Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four (32 page)

“Mum, come on.” Shelby took hold of her mother’s arm, tugging gently. “We need to go with Alex. We need to call everyone together and explain what’s going on.”

“And while we’re having meetings, how many of our new enemies will we be telling exactly what we know?” Charlotte shook her head, giving me a plaintive look. “Are you sure Cooper is our werewolf?”

“I don’t think he’s the original, no,” I said. “Something bit him. Something brought the infection here. Maybe it was a game animal smuggled into the country by someone with more money than sense—that’s how you got the manticore problem, isn’t it? Or maybe it was a person, somebody who got bitten and then came here thinking that there was enough open space for them to disappear and never endanger anyone. Lycanthropy is rare enough that even most victims don’t realize they can infect other mammals. They think that as long as they avoid humans, they’re taking the proper precautions.”

The sheep, and how calm they’d been about the Tanners, made me sure that Cooper was behind the ambushes. Looking into either the folklore around lycanthropy or the scant research that had been published (thinly veiled as explorations of a variant strain of rabies) would have made the spillover connection quickly evident to anyone who knew how to ask the right questions. He’d figured out that animals could be infected, and he’d used that knowledge.

“Still a cryptozoologist, even after changing species,” I murmured.

“What’s that?” asked Shelby.

“Nothing.” I shook my head. “We need to move. I don’t like us being out here on our own.” Between the three of us, we had the silver bullets in my gun and whatever other weapons we happened to be carrying. I knew Shelby had a pistol and several knives, as did I; while I wasn’t sure what Charlotte carried as a matter of course, Shelby had to have received her training
somewhere
, and I was willing to bet Riley hadn’t been the one to teach his eldest daughter how to hide a pair of brass knuckles in a bra. And none of that would do any good, if it wasn’t silver. Cooper had already shrugged off severe enough blood loss that he’d been pronounced dead, and one of the werewolves that had attacked us both—me sincerely, Cooper as part of whatever double-blind scheme they were trying to pull—had gotten up and walked away after being shot with almost a dozen lead slugs. Silver was the answer. Without it, we were sitting ducks.

“Agreed,” said Charlotte. She turned and walked back toward the house. Shelby and I followed, not letting the space between us stretch to more than a couple of feet. Sending one scout ahead of the group was just asking to be cut off or separated, and we didn’t need that tonight.

Shelby stuck close to me as we made our way back to the guesthouse, which I appreciated very much. I resisted the urge to take her hand, less because I was afraid of showing affection in front of her mother, and more because I needed to keep both my hands free in case of trouble. I should probably have been taking point, but I didn’t think leaving our rear flank unguarded was a good plan. With no ideal options open to us, I was going to stay where I felt like I could do the most good, and that was next to Shelby.

Gabby and Raina were on the porch when we arrived in the yard, talking intently to Chloe. We were too far away to hear what they were saying, but judging by their posture and the sharp, unceasing motion of their hands, it wasn’t anything they were going to repeat with their mother in range. Jett, who had been pressed against Raina’s leg, pushed away from her new mistress and barked once in our direction, announcing our arrival. Gabby and Raina stopped talking as they turned to look at us. Chloe took advantage of the break in their concentration, first stepping back from the two, and then bolting down the porch steps.

It was really too bad for her that Shelby did the bulk of her work with large carnivores, and was accustomed to thinking like a predator. By the time Chloe’s foot hit the pavement Shelby was there, a gun in her hand and a smile on her face. She shoved the muzzle of the former into Chloe’s chest, digging it in with enough force that I knew the thinner woman was going to have a bruise.

“Going somewhere?” asked Shelby.

Raina hopped down the porch steps, coming to a stop behind Chloe. “She wanted us to shoot Dad,” she reported, in a low, dangerous tone. “She came in here to say that if we didn’t do the right thing on our own, she’d go to the Society and get them to
order
us to do the right thing.”

Shelby looked horrified. “What about the quarantine period?” she demanded. “We’ve had people locked up in there for days!”

“
He
proves that you don’t think the rules apply to you and your family,” said Chloe, stabbing a finger at me to punctuate her statement. “Your little American boytoy should be shut away like the rest, but he’s running free, because the rules don’t apply to the high and mighty Tanner family. You really think anyone’s going to believe that you’ll keep Riley caged? He’ll be free by morning, and then we’re all doomed!”

“Shelby, can you keep her here?” My words seemed entirely out of place, given the situation. I needed to say them anyway.

Thankfully for me, Shelby understood the way my mind worked at least well enough not to question me. “Yeah,” she said. “Go take care of whatever you need to do.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and ran for the porch.

Even if the guesthouse hadn’t been small and mostly comprised of closed doors, I would have had no trouble finding my room: all I had to do was follow the sound of high-pitched rodent voices chanting liturgies. I swung myself through the open door and found the entire congregation standing in a circle on the floor, some of them holding brightly colored feathers from unidentified local birds, others holding small candles of the sort commonly found on birthday cakes. Shelby’s garrinna, Flora, was curled up on the bed with her forepaws crossed in the classic feline manner and her head cocked hard to the side in a perfect expression of avian fascination. All the mice stopped chanting as they turned to look at me. Flora raised her head and mantled her wings, giving a screech of welcome.

I was, for once, speechless. It seemed the mice were, too. Then, as one, they began waving their feathers and candles and shouting, “HAIL! HAIL THE GOD OF SCALES AND SILENCES, CONQUEROR OF WEREWOLVES!”

“That is
not
going to become a part of my official title,” I said sternly. I crouched, putting myself more on a level with them. “I need three mice to come with me. The mission will be a dangerous one. I cannot guarantee the safety of any who choose to volunteer. I can promise you that I will do my very best to keep you from harm, and that should I fail, I will carry the weight of my failure for the rest of my living days.”

Aeslin mice never forget anything. They don’t hold the rest of the world to the same lofty standard, which is a good thing, or we would be forever breaking their tiny, fragile hearts. For them, an offer of memory by one of their gods was the greatest of all possible honors. I just hoped I wouldn’t have reason to make good on my promise. “What do you need us to do?” squeaked the priest, lowering its feather. “We are at your Service.”

“The werewolf we came here to find is cleverer than we suspected, and has done more damage than we feared,” I said. “We need to check people for signs of infection. We suspect that it’s been biting them and then coaching them through their first change, bringing them back only when they can control their tempers.” It occurred to me that there might be some sort of master schedule I could consult, something that would tell me who had taken sick or vacation days, and when. Back home, it would have been virtually impossible for one of us to be bitten by a werewolf and disappear for a week without someone taking notice. Maybe I’d get lucky, and it would work the same way here.

I hadn’t been getting lucky very often.

“No bitten thing can control their temper,” said the priest, sounding dubious. “It may Seem So, but that will be Mere Illusion. Given time enough, they will slip. The bonds they construct around themselves will break, and the Beast will be Freed.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Will you help me?”

“A moment,” squeaked the mouse gravely, before turning back to the congregation. The circle constricted, becoming something more closely akin to a huddle, and they began murmuring, squeaking, and otherwise talking amongst themselves. I resisted the urge to lean closer and try to listen in. They deserved to make this decision without feeling like I was judging them.

Finally, all six mice turned to look at me expectantly. “We will Come,” squeaked the priest. “But you must Choose.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I cannot claim this Honor as my own, for I am responsible for the Lives under my Care,” said the priest. “But you are responsible for the Heavens and the Earth, and the lives of mice and men must be as tools to you. So you will Choose the three who will accompany you, whose lives will be risked for this Sacred Task. Thus will we know that the correct souls have been selected for such a Holy Undertaking.”

My mouth went dry. I had known when I asked the mice if they would be willing to do this for me that I would be risking their lives—and while Aeslin mice are superheroes compared to their more mundane cousins, they’re still mice. They can be killed by cats, or poorly placed human feet . . . or werewolves. I had been hoping, on some level, that they would choose their own best and brightest, and save me from the responsibility.

They were all still watching me with bright beady eyes, clearly excited by the idea of going on a holy mission, even as the thought of initiating that same mission made me feel slightly sick. “You, you, and you,” I said, stabbing my finger almost at random into the congregation. “You’re the ones I choose.”

The three mice who had been selected for this great honor—and this incredible risk—squeaked with startled delight, throwing their feathers (and in one case, lit candle) aside. The candle was quickly retrieved by another mouse, I noted, before it could set the carpet aflame. That was a small mercy, as the three chosen mice swarmed onto my palm and then raced upward to my shoulder, their squeaks and chitters of joy completely unintelligible to my human ears.

I remained in my crouch, briefly meeting the eyes of the young priest. It looked more tired than it had when we left America, and I realized with a pang that I didn’t know its name, or whether it was male or female, or whether it was mated. It was a cypher to me, and I was a god to it, and that suddenly didn’t seem fair.

“Do you want to come along?” I asked the priest. I couldn’t figure out how to broach the bigger questions. I had never been as good at talking to the mice as my sisters were, and maybe that went both ways: Verity and Antimony were priestesses, not gods, and that made them objects of less reverence to the colony. There was room for conversation there, and maybe that same room didn’t exist for me.

The priest flattened its whiskers, looking pleased by the offer. At least I’d gotten that much right. “No, but thank You,” it said. “I will stay here, with the congregation, and Pray for the Success of Your endeavors.”

“All right,” I said, and straightened. The mice on my shoulder gave another brief cheer. “You are hereby free to go wherever you need to go in order to keep yourselves safe. If danger comes into this house, go to the walls, and keep yourselves safe.”

“We Shall,” squeaked the mouse priest, and the two remaining members of the congregation cheered as loudly as their tiny lungs allowed, sealing the compact.

Still feeling as if I were somehow betraying their trust in me, but with no other evident solutions, I turned and left the room as the mice atop my shoulder cheered.

The hall was empty. The other doors were closed—including one that had been open until very recently, where Riley Tanner was being quarantined. I hesitated as I passed it, unable to fight the idea that I should stop and knock and tell him what was going on; that Cooper was a traitor, or at least was no longer on the side of his former allies. That we were going to check the Society for other turncoats, and find a way to track Cooper down before he could spread his sickness through the whole continent. I would have wanted to know, in Riley’s place.

I would also have wanted to help. And the only way Riley had left to help was to stay locked in that room with the virus in his veins, waiting for my makeshift treatment to either cure him or fail him. He couldn’t come out. He couldn’t protect his family. Telling him what was really going on wouldn’t just be futile, it would be cruel, and much as I didn’t like the man, I didn’t want to torture him.

Sometimes there are no easy answers in our line of work. Sometimes there’s no way to prevent people from getting hurt. I sighed, looking away from the door, and kept on walking.

It was the only thing I had left to do.

“Family matters more than anything else in this world. Family doesn’t have to love you. Family doesn’t even have to like you. But when you need them, family has to have your back.”

—Kevin Price

Once again on the front porch of a secluded guesthouse in Queensland, Australia, really wishing there were some excuse to make all parties involved take a nap

C
HARLOTTE HAD LIT
WHATEVER
version of the Bat Signal the Thirty-Six Society used because when I stepped back onto the porch, I was greeted by yet another sea of Australian cryptozoologists. It was becoming a common enough occurrence that their sheer numbers didn’t throw me—I was more amazed by the fact that she’d managed to rouse this many people at two o’clock in the morning.

It helped that most of the Thirty-Sixers were standing very still, casting nervous glances at their neighbors and looking like they didn’t know whether they should be declaring their own uninfected status or avoiding contact with everyone they couldn’t be sure of. I scanned the front lines, looking for familiar faces. I hadn’t been in Australia long enough to learn everyone’s names, but I had been there long enough that at least a few people had started standing out to me.

I found about half of them. The rest were either farther back in the crowd, protected from casual observation by the surrounding bodies . . . or they weren’t here. And if they weren’t here, there was every chance they were with Cooper.

This was going to be harder than I’d thought.

Charlotte turned when she heard me step onto the porch, a spark of animation coming into her otherwise empty eyes. “There you are,” she said. “Good. You can explain the plan from here.” And then she stepped to the side. Charlotte Tanner—who already looked like she’d been widowed, even though her husband was alive upstairs, waiting to see what the end of his incubation period would bring—stepped to the side, indicating that I should move forward. Raina put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, bolstering her up.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, Shelby made a small beckoning gesture. Her gun had been holstered, and Chloe was gone. I swallowed the urge to turn and bolt for the safety of the upstairs as I squared my shoulders and walked to stand between them. The eerily silent crowd turned its many eyes on me. The urge to run rose again. I swallowed it back down.

“Where’s Chloe?” I murmured, as I stepped into position.

“Mum wanted us to form a line, so I asked Gabby to take Chloe inside and lock her in one of the quarantine rooms,” said Shelby. “We can question her when this is done, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I kissed her on the temple before turning my attention to the crowd. “This is what we know,” I began.

It took about fifteen minutes to explain the situation, from what we had found (or hadn’t found) in the tin shed that was
not
a suitable substitute for a morgue to all the reasons that the werewolf in the basement’s behavior was abnormal. Gabby returned somewhere in the middle of my explanation. I stressed, several times, how important Helen Jalali was going to be to the Society’s recovery, since she was the only doctor we knew of who didn’t have to worry about potential infection, and who could thus treat anyone who had been exposed. And then I stopped talking, and I waited for the inevitable questions.

The first one was something I hadn’t been expecting, although I probably should have been. A man shouldered his way to the front of the crowd and demanded, “Well, how do we know if we’ve been exposed? Cooper helped with dinner the other night! Maybe he put something in the soup!”

The people around him erupted in anxious mutters. I put my hands up, waiting for silence. Inch by slow inch, it fell. I lowered my hands.

“Lycanthropy is spread via fluid transfer,” I said. “You can’t catch it from a toilet seat or by sharing a glass. It can’t be cooked into food without denaturing the virus and making it ineffective.” Technically, Cooper could have drooled or bled into something cool, like salad dressing, but even then, there would only have been a risk if the people who consumed his “specialty dishes” had had open sores or wounds in their mouths, throats, or stomachs. The odds of an infection via that route were perishingly small, and I decided quickly that it was better not to mention them at all. I was already struggling not to start a panic.

Shelby stepped up next to me. The crowd, which had been starting to mutter again, calmed, looking to her with a degree of trust that they would never show to me. I was an unknown quantity. She was the daughter of their current leaders, the heir apparent, and even if she’d been away for a long time, she was still someone they knew had their best interests at heart.

“We have a test for lycanthropy,” she said. “It doesn’t require bleeding, which is good, since we’ve seen enough blood shed in the last few days, yeah? It just needs you to come over here and let the talking mice get a whiff. If they say you’re clean, you’re clean. If they say you’re not, well. We have plenty of space in the quarantine house,” she nodded over her shoulder to the building behind us, “and we’ll be offering the best possible care. We want to help you get better.”

There was no “getting better” for someone who’d been infected long enough to have experienced their first transformation. The body the new-minted werewolf returned to was no longer fully human, having grown the necessary circulatory backups and additional nerves to survive repeated changes. There was no point in going into any of that under the circumstances. We wanted anyone who had been infected—or suspected they might have been—to come to us willingly, not turn and bolt for the hills.

“Why do we trust a bunch of talking mice?” shouted someone.

To my surprise, it was Gabby who stepped forward and said hotly, “Because they’re Aeslin mice, and Aeslin mice can’t lie! Unlike you, Patrick Hester. Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you trying to catch that drop bear last year.” The target of her rage was a large, towheaded man. The people around him stepped away, creating a bubble of open space that was extremely visible in the middle of the otherwise packed crowd. “You were going to sell that poor thing to a private collector, and for what? A little money? You should be ashamed of yourself. We trust the talking mice because they’re talking mice, just like we mistrust you because you’re an arsehole.”

“That’s my sister,” said Shelby, looking amused.

Raina didn’t look so amused. “That’s not right,” she said. She reached forward, putting a hand on Gabby’s shoulder. “Hey. I’m the angry one, remember? Dial it back a little, we need to keep these people on our side.”

Gabby’s head whipped around so fast I heard the bones in her neck crack. She bared her teeth at Raina in a human parody of a dog’s snarl. Raina’s eyes widened and she took a step back, almost colliding with me. Jett matched her motion, ears going flat.

“Gabrielle?” said Charlotte. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

Bit by bit, Gabby’s snarl faded into a look of wide-eyed dismay. Then, before any of us could gather our wits enough to react, she turned and flung herself from the porch, shoving through the crowd as she fled toward the woods.

“Gabby!”
Charlotte jumped after her middle daughter, giving chase. I had to give her this: she was in her late forties at the very least, she was a mother three times over, and based on the speed with which she pursued her fleeing child, I would have been happy to have her represent me in a triathlon. The crowd, which had parted somewhat to let Gabby through, closed again around Charlotte, not to protect the fleeing girl, but because they were all starting to demand answers at once.

Shelby was standing frozen, a horrified expression on her face. I turned toward her, and said the words I most wanted to avoid:

“She’s been exposed.” They were cold, cruel words, and they fell hard into the space between us, seeming to create a chasm that could never be bridged. “The temper, the physiological response—it’s the only thing that fits.”

“She’s my
sister
,” snapped Shelby.

“That doesn’t make her immune.” It hadn’t made her father immune. It hadn’t made me immune. All any of us could do was roll the dice and take our chances.

“I know where she’s going.”

Shelby and I both turned to Raina. She was still standing where she’d been when Gabby ran, Jett pressed against her legs like the small black dog thought that her new mistress was the only remaining source of safety in a world that had suddenly turned confusing and cruel.

“What’s that?” asked Shelby.

“I don’t think she’s working with Cooper—not voluntarily—and I know where she’s going. The same place she’s always gone when she was scared.” Raina’s expression went hard as she focused on me. “I can take you there, but you have to promise you won’t hurt her.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that,” I said, tracking Charlotte’s progress—or lack thereof—through the crowd. Gabby was gone, leaving nothing but confusion and shouting in her wake. “If she attacks one of us, I’ll have to react accordingly. But I can at least try to make sure she isn’t hurt.”

“If you can’t promise, I can’t take you,” said Raina stubbornly.

Shelby sighed. “And when Mum gets back here? Do you put the same requirement on for her? If Gabby’s been infected, we’re going to need to deal with it, one way or another. If we go now, maybe we can talk her down before Mum makes things worse. She means well, you know she does, but . . .”

“But she’ll pick and pick and agitate the situation.” Raina shook her head. “This is such a mess,” she practically moaned. “I should have seen it. She’s my sister. I should have
seen
it.”

“We promise,” I said, before the conversation could continue. I lifted the mice down from my shoulder, setting them on the porch railing. They looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes. “When Charlotte comes back, help her,” I instructed. “Let her take you around to sniff out the infection. All right? She is the mother of your newest Priestess. Until I return, obey her as you would
my
mother. Understand?”

“It Shall Be So!” squeaked one of the mice, while the others shivered in religious ecstasy.

We could deal with the issue of whether I had just deputized Charlotte Tanner as an official Mouse Priestess later. I turned to Raina. “Please,” I said. “Take us to your sister.”

Raina nodded, eyes bright with the tears she wasn’t allowing herself to shed. Then she turned and bolted back into the house, leaving Shelby and me to follow her or be left behind. Jett ran at her heels, ears folded flat against her head and long canine legs eating up the distance with ease.

We ran through the front room and down the hall, until we came to a small, boxy kitchen that hadn’t been included on my earlier tour of the house. There was a door on the far wall, half-blocked with boxes and kitchen detritus. Raina tore into the barricade like a wild thing, raining down cardboard and boxed pasta on Shelby and me, until she wrenched the door open and flung herself through it in turn, vanishing down the back porch steps. Shelby and I exchanged a look before we pursued. We had already come far enough that turning back seemed impossible.

Trees loomed up on the other side of a narrow strip of uncultivated lawn that was half wildflowers and half snarled scrub that snatched at our feet and ankles as we ran. I didn’t recognize any of it, and I didn’t remember enough about the local flora to know if we were charging straight into the Australian equivalent of poison sumac.

If that was the case, the Tanners would no doubt have the Australian equivalent of calamine lotion in their medicine cupboard. I kept running.

Eucalyptus forests are not like evergreen forests in any but the most general of senses. We ran until we could no longer see anything but trees in any direction. The space between trunks remained broad enough to feel like something out of a Hollywood film. It was like we were running through a soundstage, and not an actual wood, and that only made me more uneasy.

“This is ridiculous,” muttered Shelby. She put on a burst of speed, grabbing Raina by her elbow before the younger Tanner girl could vanish into yet another thick copse of trees. “Stop! Raina, just stop, all right?”

Raina stumbled to a halt, turning to glare mulishly at her sister. “You said you wanted to help me. You
said
.”

“Yes, and we even ran off half-cocked to do it, but where are we even going? We’re in the middle of nowhere, and there are
werewolves
on the loose!” Shelby let go of Raina’s elbow. “This isn’t a good place to be without a plan.”

Jett leaned against Raina’s leg and whined. I looked at the dog, a sudden, horrible thought occurring to me. She had been with Cooper when I first met her. Who was to say that the sweet little black canine wasn’t a werewolf in waiting?

Bringing it up now wouldn’t do any good. I made a mental note to have Jett checked for lycanthropy as soon as we got back to the mice.

“I have a plan,” insisted Raina. “We’re going to find Gabby and make her come home. That’s the plan. We’re going to fix her.”

Shelby cast me a sidelong look. I shook my head. I was staying out of this one for as long as possible. Having two younger sisters of my own has left me well-equipped to know when to shut my mouth.