The Better to Hold You (33 page)

“Don’t worry, I’m fine now.” Half naked, hairier than I remembered him, Red sat with his chest heaving in and out, panting for air. “I just couldn’t breathe for a minute. You know what? I’ll just open the window a crack.”

“No! Abra,” my mother called, “you have to stop him!”

Too late. I’d barely had time to take a breath of cold morning air before I saw the waxing moon hanging low in the twilight sky. Moonlight. Shit. I turned to my mother, and what ever I was about to say lodged in my throat because in the next moment Red was on top of her. And he wasn’t human anymore.

Panicked, I rushed forward, dropping the hypodermic. Cursing my own stupidity, I jammed my hand sideways into Red’s mouth and for a moment there we all were, frozen in tableau: my mother silent and frighteningly cold underneath me, Red a hundred and seventy pounds of wolf above me. Then he twisted his neck to try to get free and I punched him so hard in the nose with my good hand that he rocked away from her and rolled off the bed and back onto all four feet in one smooth motion. For a second, I thought he was going to go for me, but there was something in his eyes, not so much recognition as lack of malice. He was like a dog on the scent of quarry, quivering with excitement and focused on one thing and one thing only.

Killing my mother.

I looked directly into Red’s eyes, trying to challenge him, draw his attention back to me, when I heard them.

“Oh, look,” Hunter said, and of course I turned to see him. His mouth and beard were stained with blood. “It’s little Red and the motherin-law.”

Magda, still dressed in my mother’s Bob Mackie, laughed that awful fake laugh women used to use with men, the kind you hear on old television shows. She turned and I saw that she had something in her arms, half hidden beneath the generous cleavage spilling out of the gown.

I had Red by the scruff of his neck, but his attention had caught on some new prey. Following the line of his vision, I saw what he was looking at: Pimpernell the Chihuahua, cradled like a baby in Magda’s arms. Glad for the distraction, I managed to throw my mother’s caftan over Red’s back, and he shivered and changed. Trembling with reaction and paler than before, he remained crouched by my feet, a beaten man in a big dress.

“Red? Are you all right?” When I looked into his unfocused eyes, I could see they still gleamed a wolfish gold. “No, he’s not all right, Abs.” Hunter smiled at me, enjoying himself. “He looks like a frowsy red-haired fortune teller, for one thing. And he’s hungry. Blood-hungry.”

“Hunter, why are you doing this? If you wanted to leave me, then why didn’t you just go? What does it gain you to be cruel?”

Hunter looked at me coldly. “Abs, you’ve spent the past ten years perfecting your little martyr act, but it’s just not going to work anymore. My time with Magda helped me see your game. You pretended to be in de pen -dent and fine with my work, and I never understood this undercurrent of guilt I kept feeling. You were reeling me in, trying to tie me down to the kind of life I loathe. Even when I tried to explain that I couldn’t live your way anymore, you kept clinging to me, making it impossible for me to make a clean break without being a shit.”

I could hear the echo of Magda’s voice in this, and yet there was a strange, clunky ring of half-truth there, too. For the first time I understood that Hunter was filled with a kind of corrosive rage that had been eating away at what ever other feelings he might have once had for me. “So now you’re okay with being a shit. Fine, Hunter. Great. But are you okay with being a murderer?”

“Don’t be so melodramatic.” Magda shook her head, and for a moment seemed again a respectable European scientist. “As far as I can see, the only person in danger is your mother. And the one looking to murder her seems to be your boyfriend.” And that’s when I looked up to see that Red had gotten right up close to my mother, and was sniffing her wrist.

“You’ve made your point by killing all the dogs, all right? So get him away from her.”

“We set the dogs free, and they attacked us. It was self-defense. As for the cats …” She shrugged. “I am not a cat person.”

“Are you willing to be an accessory to murder?” I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “You can’t actually mean to let this happen, Magda.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the hypodermic that I had dropped earlier, lying half under the bed. I looked away, trying not to change my expression. “Back at the house, you said we were all civilized.”

Magda narrowed her eyes. “That was before you challenged me. But fine. You want to save your mother? Go ahead. We won’t stop you.”

Red was kneeling by my mother and examining her wrist now. My mother made a low moaning sound.

“Hunter! Hunter, you can’t let her do this!”

“Don’t worry, Doc,” Red said from across the room, “I’m not losing control. I’m just checking the extent of your mother’s injuries.”

My mother tried to raise her head. “What are you—Hey! Stop licking me. Stop …” Her voice trailed off as Red’s eyes held hers, and she seemed to grow calmer. It reminded me of how wolves hypnotize their prey, giving some kind of predatory look that the wounded victim instinctively understands and accepts.

“It’ll feel quite nice, actually,” he said as he bent over her.

“Don’t interfere,” said Hunter, coming up behind me to grab my wrists. “I’m getting turned on.”

I struggled, but Hunter’s grip was like steel. “Red! Red, stop this! Please, don’t hurt her, don’t—try to remember who you are. Try to remember that I’m her daughter. Please, Red, stop.”

Magda turned to Hunter. “Americans really love to talk everything to death, don’t they? What a bore. Did she analyze your sex life, too?”

Hunter laughed. “She was too repressed.”

“Well, I’m not.” Magda lifted her chin and Hunter switched both my wrists to one hand and began kissing his lover openmouthed. The little dog whimpered as it found itself pressed between their two bodies.

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

Magda cried out, “Ouch, that little shit just bit me!” and dropped Pimpernell, who whimpered and then raced over to my mother. Bracing his little matchstick legs on her shoulder, he barked imperiously at Red.

I don’t know what the little dog said, but it must have been convincing. The next thing I knew, there was a blur of reddish-brown fur as Red left my mother and his human form all in one lightning movement, launching himself onto Hunter with snarling jaws. For one wonderful moment, Hunter remained in human form and fell down. In that endless sixty seconds, I had time to dart forward and grab the hypodermic. And then Hunter changed and stood, a much bigger animal than Red, and far more aggressive. His hackles raised, and although Red did not back off, I could tell which was the more dominant animal.

“Don’t forget me, Abra.” Magda smiled, and it was like a baboon’s threat of teeth.

“How could I forget you—the biggest bitch in the room?”

“Careful, little girl—I might just have to discipline you.” I could hear the snarls and growls as the boys circled and lunged at each other. How long did I have before Hunter took Red out?

I stood up and could feel my mother watching me from the bed. Make a scene, I thought. Make one worthy of Piper LeFever and maybe you can act your way out of this. “Oh, you mean I shouldn’t mention that you’re a little long in the tooth to be playing dress-up? Not to mention a little too old for whelping lots of puppies.”

“I am fertile.”

And that was why we were all here, I realized. I remembered Red telling me that not everyone who got bitten by a lycanthrope became infected. You needed to have some kind of predisposition. Maybe Magda had been looking for a mate for a long time—her own personal breeding program to save her own endangered species. “Are you? For how long, Mags? You’re forty-five, forty-six? Fine for a woman wanting one or two kids, but you’re aiming a little higher, aren’t you?”

“I do not think the world needs more nearsighted, bucktoothed, asthmatic children who are allergic to peanut butter and require pencil grips for their clumsy little hands.”

I moved closer to Magda. “Gee, I don’t know. I was a little nearsighted, bucktoothed child myself.”

“Precisely.”

“Don’t you believe in penicillin, or should we just let the sick work it out for themselves?”

Her snort of laughter was the first unpremeditated sound I’d heard her make. “Penicillin has bred a generation of weaklings. I suppose in your work you would like to save little mutant runts like that bowl-headed excuse for a dog. Dogs must be fast enough and smart enough to hunt and kill, or they should be allowed to die. And, yes, people, too. We need to bring out the best in our children, not settle for defects of the heart, the eyes, the brain.”

“So you want to breed the strong, and I want to save the weak.”

“Yes. That is why I—”

My bitch slap caught her completely off guard. I hit her on the right cheek, then harder on the left, and while she was falling back, I jammed the hypodermic I’d been concealing into her neck.

“What have you done!”

“I had to put a dog to sleep to night,” I lied. “It’s sodium hydrochloride.”

“How much?”

“Enough to put you down.”

“Hunter!” She fell to her knees. “Help me!”

But Hunter was a wolf, and he didn’t quite understand that bad chemical smell, although it scared him. He growled, and Red lunged at him.

“No, Red, down!” Magda tried to take advantage of my momentary distraction, but wound up causing me to jerk my arm, depressing the plunger.

“Oh, my God,” she said. Her eyes were wide and terrified.

“Magda …” The syringe had actually contained only butorphinol, a sedative, and I wasn’t sure how quickly it would take effect, or what kind of effect it would take.

“You are going to absolutely ruin the Unwolf species with your inferior genes,” she said, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She had passed out from fear, I thought, unable to believe my good luck.

“I happen to like your inferior genes, Doc,” said Red, who had changed form while I wasn’t looking. “I’d be honored to mix them with my own.”

I looked pointedly at my mother’s caftan, which Red had wrapped around himself. “Not if you keep wearing women’s clothes, I won’t.”

“Well, I did manage to subdue the wildlife.” Red gestured to Hunter, whom he had muzzled and hog-tied with the fringed headscarf. “Now, let’s see to your mother. You doing okay there, ma’am?”

My mother may have been half dead from shock and loss of blood, but you do not call Piper LeFever “ma’am.” Her brows came together and she looked past him. “Abra,” she said firmly, “get this redneck asshole out of the room. Get me my black gown. And for Christ’s sake, call 911 before I lose consciousness.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“Then try to act like it sometimes.”

I didn’t want to kill her by trying to have the last word. I called the ambulance. But Red stopped me from calling the police.

In the aftermath of violent change, you think you yourself are changed. And maybe you are. But after a while, things get back to normal. You start thinking about the fact that you need a new winter hat. You stop thinking about how you almost lost your mother and how she still has a thin scar on the inside of her wrist. You have that first argument when she criticizes your lack of a hairstyle. And then you remember that your husband and his new girlfriend killed her animals and are now on supernatural probation, which means they can’t get furry unsupervised for a year. The sheriff, Emmet, turned out to be a gruff, taciturn, seven-foot man with hands the size of dinner plates and a sharp beak of a nose. When he shook my hand, I saw that there was dirt embedded deep in the wrinkles of his dry, hard skin, and when he tipped his long-brimmed Stetson hat to me, I saw that someone had carved crude symbols or letters on his forehead. I asked Red whether anyone thought the sheriff of Northside looked a little unusual, and he smiled and said that anyone who actually met him was already well-acquainted with weird.

At first, I’d thought that the sheriff had let Magda and Hunter off too lightly, but something about Emmet made it hard to argue. He did say that they’d have to perform community ser vice, which in their case meant maintaining the cairns and wards all along the Northside town limits. I hardly thought this seemed sufficient, but at least they would have to wear bright orange jumpsuits when they did it.

And then I woke up feeling tired and cranky on the last day of the old year, with a cramp low in my abdomen. I could feel that it was that time of the month, but because I was in Pleasantvale and not in Northside, the pull of it was weaker than before.

My father had left just a few days ago after coming up from Florida, tanned and too thin, to celebrate our survival. He had wanted to bring his new girlfriend, but had finally agreed to leave her at home out of respect for my mother, who was still mourning the loss of her animals.

“She’ll get better, Doc,” Red reassured me. And at midnight, I saw him rescue her from my father, walking her underneath the mistletoe to kiss her gently on the cheek and whisper something that seemed to take her by surprise. She turned in my direction, and even from across the room I could see her eyes brighten. It was close enough to the full moon for me to tune my hearing in.

“So your bite wasn’t infectious, but Abra’s might be?”

Red whispered something else, and for the first time in over a month, I saw my mother’s old flirtatious look reappear. She hooked her arm through my boyfriend’s and walked him over to the buffet table, which was groaning with meat and pies and three different kinds of potatoes. I heard a noise and saw a bounding blur of large, curly dog. It was Morgan, a standard poodle who had broken out of the kitchen and was making a beeline for the roast beef. Red fixed her with a stern look and Morgan had the good sense to back off. He might not have been the biggest wolf around, but he was the biggest wolf around our house.

Except for me.

I felt him come up behind me, a full plate in his hand. “How’re you doing, Doc?”

I leaned back into him and let him put a piece of chicken in my mouth. It’s hard to be a complete vegetarian around the holidays. Especially given my lunar cycle of meat-hungry hormones.