Sometimes it seems like a lot of the big choices in life are.
The gate crew called for people who needed extra time down the aisle to line up at the door. Shelby stood, stretching so that her shirt rode up about an inch above the waistband of her jeans, revealing a stripe of tanned skin. The absence of a knife tucked into her belt was almost jarring. Travel was something that I never seemed to get used to, no matter how much I did it.
“Come on, lazybones, up you get,” said Shelby, offering me her hands. I took them, letting her tug me to my feet. “You can sit for the next fourteen hours, a’right?”
“I can’t wait,” I said dryly.
My suitcase cheered again when I picked it up. I sighed, and followed Shelby to the line.
Airplanes: essentially buses that fly, and hence have the potential to drop out of the sky at any moment, spreading your insides—which will no doubt become your outsides sometime during the collision—across whatever you happen to have been flying over. Since we were flying mostly over ocean, I was sure the sharks would appreciate our sacrifice.
Shelby was in the aisle seat, having claimed that her smaller bladder and shorter legs made it hers by divine right. That left me with the window, which showed an unrelentingly blue ocean scrolling out as far as the eye could see beneath our plane. There were occasional smatterings of cloud, but for the most part the weather was staying good and the skies were staying clear. The edge of the horizon was brighter than anything else; the sun would be down soon, and I would have nothing to look at but the books I’d brought to read during the flight. Well, and Shelby, but she’d been sleeping since about ten minutes after takeoff—just long enough to finish her complimentary glass of business class champagne, kiss me on the cheek, and turn on her iPod.
Most of business class was asleep, in fact, having been lulled into unconsciousness by the combination of soft seats, free booze, and marginally reduced cabin pressure, which was like traveling from sea level to the Rocky Mountains without any of the normal transitions in between. It made people sleepy and a little sick to their stomachs, which most of them were treating with, yes, more alcohol. The mice were probably having a full-on bacchanal in the overhead compartment, but between the snoring and the roar of the engines, no one would be able to tell.
I sighed and reached up to turn on my reading light. We had a long way to go before we got to Australia. I might as well get a little work done.
There are very few cryptozoologist’s guides to Australia—or at least, there are very few guides available to non-Australians. I assumed the Thirty-Sixers would have plenty, since they’d been studying their home continent since before their official inception as a group, and no organization larger than three or four people can survive for long on nothing but oral traditions. I was hoping to come home from my visit with some of those guides to add to the family collection. In the meantime, I had to make do with Grandpa Thomas’ guide to the cryptozoological flora and fauna of Australia and New Zealand, which Dad had sent via overnight mail when I called to tell him that I was going home with Shelby. The book had been written before Grandpa Thomas met Grandma Alice, so it was almost certainly out of date. It was also the best resource I had.
I leaned back in my seat and opened the guide to the chapter on drop bears, which included some sketches that made me want to ask the pilot to turn the plane around. Give me a nice normal waheela or wendigo any day: drop bears were freaky.
(Yes, “give me a nice normal thing that I can find where I come from” is a statement drenched in colonialism and privilege: it supposes that the ecosystem that the speaker comes from is normal, and all other ecosystems are somehow weird or flawed. At the same time, Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.)
According to the guide, where we were going we would be contending with drop bears, bunyips, Queensland tigers, and other lovely, predatory things that I wasn’t used to seeing on a regular basis. There were also species of coatl, although Grandpa didn’t call them that, and garrinna, the marsupial equivalent of the miniature griffin. That was nice. I was already missing Crow more than a little.
I turned the page, and kept reading.
My grandfather—Thomas Price, the man who gave my family its name, along with the recessive genes that somehow resulted in my youngest sister being almost six inches taller than any of the other women in our family, and don’t think that hasn’t caused its share of resentment—was originally from England, but traveled a lot before settling down in Buckley Township, Michigan, where he married my grandmother and was eventually sucked into a dimensional portal leading to who-knows-where. (Grandma Alice is still looking for him, and continues to insist that he’s not dead, even though it’s been more than sixty years. Hope springs eternal, I guess, and is rarely questioned when it’s harbored by a woman whose idea of “Hello” sometimes involves frag grenades.)
Grandpa Thomas had been a member of the Covenant of St. George. Not that he’d fit in very well, being the sort to question authority whenever he could get a word in edgewise. His travels had been the Covenant’s last-ditch attempt to find something he could do to make himself useful: roam the world documenting the cryptid populations they had failed to find or eradicate, and then come home to England with his notes, making them available to the newest generation of monster-killing bastards in need of easy targets. Instead, he’d sworn up and down that he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anything “unnatural” while he was traveling, and that he was ready for a nice, sedentary assignment. Somewhere out of the way, where he could work on his memoirs and maybe perfect his masterwork on the snake cults of the world.
He’d been lying, of course. His guides to the cryptids of every continent had formed the seed of our family library, and we’d been improving and expanding them ever since. If Grandma Alice ever proved herself to be right—if she ever brought him home—he’d find that his habit of dry, slightly amused scholarship had spawned generations of extremely earnest imitators. I liked to think that he’d be pleased.
Grandpa Thomas’ stay in Australia only lasted two years, from 1950 to 1952. During that time, he’d nearly been killed by the Thirty-Six Society—twice—before becoming an honorary member, which may have been the beginning of his final separation from the Covenant of St. George. It’s hard to swear to uphold the ideals and goals of two completely disparate organizations, and from reading his account of his Australian visit, I think he liked the Thirty-Sixers better. He certainly described them in more consistently positive terms, and used the word “wanker” a lot less.
During those two years, Grandpa Thomas traveled all over the continent, documenting dozens of creatures, plants, and hostile rock formations. Most of them wanted to kill him and none of them succeeded, which means Australia could be considered a sort of “trial by fire” for his eventually being allowed to marry my grandmother.
The thing that most caught my attention as I read was a passage in the introduction to his guide to Australia’s flora, fauna, and silicate life:
“Do not be fooled by the presence of sand, grass, and clouds; do not be soothed into carelessness by the familiar shapes of sharks swimming in the water off the coast, or the pleasant silliness of the fairy penguins riding in with the evening tide,” said the text. “This is not your home: this is not a room you have visited before, transformed by new curtains and a few new pieces of furniture. This is an alien world that happens to share a planet with our familiar climes, and to lose your focus is to, very probably, lose your head. As I am sure you would like to keep the latter, hold tight to the former, and do not let Australia’s many natural beauties lead you astray.”
I sighed and closed the book, looking at Shelby—the greatest of Australia’s natural beauties—as she slept in the seat next to mine. Her face was u
tterly relaxed, unlined in her contentment. She looked more beautiful than anything else in this dimension or any other, with her long blonde hair tangled in front of one eye and her mouth hanging just a little open. I tucked the book into the pocket of my seat, reached up to turn off the reading light, and leaned over to rest my head against her shoulder. There would be plenty of time to read before we reached land.
We were traveling to another world, after all.
Shelby woke me when the stewards came around with dinner. I fell asleep again after that, and woke a few hours later to find her hunched over her computer, typing rapidly. I sat up, yawning, and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand before I asked, “What’s up?”
“Just checking in,” she said, not looking away from her screen. “How did we live in an age before inflight Wi-Fi? It must have been like being back in caveman times, all silence and no shouting.”
“I think cavemen shouted a lot,” I said, yawning again. “Okay, I would commit a felony for a cup of coffee.”
“There’s a self-serve kitchenette a bit down the plane,” said Shelby, pulling her laptop into her actual lap and contorting herself in a way that would have been impossible in anything smaller than a business class seat. I found I was unable to make myself stand up, more interested in tracing the tangled lines of Shelby’s legs than I was in getting the caffeine my brain so desperately needed.
Shelby caught me staring and grinned. “Eyes up, and get moving. I want you half-awake when you get back. We have some strategy to plan.”
“Yay,” I said, without enthusiasm, and finally stood, squeezing through the strip of space between Shelby and the wall in order to reach the aisle. “Do you want anything while I’m up?”
“Bring me a granola bar or something.” Shelby uncoiled herself again, resting her toes lightly on the plane floor as she returned her attention to her laptop. “Maybe an apple.”
“I’ll bring whatever I can find,” I said, and started down the aisle toward the promised kitchenette.
Domestic airplanes are basically designed to keep people seated, settled, and sedated for the duration of flight. If they could, they would install catheters in the seats and strap the people down from takeoff until landing. International flights are a little different, due to the part where sometimes people’s veins explode if they sit still in a pressurized cabin for too long. (This may be a small exaggeration—emphasis on “small,” not “exaggeration.” Deep vein thrombosis is the silent killer of the long-haul flight.) To combat this, international carriers often encourage people to get up, move around, and keep their blood circulating normally. Sure, it means the aisles get a little crowded from time to time, and it makes the TSA nervous, but better that than a bunch of dead passengers.
I inched along the aisle, careful not to hit any of our sleeping business class companions in the head, and made my way into the small, brightly lit alcove of our private kitchenette-slash-minibar. Unlike the self-serve zones in coach, our beverage selection included white wine and a selection of Australian beers, which was denuded enough to tell me that some of our fellow passengers were going to wake up with impressive headaches. Or maybe not: many of them were Australian, after all, and Shelby could drink me under the table, the floor, and possibly the Earth’s crust.
The whole thing was nicely designed and laid out. Refrigerated crisper drawers held fruit, small cakes, and an assortment of cheeses and sliced meats, while individually wrapped packets of mixed nuts and granola bars were isolated off to one side, where they wouldn’t pose a risk to people with allergies. I paused in the act of reaching for the cheese drawer, a sudden suspicion overtaking me. “Are there any mice in here?” I asked, loudly enough to be heard, but quietly enough that I wasn’t shouting to the entire section.
The cheese drawer answered with a muffled “hail.”
I groaned, leaning closer and addressing the drawer. “I told you to stay in the bag.”
“False!” A brown-furred head poked out from behind a wedge of what I assumed was brie, whiskers quivering with joyful indignation. Aeslin mice were rarely happier than when they were arguing a point of holy writ. “You told us to Stay Quiet and Stay Still until we were in blessed transit. And truly did we heed your words, which echoed the ancient teachings of the God of Unexpected Situations, husband to the Violent Priestess. But once we came to blessed transit, we turned instead to the words of the Noisy Priestess, who did tell us, lo, You May Leave the Bag, Just Don’t Get Caught. And we have left the bag, and we have not been caught!”
The mouse sounded so delighted with its cunning navigation of a point of theological trivia that I didn’t have the heart to argue. I wouldn’t have been able to win if I had: the God of Unexpected Situations was my great-grandfather, and the Noisy Priestess was Grandma Alice. The mice put a lot of stock in each new generation of gods and priestesses, but most of us lacked the cachet to successfully overturn Great-Grandpa Jonathan or his daughter on a point of order. Maybe someday, when I was older and had done more things to actually impress the mice.
Probably not.
“Well, just don’t take all the cheese, all right? There are other people riding in business class who might want a midnight snack.” Not that any of them seemed inclined to wake up from their alcohol-induced slumber, which was why I felt so comfortable having a religious debate with a talking mouse in the middle of the minibar.
Sometimes I feel as if my life is very strange.
“We will Leave Some Cheese,” said the mouse, in the sort of reverent tone that usually meant I had just solidified a new commandment. Thou Shalt Not Denude the Airplane’s Cheese Selection.
Again, I chose not to argue. If it meant the mice were happy and under control for the duration of flight, they could raid the minibar as much as they wanted. Instead, I took a plate from the stack next to the muffins and piled it with fruit, packets of nuts, and some of the remaining cheese, before filling two cups with coffee (mine black, Shelby’s more than half milk and sugar) and walking back along the aisle to my seat. The mice could find their own way. They’d managed to wander off without my assistance, after all.
Shelby’s laptop was closed and tucked into the seat-back pocket when I returned. She blinked at the tray in my hands, and asked, “Starving, are you?”
“The mice are in the middle of a fairly major supply raid,” I said, squeezing past her and sinking back into my seat, somehow managing to do so without spilling my pilfered goodies. “I’ll warn them about eating everything before we land after breakfast comes around, since that should give them an hour or two.”
Shelby blinked again, slowly this time. “The mice are roving freely through the airplane?” she asked.
“Mice do not feel obligated to obey the fasten seat belt sign,” I said, and picked up my coffee. “What’s the situation on the ground?”
“Not so good,” said Shelby, her confusion—and her levity—melting into a look of grim despair. “Mum says we’ve had four people bitten so far. Two of them are under quarantine. The other two ran off before we could catch them. One of them, Trevor McConnell, probably went to take care of things before anyone got hurt. The other’s a relatively new recruit, Isaac Wall, and it’s harder to say with him. He could be doing the right thing by the rest of us. He could also be going to ground and hoping that if he does turn out to be infected, he can figure out a way to live with it.”
“There is no way to live with it,” I said. “The virus wants to spread. He may have the best of intentions now, but if he changes, he’ll be a monster like all the rest. All this means is that if he’s infected, no one will know to be there to stop him before he starts attacking people.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant by “doing the right thing.” There’s only one “right thing” where lycanthropy is concerned, and that’s the thing that means you’ll never have the chance to pass the infection on. It’s a horrible, unfair positio
n to put a person in. But viruses have never been known for their mercy, and people who have actually observed the progression of the lycanthropy-w virus within a community have sworn, repeatedly, that suicide is a kinder solution than any of the alternatives, and sadly, I believe them.
Lycanthropy-w is hard to catch. Out of every five people bitten, four of them will be perfectly fine. The virus doesn’t deal well with the static virility of a nonshapeshifting immune system. But the fifth person . . .
The fifth person was doomed. The only question was how long it would take for them to admit it.
Shelby nodded, expression growing even grimmer. “We can’t tell who’s harboring the infection. That’s the worst part. Da says they’ve killed four werewolves so far, but the bastards just keep on coming. There’s so much open space there, we could be looking at almost anything.”
“Remember that it could also be a ‘what’ harboring the infection,” I said, and took another sip of my coffee, trying to buy myself a few minutes to think. We were going to need a way to locate the remaining werewolves, assuming they hadn’t already been put down. Sadly, they didn’t tend to mark their dens with “werewolves here, inquire within.”
Shelby shook her head. “My folks were not happy to hear that kangaroos could be werewolves, too. Not the sort of thing you want to spring on them, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. It was still startling to me how little the Thirty-Six Society knew about lycanthropy. It made sense—they’d never had to deal with it before—but I kept stumbling over things “everybody knew” that were a complete surprise to Shelby. Even Grandpa Thomas’ notes didn’t help. There were too many holes where things that “everybody knew” had been left out to save space. “Have there been any signs that a pack is forming?”