11 
DEAR JOHN
My escape from the wilderness retreat the Templars were using as a stronghold is a series of blurred impressions: the sounds of scattered fighting before sonics went off somewhere and someone began flossing my skull with barbed wire. Running through a hallway just in front of a spreading gas cloud, the sweet smell of wolfsbane stinging at the root of my nostrils and causing my nose to bleed. Stepping over bodies in a darkened common area, running around the hood of a garbage truck that had rammed through double wooden front doors, and then, open morning air, a gravel parking lot where a truck was running over cars, presumably the knights’ cars, a Nissan pulling up to us driven by a black-haired man with a single large eyebrow and a thick moustache, piling in with two other men and taking off.
I don’t know where the sprite went. We weren’t close and had been a little too close at the same time.
As soon as we were out of the range of the sonics and skidding too fast around the bends of a gravel road, the short red-haired guy in the shotgun seat began dialing on a cell phone. He was swollen with muscle, and when he twisted his head to address the backseat, his neck bulged with cords and tendons. “We’re the Clan. We’re here to rescue you. Gabriel, explain what’s what to our guest.”
The werewolf next to me, another short guy, though this one was wiry, looked like a full-blooded Native American or indigenous Mexican. He never took his eyes off the rear window while he talked. His nose had bled a little too. “Hi. I’m Gabriel. We’re the Clan. We’re here to rescue you.”
There was a massive Hardee’s bag full of wrappers and napkins jammed between the front seats, and I removed a napkin from it and began wiping my nose. “How did you get that code phrase?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said tersely.
“Let me clarify,” I said. “If I think you harmed the person you got it from, I will kill every one of you right now and go back there and start killing your friends.”
It was only then that he noticed the high-powered rifle that I’d taken off one the wolves I’d knocked out. It was pointed at his head.
“Hold on,” Muscles the Leprechaun said from the front seat. I don’t know if he was talking to the phone or me, but he withdrew a letter from somewhere, unfolded it, and passed it over the seat. I only glanced at it. I didn’t know what her handwriting looked like, but it smelled like Sig.
The first two words were “Dear John.”
Great.
The second line was “Don’t kill the men you’re with unless you have to. I’ve made a deal with them.”
I only had one hand free, so I shoved the letter into a pouch in my armor. It was a page long and I didn’t have time.
Muscles was having a tense discussion. Normally, I would have been able to hear whoever was on the other line, but the car was making a lot of noise on the roads.
“It’s a clusterfuck! There were a lot more knights there then we were expecting. We took them by surprise, but they were holding us off when we left. Maybe doing better than that. Our reinforcements from the woods never showed up.”
There were more knights than they expected because the Grandmaster of the whole order was there, but I didn’t share that information. I didn’t know anything about these people.
“…”
“Yeah, we got him. He’s fine. He was loose when we got there. He damaged two of us pretty badly, and there was a hallway full of dead knights behind him.”
Probably not dead, or not most of them, anyway. Again, I didn’t overshare.
“…”
“I don’t know. He was about to start shooting us before I gave him the letter.”
“…”
“Yeah.”
“…”
“They probably have reinforcements coming. You can send them, but I don’t know. Are you ready to turn the raid into a small-scale war?”
“…”
“No, I haven’t seen them.”
“…”
“Jesus! Well, what do you expect? We’re werewolves, not weremonkeys. Do you want us to go get them?”
“…”
“He’s dead.”
“…”
The Nissan suddenly braked at the side of a mountain road, and Muscles put the phone away with a quick “We gotta go.”
Gabriel opened his side door and got out, urging me to hurry up after him, and the black-haired driver took off again as soon as I closed the door behind me. I followed the other two into the woods.
It was early morning, a soft bluish gray light outlining the trees, the ground beneath our feet slightly softened by the water that was still evaporating into the dense air around us. A beautiful sight. It was as if the world wasn’t paying any attention to our bullshit.
“I’m Robert. We’ve got a Jeep parked on a logging trail near here,” Muscles told me. “Are you ready for a short hike?”
“It would be better if we ran,” I said.
Muscles nodded abruptly. “Let’s go.”
We loped through mountains and forest at a speed that no humans could maintain, falling into an easy pattern that felt natural. It was affirming in a way, bond-forming even, feeling them around me without looking, knowing I didn’t have to hold back or explain anything. We were still edgy and wary when we arrived at a Jeep that a tall black man had parked next to a river, but there was a tangible difference, an almost-reluctant acknowledgment that we had achieved a shared purpose.
We took care of a few details fast: the black man was named Devonte. Muscles didn’t want to tell me where we were going until he was sure we’d gotten free and clear. Nobody was sure if more werewolves than knights had been killed in the raid, etc. Nobody pulled a weapon on me after we filed into the Jeep, and I slowly unfolded Sig’s letter. The ride was jolting and I had to pause frequently while reading, but I didn’t really notice.
Don’t kill the men you’re with unless you have to. I made a deal with them.
I guess you want to know how I found you. That ring I gave you didn’t really belong to my family. It belonged to a woman named Suzanne who committed suicide after her husband died, and Suzanne’s spirit will follow that ring anywhere. I used her in a way that I’m not really proud of, but I know you lied to me. I don’t want to be the person you give your life for. I don’t want to be some point you make to yourself, or an excuse for you to finally quit and feel justified at the same time. Sorry.
You don’t know how badly I want to bust in there and kill those knights so that I can kick your stupid ass myself, but I can’t do it alone, so Parth contacted someone who could. The wolf clan… don’t call them a pack, they hate that for some reason… won’t let me come with them, but once they heard about you, they agreed to rescue you. It’s not free, though. You have to go through some kind of thing. They won’t really explain it to me, but it sounds like a cross between a cult initiation and fraternity hazing and basic training.
I think you should join them. You and I are in an impossible situation and we’re working against each other and not telling each other everything, and that’s not good. Neither of us wants to feel responsible for anything bad happening to the other, and we’re both too wounded or guilty or god knows what to work well together.
My sponsor has been telling me about this phenomenon called New Relationship Energy. It’s about chemistry and hormones and what we think is love at first sight, and sometimes people who barely know each other at all can think they’ve found the love of their life, especially if they’re lonely and… fuck it. You’re smart enough to know what I’m trying to say.
And you’ve never been with your own kind before, and you need that. Do you know what I would give to find a group of Valkyries to take me in? But really, the Clan can protect you in ways that I can’t. I know, you’re the man and you want to protect me. Go to hell, John Charming. I just got out of one fucked-up relationship with a man who was pretending to protect me from our world, but the truth is, he was just using that as an excuse to be who he was because he was afraid to be anything else. I had to take care of him in every way that really mattered. He was keeping me in the same place, and I don’t want to be in the same place anymore. I want to grow up. If I aged normally, I’d almost be middle aged. I should have grown up a long time ago.
I don’t know if I’m an addictive personality or not, but my mother set that example for me, and I’m back in that place I don’t want to be. I know doing anything to escape my head right now is a bad idea, but part of me doesn’t care and that scares me. I’m hanging on by my fingernails here. I don’t know what’s right, and I can’t be in a place where I’m worried about some man, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to him and I don’t have any control over it. I have feelings for you, very strong feelings, but that’s why you’re not good for me right now. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. Knowing that you were away and safe somewhere would be good for me, and it wouldn’t be bad for you either, obviously, so if you really care about either one of us, why don’t you just do that?
Okay, some jerk with a uni-brow is telling me to hurry up. And I know you’re reading this letter first too, moron, and yes, I’m talking about you, uni-brow. And you’d better show this letter to John after you read it, because he won’t cooperate with you if you don’t. And if I ever see you again, good luck keeping all of your teeth. Or fangs. Whatever.
Sorry, John. I can’t be any more confused and scared than I already am right now. I need to focus on the things that I have some control over. I think I said that already. I hope you can understand that. I do care about you and want you to be good, but I also know that’s a long way away for you. Me too. I need some peace for a while and your life is chaos. I don’t know if you look for it or if it looks for you, and I don’t know how to end this letter. There’s no time, and I shouldn’t say what I want to say, and I don’t want to say what I have to say. Heal. Survive. Even if you have to forget about me to do it. I am going to try to do the same.
Sig.
I read the letter several times. It didn’t change. The Jeep abruptly skidded to a halt and Muscles turned around as far as his seat belt would allow. His face bore the distinct scars and burns of a lot of wrestling mats, and he looked a little agitated. “We need some air.”
Devonte started to protest, but Muscles repeated himself with a crisp snap in his voice. “We need some air.”
It was a good call. There was already a lot of adrenaline and testosterone in the atmosphere, and rage was pouring through my skin and filling up the crowded confines of that Jeep. My escorts left the doors of the Jeep open and fanned out into a wide triangle around me. I didn’t bother trying to meditate, and I didn’t scream up at the sky or kick the Jeep into scrap. I just stepped out, sat on dry mud and leaves, and braced the stock of my rifle on the ground. Just sat there and thought about different ways to kill them all if they tried anything.
It calmed me.
I read Sig’s letter one more time, searing the words into my memory, then burned the letter, literally, with a lighter from an armor pouch. It wasn’t some big dramatic symbolic gesture. I just didn’t want to leave behind any tangible proof that Sig had anything to do with the attack on the knights. Emil had given a witnessed oath that the knights would leave her alone if left alone, and it turned out he had more than enough authority to make that stick.
I understood what she’d written. All that stuff about simplifying her life, focusing on what she had control over, the mention of a sponsor. Sig had obviously been going to some AA meetings, and that was a good thing.
It was a great thing.
Yippee.
Muscles got back on his phone and talked to somebody else about who died and who didn’t and gave the person on the other end of the line an estimation of my size. When he was done, he walked over to me and squatted down about ten feet away. He had good balance in spite of being top-heavy, and his small, thick hands had done a lot of fighting. He didn’t smell like fear, but he was respectfully lowering his elevation so that he wouldn’t seem aggressive or dominant, keeping his ego out of it. That’s why he was the leader.
“You realize that you didn’t actually save me,” I told him. “I was freeing myself when you found me.”
“I suppose you could argue that,” he agreed carefully with an accent from somewhere down Pennsylvania way. “But we lost a lot of people on your account, and we did it because your woman asked us to. She promised us you’d go through our training camp.”
The supernatural world takes promises very seriously.
“Balls. You would have gone anyway,” I asserted rudely. “You saw a chance to take out some higher-ups in the Knights Templar and you took it.”
He took a deep breath, released it. “Like I said, I’m not going to argue. I just lost some friends getting your ungrateful ass out of there, and arguing wouldn’t be good for either of us. Your woman promised us you’d come along. If she lied about that, you can leave, but we’ll have to visit her and renegotiate. We can’t have people thinking they can use us.”
For a brief, ugly moment, I got a surge of black satisfaction at the thought of Sig having to deal with a large, hostile werewolf paramilitary group while living her peaceful, controlled life. I’m not proud of it, but I had that moment.
On the other hand, it was a moment because it didn’t last.
“You’re telling me that if I want to protect the woman who’s rejected me for trying to protect her without asking, I’m going to have to keep a promise that she made for me without asking in order to protect me.”
He tried to untangle that sentence for a second and then gave up. “If you say so.”
“I need a few days to take care of some things,” I told him. “I’ll come join you after that. And this time I’ll be the one who gives you my word.”
He didn’t pretend to think about it. “No. You’re coming with us or not. You have to decide now.”
“You might want to step away and shut up again for a minute,” I advised.
He smelled what was coming off of me and did.
So, yeah, that happened.