet and piñatas. We’d hit Mexico and the beaches and not come back for a year. Nothing but fun, sun, and knock-you-flat tequila. We more than deserved it.

But if he couldn’t put me right and keep himself the same in the process, I’d rather live a clean if intellectually simplistic life. I’d rather be the Catcher who lived only in the moment, a Catcher without an identity beyond the most basic concept of “me.” A Suyolak-contaminated Rafferty was not a clean life, for either of us. It was wrong, a polluted existence. And I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t change his mind; I could only hope he was telling the truth: that he could handle it.

“Ah, but, dog, what if he cannot?”

I swiveled my head as I sat in the passenger seat of the moving car but saw nothing. It didn’t stop Suyolak’s oily voice from sniffing around the inside of my brain like a cat in heat, ravenous for any satisfaction he could get. I didn’t know if anyone else could hear him, although no one looked as if goosed with an icy finger, which was how I felt. All that was missing was a doctor telling me to cough.

I closed my eyes and I could see him as he was a long time ago: human with wavy black hair to his shoulders, mischievous black eyes, and a smile that outshone a thousand commission-hungry salesmen. I didn’t think they had such good teeth in those days, but he was a healer. Who needed fluoride if you could heal a dying person or turn him inside out, depending on your mental wiring? Suyolak had some very bad wiring. A conscience was only a word to him, without any real meaning. He had never healed a bird and let it fly away.

“You think that being born without a conscience is my fault, my friend?” The moon was orange as Cal had said it had been in his dream and Suyolak was sitting on a vine-covered log by a small fire with a pot of bubbling stew. In his lap he was casually bouncing a small boy. The child was three or four years old and dressed in an old- fashioned nightshirt with colorful embroidery around the neck. His head swung back and forth, lolling without any control. His legs and arms were limp and his eyes blank, but he breathed. He had dusky skin, a mop of black curls, and a face as flawless as Suyolak’s.

“You’re smart enough to follow the rules of society.” There were only words in my head, but I heard them as if I were still able to say them aloud. It’d been so long since I’d heard my voice, even in my dreams, that I’d almost forgotten what I sounded like. “Smart enough to know they’re there for a reason even if you can’t understand or feel the reason behind them.”

“You are the first sanctimonious Wolf I’ve crossed paths with. Curious. And, yes, I am smart, more than enough to know that rules don’t apply to one such as me.” Even as he said the words, the grin was as compelling and charismatic as before. The bait to pull in the unwary. Nature at its darkest and most chaotic. Biology. I was a biologist, but I didn’t have to be to see it. I didn’t have to be a psychiatrist either to know Suyolak was a creature beyond redemption. Nature was nature. The volcano didn’t cry for Pompeii -it didn’t care whom it killed and neither did Suyolak.

“I wanted a son,” he added, the fleeting concept of conscience of no further interest to him. A sociopath before humans had come up with the label. He bounced the boy one more time and then let him roll carelessly onto the ground where he landed face- first. He hadn’t cried or made an attempt to catch himself. “But that’s a lie.” The smile only became warmer. “I do like to lie. Do not hold it against me, brother.” Amiable; happy and amiable. Born in a human body, but one untouched by a soul.

“No, I did not want a son. I wanted another me, because, truly, what could be more entertaining than the Plague of the World? Would you guess? No? Two Plagues. We would devour the world and then one of us would devour the other. Now that would be a game genuinely worth playing; a challenge like no other. But instead, this is what I received.” He pushed the unmoving boy farther away with a disgusted nudge of his foot. “Even in the womb of his useless cow of a mother, whom I took great pleasure in drowning in her own amniotic fluid during childbirth, he was like this. When he was smaller than my fist, I felt it. No brain. Oh, a spoonful perhaps, but not enough to be anything but an empty, breathing sack of nothing. No potential for consciousness. No chance to be the challenge I craved. And I could do nothing. You can change a brain; you can easily tear it down if you wish, but you cannot make one. I tried again and again, but it was only more of the same.”

He followed my gaze still fixed on his son. I hadn’t given nature the credit it deserved. It had tried to make up for its mistake. This was its answer to no more Suyolaks. I wished nature had found that answer before Suyolak himself had been born. “Do not worry about that one. I let him live although he’s long dust now. I let them all live. Why kill what was never alive? Where is the pleasure in that?”

“But your cousin.” That smile, that endlessly magnetic and intimate smile. “A challenge finally arises and at the same time that I arise. It is fate. Destiny.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded. “Because I do have better things to do than listen to the medieval version of Ted Bundy. Why are you yapping to me like a bored cub?”

“Because your cousin isn’t listening right now. He isn’t listening, and he is going the wrong way.”

This Suyolak, the one suddenly in my face, the moon gone and the fire smelling of burning human flesh, was the skin-wrapped bones of before. Blind eyes not an inch from mine, snapping stained teeth far from the brilliant white of before, his breath carrying the stench of the Black Death itself.

I yelped, eyes opening, and jerking back quickly enough to bang my head on the inside roof of the car. “What the hell?” Rafferty said. “Did you have a bad… shit, Suyolak.”

I’d had a bad Suyolak, no way around it. But he’d said we were going the wrong way and there was a way around that. I clamped my jaws around the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. I believed Suyolak wholeheartedly. He wanted to fight my cousin. He wanted us there when he got out of that coffin. He was getting out too. We wouldn’t be able to stop it. Destiny… fate. I hadn’t always believed in the theory, despite a different girlfriend than the Buddhist one. This one had played around with tarot cards. I’d thought she was a complete flake, although one with gorgeous legs and an amazing… All right, that was beside the point. But that’s what I’d believed in then, not fate. I believed now. This all felt designed: that I would be sick; that Rafferty would be this desperate; that Suyolak would choose this time to escape or that time had chosen it for him.

Whether you were a pawn or a king, everyone had a part to play in the world. It was time to play ours. I yanked at the wheel again, growling. “Will you quit it?” Rafferty said. “I’m pulling over already? See?” He pulled the car off the highway and slowed it to a crawl. “I smell Suyolak.” Not a genuine smell, but a healer sense, although Rafferty wouldn’t be caught dead saying the soppy, fake mystical “I sense…” about anything. “He couldn’t hurt you. I have us all shielded.”

“He could speak to him, though,” Niko said from behind me, “as he spoke to Cal.”

“Through what I’ve got up?” Rafferty said dismissively. “No.” My cousin had never lacked in self-confidence. Not being able to heal me was the sole exception to that. It made him a formidable fighter when he had to be, an incredibly talented healer, and sometimes a giant know-it-all ass.

I put my muzzle next to his ear and growled again, one very serious growl rarely heard from the nonoctopuseating, almost-vegetarian, save-the-planet, mellow Wolf I was. Rafferty grimaced. “Okay, Christ. I can’t believe I ever bought you pancakes and had the cojones to ask for whipped cream on them. Don’t you forget that, because I’ll never be able to live it down.” He put on the brakes and brought the car to a complete stop. “Get your computer and tell me what is so damn important that…” He shut his mouth over the rest of the sentence before changing it to a quiet, “He’s turned around. The son of a bitch has turned around.”

“I thought you had him,” Goodfellow accused. “No possible way you could lose him, I believe you said.”

Sometimes you can concentrate too hard that you can’t see the flock for the sheep. It was an easy mistake to make, especially when you were as emotionally invested in all of this as my cousin was-the same cousin no one could get away with talking badly about, especially fast-talking pucks. I turned the snarl on Robin in the backseat, for the first time ignoring the demonic King Tut cat sitting on his shoulder.

“That is what I said.” Rafferty looked over his shoulder, then jerked the steering wheel and slammed his foot on the gas. The car tore through the dirt, across the asphalt of the road, and then more dirt that made up the median, and we were headed back the way we came. “When I thought I was better than he is.”

The snarl became a startled gurgle as I again turned my head. The set profile of my cousin was enough to disillusion me that I’d heard wrong. Another gurgle, this time from Goodfellow, was a distant Grand Canyon reflection of mine. “What did you just say? I know you did not say he is better than you. As much as I agree that your ego is as enormously inflated as your social skills are nonexistent, but you told us you could take Suyolak. You were to do the heavy lifting on this little escapade, because apart from having our hearts explode and our brains dribble out our ears, there isn’t much we can contribute to the campaign.”

“We took this job before we knew Rafferty would be available, so that’s not exactly fair,” Niko said. “Behave.”

The puck did not. I wasn’t in any way surprised. I’d only met two other pucks in my life and they had been noise pollution on the hoof. Goodfellow was no different.

“Only if you’re using ‘we’ with the broadest of definitions. He came aboard this ship of death before I did. I expected him to be our lifeboat, our coast guard rescuer in a tight uniform. I dislike having my expectations, especially of living, shattered.” Goodfellow scowled, folded his arms, and slid down in the seat, but he didn’t tell Rafferty to stop the car and let him out. That was huge for a puck. Besides making a good deal of noise, they were accomplished fighters when they had to be, but they were equally accomplished at keeping themselves in one piece. It should’ve been surprising that there were so few of them left. Still, if you thought about it, as I had before of Robin, if you lived forever… did you really want to? They had far too much time on their hands, and it was likely I had too little. The world was funny that way.

I thought I’d picked up enough about Goodfellow from our first meeting and this road trip to know that he was being brave, not suicidal, though, but what about Suyolak? He was going to be more than happy to make sure none of us saw the dawn of the next day, much less forever, and I didn’t want my cousin giving up his life if he had no chance of stopping the bastard.

“Cuz.”

I rolled my eyes back and forth again, but no one was speaking, not the others, not Rafferty. No mouths were moving and it wasn’t my ears that had picked up the word. This was turning out to be the day of playing with my brain as if it were Play-Doh. Grumbling deep in my chest, I closed my eyes again. This time I didn’t see Suyolak. I saw Rafferty. I saw the world around Rafferty. It was from our college senior ski trip. The air wasn’t cold and the snow matted down in my ski boots wasn’t freezing my feet as it had back then, but the vision of it… It was the same as the framed picture on Rafferty’s guest room dresser. Rafferty could’ve stepped out of that picture himself. He was seven or eight years younger with hair that, while it still rivaled a well-worn janitor’s mop, wasn’t as unkempt as it was these days. I held out my hands, gloved and holding ski poles. Hands. I dropped the poles and stripped off the gloves. They were as I remembered: the scar across the back of my right one. Nails chewed short. I’d started gnawing at my paws when I was a cub and never stopped, as a wolf or a human. A plain ring of silver around my right ring finger… just because we Wolves loved to mock that whole silver legend.

“I’m me.” I gave a wide and happy grin. “I’m me and I can talk. No stupid computer, which you skimped on, by the way. You couldn’t fork out the big bucks for a Dell? This one takes an entire century to reboot. And don’t get me started on Windows Vista. That’s what demons pass when they get the Tijuana Trots. And-”

I was silenced as Rafferty tackled me and hugged me so tightly, my imaginary breath whooshed out of my imaginary lungs and I almost slipped and fell down in the equally imaginary snow. It was unexpected, although we Wolves were more touchy- feely than humans tended to be. But Rafferty had been born a grump, not that I didn’t love the hell out of the guy. I did, but it didn’t change the fact this was unexpected. It was even a little bit shocking and it was great. I was me and it was just… great.

“I wish I’d figured this out without copying it from Suyolak,” Rafferty said gruffly at my ear. “We would never have needed a computer. We could’ve talked… even if you talk too much and carry on about the plight of the whales and shit. But we could’ve actually talked and you could’ve been the other part of yourself, if only in your head. I screwed up and I’m sorry.”

I stepped back out of the hug. Since Rafferty was not the hugging type, that meant he felt guilty, he was scared, and he needed some good down- home counsel-pack style. He’d tackled me with the hug. I tackled him to the ground and rubbed snow in his face. “Awww, you’re so sweet. You’re like Lassie or Lady. Maybe we can find Tramp for you and you can share spaghetti and meet in the middle. Very cute.”

Jumping up before he could kick me off, I continued. “We’re here now. We’re Wolves, Rafferty. We might fool ourselves by running around half the time looking like humans and buying houses, cars, going to college, but the bottom line is we’re Wolves. And being only in the here and now is what we were in the beginning. I’m not saying let’s go crazy and join the cult of All Wolf like Delilah, but we can’t forget either that ‘now’ isn’t so bad.” I reached down and grabbed the hand he wasn’t using to wipe snow from his face and pulled him to his feet. “And right here, right now”-I grinned again at the play on words-“is the best.”

“It is pretty good,” he admitted, and nailed me in the hair with the snow he’d scraped from his face and balled up in his other hand.

And it truly was the best. I hadn’t had a better moment since before getting sick, but Rafferty was driving and how he was managing that and this at the same time was anyone’s guess. Then there was Suyolak.

“You can’t take him.” I brushed nonexistent snow from my hair and went on with some trepidation. I didn’t want to make things worse for Rafferty with doubt. “That’s what you said. If that’s true, then we should get out of here. Saving the world is never a bad thing, don’t get me wrong-I had my car bumper covered with stickers that said the same thing-but if you can’t take him, I don’t want you dying for no reason. The world will have to find a different solution.”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t take him.” He scowled automatically at being told there was anything he couldn’t do, the cocky SOB, but he sobered. “I said he was better than me. You’ve played blackjack with me. Football at Thanksgiving in your parents’ yard back in high school. You’ve fought me roughhousing around during hunts. You know me. Being better than me doesn’t mean someone can take me.”

He was right. He… I… we all thought he was the king when it came to healing, but I was smart, in math and physics as well as biology. I could count cards; learned it second semester of college. That didn’t stop him from beating me in games of drunken twenty-one in the dorm laundry room while we waited for our clothes to dry. I was a little bit bigger, faster, and stronger than he was as a wolf too, but he still kicked my tail more often than not.

Stubborn, ruthless, would cheat in a heartbeat, and was sneaky as hell; it usually gave him the advantage over me. It might do the same for him with Suyolak. In my heart, though, I was as tame as Delilah mocked me for being. Rafferty while in human form was a healer, first, last, and always, but as a wolf, he was Wolf. He hunted with no regret and killed enemies with a double helping of glee. He wasn’t ashamed of it either. He was who he was… to the brink and beyond. He simply happened to be two widely different creatures.

As a healer, he healed and he didn’t ask if you deserved to be made whole. As a wolf, he killed and whether you’d deserved it or not, I didn’t ask. Because he was the normal Wolf, the predator. I was the one in the butterfly collar and if I hadn’t been sick and stuck, I might have merited the ridiculous thing regardless.

“Not better than him, but you can take him.” I nodded before having my last look at the trees, the snow, the blue sky that was a different blue to human eyes than wolf ones. I had already studied my hands; now I felt my face. Stubble, lean jaw, thick eyebrows. I’d missed this face. It was only half of the whole of me, but I’d missed it.

“I can take him.”

“Okay, then. You can,” I agreed with the same confidence Rafferty was putting out there, then smiled. It was the moment I never thought we’d get. If he took down that ancient Rom and cured me, it would be good. But if he took Suyolak and couldn’t make me what I was, it would still be good, because I was able to say a real good-bye, one that, at the end of the road, had nothing to do with whether he could take Suyolak or not; one that was for him and me and our past wandering years.

Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.

“By the way, in college? I slept with that girl you were sleeping with junior year.” Good-byes shouldn’t be melancholy. They should be until we meet again. They also shouldn’t include getting the crap knocked out of you on the memory of a snow slope, so I ran the last bit together a little hurriedly. “But you weren’t actually dating, so it didn’t count.” I gave him a quick happy- go-lucky, life-is-good smile, the one my parents had said I’d had since the day I was born-a grinning golden retriever born of Wolves. “Be seeing you.”

I opened my eyes quickly and was back in the car. There was no snow or the smell of pine. There was the smell of old vinyl, the faint scent of ancient baby food and dirty diapers, pot, cedar chips, and a long-gone hamster, and a puck and two humans or semihumans who hadn’t had a chance to bathe in a while. The mummy cat smelled almost like gingerbread cookies, the kind Mom had made at Christmas, and I smelled like fries.

Rafferty just smelled pissed. “Goodfellow, where’s the damn water bottle you spray your cat with? I have some serious behavior modification to do.” To me, he accused, “You slept with Natalya? She was six feet tall, a model, and a Wolf. Orthodox. My mom, if she were alive, would’ve loved her. I might’ve dated her. I thought about dating her. You son of a bitch.”

I grinned and panted in the fine spray aimed at my face. Ah, refreshing. Mummy cats were pussies, literally, if that slowed them down. I kept on grinning as we chased Suyolak until he went to ground like all prey. I could do that, because it was all about the here and now. My cousin cursing at the wheel. Left-over fries to munch. A tug-of-war as a sex-starved puck unsuccessfully tried to steal my racy calendars while desperately declaring monogamy and celibacy as the number one killer, miles ahead of heart disease. Then, when he lost the tug-of-war, pulling out a white and gold peri feather to slowly run through his fingers-a sensation he seemed to be memorizing. There was also the Auphe unconsciously humming under his breath along with Barry Manilow on the radio, the sunglasses beginning to slide down his nose as he seemed to find a meditation groove-no matter how evil and unnatural Manilow was. The ninja/ samurai/assassin-could-be if didn’t-wannabe glancing sideways at his brother as if slicing his throat to stop the non-melody was out of the question, but the fantasy of it not completely so.

It was good, all of it. The future was a myth, the past as lost as the innocence that falls away with a baby’s first breath. The here and now…

It was what made life worth living.