“Start again.”
“No.” For the first time in several days, nothing hurt. Not one single part of my body was sore, throbbing, aching, burning… Pharmaceuticals were a wonderful thing.
“Stop,” Ethan said quietly. “He’s talked about it enough for now.”
Waltrip huffed. “I was dragged into this shit under false pretenses and damn near got killed over it. All I care about right now is getting to the root so the vine can be killed.”
I closed my eyes and let Ethan stroke my hair back from my face. We were all holed up at his house in Belmarais. It was not the one I’d imagined him in—the one he’d grown up in, all wood floors and dark brick with a screen door hanging on for dear life. This was a smart little bungalow with actual gingerbread trim and a pale green front door with a wreath hanging off it. Ethan had muttered something about Halloway at the station and his wife making these seasonal things for all the folks on the force, and he just put it up to be polite, but I knew he was really into that Martha Stewart type stuff and loved that he had a bunch of sunflowers and raffia dangling hanging there for the summer months. I saw him straighten the wreath as we all trooped into his tiny front room, smiling a little at the cheery flowers before shutting the door. I had still been in pain then, too tired and broken to say much about anything, least of all Ethan’s wreath. Now, though, thanks to some heavy-duty painkillers and who knows how much sleep, I was slightly more alive, and a lot less busted up than I had when we first arrived. “Aren’t you dead?” I asked Waltrip softly. “I was pretty sure you’d died.”
He crouched beside the sofa to bring his face level with mine. “Don’t you watch movies, Babin? If you don’t see a body, don’t assume they’re dead.” I must have made a face, or maybe he just took some pity on me because he sighed and sat back on his heels. “Some asshole were locked me in the trunk of a car after I got this beauty”—he lightly touched the gash on the back of his head— “at DuBois’ place. They were going to make it look like I’d had some sort of accident, a wreck on a rural road somewhere. I’m not famous, but it’d definitely draw attention from the were community if I went missing.” He winked, all false cheer over darker anger. “Always join the chamber of commerce, Babin. Networking is important.”
“There’s a were chamber of commerce?” I was so tired. Not sleepy, but definitely in the neighborhood of loopy.
“Mmhm. We’re very organized.” He rose to his knees and murmured something to Ethan. “You think you could eat something?” he asked me. “If this was your first change—”
“I don’t understand,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m not… I never have before. Even when they were dosing me with the Lycaon, all it did was make me squirrely. Why now?” I tipped my head back to look at Ethan. “Will it happen again?”
Ethan exchanged a look with Waltrip. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “And the only people who could maybe tell us are in the wind or dead, as far as we know. I’m thinking, and this is just me guessing, so don’t take it as gospel truth—the, ah, stress of the situation triggered it. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve never been in that kind of situation before, so close to being killed. Right?”
“I think I’d have mentioned it.”
“Hmm. Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of shit you haven’t told me about from when we were being idiots.”
“We?”
“Share the blame, share the love.” He smoothed my hair again, making my eyes drift closed. “Most weres don’t get our first big change until puberty, even when we already showing signs for years before. Our senses, speed, strength—they all kick in when we’re kids. But the actual shifting?” He sighed. “Puberty is a bitch on many levels.”
Waltrip rose to his feet and padded off into the kitchen, leaving us alone for the moment. I pressed my head against Ethan’s hand and asked the question he’d been avoiding answering since we left the clinic just ahead of a whole horde of police cars and a few dark, unmarked SUVs. “How did you know where I was? Or did I really die, and this is just a weirdly boring but comforting afterlife?”
“Sartre-lite,” he suggested. “All of the tedium, none of the existential angst?”
“I’m saving the angst for after dinner.” I poked his leg with my finger. “You’re diverting.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I jabbed harder. “Ethan.”
He exhaled slowly, tangling his fingers in my hair to tug gently as he spoke. “Cleverly. She sent me a message. Said she’d fucked up, and you were in danger. She said she didn’t think she could fix things like she’d hoped.”
“Oh.” The word came out as barely more than a breath. Tears stung hot and acid, burning my eyes before they started to fall. Ethan didn’t pull me into his lap like he had before, just kept petting my head, letting me press my face against his thigh as I sobbed out everything inside. When I was empty and burning raw inside, he helped me sit up. Waltrip had come back sometime during my crying jag and placed a plate of sandwiches, a jug of water, and a large bottle of sports drink on the coffee table in front of me. Both men watched me as I took a bite of food, then another. “What?” I demanded around half a mouthful of cheese and tomato. “Are you waiting for me to shift again or something? Or is there some side effect of post-puberty changes that you’re looking for, like I’m gonna burst into flames or something?”
“No, that only happens on your second shift,” Waltrip popped off. “Drink. You’ll feel even worse if you don’t.”
Ethan pushed the plate closer to me, more for the need of something to do than to encourage me, I thought. He and Waltrip exchanged another one of those silent communication glances. “What?” I demanded. “Just fucking say it.”
“When you’re done, we need to get going,” Ethan said after a beat. “We need to go see Garrow.”
The sports drink did help me feel less queasy, but I wasn’t going to admit that to Waltrip when he asked as I was getting into Ethan’s truck. When I just grunted at his question, he smirked and pushed a fresh bottle into my hands with an order to ‘sip, don’t chug’ and to keep a bottle going for the next few hours. “We don’t know if this was a one-time thing or if you’re going to be able to do it all the time now,” he reminded me. “No use letting your body go to shit just because you’re in a sulk. If you need to shift again, you want to be ready. Being dehydrated will just make it hurt even worse.” He’d given me a wink, something I’d decided was a bad habit of his, and rapped on the roof of Ethan’s truck before jogging over to his bike so he could follow us to Garrow.
“You stashed him out here?” I demanded as soon as I recognized the turn off. “What about the Raymonds? Er, the parents, I mean.”
Ethan cut a glance my way, his jaw tight. “In the wind. Tyler’s had eyes on the place for a few days now, and there’s been no sign of life. It’s secure enough for our purposes and the utilities are still on so he can access Wi-Fi and shit. Swear to God, I think he’d actually die if he couldn’t do his hacker shit.”
I made a small, noncommittal noise and sank back in the seat. We bumped up the rutted road to the Raymond’s less than thirty minutes later. Ethan pulled the truck around to the side yard, following worn dirt tracks plowed into the grass by years of other cars parking there rather than the garage or driveway. Waltrip tooled up beside us and shut off his bike, face set in grim lines as we got out. Tyler opened the ratty screen door and stepped onto the front porch. “Y’all coming in, or should we move the party outside? Cause I gotta say, it’s hot as balls out there, and we’ve got a/c running in here at least till they cut power next week.”
Ethan took my hand and squeezed gently. I had a powerful jolt back to being seventeen, linking my fingers with his on his father’s front porch, both of us pretending not to hear Tyler’s mutterings about ‘gross’ and ‘Dad’s gonna kill you, Eth.’ Now, Tyler didn’t even blink, turning to hold the door open and let us troop past. Ethan kept his fingers wrapped through mine even as we navigated to the backroom, the one that had been wall-to-wall trash and used syringes when I’d been there before. It was still trash and used syringes, but everything had been pushed against one wall in a towering stack of awfulness, leaving an expanse of greasy carpet that may have once been blue or maybe gray but was now a color I’d forever think of as Rotting Whale Carcass. Against the other wall was a low table set with a jug of water, a plastic cup, and the remains of a fast-food chicken dinner. On the floor, on that greasy dead whale-colored floor, was Garrow. Someone, I guessed Tyler, had fastened a choke collar around his neck and run a heavy-duty dog lead to a metal spike hammered into the floor, through the carpeting, and into the under-flooring. “The real kicker is, that spike was already here,” Tyler said gleefully. “I don’t even want to think about what was going on in this room but judging by some of the shit in those bags, it was fucking wild.”
“Just an FYI, I have a really sensitive stomach today, and I am not above ruining your shoes,” I informed him, pressing closer to Ethan. “Is he still alive?”
“Yeah. He’s just faking. Lachlan dropped his dinner off earlier, and the asshole chomped it down just fine. He just likes to pretend to be asleep whenever one of us comes to sit with him.” Tyler nudged Garrow with the toe of his booted foot. “Hey, jackhole, open your eyes, or I’ll re-enact that scene from Clockwork Orange on you.”
Garrow grunted, pulling himself into a ball on his side. It should have been pitiful to see, but I was burning hot acid anger. Ethan’s grip on my hand was tight enough to hurt. Beside me, Waltrip was fairly quivering. Tyler gave Garrow another nudge with his foot, maybe a bit harder than before, and jerked his head in the direction of the hallway. “Lachlan will sit with him until we’re done. Come on.” Lachlan darted into the room, squeezing between Waltrip and me to take up a perch on the table beside the remains of Garrow’s dinner.
“Are you sure?” Waltrip asked.
Tyler nodded. “Lachlan can handle him. Want to show them?”
Lachlan grinned. “If he manages to slip his chain, I’ve got this.” He pulled a police-grade taser from his hip pocket. “I’ve monkeyed with it a bit, so it goes up to eleven.”
Tyler shook his head, smiling fondly. “Seriously, dude, if you weren’t taken, I’d be all over you.”
“Fuck off,” Lachlan laughed. Tyler shut the door behind us, but not before we heard the sizzle-pop of Lachlan turning on the taser just in case.
“I need a soda,” he said, moving toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry—we’re using coolers instead of the fridge. I don’t know what died in there, but its descendants are currently developing a religion based around its corpse in the crisper.”
“What are you trying not to tell us?” Ethan asked quietly. “Tyler…”
“Fuck, this is sucktastic,” Tyler muttered. He swung a leg over one of the kitchen chairs, so he was facing us over its back, resting his arms on the high wooden slats. “Okay, first things first. As far as anyone else knows, outside of us in this room, your aunt was killed during a workplace break-in gone wrong. That’s the official finding from law enforcement. No one is going to know anything else about what went down.”
I shook off Ethan’s grasp and sat heavily on one of the other kitchen chairs. “How are they believing that? She was… He…”
“They’ll believe whatever makes paperwork easiest,” Waltrip said. I looked to Ethan for denial, but he just grimaced.
“He’s not entirely wrong,” Ethan admitted. “Most of the time, you go with the easiest explanation. Finding Cleverly dead, obviously murdered and not just a heart attack or something? They’re looking at hours and hours and hours of investigation and paperwork. Even a big city like Dallas is going to be thin on resources for a murder investigation. Throw in things outside the parameters of normal? Few, if any, cops are going to jump on that without putting up a fuss. Cleverly being murdered when someone tried to break into her workplace, maybe looking to score some drugs since it’s a medical clinic and finding her working alone? The report practically writes itself.”
“Suspect at large,” Tyler intoned in a news announcer’s voice. “No witnesses, but there’s been a reward posted by the victim’s family.” He paused, then added, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to do that part, but it sure makes it sound realistic.”
“I don’t understand why…”
“She thought she was going to keep you safe, keep her brother safe. Your father made a deal. but he got greedy. What’s that saying? Better the right hand of the devil than in his path?” Ethan said.
“Lachlan was able to do some digging and tracked her bank records back to around the time you moved in with her as a kid. She went flat broke virtually overnight. Cleared out everything from her 401k to savings, even her Christmas club account at Tuttle First National. The money from… from what she did would have replaced all of that, and then some.”
Grief mixing and warring with anger and revulsion was a hell of a feeling. Do not recommend, zero stars. Ethan moved as if he wanted to take my hand again but stopped and settled back, letting me be the one to do the seeking when I needed it. “Glad to know I contributed to the household,” I finally said. “No wonder she was never really on my ass to work as a teenager.”
Waltrip burst out laughing. “Christ, that’s grim. I think I do like you after all.”
Ethan made a growling noise beside me, but I just shook my head. “It’s fine,” I muttered. “He’s not wrong. It is grim. And I’m not going to get over it today, or tomorrow, or maybe ever. But it’s there, and it’s what happened. Cleverly is dead, but those remains in someone’s cold storage drawer right now? That’s not my aunt. That person never existed.”
Tyler rapped his fingers on the table, nibbling on his lower lip for a moment before speaking again. “I wish you’d have saved that speech for a minute or two because there’s a bit more. The good news is, it doesn’t look like your aunt… um, I mean like Cleverly was passing out Lycaon to anyone other than the Raymonds. The only extra pills she had access to were yours, and since no one else she had contact with has turned up dead or, you know, a werewolf, we’re pretty sure the Raymonds were it.” He looked at Ethan, raising his brows expectantly. When Ethan nodded, Tyler reached into his jeans pocket and brought out a rather nice smartphone. “We were able to get Garrow talking before he realized we were recording. Once he cottoned, he shut up and started his Sleeping Beauty routine.” He pushed the phone to me. “Hit play. Volume’s already all the way up.”
Garrow swam to life on the small screen. All those pixels, I thought, and he still looks like a blob with hair. The picture shrank then adjusted, whoever was holding the camera discovering some sort of focus mechanism because then, Garrow was full Technicolor and clear as day in front of me. Lachlan’s voice came first.
“What were you intending to happen to Doctor Babin today?”
“This is a false arrest,” Garrow spat. “Kidnapping, attempted murder, false imprisonment.” He jerked, so the lead he was attached to rattled. “God knows what else they’ll charge you with when I’m done here.”
“What were you intending to happen to Doctor Babin today?” Lachlan repeated, sounding monotone and bored.
“Fuck. You.”
“What were you intending to happen to Doctor Babin today?”
For nearly a full five minutes, it went on like that. Lachlan repeating the same question, Garrow hurling insults and threats until finally, Garrow snapped.
“Landry Babin needs to die,” Garrow shouted. “He’s a failed subject and should have died with the others!” He jabbed a finger at his own head, pressing hard enough on his temple to leave a red mark. “We gave him all the help we could, but he failed. Our later gens have reached perfection. Finally. Finally! We need comparisons between first-gen and new-gen. Doctor Babin,” he said my name like it tasted bad, “is the only first-gen we can get hold of. And,” he added with a smirk, “the fact he’s a pain in my ass is an added bonus.”
I pressed stop. Ethan started to rise as I pushed away from the table, probably had a good idea of where I was going, but Waltrip shook his head. “He’ll be right back,” he said. Ethan began to protest, but I didn’t wait to hear.
The bedroom wasn’t far. I made it to the door before I could second guess myself. Lachlan was still perched on the table, but Garrow had sat up now and was facing the door when I opened it. “I need a minute,” I said. Lachlan hesitated but slid off the table and eased past me into the corridor. He pressed the taser into my hand with a murmur of, “Just in case,” pulling the door almost shut behind me.
“What were you going to do once you took me apart?”
“You’re a scientist, Doctor Babin,” he said, voice more gravel than sound. My title was a mockery on his lips. “Don’t you remember how these things work?”
“Were you going to do it to my aunt, too?”
Garrow’s lips twitched. “I rather screwed that up, didn’t I? We still have another, but I’m worried he’s going to get himself in rather a lot of trouble before the end.”
Oh. “Justin.”
“Indeed. Doctor DuBois wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea at first, but he was convinced by our counselor that it would be in his best interest.”
“What did you do with him?” The taser was a nice weight in my hand. I wanted to use it, make him hurt, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t satisfy that howling deep down inside me.
Garrow’s eyes flicked to where I was running my thumb over the Taser’s button, not pressing it but feeling the possibility. “I have no idea,” he laughed softly. “It was his first unattended shift. He must have been scared. Were you scared when it happened to you? I need to know how it all felt.”
“I’m sure you’re familiar with it. What are your clients going to do now that… now that everything’s gone to hell?”
His laugh was sudden and loud. “Nothing’s gone to hell. It’s taken an interesting turn, but it’s definitely not detrimental to our clients’ interests.” He started to lean forward before remembering the choke collar. He arrested his movement at an odd angle, a man caught mid-lean and wild-eyed. “You weren’t supposed to change. For years, you were just this broken, wrong thing. You were a promise that never quite panned out. It was enough to give our clients hope, to let them see what we were working toward, but it took two more generations of Lycaon to get where we wanted to be, to show them their faith in us was rewarded.”
Garrow was jerking, twitching against the chain even as it bit into the soft flesh of his neck. He wanted to shift. I could smell it on him, practically hear his bones crackle. The ghost sensation of my own shift, fast and surprising and confusing, tickled at my senses, itched under my skin. “Now what? Your lab is useless to you now the human authorities are involved. You can’t run your experiments there anymore.” I thought of the news story I’d managed to hear that morning before Ethan casually on purpose switched the station to some cable rerun of a college bowl game. Bluebonnet Biomed had been shut down by federal authorities due to unethical practices and poor worker conditions. Garrow Clinic, a subsidiary of Bluebonnet Biomed, was closing its doors temporarily during the investigation with plans to reopen as a substance abuse treatment facility. I imagined someone in the clinic’s PR department thought that was a nice touch, make it seem like the organization really wanted to do good. Waltrip thought it was just the next thing to hide what they were doing. Waltrip was probably right, but I hoped not.
“Do you think we put all the eggs in one basket?” Garrow asked, his voice thick and barely human now. “Baltimore. Denver. Houston. You remember…”
“Landry.” Ethan was on the other side of the door, pressed close to the opening. “Hey, we need to get out of the way. His ride’s here.” I stepped back, not quite able to look away from Garrow’s grin.
“Why did my aunt decide to take it? Why did she… why did she want to be like you?”
Garrow spread his hands, grin even wider as Ethan tugged me back out of the way, and two large, barely familiar, weres moved into the room. “Age makes fools of us all.”
The weres hefted him to his feet, one of them grabbing the end of the lead and the other slinging Garrow over his shoulder. “He got that wrong,” one of them said. “It’s ‘time makes fools of us all.’” Garrow chuckled, giving me a small wave as he was carried past. We trailed after them, through the Raymonds’ wreck of a house and onto the front porch.
Watching them load Garrow into the back of a white SUV with ridiculously tinted windows, it occurred to me where I knew them from. “Waltrip, are those your buddies from… Shit, was it just last week?”
He snorted softly. “They’re my associates at the firm, yeah. And they’re taking Garrow to…” He trailed off and glanced at Ethan. “They’re taking Garrow.”
Tyler joined us on the rickety, rotting porch, giving the departing SUV a cheery wave. “Y’all don’t come back now, hear?”
“You’re such a dork,” Ethan muttered.
“I’m a dork who needs to get on the road,” he corrected. “I’ll give you a call tonight when we get to our first stop.” He hesitated, then leaned in and gave Ethan a hard bear hug. The brothers did that back pound jock hug maneuver but then just held on for an extra few seconds before Tyler finally pulled away. He looked between me and Ethan and sighed. “So, it was a bad idea when you were teenagers but for different reasons than I thought at the time. But it’s less of a bad idea now, for what it’s worth.”
“Are you giving us your blessing?” I teased. Nervous butterflies were back in my belly, this time with tiny little knives.
“I’m giving you my ‘eh, could be worse,’” he said, then surprised me by giving me a quick hug and a thump on my back. Guess I was really one of the boys then. “Waltrip.”
Waltrip jerked his chin in a nod. “Stay in touch.”
“Where are you going?” I asked belatedly. Tyler jumped down from the porch as Lachlan trundled out of the house with an armload of electronics.
“We got some chatter on a skittish wolf lurking around Houston. Scared the hell out of some neighborhood kids.” Tyler made a wide-eyed face. “I wonder who that could be.”
“Justin?”
Lachlan gave me an awkward thumbs up around his burden. “Got it in one. Dizz and the guys are on site already, trying to keep ahead of the Velazquez clan. Houston’s a touchy area, and they don’t like newbies.”
Ethan groaned. “You gonna let me know if it all goes to shit?”
Tyler, leaning out of the driver’s side of his truck, laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to pull the my brother’s a cop card if local PD picks me up for something.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Ethan murmured, raising his hand in farewell as Tyler and Lachlan backed down the drive. It was a hot, sticky quiet as we stood on that rotting porch and looked anywhere but at each other. Finally, Ethan spoke again. “You heading back to Dallas tonight or staying around a bit longer?”
Waltrip rocked back and forth on his heels, humming low in his throat. A few days ago, I was terrified of him. Then annoyed. Watching him on the porch, I was going to miss him, I realized. He caught my eye and smiled. “I was thinking maybe stick around at least for the night. Traffic’s gonna be a bitch, and I could really go for a beer right now.”
“Beer sounds good,” Ethan agreed. “Um, Landry?”
I nodded. Tomorrow would mean dealing with arrangements for Cleverly. Talking to people, making sure stories stayed aligned, figuring out what the hell to do next. I was her next of kin, I had her power of attorney, but what did that mean now? Her house was supposed to come to me, I remember that from helping her draft up her will, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of living there now. The place I’d grown up wasn’t a place of safety and good memories. It was the place where I was a lab rat, where I had my childhood turned into a science experiment. Hell, I’d have to talk to her bank, I realized. And what was I going to do with her money? Knowing where it had come from, who she’d worked for… I didn’t want a cent of it. Even if it would help tide me over till I could get a job. Hell, did I have a job again? Or was I still screwed? Ethan looped his arm over my shoulders and pulled me to his side. I let my head rest on his shoulder. “Beer definitely sounds good.”