Feral Pride (18 page)

LYING ON THE KING-SIZE BED
, staring at the dimly lit ceiling, I’m afraid to sleep and afraid not to. It’s almost daybreak, and the governor is supposed to die during prime time tonight.

I wonder if Dad will return Junior in time for the show. It’s clear now that he’s known for some time that my friends and I were on Boreal’s hit list. I’m glad that Clyde doesn’t trust my father. I only hope my friends will protect the snowboy and hear him out.

My in-room landline has been cut off, but otherwise Whispering Pines makes for a plush prison. Snowmen escorted me back to my suite. They stand guard outside the door and beneath my balcony. None of the chipped shifter employees we passed reacted to the sight of them, and all of the MCC executives have vacated the property.

The knock at the door is a surprise. It’s such a polite gesture, a knock.

I didn’t undress for bed, and I don’t pretend by throwing on a robe. I check the peephole and open the door to Boreal, cleaning his spectacles.

“Uh-hem,” he begins. “Crystal requested you.”

“Her name is Drifa,” Crystal tells me. The snowwoman is breast-feeding in a lounge chair, her furry feet propped up on a lime-green-and-peach striped ottoman.

The fourteen-and-a-half-pound baby, Drifa, has huge blue eyes and is enormous for a newborn. So is the diaper made from a hotel pillowcase. “She looks like you,” I say.

I’m leaving Boreal, who already took off, out of it. They’re used to living with human servants. I should know. For a while, I was one of them.

On the island, Crystal never would’ve bothered having a conversation with me. Here, she offered to split her special-order yak breakfast quesadillas from room service. Maybe she’s lonely for feminine companionship. She (and now Drifa) are the only females of her species I’ve ever seen. The guards and medical team are all men.

“Yes,” Crystal agrees. “She has a proper coat of fur.” She scowls. “But I don’t.”

Crystal gestures to a cosmetics case on the dresser. “Bring that over here and open it up.”

We’re on the top floor of the new lodging building. It features the same kind of colorful blown-glass art and framed sepia photos as the hotel. From what she tells me, the lower levels are more utilitarian, with cheap linens and rooms a fifth the square footage of this one. I pause at the sliding-glass door to the only balcony and its view of the river and wooded grounds. The winding, hilly drive from the highway to the resort took the limo a little over five minutes. The state park is on the other side of the water.

“You don’t want to do that, pet,” Crystal warns me. “Boreal has werepredators patrolling the forest. The flat-headed werepeccaries are especially vicious, and you are a weak, pink-skinned human, so much ugly skin. It’s better that you concentrate on grooming me instead.”

What’s a Peccary? Does she mean a werejavelina? And my pink skin is not ugly. It’s just not covered with hair. Furry Crystal, on the other hand, has no use for foundation, eye shadow, lipstick, or blush. Instead, her case is packed with brushes and accessories — sparkly barrettes, rolls of ribbons, fabric and metal and rhinestone headbands, and an array of head wraps.

I skirt around the chair and set to work on her spiral curls. I hope she doesn’t expect me to brush out the fur all over her body. I have zero desire to tackle butt tangles.

I imagine the snowpeople living in high-tech underground ice palaces, but I have only the faintest idea of what their society might be like. At the same time, I can see they’re desperate to unravel ours. The suite is littered with news, sports, celebrity, and fashion magazines.

“Will you leave the resort, now that you’ve had the baby?”

“We would, if Junior hadn’t run off. A handpicked management team is scheduled to arrive at dawn to program the werebeast workers with a new control word and reopen the resort. We have to vacate by then regardless.” Crystal sighs. “Unfortunately, your great minds are closing in on us
Homo deific.
” She says “great minds” like the concept is absurd. “However, if Boreal and I return home with Junior, having secured MCC’s financial future, our losses at Daemon Island will be irrelevant. It will be dismissed for what it was, a pet project gone awry.”

Never mind the millions Daemon Island made or the werepeople who were murdered there. . . . Boil it down and Boreal’s approach here is much the same. Only now he’s doing it on a bigger scale, through a pseudo-legit operation, and expanding his market.

“Junior referred to you, a human girl, as his friend.” Crystal sounds puzzled by the notion. Does she realize he was raised by a fortune-telling werecat? If so, has she considered what that might mean to him? Granny Z may have left Junior to marry the Old Alligator Man, but she loved the kid. For years she protected him, and now that I think about it, she didn’t leave him alone in the world. She left him with me, Clyde, Yoshi, and Kayla.

Crystal adds, too casually, “By any chance, do you know where he ran off to?”

“How do you know the Peccaries didn’t get him?” I sound more nonchalant than I feel. I considered the possibility that Junior might be overwhelmed by his mission, that my friends wouldn’t trust him. It never occurred to me that he might not have made it off the property alive.

“He is no intruder werebeast,” Crystal replies. “No mere human.” She strokes the fur on her baby’s forehead. “The shifter vermin in the forest have been programmed to do no harm to
Homo deific.
”

Which means Junior could leave and return safely, but . . . “What about my dad?”

She ignores the question. Of course if Dad tries to return but doesn’t make it to the amphitheater, they’ll still have Junior back and me to do with whatever they want. For the foreseeable future, it looks like playing nanny may be my only way to stay alive.

I trade out the paddle brush for a wide-tooth comb and try again. “Why did Boreal choose Seth to summon in the first place?” I’m not an expert on demons, but there’s clearly a variety of them. “Y’all are pretty committed to a low-profile lifestyle, and if you’ll excuse me for saying so, he’s kind of a show-off.”

“What an astute question!” she exclaims. “Pet, you are a bright one!”

I paste a smile on my face and keep brushing.

“Boreal meant well,” she explains. “He always does. Every type of hell spawn has its own bailiwick. The ancient stories tell us that Seth’s mission is to sow hostilities between the species of man, which seemed compatible with our various enterprises around the globe.”

“But
Homo deific
are a species of man,” I point out.

“We’re only distantly related to humans.” She laughs out loud. “You are all such children. We recall a time when
Homo sapiens
and
Homo neanderthalensis
edged on breeding compatibility. Like horses and donkeys. Our species is further apart from yours than that.”

Is it? I’m tempted to ask her about the “breeding compatibility” of
Homo neanderthalensis
and
Homo deific
, but it’s smarter to keep my mouth shut.

“Boreal had every intention of riding herd over that vile creature on the assumption that I would agree to surrendering our offspring in trade.” Sobering, Crystal reaches into the case, plucks out an oh-so-darling sparkly green barrette, and snaps it around a lock on top of Drifa’s head. She adds, “
Homo sapiens
cannot be trusted with primary guardianship of this planet. We have no choice but to manipulate your society’s commercial and political systems to improve your environmental protocols. Once werebeasts become a servant caste, we’ll all be relieved of fairly compensating them. Those profits will buy the influence we need.”

Slave caste is more like it. She may have a point about the environment. I could see where global warming would panic snowpeople. But the ends don’t excuse the means.

Her matted fur is sticky.
Ew
, is this pink stuff bubble gum?

“We’re not inhumane,” Crystal concludes. “We’ll provide food, shelter, do selective breeding. They’ll be given no reason to rebel like on Daemon Island.”

No free will to rebel either, what with the brain chips. Was
this
how I sounded to Clyde? I shouldn’t antagonize her. I can’t help myself. “Would you want to be selectively bred?”

“I was,” she replies, steepling her thick fingers. “My mother chose Boreal for me because of his ambition, imagination, and work ethic.” The baby starts fussing. “She believed his interest in demonology would prove useful. She agreed with him that deepening the divisions between your people and the werebeasts would prove profitable.
I
would have selected someone with better eyesight and more pronounced genitals.”

Gah. I have no idea what to say to that, but she’s still talking. “The only reason I’ve come along on these past two endeavors is that he cannot be trusted to act unsupervised. Once Boreal has made amends to the Assembly of Matrons, I will personally tutor Junior to be presented to highborn peerage females. He lacks sophistication, even by what I understand to be human standards.”

Assembly of Matrons? As in ladies? Female
Homo deific
are the dominant gender?

“Poor Frore,” I reply, remembering that he was her brother and Boreal’s cousin (small gene pool). The funeral pyre must still be fresh on her mind. On the island, Crystal took up for Frore when the males clashed. “He certainly paid for Boreal’s ambition.”

“Yes.” She gently bounces Drifa to soothe her. “Such a loss.”

I reach for a round brush. “After he agreed to be implanted with a brain chip, too.”

Suddenly, I have Crystal’s undivided attention. “What are you talking about?”

I take my time, smoothing curls at the base of her thick neck. “It was in the news,” I explain. “When his body was found on that life raft and brought to scientists. They discovered the chip when they examined his remains.”

Crystal stands without warning and plops the baby against my chest. “Take Drifa to the bathroom. She needs to be changed. Be certain to wash all of the excrement from her privates.”

I’m going to count that as a win anyway.

AT THE HIDEOUT HOUSE
, we use Joshua’s odor-free soap and shampoo. We brush our teeth with baking soda. It’s nothing we haven’t been doing every day, a couple of times a day, since returning to Austin. Except this time, Kayla and I pull on charcoal-lined black T-shirts and tear-away warm-up pants, washed in hunter’s detergent. We tug on running boots.