Helix: Plague of Ghouls (15 page)

He raised his hand. He’d heard all of it before. “Insults don’t stick when no one knows what you are—especially when you can’t remember either.
Am
I Lebanese? Turkish? Italian? Syrian? I dunno. Nobody knows, not even Anders, and he’s the one who rescued me. And in the end, does it even matter? After a while, he’s just some pathetic old man yelling ‘you’re a stinky poopoo head!’ Such a waste of energy on his part. But he never let it interfere with his business decisions. No matter what slipped out of his mouth, he always picked the right person for the right task, and he rewarded or punished according to the deed, not the doer. Business was always business.”

“But Immediate Kill orders? For three hundred people?”

Ishmael took another drink. “He was right about keeping that many new lycanthropes a secret, and he was right about their exponential growth in numbers. He needed to put an immediate, thorough, subtle, and permanent stop to the outbreak over there.” He crushed the half-empty bottle in his hand. “And there are no two quieter killers than Jay and me. That’s why he sent us. Just us two.”

Suddenly he understood why he was so bone-weary. He carried around the guilt of fifteen deaths from just that one mission, and that was bad enough. The real problem was, while he was keeping the other hundred and some secretly alive, someone was making kittens and blaming him.

“You think that’s why Jay went crazy?” Bridget asked. “Killing so many people?”

He thought about it. “What do you remember about your time in hospital? After the attack.”

She shrugged. “A lot of it, but as if I’d read it in a book or saw it in a movie. Second-hand memories, nothing else.”

“You remember when Jay said he wanted to pull your life support and let you die?”

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

“I wanted to keep you alive,” Ishmael said, “because I wanted your infection to fully set in, so we could get a look at what kind of lycanthrope your attacker was. Jay said he wanted to let you die, so you wouldn’t have to live the rest of your life looking like the asshat who attacked you.”

She snorted.

“Then I said I wanted to keep you alive because you were our last witness. Jay wanted you dead because you were becoming a literal body of evidence, proving the existence of shape-shifters. He may have zero qualms about murder, but he always found a logical reason to commit it.”

“So there was a time when he wasn’t an
irrational
dick.”

“You made up our minds for us,” Ishmael said, with a dry laugh. “You reached between the bed rails and grabbed Jay by the junk. He stood
en pointe
for a week after that. Good times.”
And that was when she was still Claire Bambridge!
“And now look at us.”

“Both of us one of a kind,” she said, and not for the first time. As far as anyone knew, like Ishmael, she was the last of her kind. Her attacker had simply fallen off the radar. Dead, with luck, but forever missing. Schrödinger’s were-hyena.

“So did he snap and go crazy?” Ishmael asked. “Hell no. Before infection, he was a highly decorated WWI veteran. You don’t get that by being gun-shy. No, he’s a high-functioning sociopath, but he’s not crazy.”

“Oh, yes. That makes me feel so much better,” she said.

“So yes, I extorted money from Wyrd, and yes, I disobeyed direct orders by saving lives, and yes, I lied to the Council, a lot. You’d have done the same in my place.”

“No, I wouldn’t have,” she admitted, sadly. “I’d have started following Jay’s example, killed one or two people, then jumped in a lake wearing a concrete life jacket, so I wouldn’t have to kill anyone else. But after what I saw at Wyndham Farms?”

“If you saw those people in Moldova . . . ?” Ishmael replied. “All gathered in one place,
waiting
for you to kill them? They’d been hiding, Bridge. Hiding in the last place they thought we’d ever look for them—in a waste processing facility. They were wallowing in human
shit
, Bridget, because they thought it would cover their scent, that I wouldn’t be able to find them. But when I found them, they just gave up. Two women had toddlers with them. They kept handing the kids over to me, begging me to take them and hide them some place safe, to take them to America, anything, and to let the adults die. You’re tough, Bridget, and you follow the orders that are given to you. But when someone hands you their baby and then tries to drown herself in a septic tank, even you might have a crisis of conscience.”

She reached forward and turned on the interior fan. She looked more like her old self than ever before. “I hated you for killing all those people, you know. Then a year later, I stopped hating you, because I saw just how bad an outbreak could get. But I couldn’t trust you.”

“Do you still think I could have kidnapped eight girls and turned them into
me
?” he said.
“
After everything we’ve been thr—after everything
you’ve
been through, Bridget, do you think I would do something like that? That I would turn someone involuntarily?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“No one told me about quarantine,” Ishmael said, “because people must have known what I did in Moldova. They must have suspected that I’d mauled but never murdered. Even Chloe didn’t want to tell me about quarantine, because she knew it was the right thing to do, and she didn’t want me to swoop in like some knight-errant and rescue them all.”

“Like you totally did,” Bridget said.

“Like I did at Moldova, and then again at Wyndham Farms, just like she knew I would.” He rubbed at his shoulder. People weren’t the only things he brought out of quarantine. “And now that you know about Moldova,” he added, gravely, “their lives are in your hands. So is mine. So is Chloe’s life, and Anders’. Because damn it, even if you don’t trust me,
I
have to trust someone.”

“You’re the only one of your kind, Ishmael,” she insisted. “There isn’t anyone else who could have infected those girls! I know that.
You
know that. You’ve spent the last thirty years looking for anyone even
remotely
feline. If it wasn’t you, then who?”

“Assuming that the video is even real,” he said.

“It’s damned conv—” She realized she was shouting, and she lowered her voice. But Ishmael figured the damage was already done. The Padre had stopped snoring. “It’s damned convincing, even if it were faked.”

“I came from somewhere,” he said. “I’m not a random mutation. This change is too complex, too complete, and too . . .” He shrugged for want of a better word. “Too perfect to be random. Holly having year-round white fur, while everyone else has brown, or grey, or black? That’s a mutation. Having a tail or not, that’s a random mutation. Feline versus canine—not random. Hell, you might not even be part hyena. No offense, but you could pass for a shit-ugly werewolf.”

“No offense taken,” she blurted, though clearly offence was taken.

“But Bridget, I came from someone before me. Just as you came from someone else.”

The truck accelerated.

Dead or alive, her forebear was still out there, somewhere. He was Bridget’s
raison-d’être
in so many ways.

“For all I know,” Ishmael said, in a calming voice, “my own forebear’s responsible for those kittens. Maybe he’s still out there—he or she. Maybe I have a viral cousin who’s even better at hiding than I am. I don’t know.”

“Someone could have stolen a sample of Ishmael’s blood,” Holly added, softly. She sat up, rubbing the sleep crusts from her eyes. “Or maybe even less than that. For all we know, those kittens could be clones derived from some Kleenex left in a motel garbage pail.”

They both glanced at her oddly.

“I mean, from a bloody nose or something,” Holly said. “Get your minds out of the gutter.” She stretched as much as space would allow.

“The point is,” Ishmael said, “someone’s been giving you half-truths. Yes, I’ve been bleeding money from Wyrd, but for a very good reason. Yes, I’ve been running all over the globe on unauthorized trips, but for a very good reason. But someone tipped you off, otherwise you wouldn’t have looked into my personal records.”

“Angie Burley,” she said.

“And now she’s in my job. Go figure.”

“She did it because she knew you were up to something, and when we got wind of that video, she asked me to look into it. She knew what you were doing was wrong, and she needed someone close to you to find out the truth. But since there was room for doubt, she refused to help coordinate your capture until she was convinced. And we were both convinced. Haberman wanted you tossed into quarantine back in 2010! It took us four years to build a case against you.”

God, too many spinning plates
.
Even if we survive this, we still have Dep and Helen to deal with.
“We need to get to Halo,” he said. “We need to find and stop a hungry, hungry cannibal. And if Two-Trees’ suspicions are right, police have a lycanthrope in custody, right now. In order for us to confirm or deny it, we need Harvey, whether he trusts me or not.”

“I know!”

Holly interrupted. “Does Angie trust you?”

Bridget didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t think Angie knows who to trust either. Not since Jay disobeyed direct orders and brought a damned army helicopter to torch Wyndham Farms. And not since I accidentally fired a missile into my own camp while hauling your asses out of the fire.”

“The only thing you did,” Holly said, “was save lives. She’ll probably trust you more than she’ll trust Ishmael. Second question: does
Harvey
trust Angie Burley, and vice versa?”

Bridget seemed to see where Holly was going with that thought. “Angie trusts Gil, because Gil has nothing to gain and nothing to lose, and he doesn’t waste time on lies or suspense or drama. And both of them trust cold hard facts more than they do people. Get the facts to
Gil.
Let Gil talk it out with Angie, and get Angie to contact Harvey. Get Harvey and his dogs up here, find our suspects, get back home, and deal with this kitten catastrophe.”

And maybe put down a couple of new wendigos
, Ishmael thought.

“That sounds like a workable plan to me,” Holly said. She stretched again and scratched her knotty hair.

“Yeah,” Ishmael agreed. “Now all we need are cold hard facts.”

TWO-TREES’ SECOND
night in the Marigold hotel was marginally better than the first, though he’d had to prop open the window with his laptop. When it began to snow outside, Two-Trees thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He slept like a log between the end of the
Late Late Show
and the burr of his cell phone vibrating on the nightstand. It was six in the morning when he woke.

He scratched his hairy belly and decided now was as good a time as any to get up and check his emails. He was surprised to find his laptop monitor covered in a fine coating of dust. He blew this away, then wiped the screen with his bare forearm before sitting and loading his email software.

It had been sixteen hours since last he’d heard from Buckle, and he figured either Buckle was too busy, he’d been warned off contacting Two-Trees, or that he’d just plain forgotten. Worse—he might have thought that a forensic anthropologist was little to no use in a murder investigation, aside from identifying the corpus delectable. He sat at the desk wearing nothing but underwear and overnight sweat. When he reached for the mouse he saw that his skin was dotted with tiny red marks.
Hives? Damn it, no. Bed bugs.
He’d have to fumigate his clothes, his computer, his car, everything. In all good conscience, he couldn’t check into a different place, not so long as his clothes and equipment were infested. He’d only infest a second hotel. So he was stuck with Nickelback, bad TV, and lousy room service until such time as he could find and confront one or many cannibals, then return home to a thousand-acre complex where werewolves lived.

At the end of that thought, Two-Trees dropped his elbows to the table and his face into his hands.
It doesn’t get any better than this, does it, Dad?

There were no new emails. He went to take a shower.

When he came back, the only change was that his stomach was growling and his skin was itchier. He had no new emails, no new text messages, no new inspiration in his facial reconstruction images. Nothing matched the local missing persons reports. He’d promised a series of possible faces to match the skull, and as of ten or so the night before, he’d done that. Until he heard back from Buckle, he stopped being a forensic anthropologist and went back to being a Wyrd agent.

A very itchy one.

He shook out his clothes—for all the good that would do—before dressing, then he packed up his computer, notes, wallet, and phone, and headed to reception to lodge a formal complaint. The receptionist that morning was a woman whose breasts overflowed her bra and whose belly overflowed her belt, with cow-licked hair that had been cut too close. As a rule, he preferred large older women because they weren’t half as pretentious as skinny young ones, but this one looked like a new hotel uniform was on back order, and instead of letting herself be large and comfortable in her own skin, she looked like a half-melted altar candle. She was, however, quick to the point, friendly, and apologetic. When he told her about the possible bed bugs, she immediately went through the roster to check for the next best room, upgraded his accommodations while they investigated, took fifteen percent off the top of his final bill, and gave him a voucher for free dry cleaning. She took his hotel room key and told him someone would be by to move his luggage to the new room. They’d close off the old room and the ones near it, until someone could come in and investigate.