Bruce shifted again and was pleased to realize he did it easily. Apparently all he had to do was think about what Laddin needed and bam, his body accommodated his wishes. So now he was on all fours, squatting beside Laddin, as he spoke in the gentlest tone he had.
“Hey, Laddin,” he said. He didn’t expect a reaction and wasn’t surprised when there was no response. So he took a deep breath and started talking for real.
“My first multicar traffic accident was brutal. I suppose everyone’s is, but this one was bad. I’d seen street pizza before, but this incident was something I still have nightmares about. It was January, on the freeway. Someone was driving too fast on black ice and plowed into someone else, who ran into a truck, and then everything went to hell after that. My partner had a pregnant woman, DOA. I was cleaning up her husband, who wasn’t going to make it either, but I had to try. And everywhere you looked, all you could see was disaster.”
He paused to steady his breath. He didn’t want to remember this but knew that Laddin needed to hear it.
“In any accident, all we think about is finding the victim, stabilizing the bleeder while watching for fire, and getting them ready for transport. That’s it. Find, stabilize, transport. The sounds, the smells, and the noise—it’s all chaos. We put one foot in front of the other until it’s done. We don’t think about it, we do our jobs.”
He leaned back against the van bumper, blowing out the memories as he relaxed his body.
“And then it’s done. We’re back in the firehouse and no one’s talking or we’re talking obsessively. Depends on the person. Me, I’m quiet. Then I’d find the nearest girl and I’d plow into her as fast and as furious as I can. But that only takes a guy so far. Eventually you have a moment when it’s just you and your thoughts and suddenly you’re back there again. And this time you can’t shove it away. You smell it again, breathe it again, and the feel….” He shuddered. “I scooped gray matter off the pavement as we lifted his body onto a gurney. He was still breathing because the body does amazing things at times, but we all knew where it was going. We did our job and moved on.” He swallowed as the memory rolled through him.
Then he looked at Laddin, who had lifted his head off his arms. His dark eyes were barely visible in the shadows, but he was watching Bruce. And he was listening.
“I scooped part of a man’s brain off concrete, and it still haunts me.” He leaned back against the wheel of the van. “What you went through today was worse. A thousand times worse. And I’ll bet you never trained for that.”
Laddin lifted his head. “There hasn’t been time,” he said softly.
Bruce shrugged. “I’m not sure you can train for murderous fairies, anyway.”
Laddin let that hang in the air for a while. Eventually he relaxed his grip on his legs and set his chin on his knees. “I keep thinking this is like the rabbits, only it’s so much worse.”
Bruce frowned. “You’ve fought Monty Python killer rabbits?”
Laddin’s lips curved into a ghost of smile. “No. Normal, everyday kind of bunnies living out their lives in the woods.”
“And they attacked?” Bruce couldn’t picture it.
“No. They were normal rabbits.” He blew out a breath. “I ate them. We were running as a pack, doing something. I smelled them, dug around until they came hopping out, and then I….”
Ate them. Right. What the hell was he supposed to say about that? “Wolves will be wolves?”
Laddin shrugged. “Something like that. The thing is, I wasn’t really popular as a kid.” He held up his weird hand. “It was hard to play ball well with this. I managed okay and I had friends, but for baseball or basketball, I couldn’t be as good as the other guys. Even video games had extra challenges.”
And boys that age were all about sports. “No good at soccer?” He wouldn’t have needed good hands for that.
“Not good enough, and believe me, I tried. I never made it onto any high school sports teams.”
That was weird because Laddin seemed all about the pack. Unless…. “That’s why you keep talking about the pack. About how you love running around as wolves. It’s your team sport.”
Laddin nodded. “It’s the best. Sometimes, there’s a goal—find something, hunt something, I don’t know. But we’re all together, part of a pack even though we’re doing separate things.”
A team. And when a team worked well, there was nothing better. “A good firehouse is like that too. It works whether we’re fighting fires or hanging out eating barbeque.” But how did the rabbits fit in?
“I never had that as a kid. Not after peewee football ended. It was just my mom and me, and sometimes my grandmother.” He rolled his shoulders back and lifted up off his knees enough to look at Bruce. “Except for my mom’s rabbits in her lab. I would go there after school and she’d let me play with them. When I was really little, I used to fall asleep in a pen with three or four of them hopping around. And when I grew older, I would talk to them. If Mama was busy, I’d tell them about my homework, I’d practice my speeches.” He closed his eyes. “I told them I was gay before I told Mama.”
The rabbits had been his friends, his confidantes, and his pack. Lab animals who probably had a doomed life, but Laddin hadn’t cared. They were there for him when his mother was too busy. “Then you ate wild rabbits as a wolf?”
“Yeah.” He looked up, his expression haunted. “Bruce, they tasted fantastic.”
What a mind-fuck that had to be. “Finding it hard to reconcile the two? Childhood bunnies with—”
“Romping through the woods with my pack and eating whatever hopped into view.
