46

DEAD AHEAD

Sig?”

She came up next to me and squeezed my forearm. I followed her eyes and saw that fog was condensing thicker and faster out in the woods to our left, roiling into a ground cloud. A silhouette of a large wolf came stepping gingerly to the edges of visibility. Then another.

More wolves were beginning to manifest as the mist continued to thicken, a rolling bank of it emerging from the woods and flowing over us. A wolf, or at least something with a wolf’s general outline, walked past us down the road. Then another.

I whispered to Sig, “And you say weird shit happens around me?”

Were Valkyries some kind of ghost magnets or something?

She squeezed my arm again. “People keep saying the Pax is breaking down. Maybe it’s true.”

Ben was murmuring something in Anishinaabe, and I realized that he was talking to the men in the back of the moving van.

When a wolf with no scent passed near Gabriel, it growled. Gabriel backed away hurriedly, his eyes wide and terrified.

Several more ghost wolves passed. Some kept walking, but some halted, turned, and waited. They seemed to want us to follow.

Ben moved to the back of the moving van and opened it. Then he began taking off his clothes as members of his pack jumped out on the ground. They soon followed Ben’s suit. Or followed his un-suit. Or something.

Apparently, the Anishinaabe attitude toward spirits is much different from mine.

“What about your weapons?” I asked.

“They want us to join them as wolves,” Ben said simply.

“Ben,” I said. “They’re ghosts. That doesn’t make them smarter or nicer. It just makes them dead.”

He ignored me.

I tried again. “We can’t leave our vehicles here like this!”

Ben smiled tightly. “This is what happens when you ask a bunch of injuns to play the cavalry.”

I just stared at him.

“This is our story, John,” Ben told me simply. “You’re just a side character.”

And Ben changed into a wolf. He transformed seamlessly and ran down the road, after the ghost wolves. His followers… followed.

I heard Virgil yelling as they passed around the bend, but I just stared and listened until I couldn’t hear them anymore.

I turned to Sig. “Fucking ghosts. No wonder you have a drinking problem.”

Sig didn’t smile, but she wasn’t offended either, thank God. There’s a thin line between a smart-ass and a dumb-ass, and I think I might have crossed it there. I was rattled.

“A lot of werewolves have died around here, John,” Sig said somberly. “And died badly. Things like that don’t just happen.”

“A lot of wolves have,” Gabriel offered miserably, and we looked at him.

“I know where we are.” Gabriel seemed crushed and empty, the human version of a beer can that had been tossed aside. The ghost wolves hadn’t wanted him along.

“What is it, Gabriel?” I walked around and turned the car on while I talked to him. He watched as I pressed the button that made all the windows go down. It would be easier than trying to wipe them off, and ghosts appearing didn’t mean we had more time. Hell, it meant we had less.

Gabriel cleared his throat. “We’re going to the school.”

Matthew directed his friends back to the creek to soak more clothes for rags, and Sig began removing seat covers. Nobody wanted to get in the backseats, but we draped blankets from the trunk over the ruined vinyl and concentrated on cleaning off the parts of the cars that were visible through the remaining windows, while Gabriel talked.

“It used to be one of those old-fashioned schoolhouses back in the fifties,” Gabriel said. “The kind in the middle of nowhere. Bernard sends werewolves who can’t control themselves there. They get hard-core.”

“Define hard-core.” I was applying elbow grease to the dashboard by this point.

“Whips. Electric shock. Waterboarding. Bernard said it was a last chance to save werewolves who had gone over the line. Teach them some control. Catherine said…” Gabriel hesitated.

“Catherine said what?” Matthew’s voice was quiet as he joined Gabriel.

“She called it Bernard’s obedience school,” Gabriel said reluctantly. “She was starting to worry that Bernard was using it to get rid of people who were causing him other kinds of problems.”

“Yeah, Gabriel,” I said. “Just fill the world up with werewolves and it will be a utopia. All the stupid things we fight about will just melt away.”

Gabriel shot me a ferocious look. “Can we just get my sister?”

“Hold on,” I said, and went to the trunk and fished out more of the gear we’d hidden, including some fresh clothes and a machete. It was no katana, but it was better than using harsh language. “Matthew, I think we’ve done enough to keep anybody from calling the cops on sight. Can you and your crew stay behind to get rid of this mess and tell Parth and Carl what’s going on?”

He could.

What was left of my claw started to pile into Sig’s car, and I indicated that Sig should get behind the steering wheel.

“Shouldn’t you drive?” she wondered. Sig was used to being the leader of her own team. She had handled me calling the shots for my claw fairly gracefully, but it was still an adjustment. “You’re the only one here who won’t be affected by the ward.”

“They’ll have at least one sentry hiding behind the ward wherever your GPS blinks out,” I said.

“You’re going to use me as bait,” Sig said pensively.

“As a distraction,” I admitted. “You’re good at it.”

Her face suddenly broke into a warm smile. “You’re not trying to protect me.”

I guess if she was sane, she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.