15

INTROSPECTION FOR DUMMIES

One-on-one sessions with Chai were in a glade far enough away from the camp that there was actually some degree of privacy. A portable CD player played some kind of new age stuff that sounded like aborigine instruments being used to help a woman imitate Enya. At any rate, there was definitely a bull-roarer and a didgeridoo in there somewhere.

I think the music was meant to mask the sounds of our conversation from eavesdroppers. Either that or just drive them away.

“We need a smokeless fire for daytime cooking,” I told Chai.

I was a lousy patient, if that’s what I was. I won’t deny it. I was using my solo session to try to convince Chai to address the camp cooking issues. The Clan had a strict policy about not lighting fires during the day, because it didn’t want to leave any smoke trails floating above the tree line. It was a major pain in the ass, because we had to do everything involving fire use after sunset, including cleaning and sterilizing.

As it turned out, Chai knew full well what a Dakota smokeless fire pit was though he didn’t call it that himself; Chai hadn’t told me a lot about his life, but it was clear that he’d spent a lot of it outside and knew something about concealing trails and scents and minimizing noise and disposing waste. You can’t spend days on end with somebody in an outdoor setting and not pick up on stuff like that.

“Bernard’s orders about not cooking during the day were very clear,” Chai responded. I still hadn’t met the mysterious leader of the Clan, but whenever Chai dropped the B word, it was like he had discovered one of the ten thousand names of God. If names weren’t capitalized, this Bernard’s would have been anyhow.

“If this is about avoiding detection, smokeless fire pits are actually better than burning fires at night,” I argued. “Knights have access to aerial spotters and satellites.”

I felt a slight internal wrench when I offered this information. Geez. I mean, Geas.

To his credit, Chai thought about it. I wondered what the penalty for error had been when he was growing up, or where he’d grown up, or how he’d wound up in the middle of a Wisconsin-based werewolf clan.

Unexpectedly, Chai’s façade cracked a little. He sighed, and it was like watching an accordion fold. “This is the problem with being both the head of a paw and its counselor. I’m triggering your authority issues left and right.”

“Personnel shortage problems?” I guessed.

His face froze. “That’s clan information.”

I waited.

Chai sighed again. “My point was, you are not the only one caught between a rock and a hard place, John.”

I waited.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Chai said. “I’ll get you permission to build a wind funnel fire. But you need to teach Jelly and Cory how to make them as well.”

I grimaced. “It would be more efficient if we just did it ourselves.”

“It’s not about the making,” Chai said patiently. “It’s about the teaching.”

“So why exclude Mayte?” I wondered.

He shook his head. “You are less guarded around females than males. Have you noticed that?”

I thought about it. “Most of my issues come from growing up among hostile males. Women get under my defenses easier. And I like the way they smell.”

Thankfully, Chai didn’t take this opportunity to explore my lack of a mother figure. “This is for Cory and Jelly too. You can help teach them self-discipline. I can only teach them other-discipline.”

He smiled sadly. “I limited myself to that role when I had to kill Timothy in front of them.”

“Does that happen a lot? You having to kill…” I trailed off. What were we? Recruits? Students? Patients? Cult members? Chai might say we were family, but could you really say that just because we were all werewolves?

“How much is a lot?” Chai sounded tired. “It happens more than it should. But the Clan saves far more werewolf lives than it takes. How long do you think Jelly and Cory would last without supervision or guidance?”

“Not long,” I admitted.

“The knights don’t have any programs for teaching new werewolves to adapt.” A rare growl entered Chai’s voice. “They expect us to figure it out or die. But giving werewolves time and space to work things out among peers causes far less disruptions to their precious Pax than waiting for eruptions and eliminating them.”

“Large groups are harder to conceal than individuals,” I said cautiously. Chai didn’t open up much, and I didn’t want him to stop.

Chai disagreed, and not all that politely. “The answer is control, and werewolves have social instincts. It’s the most powerful control mechanism for moderating our behavior there is, but the same knights who want us to control ourselves do everything in their power to isolate us.”

That actually made sense.

“It must be difficult,” I probed. “Having to kill someone after spending so much time trying to understand them.”

“Of course it is.” Chai smiled but not really. “Everything I know about martial arts, I learned as a by-product of meditation. I had weak lungs as a child. I learned Chinese boxing because someone told my family that its breathing techniques would help clear and strengthen my lungs. And it did. But I always wanted to be a healer.”

He looked at me wryly. “I suspect that we are opposites in that respect. Everything you know about meditation, you learned as a by-product of learning how to kill people.”

I didn’t confirm or deny that. “So it’s doubly hard for you to kill someone you’ve tried to understand.”

Chai waved that off. “That’s hard for anyone. It’s why knights don’t want to understand us.”

“It’s why I don’t want to get to know you too well,” I admitted. “I’d like to believe that this isn’t all going to end in blood somehow. But I don’t.”

Suddenly, Chai became so intense that he seemed to freeze time. It was as if he were absorbing gravity and light, becoming the center of the glade. “That is when it is most important.”

He didn’t explain what “it” was.

He didn’t have to. “Who did you lose, Chai?”

He smiled that sad smile again. “Work with Cory and Jelly.”

“What I really want is some itos,” Jelly said, and those normally dull and lifeless brown eyes of his contained a low guttering flicker of pure lust. “Doritos, Fritos, Tostitos; give me any kind of ito as long as I can dip it in some cheese. Nacho cheese.”

Food was really the only thing that Jelly talked about without prompting, at least with any frequency or passion. We hadn’t killed any boars, and he had just finished a five-minute treatise on bacon.

“Well, there’s Danny DeVito.” I was smacking and packing dirt around the edge of the pit Jelly was digging. “I guess you can eat him.”

Jelly lowered his shovel and looked around as if trying to spot the actor. It was the closest thing to a joke I’d seen from him.

Cory grunted and cupped his testicles. “How about my big burrito?”

Jelly didn’t bother to respond directly. “How about some coquitos with a little sausalito?”

“Sausalito is a city in California,” I pointed out. “You’re a werewolf, not Godzilla.”

“I’ll bet he could do it,” Cory muttered.

“Make your exit point slope more.” I walked over to demonstrate. The trickiest part about building a Dakota smokeless fire pit is not collapsing the ventilation tunnel. Basically, you build a pit, then build a sideways hole with a sloping exit out from the bottom of that pit. The idea isn’t to channel the smoke out—the hole draws wind in and fans the flames of the fire, keeping them so hot that they burn the fuel bits that usually produce emissions. “You can’t make the hole vertical, Cory.”

“The hell I can’t,” he snickered.

I didn’t even know what that meant, and I still wanted to smack him. One thing I’d discovered in the last hour was that hanging around two idiots who healed fast gave me lots of Three Stooges–style impulses.

Cory continued his theme. “Just don’t get any ideas about eating Mayte. I saw her first.” He stuck out his tongue and waggled it suggestively. Suddenly there was an underlying hostility and tension in the air. He was pretending to make a joke, but he was giving me a real warning.

Ignoring Cory really wasn’t working. I planted the tip of my spade in the ground and leaned on the handle. “You need to adjust your attitude about Mayte.”

I was going to elaborate on how we were a bunch of people in a volatile state who were crammed into a small space and that emotions were running high and sexuality was one hell of a spark when it came to making drama explode even under normal circumstances—I really was. But Cory responded by jumping out of the furrow he was digging and strutting up to me as if ready to start something, holding his collapsible trench shovel at his side and shaking it up and down. I casually swung the spade in my hand like a golf club and dislocated his left kneecap. Cory dropped his trench shovel and fell to the ground howling.

“Was there something you wanted to say to me, Cory?” I asked mildly.

“Fuck you!” he yelled, then tried to regain his feet before collapsing into a half-fetal position and yelling again.

“Yeah, healing fast isn’t really going to help you here,” I said sympathetically. “Nothing is broken or ripped. Your kneecap is just locked out of place.”

Cory tried to grab his knee and straighten it then, but screamed and thrashed backward almost immediately.

I crouched down. “The thing is, Cory, I like Mayte. When you talk about her that way, it hurts my feelings.”

“Fuck you!” he screamed again.

“Jelly?” I spoke slowly and clearly. “Would you hold Cory’s arms against his sides and brace him? I’m going to fix his knee.”

It took a little awkward negotiating after that, but once I had Cory’s knee firmly locked, anything resembling a fight went out of him. I torqued his leg sharply to the right with my weight pressing downward, and he screamed as his kneecap snapped back into place.

I stood back up and waited for Cory to quiet down. Even with a werewolf’s healing, I had a little bit of time before he would be moving quickly on that leg again. “So what’s with all the sex talk, Cory? Are you a perv or something? You one of those guys who goes into porn theaters in a trench coat?”

“Fuck you!” he gasped again.

“I’m being serious,” I said. “Nobody thinks you’re funny. You’re sure as hell not turning Mayte on. You ought to be able to smell that. What’s going on with you?”

Cory got so red that he looked like a sunburn victim. Jelly smirked, but fortunately he was still behind Cory when he did it. Cory struck me as the kind of guy who would try to shunt embarrassment away by humiliating somebody weaker.

“I… look, it’s my body, all right?” Cory said. “This is messed up! Before all this happened, I was running six miles every day over rooftops! I was climbing stuff and lifting weights and doing things, you know? And now I’ve got all this energy and I’m not doing anything at all, and I’m not doing anything else to take the edge off, either! It’s driving me crazy!”

I did kind of know what he meant. My normal exercise routines had been disrupted too.

“No real exercise, no sex, no television, no drinking, no smoking, no video games!” Cory went on, tears starting to stream down his cheeks. “My friends are dead, man! The only one I’ve got left got put in some other group and I can’t even talk to him! Who knows what my family thinks. And I’m goinna die if I don’t go along with it? What the hell?!?”

I’d forgotten that Cory was in a group of people who were attacked by wolves. He never talked about it during Chai’s sessions. Some people’s sex drives get amped way up when they see death firsthand. It’s a real thing, like an alarm has gone off and their sperm are trying to jump out of a burning building.

Cory pleaded, “Why can’t we just take a day and go running on some rocks?!? Burn off some energy!”

Something clicked. For whatever reason, Cory’s lifestyle had been arranged to avoid having to focus on his feelings. Now he was being forced to isolate his feelings and examine them at the same time that he had more intense feelings than he’d ever had before, and all his coping mechanisms were gone.

A thought about getting him a copy of Introspection for Dummies flashed through my mind like a passing subway train, but I didn’t let it out of my mouth.

“Maybe you and I can spar a little,” I offered. “I need to burn off energy, too. Hell, you’re more relaxed now, aren’t you?”

Cory actually laughed. He looked away and mumbled an invitation to oral sex under his breath, but he laughed.

“We’re not supposed to do stuff like that until we become a claw,” Jelly objected.

Becoming a claw was the next step in a paw’s evolution. It was where clan members began receiving military training.

I stared at Jelly, thinking about what Cory had just told me. If Jelly had been a comfort eater before becoming a werewolf, maybe that explained his food obsession too. It had to be frustrating. Here he was, hungrier than he’d ever been, able to eat massive quantities without gaining weight for the first time in his life, and he couldn’t get near a cheesecake or a stack of waffles or a plate of French fries.

“People die from overdoses,” I told them. I hadn’t meant for it to be a cryptic statement, but they both looked at me blankly.

“So?” Cory demanded.

“They die from eating too much too.” I looked at Jelly. “Or drinking too much. They get so addicted to texting, they do it while they’re driving. They get so addicted to endorphin rushes that they get heart attacks from pushing their bodies too hard. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Cory made a short tchht sound. “Man, I hardly ever understand what you’re saying.”

“If you were free to do whatever you wanted, you’d get yourselves killed right now,” I said. “I don’t know how it would play out, but you would. If you didn’t kill yourselves outright, you’d draw attention to yourselves, and then somebody like me would come along to quietly take you out.”

“I thought the Clan was supposed to be bullshit,” Jelly observed.

I didn’t have an answer for that.