Running With the Pack (24 page)

“I’m happy for the moment, although I do understand that the nature of life is change,” Prime replied. “What do you all do?”

“We do,” said Yuri, “exactly as we please. We have a little money, and we do not have complicated needs. We have the world, and family. We have simple pleasures. Eating, breathing, enjoying nature. It is a good life.”

They kept chatting and Prime had a good time. These were good people. A little weird, but who wasn’t? He was happy with who he was, but he wasn’t normal by any means. At one point he asked about Sage.

“My friend tried to talk to you last night,” he said. “The guy in the white suit. Remember him?”

“Oh yes,” said Elena, a subliminal “tsk, tsk” in her voice. “Poor boy.”

Poor boy? Sage? The man had picked up twins at the Playboy Mansion and had a threesome in the grotto. That was no poor boy.

“Yes,” said Anastasia. “He is sad, isn’t he?”

Sad?

“He smelled of rabbit food,” said Yuri, authoritatively. “I hope your friend does better in the future. Maybe you can help him. I trust you are good to your friends.”

Okay, some people were weirder than others.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Sage said. He turned away from Prime dismissively and bent to turn on the gas fireplace.

Prime steamed. “No. I feel like I’m finally waking up. You’re not jealous, are you? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you they thought you smelled weak.”

“Look,” said Sage, standing back up, “I’ve got Sally coming over soon, so I don’t have time for this nonsense. Isn’t tonight your night with Brenda?”

“I cancelled,” said Prime.

Sage rolled his eyes.
Oneitis
, said that look.

“Don’t you want me to be happy?” he asked his friend.

“God, yes!” roared Sage. “And that is why you need to get back on track.”

“Are you happy with this lifestyle?”

“Of course. What more could I want? I sleep with beautiful women, live in a mansion in San Francisco, wear the finest clothes and eat the finest foods.”

Prime smiled, remembering it had been called “rabbit food.” Still, he couldn’t help but feel that he had had a peek into a simpler, more natural, and more honest life. A life with Anastasia. And he was going to take up the invitation he’d been offered.

“Well, let’s just wait until after tonight, okay?”

“More hanging out with the Monobrows? Jeez, man, it’s like a bad
Saturday Night Live
skit, and you’re living it.”

“I’m living life,” Prime replied, simply. “Respect that.”

Sage sighed audibly. “Fine. I do respect you, you know that. I just don’t like to see you regressing into some kind of AFC. You’ll end up broken.”

“Or changed.”

Sage nodded.

Prime met up with Anastasia and her family out at Yosemite.

They already had a more than respectable fire blazing at their campsite and were working on a small keg. Camping, fire, beer . . . not a bad start. As Prime looked at his woman, he knew what a perfect night like this also needed: sex. And it was there.

Out came a boom box. Out loud came classic rock, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.”

Okay, everything wasn’t pure and natural, but music was good to have. Primal.

Anastasia danced with joy, tilting her head up toward the night above, the firelight dancing across her features.

Prime finished his beer and rose to join her in the stepless dance of life.

Together, they moved.

The night faded. Her family faded. Together they were only two, under the stars and the rising full moon.

His arms over her shoulders, her green eyes locked onto his.

A voice. Yuri’s.

“You want to chase real tail? You want the real thing?”

Dancing. Intoxicating smell of woman.

Yuri’s voice, still calling, but more . . . howling than calling.

“You want to live life? Howl at the moon, man!”

At least that’s how it seemed, as he spun with Anastasia.

“You want it?” she asked. “You want a natural life? A simple, honest life? A free life?”

He didn’t think too hard about that? Why should he? The answer had been hidden in his heart for years.

“For a real man, this life is the best,” she said, grabbing his head, pulling his hair. “For you, my mate.”

Who was picking up who?

Did it matter?

They danced and Prime opened his senses while turning down his analysis.

At some point the physical urges became too much and he had to have her. Damn the lack of privacy. Damn the family. Damn the world.

They ripped their clothing. Their own. Each others. It was all the same.

Words became sounds.

Smells.

Tastes.

Pull hair.

Lick skin.

Bite.

Feel the air, the moving air, the wind.

Feel the real.

Howl!

Wait, what was he doing? What was Anastasia becoming? What was the biting doing to—stop!

Stop thinking
. Feel. Go with it, truth, life.

Howl!

Time for Prime to become Primeval.

Hair, sprouting. Fangs, growing. Claws, extending. Nose, blossoming. Eyes, sharpening. Ears, encompassing. Body, transforming. Becoming a better . . . being.

Time for Primeval to take his mate.

On all fours, hunching, biting, howling, coming, with the scent of blood spilled from the sex for the first time. An honest mating. The best.

Running through the night, howling again, with wind, with his true family, his pack.

He belonged. He had his place.

He had his mate.

He had his pack.

It was going to be a long-term relationship.

Primeval howled with satisfaction.

He’d been picked up.

THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL

AMANDA DOWNUM

The ghosts follow Sephie to work again that day.

They stand outside the windows of the bookstore, staring in with hollow eyes—more of them now than a few days ago. She tries to ignore them. At least they never come inside.

Most of them, anyway.

The light dims as she’s shelving books, and Sephie turns to find her ex-boyfriend grinning down at her, pink filming his long ivory teeth. He tilts his head, shows her the still-wet ruin a bullet made of the left side of his skull.

Her hands tingle with adrenaline shock as the smell of his blood coats her tongue—copper sweetness, and beneath that the familiar salt-musk of his skin.

A wink and he’s gone, and the air smells like books and dust and air freshener again. Sephie wobbles, and the stack of books in her arms teeters and falls, hardbacks and trades thumping and thwapping one by one, echoing in the afternoon quiet. No blood stains the worn green carpet.

The third time this week. Cursing, she crouches to pick up the books, and pauses as she reads the nearest title.

Lycanthropy: An Encyclopedia

Caleb always was a smart-ass—she shouldn’t expect that to change because he’s dead.

“Are you okay?” Anna calls from across the store.

No
, she thinks.
Not even a little
.

The sky darkens as they close, October nearly over and autumn chewing the days shorter and shorter. Purple eases into charcoal, and the grinning jack-o’-lantern moon rises over the jagged Dallas skyline.

The moon doesn’t bother her, never mind Caleb and his lousy jokes.

Sephie lights a cigarette as Anna sets the alarm and locks the back door. Her hands shake, the itch in her veins more than nicotine can ease.

“You want to get some coffee?” Anna asks, pocketing her keys and pulling out her own cigarettes. Her nails are orange and black to match her Halloween hair. Her lighter rasps, and the smell of cloves drifts through the air.

Sephie swallows, her mouth gone dry. The shakes are coming on for real, her stomach cramping. “That’d be nice, but I need to run some errands. Maybe some other time.” She likes the bookstore better than any of the other jobs she’s had, and doesn’t want to get fired because someone thinks she’s a junkie.

It’s not like she can tell them the truth.

“Sure,” Anna says, waving as she turns toward her car. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. ’Night.” Sephie ducks down the alley toward the street, trying not to think about Anna’s bemused little smile.

Tonight will be bad—she hears it in the hollow roar of traffic, sees it in the halos bleeding off the street lamps. But cold sweat prickles her scalp, her neck, and chills crawl up and down her back; she can’t wait another day.

Hunching her shoulders, she slides into the ebb and flow of downtown streets.

For a few blocks everything’s okay. The night hums and chatters, traffic and voices, the cacophony of city-noises. The air tastes of exhaust and asphalt, the sewer-stench of the Trinity fading now that summer’s passed. She catches a whiff of decay, of meat, and saliva pools on her tongue. But it’s only a dead dog, not what she needs.

Then it happens, that sideways lurch in the pit of her stomach, and she’s alone on the sidewalk. No more neon and shining glass, no more noise. Dusty brick and stone instead, grime-blind windows and the moon grinning overhead.

And the ghosts.

She’s learned not to stop, not to listen to their whispers. Keep walking, eyes on the sidewalk—don’t look at those pale faces peering out of the shadows, bruised and bloody or just empty, eyes burning with a junkie’s aching need.

She knows the feeling, all too well, but she can’t help them. She can barely help herself.

Her nose wrinkles against the smell of this place. The city stinks, but at least it’s a living stench. This is dry bones and dust, old tombs.

The wind that sighs from black alley-mouths is worse—sulfur and ammonia, sickness and pain. It aches like a bruise when it touches her, makes her eyes water.

Her footfalls echo as she lengthens her stride. It will pass. It always does. She has to keep moving, out of the between-places.

But she’s a between-thing now, and she may never leave this place behind.

A breeze eddies past her, and Sephie stumbles to a halt. Rose gardens and evergreen, the smell of evenings as summer melts into autumn. The smell of her dreams.

The scent leaks from under the door of a narrow shop, its windows curtained and dull. She reaches for the knob with a trembling hand.

But her stomach cramps again, and already the braver ghosts are moving toward her, murmuring, pleading.

She turns and runs, and doesn’t stop until the world slips back to normal.

Bobet & Cask Funeral Services is long closed, but a light burns in the back. Sephie crouches in the shadow of a hedge, holly pricking her back as she finishes her last cigarette and tries to slow her breathing. Her legs cramp from exercise, but that’s nothing to the pain in her gut. She wipes clammy sweat from her face and drags her fingers through the curling cowlicked mess of her hair.

Peter waits by the back door, even though she’s early. Hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes flitting back and forth—he looks like a really bad spy.

“You should start smoking,” she says, moving out of the dark. “It’d look more natural.”

He jerks, presses his back to the door. The smell of his fear cuts through the muggy night and Sephie’s stomach growls.

“I—” He swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Come inside.”

He always invites her in; he’s read too many books. She follows him down the corridor, down the stairs to the morgue.

The air smells of chemicals and death, and she rubs her arms against crawling goosebumps. Her sweat gels in the cold, sticking her shirt to her back. A body lies on a metal table, and her stomach clenches again. Peter glances at her, blue eyes narrowing, like he thinks she’ll start gnawing on an arm.

She’s not sure what would happen if he weren’t here.

He opens a refrigerator, takes out a lidded plastic bowl. “It’s heart, and liver, and some other things . . . A car crash, so I could take a little more than usual.”

“This guy?” She nods toward the corpse in his funeral suit, wrinkled face coated in makeup that can’t simulate living color, no matter how skillfully it’s applied.

“No, he had a heart attack. The accident was a few days ago.”

Sephie smiles, close-lipped. “Thank you.” She tugs a roll of bills out of her pocket, trades it for the container. He tried to give the money back, once, but she makes him keep it. She’s afraid he’ll ask for something else if she doesn’t.

He stands there watching her, gangly and awkward, while her fingers tighten on the plastic and she swallows hungry spit. Finally he ducks his head and retreats. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

When his footsteps recede, Sephie sinks onto the cold tile floor and opens the container. Thin slices of organs—pomegranate heart and pinky-brown liver-and slivers and cubes of fat-marbled flesh. Once he gave her an eyeball, but it was salty and bitter and too gross even for her.

She saves the heart for last, chews it slowly, sucking bloody juice out of the muscle. Shudders ride her, and she closes her eyes against a flood of scattered images and sensations. She doesn’t want to know about the person whose heart this was.

“This is what you left me for?”

She opens her eyes to find Caleb crouching in front of her, long hands dangling between his knees. Blood and brains drip onto the floor, vanishing when they hit the tile.

“Leave me alone!” Her voice cracks. The empty bowl falls from her hand and rolls in a lazy spiral.

“Tell me this is what you want. Tell me you don’t miss me.”

She closes her eyes, pulls her knees tight against her chest.

“Tell me you wouldn’t rather eat that boy of yours. He might like it.”

A hand touches her knee and Sephie gasps, but it’s only Peter. “Are you all right?”

Caleb’s vanished again.

She stares up at Peter—she feels his pulse through her jeans, hears the nervous rhythm of his heart. He wants her. He’s afraid of her. He smells like food.

Caleb knows her too well, damn him. She’s had more than one daydream about fucking Peter on a cold steel embalming table. Some of those fantasies end with her tearing the poor boy’s throat out. The smell of warm flesh fills her nose.

She pulls away, crab-crawls across the floor and stumbles to her feet. Peter gapes; she’s getting faster.

“I’m fine.” She nibbles a drop of coagulated blood from under her nail and straightens her blouse. “I need to go.”

Peter frowns, and she can see him searching for the nerve to ask her to stay. He’s like the ghosts, needing, wanting. Whether he wants a girlfriend or a pet monster, she’s not sure, but she can’t offer him either.

“Thank you,” she says again, cutting him off. “I’ll be back next month, okay?”

He nods, shoulders sagging. “Yeah. I’ll see you then.”

And Sephie flees up the stairs, into the dark, and hurries for home.

The apartment is empty. Seth’s gone a lot lately, looking for work—jobs that pay cash and don’t run background checks. Sometimes, like this week, it’s out-of-town work, leaving her alone. Hard enough to sleep most nights, even with his steady snoring drifting down the hall. When it’s her and the echoing silence, it’s nearly impossible.

The ghosts never come too close when he’s here. This week she’s seen a few lingering near the stairs.

Even if the ghosts don’t find her, the dreams always do.

She slips one of Seth’s cassettes into the old tape deck by her mattress. Sephie teases him about his music, sad bluesy stuff a few generations before her time, but some of it’s pretty. Billie Holiday’s husky-soft voice chases away the silence, wraps around her like a blanket.

Her gun is a hard lump under the pillow; she always sleeps with it when she’s alone.

Tell me this is what you want.

She thought she was rid of Caleb six months ago, when she left him sprawled in a cooling pool of blood on a dusty Oklahoma street. Not that she could even do that herself—she had to find someone else to pull the trigger for her.

His words echo in her head. Is this what she wants? The cramped apartment, the string of lousy jobs. Gravemeat and ghosts. Seth is gone half the time, and she doesn’t dare make other friends, not even something as simple as getting coffee with Anna.

She’s wanted lots of things over the years—travel, excitement, glamorous jobs that turned out to be too little glamour and too much work. But the one thing she’s always wanted, as long as she can remember, is to not be afraid anymore.

“I’ve done a great job of that, haven’t I?” she whispers to her pillow, to the gun beneath it.

The tape clicks over to the B-side before she finally drifts off. Lady Day’s voice follows her into the dark.

She dreams of the wall again. A wall in a dark forest, stones pitted and pocked with age, veined with moss and ivy. Too high and sheer to climb, so she follows it on and on, searching for a door. Her fingers bruise the green, filling the air with its musty-damp scent, and sap clings sticky as blood on her skin. Yellow eyes gleam in the shadows around her.

The werewolves.

Tall spindly beasts, long-armed and stilt-legged, tongues lolling amid bone-needle fangs. They never approach, never touch her, only stare and follow, muttering and laughing to themselves, singing to the swollen orange moon.

Maybe there’s no door, no opening, and she’ll circle the wall forever. But Sephie’s smelled the wind from the other side, a wind that smells like forests and gardens, like heaven. Roses and evergreen, ripe peaches and fresh bright blood.

And she knows, with the certainty of dreams, that the garden is a place for her. An Eden for ghouls and monsters, where the trees pump blood instead of sap and hearts grow ripe and beating on the vine. A place where she’ll never have to eat cold meat, never have to kill. Where she won’t be afraid.

It’s enough to keep her walking the wall, night after night, ignoring the werewolves’ snuffling laughter.

She doesn’t find the door tonight. Instead the dream splinters and she falls through the cracks, falls back onto her sagging mattress. The shadowed bedroom ceiling stares her down while Billie Holiday sings about the moonlight.

Something woke her, but she’s not sure what, until the mattress creaks and a warm weight settles over her. Familiar scratch of stubble, the salt-sweet taste of Caleb’s skin.

He shouldn’t be here, but his hands are sliding under her shirt, callused fingers kneading her ribs, and her body still remembers him, remembers when she didn’t spend the nights trembling and alone. She arches against him as his tongue traces the angle of her jaw; her fingers tangle in his wet hair.

“Tell me you don’t miss me.” His breath tickles her sternum as his fingers slip beneath the elastic of her underwear. She bites her lip and doesn’t answer.

His hair trails over her stomach, leaving warm wet streaks behind. “I would have taken care of you.” He tugs her underwear over her hips and her breath hitches. “I still need you, Sephie.” Lips press warm and rough below her navel, the pressure of teeth.