Roadkill

taken us on our side trip to Candy Land gone horribly wrong. We were all sprawled in Abelia- Roo’s RV. Catcher, Rafferty, and I were sprawled anyway. Robin was sitting perfectly upright, touching as little of the cushions as he could for fear the eye-searing pink roses would jump from the upholstered bench seat to taint his clothing beyond redemption. “Is there no limit to what you will do to disarm your marks?” He sneered at Abelia who sat in the kitchen booth.

She sneered back. “This from a trickster. I take that as the finest of compliments, goat.”

The old woman had answered Niko’s call and come back to pick us up. Branje had suggested she and the others go back to the exit while he went to the house to make sure we were doing our job. Waiting on gadje was no task for a queen like Abelia. It was the perfect line for Abelia- Roo and the only one she would’ve bought. Maybe because she did buy it helped her to blame us for his death. Suyolak had done the damage, but we had a healer. We could’ve saved him. Hell, I didn’t know. Maybe Rafferty could have, but Salome saw someone trying to kill us and she took care of the situation. Diplomacy and client relations weren’t concepts in her pickled little brain-if she had a brain. Didn’t they remove them during mummification?

It was not a subject I wanted to dwell on. One of the four men left was driving. He slowed at that same four-way stop I’d been so unimpressed with before. There was no way I’d be forgetting it now. “Should I stop, Bara?” he asked.

“Bah. Fool. Do you see any cars here to steal?” She tossed a bony finger at the window at the only building around: the post office. “Should they steal a mailman’s truck? Such a fool. You shame me. Go to the next exit. Perhaps there will be better pickings there.”

“And a computer,” Rafferty added. “We need a laptop. As soon as possible.” He looked down at Catcher who was sleeping. Unable to communicate on an in-depth level, there wasn’t much else he could do- sleep or gnaw on those ugly cushions.

Brilliant white, store-bought teeth-those were new-bared in a smile of the haggling kind. “Perhaps this I can help you with, doctor dog. You could not do for Branje, but you can do something for me.”

It wasn’t at the next exit but the one after that that we found a car. We didn’t steal it as Abelia suggested. We had more than enough of her money to pay for it, although with Robin, trickster and used car salesman, on our side in the negotiations, the guy we bought it from had to feel like he had been not only robbed, but mugged in an alley, then lost his retirement in a Ponzi scheme. We left him stunned with the key to the tiny car lot dangling from his hand, trying to get up the energy to close up. Goodfellow was smugly satisfied, Niko had another giant, ancient car, and I had air-conditioning. Genuine making-life-worth-living air-conditioning. It was almost worth the loss of my guns.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the cool air in my face. Beside me was the clicking of a car lot ink pen against a keyboard-Catcher’s new laptop. There hadn’t been an exchange of money for it. From the looks of Rafferty and the car he’d left behind, he didn’t have much to spend. But there was no way Abelia- Roo would give anyone anything for free. “What’d she want?” I asked. “For the computer?” I wasn’t surprised she had one to trade in the RV. I’d bet the old witch had more stock than Kmart in there.

“She has a bad heart.” I heard the rustle of cloth as Rafferty shifted position and I opened my eyes to see him lean and read Catcher’s typing. He snorted in agreement, “Yeah, full of bitchiness too, but that I can’t cure.”

“So you could fix her heart?” I was surprised she had one at all.

“I improved the function some, but you can’t cure old.” Unless you were willing to do things only Suyolak would do. “Every heart has only so many beats in it. I gave her the maximum hers has. Another month more than she would’ve had-maybe. Not that I told her it was that little. We wolves can do creative bargaining ourselves; we just call it what it is: lying.”

“Well, it’s a month more than she deserves,” I said under my breath as I used my cell to finally call Delilah and fill her in on what had happened, now that I knew she wasn’t behind what had happened. She was still angry. I’d known that or she would’ve come looking for us. She would’ve sniffed us out, found us, made things considerably easier on our twenty-mile trek. But she hadn’t. In some ways that was almost worse than her possibly considering killing me. Killing me was an intimate thing; it was personal. Being ignored… that was like not existing at all. That wasn’t Delilah-like; it wasn’t even Wolf-like. Ninety-nine point nine percent of Wolves regarded me with loathing, fear, and murderous fury. Rafferty and Catcher had given me the benefit of the doubt years ago, because one was a healer and one was different himself; at least that was my best guess. I could’ve been wrong. Who really knew? Rafferty might be a healer, but he wasn’t handing out smiles and lollipops after exams in the surgery room of his house.

Delilah-I knew I didn’t know her inside out either. She was a different species. She was a killer, although she claimed not to kill humans because it wasn’t enough of a challenge. She was a career criminal and enjoyed it. But she also liked me, gifted me with pretty fucking amazing sex, and treated me as nothing particularly special. When those in the preternatural world who could tell what fathered you were either terrified of you or wanted to kill you, and then someone came along who treated you as just a guy, nothing out of the ordinary, it was… good. It was damn good.

I closed the cell after she disconnected wordlessly after my explanation. This though-this wasn’t good at all. If she was going to try to kill me, I wished she’d do it already. That I could handle. This sucked. This made me want to kill someone. Hell, this wasn’t a new feeling for me-just a new feeling for me with Delilah. And the feeling lasted well into the next moment, although it shifted to someone specific, because he was back.

The goddamn Plague of the World.

“The sun has fallen; the moon will soon be a cradle for newborn babes rocked to gentle sleep.”

He was sitting between Niko and Robin this time, up front, on the old bench seat. There was room enough for a hide-covered skeleton. I saw the line of the pointed jaw in the dark as the head turned to look from one side; then from the other; then the glimpse of a marbleized eye as Suyolak shifted his gaze back to Rafferty specifically. “But not all babes, my carnivorous friend, yes? Not all babes.”

There was more than Catcher’s snarl this time. There was his, his cousin’s, the yowl of Salome, and my own incoherent growl. If only I knew where he was, if only I’d seen it, I’d have traveled there in a heartbeat despite what Niko thought about gates. But I hadn’t, and I couldn’t go where I didn’t know the way. It didn’t stop me from lunging at the image, my hands passing through where his neck would’ve been under all those tangled hanks of hair. The bone-gleam of a grin was there and gone as he disappeared, popping out of existence like a soap bubble… like a magic trick. When you wanted to strangle someone, magic tricks weren’t what you wanted to see.

The snarling beside me continued, from human and wolf throats. I wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated. “Monogamy, the Plague, and killer babies,” Robin said blackly as Salome tried to crawl up the inside of his shirt. “This is officially the worst road trip in history.”

“It’s not your fault, Rafferty,” Niko said, ignoring the puck and addressing what needed to be said. That’s what he had always done for me. Now he did it for our ally. “It’s far easier to destroy than rebuild. There’s nothing you could’ve done and we know that. And Suyolak knows it as well. He’s pushing your buttons. Don’t let him.”

The healer snapped his mouth shut on the next snarl and turned to look out the window at passing lights… the night… or nothing. Any of those would’ve been better than looking at the inside of his own head. I could see that blood-splattered nursery in IMAX fucking vibrancy on the inside of mine, and I could’ve done without it. And I wasn’t the one whose specialty was doing something about things like that. I was more like Suyolak. Killing was about all I was good at; killing and being a smart-ass. Neither of those should’ve done any good in that baby’s room, but the only good Rafferty had been able to do was the same, which had to make him feel like utter shit.

He wasn’t alone. We had known there would be civilian deaths and accepted it. There was nothing else we could do about it and stopping to try to help would only make things worse and give Suyolak more power over us. We hadn’t gone faster because we had to meet up with Rafferty. There was nothing we could do and nothing we had done-not one damn thing. We all felt like shit.

And there was still nothing we could do… except this time go faster.