Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (21 page)

“—foxes’re all high-strung—” “—on drugs, Ah bet yew—” “—couple faggots—” “—business out in public—”

“I don’t know,” Mike said in a low voice. His muzzle, inches from Alexei’s, exhaled warm breath, filled with the scents of the meal they’d shared.

Alexei tucked his lower lip under both canine fangs and bit, the habitual action and familiar small pain sending him spinning back down into his past. He looked into Mike’s eyes and saw confusion, hurt, emotions for which he had no answer in this place, in this time. He couldn’t tell him it would be all right, he couldn’t tell him that one day they would get away from this place, from the people causing the hurt, because this time the one causing the hurt was him.

Konstantin held his throat in check, but he was able to force out the word, “Sorry,” in two choked syllables before turning and running toward the nearest exit, down the stairs to the room full of games.

Blessed cacophony enfolded him, lights and noise and the scents of fifty or so people in the heat of competition. Even though his head had begun to pound, Alexei lost himself in it, stumbling between rows of video games and islands of multi-player competitions until he came to rest against a shooting machine. With one trembling paw, he clutched the console, looked over, and saw—

—a public square, the statue of a tiger in the middle of it, filled with zombie soldiers in military coats lurching toward him—

—and he yelled and ran until he hit a uniformed goat, barely older than he himself was, who grabbed his shoulders and said, “Hey, hey, no running.”

“Got to get out,” Alexei sobbed.

“Jesus Sheep,” the goat swore. “Okay, okay, there’s a bathroom out this way. Don’t puke on the floor.”

He led Alexei to a back hall and held the door of the bathroom for him. But Alexei caught the red glow of the exit sign up a narrow, dark staircase, and said, “Outside.”

“Suit y’self.” The goat let go and retreated a couple steps, making sure Alexei wasn’t going to head back to throw up on his carpet.

Alexei stumbled up the stairs and threw himself against the door. The hot, muggy air did nothing to relieve the pressure in his throat and chest, nor did the silence of the alley help clear or distract his thoughts. Rotting food and smoke fought with car exhaust from the nearby road to offend his nose. Alexei ran to a dumpster and leaned back into the corner it made with the stone wall behind it. The smell of garbage, terrible, nearly overwhelming, was what he deserved.

Weak.

“It is all right to be weak,” he said. “It’s all right. I don’t have to beat up everyone. Mike is a nice guy.”

Out here in the alley, the words flowed more easily, the constriction in his chest loosening. But the other voice was still there in his head.
If you show weakness, people will exploit it.

“Who? I am no soldier!”

Military, government, family, society. It is all the same. And you are forsworn.

Alexei shuddered. “I haven’t done anything,” he said. “I was just having dinner with a guy.”

Yes, and what were your intentions regarding this sheep?

The word “sheep” echoed with disgust. Alexei clutched his head below his ears. “Did you help my sister?”

The tension in his chest vanished, though the pounding in his head remained, a thick pulsing that pushed against the space between his eyes from the inside with every heartbeat. He closed his eyes, and as he did, another smell intruded on the thick smell of refuse, a smell of cold and stone and ice, a smell of fox and earth and thick wool. His stomach fluttered, and he pressed himself back into the wall as Siberian words echoed off the concrete wall, the metal dumpster.

“
If you care so little for your promises, then how shall I regard those I made to you?
”

The voice sounded strange in his ears here in the real world, without the filter of dreams. “
You are not real
,” Alexei rasped through gritted teeth, the tightness in his chest all his own now. “
You are stress and worry and…
”

“
And sadness
.” The voice moved closer to his ears. “
Yes. All of that
.”

Alexei felt the wave of it, and then felt movement with his whiskers. He shrank back, but nothing touched him. The weight of his sister’s plight came down on him again. He had been a fool to trust a ghost, a hallucination, to produce any effect in the real world. “
You’ve done nothing to help Cat. I was a fool. You only wanted—
”

“
I promised
.” The fox’s growl echoed in the alley. Alexei’s whiskers registered motion in time for him to flinch, not quickly enough for him to escape the cuff to the side of his head that sent it into the metal wall of the dumpster.

Pain shot through his skull and sparks flared behind his closed eyes. A moment later, his ear rang and the side of it where it had been crushed into the dumpster throbbed with pain as well. He squeezed his eyes shut as his legs nearly gave way; he would have landed on the ground had he not thrown out an arm to steady himself.

Konstantin’s words penetrated the red haze and the ringing in his ears.
“…dreams are difficult to navigate. I will continue to search, as long as you hold to your promise
.”

Alexei wanted to keep his eyes closed. He could imagine that the voice was in his head, that his nose was addled with the horrible smells, that he had slipped and banged his head into the dumpster. He did not want to open his eyes and see the military coat against the backdrop of the alley, the gold sash bright against the navy. He wanted his ghosts to remain in his dreams, insubstantial, where they belonged.

“
Think of your sister
,” Konstantin said. “
If you value her future…
”

“
You’ll help her get away from my parents
.”

Fingers gripped the end of his muzzle and lifted it. Alexei could not keep his eyes closed; they flew open and he stared into the cold dark eyes of the older fox.

Here in the darkness, details about him were not as clear as they were in the dream, where Alexei could focus on the grey patches on his muzzle and around the edges of his ears, or the short cropped fur along his cheeks. The notch in his ear seemed to glow with the light behind it, but otherwise Alexei’s gaze jumped about, taking in the dry black nose, the tips of the canine teeth visible over the fox’s lip, the black smudge down his muzzle. He could not smell Konstantin’s breath as anything other than moist, wet earth, like the smell from his dream.

“
I will find this Chichikov
,” Konstantin said. “
Your parents I will judge when the time comes
.”

Alexei’s heart hammered against his chest. He did not feel Konstantin’s false confidence inside him, but when the issue was his sister… “
My father drinks
,” he said roughly. “
My mother does too. They don’t love their children
.”

Konstantin narrowed his eyes, searching Alexei’s. “
I know this
.”

“
They abandoned us. The life they chose—it was killing us
.”

“
They would have made you marry, and have cubs
.”

The old soldier was about to go on about the laws of nature, Alexei knew, and he barely had the strength to meet that argument. His head still rang and his headache had gotten much worse. So he interrupted. “
They did not care for their family
,” he said. “
They struck us, harmed us
.”

Konstantin’s rough voice bored into Alexei’s ears. “
To correct you. To discipline. To make you a better person. Where they failed, I will—
”

“
For no reason but their own weakness! Being parents doesn’t make your actions right!
” He and Cat had said these words to each other many times, but he had never said them to another.

They rang against the metal of the dumpster, echoed, and vanished. Konstantin’s ears flattened and his eyes flickered; light struck them, showing Alexei the wide slits of the older fox’s pupils. He felt as though he were looking into a carnival mirror that showed what you would look like in forty years.

For a moment, he thought Konstantin might strike him again. The fox’s breathing quickened, harsh and loud, and he glared at Alexei for a full ten seconds before his eyes and whiskers relaxed and his ears came back up. “
I will see you again
,” he said, and then the fingers released Alexei’s chin.

He sagged back against the wall as Konstantin straightened, brushing a paw down his dark blue coat. The sash he wore bore stains, but not as many as Alexei remembered from his dream. It shone in the darkness, and then swept out of view behind the dumpster.

The alley went still to his ears, eyes, and whiskers. He lay against warm brick and cooler metal, inhaling refuse and urine and trying not to think about what had just happened. A hallucination was anything imagined, so he supposed that he could have imagined the feelings, the conversation, and the smack on his muzzle. The pain all down one side of his head, whatever the source, was very real. He closed his eyes and tried to relax.

“Hello?” A voice came to him from the other side of the alley, and footsteps sounded. “Hello? Someone here?”

If he didn’t respond, perhaps she would leave. But the footsteps grew louder, near enough him that Alexei opened his eyes. A moment later, a white-tailed deer stepped into his field of vision. “Hey,” she said in a soft voice. “You doing okay? Had a little too much?”

He shook his head slowly. “I am fine,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?” Her drawl indicated that she definitely was.

“No.” He put one paw to his head, pressing in on the spot that had hit the dumpster, and he winced. “From Siberia.”

“Oh, that’s what you were speaking.”

He lifted his eyes to focus on her soft blue ones, above a warm smile. “I suppose so.” He wanted to ask if she had heard only him or if there had been another voice, but he was afraid that she would say yes, and he was afraid that she would say no. So he kept the question stifled in his head and said, “I am sorry for causing a disturbance.”

“It’s no problem. I work with the homeless shelter, and so when I hear someone in an alley…do you have somewhere to go?”

“I do.” He nodded, which made his head throb again, so he stopped.

“Oh, all right.” She sounded almost disappointed. “Is your head hurt?”

“I hit it…when I fell. It will be all right.” He gritted his teeth.

“You sure you don’t need to visit the hospital or something? Let me see if I have some aspirin in here…”

“No.” He lowered his paw and breathed in, trying to settle the ache in his head. His ear hurt, and it was the same one Kendall had bitten; a trickle of blood made its way down his fur. He hoped she would leave before she smelled it.

Thankfully, she did, gathering her yellow dress around her and walking back out the alley the way she’d come. Alexei watched her go and then looked the other way, the way Konstantin had left. Slowly, he walked in that direction until he reached the street, and then he turned mechanically toward the bus stop. People passed him in either direction, but he barely noticed, wandering through a haze of light on warm concrete, smells brushing his nose like feathers and then vanishing.

At the bus shelter, he leaned against a giant glowing poster for the upcoming WonderWolf movie. The wolf looked determined, his fist poised to strike whatever evil the filmmakers had lined up for him. And he was smiling, he was confident, he knew that whatever happened, he would come out the winner.

Alexei stared at the eyes of the wolf in the poster, wishing for that same confidence. He didn’t know what would happen to his sister. He had wanted very badly for Konstantin to be real, and now he wanted nothing more than to never see him again. At the same time, that confidence in the wolf’s eyes felt very much like what Alexei had felt when Konstantin was possessing him. He wished he had that confidence when it came to approaching Mike, talking to Sol, or, most of all, when it came to reassuring his sister that he would do everything in his power to help her get out of Siberia. He closed his eyes and waited.

The bus took him to the transit center downtown, which he almost missed because the bouncing along the pothole-filled streets made the pounding in his head worse. He had his eyes closed and his paw to his ear again, and only because a lot of people got out at the transit center did he notice that he had to follow them. By the time he struggled up from his seat, people were already boarding, and he had to push past an annoyed red wolf and Dall sheep to get out. He whirled after the Dall sheep, convinced that it had been Mike, that Alexei hadn’t recognized him, but the sheep wore a denim vest and his larger, awkward horns did not shine like Mike’s.

Then the bus he needed to get home was just leaving, and he ran after it in vain, only to watch its red lights vanish through the hazy night around a corner. He could walk home from here, and to hell with it, he thought. The next bus might be twenty minutes away, so the half hour walk was worth it not to have his head bounced around like a football.

Not that the walk was much better. Drained from the date with Mike and the conversation with Konstantin, his feet dragged along the sidewalk. To avoid the lively gay neighborhood of Riverwalk with its rainbow flags and cheerful same-sex couples, he trudged two blocks over, past closed office buildings, vacant apartment homes, and overgrown parks. He passed from starkly lit concrete, pale and featureless, to hazy, disquiet darkness, and every time he saw a shadow flicker or heard the tap of a footstep, he jumped and looked around. There was no reason for Konstantin to come back, but that was what he feared more than being attacked in the street. A live assailant he could manage, or at least understand.

When he finally dragged himself up the front step of his building, he leaned against the door for a moment. The sensation of being home was such a relief, and yet he knew that before long he would be needing to sleep, and after meeting Konstantin and having the nightmare of the statue the previous night, he was not looking forward to what his dreams might bring. Perhaps he could ask Meg to mix him another drink, something that would help him sleep. With that thought in mind, he turned his key in the lock and opened the door.