Barking (27 page)

No. Leave it. Heel. Bugger this for a game of soldiers, let's go on up the bypass and chase lorries
.

For a few seconds, Duncan understood. The unicorn was out of bounds. Chasing lorries was almost as good, since they'd have a bloody good run and scare some stupid human shitless without the embarrassment and consequences of a genuine kill. It was a neatly crafted human-wolf compromise, very middle-way and Liberal Democrat, and it was what they always did under the circumstances, even though it wasn't what any of them really wanted—

In which case, Duncan thought, why do it?

The pack stopped dead in its tracks. Someone growled, almost certainly Micky; whereas from Pete he felt a great and focused sadness, like that you'd experienced on being shown the draft of your own obituary for your approval.

Sorry, Duncan thought; he was thinking aloud, of course, because he had no choice. It was frightening, but liberating as well. Sorry, Luke, but actually that thought came from you. I was just agreeing with you, that's all.

Well, don't
.

But you're right. Why the hell should we have to go chasing stupid lorries, when She's out there? So, maybe we'll all die, so what? Where's the point in staying alive if we can't chase the stuff that's worth chasing? I wouldn't have dared (he added quickly, as the pack started to growl), only it's what you were thinking. Wasn't it?

Silence; not just outside, but in his head, too. It went on so long that Duncan was scared he'd gone deaf, physically and (immeasurably worse) mentally. Then Luke said:
How did you know that?

Duncan knew that the others couldn't hear them. They were standing perfectly still, ears pricked up, tails motionless, alert and deeply disturbed. They hated him, of course.

I heard you, he replied.

You weren't supposed to
.

Oh. Sorry.

Luke was staring at him.
You shouldn't be able to
.

Really? I didn't mean to, honest. I mean, I can't help hearing what I hear. It's not like I did it on purpose.

Effete urban westerners in the twenty-first century don't really know what fear means. They think they get scared when they nearly drive into a parked car, or come within an inch of being flattened by a breeze-block falling off a scaffolding tower. They think a sudden sharp twist in the guts and not being able to breathe for ten seconds or so is fear; which is like looking at a forty-watt bulb and telling yourself you're staring directly at the sun.

No, of course not, you
know
I'm not. Come on, Luke, you can read my mind, you'd know if I was—

Maybe. But maybe I would and you wouldn't
.

Luke was coming towards him. His ears were back and his tail was down; his jaws were open. As he approached, Duncan remembered a long-forgotten RE lesson at school, when they'd been taught about how Lucifer and the fallen angels rebelled against God. At the time he remembered he'd thought, how stupid can you get? What part of
omnipotent
didn't they understand? And what utter plonkers they must have felt, when they realised what they'd done.

So
. Luke was so close he could feel the heat of his breath.
You're not challenging me, then
.

No, really. Really really.

(He was sitting in something wet. Three guesses.)

That's all right, then
.

Four more seconds of concentrated staring; then Luke broke eye contact and walked away. It was wonderful to be alive, Duncan realised; and the thought that he'd have been prepared to risk this amazing thing called life just to chase some stupid horse with a spike on its nose seemed so ludicrous that he couldn't understand it. But it hadn't just been fear of death. What had scared him was fear of—

Sin? The ultimate crime, rebellion against the alpha; worse than death. Worse, like murder's worse than parking on a double yellow. To think that he'd apparently come within an ace of the biggest Thou-shalt-not of all; he was shaking all over, and the cold was unbearable.

But you did think it. Really you did.

I know. Just
. . .
Don't keep on about it, all right?

Duncan stopped trembling. The others were still looking at him, but they didn't hate him any more. In fact, as far as they were concerned, something may or may not have happened, but if it had, they'd forgotten all about it.
Why are we all standing about here like prunes?
Kevin asked.
Let's go and chase lorries, like Luke said.

So they trotted down the road until they came to the bypass. As luck would have it, there was no traffic to be seen, but the rumble of approaching wheels hummed up through the tarmac. Micky lifted his head, suddenly tense. The others did the same, all except Luke; he was rubbing behind his ear with a freshly licked paw.

Not a lot in it, Duncan thought. And the same goes for chasing cats. Or foxes, for that matter. You know that better than I do. You were the one who put it into my mind.

Did I? I wouldn't know
.

Having a lie inside his mind was like trying to swallow a fir cone. You did, you know you did.

Maybe. But if I'd known you could hear me, maybe I'd have kept my head shut
.

Headlights. Kevin barked; Clive was making that yappy, whimpering noise that Duncan's Aunt Chrissy's red setter used to make when it was begging at table. This is silly, Duncan thought, grown men getting frantic at the prospect of running behind a petrol tanker. And so what if you can all hear me, I don't care.

They can't. I can. Now shut up
.

Mind you, he thought, as the tanker blasted by in a roaring haze of light, noise and stench, for an inanimate object it does have a certain crude allure. Like, it's big, and—

The others were off; Luke in front, not just because he was the leader, mostly because he was the strongest and the quickest. Kevin pulled easily ahead of Pete and Micky, but he couldn't catch Luke - he wanted to, more than anything in the world; the ambition streamed out of him, like oil from a Norton, but he didn't have the muscle, or the will. Micky next, with the tip of Pete's snout at his front shoulder - issues between those two, Duncan realised: they keep them down all the rest of the time, but tonight they can't quite manage it - then Clive, resigned to bringing up the rear. Then—

Then nobody. It was only when Duncan saw the white of Clive's tail vanishing into the dark that he noticed that he himself hadn't moved. For a moment he was stunned. What had got into him? Why was he sitting there, when the chase was on and the pack was committed? The answer was simple. He hadn't felt the tug, like a hook in a fish's lip. Lorries didn't cut it for him after all. There was no passion, no desperate need to catch and reduce into possession. If he wanted a lorry, he realised, he'd go to a Volvo dealer and buy one.

Something occurred to him and he froze. He couldn't hear the others' thoughts. Maybe they'd already run out of range, or perhaps it was his blatant act of defiance. Whatever it was, it had cut him off from the pack. He was alone.

Instinct prepared a wave of terror to flood his mind, but it refused to break. Free will, he thought, and his jowls contorted into a grin. Free will: not a concept a lawyer could ever come to terms with. Lawyers are pack animals too; unless followed by the words
with every house purchase
, the phrase has no meaning for them. It's a contradiction in terms, like the pursuit of what's-its-name, thingy. The prosecution of happiness, now; that was perfectly reasonable. But to chase something you could never hope to catch—

Like a lorry. Or, come to that, a unicorn.

Even as Duncan's mind selected the word, the scent hit him. It was close, fresh; it was
coming towards him
. He froze. Something told him he wasn't the only predator out hunting on the bypass that night. Or, come to that, the most dangerous.

He looked up, and she was there. Light from a distant dot-matrix sign shimmered on her white coat, her silver hooves, the ludicrous and impossible horn in the middle of her forehead. She was standing perfectly still, looking at him with huge eyes, big, round and as red as blood.

He closed his own eyes, but it made no difference. Her scent, the sound of her rapid breathing, the feel of her pulse, practically pounding up through the asphalt into the soles of his feet. The only sense lacking was taste - her blood, in his mouth, on his tongue, the most delicious thing. Desperately he tried to hear her mind; he found it, but it was locked. He knew that if she moved, so much as a shiver, he'd be lost. Please, he begged her, please don't run. Just stay exactly where you are until dawn, when I can get out of this stupid dog and back into me—

Her spring was perfect, a miracle of fluid grace. Her pace, as she collected it, was unbearably beautiful. He felt the hook, not in his lip but his heart. He had no choice at all.

If I survive this, I'm going to be in so much trouble
. He wasn't running; he was reaching out to her with his front legs, each stride a desperate appeal, like a drowning man grabbing for a rope just out of reach. He could feel each bound like a kick in the ribs as his feet thudded on the hard road, sending a jarring shock up his tendons. She seemed to float, her hooves' contact with the ground so brief that it was nearly impossible to see. She ran the way a hummingbird flies, and with no perceptible sign of effort.

After three hundred yards she left the road and set off across some open ground, a common or something of the kind: grass underfoot, no trees, a kind of silver desert. He'd studied maps, he should have been able to figure out where this patch of open land was, the direction they were headed in, the tactical considerations - likely obstacles (roads, canals, built-up areas) that could be a hindrance or a possible source of advantage. Or maybe he didn't know the area at all; maybe what he'd thought was his own knowledge was just a data feed from the pack, without which he might as well be in the Sahara. Scents were no help either, because her smell drowned them all. No; cleverness wasn't going to help him, it'd all be decided by sheer speed of foot, and he knew just by watching her that she was holding back, running just fast enough to keep a healthy distance and still force him to follow. He thought about Luke's assertion that she was the reason why Britain's a wolf-free zone. At the time he'd assumed it was a sort of sideways joke.

She ran, and as he followed, he wondered: when I die, assuming it's before dawn, will I stay a wolf after I'm dead, or will I turn back into a human? Intriguing point; pity I won't be there to find out, because I might be able to take another fifteen seconds of this, but no more than that. Should've listened to Luke. Shouldn't have been such a complete fool. He watched her immaculate stride. Why do fools fall in love?

The pain in his chest was past ignoring now. Every lungful of air came wrapped in coarse sandpaper, and tore at his throat as he dragged it in. His legs were numb, which was a blessing, and his back crackled with pain each time he heaved it. But the scent was burning inside him like petrol vapour, powering the piston that drove him, and stopping was as impossible as taking another stride. She was still there, exactly the same distance ahead of him, hardly exerting herself. Any minute now, he promised himself, she'll put on a little burst of speed and leave me behind (leave me for dead, even) and that'll break the chain. But she didn't. It was, he reflected bitterly, something like chasing lorries - pointless, because you never catch them. Well.

She picked up her pace; just a little, just enough to force him to find strength he didn't have, to keep up. The pressure of his blood against his eardrums was unbearable, and he could taste it in his mouth, sweet as chocolate and rich in nutritious iron and other valuable trace minerals. No more natural wolves in Britain, and pretty soon one less unnatural one. Natural; selection was natural, it filtered out the idiots and the losers, leaving only those sensible enough to chase lorries instead of unicorns as the breeding stock. Which was eminently fair, he could understand that. It was just unfortunate that he'd turned out to be one of the rejects—

Something hit him very hard, and he went to sleep.

 

She was kissing him. No, not quite. He opened his eyes, and saw a golden spike.

The scent. He growled, but the point of the spike tickled his throat. His muzzle was wet. The unicorn had been licking it.

‘You ran into a tree,' she said, in a voice that left no doubt about how hard she was having to work to keep herself from laughing. ‘In the dark, easily done. Are you all right?'

Her voice was - well, familiar, yes. Duncan knew it from somewhere. The awkward part was, he was sure it was his own. Except—

‘Dizziness? Nausea? Blurred vision?'

Except he wasn't a girl, and it was a girl's voice. Maybe he'd heard it in his dreams; in which case, it was a real bummer that he could never remember them when he woke up.

‘Who—?' he mumbled. It came out, he was pretty sure, as human speech.

‘We meet at last, Duncan Hughes.' Her sweet, comical face - practically Disney - twitched into what a hopeless anthropomorphiser would have declared was a smile, though of course, horses don't, not even horses with golden horns sticking out of their heads. ‘You're probably all right,' she went on. ‘Werewolves don't tend to get concussion, unless you drop large mountains on top of them. The tree's a write-off, I'm afraid. It's been there for over a hundred years, actually. Sweet chestnut, though I don't suppose you're interested.'