Moonburn (5 page)

“I’ll stick with my tea, thanks.” Malachy was frowning. “Tell me, why is it so unlikely that a coyote male might breed a domesticated bitch in heat?”

Red popped the top of his bottle. “Because the coyote male would have to be in season, too.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Folks always seem to think that wolves mate for life, and coyotes don’t, but they’re wrong.”

I busied myself examining my nails and realized that, once again, I’d forgotten to wear the golden topaz engagement
ring Red had given me last year. I hoped he didn’t think it was symbolic; the ring just wasn’t practical with latex gloves, and besides, my divorce still wasn’t final. We’d decided it was a friendship ring for now.

“Fascinating,” said Malachy, stirring sugar into his tea. “So coyotes do mate for life?”

“Sometimes.” Red took a swig of his beer. “But sometimes wolves lose a mate and then take another. They don’t all just pine away.”

Still, wolves were a hell of a lot more faithful than people. After all, wolves didn’t wake up one morning and decide they were bored with their old mates. You didn’t get packs splitting apart because the alpha male had decided that the alpha female just didn’t do it for him anymore. Werewolves, on the other hand, were as monstrous as humans when it came to fidelity. Or maybe it was just my former husband who was monstrous, in either form.

I stood up and checked on our European-style coffeemaker. It didn’t require electricity, and Red swore it made a better brew, but I had yet to taste the evidence.

“Don’t be so impatient,” said Malachy as I started to press down on the plunger. “It’s not ready yet.”

I sat back down, feeling petulant. “I hate this coffeemaker. It makes weak brown water with grounds.”

“It needs to steep, and then you have to press down slowly.” Malachy sounded his usual autocratic self, but I noticed the tremble in his hands as he tried to lift his mug of tea. His face was even more pallid than usual, and perspiration beaded his upper lip.

Red took the water pitcher out of the icebox and poured him a glass, then said nothing as Mal reached into his pocket and extracted a pill container. “Here,” he said, as Malachy tried for the third time to open the top, “let me.”

“Thanks.” I couldn’t help but notice that the container had no label, and the pills were capsules, without any markings. I didn’t ask what they were; Mal took three, his hand shaking as he lifted the glass of water to his mouth.

Without my noticing, it had grown darker in the cabin, and Red began walking around the room, lighting the good oil lamps, the ones from the antiques store. We also had a few Coleman lanterns stashed around the cabin, which were easier to use but not as pretty. We did have an indoor bathroom as well as an outhouse, but since we were off the grid, the toilet had to be flushed mechanically by pouring in a bucket of water.

Sometimes I felt like I was on a very long camping holiday. And like I was living somebody else’s life, to boot. It had never been my ambition to have the smallest carbon footprint in town, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was only a temporary arrangement, until Red could build our permanent home.

The little brown bat had begun to flit around the room, and Red caught her and put her in the bedroom; in a confined space, bats really can get tangled in your hair.

As Red returned, he passed by the hawk, who jumped down onto his shoulder, reaching for a strand of his hair. “Easy, girl, you’ve got to leave me a few.”

“You have plenty of hair,” I protested. “You just need to let it grow out more.”

“I leave the Tarzan look to my friend here,” said Red, indicating Malachy’s woolly mane. Removing the hawk’s sharp talons from his shoulder, Red transferred her to his forearm. “Hey, Ladyhawke, why don’t you pick on him? He could use the pruning.”

Mal fixed the bird with a hawklike stare of his own. “I wouldn’t advise it. Say, isn’t it a bit early for her to be
nesting? I thought red-tailed hawks’ breeding season was in the spring.”

“She’s young,” said Red. “And confused by the artificial heat inside.” He set the bird back on her perch.

“She also appears to consider you a prospective mate.”

Red’s smile was subdued. “You overestimate my charms.”

“No, she does. Didn’t you see, she was attempting to preen you—see, look at her, grooming herself like a teenager preparing for a date.”

Sure enough, the hawk was fluffing her feathers and cocking her head in what I now perceived as a flirtatious manner. “So why does she keep trying to pull
my
hair out? Does she have a crush on me, too?”

Malachy took another sip of water. “Doubtful. Perhaps she’s trying to drive you away. On the other hand, it might just be general bloody-mindedness. It’s very common to find females displaying higher levels of irritability and stress just prior to choosing a mate. Often, she’ll alternate between inviting and rebuffing various males until she chooses.”

“I never realized the term ‘cock tease’ had avian origins.”

Malachy didn’t acknowledge my pun, making me feel slightly foolish. “As I recall, Red, you had the same effect on a young great horned owl a year or so ago.”

“Yeah, that’s me, the ladykiller. I think your coffee’s about ready, Doc.” Red reached up into a cabinet for a coffee cup and the hawk made another unsuccessful attempt at his head.

There was a loud, clinking sound as Red knocked the mug he was bringing down, which surprised me. Usually, he managed to move around the confined cabin space without bumping into anything, a trick I had yet to master. There were so many things to admire about
Red: his many practical skills; his calm, efficient manner; his wry sense of humor; and above all, his basic goodness and decency.

So why was I feeling so testy with him these days? I knew it was superficial, but part of it was his lack of care in his own appearance. When I’d first met Red, I’d thought he looked scruffy and a little disreputable, like one of those marginal men who do odd jobs and rent their rooms by the week. It didn’t take me long to see behind the local yokel disguise and discover how attractive he really was, lean and high-cheekboned, with steady, clear, light hazel eyes that took in more than they let on.

But now, as Red poured me a cup of coffee, I found myself wishing that he’d make a bit more of an effort. As soon as Red’s silver-flecked auburn hair grew long enough to soften his sharp features, he went to see our local Sweeney Todd to have it all mowed off again. And then there were those burlap-tough Carhartt coveralls, with “Red Mallin, Wildlife Removal Expert” stitched over his right pocket. I was never one of those women who drooled over men in Armani jackets, but still, you didn’t catch me wearing my bloodstained lab coat to the kitchen table.

“Honey,” I said, taking a grateful sip of my coffee, “you’ve got some kind of gunk on your … no, not that side, yes, right there.”

Red flicked at his overalls, and something flaked off into the sink, making me wish I hadn’t said anything. “That better?”

“Actually, there’s another patch of blood or something. Would you mind changing out of that?”

Red hesitated, then turned his back and unzipped the coveralls. At first, I took the stiffness of his movements to be annoyance at my request, but then I caught the way Malachy was watching Red. “Simple puncture wound, or was there some laceration as well?”

Red gave a noncommittal shrug. “It’s just a little love bite. Some of the blood’s dried, is all. I was just going to leave this for later.”

Now I really felt like the world’s worst girlfriend. “Oh, God, why didn’t you say something?”

“’Cause it’s not a big deal, Doc.”

“Let me see.”

With obvious reluctance, Red peeled off the coveralls, wincing a little as he extracted his right arm from its sleeve, revealing a series of small, reddened puncture wounds.

I sucked in my breath when I examined his arm, which was swollen and clearly sore. “Jesus, Red. You’re going to need rabies shots.” I realized that wasn’t the most professional tone to take, but I was a little shocked. In all the time I’d known him, Red had never once been bitten by any of the wild animals he removed from their lairs. Something must have gone very wrong.

“The critter that got me didn’t have rabies.” As if on cue, there was a high-pitched squeal of distress and then a flash as something dark plummeted from the ceiling to the floor. For one startled moment, I thought it was a bat, then I remembered that Red had locked her in the bedroom.

“Jesus,” said Malachy, “what the hell is that?”

“It’s Rocky,” I said in surprise, kneeling down beside the adolescent raccoon. Red had rescued Rocky last summer, when he had been cute and small and badly injured by a car. At nearly a year old and almost twenty-five pounds, our raccoon was now hale and hearty and more than old enough to be living on his own, but the call of the wild had been trumped by the call of our kitchen. Rocky was a raccoon who liked his carbohydrates complex.

At the moment, he was lying on the floor, clearly stunned, looking almost comical as he touched his little
black paws to his face. I glanced up to see where he’d fallen from and realized that he must have been hanging on to the chain that holds the largest lamp over the center of the living room. I had no idea how he’d gotten there without us spotting him, but I wasn’t entirely surprised. Raccoons may look adorable, but that bandit mask is no costume. They are wild things, and second to none in making a rumpus.

I ran my hands over Rocky’s dense salt and pepper fur, checking for injuries. Luckily, he was well padded with fat, the result of constant thieving. “What were you doing up there, you idiot?”

Rising up on his hind legs, Rocky looked straight at Red and gave a series of low grunts, for all the world as if he were giving his foster father a lecture. This wasn’t unusual; unlike Ladyhawke, Rocky didn’t actively dislike me, but like all the forest creatures Red rescued, the raccoon displayed a marked preference for Red. I suppose the animals tended to associate me with shots and stitches, while Red fed them and soothed them.

Red said something, a soft, long, liquid string of sounds that might have been a sentence or a word, and seemed to calm the raccoon down. Red reached out one hand and scratched the side of Rocky’s masked face, as he might have done a cat, and said something else that meant nothing to me but evidently had an almost magical effect on Rocky. With a soft churring noise, the raccoon shuffled over to the bureau, climbed up to a partially opened drawer, and hopped in.

“You’ve trained him well,” said Malachy, watching as Rocky settled himself among Red’s woolen winter socks. Red’s socks all had holes now, thanks to the raccoon’s sharp little claws, but I think Rocky knew what I would do to him if he tried to get into my underwear drawer.

“I haven’t trained him at all,” Red corrected him. “We
just have an understanding.” Rocky settled himself in the drawer, snout just hanging over the side so he could watch us, bright black eyes glittering. Red watched him, unthinkingly flexing his injured arm as if it were hurting him.

In all the excitement, I’d momentarily forgotten about Red’s injury. “Come sit over here,” I told him, “and let me see what you’ve done to yourself.”

Red didn’t protest when I took his arm and inspected the bite. Whatever had sunk its teeth into him hadn’t crushed down or shaken its head, like a dog, so the puncture wounds were small and neat and already showing signs of inflammation and infection. “So, tell me what kind of animal does this and isn’t a potential carrier of rabies.” Shapeshifters, like lycanthropes, are rapid healers, but I figured some viruses and bacteria could overtax even the best immunological defense system.

Red tensed almost imperceptibly as I pressed around the site of the wound. “Manitou.”

From his drawer, Rocky snarled softly, but this time, Red just ignored him.

“Don’t those things live in Florida swamps, chewing on seaweed and getting scarred by motorboats?” I paused. “Hang on, I need my supplies.”

I went into the bathroom and gathered my little first-aid kit, which contained sterile saline solution, iodine, antibiotic ointment, a roll of gauze and medical tape, and some other odds and ends that came in handy when your man liked to bring home injured wildlife on a regular basis. When I came back to the living room, I heard Malachy say something that made Red laugh, then stop abruptly.

“What did I miss?” I guided Red to the bench while Malachy readjusted the lamp.

“Red, manfully trying not to moan with pain.”

“Mal was just saying that you’re thinking of manatees,” said Red. “Not manitou.”

I wondered if that was the entire truth. When the moon was nearly full, I did find some enhancement in my sense of smell and hearing, but nothing like what they showed in the movies. It would have been nice to have canid hearing while in human form, but as long as my ears were situated on the sides of my head, there was a limit to my capabilities.

As I irrigated Red’s wound, I asked, “How long ago did this happen?”

“Few hours.”

“And you’re sure that in addition to not getting rabies, these manitous don’t have nematode worms and won’t give you trichinosis? Because from where I’m sitting, this looks like your garden variety small mammal bite.” Having finished with the iodine, I applied a layer of antibiotic ointment and began wrapping Red’s arm in gauze.

Red chuckled. “I’m sure. It’s not some fancy new word for a possum, Doc. These days, people translate ‘manitou’ as a spirit, the force that flows through all things. But my grandfather used to say that was the tourist version. He said that in the old legends, when they say Raven went to Beaver’s house, and they half acted like animals and half like folks, those were the manitou.”

“I believe the word’s Algonquian in origin,” said Malachy. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, but didn’t you say that your grandfather was of the Mohawk tribe, Red? I believe they were part of the Iroquois nation.”

I secured the gauze with a piece of medical tape and looked over my shoulder at Malachy. “You know, Boss, you’re being even more pedantic than usual.”

Malachy caught my eye and raised one sardonic eyebrow. “Am I? Well, forgive me. I’m always intrigued by the origin of words.”