Roadkill (20 page)

But since I couldn’t do either, I lay there and burned. My vision went in and out as I went in and out. Eventually I was more there than not and the burning faded. I blinked once, saw Rafferty’s face, but I still couldn’t breathe—not until Rafferty lifted me and turned me over as I hung uselessly, his arms wrapped around my stomach to hold me off the floor. I would’ve been on all fours if I could’ve borne any of my own weight. “I’m sure you’ve puked a time or two in your day, Cal,” he said brusquely. “Think of this as your lungs vomiting instead of your stomach.”

It was a good description. You didn’t quite get the range you did with vomiting, but the sensation of your lungs turning almost inside out made up for the lack of distance. It couldn’t have been a gallon, but it felt like it coming out and looked like it puddled on the carpet. Green, yellow, and extremely repugnant. I coughed harshly several times, before getting enough strength back to wipe at my mouth with my jacket sleeve. That was when I noticed I was breathing again, which, now that I thought about it, was really underrated. Great hobby. Couldn’t get enough of it.

“That’s . . . just . . . not right,” I said, coughing again. “Couldn’t you just . . . have gotten rid of it?”

“I did,” Rafferty responded with exasperation at my ear.

“I meant, just make it disappear. Poof.” He helped me stand upright and steadied me when I staggered.

“I’m a healer, not Houdini,” he grunted. “And that’s the second time I’ve saved your life. Show a little gratitude, you thankless jackass.”

“Maybe I’d be more grateful if you, Mr. Super Healer, had noticed all this shit sooner. You know, not been watching your cousin Sir Hump- a-Lot giving Delilah the eye and wanting to give her a whole lot more.” I staggered back away from the pool of stinking fluids. Jesus, I could still taste it. I needed gum . . . toothpaste . . . anything.

“It was your Kibbles ’n’ Tits that started that scene,” he snorted.

My legs stabilized under me and I quirked my lips at the picture of Delilah’s face if she’d heard that one. “It’s good to be among my own kind.”

“And what’s that?” he asked suspiciously.

“Assholes.” I grinned ruefully. I looked down at the ruined carpet at my feet. “I need to get rid of my DNA. Niko’s been paranoid for a while about the government’s accidentally finding a random mutant gene of mine floating around somewhere, starting a manhunt, and beginning to clone me to sell.”

“For what? Soldiers?” He went behind the counter, rummaged around, and returned with half a bottle of vodka.

“Come on. Borderline psychotic. Do anything for the right price. Half-fiendish monster.” I squatted down. “Supersoldiers, nope. More like an army of congress-men.” Pulling out one of my knives, I cut a circle in the flat, worn carpet. By the time I was out the door, a matter of seconds, and tossing it on the asphalt of the parking lot, Niko was there to watch me use the vodka and my lighter to burn it.

“Considerate of you to not burn down the entire motel.”

The fire was flaming nicely and I let Rafferty pull the bottle of vodka out of my hand to take the last remaining swallow. “It
was
nice of me. You’re going to smack the back of my head anyway?” I asked Niko. “Because I’m beginning to worry about your causing a bald spot there, and I have enough going against me already in the dating department.”

“No, I’m not. As far as I can tell, this, by some means completely beyond comprehension, is not your fault.” His fingers were gripping my chin firmly, turning my face to one side, then the other. He was examining my skin color, the whites of my eyes, double-checking Rafferty’s work. When it came to me, Niko trusted no one but himself for the last word.

“Want to look at my teeth too?” I asked. “Guess my age like a horse’s?”

He decided to swat me after all. “Get your things and let’s go.” He stopped my first step with a hand on my shoulder. “You know, this may be one of the few times I was actually grateful you’re half Auphe.”

“You should be.” Rafferty dropped the bottle onto the concrete. It didn’t shatter, instead rolling from side to side with a musical tinkle. “Otherwise he would’ve never even made it to the door. He’d have been facedown in the parking lot right about where we’re standing. Dead between one breath and the next. Suyolak’s hypervirus had made it at least this far out. And if Cal had been human, all human, I’m not sure I could’ve brought him back.” Reddish brown went to yellow, then to dark amber as he stared at us through ragged auburn hair. “The Plague of the World. They weren’t shitting when they gave him that name. He’s a harvester of death, all right, but I’ll reap his ass.”

“You can be sure of that?” Niko demanded.

“No,” he answered, passing us on the way back to the car.

At least he was honest.

My name is Catcher. . . .

My name is Catcher. I was pretty sure about that, as I gave a sleepy blink—as sure as I was of anything. Sun and wind and smells; some were new, some not, and all of them confusing. There was also a hazy memory of a cat. My ears lay back and I decided I didn’t care about my little way of checking if I was in my right mind, because then I sort of wished I weren’t. Full consciousness had hit me, and I woke up to a massive case of unhappy. Despite the easygoing attitude I tried to hang on to all my life, I didn’t think that was going to change anytime in the next day or so.

The day before Rafferty and I had gone to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to meet with an American Indian healer. He also happened to be about one-sixteenth trickster. One-sixteenth didn’t sound like much, but when some tricksters counted themselves as gods, it could give you serious bragging rights and sometimes the ability to go with it. I didn’t know if this guy had gotten anything extra from his trickster blood, but if he had, it hadn’t superpowered his healing ability any. He couldn’t undo what Rafferty had done and told us both, sympathetically but in no uncertain terms, that no one could. I’d been a dead man walking. Rafferty had traded my human half for more than five years of life, and only he could’ve pulled that off. No one else could do what he’d done to begin with and there was no way on Coyote’s green earth that anyone could undo it either, the other healer had said.

My cousin didn’t take it well.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t throw anything either, and with his temper, that was saying something. I would’ve been less worried if he
had
thrown something. But he didn’t. He just said calmly that we’d keep looking. He wasn’t giving up, and he meant it. He actually meant it.

Raff didn’t get it. He was never going to get it. He talked about Niko’s knowing some Japanese healing entity and maybe . . .

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

He couldn’t let me go. He couldn’t forgive himself when there was nothing to forgive. He had saved me, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t convince him of that. And now he was going to get himself killed on our one break from searching under every rock for my impossible, long-lost humanity. No Disney World. No Grand Canyon. No Hawaii, although they had strict quarantine rules there for my kind anyway. My cousin needed a vacation in the worst way. I liked him sane and the way he was going, he was going to be leaking lucidity as if his brain were a sieve. Disney World might not have cured that, but it was better than a psychotic antihealer who was turning the air itself into death. Rafferty had gone through more than enough these past years. He didn’t need this burden too. Did I care if he was the only one who could stop this Suyolak? Not really.

I had cared before. I’d cared about the world and doing the right thing, but that was when I knew Raff could take down this Rom disease without breaking stride—because he was that good, my cousin. Then I’d heard Cal’s voice as he went from perfectly healthy to death’s door in seconds—a half Auphe taken out that quickly.

I cared about the world all right, but I cared about my cousin more. Besides, Niko and Cal just hadn’t looked hard enough for another healer. I knew about looking. One day didn’t count. Even if Rafferty was the only one who could take out Suyolak, that didn’t make it fair. I’d always thought life should be fair, whether wearing fur or skin. I knew it wasn’t—I wasn’t naïve, but it didn’t change my thinking it should be. Wolves didn’t actually see in black and white; we saw in blues and greens. Yet
I
saw in black and white when it came to my view of the world. Things were either fair or they weren’t, and this wasn’t.

No, I wasn’t happy about this whole thing, and my waking up with a dead cat curled on top of me didn’t improve my mood at all. I liked to think I was a good guy. I was going to help stop global warming when I was a student; that and save the rain forest. These days I avoided watering people’s prize rosebushes and put up with the humiliation of letting little old grannies pat me on the head while trying to shove dog biscuits down my throat. That was an effort, right? Considering the taste of dog biscuits, it was a big effort. But now . . . now this good guy bared his teeth at the cat before lifting his head to bare his teeth at everyone else around him. It was a good thing you could fit about fourteen people in an Eldorado—fourteen people or one human, a monster mix, a puck, two werewolves, and that damn dead cat. It was about equal comfortwise, but it was a tour I wished we hadn’t signed up for.

I glared at my faithful cousin who’d put me to sleep when I’d been fighting with a female feline with male pattern baldness and an advanced case of dead. I wasn’t sure if the battle had been an “episode” or just a general freak-out at the sight of a walking, grinning, tail-thrashing
zombie
cat. I’d seen a lot of things in my life; as a werewolf that’s a given, but that was a first. Another first was its nearly kicking my furry butt. I should be glad Rafferty had sent me to naptime. That way I could pretend it was a draw and save some of my fuzzy dignity.

The cat felt me move, yawned, and leaped up front with Niko and Goodfellow to curl up on the dashboard. Her toothy, fanged grin was smug, and I couldn’t help but bristle. I growled at her, then sat up to turn my head toward Rafferty and growled harder.

“She’s already dead,” he said in his defense. “I couldn’t put her to sleep. Suck the life force out of her and rekill her, yeah, but not put her to sleep. And Goodfellow, with his usual bad taste, seems to like her.”

I snorted and kept growling. That was no excuse and I let him know it. Niko was driving and I was between Cal and my cousin. We were on the road, the parking lot just a memory. That was odd. I gave up on the growling, and sneezed curiously. We’d left our car behind. I liked that car. I especially liked the catless atmosphere of it, and, sorry to say it about Cal, but he smelled of murder in the shadows. It wasn’t his fault. I imagined he’d suffered more than I could imagine from being what he was, suffered from prejudice, suffered from instinct, suffered by knowing he had been created to be nothing but a living weapon. I felt bad for him, I did . . . but he still smelled like he smelled: Auphe—unkillable monster; five times worse than a demon from Hell. Granted, most couldn’t smell him, but Wolves could. Couldn’t they at the very least hang a deodorizer off his ear out of common courtesy? Pine-fresh maybe? I could handle that. I was the accommodating kind.

I poked Rafferty’s shoulder once, then again urgently and almost instantly. “Okay. Christ. Give me a chance,” he grumbled as he reached down to the floorboards for my laptop. He pulled it out of the computer bag, opened it up, and set it on his lap, swiveling it in my direction; then he fished back in the bag for my pencil. Once it was set up and ready to go, I typed in a question.

He turned to read it, but not before Cal peered around me and read it out loud. “
Where’s our car, General Jack-off?
General Jack-off?”

Rafferty shook his head. “Don’t ask. It’s a theme. Although the cat thing apparently got me promoted. And I left the car, Catch. I stripped it of ID—the license plate was stolen anyway—in case it gets towed. I need to sleep. To rest up for Suyolak. I can’t drive and do that. And the last time I let you drive, I got my license pulled. And you ended up in the pound because your rabies tag was expired. Some cops, they can’t just let you go with a warning, huh?”

My cousin’s sense of humor aside—the best place for it—leaving the car did make sense. Or . . . or maybe it meant he thought he wasn’t going to walk away from his battle with Suyolak. Worse, maybe he didn’t want to. The guilt, the burden of me; it was more than anyone should have to carry, but Rafferty wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t give in. Anyone else would have. No Wolf alive would go on and on as he had, not even for family. They would’ve seen the sense long ago. Wolves prized family, prized pack, but we were also practical creatures.

Except for Rafferty. He hadn’t given me life to throw his own away, but what if I was gone? Before Suyolak, what if I fell into my wolf half and didn’t resurface? What happened if the next “episode” was the last episode? What would he do then? And how do you ask that? I hesitated, hit the CAPS LOCK for emphasis, then typed,
HUNT NO MORE?
And Cal, whose scent still had the hair along my spine bristling, faithfully repeated the three words. What was wrong with him anyway? Couldn’t he read without moving his lips? And Goodfellow, of course, jumped on the bandwagon. His mouth was faster than a speeding bullet, in all sorts of ways I didn’t want to think about, like all pucks, but definitely when it came to talking.

“Hunt no more? That’s dead for Wolves,” he pounced. “If you can’t take Suyolak, you’d better speak up so we can turn this parade around. I can think of better ways to die. Ten thousand at the very least.”

Rafferty ignored him, but this was a puck we were talking about. You couldn’t ignore one of them any more than you could a kindergarten class with each kid hyped up on five pounds of pure cane sugar. Goodfellow asked again . . . and again . . . and then again. That was when my cousin paralyzed the puck’s vocal cords. When Goodfellow turned in the seat and started to swing a quick and what looked like a lethal fist, Rafferty leaned out of reach and, unimpressed, said, “Keep it up and your hair will fall out, your eyes cross, and I’ll make you impotent for the rest of your long life.” His eyes flickered back and forth between the colors of a noontime sun and a setting one. “There’s immortal and there’s immortally limp dicked. Think about it. You’re asking me to kill a healer. ‘Do no harm’ has fallen by the wayside. Got it?”