Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (20 page)

“Is this the one who was exposed?” he asked, looking back to Gabby for confirmation.

She nodded. “One bite. It’s been thoroughly cleaned out, but . . .”

“You and I both know that doesn’t mean anything,” he said, and turned back to me. “My name is Angelo Magdael. I will have the extreme pleasure of being your jailer for the next twenty-eight days. If you have any weapons on you, please surrender them now.”

I’d been waiting for this, which meant I’d had plenty of time to consider my reply. “No,” I said, as politely as I could manage under the circumstances. “I appreciate your reasons for asking, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse.”

Angelo blinked. So did Gabby. Gabby—possibly because she had grown up with two sisters arguing with her over everything under the sun—recovered first, demanding, “Why not? I’m holding a gun, you know.”

“Yes, and so is he, and neither of you has a proper grip,” I said. “You shouldn’t keep your finger on the trigger while you walk, either. I understand the necessity of keeping control of the situation, but I’m not going to run, and even if I’ve been infected, I won’t be able to infect anyone else for twenty-eight days. We have a window. As for why I won’t give you my weapons, I’m a Price. We
never
give away our weapons.”

“Gun,” repeated Gabby, like it made all the difference in the world.

“Two guns,” I countered. “Also several knives, a garrote, one of my grandfather’s poison rings, and the technique for making werewolf antiserum, which I have memorized and have yet to pass on to any members of your organization. For the moment, you
need
me. You’re not going to shoot me until the need has passed. Now, I’ve come along with you willingly. I’m letting you put me in quarantine, although I’m going to have a serious talk with your father later about how long I’m willing to stay there. You’re not getting my weapons. That’s where I have to draw the line. Besides, if I’m infected, I reserve the right to fix the problem myself.”

Angelo and Gabby exchanged a look that I recognized in concept, if not in its exact details. They’d clearly been working with each other for a long time; they’d just as clearly been expecting me to behave according to their script. To be fair, they had probably used that script on all the other people currently in quarantine, and it had no doubt worked every time. Unfortunately for them, those people were members of the Thirty-Six Society. They had a sense of duty to their fellow society members, and to the country of Australia, which would be better off without a bunch of heavily armed werewolves running around the place.

My sense of duty was to myself, and to Shelby, and to the idea that I was going to find a way to beat this: a way to go home human. And if that couldn’t happen, I needed to be the one who decided when the battle was over. Allowing these people to disarm me, no matter how good their intentions were, was not the way to get what I needed.

“Mr. Price—” began Angelo.

“I don’t think you should waste your time, or mine, with this argument,” I said wearily. “Please. I just want to get to whatever room you’re planning to keep me in, and take a nice hot bath while I wait for Shelby to show up with a physician who can take care of my wounds without having a panic attack. I don’t want to stand here and fight with you. You won’t win. We’ll all lose.”

“This is very irregular,” said Angelo. He gave me a reproving look. “You’re going to get us into trouble.”

“Just tell Riley I was the one who wouldn’t cooperate. I bet you he’ll have no difficulty believing it.” I paused as something occurred to me. Looking to Gabby, I said, “Do you think you could do me a favor?”

She blinked. “You’re refusing to follow a simple request, and you want me to do you a favor? Did you hit your head when that werewolf knocked you over?”

“Asking me to give up my weapons is not a simple request, and you know it,” I said sternly. “I need you to go to the room where my things are, and get the mice.”

“Mice?” said Angelo.

“What?” said Gabby.

“I need the mice,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I don’t need my clothes or my books—although I’d welcome my books, it’s always good to have something to read while you’re in solitary confinement—but I need the mice. They need to hear what’s happened to me.”

Gabby nodded, understanding dawning in her eyes. “I’ll ask if they’ll come with me,” she said. “How much do you want me to tell them?”

“Tell them the God of Scales and Silences needs them to be with him; say that it’s a matter of holy writ,” I said. “They’ll come.”

“All right,” said Gabby. “He’s all yours, Angelo.” She turned and fled—taking her finger off the trigger of her gun, I noted, as soon as her back was to me. She was more frightened of the lycanthropy-w virus than she wanted to admit, maybe even to herself.

Angelo was staring at me when I turned back to him, an expression of utter disbelief on his smooth-planed face. “You called yourself a god,” he said. “You’re not really telling me those rumors about you having a colony of Aeslin mice were
true?
”

“Not a whole colony,” I said. “Just six. Technically it’s a splinter.”

“Man, you won’t give up your guns and you travel with a splinter colony of extinct theologians,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe you’ll survive this after all. You’re too damn weird to die of something as plebian as a werewolf bite.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right,” I said. “Which way to my room?”

Angelo started a little, seeming to remember his duty. “This way,” he said, and indicated the stairs.

The décor in this house was as basic and IKEA neutral as it was in the main house, down to the same brightly colored vases lining the stairwell walls. It was like they wanted people to believe that their properties were lived in, but only to a point. There was something faintly off about the whole place, like a showroom that had somehow acquired a whole ancestral home’s-worth of ghosts. A brightly colored rug blunted the edges of the stairs. It was the only thing that showed any signs of wear, with dull and patched spots breaking the lines of the pattern. That was almost soothing. Humans like to know that they live in the places where they exist.

The stairs led us to a narrow hallway lined with doors, all firmly shut. Angelo stopped. I did the same. “There are four bedrooms on the second floor,” he said. “Two of them share the master bathroom. The other two have ensuite bathrooms of their own. We’re putting you in one of the ensuite rooms, which means you won’t have a tub, but you’ll be able to take a shower if you like.”

“Can I get some plastic sheeting to keep my injuries dry?” I asked.

Angelo nodded. “I’ll bring it right up. You’ll be locked in. The door is opened three times a day for the delivery of meals; I’ll knock thirty seconds before I open the door. I never come alone, and I always come armed, so please don’t get any funny ideas about rushing me. You don’t have a phone, but there is a cell you can ask to borrow, providing you’re willing to let one of us stay to monitor any calls you want to make. I’d normally say that we’ve removed everything sharp, but since you’ve got your share of sharp things, I don’t think we really need this disclaimer. Do you have any questions for me?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly weary, looking at those four unmarked doors in this cheery, oddly distressing hallway and feeling like I was looking at my inevitable demise. “What happens when I tell Riley this isn’t the way to go about things? Quarantine is important, but this is overkill when you’re talking about a disease that can’t even be transmitted for the better part of a month.”

“If Riley hasn’t magically transformed into someone who takes advice from people who don’t belong to the Society? Nothing happens, except you piss him off. You stay in your room, we figure out a way to pick your brain without letting you anywhere near anyone that you might hurt. Come the end of the month, either you’re clean or you’re a monster. If you’re clean, we give you our apologies, maybe a fruit basket or something. If you’re a monster, we give you three silver bullets to the head and three more to the heart, and then we feed your body to the drop bears.”

“You realize that means you’ll run the risk of infecting the drop bears,” I said.

Angelo looked at me flatly.

I sighed. “Right. Okay, which room is mine?”

Angelo pointed to the first door on the left. I tapped my forehead with one finger in a quick semi-salute, walked over, and tried the knob. It was unlocked. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say, and so I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. The sound of a key turning in the lock followed only a few seconds later, sealing me inside.

I listened to his footsteps moving away in the hall outside my guest room-slash-prison before I finally allowed myself to sigh and relax. The tension I’d been carrying in my neck and shoulders didn’t drain away—I doubt anyone who’s just been bitten by a werewolf is capable of letting go that easily—but it did migrate down into my chest, where it formed an iron band around my lungs and heart. Breathe too deep and the whole thing might shatter. Rubbing my sternum with one hand in an effort to ease the constricted feeling, I took my first real look around the room.

If the guest room I’d been assigned before had been perfunctorily decorated, this one was positively Spartan. The walls were painted a soothing shade of beige that did nothing to make up for the bars on the windows or the cover bolted over the light bulb in the ceiling fixture. There was a bed: it had two thin pillows and what looked like a hotel duvet, the kind designed to be bleached to within an inch of its life. There was a dresser with four drawers. I walked over and opened them, driven more by dull curiosity than anything else. The top two were empty. The bottom two contained a spare set of sheets and a Bible, respectively. Despite Gabby’s joke about cable, there was no television, computer, or phone.

“This isn’t going to do at
all
,” I said, scowling. They could lock me in here at night, but during the day, I was going to need to be allowed out. I couldn’t do my research without a working Internet connection and access to my books; I couldn’t mix more of the only treatment that stood a chance of keeping me human without proper equipment. No matter how I looked at things, I couldn’t stay here.

The attached bathroom was as small as possible while still holding toilet, sink, and shower, and the shower left no room for me to keep my dressings dry. Angelo didn’t return with the promised plastic sheeting. I wasn’t really surprised.

In the end, I had to settle for a sponge bath at the sink. There was no mirror. Someone who wanted out of their situation could use broken glass as a weapon just as easily as they could use it as an instrument of suicide; it was too risky. I could understand every decision that had gone into preparing this facility, and I could even understand why they had continued to seem like good ideas after people began being bitten. But this simply would not stand. People who were locked up in conditions this tight for a disease with this long of an incubation period would worry themselves to death long before they showed a single symptom.

When I was clean enough that I was willing to live with myself, I returned to the main room and stretched out on the bed, resting my injured arm on my chest and tucking my right hand behind my head. War is war, no matter what form it takes, and when you’re at war, you get your sleep where you can find it. I closed my eyes and went under in a matter of minutes.

My dreams were full of teeth.

The sound of the door being unlocked jerked me out of my fitful doze. I sat up, my right hand going to the knife at my belt, and waited as the door swung open and Shelby stepped into the room. The mice riding on her shoulders gave a subdued cheer when they saw me.

“Brought you some visitors,” she said.

“Shelby.” I sat up straighter, letting go of my knife in order to run my fingers through my hair. It was still mud-caked, despite my attempts at a bath; I probably looked like some sort of horrifying genetic experiment involving a lab tech and a hedgehog. “I didn’t think they’d let you come to see me.”

“Oh, they weren’t going to,” she said, taking a step forward before crouching down to let the mice run off of her and onto the floor. “Dad came up with a good dozen reasons why I was never going to see you again, and Mum as good as said I’d let myself be swayed by emotion and let you out of here if I was the one to bring you the mice. It was a roaring argument; you should’ve been there with popcorn. Not that you would have enjoyed it much, since it was your fate we were mulling over, but at least you would’ve had popcorn.”

“HAIL!” cheered the mice, with more enthusiasm this time. They scampered across the floor and swarmed up my legs, running the length of my body to get to my shoulders, where they spread out like a tiny prison lineup. They managed to avoid stepping on any of my actual wounds, although two of the six ran down my arm to sniff at the gauze.

One of them squeaked something too shrill for me to understand. The other four went to join the investigation. That was . . . probably something I would need to worry about in a minute. I turned my attention back to Shelby, who was still in her crouch, looking nonplussed by the activity on my arm.