Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (15 page)

“I also said that it’s not a vaccine, and it’s potentially fatal,” I protested. “It’s an after-the-fact treatment, and while I’m more than happy to mix some up as a last resort, it isn’t going to keep you ‘safe from werewolves,’ and it needs to be made fresh because it doesn’t keep for more than three or four days. If I made enough to treat the whole Society, I’d blow through all the supplies I brought with me from the States and then some, and it would all be bad inside of the week. Small batches are the only way to make this work.”

“How small?” Riley seemed suddenly more tightly wound, like something I had said had caused the string that ran through the center of his body to contract, drawing him inward. It was unnerving, like watching a snake coil in preparation for striking. “Could you treat a dozen people without endangering your precious supplies?”

I tensed. If that was the number of new infections he was expecting within the next week, the situation was even worse than I had suspected. “A dozen I could do,” I said, fighting to keep my tone level. “It would also be useful to start stockpiling more supplies, just in case they’re needed. They hopefully won’t be, but again, I was limited by the carrying capacity of my luggage.”

“Good,” he said. “We’re going to the med station, and you’re mixing up enough to offer the treatment to every Society member who’s been exposed. Am I clear?”

Oh. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be ready in a minute.” The people who had been bitten before I got to Australia were on the cusp of crossing the line from “may still be saved” into “lost forever.” The treatment
could
work right up until the first transformation, theoretically, but we had no confirmed instances of it working after fourteen days.

I hated to make them wait even a moment, but I knew enough about fieldwork to know that if I didn’t eat now, I might not get the opportunity to eat again before dinner—if then. I’d been on a manticore hunt once that had resulted in skipping four meals in a row. Not because we wanted to; because the manticore was chasing us, and we couldn’t stop to build a fire.

(Grandma Alice always said being in the field should be treated like going to war: eat when you can, sleep when you can, never put your gun down, and never get drunker than the people around you. Grandma Alice was more than a little bit paranoid. Sadly for me, she was also more than a little bit right.)

Riley stood next to my chair, not speaking, and watched as I ate breakfast. Shelby joined us while I was still shoveling eggs into my face. She took one look at her father, sighed, and said, “Mum, slap me together a sandwich, will you? I need to go get my knives.”

“All right, honey,” said Charlotte.

“Can you grab my go bag?” I asked. “It’s the big brown one.” I didn’t like asking her to carry my things when I was sitting and enjoying breakfast with her family, but Charlotte didn’t seem inclined to make me a sandwich, and Shelby was already going upstairs.

“Shall do, lazy boy,” said Shelby, and made her retreat.

I had finished eating by the time Shelby returned, now with Flora riding on her shoulder. The little garrinna had her tail linked around Shelby’s neck, providing the leverage she needed to stay upright. Riley turned and walked toward the door without a word. Shelby got her egg-and-ham sandwich from her mother, and the two of us followed him out to the car.

The medical station was a thirty-minute drive from the house, down a series of successively smaller roads, all of which Riley drove along like he was challenging the God of Car Crashes and Automotive Fatalities to do something about it. Shelby sat in the front with him, Flora shrieking challenges at birds in nearby trees as we went rocketing by, and I bounced around in the backseat despite my seat belt, grabbing onto anything I could to try and stabilize myself. By the time we pulled up in front of the small white-walled building that was our destination, I was beginning to seriously rethink my views on carsickness.

Cooper was already outside, leaning against the wall next to the door with his hands shoved into his pockets and a vaguely disinterested look on his face. A black dog with high, pointed ears was sitting calmly beside him. Cooper’s expression didn’t change as we piled out of the car. Flora shrieked at the dog. The dog barked twice at the garrinna, a high, piercing sound that didn’t hold any real threat, but would definitely have served to alert Cooper if Flora had been sneaking up on him. The garrinna took off from Shelby’s shoulder and flew to a nearby tree, still shrieking.

“Sometimes I feel like I never left home,” I muttered.

“What’s that?” asked Shelby.

“Nothing,” I said. Louder, I continued, “Morning, Cooper. Good to see you again.”

“I go where Riley tells me to,” he said, by way of greeting.

“Cooper’s a vet tech,” said Riley, brushing past me as he went to unlock the building door. “He’s going to watch everything you do. See if we can’t figure out how to replicate the process when you’re not around.” His tone was challenging, like he expected me to protest and claim the tincture as some sort of family secret.

If he’d been hoping for a fight, I was going to disappoint him. “That sounds like an excellent plan to me,” I said, adjusting my glasses. “What are you and Shelby going to do?”

“Area patrol,” said Shelby, sounding almost obscenely pleased about the idea. “Going to poke through the local brush, make sure nothing unpleasant has decided to set up camp. You know, the usual sort of work.”

I blinked, looking at her. She was wearing what I thought of as her zoo clothes: a tan shirt and khaki shorts, with thick white socks under thicker brown leather boots. It was great attire for showing off with tigers in a controlled environment, but for the Australian brush, I’d been expecting something a little more platemail-esque. “Really?”

“Really.” She darted forward, pressing a kiss against my cheek. Riley looked over his shoulder at us and scowled. “I promise I’ll be fine. The boots’ll keep anything from taking a chomp out of me, and if I run up against something that’s aiming above the knees, clothes wouldn’t have saved me anyhow.”

“That’s encouraging,” I said dryly.

“Buck up, Alex. If I die, they’ll probably deport you. So either way, the outcome is in your favor.”

Shelby was still laughing at her own joke—and my stricken face—when her father shoved the door open and turned to stalk back to where we were standing. “How long is your little alchemy lesson going to take?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “The stuff is delicate. It could be as little as an hour. It could take as long as three hours. It all depends on whether I get it right on my first attempt.”

“Get it right,” said Riley. “Shelly, you’re with me.” He kept walking, moving onward into the dense underbrush on the other side of the narrow dirt track masquerading as a road. Shelby shrugged and hurried after him, giving me a “what can you do?” look over her shoulder. The brush rustled as it swallowed them whole, and I was alone with Cooper, his silently watchful dog, and Shelby’s garrinna, which was still giving off intermittent shrieks, just in case we’d forgotten she was there.

“I can’t imagine why they’re on the verge of extinction,” I said, turning from the garrinna to Cooper, who hadn’t moved since we arrived.

He didn’t smile. “They’re noisy because we’ve taught them to be that way,” he said. “They’re too bright colored to hide, so the ones that survived the hunters long enough to breed are the ones that got early notice when danger was coming. Hence the screams. In another few generations, it could be they’ll never stop.”

“Er.” My sense of humor has never been the most refined, but I wasn’t accustomed to being shut down quite that efficiently for something that hadn’t been that offensive. “I’m sorry. I think I’m still jet lagged. I keep sticking my foot in it.”

Cooper seemed to thaw slightly: while he didn’t smile, his stone-faced expression was a little less unyielding. Under the circumstances, I’d take it. “You’re in a bit of a hard place, all things considered. No one’s ever been willing to take a run at one of the Tanner girls before. Between Riley and Jack, it was always pretty damn clear that they were off-limits. When Shelly sent home word that she was seeing someone, Riley came close to hitting the roof. Doesn’t help that it’s her, either. Daddy’s girl isn’t supposed to fall for anybody else.”

I knew from my conversations with Shelby when we first started dating that I wasn’t her first serious boyfriend—far from it. She’d dated more than I had, mostly while she was away at school. That apparently didn’t jibe with Riley’s understanding of his own daughter. I decided it wasn’t my place to bring up things she might not want finding their way back to her parents, and just shrugged. “He has three daughters. Maybe he needs to get used to the idea that they’re going to date eventually.”

“He was better about it before Jack died and made Shelby her father’s heir,” said Cooper. “People get protective of the things they love once they realize those things can be lost.”

“Yeah. I know.” The conversation was getting uncomfortable, and I felt very exposed having it in the middle of the road. I walked past him, into the medical station. As I had expected, Cooper followed me, shutting the door behind himself.

It was a small room, more of a glorified shed than anything else, but every inch of space had been used to the best of its abilities by whomever had overseen the conversion of the original structure into a fully equipped veterinary office. Shelves lined the walls, glass-fronted and stocked with common medicines, first aid supplies, and what looked like a surgical kit. An operating table was pushed up against one counter, where it could be moved as necessary, and there was a small wet station, complete with sink and what looked like a chemical shower.

“Water runs from a tank, not a pipe, so only use what you need,” said Cooper, moving to raise the shades on the two small windows. “We have it refilled after people need to use this facility, but that’s not going to be any help if your hands need washing and you’ve already sent all the wash water off down the drain.”

“Good to know.” I hoisted my go bag onto the operating table and began carefully unpacking it. I could have moved faster, but I wanted to be sure none of the seals had been broken and none of the potentially hazardous materials had managed to mix together. Piece by piece, the results of a thousand years of scientific progress and folk medicine appeared on the gleaming stainless steel.

Dried aconite. Powdered silver nitrate. Liquid mercury, heavy and poisonously lovely. A jar of rowan ash, burnt so fine that it looked almost volcanic. Another jar, this one filled with unicorn water. There were no unicorns in Australia; unless they had a native purifier I didn’t know about, I was going to need to measure what I had down to the drop.

“You’re going to tell me what all these things are, yeah?” asked Cooper. His dog had followed him inside; its pointed black ears appeared above the edge of the table, quivering as it listened to the noises I was making.

“I’ll walk you through the whole process,” I promised. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Jett,” said Cooper. He smiled down at the dog, an expression of absolute fondness on his face. “She’s my good girl, aren’t you, Jett?”

Jett emitted that high, piercing bark again, as if to say that yes, she was absolutely a good girl, and she didn’t understand why it was even being questioned. There should be no room for debate. In the Good Girl Olympics, Jett was clearly taking home the gold, and might be shooting to bring back the silver and the bronze as well, just for the sake of having a complete set.

“Well, I think she’s lovely, and I hate to ask, but is she all right with loud noises and strange smells? This stuff isn’t exactly what I’d call sunshine and roses when it’s being mixed.”

Cooper’s look of fondness twisted into a scowl—although oddly, it didn’t come with a renewed freeze. Apparently, he couldn’t go completely cold while he was talking about his dog, even if the topic at hand was “do we need to put her outside.” “She’s come with me to the range,” he said. “If she can sit through a bunch of men shooting holes in things not ten yards away, she’ll be fine for whatever witch’s brew you’re planning to make.”

“All right,” I said. I picked up the jar of dried aconite, frowning at it, before looking back up at Cooper. “You said imported aconite had gone endemic in this country. Is there any chance we could find some growing near here? The tincture will work a lot better if I can make it with fresh flowers, rather than relying on the dried stuff.”

“Yeah, this is good country for the nasty weeds. I’ve seen them growing near here. Pretty sure I can shake us out a patch pretty quick.” Cooper stooped to pat Jett on the head. “You’re going to stay here, girl, and guard this place for us? We’ll be back to you shortly.”

Jett barked again, presumably agreeing to stay and guard, or maybe just acknowledging that her human was making sounds with his flappy face hole. It was difficult to tell, with dogs. I’d never had the experience that might have made it easier.

“There’s some nasty stuff in the wood around here,” Cooper explained, straightening up again. “This is bunyip territory. Better if she stays behind where she won’t get eaten.”