Men of the Otherworld (21 page)

Once Nick had his boots, Jeremy wanted to take a look in the appliances section. We needed a new toaster. I'd broken ours by stuffing two pieces in each slot at once, trying to speed up the process. Since the toaster was one of the few cooking tools Jeremy could reliably operate, we needed a new one—fast.

Few departments hold less interest for young boys than the small appliances section, so Nick asked whether he and I could check out the sporting goods. When Jeremy hesitated, Antonio pulled the “you worry too much” routine, which usually worked; Jeremy hated sounding like a worrywart. He told us we could go, as long as we waited there for them and I didn't touch anything.
Jeremy pointed us in the direction of the store map, and we took off.

According to the map, the sporting goods department was on the first floor. We were on the fifth. That left us with a decision: elevator or escalator. For me, there was no choice. I'd pick zooming down motorized stairs over waiting for a crowded elevator car any day. As we raced past the elevator, though, we saw that we didn't have a choice after all. The elevator was out of order. We ran past the sign, then Nick stopped and walked backward for a better look.

“Cool,” he said. “Clay, come here. Check this out.”

He disappeared around a rack of girl's dresses. I backtracked and found him stepping over a cord that roped off the elevator area.

The elevator door was open. There were tools scattered around the opening, as if someone had been working on it, but the serviceman was nowhere to be seen. I walked up beside Nick and we looked down the elevator shaft.

“Whoa,” Nick said. “Where's the elevator?”

I looked around, then pointed up. It was just above our heads.

“How far down you think that is?” Nick said, peering into the inky black of the shaft. “Twenty feet?”

“Maybe thirty,” I said, though I could barely see the floor through the darkness.

“Bet you couldn't jump down that.”

“Bet I could.”

“Bet you couldn't.”

“Could.”

“Couldn't.”

I looked up at him, meeting his eyes. “How much?”

“All the movie popcorn. You do it, you can have mine. You chicken out, I get yours.”

“You're on.”

At a low murmur of women's voices, I tensed and motioned for silence. We waited. No one appeared.

“You stand watch,” I said.

Nick nodded and walked back to the dress rack. As he went, I squinted into the darkness. Thirty feet? That didn't seem right. If it was five floors, and each floor was at least— I stopped calculating. It didn't matter. I'd taken the dare.

I stepped up to the edge, bent my knees, counted to three… and jumped.

The first thirty feet of the drop went fine. It was those last twenty that did me in.

By the time I reached the second floor, I'd picked up so much speed that when my elbow glanced off the side of the shaft, my arm whipped up over my head, wrenching my shoulder, and whacked against something protruding from the wall. I heard a crack, but didn't have time to register pain before my feet struck bottom.

I hit hard and, had I not positioned myself exactly right, I'm sure I would have broken my legs… or worse. As it was, I slammed onto the floor of the shaft with my knees bent, absorbing the shock, but the force of the sudden stop pitched me forward. My head hit the wall and I blacked out as pain ripped through my right arm.

I don't know what happened next. Being unconscious does that. Nick might have gone to get Jeremy and Antonio, but knowing Jeremy, he was probably already coming, knowing I was in danger—his usual sixth sense when it came to my safety.

They'd have wanted to get me out of there without alerting anyone, but I'm sure the moment Jeremy had realized I was lying
at the bottom of a five-story elevator shaft, unconscious, he'd decided this wasn't a time to worry about calling attention to ourselves. When I regained consciousness, I was lying on the floor, being examined by paramedics, and surrounded by what looked like every customer in the store.

The paramedics declared that I had miraculously escaped serious injury, which they chalked up to a child's resilience. My arm was the worst. When I came to, the first thing I felt was pain. Though the paramedics instructed me to lie still, I managed to twist around and get a look at my arm before they could cover it up.

My forearm was bent above the wrist in a way I knew wasn't natural. Just above the elbow was a gash at least two inches wide and an inch deep. My first thought was
hmmm, that can't be good.
I suppose the sight of my own insides should have been more disturbing, but living in the world I did, where I saw flesh and blood every time I caught a rabbit, it didn't bother me. The pain
did
bother me. I won't say I sucked it up and toughed it out. I was eight years old. I'm sure I cried.

The paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. An obvious step when a boy fell down an elevator shaft. Not such an obvious step, though, when that boy was a werewolf. Pack werewolves didn't go to hospitals. Mutts had been known to die from infection rather than risk a hospital trip. Fortunately, the Pack had devised a better system.

The Pack has always relied on the power of greed when it comes to finding services it doesn't dare accept from regular sources. If you're willing to pay a premium, you can find a doctor—even a good one—who's willing to set broken limbs and perform minor surgery, no questions asked.

Dominic had found such a doctor in New York, a well-respected physician who ran a side business offering medical services to the Mafia. Dominic insisted we go to him and paid all
our bills. And if the doctor ever wondered why he saw a lot of ripped flesh and very few bullet holes, he never said a word, just took our money and stitched us up.

The problem was that our doctor was over four hours away, and I had a gaping wound on my arm plus a good blow to my head. Jeremy and Antonio talked it over—out of earshot of the paramedics, but close enough for me to hear.

Antonio wanted me to go to the Syracuse hospital. Pack wolves are allowed to do this in emergencies, using the ruse of religious beliefs to prevent the staff from analyzing our blood or doing anything else that might lead them to suspect we weren‘t quite human.

When Jeremy hesitated, Antonio pulled the “you worry too much” routine again, but it wasn't necessary. Had Jeremy himself been lying on the stretcher, he'd have let Antonio drive him to New York, and if he'd suffered as a result of the delay in treatment, so be it.

But this was me. If I needed immediate medical attention, I would get it immediately. We went to the hospital.

The paramedics gave me something for the pain, so most of the ambulance ride was a blur. Next thing I knew I was in a white room being examined by a white-haired man in a white lab coat. After a few seconds of drowsy confusion, during which I feared the fall had affected my ability to see colors, I recognized the setting from a movie and knew I was in a hospital.

“So,” the doctor said, holding open one of my eyelids and peering through a silver instrument. “Why aren't you boys in Vietnam?”

I was about to answer when my fuzzy brain cleared enough to realize that it was unlikely he was directing the question at me.

“Haven't been called up yet,” Antonio's voice said from somewhere to my left.

I tried to glance at Antonio, but the doctor wrenched my head back so I was facing straight. At Jeremy's touch on my shoulder, I swallowed a growl and kept still. Both Jeremy and Antonio moved behind the doctor so I could see them.

“The recruitment offices closed shop?” the doctor said, shooting a glare Antonio's way.

He shot back a rueful frown. “I wish I could. I really wanted to sign up, but now that my brothers are gone, I'm the only one left to work on the farm. After the heart attack last year… well, my dad's just not the same. And, of course, Jeremy has the boy to look after. But when they call us up, we'll go. Gotta fight for your country. Can't argue with that.”

Jeremy made a noise of assent and the doctor seemed placated. Neither Jeremy nor Antonio would be called for the draft. No one in the Pack would. It wasn't a question of patriotism; that much prolonged contact with humans wasn't safe. Like I said, the Pack had long since learned how to take advantage of human greed, and they'd had two World Wars with which to perfect their system of buying draft passes for their members, and those that wished to contribute found other ways to do it.

“You giving these guys a hard time, Doc?” said a young dark-haired nurse as she walked around Jeremy and handed the doctor a chart. She flashed a too-friendly smile at Jeremy and Antonio, then winked. “You want my opinion, I think they should stay out of that hellhole as long as they can.”

“When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it,” the doctor said, snatching the chart.

While he read it over, the nurse mouthed “grumpy old bugger” at Antonio and Jeremy, and rolled her eyes.

The doctor thrust the chart at her. “Take him down for X rays.”

“Sir?” Jeremy said as the doctor turned to walk away. “Do you think he'll need surgery?”

The doctor seemed ready to snap something back, but noticed the concern in Jeremy's eyes and softened his response. “We can probably do this without operating, but let me see the X rays first.”

“Thank you.”

We picked up another nurse on the way to the X ray room. I didn't think my situation required a second one, but when we passed a young blonde in the halls, our nurse motioned to her, she saw Jeremy and Antonio, and seemed to decide our case was more important than whatever she was currently working on.

Although there was nothing wrong with my legs, the nurse insisted I be transported on a rolling bed. That meant as I was being wheeled down the hall by Jeremy, everyone else could talk literally behind my back. Everyone except Nick, that is, who walked beside me, looking miserable.

Jeremy had told Nick the accident wasn't his fault. I'd told him it wasn't his fault. Even Antonio, after a brief talk about “peer pressure” had, seeing how upset he was, agreed it wasn't entirely his fault. But he was still miserable. So he walked beside me, gaze on the floor, and said nothing.

The nurses said plenty, most of it seeming to have very little to do with my medical condition. They seemed very impressed by Jeremy taking guardianship of his “poor orphaned cousin,” and almost equally impressed by Antonio treating his nephew to a day in the city.

Antonio always introduced Nick as his nephew. That was always easier than having people calculate how old—or how young—Antonio had been when his son was born, and giving their opinion on the subject of teen parenthood.

For werewolves, it's common to tangle the limbs of the family tree when dealing with humans. Not only is it an added layer of protective falsehoods, but it solves one problem with our delayed aging.

Werewolves age slowly. Whether this means we can live longer than humans is debatable, since few werewolves live long enough to test the theory. It does mean, though, that we stay physically young longer. Like most of our special abilities, this is all about survival—the longer we stay healthy, the longer we can fight off attacks.

When dealing with the human world, though, it can be tricky. Although it's not impossible for a fifty-year-old man to look thirty-five, it does call attention to him, and no smart werewolf wants that. So we fudge our ages, and lie about our family relationships.

The slow aging doesn't kick in until one becomes a werewolf, so at Antonio's age, the difference was still unnoticeable. No one would look at him and say, “Twenty-six? My god, he doesn't look a day over twenty-four!” Yet in twenty years, they'd have a hard time passing themselves off as father and son. To make things easy, they'd played uncle and nephew right from the start.

The next few hours were unpleasant. Fortunately, the doctor had taken advantage of my drugged state earlier to put in my IV and stitch up the gash on my arm, so I didn't need to suffer through that. Next they x-rayed the break, which they called a dinner-fork fracture, one that could be treated with or without surgery.

Jeremy spent a half-hour in consultation with the doctor on that, and though I heard none of the conversation, I can imagine what it was about. If Jeremy let me have surgery here, he'd be in serious trouble with Dominic. Yet he wasn't about to accept half-measures that might leave me without the full use of my arm. Such a handicap would condemn me to omega status in the Pack—the bottom of the heap.

After much discussion, the doctor convinced Jeremy that my arm could be fixed just as well without surgery. Then came the gas, which knocked me out while they put my bone back in place and casted my arm. For the next couple of hours I floated in and out of consciousness. Jeremy stayed by my side, as did Antonio and Nick.

During one of my more lucid periods, I overheard Antonio arguing with an orderly about bringing food into the room. Seems it was against the rules on that ward. Yet Jeremy and Antonio had to eat, so Jeremy whispered to me that if I woke up and he wasn't there, he'd be back in a few minutes.

While he was gone, I surfaced to groggy half-consciousness only once, when someone in a white coat poked my uninjured left arm. I assumed they were fussing with my IV, which they'd prodded several times earlier.

By the time we headed home it was 11 p.m. The hospital had wanted me to stay overnight, but Jeremy knew that a longer stay meant an increased risk, so he discharged me as soon as I was alert enough to make it to the car.

Once back at Stonehaven, Antonio and Nick grabbed their bags to return home. Antonio had offered to stay overnight, but Jeremy argued that it wasn't necessary. Dominic expected Antonio home by morning, and Jeremy didn't want to make the situation here seem worse by having Antonio extend his stay.

Nick signed my cast before leaving. I wasn't sure what the
point of that was, but it seemed to make him feel better, so I made a big deal out of it. He persuaded his father to let him come next weekend to entertain me while I was semi-immobilized.

After Antonio and Nick left, Jeremy herded me off to bed. Between yawns, I tried to argue that I'd already had at least a full-night's sleep, but he insisted I needed more rest.