Roadkill

4

My name is Catcher.

My parents named me after Catcher in the Rye, the book on which they’d had to team up to do a class presentation. Until then, they hadn’t been that interested in each other. But that book about teen angst and a loss of innocence had brought them together, and from then on they had been small-town high school sweethearts-depressing book; nice story.

But that’s not the point.

My name is Catcher.

I thought that every morning when I woke up-every single one-to make sure I was okay; all there; in my right mind; not having an episode. I could picture the air quotes around that last word clear as a bell. “Episode”-what a stupid thing to call it. I snorted and opened my eyes to see the morning light streaming through the battered blinds. It was useless really. If I were in my wrong mind, I wouldn’t know anyway. But the routine made me feel better, so I said it in my head. My name is Catcher.

My name is Catcher, and I’m hungry.

It wasn’t War and Peace, but it was an accomplishment and a relief. I took it as such and lounged on the motel bed, its busted springs complaining under me while I waited for my cousin to bring back breakfast. They didn’t like my kind in diners. They had their laws, their signs on the door: NOT ALLOWED. KEEP OUT. Pure prejudice. They had ramps for the physically challenged; parking spots for the same. For me they had nothing but the boot. The hell with them then. If I wasn’t good enough for them, then I’d hang around and watch TV until my cousin came back with all the sausage and pancakes I could eat. It was better than dealing with cranky morning commuters trying to snatch some breakfast before work anyway.

Besides, any day I was myself was a good day, and I was determined to enjoy every good day to the fullest. My mom had always said I wasn’t the glass-half-full type-I was more of an Olympic- sized-pool-overflowing kind. Moms, they always thought the best of you, but I had to admit she’d been right. If there was a bright side, I could see it. If there wasn’t a party, I would start one. Life was a gift. I’d always known that-maybe for a reason. The universe was all about balance.

I yawned, and lazily smacked the remote bolted to the table. News. Smack. Morning show. Smack. Cartoons. Smack. Nature channel. Wolves of Alaska. Fighting wolves. Running wolves. Romping wolves. Mating wolves.

Hello.

The door opened and my cousin walked in with several Styrofoam containers stacked in his hands. He looked at the television and rolled his eyes. “Porn? This early in the morning?”

Like there was a bad time for it, but Rafferty wasn’t a morning person, so I cut him some slack. I liked the morning myself, but I was easy to please. I grinned and yipped forcefully as I bounded off the bed.

“Yeah, yeah. I got your pancakes with apples and whipped cream. Keep eating like this and you’re going to be one fat son of a bitch.” I pawed the air impatiently. “Don’t get your tail in a wad,” he grumped. “I have your two pounds of sausage and bacon too.” He set the containers on the flimsy table by the window and began opening them up. I jumped up on one of the two chairs and dug into the pancakes. They’d always been my favorite since I was a kid. My mom fixed them every Sunday morning, the same Sunday mornings Rafferty would wander over. His mom, my mom’s twin sister, had died a year after he was born, and his own dad wasn’t much of a cook. Raff ate most of his meals with us.

We’d done most everything together. We were in the same grade. All the new kids would think we were brothers. When your mothers were twins, you tended to favor each other. We both had auburn hair, but mine was a shade darker, and neater than the I-don’t-give-a-crap style Rafferty had had his whole life. My eyes had been the same russet of his-except when they were yellow.

They were yellow all the time now.

We’d grown up together, three houses apart. Gone to elementary school together, junior high, high school. Family stuck together. Wolves stuck together. When you were both, you really were glued at the hip. We’d even gone to the same college, although postgrad we’d gone different ways. He’d gone to one with a better med school, and I’d headed to one with a professor famous for his study of the rain forest. But we still e-mailed, called once in a while, spent the first year’s spring break together chasing bikinis on beaches. Then the second year I’d chased my master’s degree in biology to the Amazon.

Nine months later I’d come back and ruined my cousin’s life.

I lifted my muzzle from the scraps of the pancakes. I looked back toward the blinds and the light. Years; it had been years now. Five. Six. It was getting harder and harder to keep count, just like it was getting harder and harder to stay myself. I came and I went, more and more often now.

“You have whipped cream on your nose. Hard to mope with whipped cream on your nose,” Rafferty grunted, pointing a piece of bacon at me. “We’ve got another chance. That guy in Wind River, Wyoming. The Arapaho healer. He’s supposed to be good.”

But not the best; Rafferty was the best. I knew it; Rafferty knew it too, but I wasn’t going to push him on it. My cousin had done everything for me. I wasn’t going to take away his… not hope. That was long gone. What he had left was denial. I wasn’t going to take that away. It wasn’t hope, but it was better than nothing.

And that nothing would come soon enough.

I ducked my head, licked the cream off my nose, then snatched the bacon out of his hand. Crunching it, I swallowed and gave him my best nonmoping grin. I looked back at the still-horny wolves on television, then at the food, and gave a low woo woo of inquiry.

“No. No good- looking waitresses. And stop with the I-need-to-get-laid thing. You know I’m a born asshole. A little sex isn’t going to change that, and I have other things on my mind right now, okay?”

The born asshole who had just happened to give up years of his life for me. My family since I could remember. The only family… the only real family I had left now that our parents had died. They had gone too young, but I was almost glad they weren’t here to see this. I sighed. Wolves do sigh, sometimes for the very same reasons people do. I picked out three pieces of bacon and dropped them in his container. It wasn’t like he was afraid of germs. One: He was a healer. Two: He had plenty of Wolf germs of his own. His eyes flashed yellow and back to amber. “You’re a pal.” A born ass, a born sarcastic ass, but he meant it. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend; meat is a werewolf’s.

He ate them, but he was distracted-not seemed distracted. Not only could I read my cousin’s face with the ease of long practice; I could smell him just as a person could smell a bakery. Humans could smell chocolate, vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, a thousand different things. But we Wolves could smell so many more things, and so much more intensely. Emotion was easy. A state of mind like distraction wasn’t much harder.

I whuffed at him abruptly, jumped down from the chair, and moved over to the open laptop on the floor by the TV. Using my mouth, I picked up the pencil lying next to it, maneuvered it around, and tapped the mouse pad with it. I sat on my haunches as my settings loaded. Slow, slow. Give a wolf a break already, Dell. Finally, I pulled up Word and started typing. Still chewing bacon, Rafferty finally wandered over and bent slightly to read.

“Hey, ‘Captain Jack-off’ seems a little harsh, especially coming from someone who keeps forgetting to flush the john,” he grumbled. He read further. “Damn it, I’m not keeping secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can pick the music today, but you play any country western and I’ll kick your furry ass. Hell, no, it wasn’t me stinking up the place last night. You were the one who ate all the White Castle sliders.” He frowned at the next line. “You want to see the new Batman movie? The one that’s in the theaters now? Catch, I don’t know. Last time we almost got busted.”

I growled. He snorted and echoed the growl perfectly. “Right. I’m terrified.”

This time I growled and bared my teeth. When that didn’t work any better than the other, I fell over onto my side and rolled onto my back, exposing my vulnerable stomach and neck. He groaned, “Goddamnit, fine. We’ll go tonight, but you’ll have to take a bath, so no whining.”

Sucker. I grinned around the pencil and sprang back up to type one last line with pithy punctuation. “No,” he said with exasperation and a big fat lie, “no damn secrets, and if that emoticon of the guy doing the sheep is another subtle hint at my needing to get laid, cut it out.”

I dropped the pencil, slammed the laptop lid down with a hard swat of my paw, and growled again. This time I meant it. The deep bass of it reverberated in the back of my throat before spilling out as my lips peeled back to show my teeth. Rafferty’s eyes swirled between amber and yellow. “Shit.” He straightened and rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, it’s Niko and Cal. Nik called on my cell last night when I was out getting us dinner.” He never answered calls anymore. He hadn’t since we hit the road more than a year ago. It was always someone wanting healing, and he didn’t have time for that anymore. He was a man… well, werewolf… with a mission. Me. I came first-no more healings until I was healed.

Trouble was that I was healed.

My cousin, he was the best in the country-in the world. I didn’t doubt it, but sometimes you did a thing so well, so right, that what you started out with was changed forever. I didn’t blame him for this, for being stuck as a wolf with no ability to change back to human. How could I? It was this or death. Even if I’d died and hung around all wolf wings and wolf halo, I wouldn’t have blamed him. Rafferty would’ve turned himself inside out, given up his own life for me if he could have. But sometimes your time was just your time. He knew that. He’d lost other patients. But I hadn’t been just another patient.

We all made mistakes.

He gave me years I wouldn’t have had. They weren’t quite the way I would’ve wanted to spend them, not every minute of them at least, but I had them. That was something. It damn sure was. And if I lost part of myself with each passing year, nothing lasted forever. Not a thing-that was something Rafferty didn’t know. And that was why we were covering the country state by state, rumor by rumor. It was for Raff, not for me.

“Stop it, Catcher. I mean it. Stop it right now,” he snapped.

I realized I’d stopped growling and was feeling… melancholy, nostalgia, inevitability, resignation. Even in our human forms we kept our wolf sense of smell. I lifted a paw and he took it in his hand and squeezed hard. “It’s not over. It’s not. I’m getting you back, all of you. Got it?”

I twitched my ears. I got it. I did. Pulling my paw back, I poked my nose at the cell phone in his jeans pocket. “Yeah, Niko.” He walked over and sat on the bed. I followed and jumped up to sit beside him. “I wouldn’t have answered this time either. You come first, but I felt”-he shook his head-“something-something bad. There’s a sickness to the east. I can’t smell it or touch it, but I can feel it inside. It’s like the worst bioengineered death germ a lab could come up with and it’s about to crawl out of its petri dish and make a run for it. And I guess I felt like a shit for ignoring all the other calls and messages. The two of them, they’re kind of like us-family. One of them not quite right in the head.” He tried for the joke, resting his hand on my head and giving it a good shake. I blew out an outraged wet snort and reared up on my hind legs, waving my front ones in the air. I tried for a combination of roar and hiss, but it came out more a choked-on-my-Alpo gurgle.

Rafferty raised his eyebrows. “That’s all you’ve got? That’s the best Auphe imitation you’ve got?”

Disgruntled, I settled back down and turned my head away dismissively. Critics, they were all the same.

“Diva,” he mocked. “And, sure, Cal ’s half Auphe, and I want to either eat him or piss on myself every time I smell the guy, but since New York City is still standing, he must be behaving himself. It’s not as if we can blame him for who or what his father was.” He turned his head… to the east, where he said he felt it, the sickness. “Anyway, they’ve run into a situation with an antihealer. Suyolak. Sickness doesn’t come close to describing him.” I looked back curiously with a never- heard-of-the-guy blink of my eyes.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” he responded. “Only the Rom and the trickster gossip network know about him. Well, they, and those who study mythology, and healers. All healers know about Suyolak, though. It’s the first thing they teach you when you start healer training.” And he wasn’t talking about med school. That was only supplemental to being trained by a true healer. Rafferty at the age of thirteen had surpassed his healing teacher in six months. All healers had the same healing talent, but when it came to power-that was the difference between making a diabetic less prone to high blood sugars or flat-out curing him. Rafferty fell in the latter category. Most healers ran on double D batteries. Rafferty was a nuclear power plant. He was nothing like the healing community had seen.

He was unequaled-or at least I thought so until he started talking.

“Suyolak was a Rom healer. He’s old. I don’t know how old, but he almost took out Europe during the Black Death. He was the Black Death with the help of some fleas and rats. He was born a healer, but he became a killer.” He lay back and stared at the ceiling. “They called him the Plague of the World. They always tell healers when we train: Do no harm. And not for the same reason they tell human doctors that. If we start to do harm, we could become like Suyolak; we might never stop. Destroying is easier than fixing. Don’t go all Dark Side, in other words. Once Suyolak had a taste for killing, he couldn’t stop-or didn’t want to.”

I turned three times, curled up, and rested my head on his chest as a “go on” nudge. “Somehow or another-I think poisoned alcohol and lots of naked women were involved-he was sealed up in an iron coffin. I imagine he was already waking up when that happened or they would’ve chopped his head off instead. His clan has spent the time since then hauling him around-apparently the bastard is still alive in there-until someone swiped him, coffin and all. Nik asked for our help, because if whoever stole him lets him out…”

The Plague of the World.

Rafferty could put people to sleep with a thought; he could stop their heart with a touch. My cousin was the best in the world, but it sounded as though Suyolak had been the best or the worst, depending on how you looked at it, in his own world. It would be a good bet that Suyolak would kill any nonhealer before his heart had time to move from one beat to the next. Niko and Cal needed the help and badly. It was one thing to put me first; another thing to put me first over the entire world.

I glared sideways at Rafferty. “I know,” he said, giving in. “I’m an arrogant SOB, but on this, I know what I have to do.” I curled my upper lip. “Okay, what we have to do. I’ll call him back and let him know we’ll meet him in a few days, after we hit Wyoming.” I glared again. “Be as pissy as you want,” he said, refusing to budge on that. “We’re going to Wyoming first. We’re getting you fixed there, and then we’ll help them. It’s the way it’s going to be. Live with it. Now, go grab a bath if you want to see your movie.” I lifted my head as he rolled out of bed to grab a suitcase. Digging through it, he pulled out a bright orange dog vest that read CANINE COMRADE in bold black letters. We’d discovered WOOFER WINGMAN didn’t convince a lot of people. This one worked well enough most of the time and was my ticket into the movie theater.

“Same as usual? I have McKay-Stewart Spontaneous Colonic Hyper-spasm syndrome, and it’s the dog for early flatulence detection or a bucket because there isn’t an adult diaper big enough in the world.”

I grinned in agreement and jumped down to trot to the bathroom and turn on the shower with my jaws. Two hours later I was lying in the aisle, watching a Batman movie. Given my size, I was actually blocking the aisle. A fire hazard, that was me. I knew Rafferty was watching me for any signs of an “episode,” and I heard a few whispers about my size. How if I were a dog, then some guy would kiss my furry butt. I ignored it all as I buried my muzzle in a popcorn bag, extra butter, and for two and a half hours watched as some bad guys got their asses kicked, a hero fell from his pedestal, and an oddly sympathetic psycho villain took out people right and left, blowing them up; shooting them; catching them on fire; tossing them off buildings. But that was all right. It was just entertainment, not real life. For two and a half hours, I was able to escape knowing that that was real life for some. For two and a half hours, I was able to eat popcorn; I was able to sit with people, watch actors do their thing, and watch couples in the back make out.

I got to watch a brand- new movie. I got to hang out with my cousin in public.

I got to be normal.

It was absolutely a glass-half-full day.