His hand came open as he fell. It would almost have been a mercy if it hadn’t. The body of the crushed Aeslin mouse was too small to make an audible sound when it hit the porch.
It may as well have echoed through the entire world.
The mice on the support beam raced back down and along the rail. I put out my hand, and the two of them jumped a full six inches to huddle in my palm, shaking, sides heaving as they struggled to breathe through what must have been a full-blown panic attack. I brought my hand to my chest, sheltering the mice, protecting them from any further attacks. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at the fallen man with the bloody fingers, who was now being helped up by his compatriots, and waited.
“I wanted to show that I was clean,” he protested, raising his clean hand to rub the side of his face. He carefully avoided touching his nose, which was leaking blood and looked like it might have been knocked askew. Good. I wanted to punch him again, and keep punching him until he looked like the broken thing I was refusing to let myself see. “The damn mouse wouldn’t check me. Said it wasn’t right to check me until you said it could continue. I just wanted to show that I was clean.”
He looked from side to side as he spoke, looking for support among his compatriots. They drew away, not meeting his eyes. I watched this edifying sight for a few seconds before I took a breath, steeling myself against what needed to be done, and knelt.
The mouse he had closed his hand around looked no different than any of the dead mice I had encountered in my life, the ones purchased from pet stores to feed to my snakes, the ones carried into the house by Crow, croaking proudly about his skills as a hunter. (He knew better than to hunt the Aeslin. The Aeslin had a nasty tendency to hunt back, and they could carry a grudge for a long, long time.) So no, there was nothing special about this mouse, save for the small necklace of buttons it wore around its thick rodent neck, and the fact that only minutes before it had been a talking, thinking, intelligent creature with a life and a future of its own.
I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. I looked at it, lying there broken and motionless, and I couldn’t do it. Instead, I cupped my other hand over the Aeslin mice that were still alive and straightened, turning to face the Tanners. All three of them were staring at me, Shelby with her hands clapped over her mouth like that would somehow keep the tears inside, Charlotte and Raina with matching looks of wide-eyed horror.
“Someone needs to bring the body to my room,” I said quietly. “The mice will have funeral arrangements to make, and rituals to observe. Now, if you will all excuse me, I need to go and explain to my colony’s head priest how I’ve failed them.”
Shelby dropped her hands. “Alex—” she began.
I shook my head. She stopped. “I failed them,” I repeated, and walked through the open front door, the remaining Aeslin mice a small, shivering weight in my palm.
The door to my room was open when I reached the second floor. The mice were nowhere to be seen. I stepped fully inside, took a deep breath, and said, “I need to see you, please. Come out. It’s important.”
“All right, mate,” said Cooper, in an exaggerated Australian drawl. I had time to turn toward his voice, a look of horror spreading across my face. Then something was clapped over my nose and mouth, and the smell of chloroform obscured everything else. The last thing I saw was Cooper’s smile, broad as a Cheshire cat’s, and twice as dangerous. Then my vision went black, and Cooper, along with everything else, was gone.
Sixteen
“Ah, ambushes. Those take me back. The best ones are the ones that start with chloroform and handcuffs, and end with death threats and knives. And by ‘best’ I mean ‘most irritating,’ you understand.”
—Thomas Price
Waking up in an unknown location that is hopefully still in Queensland, Australia, but might as well be on the moon
WAKING UP WITH A chloroform headache wasn’t a new experience for me, and hadn’t been since I was eight years old and my father spent the better part of a summer ambushing me at various points around the property. (When I got good enough at avoiding him to go a week without being knocked unconscious through some mechanism or another, he called his mother to come spend the rest of the summer with us. Waking up to the sight of Grandma Alice grinning maniacally while she cleaned her guns was sobering, and more than a little disturbing, in a “maybe my parents should not have been allowed to have children” sort of way.)
After taking a few shallow breaths to be sure my head wasn’t going to explode at the slightest provocation, I dared to sit up a little straighter. The motion betrayed the fact that I was strapped to whatever it was I was sitting on; my wrists and ankles were no doubt restrained as well, if the numbness in my extremities meant anything. People who weren’t in the habit of taking hostages always made things too tight, at least at first. It was like they didn’t care about loss of circulation and gangrene.
Oh, wait. They probably didn’t care.
“Are you awake, or are you just having a dream about your pretty girlfriend? It’s been three hours. That’s long enough for a sleep.” The voice was Cooper’s; judging by his calm, conversational tone, he was no more than five feet away. Something nudged my calf, causing my numb ankle to rub painfully against something that felt like a length of twine. They definitely weren’t worrying about my losing circulation. Either they weren’t planning to keep me for long, or they didn’t care whether I ever walked again.
It’s a sad fact of my line of work—cryptozoology, not herpetology—that waking up tied to an unidentified piece of furniture, being held captive by a werewolf, was nowhere near as upsetting as the idea that I could have been unconscious long enough to need medical attention before I’d be able to stand unassisted. That was just disrespectful.
“Hey.” My calf was nudged again. I adjusted my thoughts on where Cooper was in the room. Since he was apparently kicking me, he was probably a lot closer than five feet. “Now I know chloroform doesn’t last this long, and I know you’ve probably built up some sort of resistance to the stuff, so why don’t you go ahead and stop playing dead? Unless you’d like me to start taking off fingers as an incentive to opening your eyes.”
“Did you jump to violence this fast before you became a werewolf, or is it a side effect of the infection?” My voice came out slightly slurred. I swallowed hard to try to get the dry, cottony feeling out of my mouth, licked my lips, and continued more clearly, “I am genuinely interested. For science, if nothing else.”
“I think it’s a side effect. But it’s one I’m capable of controlling, as long as I’m given a good reason to. You’re not giving me very many good reasons, Covenant boy. I’d start, if I were you.”
I opened my eyes. As expected, Cooper was standing in front of me, a frown on his face. He did not, it seemed, care for my continued disrespect. Poor him. My parents raised me to be polite and considerate of others. They did not, however, raise me to be particularly respectful of people who thought that drugging me and tying me to a—I took a quick glance to the side—to a chair was a good way to start a conversation.
Cooper was expected. The four people standing behind him were somewhat less so. Chloe Bryant—the woman with the face of a swimsuit model, and the attitude of a pissed-off bus driver—was one of them. That wasn’t a surprise. I vaguely recognized two of the remaining three; they’d been around the Thirty-Six Society compound, although neither of them had done anything to really stand out. They had been backgrounders, extras in the great adventure that had been my time in Australia. The fourth . . .
My eyes focused on him for almost a second before they processed what they were seeing and transmitted that information to my brain, which really didn’t want to accept it. Sadly, denial is not a strong suit of mine. I lunged against the ropes that held me, sending the chair rocking forward before it thudded back to the floor. The twine dug into my ankles, and the thicker rope that was
tied around my waist and throat threatened to knock the wind out of me.
The tall, broad-shouldered man with the obviously broken nose took a step backward, eyes going wide, before he realized I wasn’t magically breaking free of my bonds and coming after him. Then he grinned, the slow, sly smile of a man who suddenly felt like nothing could threaten him. “Yeah, I thought not,” he said. “Not so tough now, are you?”
“Mick, you idiot.” Chloe smacked him in the back of the head. He flinched away, sulking at her. I made a note of his mulish expression. He was the low man on their totem pole, then, the one who was most likely to yield to pressure. That was good to know, even as I still felt the burning desire to slit his throat for what he’d done to my mouse.
“Don’t torment the doctor,” continued Chloe, raising her hand as if to go for another smack. Mick cringed away. The blow didn’t come, but her voice sharpened further as she continued: “He needs to be willing to help us, and he’s not going to help us if you’ve got him all pissed off.”
“I’m already pissed off,” I said coldly. “If your goal was keeping me calm and relaxed, you shouldn’t have started with chloroform. I’ve never had a date involving chloroform that didn’t end badly.” I swung my attention to Cooper, moving my head as much as I could against the rope. “Did you tell him to do it?”
Cooper frowned. “Do what?”
“Your man, Mick. He killed one of my mice. Reached up, wrapped his fingers around it, and crushed the life out of it. Was that your idea?”
Cooper blinked, and for just a moment I saw the man I’d thought I met before the attack in the meadow, the man who loved his dog and took everything at his own pace. “Why would I tell him to do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why you do anything. I don’t know why you bit Gabby, or whether you infected your own dog, or why you think that the answer to not wanting to feel like a monster is spreading a disease among the people who are supposed to be your colleagues. So for all I know, you could have given him the order.”
“Well, I didn’t,” said Cooper stiffly. “I didn’t infect Jett, either. I love my dog.”
“It was just a mouse,” I said. “It was just trying to do what I’d asked of it. They think my family . . . they think we’re gods. It couldn’t tell me ‘no,’ not even if it was scared, not even if it didn’t want to do what I asked. How many of us can look our gods in the face and tell them we’re not going to do their bidding?” The Aeslin mice did refuse us, from time to time, but never without good reason, and never about something that mattered.
Maybe that was going to change after my fragment of the colony made it home from Australia. Maybe I was going to be the one who finally, after decades of living with us, taught the Aeslin that we were fallible.
“Lottie had that damn thing sniffing out werewolves,” protested Mick, seeming to sense the mood in the room shifting against him. “She was holding it up to people’s faces and letting it check them for infection. You said, Cooper, you said do whatever it took to keep our people from getting caught out. Well, that mouse was going to catch everybody out. Sniffing like that.”
“You also said we needed to get Mr. Price here away from the Tanners,” said Chloe. “Killing the mouse accomplished that. It was a necessary loss.”
“I see. It’s funny how you’re taking that approach now, when just a moment ago you were so invested in keeping our new friend from becoming too angry to work with us. It’s almost like you’re changing your allegiances to suit whatever you think will go over best at any given moment.” Cooper turned to look thoughtfully at Chloe. “Is that what you’re doing?”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “No. No, sir. I would never do anything that disingenuous.”
“See, I would have bet that none of you knew any words that big,” I said. I flexed my hands, trying to keep the motion from echoing in my arms and shoulders. It was difficult; I had to restrict myself to even smaller movements of my wrists than would normally have been my preference. Still, my hands moved freely, with no more impediment than the rope. That was what I had been hoping for. “You didn’t go for the organizational brain trust, did you, Cooper?”
“Brains are a liability when you’re trying to build an army,” said Cooper, sounding unconcerned. He began circling Chloe and Mick, cutting them off from their unidentified compatriots. The two remaining werewolves fell back, relieved expressions on their faces. Whatever punishment Mick and Chloe were about to face, they’d be spared. “It leads to having too many generals, and not enough soldiers. That’s just bad planning. We’ll have plenty of time for recruiting smart people to our side—starting with you. You’re smart enough to know that you’ll not be leaving this room still believing yourself to be a human being.”
“You’ll like being a werewolf, once you get used to it,” said one of the unnamed werewolves. She was tall, brunette, and spoke with an accent that marked her as coming from somewhere outside Australia, although I couldn’t have named her country of origin. “It’s nice to know that you’re bigger and badder than anything that might come after you.”
“The running around naked part’s nice, too,” said Mick. He sounded uneasy, and his eyes were tracking Cooper. I couldn’t decide whether the joke was a defense mechanism or a bad attempt at ingratiating himself with his chosen pack. It didn’t matter either way.
I kept working my hands in slow circles, ignoring the way the twine bit into my wrists. These people weren’t professionals: I’d known that as soon as I woke up with numb feet, still fully clothed. No one who catches a Price and wants to keep us captive leaves us with our clothes on. It’s just practicality. The weight of the mice against my chest was gone. Either they had run out of my pocket when I was chloroformed, or Cooper had had them removed. I wanted to ask him if he had them. I couldn’t give him that card. If he didn’t have them, and I asked, he would know that he could lie. “I’m not an exhibitionist, thanks,” I said.
“So which one, hmm?” Cooper turned to look at me. I slowed the motion of my hands by half, reducing it to a painful crawl. “The man who did the deed or the woman who laughed about it? Which one do you blame?”
I didn’t hesitate. “The man who did it. If you didn’t give the order, then he crushed the life out of a living thing because he thought it would be expedient. This is his fault. He’s the one who committed the crime.”
“Good enough for me.” Cooper started to turn away from Mick. Then, grabbing the knife from his belt, he whirled back around. He moved with preternatural swiftness, faster than anything human could have hoped to achieve; I didn’t see the cut so much as I saw Mick’s throat open in a wet red smile, blood spraying from his severed carotid artery. My glasses protected my eyes, and I kept my mouth closed, turning my head away to try to minimize my exposure to his blood. I still saw him hit the floor on his knees, hands clutching his throat in a desperate attempt to stem the bleeding.
He slumped forward. Cooper produced a gun from the other side of his belt and fired twice, putting both shots into the back of Mick’s head. The big man went limp, the smell of his emptied bowels mixing with the equally unpleasant odors of blood and cordite. Cooper kicked him in the leg. Mick didn’t move.
“Big bastard seemed like a grand idea, but he wasn’t,” he said. “Never buy in bulk if you’re hoping to get quality goods, that’s what I’m taking away from this one.”
I was probably meant to be stunned by the fact that he would kill one of his own people so easily. He’d clearly never dealt with harpies in the middle of a territory dispute. I raised an eyebrow, squinting to see through my blood-spattered lenses, and said, “That sounds like an excellent moral.”
“And here I was afraid you’d be no fun.” Cooper walked across the room to me. I stopped working on the rope that held my hands, holding perfectly still as he removed my glasses, spat on the lenses, and wiped them clean on his shir
t. Then he replaced them on my nose, pushing them gingerly into place. “Sorry about the mess. We’re hard as hell to kill once we get going, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t have a chance to make things any messier than they had to be.” His three remaining werewolves had drawn close together, forming a small, terrified huddle.
Cooper was setting himself up as the unquestioned alpha of his little pack—a power dynamic that had a lot more to do with human psychology than it did with animal behavior. I didn’t know about werewolves, for obvious reasons, but real wolves don’t follow that sort of hierarchy. People just think they do, and if there’s one thing people are good at, it’s projecting their own distorted desires onto the animal kingdom.
“I’m drenched in blood and you’re intending to turn me into a werewolf against my own stated preferences,” I said. “I’m not seeing how this could get any messier.”
“I promise, you’ll enjoy being one of us.” Cooper smiled, showing off all his teeth. “It’s the best of all possible worlds.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “If you bite me or infect me through any other means, I won’t help you.”
Cooper blinked. “What?”
“You heard me. I didn’t come to Australia to become a werewolf. My family would probably be tolerant, since they’re good that way, but it would interfere with my plans for the future. I would thus very much rather not.”
Cooper blinked again. He didn’t seem to be fully processing what I was saying. “You can’t just refuse to become a werewolf.”
“I didn’t refuse to become a werewolf, I refused to help you if you turned me into one,” I said. “I appreciate the fact that you’ve moved on to threatening me indoors like a civilized person, but my answer remains the same. I do not wish to become a werewolf. Thank you, but no thank you.”