Moonburn (29 page)

“I’m sure he will,” I lied. The truth was, I had no idea whether our cat being out of the office right now was a good thing or a bad one, but I sure was getting a whole new respect for Red. Merely invoking his name in my mind made my left arm burn a line of desire straight to my heart.

“All right now, back to the asylum.” Mal and I headed out to the waiting room, where all the clients were talking loud and fast. The dogs were as agitated as their owners, circling and panting and whining, and one dog that must have started out as a beagle was baying loudly.

Like the other dogs, the beagle didn’t look like a purebred
anything anymore. His odd conformation made him resemble a mongrel with a fair dose of shepherd in his mix. The dog that had started out as a German shepherd hadn’t changed much at all: All that had happened to him was that his hind legs had straightened out, his muzzle had lengthened, and he had attached himself to my side as my beta. And Bon Bon, Kayla’s little dog, had grown to the size of an adult arctic fox.

“Enough of this horseshit,” said Marlene as she held up her Pekingese, which had already lost the characteristic pushed-in face and bulging eyes of its breed. “I want to know what the hell is going on here.” The little dog now looked like one of those new hybrids—Peagle, or a Pekauser. In another half hour, I supposed, it would look like a Pekinwolf, and then it wouldn’t have any Peke in it at all.

“All right, now,” Malachy said, cutting into the din. “Now, have you all written down your names on the list?”

We looked at Pia, who hurried back behind the desk like a dog scrambling back to its den. “I think most of them signed in,” she said in a tremulous voice.

“We need all of you to sign your name,” said Malachy, and the clients began to reshuffle themselves into a line in front of Pia.

I leaned in to Malachy, who smelled of antiseptic and medicine, and, underneath, of simian power and potential rage. I touched the moonstone, which I was wearing over a layer of silk underwear that looked like a turtleneck, but under my sweater and lab coat. “What’s going on with her?”

“I have no idea, the ridiculous girl won’t let me take a blood sample.” Malachy half turned his back to me and quickly palmed something, which he popped into his mouth.

I had a flash of her, gazing up at the full moon with
abject misery, unable to shift into wolf form. “Can’t you do something for her? So that she can change, the way I do?”

Malachy narrowed his eyes. “That was never the goal,” he said sharply. “We want the cells to achieve a new stability.”

From the front desk, there was a yelp of surprise. The queue stared as Pia stared at Malachy, quivering with emotion. “You mean … you mean you did this to me on purpose?” Her voice rose on the last word, and I could have sworn that her spiky, light brown hair began to bristle.
“You
made it so I couldn’t change?”

“Pia, this is not the time or the place to discuss such matters.” Malachy’s voice was severe, and ordinarily Pia would have cringed and acquiesced. Today, however, she narrowed her eyes.

“Just tell me this. Can you fix me? Can you give me a shot or something so I can turn back?”

The clients were listening, and I heard murmurs: What did she mean, turn back? He does terrible experiments, you know. I’ve heard he killed his own mother for parts.

For the first time, I realized that dogs weren’t the only ones changing. It wasn’t as apparent, but there seemed to be something a little more brutish, a little less civilized about the way Jerome was shouldering Marlene out of the way. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but it did seem as if Marlene and the other women were looking shiftier and more suspicious than usual. Northsiders tended to take a lot in stride, but mutating lapdogs was pushing this crowd’s limits. Kayla, in particular, was looking at me with narrowed eyes. “What’s this all about? What did he do to her?”

I ignored her. “Pia,” I began, but Pia kept her gaze trained on Malachy.

“Tell me,” she said.

Mal shook his head, so slightly that it was hardly a movement. He almost sounded regretful as he said, “No. I can’t reverse the process.”

With a howl of fury, Pia launched herself over the desk. Standing in front of Malachy, shaking with rage, she said. “I used to think I loved you. I thought I loved you more than my own mother. I thought you did what you did—I thought you were trying to help me. But I was just a test subject, wasn’t I?”

Malachy calmly reached into his jacket pocket. If he was surprised by Pia’s declaration of love, he didn’t show it by so much as a flicker of emotion. “I refuse to discuss anything with you if you’re going to have a tantrum, Pia.”

“Please,” she said, sounding like a wounded child. “Just tell me. Did I mean anything to you? Anything at all?” A single, fat tear slid down her cheek, and she brought her hand up to wipe it away, then stared at the moisture on her fingertips. I had never seen her cry before.

Malachy looked at the clients, then back to Pia. “I’ve already said all I’m prepared to on the subject.” Despite his cool demeanor, he was nervously fingering something in his pocket; his pills, I realized. He was holding the vial the way a child might hold a favorite toy, for comfort.

“Oh, you have, have you?” At first, I thought she was going to hit him, or go for his throat. But I had underestimated how human Pia had become. With a flash, she reached out and plucked the vial of pills from his hand. “Maybe I’ll refuse to let you have these, then.”

“Pia!” Malachy’s brows met, and his expression was thunderous. “Give those back this instant!”

“No,” said Pia, and her expression was defiant and exhilarated and frightened, a classic adolescent mixture. Of course, Pia wasn’t really an adolescent—not biologically, at any rate.

“Pia!” She turned on her heel and slammed into the office, and for a moment, I thought she’d run from his anger. Then I heard a crash and saw Malachy turn white and stagger. “My supply,” he whispered, and then the back door slammed open and shut. Ignoring the complaints and queries of the crowd, Malachy and I ran into the back office where I’d hung the William Wegman prints and saw that Pia had opened the safe.

I turned to Malachy, who had sunk into a chair and was holding his head in his hands. I put my hand on one bony shoulder. “Do you have any more of the drugs you need at your home?”

Malachy shook his head. “I had to use them all up to get through the full moon,” he said, resting his head in his hands. “I was just about to make up some more.”

I felt a pang of guilt, remembering that I had left him alone while I went wolfing it up with Red. Not that I’d had a choice, but still. I gave my boss an awkward pat on the back, thinking that in one sense, this was a success for Malachy. His little protégé had cried real tears today. And she had betrayed him.

No one could argue that she wasn’t human now.

An hour later, Malachy and I had secured the changeling dogs in cages and crates and closed the office. The crowd’s mood had turned uglier, with Kayla accusing Malachy of seven different kinds of abuse and Marlene ranting that the virus affecting the dogs could spread to humans. I was more concerned that the lycanthropy virus had mutated so that humans could infect dogs. After all, Malachy’s tinkering with the viral DNA had resulted in Pia’s transformation. Perhaps the mutated virus had undergone another transformation.

But of course, I didn’t say any of that out loud. Just as I didn’t question why the virus hadn’t manifested itself more during the fullest phase of the moon. In my opinion, that was the strangest part of all, but nobody had asked my opinion. Yet.

“If there is any possibility of interspecies transmission,” Malachy had said smoothly, “your best protection is to head home now and let me run tests on your animals.”

Reluctantly, the clients had dispersed. Now Malachy sank down into a chair in the waiting room, his head back, his eyes shut. “Right,” he said, rubbing his temples. “First, we need to draw blood samples. Next, we need to run through the various scenarios and determine
what we’re looking for. Then we need to chain me up in the basement.”

I gave a little laugh, to be polite, and Malachy looked at me as though I had just had an accident on the floor. “I was not joking, Ms. Barrow.”

“Oh, come on, Mal, aren’t you being a little dramatic?”

“Have I ever struck you as dramatic? Is that a word you have associated with me in the past?”

Okay. Point taken. At a loss for words, I realized that I had never seen Malachy in this kind of a mood; he seemed defeated. “So can’t we whip up a new batch of whatever it is you take?”

Malachy rolled his eyes. “My word, what a marvelous idea! Now, why didn’t I think of it? That was sarcasm, in case you failed to notice.”

I planted my hands on my hips. “And may I inquire as to why you can’t make more pills for yourself?”

Mal kept his eyes closed as he massaged his temples. “Oh, I can absolutely make more pills for myself. Unfortunately, by the time they’re ready, there won’t be enough left of me to know I ought to take them.”

In the charged stillness that followed his statement, I found myself observing inconsequential things. Sunlight slanting through the window, illuminating the dust particles in the air. The flyers on the wall for stray cats and runaway dogs, left by owners who wanted them back, and the flyers for cats and dogs up for adoption, left by owners who wanted to get rid of them. Leashes and dog treats for sale,
Dog Fancy
magazine on the low table. All the trappings of normalcy, on a day that seemed headed straight into the twilight zone.

“It’s still you, Mal,” I said, and my voice seemed very loud in the quiet room. “It’s not some other being. Just as my wolf is still me.”

“It’s not the same, Abra.” Malachy’s voice was curt,
either from fatigue or annoyance. “Maybe some essential essence of you is unchanged in wolf form. I wouldn’t know. But what I become … is deranged.” He paused. “And in that deranged state, I revel in my abased and degraded condition. I enjoy myself.”

“I don’t understand. What do you do that’s so terrible? I’ve hunted deer, Mal. I’ve grabbed a living creature with my teeth and dragged it down. Maybe that’s debased, but when I’m a wolf, it doesn’t feel that way.” I waited for his answer, my heart pounding. I had never talked about what I did as a wolf with Red. I had never discussed it with anybody, and I wasn’t entirely sure why I was revealing this now.

“It’s not terrible,” said Malachy. He turned to me, his eyes pale in his shadowy face. “If you think like a wolf, and act like a wolf. But have you ever been something less than human and more than beast? Have you ever had just enough awareness to pervert those basic animal pleasures?” Malachy held my gaze. “Have you ever toyed with your prey?”

I didn’t say anything, but the memory of what had happened with those young men replayed itself in my head. That had not been a clean, wolf kill. That had been me, between woman and wolf, and it had felt shameful.

“Ah,” said Malachy, leaning his head back on the chair and closing his eyes again. “I see that you have. And that is why people have always feared werewolves, I suppose. Because they combine all that is worst in both species.”

“Not always,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“Perhaps not, for you. But I was trying to isolate the genes that control aggression. And as I said, I do not turn into a wolf. My syndrome is more akin to the one described by Robert Louis Stevenson.” At my baffled look, he added, “in his novel
The Strange Case of Dr
.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. Honestly, woman, do you Americans even read books in school?”

“Hey, I saw the movie.”

“That would be amusing if it weren’t so sad.” He sighed, and I realized how much I loved arguing with him. Some people have special friends for seeing foreign films, or special friends for tennis. Malachy was my special friend for arguing.

He looked old with his eyes closed, I thought, looking at him now. When he was looking at me, I was distracted from the lines and shadows on his face. But now, he seemed older than my mother, who had two decades on him. “Mal.”

His hand still over his face, Malachy opened his eyes and peered at me through splayed fingers. “What?”

“Can you give me directions to make the pills?”

Malachy sighed. “And what good will that do?”

“I can make them for you, and slip them to you if you’re not in the right frame of mind.”

Malachy removed his hand and just looked at me.

“What?”

“You’re brilliant. Or I’m an imbecile. I can’t decide which.”

“Hey, maybe it’s both. How long will it take to get the ingredients together?”

Malachy sat up. “It has to be done in stages. I can write everything down and we can do the initial steps now.”

“I have one request.”

“At this moment, I do believe that I would do anything you wish, Ms. Barrow.”

I smiled, because it was pretty damn sweet to be hearing this. “Anything, huh?”

With a rueful shrug, Malachy amended, “If it’s within my power to provide.”

“In that case, as soon as we’re done mixing up your
potion, I need to eat something. Let’s go get some lunch.”