Roadkill

15

We ended up back in Wyoming at Yellowstone Park right before twilight. I’d never been there before. Rangers wouldn’t let Sophia scam the tourists, so no parks for us as kids, but I damn sure knew a lot of red-light districts like the back of my hand. Then when Niko and I were on the run from the Auphe, hoping to hide as best as we could, wide-open spaces made up of thousands of acres weren’t what we were looking for. That was a Where’s Waldo? freebie right there.

Rafferty parked past the West Entrance just as most people were leaving, trickling out in carloads. We wouldn’t have made it in if the park ranger at the station hadn’t decided to keel over almost face- first into his beef stew. Luckily, he barely missed it and began snoring loudly enough that I hoped a passing lonely bear didn’t molest him. With an irritable healer along for the ride, who needed Obi-Wan and his hoodoo protection for what I’d always strongly suspected were his love droids?

Yeah, I almost jumped in with Robin to fight for Catcher’s calendars, but who could blame me? Delilah and I hadn’t had a whole lot of alone time on the trip and that had nothing to do with her possibly having orders to kill me. When you weighed possible death against certain sex, I was the same as any other guy-I was willing to toss those dice. But time hadn’t been kind to Cal junior. It wasn’t the best road trip I could’ve imagined-in that or any respect. Surrounded by death and very little sex, I could’ve gotten the same if I were a hundred and stuck in a nursing home-if there were nursing homes for Auphe. What a way to spend the prime of my life: all but celibate, attacked daily, more Auphe than I’d ever been, and with all the porn hogged by a monster-sized wolf in a butterfly collar.

Life pissed me the fuck off.

We drove to the first parking area we could find. It was empty by the time we arrived… except for a certain black truck. They said Death rode a pale horse. In fiction maybe, but in the real world, Death rode in a coffin in the back of a very plain, unnoticeable black truck. I was out of the car and at the back of that truck in seconds. Rafferty didn’t say anything to stop my progress, which was a good-enough go-ahead for me. If Suyolak had been there, I’d have been on the asphalt with a healer footprint on my back. Rafferty wasn’t letting anyone get ahead of him on this guy.

The doors were unlocked, which meant only one thing, but I opened them warily all the same. I’d seen what this guy could do. I’d felt what he could do. I’d nearly lost my life because of him and the twisted virus he’d turned loose at the hotel.

Dying was inevitable. You came into this world with an expiration date and there wasn’t much you could do about that. Like Rafferty had said, your heart has only so many beats in it. There were the unexpected ones too, like milk going bad a week early. It came with the territory when you fought for a living. I didn’t mind dying, the same way I didn’t mind winter. Both were coming, one way or the other. However, if I curdled early, I wanted to go out fighting all the way. I didn’t want to have some bubonic-plague-spreading asshole pointing a finger at me, and like that sour milk being poured down a drain, so I’d go-without landing a blow. Someday someone or something would kill me. Fact. But I wanted them to see the scars of that encounter every time they looked in a mirror.

Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.

The doors didn’t creak spookily. No reality show ghost hunters/plumbers jumped out to wave idiotic electronic toys to either detect those passed on or snake your sink. As if when you died and there was life after death, which I highly doubted, you’d hang around the place where you took the big dirt nap. Get thee to a beach and haunt it if you have no place better to go. People-stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

But this was no illusion of a haunting. It wasn’t the site of a vengeful mass murderer lying in wait either. It was only a truck… with a coffin in the back, a coffin made of metal and with the lid pushed to one side. “The seals are broken.”

I could’ve jumped at the deeply somber voice right at my ear. Instead, I chose to give my balls a moment to descend and crabbed over my shoulder, “Do you want me to piss my pants, Nik? Seriously? Isn’t the car a little fragrant enough at this point?”

“As entertaining a story as that would be to tell, you’re correct. I apologize.” He rested a hand on my shoulder and hoisted himself up into the truck, not that he needed the support. Then again, maybe we both needed it in the coming battle. Rafferty had said it himself: Suyolak was better than he was. If he went down, we would have to step up, very probably only to follow the healer right back down. Fighting a losing battle is one thing. Fighting an absolutely hopeless battle is a different thing altogether. It certainly made catchy slogans harder to come up with. “I’ll be back.” Well, no, I won’t. “Yippe ki yay, motherfucker.” Too upbeat. “Hasta la vista, baby.” Too temporary and so idiotically clichéd. “I regret I have but one life to give…” Okay, that I could see. I did regret I had but the one life and that it wasn’t enough to kill the bastard. When you were Auphe and that wasn’t enough to kill something, damn if you weren’t having a seriously bad day.

I followed my brother. There was grit under the soles of my shoes, lots of it-probably what was left of those seals Abelia-Roo hadn’t kept up to OSHA standards, thanks to that overblown ego of hers. I should’ve known that from the first second she spoke to us. Abelia was many things, bad ones, familiar ones from my childhood, but she was also sharp as they came. Sometimes sharp wasn’t enough, though. She had a heart on its last legs, but she wasn’t anywhere close to senile. She did think a lot of herself, however, a damn lot, more than Goodfellow did of himself, if possible. The seals had failed because, unlike Rafferty, she thought she was better than Suyolak. If she’d thought less of herself, tried harder and stayed on top of her duty, the seals, and the iron coffin would’ve been sealed tight as it had been all those generations before.

But now we were left with an empty metal box filled with dust and a smell like a cobwebbed attic that hung in your nose and lingered on the back of your tongue. “I’ve always enjoyed a challenge,” Niko remarked, sifting through the powder to lift something out. “I think perhaps there are other things I could enjoy instead. Bonsai trees, painting, forging my own weapons. The opportunities are endless.” He opened his hand to show me the small braid of several yellowed hairs. “Voodoo.”

“Think it would work?” I perked up. Killing from a distance wasn’t usually my thing, but in this case, I’d make an exception.

“Unfortunately, no.” He dropped the braid and dusted mote-sized bits of Suyolak off his hands. Horton wasn’t hearing a Who on any of those-not unless it was a frothing rabid killer Who-and he wouldn’t want to listen to one of those anyway if he was smart.

“The driver’s dead,” Robin said a few feet below us. He was catless. Salome was not only not with him; she wasn’t in the car either. She’d jumped out of the window onto the top of another car that we’d passed at the ranger station going in the opposite direction. She must’ve decided, with whatever filled the empty space between her pierced ears, that not only was the station as far as she cared to go, but that, in fact, she would like to travel in a direction far from us. I thought her tail waved a cheerful good-bye, but it could’ve also been feline for Screw you and your little werewolves too. What did I know? It was a cat. Live ones were a mystery and dead ones… way out of the ball field.

“Great.” Although truthfully, I didn’t care one way or the other. Kirkland started this mess. Yes, to save his wife, and, yes, back me into a corner and I could say without a doubt I would’ve done it for Nik. But it wasn’t me. This wasn’t a hypothetical coulda woulda shoulda. Suyolak was gone and my empathy had gone with him, so the hell with the dead guy.

Niko jumped down and started toward the front of the truck, with me behind him. “Rafferty can’t save him? Bring him back?”

Robin snorted. “Jesus fresh off his Lazarus Tour couldn’t do a thing with this one.”

Both Niko and I still took a look for ourselves. The driver’s door was open, thanks to Rafferty or Robin. I was going with Rafferty, because I’d seen roadkill that was more photogenic than the late professor, and I couldn’t see Robin panting in anticipation for a closer look. Kirkland could’ve been a corpse that had lain under the desert sun for months. Dried skin shrunken to frame the skeleton, coarse short hair drained of moisture and color that had fallen away from the scalp in patches. Eyes turned to raisins in the hollow of his skull. He was a long-dead spider found under your refrigerator. A husk.

He looked quite a bit like Suyolak had in my head.

“Mihai, Yoska,” said Abelia, a still-scuttling spider chock-full of poison, standing behind us. “I might find a use for bits and pieces of him later. If nothing else, he’ll be a good attraction for the marks. Mummy man, cursed to death by the hand of the Rom. ”

“You are a shame on any people, including the Rom,” Niko retorted, but he stepped out of the path of the two men. It was simpler. An empty truck was easier for cops to overlook in their files than an empty truck with a dead man in it. The other two Rom stood to one side and respectfully behind Abelia while their brethren hauled the husk of Professor Kirkland over to the RV and stashed him away. The parking lot was empty by then. No one saw and if they had, they would’ve passed it off as a Halloween prop.

“Shame.” She spat on the asphalt. She did have a thing for the liquid expression of her emotions. “It is you who are the shame and your own blood the monster. Now let us find the other monster and end this business.”

“For the betterment of humanity and the improvement of the present company by your removal, I’m forced to agree with you.” Nik did have a way with an insult-a way that sometimes required a dictionary, but a way all the same. He turned his back on Abelia, another insult but more pointed, and shut the door of the truck. “Rafferty?”

“He is gone. On the hunt. Following prey.” Delilah had pulled up on her motorcycle seconds ago and was now undoing her braid, the silver hair falling to her waist. She too was ready for the hunt. Despite the purple shadows of twilight, she was a brilliant flash of white. Her hair, the leathers; she was the moon come to Earth. “We follow.” She stepped close to thread her hand in my hair and kiss me with a heat and familiarity that made it hard to forget that I’d had this so short a time. It seemed like years. I returned it with enthusiasm, refusing to wonder if I tasted different to her now. An extra dollop of Auphe in all likelihood would only make me spicier to Delilah. And there I was thinking about it after all, but before I could push it out of my mind, I heard a clearing of a throat. Niko. He was right; it had gone on for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the ability to store up sexual pleasure like British rock stars with their freaky Tantric batteries. I had to take it when I could get it. There was a cough this time that would be promptly followed by a thwack of a sword to the back of my knees if I didn’t step back.

I stepped back.

Delilah gave me a smile ripe with anticipation of the chase before us. “In case we hunt no more.”

“Great for you two,” Robin complained. “But what if Niko and I end up ‘hunting no more’? Where’s our kiss of potential death? Or quickie of potential death? I’m open to all options.”

Both Delilah and Niko snorted and Robin did without. I knew he was serious about the kiss; I wasn’t as sure about the rest as I saw him finger his cell phone before hitting a number. Speed dial. This relationship could be more serious than I thought. Monogamy and ranking on Robin’s speed dial. He turned his back to us, but that didn’t keep wolf or human ears from hearing. “It’s me… of course. Who else would bother to call your cranky feathered ass?” He paused, listening. “No, everything’s fine. We’re about to wipe this walking, talking, antibiotic-resistant son of a bitch out of existence, and I should be back soon.” Goodfellow could lie like no one I’d seen in my life, except my mother, but this time, I wasn’t so sure he pulled it off. “I only wanted you to know that you are wholly responsible for the vow of the priesthood I took on this trip. And if by some completely unlikely chance I don’t survive, I fully expect you to pack your dick away in shipping foam and never use it again. Fair is fair.” He paused again, then said briskly, “No, I’m not saying that or implying that. I just wanted… oh Hades.” He flipped the phone shut. Good-bye was what I guessed that he refused to say and when the phone rang, he turned it off, sticking to his guns on the subject.

I didn’t blame him. Saying good-bye was an impossible thing sometimes; no matter how long you had to prepare yourself. Niko and I’d learned that a few times more than I wanted to count. And when you didn’t know in your heart precisely what you were saying good-bye to… that had to be worse.

Delilah turned out to be right about Rafferty. He was gone and Catcher had disappeared with him, but they weren’t far away. We caught up with them in a short matter of time, all of us: Niko, Robin, Delilah, Abelia-Roo and her four men, and lucky me watching our flank. Fortunately, it was Delilah’s flank I was watching and if I was going to die, that wasn’t a bad last image to take with me.

We moved quietly along wooden walkways surrounded by trees, some kind of pine or fir. Big though, whatever they were. More than a hundred feet tall, easily. The wind played through the needles, a song you couldn’t quite make out the words to, but a nice song. Peaceful-until the trees fell; hundreds of them, in slow motion, as roots gave way and they tore loose from the ground. The first one would’ve landed right in front of some of us and on top of the rest if we hadn’t heard the creak of wood and been hit with a cascade of now-silent needles, brown and dead from above.

No one said run. The situation was self- explanatory in that respect, and if it wasn’t, then Darwin was ready to take your hand and lead your oblivious ass to extinction. Delilah and I ran past Abelia and her men. I didn’t help little old ladies across the street. I should have, but I didn’t. And if I didn’t do that, I wasn’t going to play out the tale of the Frog and the Scorpion with Abelia- Roo. It was the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog. It would be Abelia’s pleasure to stab me in the back if I hoisted her up on it, only unlike the scorpion, she’d wait until I’d hauled her to safety first. I let her men deal with scooping her up and fleeing with her.

We caught up with Niko and Robin as the first tree crashed across the walkway behind us. It shook the ground hard enough that I felt my feet leave it for a split second. As the rest of the hundred or so fell, that shaking became a good imitation of an earthquake. We ran, we dodged, and in one spectacular, humanly impossible leap, Delilah sailed over the huge trunk of one already down. I started to look behind me once and Niko grabbed my jacket and yanked me along faster. Within minutes we raced out from the wooded area and stopped to see… just to see. A massive stretch of destruction lay behind us. The giant trees, dead but not gone. They lay across the pathway, every one a stand- in for a bullet through the head. Trunks piled upon trunks, branches bare as needles had dropped away-the death of nature itself.

With almost every step Suyolak had taken here before us, everything around was dying-or had already died. The trees, the grass I bent and felt break under my palm, the rabbit dessicated to nearly nothing by my foot. Once Suyolak had started his engine, he’d stopped the same in everything else he passed, holding back only enough that the death throes were timed to crush us flat. I nudged the rabbit corpse off the wooden path and onto the dead grass. Not much improvement for it, but it was the best I could do.

“Let’s keep going,” Niko said, turning back to move on. As we did, I caught a glimpse of one of Abelia’s men looking over his shoulder uneasily at the remains of what we’d barely escaped. Uneasy-holy hell, if he were smart, he would be fucking terrified. We were trailing after the actual embodiment of death; not the idea of it or the chance of it, but its purest distillation. Terminal cancer and every plague known to man crossed with a great white shark and we were chasing the bastard down. If that didn’t make you think twice, then you had nothing to think with. Suyolak was loose, the Plague of the World, and he was already killing that world around him.

We found Rafferty and Catcher just off the walkway by a sign that heralded the Midway Geyser Basin. Sounded scenic and me without my camera. No way to capture the memories. What a pity. Or what a pity if I were alive next month to worry about it. As it was, even if I had a photo album, I think I had only the one picture for it-my sixteen-year-old yellowed and curled-at-the-edges Santa photo, and Niko wouldn’t give that one back. My life didn’t much lend itself to pictures I cared to revisit. If we got to live, maybe I’d do something about that.

Rafferty had stopped with Catcher standing stolidly at his side, waiting for us. “He’s ahead,” he said, “past the Grand Prismatic Spring. Too bad it’s not daylight. Dark blue water, ringed by red bacterial mats. Colorful. Nice.” That was a lot of words for Rafferty and none of them curse words. I was impressed. If he could do it, maybe there was hope for me yet. I raised my eyebrows and Rafferty shrugged. “Catcher’s a tree hugger. We’ve been here before.”

“Wonderful. You’re an informative tour guide. Should we, by some slim chance, survive this, I’ll be sure to tip you generously.” Robin massaged his forehead as we ringed the healer and the wolf. “Are you absolutely positive this time? Because, honestly, he’s led you by the nose up until now and rarely in the right direction, not to mention he did just try to swat us with several acres of trees. On the other hand, that rather bears mentioning. He tried to kill us with trees. Extremely tall Christmas trees and how diabolical is that? To ruin a gift-giving holiday and celebration of the pagan winter solstice all in one.”

“Not kindly or succinctly put, but something we need to know. Rafferty?” Niko was carrying his sword and had discarded his coat when the wooden path had ended. There was no one and nothing to see us now; only the dead. “You do know where he is? If Suyolak is going to kill us, I’d prefer he do it from ahead and not behind. Granted deceased is deceased, but we’d have something more of a chance if we knew his position.”

“He’s ahead all right, more than ready and willing to play,” the healer replied impassively. “He’s in my head now. Talking, talking. Bastard won’t shut up. This is what he wants. He doesn’t think any of us is worth hiding from.”

Always fun hearing that. The big badasses were like that. It had been so long since they’d had an actual challenge that they’d forgotten one could exist. But in the past, we’d taken down everyone we ran up against. Sometimes it took only you and the fear of what the son of a bitch might do trumping the fear of dying. Sometimes it took a shitload of backup and weapons. Sometimes it took your entire lifetime to date. Whichever it was, Niko and I had never failed to get them in the end.

We’d also never come up against someone like Suyolak. He could kill with a thought, and guns weren’t much good if you were dead between aiming and pulling the trigger. True or not, I wasn’t going to admit it. The bastard might get my life, but he wasn’t going to get my fear. “Then let’s go show him how wrong his mummified ass is,” I said as I pulled my Eagle from the holster.

Moving again toward the spring Rafferty had-what did they call it?-“waxed poetic” about. I got the poetic part; where the wax came in had left me in the dark, and when Niko had explained it back in the homeschooling days, I would’ve zoned out immediately. How a language evolved throughout the centuries didn’t much interest me then… or now. I knew what the phrase meant and that was enough for me, although I’d guarantee Nik had smacked me in the back of the head or flicked my ear painfully at my lack of interest at the time.

As he did now. “Jesus,” I hissed in a low tone, and glared at him as he now walked silently beside me. “What was that for?” It was always for something. Niko had never outgrown the role of teacher-he never would. If we lived to be in our nineties, he’d still be force- feeding me yogurt, teaching me the new martial arts of our alien overlords, and jacking my brain directly into some long-winded documentary about the dung beetle and its place in history. On the day I was born, Nik became a big brother and until the day I died, he still would be.

“Don’t gate,” he warned me in the same near whisper, but no less authoritatively with the lack of volume, because that was Niko. Some, such as Goodfellow, radiated charisma rather like a supernova did light and deadly radiation, and some, like Nik, were that radiation. Whether it was a whisper or not, you listened. “Don’t think you can travel next to Suyolak and empty your clip into his head before he can kill you, because you can’t. Rafferty is here for a reason. Let him do what he’s meant to-heal the world of a pestilence.”

And if he can’t, I wanted to ask, but whisper or not, Rafferty would hear it. We were down to the wire now. It was time to shut up about his qualifications. Besides, if he couldn’t put down Suyolak like the rabid dog he was, traveling probably wouldn’t be an issue. Trying to shove the shredded lungs I’d coughed up into the dirt back down my throat and into my chest where they belonged might be. However, in all likelihood, traveling would be lower on the list. And weighing the risk of the Auphe in my progressing because of it would be at the very bottom.

“ Cal.”

Niko was serious most of the time, but there was serious and then there was now. I didn’t push him on it. “Okay. No traveling.” This time I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. If Suyolak was in Rafferty’s head, a whisper wasn’t going to be an effective stealth tool. I was surprised the bastard hadn’t dropped us all in the parking lot the same as he’d taken down the mass of giant trees.

“That’s because I’m still protecting you,” Rafferty said as he stopped walking. Catcher’s eyes glowed in the purple light as he looked back at us.

“Great. I’ve had Suyolak in my brain,” I complained. “I don’t want you sneaking a look too.”

“It’s no goddamn picnic for me either,” he snapped, but absently, his main focus elsewhere. “If your customers knew what you put in their beer.” Before I could protest that I only thought about it, hadn’t actually done it, he added, “There it goes.”

By “it,” he meant the spring… or now a geyser. We, including Delilah, Abelia, and her men, were standing on hardened, ridged dirt that rose slightly at a fair distance in front of us, and that’s where the show was. I smelled it before I heard it and heard it before I saw it: sulfur, then the sound of boiling… as if something as big as the ocean itself were churning, and finally the explosion of water that hit the air and kept going up. Up. Up, and holy shit. I felt like Moses at the parting of the Red Sea. No, I felt more like an Egyptian soldier just there for the paycheck, wondering where it all had gone wrong as I drank the water down. “How the hell is he doing that?” I craned my head to see the water high above us shimmering with a light that was a pale purple reflection of the sky above it.

“The bacteria in the water,” Rafferty said. “He’s agitated them to a thousand times their normal activity. That light is them dying. He turned them into… hell, stars. But microbial stars don’t live long.”

“Is he going to boil us alive, because, quite frankly, that is the one near death I’ve avoided throughout the millennia, and I’ve no particular interest in it now.” Robin had his sword out too, but for the first time it looked useless and he, thanks to those millennia of experience, was Niko’s equal in swordsmanship… if he was sober. “Although at least these wretched clothes from that equally wretched, low-fashion and inedible food store are machine washable. If I do die, at least my corpse won’t reside in shrunken, wrinkled rags.”

“No. We’re not going to be boiled alive, but you just made me wish we would be,” Rafferty growled.

Rafferty was a lightweight when it came to surviving the puck experience, but he was also right. We weren’t boiled alive. A good portion of the water splashed down about two feet from us… a generous estimate. “Cutting it a little close, isn’t he?” I said it to Nik, because when it came to healing, fine, Rafferty was our guy… Wolf… both. But when it came to logistics in a battle, I trusted my brother over anyone and everyone.

And when it came to the abrupt smell of copper and calcium and the five piles of dust that appeared on the ground behind us, it looked like I didn’t have to worry about trusting or not trusting a certain someone ever again. Abelia-Roo and her men were gone. The scent and the flicker out of the corner of my eye had me whirling around, Eagle pointed-except there was nothing for it to do. A dust buster was the only thing that would be any good now. Niko bent down and ran his fingers through one heap. The residue flew off his fingers, finer than flour dust.

“It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again,” Robin said in a hushed tone, finally impressed enough to be almost quiet.

“Shit,” I repeated, without the “holy” this time. There was nothing much holy about this. She’d been a bitch from Hell, Abelia, one so full of hate and loathing that every foot she put to the earth had most likely poisoned it… with just a slower poison than Suyolak’s version. That she could be gone so quickly and quietly, without a screech or a curse, was shocking and almost unbelievable. Like someone’s snapping the fingers at a town-destroying tornado and its simply disappearing. Poof. Gone.

“I couldn’t protect everyone.”

I looked back, but Rafferty hadn’t bothered to turn around. “They were the ones that caused this clusterfuck. They’re responsible for Suyolak’s escaping that coffin. If someone had to go…” He shrugged again. He did that a lot. It was not my favorite thing, especially under deadly circumstances where I had no control. I had issues with control. We’d all seen that, but tricking myself into believing I had control was something that had saved my sanity more than once. Tricks and wire stitching us together sometimes was all you had, and I was missing it badly now.

“We all make difficult decisions in battle. You are Solomonic in your wisdom,” Goodfellow said to Rafferty smoothly, if hastily. There was nothing wrong with knowing which side of your bread was buttered, and as he’d been alive before bread or butter, Robin had mastered that maneuver.

“If you think your silver tongue will save you, goat, it will not.” It was Suyolak’s voice-a real voice this time, not manufactured in my brain. I heard it. I heard him. “To make it close to a fair contest, he will have to sacrifice more of you. All of you, and even then…” He stepped into sight.

It was darker now and I didn’t have the eyes of the three Wolves, but between the lingering twilight, the rising moon, and the flickering glow of dying bacteria, I could see him as he came around the left curve of the spring. He was human again with flesh, dark eyes, and black hair that touched the ground and that cheerful Rom smile from my dream. It was that damn-are-we-going-to-have-some-fun smile; the isn’t-the-world-one-big-party smile; a have- I-got-something-to-give-you grin. The last one was the one I believed. He had something to give us all right, a great big frigging present, and if it was what Abelia and her men had gotten, we’d be damn lucky piles of dust.

I hadn’t believed in luck since I was five.

“He used them to reconstitute himself,” Niko said. “Abelia and the others. He drained the life out of them to make himself whole.”

“Not only them, Vayash cousin.” He was closer, a little more than seventy-five feet away. Almost nude, he had only strips of faded cloth hanging from him. Hundreds of years in a coffin were rough on the wardrobe. He made a washing motion with his hands and the twisted, foot-long fingernails fell away. “I also took the trees, the grass, twenty-one elk, six bears, two mountain lions, several sheep, and numberless small vermin. Some creatures I didn’t know existed in my time. It’s always a pleasure to kill something new.” He stopped and pointed at me. “You are new.”

“And old and something the world had never seen before. Yeah, been there, heard that,” I snapped, turning back, and this time I had something for the Eagle. I aimed and when the ground came up to smack me in the face, I was more than a little disappointed. Not surprised, no, that Suyolak had given me an invisible swat, but there was a complete lack of satisfaction, no doubt about it.

I heard Delilah’s growl, but it wasn’t her normal one… human or wolf. It was frightened-Delilah, who was never scared, who wasn’t just borderline suicidal against an enemy, but flat-out ecstatic kamikaze all the way. She didn’t fear pain or death. I thought she didn’t fear anything, but I was wrong. I wasn’t the only one. “He is wrong,” she snarled. “Unnatural. Unclean.”

I could smell it, what she smelled. Even on my stomach, facedown in the dirt, I could smell it. It had lingered around the coffin, but his odor this close… It could choke you. It was rotting flesh and disease and mass graves sweltering under a hot sun, but beyond that-beyond who he was to what he was, it was alien. Delilah was right. He was wrong and unnatural. Even the Auphe, twisted monsters that they were, had belonged here. They’d died elsewhere, but they’d risen from this earth. As much as you wanted to deny they were natural, they were actually nature at its most effective. Suyolak was outside nature; a mistake that could destroy what had accidentally spawned a creature it had no hold over. Nature had been an ant creating the foot that would crush it.

I had no idea what was in the dirt I was inhaling, but it must’ve been some potent stuff. Philosophical thoughts in a not-so-philosophical situation by the farthest thing from a philosopher as you could fucking find. Suyolak was one huge-ass mistake. Didn’t need to say more than that. I got my hands under me and started to push up as I felt a hand tangle in the back of my jacket and pull me the rest of the way. Not to my feet, which was asking a little much right then, but to my knees. “What… the hell… was that?” I tasted blood in my mouth and I was hoping it was from a split lip or broken nose, because both of those were better than nearly anything Suyolak could dream up.

Niko decided that if I could talk, I could stand after all and finished the job by pulling me to my feet. He was right. I weaved, even with his hand still holding me up, but I did stay up. Niko was the rock that at times held me up and at other times could take me down as efficiently as Suyolak had-which reminded me. “What was that?” I repeated, wiping dirt and blood from my face.

“A distraction,” Rafferty answered, his shaggy hair tangling in the wind.

A distraction could be good. If I’d distracted Suyolak enough that he’d swatted me with his antihealer mojo, then Rafferty might have been able to swat him right back-only harder. I looked past him. Shit. Suyolak was still standing, still grinning, looking so much the cheerful Rom, so like our mother, he could’ve been her slightly more sociopathic cousin. With hair grown long in the coffin and a face that was meant to attract the unwary, to anyone but us he would look like a god come to Earth. To me, he looked like a trap. One thing he didn’t look was one bit distracted, which meant I was the one distracting Rafferty, not Suyolak-and that wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.

“Why the hell didn’t you take him while he was doing the same to me?” I held on to my gun stubbornly. I might be the fly and Suyolak the swatter, but that didn’t mean I was going to be flattened without getting off at least one round-not next time.

“Probably because if he had, you’d have done more than hit the ground. You wouldn’t have gotten back up again,” Niko said as he steadied me.

“I took only one or two beats of your heart.” Suyolak raised his voice over the growling that was still coming from Delilah and had been joined by those of Catcher. “You do not miss them now, do you? One or two seconds of your life. Believe me, by the time I am finished here, you’ll be glad to die those few seconds sooner than the rest.”

Now Rafferty did split enough of his attention to the nearest warm body. It happened to be Goodfellow. He took his arm and pushed him toward Catcher. “Hang on to him. You might need some help, but do it. He’s okay now, but that could change when it all starts. It could flip a switch and I don’t want him any closer to Suyolak.” He took Catcher’s face, gripping the fur on both sides, focusing on him. “I’ve got one chance at this, Catch. I can do this, but not if you go Cujo on me, okay?” The growling and snarling had stopped and Catcher regarded him with an eerie silence before pressing his nose into his cousin’s hair, snuffling, and then blowing out air in an aggrieved sigh. But he stayed put, aggrieved meaning agreeing if not particularly liking it.

“Good.” Rafferty straightened. “The rest of you stay back and out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do for me. I’ve got more power up between you and him. Hopefully he won’t get through again if you don’t give him reason to. He wants me first.” With that, he moved toward Suyolak and away from us. Ill- tempered and bossy to the end, that’s who he was. Cranky I could understand, but telling me what to do, that wasn’t going to fly. Like him, I’d gone up against creatures better than I was, and I’d survived, but that was only because I’d always had help. Without the last, I still would’ve gotten the job done, but I wouldn’t have walked away to tell the tale. We’d gotten Rafferty into this. It would be a piss-poor partnership if we didn’t help him to live to pass through and see the other side of it.

The hand that had been holding me up now moved to my shoulder to hold me back. “Wait,” Niko ordered.

I hadn’t moved. There was a time to make your move. If you were good, you knew it when it came. There were many things I wasn’t especially good at in life: handling customer relations, dealing with relations of any kind, keeping the smart-ass in check, not recognizing addiction when it bit me and everyone around me in the ass. But one thing I did know was the right time. The shot I’d tried to take at Suyolak hadn’t been it. That had been the first punch in the first round. That wasn’t the moment I was talking about. Our moment in this game now was the last ditch, now-or-never-again time that you had to take or you wouldn’t live to take anything else. I knew it because Nik had taught me to know it… and being half predator-more than half, whichever-that didn’t hurt either.

We were waiting for the end of the line, and we weren’t there yet. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other kids, Mom,” I grumbled.

“I feel for you,” he commented wryly. But he let his hand drop away, because he trusted me. It was impossible to fathom how he kept that trust day after day when my subconscious was determined to do everything it could to deserve anything except that trust-or maybe it wasn’t so much trust as acceptance, unconditional and never-ending. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought I hadn’t felt lucky since I was five. I should’ve felt lucky every single day of my life.

“I wish someone felt for me,” Robin complained with a sneeze. He was crouched beside Catcher with one arm hooked around the Wolf’s neck. “Felt for me, felt of me. Anything at this time would be welcome, because I had much higher hopes of this ending with me not dead. So any fondling or groping would be welcome.” Catcher turned and gave him one broad lick across the mouth and nose before going back to snarling and staring at the two healers approaching each other. “Not what I had in mind, but the effort is… ah… appreciated, thank you.” Goodfellow scrubbed his face with his sleeve.

“You should’ve said more in your call to Ishiah,” Niko said, moving to stand beside me now that I could actually stand on my own. “If you can actually consider monogamy, then you owed Ishiah more than a weak excuse for a good-bye.” Niko, like me, did understand the impossible nature of a good-bye, but unlike me, had the balls and the spine to tell someone else to go above and beyond.

“Your brother might need a mommy, but I do not,” Robin shot back stiffly, still hanging on to Catcher. He didn’t need a mommy, but it looked as if he had one huge teddy bear. “When I tell Ishiah… Whatever I plan on telling him, it won’t be only because I don’t think I’ll be around later for the consequences. He deserves better than that.”

“Not soap opera. Battle. Be ready,” Delilah contributed with an impatient toss of white hair and a deep rumble in her throat that outdid Catcher’s. “Humans, pucks, even Auphe. Hopeless all.” Delilah, who didn’t trust anyone but herself and didn’t want to; whole and complete within herself, that’s what she thought. She was the unlucky one, but I didn’t think she’d ever know it.

Catcher moaned. He knew what it was to be lucky, to have someone-family or otherwise-and that meant what he was now seeing had to be his worst nightmare: Rafferty and Suyolak coming together.

The moon had risen behind the antihealer. It was the same moon from my dream. Huge and orange, shedding the light of a forest fire down on us. It hardly ever looked like that in summer. I took it as a sign that fate was feeling particularly bitchy, giving a nightmare-perfect background to another nightmare, the one we were facing. Suyolak spread his arms under it. “So long has it been since I’ve seen the sky. So long has it been that I walked in a world that had never seen my like”-he lowered his arms and finished lazily-“and is now seeing it again, Wolf.”

Rafferty staggered. I smelled the blood he spat on the ground in front of him, but he didn’t fall. He wiped his mouth. I saw the dark stain on his hand. He spat again. More blood.

“It was called consumption in my day. Now you call it”-Suyolak tipped his head to one side as if listening, picking the term from a mind-“tuberculosis. It is an ugly word for such an elegant process that eats your lungs small bite by bite. A tiny predator ranging wild within. Marvel at the beauty of it.”

Marvel. Jesus.

Straightening, Rafferty said, “We cured that a long time ago, asshole. And you talk too much.” His voice was clear, not thick and choking, and the rest of us weren’t dead on the ground. That meant he was holding his own. “Here’s something new for you.”

This time Suyolak was the one to stumble. It was only a few inches back and he stayed on his feet, but the blood that poured from his nose and mouth cheered me up some. He coughed, holding up a hand toward us, palm out. Whatever was behind that hand stopped Rafferty after a single step, one he’d been quick to take. He was a healer, but he was a Wolf too. He could kill with his mind and he could kill with his hands. With Suyolak he’d use whichever one would do the job.

“Ah, this… one.” Suyolak lifted his head to grin with teeth now coated black in the moonlight. “This one is a thing of magnificence.” The blood stopped. “What do you call this then? Ebola? Hemorrhagic fever? A fitting name for a glory I’d not even dreamed of.” The grin widened. “I approve.” This time Rafferty didn’t just stagger; he almost fell, and I didn’t want to even guess what kind of god-awful disease he was fighting. Leprosy. Smallpox. Suyolak’s blue plate special, the plague.

“Goddamn it,” I muttered. “Why doesn’t he just go for the heart like he did to me?”

“I imagine that’s quite thoroughly protected as Rafferty is protecting his and ours. They most likely have only the tiniest cracks that are weak enough to attack.”

Niko’s comment didn’t satisfy Delilah. “No manner to fight.” She paced the area behind us. “Throwing germs.” There was a righteous disgust in her voice. “It is wrong. To stand aside. Wrong. Want to fight. Want to bite. Want to kill.” Catcher was picking up on her blood-lust, his growls growing wilder.

I grabbed Delilah’s arm as she passed to yank her to a stop. “Quit it. If you send Catcher off the deep end, you might distract Rafferty, and then we’ll all be spreading the news about how festive Ebola is. If we survive this, you’ll have plenty of other things to kill.” One of them might be me, but there was a time and a place to worry about that. It wasn’t now.

She threw my arm off. “It is not just the kill. It is the battle. The fight. I am Wolf, not sheep. I do not stand. I do not wait. I fight.”

“Then look over your shoulder,” Robin said, hanging on to Catcher for all he was worth. “You’re about to get ten years of birthday wishes all in one. And thanks so very much by the way. It’s just what we needed on top of the oh-so-entertaining parade of diseases throughout history.”

Too agitated to pick up their scent or unable to detect it over Suyolak’s own, Delilah hadn’t smelled them coming-neither she nor Catcher. The Ördögs were back. Or since we’d killed all of the others that had come out of the truck the day before… hell, not the day before… this morning. It had been this morning. Talk about one long damn day. Time was so raveled in knots, I honestly couldn’t tell one day from the next, but it had been this morning. It had been today-the day that I’d argued with Delilah, eaten a Big Mac, then a deer, lost a piece of what humanity I had left, and now it was time to fight for my life… again. The army thought they did more before nine a.m. than most do all day. Well, they could get in line.

No, these Ördögs weren’t from the truck or the creek where we’d killed the others. There were more this time and they looked… full… their sunken bellies now bulging with food. From their appearance, they’d had at least the entire day to hunt for prey and that would only make them quicker and stronger than the last. Suyolak hadn’t chosen this place at random. Whether he’d gotten the location from the dead professor’s mind or just felt the huge area teeming with life, he had picked the park; he had the Ördögs waiting. I thought he’d underestimated the seals, as Abelia had overestimated herself, and had the truck pass it by until he could get out of the coffin.

Or, out of the kindness of his heart, he’d waited to wreak death and destruction until the noncamping areas of the park were empty. That, I sincerely doubted. We used to have a neighbor when I was ten, for a few months before we moved again as we always did. She was pear shaped, her hair always in rollers, and she had a mouth so small and pursed, she could’ve doubled as a nickel slot machine. She’d once told me, as she crushed a cigarette under one large rubber flip- flop, that I was no better than I had to be. I hadn’t gotten that as a kid, and Niko for once hadn’t felt the need to explain it to me. No better than I had to be; seriously, what did that mean? I’d long since learned what it meant, and I knew Suyolak was no better than he had to be either, certainly no kinder than he had to be.

And that wasn’t kind at all. We were lucky we weren’t hip deep in tourist corpses-instead of being hip deep in all-too-alive Ördögs. But better than all that, just too fucking good to be true, were the Wolves behind them. Ten of them: nine in lupine form and one still wearing his human suit in the midst of them all.

“Cabal,” Delilah announced with a mixture of disdain and what sounded like reluctant pride. “Pack leader. Mine.”

I understood the emotions then. Disdain because traditionally Alphas were male and that was not a tradition Delilah embraced. She wanted to be Alpha and, despite not being male or a high breed, and being a believer in the All Wolf on top of it all, I’d have put my money on her. That was before I’d come into the picture, and, it being a particular talent of mine, I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A female, maybe; an All Wolf, chances were slim. Screwed an Auphe-if that wasn’t the sole reason the dictionary had the word anathema in it, you’d have to show me proof otherwise.

As for the pride part of her emotion, she might want to kill him and take his place, prove herself worthy, but if you were a Wolf, your pride also rested in your Alpha. He represented your pack. He was your pack. Every day was the day you hoped to end his reign and begin yours, but until then he was as the world saw you-the Wolf world. He was you.

“You called them here,” Niko said to Delilah, not as an accusation but as a fact.

“Yeah, she did.” I wasn’t any more surprised than he was. I wasn’t disappointed either. I wasn’t hypocrite enough to let myself be. I’d known all along what she was, and I’d known this was more than likely coming. But I thought it would be Delilah herself. Death was personal to her and a thrill she wouldn’t care to share with anyone but her victim.

But I was wrong; right and wrong, but wrong in a way that didn’t necessarily help me out.

“Yes. I call.” She cupped my cheek. “I told them you too much for me.” Her smile was bright and mocking. “They believed. They believe anyone too much for me, then they deserve to die. I call twice a day as Cabal orders. I call and they follow. I do this because I know, you are too much for them. My duty to my pack complete and you still live. It is a good plan.”

It was a good one. If we fought off her pack and, more ideally, her Alpha, Delilah was free and clear. I felt a relief I didn’t want to admit to, but admit it I did. I had too few people in my life. I didn’t want to lose one. Delilah had done as her Alpha had asked: She had delivered me up, and if he and the pack couldn’t manage to chew me up and swallow me down, then maybe they should start hunting little furry bunnies or the ferocious squirrel. She’d be happy to tell the survivors so-if she spared any. Werewolves, like ordinary wolves, were pack creatures. They were drawn to one another, the majority of them, but there were always exceptions-lone wolves. Delilah was a loner through and through. She was only pack as a career choice. She was Kin before she was Wolf; she was Kin before she was anything.

Yeah, it was a good plan, a perfectly Kin plan.

If it had been her only plan, things could’ve ended better.

Cabal didn’t waste any words. Raising his hand, he motioned imperiously for Delilah to join them. He was in his mid- thirties with what was probably thick silver hair, wolf silver, shorn short. In the moonlight, it, like everything, had an orange tint. He had a thick build, with broad shoulders, and large hands that could strangle the life out of two people at once without changing form. I couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but as I didn’t plan on staring into them soulfully and asking him on a date, that didn’t much matter. In spite of his build, he looked as if he’d be quick-quick and lethal. That wasn’t a guess. It was a fact. He wouldn’t be Alpha if he weren’t. But he wouldn’t be the first Alpha I’d had a hand in killing and that Alpha, Cerberus, could’ve eaten this guy in three bites with one head while conducting Kin business with the other. You really hadn’t seen anything until you’d seen a two-headed Wolf.

Delilah shook her head at her Alpha’s beckoning. “I fight the cute foxes, Cabal. The Auphe, he is yours. A challenge. My gift.”

Her words were phrased so Cabal couldn’t refuse, for if he refused this “gift,” he would lose his pack’s respect. And if he lost that, then Delilah wouldn’t be the only one jumping at the chance to replace him. Every member of the pack would look at him with different, dubious, opportunistic eyes. No Alpha could afford that. He bared human teeth and growled. It was a signal to his pack and they flowed forward, side by side among the Ördögs. It was a companionable joining. The Ördögs had their objective and it was the same as the Wolves. It was too bad for the Wolves that they didn’t realize what might be waiting for them if they did kill us. While they had to smell Suyolak, they apparently had no idea how much worse he was than I could be.

For now.

Not that that would happen, a Wolf taking me down. Delilah was right. Suyolak might be too much for me, but I was too much for your average Wolf. Whether Cabal was above average or not, we’d see-if the Plague of the World didn’t get me first.

I shifted my focus back to the healer battle. Both Rafferty and Suyolak were dripping with blood, but Rafferty was wavering, weaving as if he were drunk. He was fighting and having to protect us all at once… and he wasn’t as good as Suyolak. He’d told us so. Now he was showing the toll of doing double duty. But he’d also said he could stop the bastard. Right now we didn’t have any other choice but to believe him.

The Ördögs and the Wolves were seconds from sweeping over us. I aimed the Eagle with one hand and tugged Niko’s braid with the other. He didn’t need to have his attention sidetracked by double duty the same as Rafferty. “I’ll be fine, Cyrano. Only adult, responsible decisions.” Allowing Delilah along had been adult-the rated XXX kind of adult, and perhaps not the most responsible thing. I thought she’d wait until it was all over to make her move, not in the midst of it. Although the move had turned out to be for me instead of against me, it was damn inconvenient all the same-and truthfully, the move was more for her than for me. Whether her pack died or I did, she still won.

“I know you will.” The response was prompt and confident; his sword was between him and the leaping horde.

“Because you’re my brother or because you’ll kick my ass if I don’t?” I shot two Ördögs in the head, fifty or so feet out. They fell so quickly, their eyes so instantly empty, it was hard to picture them having been alive at all.

“Both,” he answered matter-of-factly before continuing. “Don’t forget either option. Goodfellow, keep Catcher out of this if possible.”

Keeping a Wolf, especially one with only the loosest hold on his mind, would’ve been a trick, but it was one Robin didn’t have to pull off. It was too late; the Catcher we knew was temporarily on vacation… gone… and the body that had held him was gone as well-into the midst of the Ördögs and the other Wolves, ripping and tearing flesh right and left. It could’ve been worse. He could’ve gone after Suyolak. Delilah was a fraction of a moment behind him. She’d shed her leathers for fur in seconds and was as caught up in the fight as Catcher. Luckily he was the only red Wolf in the mix. That could’ve been awkward. Shooting your ally’s cousin. Rafferty wouldn’t be any more forgiving of that than I imagined I would be if someone took out Nik for being one of too many blonds in a crowd.

I hit the ground as two Ördögs sailed over me, missing me by inches. I heard them hiss and mutter in annoyance. “Food. Food gone. Food hide. Food like rabbit.” That was fine. Insult me all you want in a fight. I did it too, but it was only worth doing if you were the one walking away afterward. As they turned, literally in midair before landing-bodies slithering into a serpentine U-I shot them both. Other than bleeding and dying in the next breath, they had no further comment. In that same moment I was hit from the side by a big gray Wolf. When you couldn’t get your gun up in time, there was one move to save your throat from being ripped out. I’d done it before, but it didn’t mean I looked forward to doing it again. It worked, but it hurt like hell.

I rammed my forearm into the Wolf’s open jaws, back to the teeth that ground bone, not the ones up front made for tearing the meat. It kept my throat in one piece and let me put one bullet into its right eye. Werewolves were tough and could recover from most wounds, but the brain and the heart were as vulnerable as a human’s. Lead also did the job fine and was a whole lot cheaper than silver.

I kicked the body off me and was back up a split second before going down under three Ördögs. You wouldn’t think at the time, Christ, this was not my damn day. A murderous antihealer, a failing good healer, werewolves, Ördögs, and give a guy a break already. No, you might think that later… if you survived… while lying in bed nursing your wounds, because that was easier to swallow than what you actually thought at the time, which would be more of a less manly “Shitshitshitshitshit.” But that didn’t sound quite as macho, so you ran through the things you would’ve thought, might’ve mentally said, if you hadn’t been A) fighting for your life and B) not to be repetitive, but fighting for your fucking life.

My other hand already held my favorite revenant slicing combat knife. I sliced one sleek black body from jaw to tail and the fact it moaned, “No. Hurts. Hurts,” made me hesitate for less than a second before shooting the other two. I made it to my feet again, wearing a good deal of the Ördög I’d all but turned inside out, and this time, instead of being a target, I saw another one. A brown Wolf, a damn big one even by Wolf standards, was in midleap toward Niko’s back. Nik was taking care of four more Ördögs facing him and two more to the side. That didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of the Wolf and it didn’t mean he couldn’t take care of the Wolf, but he had a lot on his plate. I didn’t like to take chances if I didn’t have to, not when I had so few to take. I hit the Wolf from the side and rode it to the ground while pulling the trigger and putting one in its heart.

“Your charity, not that I need it, is appreciated.” Niko’s back hit mine as I climbed, again, to my feet. We were ringed by Ördögs and three more Wolves. We’d faced worse… not more times than I could count. I could in fact count the times our asses hadn’t been quite so far up the creek, but there had been a few worse, and I didn’t doubt we could handle this… until I heard the gunshot. I looked in confusion at my finger on the trigger on a gun that abruptly felt heavy. My finger hadn’t moved. I hadn’t fired the shot, and no one else was carrying a gun.

And how had I gotten on the ground? I hadn’t lost my gun. Never lose your gun. Over and over, Nik had told me that, because I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t Bruce Lee with an honorary license to kill from Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I was… I coughed and tasted blood. I was a good fighter hand to… shit… hand? Tentacle? Paw? Whatever I was up against, I could give it a run for its money, unless it was human, and then I could kill it without much effort. I’d never killed a human with my bare hands… not yet. I could, though, but I’d never be as good as my brother and he knew it. Always hold on to your weapon, he told me, and there was that shitshitshitshit again when I finally realized.

Someone had shot me.

“Traitor!” The howls began. “No Wolf is such a coward. No Wolf kills out of reach. No Wolf.” The howls were everywhere now. “You are not a true Wolf. You are not our Alpha. You are not Wolf.”

It wasn’t Delilah’s voice. It wasn’t a single voice either. Three, maybe four. The rest of the pack, those left alive. They didn’t sound happy with Cabal. No, not happy at all. A white Wolf leaped over me and was gone-on a mission, not from Buddha, but I heard the sounds of that mission being completed. Snarls and growl after growl that would send shivers down your spine at how it took up every molecule of air around us. They call them a pack of wolves. They should call them a storm. A storm of wolves rolling over an ex-Alpha to wash this place clean of him. I didn’t shiver at the sound; I didn’t have the energy. I swallowed blood, touched my chest to feel more of it, and resumed my standard shit… shit… shit-only slower and with less enthusiasm.

Besides the sounds of Wolves fighting one another and dying, I heard the slice of metal sizzling through the air to hit flesh with a meaty thud. “How is he?” The voice cracked. “Merciful Charon, turn away. Another time we need a thrice-damned healer and he’s currently occupied dying himself.” Robin… Robin talking about Rafferty’s dying, talking about my dying. Well, hell, give a guy the benefit of the doubt. But it was also Robin protecting me while I was down, giving Niko a chance to check me out. Because there was nothing else for Nik to do. Like Robin with Ish, Niko couldn’t say good-bye. He’d done it once. I didn’t think he could ever say that again.

The moon gone from orange to red radiated a light so bloody, I wouldn’t have known where my own ended and the light began. Did I really want to see it pouring out of me that badly? Wasn’t suffocating in it enough?

“Cal.” Hands pulled me up so damn carefully until my head and upper shoulders were supported against him. Nik, on his knees, bent down the rest of the way to murmur in my ear. “It’s all right. Cabal shot you, but it’s all right. Rafferty will heal you.” Because Niko could never admit to himself again that I could die on him. It took months to drag him back from the hallucination of it, back to himself. I refused to let him go back there again. I wouldn’t let Cabal put him back there for real.

Cabal, a Wolf with a gun… a Wolf with a gun and damn good aim. His pack was right. That wasn’t the Wolf way. My reputation preceded me and that had caused a Wolf to do what a Wolf would not do, which in turn had a bullet proceeding into my chest… into one of my lungs from the blood that kept rising in my throat. Preceding and proceeding and hadn’t he bothered once to look past me to see the real monster? Rafferty was dying, Robin had said, and Niko refused to believe. If Rafferty did die, Suyolak would kill us all… to a man and to a Wolf, and my keeping my brother sane, instead of the usual other way around, wouldn’t be a problem.

Niko’s hand rested on my chest. I saw the dark fluid that ran between his fingers, instantly covering his hand. With his other, he dug in my left jeans pocket. “Messy. I can always depend on you to be so damn messy… yes. Your sheer lazy ways save your life. Why am I not surprised?” He pulled out a Twinkie wrapper, uncovered the wound by pulling up my shirt with bloody fingers, and spread the plastic wrapper to cover the gunshot wound with it. The air that had been whistling in and out stopped. A Hostess wrapper wasn’t the next best thing to sterile, especially with a bit of crème still left on it, but it did get the job done. I could breathe the tiniest bit better. One death by sucking chest wound slightly delayed. Go team.

Nik kept his hand pressed to the wound, keeping the plastic airtight. “Rafferty, now. Kill that bastard now!” The Ördögs were dying in droves around us, Robin no longer looking as if he didn’t know what to do with his sword. He was an avenging angel, righteous with fury. An avenging, very horny angel. Ishiah was rubbing off on him, the avenging part at least. The metal flashes of the blade were so fast, so damn quick, I didn’t know if I saw it at all or if it was the streaks of light that heralded the darkness of approaching unconsciousness.

“Nik?”

He looked down at me, grim and furious, at fate… at me. I didn’t blame him either way.

Six months ago I had died… only I hadn’t.

And I didn’t plan on doing it for real this soon either. I wouldn’t put him through that again. Not now. Not for as long as I could avoid it. I wouldn’t do that to my brother. That was the easy way out, and while I liked easy, for Nik, I would and could do the impossible.

I wasn’t going to die and neither was Rafferty.

I spoke again before he could, feeling the blood trickle down from the corners of my mouth, hearing the faint gurgle behind my words. “I fought with… my girlfriend today.” I sucked in a breath and kept going. “Ate a Big Mac. Lost part… of me. A good part. Human part. I fought… for my… life.” I grinned at him, more blood in the back of my throat, rising higher. “Don’t you… fucking dare… think I’m… done yet.”

His hand, calloused from years of training, fighting, weapons sparring, rested on my forehead. “Promise, you bastard?” His mouth had always been home to the most fleeting of smiles, the wry quirk of lips, the angry line when someone crossed his, the twist of pain, the curve of belief. It was curved now. He believed. Of all the times I’d almost died, I wasn’t going to let a simple bullet accomplish where far less mundane motherfuckers had failed.

“Promise.” My grin became something else-not the grin of a little brother, but one of what Rafferty had labeled me: old and new; chaos and control. I let my head fall to one side to see Rafferty and Suyolak. Rafferty was on his knees. Good, ruthless, and maybe he could’ve taken Suyolak if it hadn’t been for Catcher and the rest of us pulling him into the depths like an anchor. He was on his knees protecting us while he had one breath left in him, but protecting and fighting were too much against the Plague of the World.

Too bad I was the Plague of the World as well or what was left of them. Or better yet, something the world had never seen. Suyolak was wrong. It had seen him, a long time ago. It had only just seen me, the new me.

Something old, something new, something unlike anything on this earth. I would keep one promise to Nik, I thought, but I’d have to break another to do it. I’d thought I’d need a compelling reason or an act of God to open another gate.

Suyolak was the compelling reason.

I was the act of God.

I couldn’t open one and appear next to Suyolak to shoot him before he stopped my heart. He would kill me before I pulled the trigger as much as I’d wanted to believe differently. He’d kill me if I even aimed my gun. But he couldn’t kill me before a thought was sent flying his way. After maybe, but there’d be no after for him. There was something I could do all right… something he wouldn’t anticipate. Something no one would think of. Something I’d only this moment thought of. Something fun.

I opened the gate.

I opened it in him… inside of him.

Ever see Fourth of July fireworks?

This was better. He glowed, bright as the scarlet moon, then brighter, brilliant as the sun, if the sun were an explosion of blinding silver light. Now there was a silver lining to a dark day. The light shone through his skin, his eyes, his open mouth as he screamed. And he did scream, the Plague of the World. He screamed until every Ördög and Wolf left screamed with him.

Me?

I laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh as it fought its way through the tide of blood. Fun? Goddamn, yes, it was fun. I meant it, too, and I felt it in every part of me. He’d been a disease that had enjoyed every death he’d caused. Rafferty was supposed to be his cure. I wasn’t anything close to a cure. I was the fire that made the scorched-earth policy what it was. If you burned it, you killed it. If you ripped a hole in reality that sucked the majority of Suyolak’s internal organs and torso into a radioactive dimension that no one had the key to but me, it was close enough.

He exploded. Fourth of July again. This time it was one big-ass M-80, those brutes no self- respecting adult would let a kid have. We hadn’t known any self-respecting adults when I was at the age when blowing up things was damn cool. I was twenty-one now and it was still damn cool. There was nothing left of Suyolak but arms, one leg, and his head lying on the ground with the amputation marks cauterized to a crunchy bacon crisp. I’d never been the freak-the Frankenstein’s monster-who cared about the neatness of my kills, but this time I did a nice job. Good for me. A for effort.

My grin faded when I saw Rafferty drop to his knees, grab the head, and then lift Suyolak face-to-face. There was the moon, but moonlight can be deceiving. I saw it, but I didn’t want to believe it. So I blamed it on the night and the shadows cast by the gory moon. I didn’t see Suyolak blink… although he did. I didn’t see Rafferty’s fingers sink through hair, flesh, and bone up to his knuckles, but they did. He wasn’t only mentally in Suyolak’s brain-he was physically there too. And suddenly the good time of watching Suyolak go to pieces in the most literal way passed and I slurred, “That’s so… not… right.”

“No, it is not, but it might be necessary and that’s good enough for me.” Niko called sharply, “Rafferty! Now! We need you now!”

The healer turned and I could see red-amber eyes turn Rom black and then back. Suyolak’s own eyes filmed a solid white and his head tumbled toward the ground, dust before it made it there. Rafferty was done with him. He had what he’d wanted all along: Suyolak. That was what made him tick-what made him creation and death all tangled into one immense tidal wave of power.

He moved to my side and knelt. “Great. What did you do? Shoot yourself?” His hand replaced Niko’s.

“Yeah.” The word was wet, as soaked as the oxygen in my lungs. Where he’d saved me from drowning in my own mucus before, now he had to stop me from drowning in my blood. No matter in what you drowned, the sensation sucked. “Watching… you pretend… to fight… made… me”-I gulped air-“suicidal.”

“You did a good job of it,” he grumped, enough like his old self that I almost forgot the flash of Suyolak that had passed through his eyes. But monsters, we always knew one another. He was Rafferty, but he had something else in him now: a reaper. He was a healer harboring a grim reaper and he couldn’t live like that. But right then I didn’t feel like I could live at all. It might be better to concentrate on that. I’d told myself I wasn’t letting Nik down and I meant it.

His other hand rested on the side of my head. “And you went and built another gate. After I practically rewired you. Now not only are you bleeding out, but your blood pressure is all but liquefying your brain and making you bleed out even faster while your temperature would blow up a thermometer.”

“Like… Suyolak.” I closed my eyes and curled my lips. “Boom.”

“Boom all right.” Robin was on my other side now. All the Ördögs were gone. When their master had died, they’d given one last shriek that shook the trees left standing and had poured away into the darkness. “Please endeavor not to get drunk and try that as a party trick. I don’t wish to be a five- hundred-piece puzzle with four hundred ninety-seven pieces missing. I would greatly appreciate the restraint. But if you must, there is one piece I wish you to promise to leave in place. I believe you know the one I refer to. That would be the glory that is…”

“Mercy killing.” I shaped the words to Rafferty, to Niko… anyone who could get the job done. My head hurt, I couldn’t breathe, and I was racked with cold from the fever. And through all that, Robin’s voice was still able to cut like a knife. It was comforting. Locations change, enemies change, even my wiring changed, but Goodfellow, his mouth would never change.

There was a snort in the darkness. “Like you deserve a mercy killing. Not today. Sorry about your luck,” Rafferty sniped. Then the heat that flared in his hand on my chest arced through me to the one on my head. I didn’t know if I was glowing like Suyolak had when my gate had gobbled him up, but I felt as if I was. I felt like the sun… hot, intense, and far up in the sky. Floating. Not that the sun floated, but I did. And the air that I floated in flowed in and out of my lungs. The pain was gone too, as were the headache and fever. Rafferty had given me that last gate for free.

I opened my eyes and saw the blackness of Suyolak shadowed behind Rafferty’s eyes. “It’s good, isn’t it?” I said knowingly. “Being bad. Ironic, huh?” I coughed and was pushed up in time for the residual blood to spray on my jeans.

“He’s in there. In you.” Niko reached over and almost touched the healer’s forehead, but at the last minute decided against it. “You were supposed to cure the world by killing him.”

“Instead you ate him.” There was blood all over my shirt and, black cotton or not, the color wasn’t helping. I felt the warm stickiness of it everywhere. I peeled it off over my head, then wrapped my no- longer wolf-gnawed arm-Rafferty had healed that too-around Niko’s shoulder and we were up. I got my “living legs” under me again. “Did he taste good?” I asked as if I genuinely wanted to know. And, darkly… dreadfully, I did.

“I can’t imagine that he did. Death, any death, is not a taste anyone should want, crave, or have.” Robin hadn’t lowered his sword. “You were to be the cure, not the replacement.”

“It’s for Catcher. With what I took from that murderous bastard I can bring Catcher back. It’s worth it, and when I’m done, I’ll get rid of the rest of Suyolak. And that’s the way it’s going to fucking be, got it?” Rafferty snapped, a wolf snap-one with flashing teeth.

He started to stand until I caught him by the arm and caught him quickly-a little too quickly. I’d noticed that. I kept getting quicker and quicker. “Could you-” I ducked my head to swallow the growl that wanted out, but the Auphe in me could growl all it wanted. On this, I ruled. I pulled Rafferty closer and asked my question close to his ear-where no one could hear if the answer was no. So no one could feel sorry for me, because that’s the last damn thing I wanted.

He considered my request. “Yeah, maybe. I can’t guarantee they’ll stay that way, but I’ll try.” His hand came up to cover my eyes for a second. One second. He had Suyolak in him all right, a supernatural battery that could level this entire park if that’s what Rafferty wanted.

Dropping his hand, he leaned in for a look and grunted. “Good as new, but, like I said, that could change.” They were gray again then, no russet or scarlet marring them-but pure gray, the same gray Niko and I had shared all our lives. If someone looked at us, it was the only sign they would see that we were related. I wanted to keep that. I couldn’t keep the happy, I couldn’t keep the human, but I could keep part of my brother. In the end, that made this a win.

Rafferty had risen immediately after changing my eyes back. He was scanning the area for what it was that he wanted to keep. I hoped he was as lucky as I’d turned out to be. “Catcher? Catch?” He caught sight of the one red Wolf, flanked by a white one, in the middle of more dead Wolves. I’d had the feeling that Delilah wouldn’t let there be any survivors. She and the others or just the others had killed Cabal, and Delilah had put down the rest of them. She was born a killer, born a queen, and now she had crowned herself both. I’d known, whichever way that it went, she wasn’t going to lose. She never did.

Catcher lifted his head, although I didn’t know if he understood his name or not. He might have recognized the scent of his cousin; the call of the same whispering in his brain. He catapulted toward Rafferty, leaping over bodies, making a sound I couldn’t identify except for “happy wolf” roo roo. His fur was even more red under the moon and Delilah moving leisurely in his wake was now a nude human statue carved from amber, her white hair now the color of fire.

Rafferty caught the boisterous Wolf that hit him, nearly bowling him over. “Catch. Concentrate. Come back, okay? I need you. I need you now.”

Standing on his back legs with his front hooked over Rafferty’s shoulders, Catcher snuffled, his eyes blinked, confused, and he bared his teeth. But then he butted his head against his cousin’s chest and left it there for several minutes. The first time that Goodfellow or I tried to say something, Niko knowing better not to, the healer glared us into silence. Finally Catcher looked up, face-to-face, eye to eye. It didn’t take a Wolf to see it or a healer. Anyone could see the intelligence in those eyes. Smart guy, he was a smart guy. He knew the scientific names of orchids, had a master’s degree in biology, had gone to college, bought a car, had girlfriends, went on spring break, wanted to save the planet. Hogger of fries and Twinkies, he was blazing with intelligence and he was trapped. No one could fix me, but to see his cousin fix him, that would make things a little better, a little brighter.

Rafferty smiled. It wasn’t much of one, the faintest movement of his lips, but it was the first I’d seen out of him. It counted. “Okay, Cuz. You’re coming home.” He rested a hand on each side of Catcher’s head, his thumbs curving under the Wolf’s eyes, the rest of his fingers cupping the round fur-covered head. I didn’t see the energy that passed from Rafferty, but I felt it in the air. At first it was warm… the warmth I’d felt when he’d healed me. I touched the bullet hole in my chest that looked as if it had been healed for years; warm, comforting, right.

But then it wasn’t the same anymore. When Catcher didn’t change, Rafferty did and what was left of Suyolak came out. This power wasn’t the heat and the sun that had coursed through me. This was cold and black. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it. Catcher felt it too. He snarled, thrashed, and ripped his head out of Rafferty’s grip. “No,” Rafferty protested. “Catcher, I’m getting somewhere. I know it.” He reached out again and Catcher snapped at him, fastened on to his arm, and drew blood. The right- in-his-head Catcher tore a chunk out of his cousin’s arm and looked ready to do worse.

“Catcher.” Rafferty clutched the bite and healed it instantly. Back on all fours, Catcher lowered his head, ears back, hackles raised, and showed every tooth he had. “No,” the healer asserted, “it’s not poisonous. If it can bring you back, it’s not poison. It’s a cure. Can’t you understand that? It’s the only cure there is. It’s this or nothing. Don’t you get that? After all these fucking years, don’t you get that?”

Catcher stared at him. They were talking, somehow or another… Hell, the Suyolak way, they were talking the Suyolak way. Rafferty was in Catcher’s head as he shook his own. “Catch, no. No. Listen to me.”

There was a growl. I’d heard many Wolf growls in my day. Wolves loved to fight, like Delilah, but if they could fight and live, they were satisfied with that. They didn’t have the all-or-nothing attitude she did, unless they were taking on their Alpha and it was a kill or be killed situation. There were growls and then there were growls-and the last would be the one where a Wolf chose possible death over dishonor and life.

“Goddamnit, that’s not true. I won’t cure you by turning into him. We can both live. We can both be ourselves. I’m not trading myself for you,” Rafferty said, the desperation he’d kept hidden since I’d known him finally showing.

Catcher stopped growling and simply stared at him. Unblinking. Unmoving.

Rafferty fell to his knees and denied one last time. “No, Catch. I’m not trading the world for you either. I’m not. I wouldn’t be like him. I’d get rid of the rest of him before I turned like he turned. I would.” The Wolf walked forward three steps and rested his chin on Rafferty’s shoulder, his head against the other shaggy auburn head. Rafferty wrapped his arms around Catcher’s neck and buried his face in the fur. “I know. I’m lying to you. I’m lying to myself.”

I barely heard the words or the ones that came after them, but I did hear them. I didn’t know if they made me feel better for the cousins or worse.

“You can’t fix what isn’t broken.” Hoarse but accepting.

“The here and now, it’s good. It’s what’s meant to be. I know-I do. The here and now.” He sucked in a deep breath, then straightened before turning away from his cousin enough to plant both hands against the bare earth. Then he released it: Suyolak’s power. I couldn’t see it, ugly as it was and boiling with death and hunger-the same as before-but I felt it. It passed into earth where nothing grew anyway. In the old days they salted the earth after wars, Niko said, to keep crops from growing, to make the people leave. Not very neighborly. Then again, neither was war. This ground held enough sulfur to keep anything growing to several hundred feet back. It was already dead. What was left of Suyolak wasn’t going to make a difference.

And then it was gone. He was gone. Even his arms and legs had turned to dust to be stomped on the next day by a random tourist. Suyolak was nothing but the medium for someone’s footprint and I liked the poetry of that just fine. He’d thought he owned the earth and now he’d be nothing more than a footprint on it.

Off to one side, this time too far to hear, I saw Robin making a follow-up call, to say what he couldn’t before-not that I could know precisely what he said to Ishiah. I could guess, but with Goodfellow, a guess was the absolute best and worst you could hope for. As I watched him talk, it began to snow-just on Robin… snow, in the middle of summer. No. It wasn’t snow. It was feathers-white and gold feathers falling from the sky like a cascade of cherry blossom petals that I’d once seen in Central Park that had filled the air like a cloud come to Earth. Talk about when you care enough to send the very best.

Maybe there was a little magic in the world after all.

I looked away, the better to battle off any threat to my testosterone-manufactured stoicism to see Rafferty stand and say, “We’re staying here. There are wolves in the park. Not our Wolves, but wolves. It’s a good place to run and hunt; a good place to live.”

“You’re just going to…” I stopped. What could I say? You’re not going to give up everything for your family. What kind of man or Wolf would he be if he didn’t? Catcher seemed to know what I was thinking and he gave a lupine sigh. The promise I’d made him to make Rafferty one of us, to give him reason to live, to make him family, it wasn’t going to happen. Rafferty had made his own choice. He already had a family and he was staying with it.

After Catcher’s sigh of acceptance, the Wolf then perked up his ears and shook his head hard enough that I heard the jingle… metal tags ringing against each other. He wasn’t going to need that when he answered the call of the wild. I moved forward and slipped the collar over his head. If it were daylight, it would’ve been fluorescent green with butterflies and dragonflies and about the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen. “I’ll save it for Salome, Catch.”

He grinned, blew air out his nose, and held up his front leg, this time for a fist/paw bump instead of a shake. “You take care of your family, fur ball, and I’ll take care of mine.” We both knew it tended to be the other way around, but we both had our pride.

Rafferty was stripping off his clothes. He didn’t say good-bye. He wasn’t that kind of guy. “Take care of yourselves. There’s no guarantee we’ll stay here. We might move up to Canada. You guys play rough. Better sniff out a new healer. A good one. Especially for…” He jerked his head toward me. “An apple a day damn sure doesn’t keep the Auphe away.” He lifted a hand briefly, shimmered, and a wolf stood in his place. During the day you might have been able to tell them apart, but now they looked identical. I only knew Catcher from Rafferty because he stood on the left.

Catcher put his nose up in the air, sampling the wild smells of a wild place, and yipped happily. He grinned at us one last time, tongue lolling-facing the loss of identity, the loss of his whole, but he was at peace. You could see it. If I’d thought about it, I could see he always had been. He’d known how things would end up, but he couldn’t take away his cousin’s hope, so he’d hung in there as long as he could; as long as Rafferty had needed him to. Now he turned and started to lope toward a far ridge of still-standing trees. Rafferty studied us solemnly with yellow wolf eyes, dipped his muzzle, and swiveled to follow.

That’s when Delilah lifted the gun she’d taken from the body of her Alpha-the others had scorned him for it, but she was more open-minded. She knew she couldn’t take Catcher, Rafferty, and the rest of us as a Wolf alone. Catcher was running in the lead, and she aimed the semiautomatic at him. That’s when I pressed the muzzle of my Eagle to the back of her head. From life, to the edge of death and back, but as trained, I’d never lost my gun along the way.

“No, Delilah.”

“There is enough of All Wolf in the Kin to make our own pack bigger than any Kin pack,” she said, the gun not wavering. “With Rafferty we could be free; we could be what we should be. Running. Hunting. Gone into the green to never be found again. If Catcher dies, Rafferty has no reason not to help.”

Because that was how she would’ve thought if she’d been in his place. Friends came; friends went. Family came; family died. But she thought wrong. Rafferty wasn’t like her, not that it made a difference. He wouldn’t have changed her or the others regardless of Catcher’s death. He would kill Delilah where she stood, but because he was a Wolf and a cousin, not because he was anything like the Kin. Or anything like Delilah.

I might be Auphe, but I knew good from bad, right from wrong. I might lose that ability as time passed, but at this moment I still knew.

I made my choice. Delilah had saved me… in a way. She hadn’t tried to kill me. She’d given me a chance by arranging for her pack and her Alpha to die in my place-if I were good enough, benefiting us both, although benefiting her in more ways than one. But Rafferty had saved me more than once; he’d saved me three times-and on occasions of considerable inconvenience. Rafferty saved. Delilah killed. I liked Delilah, but I didn’t love her and that was why.

She was too much like me.

“Drop the gun,” I said.

She didn’t look around, keeping her eye on her running target. “You not kill me, pretty boy,” she said with complete confidence. “You not kill what we have, will you?” She thought she knew me, predator to predator. She thought I would enjoy watching her kill, because Wolves did. There was no better sex for Wolves than sex over a kill.

I wasn’t a Wolf. I wasn’t Kin. I might be worse one day; I might be worse now. But not with Catcher and Rafferty. Not when it came to them.

I kept the gun against her head and leaned in to whisper at her ear, “You’re asking the wrong question, Lilah. You shouldn’t be asking me if I’ll kill you. You should ask if I’ll enjoy it.” They say Wolves can smell truth. She knew mine.

Rafferty and Catcher ran on until they disappeared into the darkness. And not a single gunshot was heard.

Not this time.

But there could be a next time. Back home, before there or sometime after, our being alike would result in one of us being dead sooner or later. It was how the game was played, among her kind, Wolf, and among mine, last of the Auphe. For now, she didn’t push me and for now, I didn’t shoot. And if I wanted to-badly wanted to…

No one had to know that but me.