“She was telling me not to shoot myself.” Riley sounded calm, like admitting that his own daughter was concerned he would commit suicide was perfectly normal. “We don’t have much experience with infectious monsters here, but we have plenty of venomous ones. A few of them, there’s no treatment, there’s no cure; there’s just rotting from the inside out while you wait for your family to give you permission to die. Most people who get bitten choose to take the easy route to the grave, and no one blames them. It’s one hell of a way to go.” His gaze flicked back to the dead werewolf. “Of course, so is this. It might be kinder if I shot myself.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “I don’t want Shelby to be that mad at me.”
To my surprise, Riley actually laughed. “Believe me, son, neither do I, and under the circumstances, I’d probably wind up stuck haunting the place. I won’t swallow my gun. Besides, the way I’m bleeding, it may be a moot point.”
Bleeding. Shit. “Are there medical supplies in here? There must be, you told me that there were. Where are they?”
“We don’t know—”
“I know how to check the seal on a package of gauze. We can stop the bleeding, even if we can’t trust any of the medications. As long as you keep an eye on the lights and shout if anything changes, I should be safe to go and come back.”
“And if there’s another werewolf out there, just waiting for you to split the party?” The look Riley gave me was calculating and calm. “How do I explain your corpse to Shelby?”
“I could ask you the same question, you know.” I shrugged. “Someone’s explaining something either way, and I’d rather be able to at least say I tried to make sure you could attend our wedding. Now, which way do I go to find the first aid?”
Riley raised a hand—which was shaking slightly; the blood loss was getting to him, even if he was struggling not to show it—and pointed down the row of shelves to my left. “Go six shelves that way, make a right, and you won’t be able to miss what you’re looking for.”
“Good.” I stepped close enough to put my box of silver bullets down at the edge of the spreading bloodstain. “Reload, and be ready.” Then I turned and took off running, heading in the direction Riley had indicated.
The Thirty-Six Society took their stockpiling very seriously. I swung around the corner six shelves in, and found myself confronted by three racks of nothing but gauze, bandages, antiseptics of various kinds, suture kits, and other basic first aid supplies. Even if our werewolf or werewolves had been sabotaging the place, they couldn’t possibly have damaged as much as was in front of me. I began quickly grabbing things off the shelves, checking to be sure that their seals and packaging were intact, and then moving on to the next item I thought I might need. In the end, I had several rolls of gauze, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a suture kit—for Helen, not for me, as there was only so much I was willing to do in the name of saving Shelby’s father—and a box of latex gloves. I spared one last glance at the overhead lights, confirming that they hadn’t changed, and then went running back.
Riley was still sitting up in the same position when I raced into view. He lifted his head, eyes gone dull and tired, and said, “Took you long enough. What, did you have to run back to America for just the right brand of cotton ball?”
“I still beat Shelby and the others back,” I said, walking to the edge of the bloody puddle and kneeling. I rolled the hydrogen peroxide toward him. Let it get covered in blood. It wasn’t like he presented a biohazard to himself. “Uncap this and pour it over your wound. We want to try flushing it out as much as we can.”
“What, I didn’t die passively, so now you’re actively trying to kill me?” asked Riley, brows rising.
I shook my head. “The hydrogen peroxide won’t hurt you, it will flush the wound. It’s not antiviral, but it will still remove at least some of the virus that hasn’t entered your body yet. Please, work with me here.” I opened the box of gloves, pulling out a pair.
“I haven’t given you much reason to want to work with me,” said Riley, uncapping the bottle. He sniffed its contents once, suspiciously, before upending it over his injured arm. “Damn, that stings,” he said, clenching his teeth. The hydrogen peroxide bubbled and foamed as it came into contact with the blood.
“Good,” I said. “Now take off your shirt.”
Riley gave me a flat look.
“I need to see the wound if I’m going to stop the bleeding.” I held up a roll of gauze. “Shirt. Off. I’m not going to do anything Dr. Jalali will object to when she gets here, I promise. You get to keep your arm, and you’ll have some fun scars to show off a year from now.”
“Assuming I’m not big, hairy, and dead by then,” said Riley, his gaze drifting back to the dead werewolf. He hauled his bloody shirt off over his head, revealing a torso that was ridged with the lines of scars both old and long-healed and relatively new. The wound on his arm stood out red and angry against the rest. “Are you seriously planning to marry my daughter?”
“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.
Thirteen
“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
IT 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 conserva
tion 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.”