Kitty Goes to War (18 page)

“I’d like to ask them. See if they feel up to it.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. I got the feeling Shumacher wasn’t used to giving her lab rats a choice. “But Kitty—do you really think they’ll ever be able to lead normal lives? Don’t you think they’d be safer—better off—staying under supervision?”

“What? For the rest of their lives?” I almost laughed. But Shumacher just looked at me, matter-of-factly, as though the suggestion wasn’t outlandish.

Then I realized that maybe she wanted to keep them locked up for the rest of their lives. Not for their own good, but for hers.

“Do you even see them as people? As patients? Or just as an experiment?” I said.

“That’s not fair—I’m trying to do good work here.”

“You can’t keep them locked up forever.
They’re
not guilty of murder.”

She spoke with passion—desperation, almost. “We’ve never had a chance to study the long-term effects of lycanthropy like this. I’ve never had subjects I could study this closely. It’s too good an opportunity—”

“At the cost of their sanity?” I said calmly. “They’re
people
, Doctor.”

She looked away.

She’d seemed so different than her predecessor at
the NIH, but maybe there wasn’t any difference at all. The only results she wanted were raw data.

“Doctor, you have Vanderman. I’m not going to argue with you about letting him loose. But you have to let the others go. Please.”

She leaned forward, resting on her elbows. “I’ve been to see Vanderman. He hasn’t spoken in days. He paces, sleeps. If we try to confront him, he shape-shifts. He throws himself against the walls of his cell. I don’t know how to bring him back. My only option is to keep him sedated. That’s not a good baseline, even for a werewolf.”

Tyler and Walters I could help. Vanderman . . . I didn’t even want to see him. “I’ve heard stories of werewolves going so far that they don’t come back. I wondered sometimes if it was just stories. The way shifting feels, the way it gnaws at you—it’s easy to believe it could take over.”

“Nobody knows how to deal with him,” she said, shaking her head.

“This is where the bounty hunters usually come in,” I said.

“That’s terrible.”

“Yes.”

She sighed, seeming resigned. “I don’t suppose it’s that much worse than any other violent, mentally ill patient who has to remain confined.”

I said, “Most violent mental illnesses aren’t contagious.” By her frown I could tell that I wasn’t helping.
“Can I go ahead and talk to Tyler and Walters? We can help them, I’m sure of it.”

She took me down the corridor to their room, opening doors with her pass key. I straightened, readjusting my mood to leave the grimness of the conversation outside. I didn’t want them to see me frustrated or upset.

The men actually seemed to perk up when they saw me. Walters was sitting on his bed and looked up, interested. Tyler had been at the table, reading a dogeared paperback. He set the book aside and stood, almost at attention, when I came through the door.

“Kitty. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, smiling. “And you?”

He shrugged, Walters glowered, and I had to smile. Those were perfectly reasonable, human reactions to being locked up in a cell. Another step toward normality achieved. Shumacher left us, but I knew she was watching on her closed-circuit camera. My skin prickled at the scrutiny.

The normal thing to do would have been to pull up a chair to talk. But I remained standing to keep myself taller. And I wanted to let these guys out on the full moon?

“So,” I said. “Did you guys get a chance to listen to the show Friday?”

Tyler donned a crooked grin. “Shumacher let us have a radio. You do that every week?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of fun.”

He shook his head and seemed amused. “It’s kind of crazy.”

“I didn’t know there were so many of us out there,” Walters said, from the bed. “So many people called in saying they’re werewolves. Are there really that many?”

“They call in from all over,” I said. “I don’t really know how many of us there are. But they’re out there. Most of them lead pretty quiet, normal lives. They keep themselves secret and no one knows they’re there.”
And you can do the same,
was the conclusion I left unspoken. Walters nodded thoughtfully, which heartened me. Maybe he really had been inspired. “Full moon’s in a couple of days. You two feel up to maybe spending it outside?”

They looked at me, eyes wide, like kids who just found out they might get to go to Disneyland.

“Really?” Tyler said, hesitating, obviously not believing it.

“It’s a step,” I said. “You want to get out of here, you want to go home, you’re going to have to deal with the full moon. You can come spend it with my pack. See how real werewolves handle it.”

“I’d go for that,” Tyler said, glancing briefly at the camera in the upper corner of the room, where Shumacher was watching, before looking back at me. I wouldn’t blame him for thinking this was some kind of psychological experiment. Subject them to stress and disappointment, and so on.

“It’s not a done deal yet,” I said. “You need to be honest about whether you think you can handle it. Because if you screw this up, you may not get another chance. And if you hurt any of my people, I’ll finish you off myself.”

“You could try,” Walters grumbled.

I looked at him. “Yeah. And what would you say if I told you I’ve done it before?”

“What, stopped a werewolf?” he snickered.

“Killed,” I said. “Killed a werewolf.”

He frowned and looked away, suddenly uncertain.

Tyler smiled wryly. “I believe you. I don’t want to fuck with you.”

“Good man,” I said. “Walters?”

“I want to get out of here,” he said softly.

“Then we have to toe the line,” Tyler said to him, leaning in, a private conference. “Follow the rules and we get out. Got it?”

Walters nodded, closing his eyes, gritting his teeth, as if it was an effort.

“I still need to talk it over with Dr. Shumacher and my people. But if you’re up for it, we’ll come get you on Tuesday.”

“Kitty. Thanks,” Tyler said.

“I
WAS
under the impression that werewolf packs were not meant to be run by committee,” Ben said as
we pulled into the parking lot behind New Moon Monday evening, just before closing time.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t want to be like all those other werewolves, you know?”

“Says the werewolf named Kitty.”

“It’s too late to change my name now,” I grumbled.

A half an hour later, we stood before our pack of werewolves and explained the situation. Everyone had an opinion.

“I do not like the idea of baby-sitting those guys,” Becky said, glaring at me from her seat at the end of the table. “We can’t control them. They can’t control
themselves
.”

Twelve of the pack’s seventeen members were here. Word had gone out through Shaun. I’d told him over the phone what I wanted to talk about, he saw others of our pack as they came in and out of the bar, and the grapevine would have continued from there. They came to find out if what they’d heard was true: was I about to let a couple of new wolves join the pack? We clustered around a few tables in the back of the restaurant. Head of the pack, Ben and I sat at our own small table for two, presiding over the gathering.

Becky wasn’t wrong. She had every right to be worried, since she’d dealt with them up close. Our outing at the restaurant last week hadn’t immediately made everything all sunshine and show tunes.

“I know,” I said. “We need a plan. Several of us need to look after each of them. Help keep them in line, keep them grounded.”

“You’re asking us to keep tabs on a couple of Green Berets here? Are we even up for that?” Jared was in his late thirties, unassuming. Older and more experienced than I, but with no desire to be a leader, so he deferred. Like a lot of us, he just wanted to be left alone to live his life. And like it did for a lot of us, the pack helped keep his wolf side sane.

I couldn’t bullshit these guys. They’d only go along with me as long as I kept the pack stable.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “But they’re motivated. They want to go home. They need our help.”

“I understand that,” Shaun said. He was leaning on the bar, on the other side of the gathering. “But I don’t want us to turn into Kitty’s home for wayward werewolves.” A few of the others nodded in agreement. I couldn’t blame them. We’d been stable for over a year now—no invasions from the outside, no dissention from within—and most of the pack wanted us to stay that way.

“You want me to just turn my back on them?” I said.

“Your own people have to come first,” Shaun said.

“I want us to be a little altruistic here. These guys are war vets, they’ve been through a lot. They need to see what well-adjusted werewolves look like, and I think we can do that.”

I looked around at my bunch.
My
pack. It had taken a long time for me to think of them that way. When I’d first met most of them, I’d been a newly minted werewolf, freaked out and constantly on the edge of panic, rolling over to show my belly to keep out of trouble. Now look at me—giving orders. And they were actually listening. I liked to think it was because I made sense, usually. All three of the pack’s women, apart from me, were here—Becky, Kris, and Rachel. Rachel was older, quiet and submissive. She didn’t want any trouble, and Ben, Shaun, and I tried to keep trouble away from her. She was looking particularly jumpy, her shoulders bunched, her gaze darting. Becky, sitting nearby, put her hand on her shoulder to calm her. The men of the pack weren’t the most aggressive werewolves I’d ever met—the previous alpha had rather ruthlessly gotten rid of anyone who posed a threat to his authority—but they weren’t pushovers, either. If Ben and I vanished, Shaun, Becky, or Dan could serve as the pack’s alphas just as well. But they weren’t going to challenge us for the hell of it. We were a stable group, which was why I thought we could handle Tyler and Walters.

“What do you think about this, Ben?” Jared asked. I tried not to bristle, even though this felt as if he was going over my head. I glared at Jared, and he ducked his gaze.

Attitude counted for so much around here.

“I’ve met ‘em,” Ben said. “I’m with Kitty. They need a break and I think we can help. Call it our patriotic duty.”

A couple of the guys snorted—patriotism didn’t count for much when you sometimes felt like a stranger in your own country. Werewolves
were
their own country.

Kris—a thirty-something woman with thick brown hair, and a little bit of wolf always lingering in her brown eyes—sat back, her arms crossed. She was looking at the floor when she spoke. “My little brother’s in Iraq right now. If it were him, I’d want someone to help him.”

I’d known about her brother. She’d come to me about it, because knowing her brother was in danger and out of her ability to help him set her on edge, and she’d needed help—a friendly ear, a leader to help her keep herself together. But she must not have told everyone, because the others seemed surprised, then looked away, not knowing what to say.

We didn’t get any more arguments after that. So, the pack wasn’t comfortable helping other werewolves, but they’d help the soldiers. I’d take what I could get.

T
UESDAY MORNING,
it started snowing. The weather had gone from clear and windy the night before to overcast and settled. Times like these, when the sky was gray and full of weight, you hardly noticed when the flakes started falling—just a few at first, then more, until the air was a wall of snow. If I’d been paying attention to the forecast there had probably been great pronouncements of a front moving in. But I’d been a little preoccupied. The weather matched my mood.

Ben slept in and woke to find me sitting on the sofa, staring out the balcony window at the depressed gray day. He was shirtless, dressed only in sweats, and his skin looked warm and touchable.

“Think this’ll clear up by tonight?” he said.

It was full-moon night. Even when the sky was overcast, I could feel its power tugging at me, a restlessness turning in my gut that would grow stronger until the night itself, when it would boil over.

I reached up to rub his back, then put my arm around his waist. We’d been out in nastier weather than this. To a wolf, covered in fur, the cold was nothing. Our human forms retained some of that resilience. When we slept, we’d all curl up together, keeping each other warm, even as the snow fell over us. In the morning we’d wake as human, grumbling about coffee and hot showers. But we’d never freeze out in a storm. I mostly worried about the snow keeping us from driving home.

“Yeah. If it’s too bad maybe we can go out east,” I said. Depending on where a storm hit, either the mountains would get dumped on with snow, or the plains would. We could usually find someplace else to be if the snow got too bad.

Normally, I wouldn’t worry about a winter storm impacting the pack’s night out. This time, maybe I should be. “Do you think we should give Cormac a call?”

“What—in case Tyler and Walters give us trouble?” His brow furrowed. I knew he didn’t want to get Cormac involved—he might be tempted to take action.