Helix: Plague of Ghouls (8 page)

“Snow in the swamp?” Ishmael asked. “Or in general?”

Dep shrugged a shoulder. “Trying to decide ’ow much insulation we’re gonna need.”

“The Hollow is sheltered from the worst of it.” He pointed to the nearby hills, which stood between them and the prevailing wind.

Dep unclamped the other half of the sawn board, set the two pieces aside, and began work on a new plank.

“Shelves?”

“Yeah,” Dep answered. “To keep da stuff off the floor—since we don’t ’ave a floor.”

“Cool,” Ishmael said, nodding. “That’s cool.”

He didn’t know if he should offer to help or what. Dep seemed to take pride and pleasure in his work. At Wyndham Farms, they had nothing more than a handmade hammer and a few salvaged nails to play with, but Dep worked with his carpenter square with ease and confidence. Dep was young—he’d been a teenager and very human when he’d been abducted to Wyndham Farms—but his motions seemed guided by years of practice.
Apprenticeship, maybe? A hobby, before all this started?

A bird flitted into the lamp glow and dive-bombed Dep’s collar. He laughed and the bird flew off. Ishmael smiled and watched the bird wheel around, fly low over Dep’s head again, flit up, then zip over Ishmael’s ducking head before disappearing into the forest.

“They do dat a lot out ’ere,” Dep said. “Ferox puts crumbs on my shirt to see if dey’ll come and land on me.”

Ishmael smiled. “They’re not afraid of us.” The first time a grey jay had strafed him with its wings, Ishmael had run like he was being attacked by bats. A country boy he was not, and never had been.

When Dep didn’t reply, Ishmael turned to look at him. Dep was staring at nothing. “Yes, they are,” Dep said. “Sometimes.” Suddenly he looked confused. “Sometimes they won’t come near us, no matter what food we try to offer dem. And sometimes they . . . Sometimes they . . . some . . .”

Dep paused, mouth open, eyes wide and rolling. He recoiled from nothing. He looked around, as if he’d lost his thought on the ground. Then he raised his eyes and surveyed the world around him. His lips moved, forming questions and exclamations in French.

No. Shit. No. Not this again.

“You all right?” Ishmael asked.

It’s only been a month! Infection is supposed to take half a year—that’s what Foster said. Six months! Not now!

Dep seemed to be following an invisible butterfly—a gruesome, deformed butterfly—and his head wobbled on his neck. Then he stiffened and his eyes clenched shut. After a long, long moment, the seizure melted and Dep blinked stupidly at the ground.

Shit, not now.
How long do we have? A day? Two days?

Just as suddenly as it had begun, Dep shivered, saw Ishmael standing there, and smiled. Goosebumps crawled up Ishmael’s spine and into the gland at the back of his neck. He put on his jacket, to hide the gooseflesh and fear.

“Hey,” Dep said.

Ishmael’s legs were frozen.

“What?” Dep asked.

“Nothing,” Ishmael answered through tight lips and clenched teeth. His therianthropic gland felt like a full bladder; one good startle, and he’d lose all continence. Fever overwhelmed the goosebumps, leaving Ishmael shivery and sweaty at the same time.

“I got something on my face?”

Ishmael shook his head.

Every lycanthrope experienced false starts differently. These were the irregular, unpredictable, shallow changes a lycanthrope expressed some months before having their first full-fledged transformation from man to were-animal. At first, a false start could be nothing more than a lengthening of fangs and a perking of hairy ears. Later changes could include claws, heightened senses, and an excess of body hair which would fall out in the shower. But most often, the first organ to experience a false start was the brain. In Digger’s case, he’d experienced seizures, temporary memory problems, and, toward the end, a total loss of empathy.

“You feeling okay?” Dep asked.

“Wore the wrong coat for the weather,” Ishmael said.
Hands around my waist, hoisting me up over a mouth wider than my shoulders—
“I’ve uh . . .” He cleared his throat. “I’ve got to head up to the main house.” He pretended to scratch his forehead. His brow was wet and cold. “You guys need anything?”
Aside from a guillotine?

Dep stood straighter and flashed his sloppy grin. The fangs were thick and spade-shaped, but not long. Not yet. “You got more steaks up there? We’ve got a fire pit now, we could cook them up. Maybe even give you one.”

Ishmael’s heart fell. In the time Ishmael had stood beside him, Dep’s eyes had faded from brown to burnt orange.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ishmael answered in a vacant, distant voice. On rigid legs, he made his way downhill toward the swamp.

He smelled Holly before he heard her coming.

“Did you change your mind? Do you want to come up to the house with me?” He needed to talk to her. They needed to make plans, one for Dep, one for Helen, and one for Ishmael. He was dizzy. “I have no idea when I’ll be back.”

“I’ll make my way there,” she said. “But not right now. I’ve been here nearly a month, and I’ve yet to harass any deer.” She caught his hand and pulled him to a stop. She searched his eyes.

“Just . . .” He slid his hands up and down her arms. “Be
cautious
, all right?”

She nodded wearily.

They kissed, and he left her behind, thinking about orange eyes and seizures.
But in the end, Digger’s eyes turned white. Dead white, like cataracts. Not orange.

Ishmael was only steps from the ATV when he heard light feet bounding after him. Holly stopped a few feet away, fidgeting and running her hand down her shirt. “He’s going to be all right,” she said. She massaged her hand. “Dep. He’ll make it through this. Helen, too.”

“Sure,” he said.

“They’re going to be all right.” She curled her hands into fists and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. White fuzz erupted along her angular cheekbones, and Ishmael moved to keep her downwind, before her change pheromones forced him into another early cycle. “Right?” She opened her mouth to say or ask something else. Bones cracked, and she shut her eyes so tightly that tears came out. Fangs began to descend, bloody and flecked with torn gum tissue. Whatever she had to say, she decided to keep it to herself. What she needed, immediately, were the trees, and she needed to run. She tore off her coat and left it hanging on a bush. A second later, she was gone.

Ishmael mounted the ATV, switched on the headlights, and drove northwest toward the main house, feeling very much like he was going the wrong way.

THE AUTOMATED ALARM
spoke in its best Star Trek computer voice. “Front door, is, ajar. Front door, is, ajar.” Ishmael shut the weather-proofed door behind him, and the alarm twittered a three-note thank you. Someone was walking along the upstairs landing, talking to somebody else at the far end of the hall. Voices echoed across the flagstone lobby. Under the grand portrait of the late Mrs. Haberman, firewood had been laid artistically in the great hearth, but no one had lit a fire.

Something was missing, though he couldn’t place it. All the furniture was there, as well as all the couches, coffee tables, and potted plants. He went across the lobby to the lounge and adjoining cafeteria to pick up a late dinner. Nothing looked out of order, but nothing felt right either. Irritated, he checked his fly. That wasn’t the problem. He asked for his supper to go, and charged it to his Wyrd member number, as usual. He headed across the lobby to the stairs. Those creaked the same way they always had. He went down the hall toward the east wing, past artwork painted by Wyrd members past and present, and passed an
art nouveau
sculpture everyone fondled for good luck, and still he couldn’t shake the sense that the main house was missing something. The echoes were louder. The air was quieter.

He’d once had a private room in the main house, as befitting a high ranking member of the Council. Now that room belonged to Burley, and even with the door closed, it smelled of orange blossom perfume and sandalwood incense.

The library door opened abruptly and Ishmael walked into the frustrated man who was coming out. Coffee splashed between them. They apologized like strangers, until they recognized each other. The Padre seemed much the same as he did the night they left Wyndham Farms: wiry, short, and light on his feet. Unlike the other Tiger Dogs, he’d packed on energy instead of muscle mass. “How the hell are you, man?” the Padre asked. He made like he was going to shake one of Ishmael’s hands, before he remembered they were both occupied with coffee and takeout boxes.

“I’m doing all right,” Ishmael lied. “I thought you were staying out in the Hollow.”

“Studying,” the Padre said, tossing his thumb over his shoulder at the library door behind him.

It was the last thing Ishmael had expected to hear.

“I need to work,” the Padre said. He pushed his slipping glasses further up toward the bridge of his nose. The spectacles were replacements for the ones he’d lost when fighting Digger, but these slipped as badly as the old ones. “It keeps me sane.”

“You could help Shuffle build his house.”

“And once it’s built, then what? No, I need an actual job. Even if I can never leave Wynd—Wyrd headquarters—I have to earn my keep somehow.”

Unless they’re only keeping you busy until they decide how to execute us all
.

The Padre explained that he approached Haberman directly with the idea: he’d learn counselling and religion, so that he could help emergent lycanthropes come to terms with their new state of being. Like the rest of Grey’s uninformed test subjects, he’d been torn from his life, thrust into a completely new body—one that forced him to grow a tail every twenty-one days, and hours after his first full transformation, the Padre had been chucked into a military-style quarantine to fend for himself among cannibals. The Padre understood the value of a kind word, a little truth, and some direction during the early stages of a lycanthrope’s new life. Haberman likely didn’t give a shit what the Padre did with his time, but if studies kept him out of sight and downwind, then more power to him.

During his explanation, the Padre’s smile diminished, and he began to look more like his old self, slow-tempered and level-headed, but tending toward the morose.

“That good, huh?” Ishmael asked.

“I don’t think I’m cut out for studying,” the Padre confessed.

“Give it time. You’ve got enough of that, so might as well make use of it.”

“It was a bad idea.”

“I don’t think it was a bad idea at all,” Ishmael said.
Of course, sermons full of hellfire, love, and redemption wouldn’t have made much of an impact on someone like Bridget, who’d just as soon have punched the Padre in the mouth, but for others . . .

The Padre fixed his glasses. “The more I look, the less I find.” He began to look hurt, too. “And the more questions I ask, the more people tell me that, no matter what else I become every twenty-one days, no matter if I killed my own brother, no matter how many other people I killed, because of the kind of
man
I am, I’m condemned.”

“Ishmael,” Angie Burley shouted from another open door at the end of the hall. “Lord, but you do take your time.”

The Padre looked over his shoulder like a scolded boy.

“Come on now,” Burley said, though it sounded more like “caw-mown-nao”. She tossed hair over her shoulder and sniffed impatiently. “No sense givin’ the whole damn briefing by hollerin’ it down the hallway.” She was average-to-tall in height, with lean shoulders and very wide hips, blunt fingers and crossed arms, broad cheekbones, skin as dark as espresso beans, and proud brown eyes. Now a werewolf and ostensibly killed in the line of duty, she took no bullshit from anybody, no matter how big they were or what they looked like in fur and fangs. As a werewolf, she had a classic, enviable wolfen form—tail and all—but she wasn’t half as much fun as when she was human.

And in terms of usurpers, Ishmael wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to take his place on the Council. She knew her job, she knew strategy, and she knew how to tell someone to go and kill someone else. She hated it, but she did it very well, and now that the post was hers, she’d fight Ishmael to keep it.

“You too, Padre. Come on,” Burley said.

The Padre tilted his head. “Who, me?”

“You see any other would-be priests runnin’ around Varco Lake? Yes, you!”

“What do you need him for?” Ishmael asked.

Burley rolled her eyes. “
Confession
, you sumbitch, now get in here! Lord cross my eyes, I cain’t believe how slow y’all are up here.”

“After you,” Ishmael said, pointing the way for the Padre.

“Where’s Holly?” Burley asked, as Ishmael and the Padre entered the briefing room.

“I didn’t bring her,” Ishmael answered.

“But I told y’all to come up—”

“I thought you meant y’all, singular. If you meant y’all, plural, you should have specified,” Ishmael said. Burley breathed a lamentation peppered with obscure Southern metaphors, and the Padre told Ishmael it might not be a good idea to antagonize her, or he’d never get another word in edgewise.