Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(84)
So to the boy he said quietly, “Watching is fine. But wait for a bit if you want to touch . . .” He had a thought. “Stella, if she sends the Linnfords in first, I’ll do my best to stay hidden. I can take a vampire . . .” Honesty forced him to continue. “Maybe I can take a vampire, but only with surprise on my side. Her human minions, if they are still human enough to walk in daylight, are still too human to detect me. Don’t let them take Devonte out of this room.”
He tried to remember everything he knew about vampires. Once he changed, it would be too late to talk. “Don’t look in the vampire’s eyes, don’t let her touch you. Unless you are really a believer, don’t plan on crosses helping you out. When I attack, don’t try and help, just keep out of it so I don’t have to worry about you.”
Wishing they had a wooden stake, he knelt on the floor and allowed himself to change. Calling the wolf was easy, it knew there was a fight to be had, blood to be shed, and in its eagerness it rushed the change as if called by the moon herself.
He never remembered exactly how bad it was going to hurt. His mother had once told him that childbirth was like that for women. That if they remembered how bad it was, they’d lack the courage to face the next time.
But he did remember it was always worse than he expected, and that somehow helped him bear it.
The shivery, icy pain slid over his bones while fire threaded through his muscles, reshaping, reorganizing, and altering what was there to suit itself. Experience kept him from making noise—it was one of the first things he learned: how to control his instincts and keep the howls, the growls, and the whines inside and bury them in silence. Noise can attract unwanted attention.
His lungs labored to provide oxygen as adrenaline forced his heart to beat too fast. His face ached as teeth became fangs and his jaw extended with cheekbones. His eyesight blurred and then sharpened with a predatory clarity that allowed him to see prey and enemy alike no matter what shadows they tried to hide in.
“Cool,” said someone. Devonte. He-who-was-to-be-guarded.
Someone moved and it attracted his attention. Her terror flooded his senses like perfume.
Prey. He liked it when they ran.
Then she lifted her chin and he saw a second image, superimposed over the first. A child standing between him and two smaller children, her chin jutting out as she lifted up a baseball bat in wordless defiance that spoke louder than her terror and the blood.
Not prey. Not prey. His. His star.
It was all right then. She could see his pain—she had earned that right. And together they would stop the monster from eating the boy.
For the first few minutes after the change, he mostly thought like the wolf, but as the pain subsided, he settled back into control. He shook off the last of the unpleasant tingles with the same willpower he used to set aside the desire to snarl at the boy who reached out with a hand . . . only to jerk back, caught by the strap on his wrist.
David hopped onto the bed and snapped through the ballistic nylon that attached Devonte’s cuff to the rail and waited while the boy petted him tentatively with all the fascination of a person touching a tiger.
“That’ll be a little hard to explain,” said Stella.
He looked at her and she flinched . . . then jerked up her chin and met his eyes. “What if the Linnfords ask about the restraint?”
It had been the wolf’s response to seeing the boy he was supposed to protect tied up like a bad dog, not the man’s.
“They haven’t been here,” said Devonte. “Unless they spend a lot of time in hospital prison, they won’t know it was supposed to be there. I’ll cover the cuff on my wrist with the blanket.”
Stella nodded her head thoughtfully. “All right. And if things get bad, at least this way you can run. He’s right, it’s better if the restraint is off.”
David let them work it out. He launched himself off Devonte’s bed and onto the other—forgetting that Devonte was already hurt until he heard the boy’s indrawn breath. David was still half operating on wolf instincts—which wasn’t very helpful when fighting vampires. He needed to be thinking.
Maybe it had only been the suddenness of his movement, though, because the boy made the same sound when David hopped through the almost-too-narrow opening in the ceiling and onto the track in the plenum space between the original fourteen-foot ceiling and false panels fitted into the flimsy hangers that kept them in place. The track groaned a little under his sudden weight, but it didn’t bend.
“My father always told us that no one ever looks up for their enemy,” Stella said after a moment. “Can you replace the panel? If you can’t, I—”
The panel he’d moved slid back into place with more force than necessary and cracked down the middle.
“Damn it.”
“Don’t worry, no one will notice. There are a couple of broken panels up there.”
• • •
She couldn’t see any sign that her father was hiding in the ceiling except for the bed. She grabbed it by the headboard and tugged it back to its original position, then she did the same with the chair.
She’d forgotten how impressive the wolf was . . . almost beautiful: the perfect killing machine covered with four-inch-deep, red-gold fur. She hadn’t remembered the black that tipped his ears and surrounded his eyes like Egyptian kohl.