Shadows

CHAPTER 10

THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR ARCHWAY WERE STILL there when we left, but we didn’t have to walk through it again. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us, but that was probably my guilty conscience. I was standing close enough to Takahiro that I felt him quiver when we opened the front door and spilled out onto the concrete. “Taks,” I said.

“I’m okay,” he said quickly. “It’s not as bad as it was this morning.”

“Yes it is,” I said, fighting the urge to brush myself off, as if it was something you could brush off. It was nothing like the soft tickliness of Hix. And despite Hix and Taks’ shadow coat we were still feeling it. I glanced around, wondering if I’d catch any of the other students uncomfortably or absentmindedly trying to sweep invisible crawling things off themselves. I saw Jeremy with his shoulders up around his ears, scowling so hard his eyes had disappeared under his eyebrows and his hands clawing at the opposite shoulders, but that was just Jeremy in the throes of game invention.

Takahiro sighed. “Okay. Yes, it’s just as bad. But your—things—are really helping. Thanks.”

“Gruuaa,” I said. “But don’t thank me. Thank Val.”

Jill pulled up in the Mammothmobile and I opened the front door and shoved Taks in in front of me and climbed in after him. “Where are you taking me?” he said. “Should I be worried?”

“Yes,” said Jill, staring at the road. “You’re—he’s—covered in—in gruuaa. I can see them better when I’m not looking at them. They look kind of like feather boas. Only they sparkle. Sort of. And they have too many eyes. And I think those are legs. Too many legs. Maggie, what is going on?”

She saw them better than I did. “A cobey opened in the park yesterday and we’re being taken over by niddles,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No. Then it was a cobey,” said Jill.

“Yeah,” I said. “Um.”

Jill said carefully, “How do you know it was a cobey? And why wasn’t there an announcement?”

I tried to think of some other way to say it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. But I always told her everything. And it was bad enough I couldn’t tell her about Takahiro. “I closed it down,” I said.

Jill exhaled rather hard. “You. A cobey,” she said. “You closed a cobey?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was, except Casimir told me.”

“Casimir?” said Jill. “You didn’t know what it was and you closed it? It takes a regiment to close a cobey. According to the board banners we’ve got two cobey units in this town now!”

I looked down at the floor of the car where the algebra book was leaning lovingly against my leg again. “Yeah. Well,” I said. “Maybe Casimir was wrong.”

“Talk to me, damn it!” said Jill.

“I don’t know, okay?” I said. “I don’t dreeping know! I pulled some pages out of my algebra book and folded them up and threw them into this big—big—wind and it went away!”

“And now your algebra book won’t stay in your locker and is following you around,” said Jill.

“Yeah,” I said. “At least you saw that.”

There was a pause. “At least I saw that,” said Jill. Another pause. “Why am I taking you to the shelter like it’s some safe place? None of us is a homeless lost animal, are we?”

The silence that followed this remark was so deadly that Jill took her eyes off the road for a second and looked at us. “What? Now what? What else? What else?”

“I’m a werewolf,” said Takahiro matter-of-factly.

The car did a tiny zigzag, but only a tiny one. “A werewolf,” Jill said cautiously. “This isn’t a joke, right?”

“No,” said Taks. “It’s not a joke. And stress makes me turn. This armydar stresses me hard.”

“Yeah,” said Jill. “The scans were never like this. It makes me feel like a silverbug with the zapper turned on. The animal shelter?”

I had a headache. Maybe it was the armydar. Maybe I was going to turn into a turkey or a mutant chipmunk. “I don’t understand how any of this works, okay? But the gruuaa suck up random energy or they block the fact that stuff the niddles aren’t going to like is present or something like that. Oh, Val’s a magician,” I added, and the car did another zigzag.

“He can’t be,” Jill said, sounding increasingly stressed herself. “They’d’ve never let him into the country.”

“Gruuaa,” I said. “He came with a lot of gruuaa.”

“Those shadows on the shed,” said Jill, remembering.

“Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t know. He didn’t know they were there till—till night before last.” Jill shot me a look but didn’t interrupt. I went on: “He’s been teaching dead batteries that the square root of ninety-six is double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”

Jill snorted.

“—and people like Taks that—that science can make the square root of ninety-six be double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”

“For the record,” said Takahiro, “my project is about how we define the integrity of one world as differentiated from another.”

“Holy electricity,” said Jill. “You don’t want much, do you?”

“—and back wherever Val is from he was . . . I guess he was a pretty big machine.”

“Not machine,” said Jill. “Magician.”

“Whatever,” I said. “But the gruuaa are working really hard and Taks is still not happy, you know? Neither am I. And I didn’t like that scanner thing at all, and the way it almost . . . And Mongo really liked Taks . . . um . . .”

“As a wolf,” said Takahiro. “Yeah. I noticed that. Kay’s cat avoids me like—well, avoids me for weeks after, but she would, wouldn’t she? She’s a cat.”

“As a wolf?” squeaked Jill. I could see her clutching the steering wheel but the car didn’t zigzag this time.

“Yeah,” said Takahiro. “Yesterday. Val saved my life. And after . . . these are his gruuaa.” He did that vague touching thing you do when you’re groping in the dark for something that is probably fragile, if you can find it. “He sent them home with me.”

“And when we took him home, the soldiers at the corner stopped us, but Mongo sat in Taks’ lap and I think that helped too,” I said. “Val has tutorials till about six tonight. So we go to the shelter first. Where I’m hoping whatever—er—the armydar either puts out or picks up may be a little more confused. If it works we might even adopt someone.”

“Do you have a wolfhound?” said Takahiro.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “Her name’s Bella. She’s one of the Family. They have to turn the armydar off eventually, don’t they?”

“Mom says it can be weeks if it’s a big cobey,” said Jill unhappily. “First there was Copperhill and now—well, whatever they think happened, they’re slapping us down hard with this new amped-up armydar.”

“What’s it supposed to do?” I said. I think I may have howled.

“It’s supposed to stop it—them—from spreading. Cobeys. They run in series,” said Jill. “I guess they think yesterday was trying to be a second cobey.”

“Does everyone but me know that cobeys run in series?” I said. Takahiro’s hands had found something and were cradling it. It was liking this: it twinkled. But I was pretty sure he’d heard “weeks.” Maybe he already knew.

“Everybody who doesn’t zone out and end up in Enhanced Algebra with the biggest textbook on the planet, yes,” said Jill.

Jill turned in through the shelter gate. Rob Roy and Gertrude were barking, but Rob Roy and Gertrude were always barking. Clare came out of the office but her face cleared when she recognized us. “I could really use some help,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re all here to work? The army have been here half the day—it’s an animal shelter, are they expecting me to be hiding a cobey generator in an empty kennel?—and nothing’s done.”

“Sure,” said Jill. “I can spare a couple of hours.”

“Cats don’t like me much,” said Takahiro. “I’m okay with dogs.”

“Can you face cleaning kennels?” said Clare, looking up at him and smiling.

He smiled back. Good. Maybe the shelter had been one of my better ideas. “Can’t be worse than Mrs. Andover,” he said.

Clare laughed. “Joan Andover? She was a dead battery when she was your age and still Joan Ricco. I’d rather clean kennels too.”

It was better at the shelter. Clare was completely obsessed, and spent all her spare time getting grants from various animal charities and papering downtown with posters for volunteer dog walkers and special critter-education events—that’s human education about critters, you know, not the other way around—and open days, and as a result the animals at the Orchard Shelter were a lot happier and better socialized than in most shelters. (Or a lot of people’s homes, but we won’t go there.) The turnover for all the standard adoptable critters was high but Clare managed to sort of solder the ones that were too old or too ugly or too large or too cranky or too something into a kind of on-site family—the Family—which sometimes made them so charming to susceptible visitors a few of them got adopted after all. (Some of these also got brought back. Clare never refused a returnee.) But the soldering thing—I think it made a kind of critter-energy net. You felt it—okay, I felt it—as you turned up the driveway and through the gate that had Orchard Shelter on the left-hand post. I was hoping that even the armydar would have trouble punching through it.

Takahiro and I were sent out to the kennels. I showed him how it worked and let him get on with it. I hoped the dogs wouldn’t mind Taks’ gruuaa escort, if Mongo’s reaction to them was any guide. I kept the slightly dubious-tempered ones for myself. It seemed to go okay. I could hear him making the occasional comment about the weather and tonight’s homework. I grinned. Critter therapy is the big bang. I was even relaxing a little myself.

It was just after five-thirty when the gruuaa suddenly went crazy. The room filled up with small bursting stars, so many and so bright they made me dizzy, or maybe it was the odd scattered wind, or winds, which were sort of semi-something, like the gruuaa themselves were semi-something, which was so disorienting. It was like wherever they were really from was suddenly much closer than usual.

I’d been at the grooming table brushing Florrie, who was probably a Shetland sheepdog and was definitely more hair than dog. I dropped the dog brush and it went thud on the floor and skittered a little way, like any ordinary thing, wooden back and plastic bristles and a strap for your hand . . . like any ordinary thing . . . like . . .

The brush stopped when it ran into my algebra book. Which I’d left in Clare’s office with my knapsack.

The tiny exploding stars thinned out and disappeared, but I felt almost as sick as if I’d stepped on a silverbug. I couldn’t see or feel any of the gruuaa, not even Hix. Florrie twisted around so she could lick my hands in a “pardon me but don’t just stand there” way. I let go of her and bent slowly down to pick up the grooming brush. I had to hold onto the table. I had to bend over a second time to pick up my algebra book.

I put the book carefully on the counter. It didn’t seem right leaving it on the floor, even if the floor had been its choice. Maybe it couldn’t leap, but only slither or waddle. I moved around the table so I could keep an eye on it while I went on brushing Florrie but I was worried about Hix. No, here she was, shinnying up me like a kid up a tree. If she weighed more I’d’ve said she flopped across my shoulders, but it was hard to say “flop” about something that landed as hard as dandelion fluff. “You okay, sweetie?” I said, and Florrie wagged her tail—keep brushing—but I was talking to Hix. “What was that about? Where are the rest of you? Is Taks all right?” Nobody was barking, so I wanted to assume nothing too awful had happened, although I didn’t know what domestic dogs might do if suddenly confronted with a wolf: flatten themselves into doormats and hope for the best, maybe.

I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to the presence of gruuaa—or how sharply I’d notice their absence. How much heavier and more ominous the air was without them. I didn’t like the sensation that Hix had buried her face under my hair at the back of my neck, the way an unhappy dog will put his head under your arm.

I was feeling the armydar more strongly again, like the return of a fever you’d hoped had gone away for good. I could guess that Takahiro was feeling it too. It was nearly six o’clock, so time we went home and looked for Val. (And Mongo, who was used to coming with me to the shelter, and would reach the destructive stage of tragic mode soon.) I was carefully not thinking beyond that point.

What was I expecting Val to do? He couldn’t stop Takahiro from being a werewolf, or being stressed out by the armydar, and he couldn’t shut the armydar down. And two nights ago he hadn’t even known he was still a magician. Whatever that meant. For the first time since all this began—since meeting Casimir, since really talking to Val for the first time, since Hix, since the Copperhill cobey—I remembered that Aunt Gwenda’s house was called Haven. She’d told me when I was still really little that its name had originally been Witchhaven. They’d changed it to just Haven after they cut the magic gene out of everybody in Newworld—and witch became a word you didn’t use in polite company. (If you had to say anything, you said magician.) At the time my interest level in this information was a degree or two below “do you want a peanut butter or roast beef sandwich for lunch?” But I’d remembered it. I also remembered my mother saying, irritated but also uncomfortable, to my dad, as we bumped down the long narrow driveway after a visit to Haven, that one of the reasons she loved him was because he was so normal. I wondered if I counted as normal any more. Val didn’t.

I finished Florrie and put her back in her run. She sighed, shook herself all over, and collapsed on her bed. I envied her. I picked up my algebra book and went to look for Takahiro and Jill. Maybe it had just been time for the gruuaa to all go do—something. The stars and the weird wind and everything were their version of the late bell at school.

The three of us met up and headed back to the office to sign off with Clare. I was clutching the algebra book like it was my last friend, and while Hix had looped herself around my neck again I still felt that most of her was curled up under my hair. “You didn’t take your algebra book up to the kennels, did you?” said Jill.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” said Jill.

Takahiro was walking more and more slowly down the little hill to the office and the front gate. Jill was giving him the same worried looks that I was. “What happened with the gruuaa?” she said. “They all just kind of cleared off about a quarter hour ago.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Um—what did you see?”

We were walking so slowly she had time to think about it. “It was like being caught in an electric storm,” she said finally. “I think my hair sizzled. I didn’t like it.”

When we got to the office building the Family were lying over all available surfaces. It was after public hours so the barrier gate was open. Most of the dogs rolled immediately to their feet and came over to say hello. Bella was tall enough that Takahiro could pet her without bending over—although Jonesie had the answer to that one by rearing up and putting his front feet on Takahiro’s stomach. Jonesie is a Staffie cross—Staffordshire crossed with Sasquatch—and he wants you to know he is a dog of power and influence. The cats withdrew to the far side of the room and hissed.

“Off,” said Clare, making a grab at Jonesie. She glanced at the cats, clustered at the far end of the bay window and making a sound like a nest of snakes. “I guess you’re not kidding about cats not liking you,” she said. “But the dogs are making up for it, aren’t they?” Jonesie was back on all fours, but his place had been taken by Athena the greyhound, who, with her feet on Takahiro’s chest, was licking his face. Clare sighed, but Takahiro was (gently) pulling Athena’s ears and Athena, not a big tail wagger, was wagging her tail. I could see him unstiffening, but as Clare went off to raid the cash box to pay us, Takahiro looked at me and said softly, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Do what?” I said, but I knew. Where were the gruuaa? What else had happened?

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance—no,” said Takahiro. “I could just sleep on the couch.”

“No,” I said. “But we can take some of them with us. Clare’s got lots of spares.”

“What?” said Jill. “You mean in my car?”

“We’ll take the ones who don’t throw up,” I said.

“Oh, thanks,” said Jill. “I’m so relieved. Why are we taking them with us?”

“The gruuaa are all gone. All but Hix.” Jill’s eyes rested on my collarbones. She nodded.

“And the armydar—makes Taks, um, sick,” I said, conscious of Clare maybe being in earshot. Gruuaa could just be a weird teenage word. Werewolf she’d hear. “The gruuaa were kind of holding it off.”

“Sick,” said Jill. “Okay. And it can’t be good news that they’re gone either, right?”

Clare came back and shoved some money at us. “I need a favor,” I said. “I need to borrow some of the Family.”

“Borrow?” said Clare. “You know I’d let you adopt any of them in a second. Half a second. Adopt two and I’ll throw in a free set of steak knives. Adopt all of them and I’ll help you build the fence.”

“Ha,” I said. “I’ll take it up with Mom. But right now I need to borrow—several of them. Er. The big ones.”

She looked at me. “You know I trust you,” she said. “But . . .”

“The armydar,” I said. “It’s making Takahiro sick. Having critters around kind of—damps it, you know?”

She gave Takahiro a sharp look. In the office light he again looked grey, and it was like he’d lost weight just in the last few hours. He didn’t have any weight to lose. His face was all sharp angles like a connect-the-dots in a kids’ coloring book. She looked away again, at the Family. Several of them were picking up that there might be something going on. Jonesie, Bella, and Athena were looking from me to Clare and back again.

“Actually I do know,” said Clare. “I was thinking about sleeping on the sofa here tonight because the buzz in my head isn’t nearly as bad here as at home, even though it’s only the far side of the pony field.” The shelter stood on what had once been the orchard of Clare’s family’s farm. She lived in the old farmhouse.

She looked at Takahiro again and he smiled faintly. “Okay, since it’s you, hon,” she said to me. “But . . .” She stopped. “Who do you want? We’d better do the paperwork. We’ll just have a lot of ‘rehoming was not successful’ later. I’ll give you some dog food. And a blanket to put on the back seat. The big ones? I hope it’s a big back seat.”

“It’s pretty big,” I said.

Jill sighed, and went off to fetch the Mammothmobile.

One of Takahiro’s hands seemed to be welded to the top of Bella’s head, which was a good beginning. I also chose Athena and Jonesie and Dov, a Newfie cross who looked like a medium-sized bear, and Eld, which was short for Elder Statesman because that’s what he looked like, if elder statesmen were ever mastiffs. But the jowls and the look in the eyes were dead-on.

I was signing everything and Clare was dragging out a large bag of dog food when Majid came strolling in from whatever havoc he’d been creating outdoors. He looked around interestedly, twitching his tail. He took in the windowsill full of hissing, fluffed-out, bottle-brush-tailed cats and spurned them, as he usually did. Whatever was going on, he wanted his (un)fair share. He went straight up to Takahiro, lay down at Bella’s feet, and began purring.

Majid is the biggest Maine coon cat you’ve ever seen, and he doesn’t take any crap from anybody. This would be okay if he had a less all-inclusive definition of “crap.” I know Maine coons are mostly sweethearts, but Majid is a mutant. Clare had given up trying to rehome him. Most of the Family end up that way because nobody wants them—Bella’s too big, Athena has a torn lip from her racing days that healed so she looks like she’s snarling all the time, Jonesie is one big battle scar from before Clare rescued him from his previous so-called shelter and reformed him, and so on. Angela (spreading herself out ecstatically on the empty sofa) has only one eye; Mugwump growls at everybody. Majid, aside from being huge, is gorgeous—whorls of brown and mahogany with a little white on his chest and front paws—and people keep trying to adopt him because he’s so spectacular to look at, and can be very charming when he’s in the mood.

The mood never lasts long. He always comes back in a week or two having eaten the mailman or given the neighbors’ Rottweiler a nervous breakdown. He and Bella have reached an immovable object/irresistible force compromise, and he (mostly) accepts his role as a member of the Family, but Clare now locks him up (when she can catch him) when the shelter is open in case he takes a dislike to someone who, barring traumas involving a pissed-off saber-toothed tiger, might take one of our other tenants home with them.

“Oh, hi,” said Takahiro, surprised, and bent down to pet him with his other hand. Majid’s motor went into overdrive. When a thirty-pound cat purrs, the walls shake.

“No,” Clare and I said simultaneously. Taks looked up. Majid had rolled over and presented several acres of hairy belly for rubbing. Bella stood looking dignified (and disgusted). Athena and Jonesie turned their backs (which is a bit risky with Majid, although he was pretty good with the Family). Most of the cats on the windowsill were now staring in the opposite direction and trying to make their fur lie down, with mixed success. “We are not taking Mr. Destructo with us,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever petted a cat before,” said Takahiro. “The undercoat is so soft.”

“That’s not a cat,” I said. “That’s Majid. He’s a force of nature. Any resemblance to a real cat is bogus.”

“I’ll get the gloves,” said Clare. Pretty much only Clare or I could remove Majid from somewhere he wanted to be, but it was still a good idea to be wearing gloves when you tried it. The Majid gloves were heavy leather gauntlets with the cuffs extending most of the way to your elbows. He could just bite your head off, but he (probably) wouldn’t to Clare or me.

The Mammothmobile pulled up and stopped. I heard the bang of Jill’s door. So did Majid. Furthermore he was smart. As soon as I started clipping leads on our new escort he would know exactly what was up. Clare had better hurry with those gloves. I went out to spread the blanket in the car. With the back seats down there was a lot of room, although we humans were going to be squashed in front with the bag of dog food. Plus three knapsacks and an algebra book.

“It’s kind of interesting you’re driving a car big enough for a wolfhound and a mastiff to get in the back of today,” I said.

“And a greyhound, a dark brown bear, and a brindle utility vehicle,” said Jill.

“Greyhounds don’t take up much room,” I said. “They’re like dog silhouettes. But why today? Usually the Mammothmobile is stuck to the side of your house by several months’ worth of cobwebs because nobody wants to pay for the gas.”

“Nah,” said Jill. “Greg takes it out at least once a month and runs over any small annoying children that have piled up in our neighborhood since the last time he took it out. But I had an f-word moment this morning—although I didn’t know it was going to be animals. I almost funked out at the gas station. Mammoth gets the mileage of like the space shuttle.” She was tucking a corner of blanket under the seat, where it might conceivably stay put for twenty seconds after twenty paws started clawing at it. “What’s Mongo going to think?” she said.

“Mongo will be thrilled,” I said. “It’s bringing them back again that’s going to be hard.”

Clare had reappeared with the gloves at last and gingerly picked Majid up. He went ominously limp—you have the idea that cooperation is not Majid’s central reason for living—while Jill and Takahiro and I took the dogs out to the car and persuaded them to jump in the back. We started with Bella because what she did the others would all do, but she was too tall. We had to straighten her forelegs out and then lift her back end up and shove. I got the front end and Taks got the back. She put up with all this with her usual supernatural courtesy. “What a good girl,” I said, and gave her a dog biscuit, which made all the other ones want a dog biscuit too, so the rest of the loading was pretty easy, if ridiculous. It was very crowded back there, although everyone was looking bright-eyed and interested. It should be okay: they slept in heaps most of the time anyway.

I slung a bag of kibble almost as big as I was on the front seat. There were going to be four of us: Jill, Takahiro, me and a bag of dog food. Even the Mammoth wasn’t that large a car. I stuffed a few cans of wet food in the footwell under the folded-down back seat.

“I’ll get in the middle,” I said. When I wasn’t dealing with immediate stuff, like funneling five large dogs into a three-and-a-half large dogs’ space, my brain kept reverting to where are the gruuaa where have they gone and why? Hix was still wrapped around my neck, but she was too still, and if a feather boa could be stiff she was stiff. I couldn’t tell if my increasing sense of doom was just the gruuaa’s absence or something else: the armydar was making me stupid in spite of Hix, and we were about to leave the relative safety of the shelter and go back out on the street. Both Jill and Takahiro looked a little drawn, and Clare looked positively wasted, but that might have been because she was carrying a deadly weapon with a history of sudden unpredictable detonations.

Takahiro jammed himself in beside me while Jill started the car. There was a little panting going on in the back seat but I hoped nothing too severe. Jonesie was trying to get at the cans of dog food but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t succeed. And even with a Staffie’s jaws he probably wouldn’t be able to open them. Probably. “Ow,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Taks, and scooped my legs up and draped them over his knees. “Oh,” I said, startled.

I could hear Jill trying not to laugh as she said, “More.”

“Okay,” said Taks agreeably, rearranging my legs so they were over only one of his knees. Then he put his arm around me. I felt myself nestling up to his side as if I wanted to be there—I also felt myself blushing so hotly my head might explode and never mind the armydar. Jill put the Mammoth in gear and we started rolling downhill toward the gate. The pressure increased immediately: it was so bad you could almost hear it, although maybe that was just the bones of your skull grinding together. “Drive slowly,” said Takahiro.

“Of course,” said Jill. “There are a lot of loose animals in the back seat.”

As if on cue Bella put her head through the gap in the headrest. “Oh, sweetie,” I said. “I hope you’re all all right back there.” Bella, who was usually pretty reserved, lowered her massive head and gave me a brief lick with a tongue the size of a bath towel. I instantly felt better, and Hix stirred like someone waking out of a deep, drugged sleep. My head cleared—although whether it was more the armydar or Taks’ nearness that was messing me up I don’t know. I could feel Taks’ breath against my hair. If I snuggled—I mean turned—just a little bit, I could rest my cheek against his shoulder. This would be a good thing, because then maybe Hix would curl around him too. That was all I was thinking about. I wasn’t thinking about the warm weight of his arm around me, the way it tucked under my elbow so the long-fingered hand could lie palm up in my lap. I hadn’t thought about how long Taks’ fingers were since he had been that silent little boy folding paper. It was only because I was worried about how my old friend was doing that I picked up his hand and held it with both of mine. But I felt him relax a degree or two—like I had when Bella had licked me.

“Oh, big hulking suckfest,” said Jill. There was an army truck turning in at the gate, with the cobey unit logo splashed on its side.

“Pretend to ignore them,” I said. “Keep going.”

“They won’t be for us,” said Jill. “Not specifically.”

“I don’t want to find out,” I said. “Remember we’ve lost our gruuaa.”

“Yes,” said Jill. “I’m missing the sparkly shadows.”

The army vehicle had clearly seen us . . . and they wanted us to stop.

“Don’t stop unless they aim a zapper at us,” I said.

“Drog me,” said Jill. We kept rolling down the hill. The army guys didn’t quite want to turn in front of us, maybe because there wasn’t room, maybe because the Mammoth made even an army van nervous. But they went up the hill like someone who was planning on turning around and coming down again in a hurry. We got to the gate and Jill was bumping onto the main road and I was just saying, “You might turn up Rodriguez, they might not see us by the time they—” when there was a terrified scream from Clare, a shriek of overstressed brakes and . . . the sound of a large heavy metal object slamming into a cement post, like the ones that line the shelter driveway.

“Wow,” said Jill, looking in her rear view mirror.

“Did they miss him?” I said.

“What?” said Jill. She looked back at the road in front of her and finished turning. Then she turned again, down Rodriguez. Even the Mammoth knew it was carrying a load: you could feel it settle on the corners. There was the sound of scrambling in the back, but the panting wasn’t any worse. “I don’t think they’ll be following us any time soon,” Jill added.

“Go to the end of the road and stop,” I said.

“What?” said Jill again. “What do you mean, did they miss him?”

Even if some overeager army drone raced down to the gate and looked for us, they wouldn’t be able to see us sitting at the end of Rodriguez. “Just stop,” I said. “Please.”

She stopped. “You can kiss her if you want,” she said. “I won’t mind. And you’ve got a major bag of dog food for chaperone.”

“I—what?” I squeaked. I turned, but somehow I turned the wrong way. I put a hand out—just to steady myself. The dog food was trying to shove me farther into Taks’ arms. I wasn’t entirely sure Jill hadn’t given it a push from her side. My hand was on Taks’ shoulder. His arm tightened. His other hand reached across, smoothed down the back of my head, cupped my chin briefly. And then he kissed me.

Jill opened her door and got out. “I’m going to move those cans,” she said. “The clink, clink, clink is really annoying.”

This was so totally the wrong moment. Not to mention the tactical difficulties. I wound my arms around Taks’ neck (Bella gave the nearer one another lick as it slid past) and kissed him back. I unwrapped one arm so I could pull my fingers slowly through his incredibly thick hair. He moved a little, and slid one hand under me so he could lift me the rest of the way onto his lap. Fortunately the Mammoth had amazing headroom, even if not quite enough for a wolfhound. Taks’ other hand patted leisurely, delicately down my back—I shivered. He pulled me closer to him. I couldn’t get any closer.

Jonesie put his head through the gap between Taks’ headrest and the door. I could see him checking the situation for dog biscuit probability. And then I kind of lost track. I’d kissed a few boys before, but nothing like this. I had a sudden, extremely flustering memory flash of Taks’s long naked back in the bathroom mirror. . . .

There was a soft thud, and purring. Jill was just closing the rear door. I sighed, and let myself sag back a little. Taks let me go. Sitting on his lap made me seem as tall as he was: I never looked straight into his face like this. He smiled. Cheekbones to die for. How could I never have noticed?

“I’m sorry to break it up,” said Jill, “since this is obviously quality time, but if one of those army goons did get as far as to cross the street and look down Rodriguez, they would see us. Is this the him you wanted them to miss?”

I turned away from Taks, but this time I leaned against him quite comfortably. Majid, of course, was sitting in the driver’s seat and the bag of dog food was canted at an angle like an army truck had run into it from the other side. “Yes,” I said. Majid gave me a brief dazzling golden stare and then half-lidded his eyes again. I know when my life is being threatened.

“Well, he’s our hero,” said Jill, “So I guess it’s okay he’s coming with us, right? Will he eat me if I try and move him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Wiping out a cobey truck may have put him in a good mood.” I reluctantly climbed off Taks’ lap, gently pushed Bella’s head out of the way, knelt up on what there was of the seat to lean past the dog food, heaved Majid by a kind of levering process, and spread him over Taks’ and my laps, which he nobly consented to. He purred harder. He was making my teeth rattle. “We’ll go to your place the back way,” said Jill, and started the Mammoth again. It sounded a lot like Majid.

It was at that moment there was a tiny, whispery touch against my forearm. It might have been floating cat hair—Majid was a mighty fur factory, and there was the gang behind us as well—but it wasn’t. It was a gruuaa. A—tiny? Miserable?—gruuaa. It crept up my chest and lay just below my collarbones—and, trust me, it’s not like there’s an enormous shelf there for lying on. But the gruuaa aren’t into gravity much. There was some communication going on with Hix, I thought, and I was pretty sure whatever it was was making me feel tiny and miserable too. Maybe it was just that it was too easy to be expecting bad news. Even Hix’s sweet smell seemed faded and sad.

I laced the fingers of one hand through one of Takahiro’s—the one that wasn’t petting Majid—and he kissed the top of my head. I wanted to be happy, and instead I was more frightened than ever. My old friend and brand-new boyfriend was a werewolf and the army was after him. Us. Probably. And Val . . .

I wished I could talk to the gruuaa. Well, we’d be home soon enough. Too soon. Even draped with unhappy gruuaa (and a bone-shaking megacat) I could still concentrate on Takahiro sitting next to me—sitting next to me so close I could feel him breathing. (The bag of dog food was kind of a romance wrecker, but I could live with it. I could even live with Jonesie trying to catch my eye so he could express outrage at the presence of Majid in the front seat, when he, The Jones, was in the back.) Takahiro . . . sugoi. Super-quadruple sugoi.

A brief vision of Casimir’s grin lit up my mind’s eye. The grin and the dimple. I felt a brief rush of what-might-have-been. But Taks would never mistake me for a magdag whatsit mythic super-gizmo. He was there when Mrs. Fournier hadn’t believed me that I was feeling sick and I threw up all over the floor in seventh-grade science class. He’d been first on the scene in ninth grade when I stumbled and fell spectacularly over the broken paving stone outside the high school office—where I’d been summoned to discuss my failing grade in pre-algebra. I had not only skinned both knees but cracked my forehead on the step, so there was blood everywhere—and Takahiro had been the one to pick up the test paper that had flown out of my book with the big red F on it, across which Mr. Denham had scrawled Even you are not this stupid—and had never once said a thing about it afterward. Takahiro wasn’t ever going to think I was some kind of legendary hero.

Although right at the moment I wished one of us was.