Kitty’s Greatest Hits (23 page)

“No, no,” T.J. said, giving himself over to the hysteria.

Price spoke softly, steadily, like he’d given this speech before. “All you have to do is stick your hand in the cage. But you have to ask yourself: If you’re not brave enough to deal with your life now, then why would you be brave enough to stick your hand in the cage? You have to be brave enough to be a monster. You think you’re that brave? I’m not sure you are.”

Of course he’d say it like a dare.

T.J. had spent the last few weeks in a constant state of subdued panic. Trying to adjust his identity from healthy to sick, when he didn’t feel sick and didn’t know what being sick even meant. Here he was being asked to do it again, change his identity, his whole being. He’d spent his whole life changing his identity, announcing it, feeling good about it, then feeling it slip out from under him again. He thought he’d done the right thing when he told his parents he was gay. They’d kicked him out, just like he’d known they would. He’d been ready for it—happy to leave, even, bag already packed and bike filled with gas and ready to go. But from one day to the next he’d gone from closeted son to outed and independent—free, he’d thought of it then.

He went to the clinic and got tested because he’d had a raw, nagging feeling that he’d done it all wrong and was paying a price for all that freedom. From one day to the next he’d gone from healthy to not. Now, Price was offering him a chance to do it again, to change himself in the space of a minute to an animal, a creature that shouldn’t exist, with sharp teeth behind curling lips.

The wolf’s eyes, golden brown, stared at him, gleaming, eager. The woman—still flirting with him.

He could face one horror, or the other. Those were his choices. That was what he had brought on himself.

But wouldn’t it be nice to be invincible, for once?

“It can’t be that easy,” T.J. whispered.

“No, it’s not. But that’s why we’re here,” Price said. “We’ll help you.”

“How do you know it’ll cure me?”

“Jane had an inoperable brain tumor. Now she doesn’t.”

If he asked for time to think about it, he would never come back. What did he have to lose? Wasn’t he dying anyway? He stepped toward the cage.

It was going to hurt. He repeated to himself,
invincible,
and he glanced at the people gathered around him—werewolves, all of them. But none of them looked on him with anger or hate. Caution, doubt, maybe. But he would be all right. It would be like a shot, a needle in the arm, a vaccination against worse terrors.

Price stood behind him—to keep him from fleeing? The others gathered around to watch. All he had to do was reach. The wolf inside the cage whined and turned a fidgeting circle.

“You can still back out. No shame in walking out of here,” Price said, whispering behind him.

It didn’t look so monstrous. More like a big dog. All he had to do was reach in and scratch its ear. T.J. rested his hand on the top of the cage. The bars were smooth, cool, as if the steel had absorbed the chill from the concrete underneath.

Kneeling, T.J. slipped his hand down to the side, then pushed his arm inside. The wolf carefully put her jaws around his forearm. He clenched his hand into a fist, and by instinct he lunged away. The wolf closed her mouth on him, and her fangs broke skin.

He thrashed, pulling back, fighting against her. Bracing his feet against the bars, he pushed away. That only made his skin tear through her teeth, and she bit harder, digging in, putting her paws on him to hold him still so that her claws cut him as well as her teeth. Behind him Price grabbed hold, securing him in a bear hug, whispering.

The pain was total. He couldn’t feel his hand, his arm, the wolf’s gnawing, but he could feel his flesh ripping and the blood pouring off him, matting in the fur of her snout. All that infected, tainted blood.

He looked away and clamped his jaws shut, trapping air and screams behind tightly closed lips.

By the time Price pulled T.J. away from the cage, he’d passed out.

*   *   *

When he woke up, he was in a twin bed in what looked like a sunny guest room. The decorations—paisley bedspread, out-of-date furniture set—lacked personality. The woman who had been a wolf sat on a chair next to the bed, smiling.

He felt calm, and that seemed strange. He felt like he ought to be panicking. But he remembered days of being sick, sweating, swearing, fighting against blankets he’d been wrapped in, and cool hands holding him back, telling him he was going to be fine, everything was going to be fine. All the panic had burned out of him.

He pulled his hands out from under the sheets and looked at them. His right arm was whole, uninjured. Not even a scar. He remembered the claws tearing, the skin parting.

He took a deep breath, pressing his head to the pillow, assaulted by smells. The sheets smelled of cotton, stabbed through with the acerbic tang of detergent—it made his eyes water. A hint of vegetation played in the air, as if a window was open and he could smell trees—not just trees, but the leaves, fruit ripening on boughs, the smell of summer. Something was cooking in another part of the house. He’d never smelled so much.

The woman, Jane, moved toward him and her scent covered him, smothered him. Her skin, the warmth of her hair, the ripeness of her clothes, a hint of sweat, a touch of breath—and more than that, something wild that he couldn’t identify. This—fur, was it fur?—both made him want to run and calmed him. Inside him, a feeling he couldn’t describe—an instinct, maybe—called to him.
It’s her, she did this.

He breathed through his mouth to cut out the smells, to try to relax.

“Good morning,” she said, wearing a thin and sympathetic smile.

He tried to speak, but his dry tongue stuck. She reached to a bedside table for a glass of water, which she gave him. It helped.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said. “But that’s why we do it like this, so the choice has to be yours. Do you understand?”

He nodded because he did. He’d had the chance to walk away. He almost had. He wondered if he was going to regret not walking away.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“This is strange.”

She laughed. “If that’s all you have to say about it, you’re doing very well.”

Her laughter was comforting. With each breath he took, he felt himself grow stronger. It was like that moment just past being sick, when you still remembered the illness but had moved past it.

“I’m starving,” he said—the hunger felt amazing. He wanted to eat, to keep eating, rip into his food, tear with his claws—

And that was odd.

He winced.

“Oh, Alex was right bringing you in,” Jane said. “You’re going to do just fine.”

He hoped she was right.

*   *   *

He had to know for sure, so he went back.

A different guy was working at the clinic, which was just as well. “Have you ever had an HIV test before?” the staffer said.

“Yeah. Here, in fact. About eight months ago.”

“Oh? What was the result? Is there a reason you’re back? Let me look it up.”

T.J. gave the guy his name, and he looked it up. Found the two positives, and T.J. wanted to snarl at him for the look of pity he showed.

“Sir,” he said kindly—condescendingly. “With a result like this you should have come back sooner for counseling. There’s a lot of help available—”

“The results were wrong,” T.J. said. “I want another test. Please.”

He relented and took T.J. into the exam room, went through the ritual, drew the blood, and asked T.J. to wait. The previous times, it had taken a half an hour or so. The guy came back on schedule, wearing a baffled expression.

“It’s negative,” the staffer said.

T.J. exalted, a howl growing in his chest.

The staffer shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’ve seen false positives—but two false positives in a row? That’s so unlikely.”

“I knew it,” T.J. said. “I knew it was wrong.”

He gave the guy a smile that showed teeth and walked out.

*   *   *

On his first full moon, on a windswept plain in the hills of central California, he screamed and couldn’t stop as his body broke and changed, shifting from skin and reason to fur and instinct. The scream turned into a howl, and the dozen others of the pack joined in, and the howls turned into a song. They taught him to run on four legs, to smell and listen and sense, to hunt, and that if he didn’t fight it the change didn’t hurt as much. In the morning, the wolves slept and returned to their human forms, but they remained a pack, sleeping together, skin-to-skin, family and invincible. They taught him how to keep the animal locked inside until the next full moon, despite the song that called to him, the euphoria of four legs on a moonlit night. He’d never felt so powerful, not even when he left home. He was so sure he’d done the right thing then, and now.

He’d called Mitch and told him that he’d been sick with the flu and staying with a friend. When he returned, the track had changed.

It had become brilliant, textured, nuanced. The dust in the air was chalk, sand, earth, and rubber. The exhaust was oil, plastic, smoke, and fire. And the crowd—a hundred different people and all their moods, scents, and noises. A dozen bikes were on the track; each engine had a slightly different sound. He sneezed at first, his nose on fire, before he learned to filter, and his ears burned before he figured out how to block the chaos. He didn’t need to take it all in, he only had to focus on what was in front of him. But he could take it all in, whenever he wanted.

The world had changed. Terrifying and brilliant, all of it. He was free, clean, powerful.

Alex had given T.J. a ride. Before T.J. left the truck, Alex touched his arm, calming him. The animal inside him that had been ready to run wild.

“You going to be okay?” Alex said.

“Yeah,” T.J. said, breathing slowly as he’d been taught, settling the creature.

“I’m here if you need anything. Don’t wait until you get into trouble. Come find me first,” he said.

If the pack was a new family, then Alex was its father, leader, master. That was another thing T.J. hadn’t expected. He’d never really had a father figure to turn to.

Over the last week he’d learned what the price for invincibility was: learning to pass. Moving among people, thinking all the time how easy it would be to rip into them and feast, imagining their blood on his tongue but never being able to taste. Because if he tried it—if any of them ever actually lost control—the others would rip his heart out. That was how they’d stayed secret for centuries: Never let the humans know they were there. Closeted again, ironically.

So he worked on Gary’s bikes and thought about the engine, belts, carburetor, and transmission, and remembered that the people around him were his friends and didn’t deserve to die by a wolf’s claws. He wanted to keep his old life. It was worth working to keep. That was the trick, Alex and Jane taught him. You can keep your old life. It won’t be the same, but it’ll still be there.

He’d actually get to live to enjoy it, now. It was a relief. Made him want to howl.

*   *   *

Something fell on him, knocking the wrench out of his hand. He sprang to his feet, hands clenched, turning to snarl at whomever had done it, interrupted him—
attacked.
Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Mitch was waving him over. A dirty rag lay on the ground next to the wrench—that was all that had hit him.

“Gary’s last race is up, you coming to watch?” Mitch said.

His wolf settled. T.J. put away his tools and followed Mitch to the straw bales ringing the track.

“You okay? You seem a little jumpy lately,” Mitch asked.

He didn’t know the half of it. “I’m okay. I probably need more sleep.”

“Don’t we all,” Mitch said.

It gave him a sense of déjà vu, watching Gary and Alex ride in the same race. This time, though, the PA system was too loud, the crowd of spectators pressed too close, and he didn’t know who to watch, Gary or Alex. Gary was his friend, the guy who paid him under the table to keep his bikes running, who’d given him a break when T.J. needed one so desperately. But Alex was … something else entirely. Something bigger than T.J. had words for. Alex was the way he felt howling at the full moon.

The crowd buzzed, because this was Alex’s first race after the spectacular crash. It had only been a few weeks, but it seemed much longer, months or years ago. Gary won the race; Alex didn’t crash again. The incident faded from memory in that moment, but T.J. realized he saw the crash as a turning point—it had changed his life.

He and Mitch raced to the finish line to meet up with Gary. This was another of T.J.’s favorite things about the track, racing, bikes—the crowds gathering after the race, offering congratulations and condolences, dissecting what had happened, arguing, handing out cold beers and drinking as they wheeled bikes back to their trailers. This had been the last race of the day; the party spilled onto the track. Someone blasted AC/DC on a radio, and people started dancing.

Last race of the season. Gary was moving to the pro circuit, to a track out east, and had asked T.J. to come with him. The three of them made a good team. It was a huge opportunity, to go from scraping by as a bush-league mechanic to working for a team with a real shot. But a weight seemed to tie him down. Like a collar and leash.

Gary lounged back on the seat of his bike, enjoying the attention he was getting. T.J. found himself drifting toward Alex. To an observer, it would have looked like the natural movement of the crowd, people circling, clusters gathering and breaking apart. But T.J. had Alex’s black jacket in the corner of his eye, and even amid all the sweat, dirt, spilled gas and oil, he could smell the animal fire of another werewolf. A pack should stay together. Alex, helmet in the crook of his arm, caught his gaze and smiled.

“Good race,” T.J. said, as he might have said even if they hadn’t been werewolves and Alex the alpha of his pack.

T.J. suddenly wanted to be out of there—his wolf was prowling, making him nervous and awkward. He edged back to Gary and Mitch, suddenly wanting to be near his human friends.