Roadkill (11 page)

“So what do we do when we find him?” I demanded, flopping on the couch and turning on the remote. Or rather pressing buttons in thin air as the remote disappeared from my hand more quickly than Houdini could’ve managed on his best day. Niko laid it on one end table. “Fine,” I grumped. “No TV. Doesn’t change the fact that if we find him and whoever took him has let him out, we’re just a puddle of hemorrhagic fever goo on the ground. Or he might be nice and only explode our hearts or melt our brains, all before we get within a hundred feet of him. Even if I manage to shoot him before I go down or travel closer and break his neck, I still think he’ll have time to take us all with him.”

“Which is why we need a healer, and since we cannot reach Rafferty, we’ll have to try our former client at Columbia, Dr. Nushi.”

Who was in reality a Japanese healing entity called O-Kuni-Nushi. He was known to his less than observant human colleagues as Ken Nushi and worked as a doctor and special seminar instructor for the premed upperclassmen at Columbia University. With the only other healer we’d known, Rafferty Jeftichew, now missing for almost a year, Nushi was our only hope. You fought fire with fire; and you fought a hyped-up, homicidal, megalomaniac Rom Kevorkian with another healer—and not the kind healing warts for God and five bucks at a tent revival either. You needed the real deal.

Unfortunately, per his answering machine, Nushi had returned to his homeland two months ago—on a sabbatical—and was unreachable at this time. There was no forwarding number or address. Niko tried calling Promise, who in turn called in some favors from the nonhuman crowd—nothing. She even tried the other side of her life, the insanely rich—some of whom had buildings at Columbia named after them. Her luck wasn’t any better there. Nushi liked his privacy. No one knew where he was or how to contact him. “Now what?” I checked my watch. It was almost nine, close to time for me to be heading to work. Until Niko’s pals at the university finished burning the prime-time viewing oil, we didn’t even have a direction to start driving.

“Go to work. I’ll try Rafferty. It’s bound to be pointless, but he’s all we have left.” Rafferty was a healer we’d met about three and a half years ago, maybe longer. If anyone could give Suyolak a run for his money, it would be him. Rafferty had kept me alive when I’d had a single drop of blood left in me. He’d also put me to sleep by merely
thinking
it and stopped my heart and restarted it without breaking a sweat. But he had a sick cousin and was, as far as we knew, traveling looking for a cure even he couldn’t provide. We’d called a few times, but he hadn’t felt much like communicating, because he hadn’t answered a single call, had abandoned his house, and no one, not even Goodfellow with his network of fellow tricksters across the country, had seen hide of him nor hair of his cousin for more than a year.

Rafferty’s cousin was a werewolf, same as Rafferty—a Wolf healer; weird, I know. They seemed made to savage, not heal, but, like people, Wolves were all different. But that was the only way they were like people. Werewolves were born, not made; they were a completely different species from humans, although the switching from one form to the other could understandably fool those in the past who had passed on the legends. Unfortunately, the cousin was stuck in wolf form. He was also slowly losing the human reasoning werewolves carried with them while wearing the fur. Rafferty was determined if he couldn’t save his cousin, there had to be someone out there who could. He had his mission and he wasn’t straying from it. I understood that. I understood family. But talk about bad timing.

“Go to work,” Nik ordered, as he punched a number into his cell. “Watch out for the Kin—all of them.” After what the revenant had told me, it wasn’t something my brother had to tell me twice. Until I knew what the Kin’s price would be, I’d be looking over my shoulder more than usual. I pushed up off the soft couch with regret at a lost nap, wished for once we’d catch an easy break, and was just grabbing my jacket when Niko said with a surprised tone I didn’t often hear from him, “Rafferty? Is that you?”

Holy shit. Forget the break. Forget the lotto.

We’d just hit the jackpot.

My name is Catcher.

My parents named me after
Catcher in the Rye
, the book on which they’d had to team up to do a class presentation. Until then, they hadn’t been that interested in each other. But that book about teen angst and a loss of innocence had brought them together, and from then on they had been small-town high school sweethearts—depressing book; nice story.

But that’s not the point.

My name is Catcher.

I thought that every morning when I woke up—every single one—to make sure I was okay; all there; in my right mind; not having an episode. I could picture the air quotes around that last word clear as a bell. “Episode”—what a stupid thing to call it. I snorted and opened my eyes to see the morning light streaming through the battered blinds. It was useless really. If I were in my wrong mind, I wouldn’t know anyway. But the routine made me feel better, so I said it in my head. My name is Catcher.

My name is Catcher, and I’m hungry.

It wasn’t
War and Peace
, but it was an accomplishment and a relief. I took it as such and lounged on the motel bed, its busted springs complaining under me while I waited for my cousin to bring back breakfast. They didn’t like my kind in diners. They had their laws, their signs on the door: NOT ALLOWED. KEEP OUT. Pure prejudice. They had ramps for the physically challenged; parking spots for the same. For me they had nothing but the boot. The hell with them then. If I wasn’t good enough for them, then I’d hang around and watch TV until my cousin came back with all the sausage and pancakes I could eat. It was better than dealing with cranky morning commuters trying to snatch some breakfast before work anyway.

Besides, any day I was myself was a good day, and I was determined to enjoy every good day to the fullest. My mom had always said I wasn’t the glass-half-full type—I was more of an Olympic- sized-pool-overflowing kind. Moms, they always thought the best of you, but I had to admit she’d been right. If there was a bright side, I could see it. If there wasn’t a party, I would start one. Life was a gift. I’d always known that—maybe for a reason. The universe was all about balance.

I yawned, and lazily smacked the remote bolted to the table. News. Smack. Morning show. Smack. Cartoons. Smack. Nature channel. Wolves of Alaska. Fighting wolves. Running wolves. Romping wolves. Mating wolves.

Hello.

The door opened and my cousin walked in with several Styrofoam containers stacked in his hands. He looked at the television and rolled his eyes. “Porn? This early in the morning?”

Like there was a bad time for it, but Rafferty wasn’t a morning person, so I cut him some slack. I liked the morning myself, but I was easy to please. I grinned and yipped forcefully as I bounded off the bed.

“Yeah, yeah. I got your pancakes with apples and whipped cream. Keep eating like this and you’re going to be one fat son of a bitch.” I pawed the air impatiently. “Don’t get your tail in a wad,” he grumped. “I have your two pounds of sausage and bacon too.” He set the containers on the flimsy table by the window and began opening them up. I jumped up on one of the two chairs and dug into the pancakes. They’d always been my favorite since I was a kid. My mom fixed them every Sunday morning, the same Sunday mornings Rafferty would wander over. His mom, my mom’s twin sister, had died a year after he was born, and his own dad wasn’t much of a cook. Raff ate most of his meals with us.

We’d done most everything together. We were in the same grade. All the new kids would think we were brothers. When your mothers were twins, you tended to favor each other. We both had auburn hair, but mine was a shade darker, and neater than the I-don’t-give-a-crap style Rafferty had had his whole life. My eyes had been the same russet of his—except when they were yellow.

They were yellow all the time now.

We’d grown up together, three houses apart. Gone to elementary school together, junior high, high school. Family stuck together. Wolves stuck together. When you were both, you really were glued at the hip. We’d even gone to the same college, although postgrad we’d gone different ways. He’d gone to one with a better med school, and I’d headed to one with a professor famous for his study of the rain forest. But we still e-mailed, called once in a while, spent the first year’s spring break together chasing bikinis on beaches. Then the second year I’d chased my master’s degree in biology to the Amazon.

Nine months later I’d come back and ruined my cousin’s life.

I lifted my muzzle from the scraps of the pancakes. I looked back toward the blinds and the light. Years; it had been years now. Five. Six. It was getting harder and harder to keep count, just like it was getting harder and harder to stay myself. I came and I went, more and more often now.

“You have whipped cream on your nose. Hard to mope with whipped cream on your nose,” Rafferty grunted, pointing a piece of bacon at me. “We’ve got another chance. That guy in Wind River, Wyoming. The Arapaho healer. He’s supposed to be good.”

But not the best; Rafferty was the best. I knew it; Rafferty knew it too, but I wasn’t going to push him on it. My cousin had done everything for me. I wasn’t going to take away his . . . not hope. That was long gone. What he had left was denial. I wasn’t going to take that away. It wasn’t hope, but it was better than nothing.

And that nothing would come soon enough.

I ducked my head, licked the cream off my nose, then snatched the bacon out of his hand. Crunching it, I swallowed and gave him my best nonmoping grin. I looked back at the still-horny wolves on television, then at the food, and gave a low woo woo of inquiry.

“No. No good- looking waitresses. And stop with the I-need-to-get-laid thing. You know I’m a born asshole. A little sex isn’t going to change that, and I have other things on my mind right now, okay?”

The born asshole who had just happened to give up years of his life for me. My family since I could remember. The only family . . . the only real family I had left now that our parents had died. They had gone too young, but I was almost glad they weren’t here to see this. I sighed. Wolves do sigh, sometimes for the very same reasons people do. I picked out three pieces of bacon and dropped them in his container. It wasn’t like he was afraid of germs. One: He was a healer. Two: He had plenty of Wolf germs of his own. His eyes flashed yellow and back to amber. “You’re a pal.” A born ass, a born sarcastic ass, but he meant it. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend; meat is a werewolf’s.

He ate them, but he was distracted—not
seemed
distracted. Not only could I read my cousin’s face with the ease of long practice; I could smell him just as a person could smell a bakery. Humans could smell chocolate, vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, a thousand different things. But we Wolves could smell so many more things, and so much more intensely. Emotion was easy. A state of mind like distraction wasn’t much harder.

I whuffed at him abruptly, jumped down from the chair, and moved over to the open laptop on the floor by the TV. Using my mouth, I picked up the pencil lying next to it, maneuvered it around, and tapped the mouse pad with it. I sat on my haunches as my settings loaded. Slow, slow. Give a wolf a break already, Dell. Finally, I pulled up Word and started typing. Still chewing bacon, Rafferty finally wandered over and bent slightly to read.

“Hey, ‘Captain Jack-off’ seems a little harsh, especially coming from someone who keeps forgetting to flush the john,” he grumbled. He read further. “Damn it, I’m not keeping secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can pick the music today, but you play any country western and I’ll kick your furry ass. Hell, no, it wasn’t me stinking up the place last night. You were the one who ate all the White Castle sliders.” He frowned at the next line. “You want to see the new Batman movie? The one that’s in the theaters now? Catch, I don’t know. Last time we almost got busted.”

I growled. He snorted and echoed the growl perfectly. “Right. I’m terrified.”

This time I growled and bared my teeth. When that didn’t work any better than the other, I fell over onto my side and rolled onto my back, exposing my vulnerable stomach and neck. He groaned, “Goddamnit, fine. We’ll go tonight, but you’ll have to take a bath, so no whining.”

Sucker. I grinned around the pencil and sprang back up to type one last line with pithy punctuation. “
No
,” he said with exasperation and a big fat lie, “no damn secrets, and if that emoticon of the guy doing the sheep is another subtle hint at my needing to get laid, cut it out.”

I dropped the pencil, slammed the laptop lid down with a hard swat of my paw, and growled again. This time I meant it. The deep bass of it reverberated in the back of my throat before spilling out as my lips peeled back to show my teeth. Rafferty’s eyes swirled between amber and yellow. “Shit.” He straightened and rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, it’s Niko and Cal. Nik called on my cell last night when I was out getting us dinner.” He never answered calls anymore. He hadn’t since we hit the road more than a year ago. It was always someone wanting healing, and he didn’t have time for that anymore. He was a man . . . well, werewolf . . . with a mission. Me. I came first—no more healings until I was healed.

Trouble was that I
was
healed.

My cousin, he was the best in the country—in the world. I didn’t doubt it, but sometimes you did a thing so well, so right, that what you started out with was changed forever. I didn’t blame him for this, for being stuck as a wolf with no ability to change back to human. How could I? It was this or death. Even if I’d died and hung around all wolf wings and wolf halo, I wouldn’t have blamed him. Rafferty would’ve turned himself inside out, given up his own life for me if he could have. But sometimes your time was just your time. He knew that. He’d lost other patients. But I hadn’t been just another patient.