I felt a little trapped, but I still made a sympathetic sound. She inhaled deeply, sniffing. Oh, God, if she started crying, what would I do? She sighed aloud and settled even closer to me, her head upon my chest, making walking almost impossible.
“Do—you want me to go get coffee and bring it back to you?” Rachel’s desires and requests for sanctuary be damned, I wasn’t going to haul a crying woman across half the hospital to the vending machines and back.
“No. It’s good for me to walk a bit. To get away,” she said from the vicinity of my right breast, and then raised her head, and took a step back. “I don’t mean to frighten you. I apologize.”
“It’s okay.”
“We find comfort in one another. I am not often alone. I haven’t been alone for the majority of my life.” Helen looked over my shoulder, back from where we’d come. “And now—things change.”
“I’m sorry.” Where she’d been against me was warm. In other circumstances, her closeness would have been nice, say if she were a relative of mine. I wanted to do what was right, even if it felt weird. I reached out for her arm and gave her a comforting pat. I didn’t know how else to help.
She put her hand to mine, pulled it down to her own, and gave me a weak smile. “Just a hand to hold, okay?”
I could deal with that. “Okay.”
We walked hand in hand like schoolgirls to the cafeteria. It was closed but there were vending machines outside. I stood by Helen as she ordered coffee, and together we watched the machine pour. “When you’re a child, they tell you parables about the moon.”
“Like what?”
“Like the moon sees all, knows all, heals all. Whatever’s convenient for them—that’s how they are, adults,” she said, as though she weren’t among their number. “Up until tonight, I always thought that last part was true. I’d never had a wound the moon couldn’t touch. But you don’t need to be much of a were to smell the stink of death on Father now.”
I hadn’t smelled anything yet, but she was the wolf, not me. “We call that necrosis.”
“How do you ever get the smell out of your nose?”
“The hospital’s full of bad smells. You get used to it,” I lied. People put toothpaste inside their masks, or told you to breathe through your mouth not your nose. You learned how to wash homeless people’s feet with shaving cream, to cut the smell down, or set out a hospital-provided jar of clove oil in certain rooms, up high where the likely alcoholic occupants wouldn’t find it until they were sober enough to know better than to drink the stuff. But necrosis was the worst, and there was no solution for it other than debridement or amputation. It was like a refrigerator full of already rotting food, left out for days in the sun. In humid June. The scent of it clung to the inside of your nose once you left. You didn’t get used to necrosis, you just got as far away from it as quickly as you could.
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a far more sensitive nose in the hospital, walking to and from our floor. The drunks who came in in their own filth, the visitors with deodorant and cologne, the floor polish here alone—“It must be awful for you,” I said.
“It is. Kindness helps, though.” Helen took a long smell of her coffee, as though it were oxygen, and smiled at me. “Kindness, and other more pleasant things to smell.”
The way she was looking at me right now, so open and trusting—I didn’t want to ask her for her help, it wasn’t fair of me. She was as much a patient here as Winter was. Maybe I could just put Gideon in my car trunk and rely on the sight of him to scare any other attackers away. I shook myself and blurted out a question before I could say of or think of anything else dumb. “How old is Fenris?”
“Junior’s twelve. He’s in fifth grade.”
“He’s a pretty cute—I mean, handsome wolf.”
Helen laughed. “Thank you. He’s a handful, but I love him dearly. Everyone does. It’s very kind of Lucas to travel here to hold his place.”
We made our way down the stairs near the cafeteria, then cut down toward the lobby. “Do you all homeschool?”
“No. My pack’s philosophy requires forced integration, coupled with strict control. Packs that isolate themselves lose the economic means to survive. We may play in the parks come the full moon, but on a day-to- day basis we’re out there being productive citizens, paying taxes, driving on public roads.” She sounded like she’d given this talk before, and she was walking by herself now. It seemed our conversation had given her strength— that or the coffee.
Speaking of roads—“Where was your father coming from the day that he got hit?”
She reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward me with a shrug. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”
“It looked like he was coming from the hospital.” He’d been on the same corner that Charles and I had on our way to the Rock Ronalds.
“Did it?” she asked, her voice surprised.
“Kind of, yeah.” Not that there weren’t other buildings on our block.
Her head bowed and her posture slumped. “I guess now we’ll never know,” she said sadly.
We reached the lobby together. It was full as usual with visitors and vagrants—and a few of them stood at Helen’s arrival. I heard someone whisper “Mother Helen!” and a handful of people crowded up, reaching out to Helen with their hands like she was a lost pop star. “How is he? Is there anything new?” They were an eclectic group: one looked like a biker, another looked nearly homeless, a third was a soccer mom, and three others were varying shades of gray.
Their attention seemed to bring fresh life to her. Like a wilting flower put in water, she revived to stand tall. I wondered how much of it was real—being surrounded by friends in bad times helped—and how much of it was her feeling like she needed to put on a strong act. Maybe there wasn’t that much different between Helen and Luz.
The guard up near the front of the lobby glanced our way, but he had obviously seen everything before. It wasn’t his job to be the bad cop, even though he wore a badge—he was just supposed to keep the peace, and the visitors weren’t misbehaving, even though I thought they were crowding Helen. I bet it helped that I was wearing scrubs, and they were all acting like they were about to get bad news. Guards gave bad news wide berth.
Helen reached out among them like Mother Teresa, hugging and petting them, individually and together.
I likely wasn’t going to get a better chance than this to ask for her protection, even if it felt like I was invading a private moment between her and her people. This was not my place, these were clearly not my friends—I could tell by the looks they were giving me. More than I hated visitors—I hated feeling like one.
I stood to the side of the group and cleared my throat. “Helen—I know this is a bad time for you—but —”
The lobby doors opened and a woman in a parka came in, hood up. She walked past the guard’s desk and slowly turned. The badge on my lanyard lit up like candles on a birthday cake.
I shoved into the group of weres and grabbed hold of Helen’s arm. “Sanctuary—please!”
Helen turned her head to look at me in surprise. Behind her I could see the parka woman lower to all fours. Humans were not supposed to move like that. She didn’t lope awkwardly like a werewolf from a horror movie— she glided, picking up speed, jumping over orange couches in the way. Her mouth opened, so wide I could see teeth, teeth that were not right, teeth that were racing out as quickly as their owner to meet me.
“No running!” the guard yelled after her.
“Sanctuary!” I pleaded.
“Sanctuary?” Helen said, as though she hadn’t heard me, then looked behind herself. I didn’t know if the wind in the lobby shifted, or her were-senses tingled, but she shoved her nearest packmates away, sent them sprawling, and changed.
In the time it took for her coffee to fall to the ground, a blond middle-aged woman going sour with repeated loss turned into a yellow-gray wolf. In this new form, Helen crouched as the parka-woman leapt into the air to meet her.
The lobby strobed.
