Roadkill

it. He’s okay now, but that could change when it all starts. It could flip a switch and I don’t want him any closer to Suyolak.” He took Catcher’s face, gripping the fur on both sides, focusing on him. “I’ve got one chance at this, Catch. I can do this, but not if you go Cujo on me, okay?” The growling and snarling had stopped and Catcher regarded him with an eerie silence before pressing his nose into his cousin’s hair, snuffling, and then blowing out air in an aggrieved sigh. But he stayed put, aggrieved meaning agreeing if not particularly liking it.

“Good.” Rafferty straightened. “The rest of you stay back and out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do for me. I’ve got more power up between you and him. Hopefully he won’t get through again if you don’t give him reason to. He wants me first.” With that, he moved toward Suyolak and away from us. Ill- tempered and bossy to the end, that’s who he was. Cranky I could understand, but telling me what to do, that wasn’t going to fly. Like him, I’d gone up against creatures better than I was, and I’d survived, but that was only because I’d always had help. Without the last, I still would’ve gotten the job done, but I wouldn’t have walked away to tell the tale. We’d gotten Rafferty into this. It would be a piss-poor partnership if we didn’t help him to live to pass through and see the other side of it.

The hand that had been holding me up now moved to my shoulder to hold me back. “Wait,” Niko ordered.

I hadn’t moved. There was a time to make your move. If you were good, you knew it when it came. There were many things I wasn’t especially good at in life: handling customer relations, dealing with relations of any kind, keeping the smart-ass in check, not recognizing addiction when it bit me and everyone around me in the ass. But one thing I did know was the right time. The shot I’d tried to take at Suyolak hadn’t been it. That had been the first punch in the first round. That wasn’t the moment I was talking about. Our moment in this game now was the last ditch, now-or-never-again time that you had to take or you wouldn’t live to take anything else. I knew it because Nik had taught me to know it… and being half predator-more than half, whichever-that didn’t hurt either.

We were waiting for the end of the line, and we weren’t there yet. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other kids, Mom,” I grumbled.

“I feel for you,” he commented wryly. But he let his hand drop away, because he trusted me. It was impossible to fathom how he kept that trust day after day when my subconscious was determined to do everything it could to deserve anything except that trust-or maybe it wasn’t so much trust as acceptance, unconditional and never-ending. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought I hadn’t felt lucky since I was five. I should’ve felt lucky every single day of my life.

“I wish someone felt for me,” Robin complained with a sneeze. He was crouched beside Catcher with one arm hooked around the Wolf’s neck. “Felt for me, felt of me. Anything at this time would be welcome, because I had much higher hopes of this ending with me not dead. So any fondling or groping would be welcome.” Catcher turned and gave him one broad lick across the mouth and nose before going back to snarling and staring at the two healers approaching each other. “Not what I had in mind, but the effort is… ah… appreciated, thank you.” Goodfellow scrubbed his face with his sleeve.

“You should’ve said more in your call to Ishiah,” Niko said, moving to stand beside me now that I could actually stand on my own. “If you can actually consider monogamy, then you owed Ishiah more than a weak excuse for a good-bye.” Niko, like me, did understand the impossible nature of a good-bye, but unlike me, had the balls and the spine to tell someone else to go above and beyond.

“Your brother might need a mommy, but I do not,” Robin shot back stiffly, still hanging on to Catcher. He didn’t need a mommy, but it looked as if he had one huge teddy bear. “When I tell Ishiah… Whatever I plan on telling him, it won’t be only because I don’t think I’ll be around later for the consequences. He deserves better than that.”

“Not soap opera. Battle. Be ready,” Delilah contributed with an impatient toss of white hair and a deep rumble in her throat that outdid Catcher’s. “Humans, pucks, even Auphe. Hopeless all.” Delilah, who didn’t trust anyone but herself and didn’t want to; whole and complete within herself, that’s what she thought. She was the unlucky one, but I didn’t think she’d ever know it.

Catcher moaned. He knew what it was to be lucky, to have someone-family or otherwise-and that meant what he was now seeing had to be his worst nightmare: Rafferty and Suyolak coming together.

The moon had risen behind the antihealer. It was the same moon from my dream. Huge and orange, shedding the light of a forest fire down on us. It hardly ever looked like that in summer. I took it as a sign that fate was feeling particularly bitchy, giving a nightmare-perfect background to another nightmare, the one we were facing. Suyolak spread his arms under it. “So long has it been since I’ve seen the sky. So long has it been that I walked in a world that had never seen my like”-he lowered his arms and finished lazily-“and is now seeing it again, Wolf.”

Rafferty staggered. I smelled the blood he spat on the ground in front of him, but he didn’t fall. He wiped his mouth. I saw the dark stain on his hand. He spat again. More blood.

“It was called consumption in my day. Now you call it”-Suyolak tipped his head to one side as if listening, picking the term from a mind-“tuberculosis. It is an ugly word for such an elegant process that eats your lungs small bite by bite. A tiny predator ranging wild within. Marvel at the beauty of it.”

Marvel. Jesus.

Straightening, Rafferty said, “We cured that a long time ago, asshole. And you talk too much.” His voice was clear, not thick and choking, and the rest of us weren’t dead on the ground. That meant he was holding his own. “Here’s something new for you.”

This time Suyolak was the one to stumble. It was only a few inches back and he stayed on his feet, but the blood that poured from his nose and mouth cheered me up some. He coughed, holding up a hand toward us, palm out. Whatever was behind that hand stopped Rafferty after a single step, one he’d been quick to take. He was a healer, but he was a Wolf too. He could kill with his mind and he could kill with his hands. With Suyolak he’d use whichever one would do the job.

“Ah, this… one.” Suyolak lifted his head to grin with teeth now coated black in the moonlight. “This one is a thing of magnificence.” The blood stopped. “What do you call this then? Ebola? Hemorrhagic fever? A fitting name for a glory I’d not even dreamed of.” The grin widened. “I approve.” This time Rafferty didn’t just stagger; he almost fell, and I didn’t want to even guess what kind of god-awful disease he was fighting. Leprosy. Smallpox. Suyolak’s blue plate special, the plague.

“Goddamn it,” I muttered. “Why doesn’t he just go for the heart like he did to me?”

“I imagine that’s quite thoroughly protected as Rafferty is protecting his and ours. They most likely have only the tiniest cracks that are weak enough to attack.”

Niko’s comment didn’t satisfy Delilah. “No manner to fight.” She paced the area behind us. “Throwing germs.” There was a righteous disgust in her voice. “It is wrong. To stand aside. Wrong. Want to fight. Want to bite. Want to kill.” Catcher was picking up on her blood-lust, his growls growing wilder.

I grabbed Delilah’s arm as she passed to yank her to a stop. “Quit it. If you send Catcher off the deep end, you might distract Rafferty, and then we’ll all be spreading the news about how festive Ebola is. If we survive this, you’ll have plenty of other things to kill.” One of them might be me, but there was a time and a place to worry about that. It wasn’t now.

She threw my arm off. “It is not just the kill. It is the battle. The fight. I am Wolf, not sheep. I do not stand. I do not wait. I fight.”

“Then look over your shoulder,” Robin said, hanging on to Catcher for all he was worth. “You’re about to get ten years of birthday wishes all in one. And thanks so very much by the way. It’s just what we needed on top of the oh-so-entertaining parade of diseases throughout history.”

Too agitated to pick up their scent or unable to detect it over Suyolak’s own, Delilah hadn’t smelled them coming-neither she nor Catcher. The Ordogs were back. Or since we’d killed all of the others that had come out of the truck the day before… hell, not the day before… this morning. It had been this morning. Talk about one long damn day. Time was so raveled in knots, I honestly couldn’t tell one day from the next, but it had been this morning. It had been today-the day that I’d argued with Delilah, eaten a Big Mac, then a deer, lost a piece of what humanity I had left, and now it was time to fight for my life… again. The army thought they did more