Roadkill (21 page)

He didn’t wait for the puck to ponder the pros and cons of yapping endlessly like a newborn cub versus being the bald, double-visioned actor on the erectile dysfunction drug commercials for the rest of eternity. Instead, Raff handed the computer to Cal, slid down, leaned against me, and went to sleep, but not before murmuring too low for human hearing, “I’m not leaving your furry ass, Catch. Got that? Never.”

I didn’t complain at his weight against me as he began to snore. He needed it. He’d been up all night driving, and I’d heard Cal’s call for help when Suyolak’s little present got him. I might have been getting my tail half chewed off by that mutant cat, but I could still hear. I rested my muzzle on top of Rafferty’s head, my fur mixing with his hair. He never had cared that much about getting haircuts in the old days . . . in high school or college. He was just that kind of guy who waited until his girlfriend dragged him to a barber. He didn’t think about it at all now; he just chopped at it with scissors when it got too long and hit the Salvation Army when his clothes wore out. That was his life now with me. I wanted it to be better when I was gone. I hoped he meant what he said, because I didn’t want him throwing that life away on Suyolak.

“Did healing you somehow infect him with your attitude?” Robin frowned at Cal, his vocal cords working again as one hand checked his hair and the other checked his crotch. He gave a long exhalation of relief when he was assured he was as puckable as he ever was. I rolled my eyes. Pucks. They were enough to make a Wolf change his mind about the whole Humane Society’s neutering campaign.

“Half human, half monster, all attitude,” Cal replied mockingly. He had attitude all right, but he came by it honestly. I had my problems, but I wasn’t sure I would’ve exchanged them for his. Although his girlfriend . . . Kin or not, she was something. White fur—I’d always had a thing for white fur. It reminded me of snow, racing across it under the moon and stars, and having sex in the chill under a pine tree laden with icicles. Rafferty wasn’t the only one who needed to get laid.

“I’m starving. And if I’m starving, I know Delilah is,” Cal went on, idly searching my computer for games. I perked my ears up. Delilah, that was good; talk more about Delilah. “I can wait. Delilah probably could wait, but I doubt she will.”

A Wolf with appetites; I liked that. Of course at this point, any Wolf with a pulse was looking good. It had been a long,
long
time.

“That’s what drive-throughs and bad diners are made for, not to mention what you live for. I’ll stop at Omaha,” Niko said, not that concerned with his brother’s state of near starvation. “Did anyone—”

Cal interrupted him, “I was sick. I’m never sick. I could’ve died. I need to build my energy back up. At least—”

This time it was Niko’s turn to interrupt. A box of Twinkies was tossed over the top of the front seat to hit Cal squarely in the chest. That was a good interruption. Straight to the point. Niko was a man of few words and flying sugary snacks. I liked that in a human. “There,” he said sharply. “Happy? Convert your entire body to a Cal-shaped pile of sponge cake and crème. Now, may I continue?”

Cal immediately smelled contrite—more so than he would have for just annoying his brother. He’d said something to Niko that had sharply hit home, cut deeply to the bone. I didn’t know what it was, but he must’ve felt genuinely bad, because he let the Twinkies drop carelessly to the floorboards, which was a crime. I loved Twinkies. “Yeah, sorry. I was being a fucking idiot as usual. I’m listening now,” he responded quietly.

Okay, there was sorry and then there was stupid. He might not want a Twinkie, but I did. Before I could turn my head, though, and yip a protest, Niko exhaled and the scent of brooding worry faded to the more appropriate irritation. “Eat your Twinkies. You probably do need the energy.” He watched in the rearview mirror and waited while Cal unwrapped the first one, which I promptly snatched from his hand without disturbing Rafferty’s comfortable slump of sleep against me. Cal glared at me, which I ignored in crème- filled bliss, before he opened another. That was when Niko said, “Dr. Jones called again last night. Seattle professor Daniel Kirkland hasn’t been by his wife’s side for several days now, according to friends on the faculty, which is not just unusual. It’s unbelievable to them. They were the closest of couples. He has never given up hope and has never left her side since she slipped into a coma. They even said he typed on his computer with one hand while holding her hand with his other.” The computer he could’ve done his research on, found out the most likely location of Abelia-Roo’s clan . . . and Suyolak. “So there is a very good chance he is our man and our driver all in one. He might have hired men to do the stealing, but he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do the actual delivery.”

“And those guys killed Abelia’s men without thinking twice. Now he’s hauling Suyolak’s ass back home. Love can make you do some truly fucked-up shit.” Cal shook his head and looked like he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. I had the feeling everyone in this car, minus the cat, knew the last was truer than any of us cared to admit.

Niko cleared his throat and asked, “Did anyone have a Suyolak dream last night?”

Cal shook his head. “Like I said, I didn’t sleep much. I’m still waiting for one of you to have that fucking unparalleled joy.”

That’s right, I thought with a grumble to myself, rub it in. He might smell like Auphe, but he smelled like Delilah too under the soap of a morning shower. Goodfellow wasn’t happy either, muttering, “I had a dream or two, non-Suyolak related, and unfortunately for me, just dreams.”

“Yes, I and the long-suffering maid who will have to wash your sheets are more than aware,” Niko retorted. “So none of us dreamed of him?”

“One doesn’t have to sleep to dream. Life itself is only a dream, my brothers,” the nightmare spoke.

Rafferty’s head jerked up as he woke instantly. I growled and snapped, foam flying from my jaws. I couldn’t help it even though I knew he wasn’t really there. He had no scent. He wasn’t real. Suyolak—the nightmare that Niko and Cal had talked about. He wasn’t sitting cross-legged on the hood of the moving car, a skeleton covered with skin, pale moon eyes, and a gnarled mass of dusty dreadlocks that didn’t move in the rush of air that swept over the convertible. He wasn’t any of those things, although I saw him as he was. He made the dead cat look as normal and wholesome as our grandma Amelia’s apple and squirrel pie we’d eaten when we were cubs.

For a healer to appear in dreams was one thing. For a healer to appear as a hallucination in the brains of the conscious, that was another. That took the kind of healing power I didn’t want to think about. I remembered my thought that Rafferty was the best of this world and Suyolak the best of his. What if Suyolak was the best . . . period? What then?

“Don’t shoot, Cal,” Niko was saying. “He’s not actually there.”

“Yeah, I know.” But I saw that Cal’s trigger finger was having trouble catching up with his brain, same as my snapping jaws were with mine. “But wouldn’t it be better to double-check?”

“I don’t want to buy a new windshield because of this talking disease.” Niko kept driving. Yes, a human was unfazed enough by the so-called Plague of the World sitting on his ancient boat of a car to keep it at an even seventy down the Lincoln. He was brave. His balls might not have been furry, but he most definitely had them. I had to give credit where it was due. He’d have made a good Wolf.

“That’s what you are, Suyolak, a disease. You’re not human; you’re not a person; you never were. You were born a living disease, and as all diseases do, you have a cure,” Niko continued.

The cracked and shriveled lips parted in a grin. “Do you think you’re my cure, Vayash? Or do you think that mongrel behind you is? Is my equal? That a cur can face the man who reaped a continent? The Black Death himself?” The grin widened. “He is a jackal, only good for feeding on the dead that fall in my path.”

I moved to leap over the seat. Nobody talked about my cousin like that—nobody. I felt hands on me, Cal and my cousin holding me back. Suyolak raised his hands to seemingly hook withered fingers over the top of the windshield, his bleached eyes staring dead on into mine. “Why, look at you, brave dog. Look at what has been done to you,” he said with a gloating marvel. “Maybe I was wrong.” The eyes moved left, to Rafferty. “Maybe you will entertain me. I kill, but you took his mind. Which is worse? Which is more thrilling?” A bone-pale tongue tip touched the upper lip. “The taste of that, you left his life and took half his soul . . . well done, my Wolf brother. We are two of a kind after all.”

Then he was gone. The bastard was gone.

I settled back on my haunches. My teeth were still bared, as much at Niko and Cal as they were for Suyolak—for getting us into this. For getting Rafferty into this. Then I shook my head, fur flying, and turned to stick my nose directly in my cousin’s ear. He was frozen. It was more in the face of the accusation than in the hideously dessicated one of Suyolak, I knew. Suyolak had hit my cousin directly in a wound five years in the festering. He hurt him, like no one else could. And now I was the only one who could reach him. I blew through my nose hard, sending an ice-cold spray against his ear-drum. He jerked back to the here and now and away from my muzzle. He scowled before saying with a sigh, “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

Not your fault. You did the best you could, the best any healer alive could. I said it silently and hoped he heard me, smelled it, that he really did know. It was the truth, but even if it weren’t, I would’ve said the same thing.

It was what family did.

You shouldn’t see things like that in daylight. You’d think it would be better . . . to see the yellowed spiral of a long nail scrape playfully down the windshield . . . in the sun. It would be less of a horror, less of an icicle stab to the heart. It wasn’t. It was worse in the day. It didn’t belong. Suyolak was wrong, but he was so much more wrong in the light than in the dark, because there was no way to deny it—to deny him. There was no way to say the nightmare was just that . . . only a nightmare. In our life, denial could get you killed, but a few seconds of it when the time was right could also keep you sane. Just like salt . . . A little made the bland taste a little better and a lot raised your blood pressure, dropped you with a massive stroke, and boom, you were dead. Denial and salt, not totally bad things on the surface of it, but in the end they both could equal death; who knew?

Lucky we had a healer with us.

Although from the heat of the unblinking glower searing the side of my face, someone wished we didn’t. I’d gone back to poking around on the laptop after Suyolak disappeared. We didn’t all sit around and discuss the meaning of it. What’s to say? He knew we were coming—we already knew that. He wanted to kill us—still no news. He wasn’t impressed by Rafferty. He was an egomaniacal genocidal killer; impressed or not, he wouldn’t show it. Egomaniacal genocidal killers rarely did. If they did, they’d be sensible, modest genocidal killers, and those were fucking hard to come by.

So, no discussion needed. Niko drove on, leaving Illinois behind us as the Lincoln dipped south toward Omaha, Nebraska. Googled five dead there—same as what had hit me: viral pneumonia. I’d thought it before; I’d think it again, but, goddamnit, if he was doing all this now, what the hell would he do if he got out of that coffin? They were futile, poisonous thoughts and I gave up on them before they drove me nuts. Besides, I had a distraction to help me out there.

I had to make an effort not to raise a hand and feel the side of my face to make sure it wasn’t melting from the acid gaze. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned to face the yellow eyes, radioactive twin suns of absolutely nuclear pissiness aimed at me—which was unusual for Catcher. He was the happiest damn Wolf I’d ever run across. Lassie had nothing on him. He was happy, cheerful, probably a Boy Scout as a kid—well, considering what he was, a Cub Scout. But with the current situation, I could understand the change in mood. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? If he were my cousin, I’d be mad as hell that anyone got him involved in this mess too.” Rafferty was asleep again. He’d driven all night, healed me, and destroyed millions of hyperdeadly mutated germs floating in the parking lot and office. A helluva thing to see—that crimson explosion—but also a helluva drain on your resources, Wolf stamina or not.

But past all that, I could see he wasn’t the same as he’d been when I’d last seen him, years ago. There were lines that weren’t just weariness—permanent lines, years of disappointment. The last thing Rafferty and Catcher needed was us fucking up their already-fucked-up lives. That we didn’t have a choice didn’t make it any better. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but this son of a bitch Suyolak can take down the whole goddamn world. Frankly, I don’t give a shit about most of the world because it damn sure doesn’t seem to give a shit about me, but there are a few people in it whom I do care about. Even if we hadn’t called you, even if Rafferty hadn’t answered Nik—hadn’t felt that evil mojo tickle—once Suyolak got loose, eventually it would’ve become your problem too. A few hundred thousand dead people would have Rafferty after Suyolak sooner or later. He’s single-minded, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”

The dark brown lip that was peeled back to show Catcher’s dinnerware didn’t move at first, but after a few seconds it slowly lowered, but the eyes were no friendlier. They did look away, though, as he searched for his pencil on the floorboards. When he located it, he reached over with it to the laptop, switched to the window that held the Word document already up, and beneath the
HUNT NO MORE
, he typed,
PAYMENT.

He had a point. We were getting fifty thousand for this. It wasn’t fair to expect them to put their lives on the line for nothing. Robin never took our money. . . . He had more than we’d ever see in our lifetimes, but Rafferty and Catcher weren’t Kin or immortal con men. They worked for a living or had. I’d seen the tired, old ranch house they’d lived in. They could use the money, especially to keep their search for a cure going. “Yeah, that’s reasonable. How about half? Twenty-five thousand? Assuming you want a penny that Abelia-Roo has touched with her poisonous hands. Probably dusted it with arsenic powder, the bitch.”