Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (30 page)

“As long as she’ll have me, yes,” I said. I walked over to crouch beside him, careful not to lose my balance. “Lift your arm. I need to get this tied off.”

Riley obliged. Blood loss must have been making him suggestible. “She’s always been my favorite, you know. A man tries not to play favorites with his kids, but it just can’t be helped, and Shelly . . . ah, she was special from the start. Jack was my friend, but she was my angel. I didn’t like her leaving. I certainly didn’t like her coming back with a man from a Covenant family.”

“Sorry,” I said. Wrapping a werewolf bite was a lot like wrapping a snakebite, only larger. I wanted to cut off the bleeding without trapping any venom—or werewolf saliva, as the case might be—inside the wound. I focused on that, rather than looking at Riley’s face. “And I’m not from a Covenant family. We quit generations ago.”

“Ah, not your fault.” Riley shifted positions slightly, making it easier for me to get at his arm. “I’m never going to like you. We’re not the sort of men who get along. You probably won’t like me either, once you’re safely married to my daughter and allowed to admit it to yourself.”

“Believe me, sir, I have no trouble admitting that I don’t like you right this second. I don’t need to be married to Shelby to tell you that I don’t care for the way you’ve behaved toward me, or your attitude toward sapient cryptids. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand.” I tied off the gauze and sat back on my haunches. “I also understand about playing favorites, and not wanting to let the people you love out of your sight.”

“That’s not going to stop you taking her away from me.”

I raised my head and looked at him solemnly before I went back to applying more gauze to his arm. “That’s because I’m
not
taking her away from you. Shelby’s a grown woman. She makes her own choices. I’m lucky in that she’s choosing to spend at least part of her life with me, and I’m going to do my best to make it the rest of her life—and before you say something about my getting her killed, I’d like to note that I’ll be working with her to make that life as long as possible. I never thought I’d meet a woman like her, and I’m not stupid. I’m not going to gamble with her heart, because there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get this lucky again.”

“So you’re saying she’s taking herself away from me.”

“No, I’m saying that you’re shoving her.” I tied a last loop of gauze in place and stood, moving away from him. “I’m going to marry your daughter, Mr. Tanner. I’m going to work very hard to be a good husband, and to give her the life she deserves. If you want to be a part of that life, maybe you should stop pushing, and start listening.”

Riley opened his mouth to answer, and was cut off as Charlotte, Raina, and six other Thirty-Sixers hurled themselves through the doorway and into the room. They stopped shy of running into the bloody puddle, proving that they understood contagion. “Riley!” cried Charlotte, and the sound of her voice nearly broke my heart.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, mustering a wan smile.

I moved around the puddle to the other side, where I caught the eye of one of the men—North, I realized—and said quietly, “You need to move him to the quarantine building, and then you need to search this whole room. The werewolf was waiting in here for us. I don’t think there are any more unpleasant surprises, but there’s only one way to know for sure.”

“On it,” said North, with a quick, decisive nod.

“Thank you,” I said, and walked past him, out into the hall, and away.

I found Shelby in the downstairs bathroom of the small house being used for quarantine. She was sitting, still fully-clothed, next to the tub, her head in her hands. She raised it when she heard my footsteps, just enough to see that it was me, and then dropped it back down. “Is he alive?” she asked.

“He is,” I confirmed. I had removed my bloody shoes when I got out of the already-contaminated basement hall. I tossed them into the bathtub, and followed them with my shirt, which needed to be either sterilized or burnt, depending on what our resources looked like. I moved to the sink to start washing my hands. The latex gloves had protected me from the majority of the biohazard risk, but it was better to be safe than sorry. “I managed to stop the bleeding, and your mother’s with him now. Did you reach Dr. Jalali?”

“I did,” she said. “She’s going to meet us here.”

“Good. How are your elbows?” I tried to make the question as light as possible, but it fell into the space between us like a lead balloon, heavy with meaning and with weight I didn’t want it to have. Some things are unavoidable.

“I didn’t break the skin, if that’s what you’re asking.” Shelby finally raised her head. She leaned against the side of the tub, looking at me dully. There was a bloodstain over her left breast. “Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.” I shook the water off my hands and moved to crouch next to her. “You need to take that shirt off. Please.”

Shelby looked down, saw the blood, and sighed before pulling her shirt off over her head. It joined mine in the bathtub. “Can she check me, too?”

“Once we’re finished examining and treating your father, I think that would be a good idea.” It wasn’t a good idea for me to touch her, under the circumstances; we still didn’t know whether she’d been exposed, or whether a few specks of infected blood might have somehow made their way under my bandages. I still reached out and rested the back of my hand against her cheek for a moment. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Shelby admitted in a small voice. “I’m really not. He’s my
daddy
, Alex. He’s not supposed to get ripped up by werewolves right in front of me. That’s not . . . this isn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. Why is everything happening like this?”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I think sometimes the world doesn’t really care about how we feel. It just keeps on turning, and we’re expected to do whatever we have to in order to keep up.”

“Fuck the world,” Shelby said, and buried her face in her hands again.

For once, I didn’t have anything to say, and so I didn’t say anything. I just stayed in the bathroom while she stripped down and showered, washing the chance of infection away. I kept the door open just a crack, waiting for the sound of Riley and the others arriving. Then we changed places, letting me get cleaned up while Shelby went and got me a change of clothes.

We had so much work to do, and we still didn’t fully understand what the enemy wanted. We just had to hope that we could figure it out in time.

“There is evil in the world. Things might be easier if there wasn’t, if good and evil were just concepts men invented to justify themselves; we could ignore them, then. Sadly, good and evil are both very real, and very inconvenient.”

—Martin Baker

Sitting on the front porch of a secluded guesthouse in Queensland, Australia

I
T WAS A BEAUTIFUL
night. I could see the lights on in the main house from where I sat on the guesthouse porch. Jett was stretched out next to me with her head down on her paws, while my hands rested limply on my knees. The front door was open, and noises drifted down the stairs as Riley and his various companions dealt with their own issues. Technically, since it was full dark and the moon was up, I should have been locked in my own room, waiting for morning to prove that I wasn’t a werewolf yet: that was the deal I’d agreed to in order to buy my own transitory freedom. Deals seemed to have fallen by the wayside, under the circumstances.

Someone stepped on the porch beside me. I held up my hand, and was rewarded with a cool glass bottle being pressed into my palm. I lowered my arm and took a swig. Ginger beer. Sharp, sweet and bitter at the same time, and nonalcoholic. A good choice.

“All right, now you need to explain yourself.” Dr. Helen Jalali sat next to me, giving me a quizzical sidelong look. She had a ginger beer of her own, and her lab coat was pristinely white, serving as a symbol of her office and a “do not shoot the person wearing me” at the same time. “How did you know it was me, and how did you know I was bringing you a drink?”

“Wadjet have a very specific stride,” I said. “It took me a while to figure out how you distribute your weight, but after spending a year dealing with Chandi and her constant demands to see her fiancé, I caught on. There’s only one wadjet here, so it had to be you.”

“And the drink?”

“Lucky guess.” I took another swig. “What did the mice say?”

Helen sighed. “They said the infection was in him. I’ve patched his wounds and given him the anti-lycanthropy treatment, and I’ve agreed to come back the next three days to treat him again. He’s still very much in the woods. We could lose him. I’m not going to lie to you about that.”

That explained why Shelby hadn’t come out. All three Tanner sisters were inside, as was their mother, and they had more than enough on their plates at the moment. I would have been a distraction. “How’s he taking it?”

“Surprisingly well,” she said, shaking her head. “He thanked me for my service. Thanked me! A Thirty-Sixer! Honestly, that alone was worth getting involved in this whole sordid mess. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“This isn’t the time to go into the whole history of colonization in Australia,” not with God only knew how many werewolves still roaming Queensland, “but what is the deal with you and the Society? I thought they had rejected Covenant teachings.”

“They did and they didn’t.” Helen took a swig of ginger beer. “This happened before I was born, all right? I wasn’t here for any of it. My family didn’t even move here until two generations ago.”

“Secondhand knowledge at least gives me someplace to start,” I said.

“Just so we’re clear,” said Helen. “The Thirty-Six Society rejected the Covenant not because they were perfect paragons of equality and enlightenment. They just didn’t like the idea of killing everything that already lived here. They sort of went ‘Adam and the Garden’ conservationist. Taking care of all the poor, misguided, unprotected animals that needed the benefit of their wisdom and experience and firearms.”

“I’m guessing ‘animals’ that were capable of talking back didn’t fit that mission statement,” I said.

Helen nodded. “They’ve never been particularly nasty. I mean, we don’t have to deal with being hunted through the streets or ‘cleansed’ out of our neighborhoods, not the way it would have been under the Covenant. But when the Covenant was first sent packing and the Society was getting itself organized, we had some rough elements show up thinking Australia was the new wild frontier, and that they could do anything they damn well wanted. The Society closed ranks damn fast after that happened. Said if something wasn’t human, it deserved conservation, but it didn’t get a voice in how that conservation happened. Between that and their approach to ‘invasive species’ . . .” Her tone turned bitter. “As if European settlers weren’t the most invasive species this continent has ever seen. There are fewer than three hundred wadjet in the country, but some of the Society would be happy to send us all packing, because we don’t ‘belong here,’ and somehow they do.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “I don’t care if I have to move to Australia and spend all my time yelling at people; no one’s getting deported or sent away. You’re Australian citizens by virtue of birth, same as anyone else who was born or hatched or budded here. No one gets to tell you differently.”

Helen smiled a little. “I knew there was a reason Kumari liked you. And it’s not just that fabulous mammalian butt of yours.”

I blinked at her, not sure what to say to that. Helen’s laughter split the night like an ax, and we sat for a little longer in silence, waiting to see what the night was going to bring next.

It was nice to have a little bit of a break. I needed the time to think. Most of my life is lived in laboratories and offices, places where things go slowly enough that I can really consider my next move and what it’s going to mean for the situation at hand. Since getting to Australia, it felt like I’d been rolling from argument to crisis to argument again. And that wasn’t good. That wasn’t how I did my best work.

“You’re a doctor,” I said abruptly. “What kind of doctor are you?”

“See, that’s the sort of question I would have expected someone to ask before I was providing emergency medical care to the lot of you,” said Helen. “I trained as an oncologist before I came out here as a general practitioner. It’s an odd specialization, I’ll admit, but it meant I didn’t have to deal with as many humans before it was time for me to settle down and start a family of my own. The ones I saw, I saw a lot, and that let me learn how to deal with mammals better. I’ve been a GP long enough now to be quite good at it, if that’s a concern. I can’t catch most of the diseases you mammals carry. I get to do some good for the human populace, and keep admitting privileges and access to certain pharmaceuticals that my people have real use for.”

“Sounds like everyone wins, then,” I said. “How much do you know about the lycanthropy family?”

“Nasty business, related to rabies, and this is the first major outbreak I’ve heard of on this continent,” she said. “We’ve had some issues with a few nasty strains in India, but I’ve never been there, so I don’t have frontline experience.”

“Right. Everything we have says that once someone is infected and capable of transforming, they’re not really rational anymore—that they’re essentially beasts in their transformed state. But the werewolves we’re dealing with here are showing complex planning behaviors
while
transformed. They’re capable of lying in wait while they let their targets get into position. It doesn’t feel right somehow. It doesn’t mesh with what we know about this disease.”

Helen took a swig of her ginger beer, expression going thoughtful. “Didn’t this start off as spillover from the therianthropes?” she asked. “It was their disease first.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “We think it originated with either the wulver or the faoladh. We’ve never really spent the time or resources to try to nail down the origins of the infection. Most of the likely origin points are firmly within Covenant territory, and knowing where rabies lurks naturally hasn’t enabled us to cure it.”

“Right. See, here’s the thing. I’ve never met whatever that second one you said was, but I’ve met wulver. They’re perfectly nice people, and they’re not ravening beasts when they’re transformed. A little impulsive, sure, and really offended if you try to play fetch with them—mostly because they
will
play fetch, and then they feel bad about letting their instincts take over—but still people. They’re just people who look different.”

“That doesn’t match the data we have on werewolves,” I said, a sick feeling starting to form in the pit of my stomach. “I think we’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“What’s that?” Shelby sounded weary. I turned to see her standing behind us. She had replaced her bloodstained shirt with one pilfered from the clothing we’d moved into my temporary room. It hung around her like a shroud, save where it caught on the slope of her breasts and became slightly, distractingly too small. She smelled like strawberry shampoo and industrial soap.

“How’s your father?” I asked.

“Stable. He’s kicked everyone out of the room except for Mum, and they’re having a serious talk. There’s going to be a flood of people through here as soon as everyone finishes regrouping. Raina’s locked herself in the hall toilet. I think Gabby wants to do the same, except there’s only one hall toilet. We still don’t know who sent us to the meadow, and now everyone’s so upset that I don’t see how I’ll be able to get them asking again, which puts it all on me.” Shelby shook her head. “It’s a mess, Alex, it’s a stupid, horrible mess, and I don’t know how we’re going to clean it up. What was the terrible mistake?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Just as I came out here you said that we’d made a terrible mistake, and I know you’re not as dumb as you sometimes want people to think you are, so whatever it was, it’s something you don’t want to say in front of me.” Shelby wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to ward off a chill, even though it was a pleasant, even balmy night. “What mistake? What did we get wrong?”

“Ah.” I put my ginger beer aside and stood, trying to collect my thoughts. I would have had to tell her what I’d realized eventually: that was the nature of both our work and our relationship. Secrets get people killed. But I’d been hoping, on some level, to have a few minutes to work things through on my own. “Remember when I said that most werewolves were killed within the first month after their infection, when we followed the trail of carnage back to their lairs and put them down for their own sake?”

Shelby’s expression hardened. “Yes,” she said coldly, and I immediately regretted my words. Until we knew whether Riley was going to successfully fight off the infection, talking about werewolves in such absolutist terms was going to be a minefield.

“Helen just pointed something out to me. Lycanthropy began as a therianthrope disease, and therianthropes aren’t beasts when transformed. They may have different instincts—the mind is to some degree a plaything of the body—but they’re still people.” What I was about to say went against everything I had been raised to believe, and I had to wonder on some level whether my grandfather had known. Grandma Alice always said Grandpa Thomas was the smartest man she’d ever met, and he was the one who’d written most of our response plans for werewolf attacks. He’d also known, by then, that we were morally opposed as a family to anything that smacked of killing people for the crime of being dangerous.

Had he understood that werewolves were
too
dangerous to coexist with humans, thanks to the disease that made them, and written his instructions accordingly? He’d married into the family. He’d helped to shape it, both with his genes and with his teachings. But he’d never quite embraced the Healy line’s odd form of pacifism.

“What are you saying?” asked Shelby slowly.

“I’m saying that therianthropes are people when they’re transformed because they were people to begin with. We’ve always believed that werewolves became animals when they transformed, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the problem is that we’ve always been dealing with
new
werewolves, who were still disoriented and panicked by their own transformations, and hence reacted like animals.” And then there were the
actual
animals to be considered. Turning into a wolf didn’t make a sheep or a cow any smarter—and once they had reached the stage of fully transforming, we wouldn’t be able to tell them from a werewolf that started out as a human being. All werewolves looked essentially the same in their lupine forms, and they didn’t change back after they were killed. So every infected animal reinforced the idea that werewolves were irrational killing machines, and meanwhile, we continued to ignore the threat of werewolves that had originally belonged to sapient species. Their heads might be muddled when they first got sick, but after . . .

After, they would be able to plan, if they lived long enough. They would be able to consider their actions, and adjust their tactics according to the way the people around them reacted. They would
learn
. And through it all, they would be motivated by two desires: to survive, and to spread. We knew from our interactions with lycanthropes of all kinds that they shared that much at least, regardless of their starting species or how long they had been infected. All lycanthropes wanted to spread the disease that had created them.

“Wait,” said Shelby. “I thought you said werewolves couldn’t think. That they were just dumb, violent animals. That’s what you
said
.”