Rob Thurman - Roadkill

Nine months later I’d come back and ruined my cousin’s life.

I lifted my muzzle from the scraps of the pancakes. I looked back toward the blinds and the light. Years; it had been years now. Five. Six. It was getting harder and harder to keep count, just like it was getting harder and harder to stay myself. I came and I went, more and more often now.

“You have whipped cream on your nose. Hard to mope with whipped cream on your nose,” Rafferty grunted, pointing a piece of bacon at me. “We’ve got another chance. That guy in Wind River, Wyoming. The Arapaho healer. He’s supposed to be good.”

But not the best; Rafferty was the best. I knew it; Rafferty knew it too, but I wasn’t going to push him on it. My cousin had done everything for me. I wasn’t going to take away his… not hope. That was long gone. What he had left was denial. I wasn’t going to take that away. It wasn’t hope, but it was better than nothing.

And that nothing would come soon enough.

I ducked my head, licked the cream off my nose, then snatched the bacon out of his hand. Crunching it, I swallowed and gave him my best nonmoping grin. I looked back at the still-horny wolves on television, then at the food, and gave a low woo woo of inquiry.

“No. No good- looking waitresses. And stop with the I-need-to-get-laid thing. You know I’m a born asshole. A little sex isn’t going to change that, and I have other things on my mind right now, okay?”

The born asshole who had just happened to give up years of his life for me. My family since I could remember. The only family… the only real family I had left now that our parents had died. They had gone too young, but I was almost glad they weren’t here to see this. I sighed. Wolves do sigh, sometimes for the very same reasons people do. I picked out three pieces of bacon and dropped them in his container. It wasn’t like he was afraid of germs. One: He was a healer. Two: He had plenty of Wolf germs of his own. His eyes flashed yellow and back to amber. “You’re a pal.” A born ass, a born sarcastic ass, but he meant it. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend; meat is a werewolf’s.

He ate them, but he was distracted-not seemed distracted. Not only could I read my cousin’s face with the ease of long practice; I could smell him just as a person could smell a bakery. Humans could smell chocolate, vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, a thousand different things. But we Wolves could smell so many more things, and so much more intensely. Emotion was easy. A state of mind like distraction wasn’t much harder.

I whuffed at him abruptly, jumped down from the chair, and moved over to the open laptop on the floor by the TV. Using my mouth, I picked up the pencil lying next to it, maneuvered it around, and tapped the mouse pad with it. I sat on my haunches as my settings loaded. Slow, slow. Give a wolf a break already, Dell. Finally, I pulled up Word and started typing. Still chewing bacon, Rafferty finally wandered over and bent slightly to read.

“Hey, ‘Captain Jack-off’ seems a little harsh, especially coming from someone who keeps forgetting to flush the john,” he grumbled. He read further. “Damn it, I’m not keeping secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can pick the music today, but you play any country western and I’ll kick your furry ass. Hell, no, it wasn’t me stinking up the place last night. You were the one who ate all the White Castle sliders.” He frowned at the next line. “You want to see the new Batman movie? The one that’s in the theaters now? Catch, I don’t know. Last time we almost got busted.”

I growled. He snorted and echoed the growl perfectly. “Right. I’m terrified.”

This time I growled and bared my teeth. When that didn’t work any better than the other, I fell over onto my side and rolled onto my back, exposing my vulnerable stomach and neck. He groaned, “Goddamnit, fine. We’ll go tonight, but you’ll have to take a bath, so no whining.”

Sucker. I grinned around the pencil and sprang back up to type one last line with pithy punctuation. “ No ,” he said with exasperation and a big fat lie, “no damn secrets, and if that emoticon of the guy doing the sheep is another subtle hint at my needing to get laid, cut it out.”

I dropped the pencil, slammed the laptop lid down with a hard swat of my paw, and growled again. This time I meant it. The deep bass of it reverberated in the back of my throat before spilling out as my lips peeled back to show my teeth. Rafferty’s eyes swirled between amber and yellow. “Shit.” He straightened and rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, it’s Niko and Cal. Nik called on my cell last night when I was out getting us dinner.” He never answered calls anymore. He hadn’t since we hit the road more than a year ago. It was always someone wanting healing, and he didn’t have time for that anymore. He was a man… well, werewolf… with a mission. Me. I came first-no more healings until I was healed.

Trouble was that I was healed.

My cousin, he was the best in the country-in the world. I didn’t doubt it, but sometimes you did a thing so well, so right, that what you started out with was changed forever. I didn’t blame him for this, for being stuck as a wolf with no ability to change back to human. How could I? It was this or death. Even if I’d died and hung around all wolf wings and wolf halo, I wouldn’t have blamed him. Rafferty would’ve turned himself inside out, given up his own life for me if he could have. But sometimes your time was just your time. He knew that. He’d lost other patients. But I hadn’t been just another patient.

We all made mistakes.

He gave me years I wouldn’t have had. They weren’t quite the way I would’ve wanted to spend them, not every minute of them at least, but I had them. That was something. It damn sure was. And if I lost part of myself with each passing year, nothing lasted forever. Not a thing-that was something Rafferty didn’t know. And that was why we were covering the country state by state, rumor by rumor. It was for Raff, not for me.

“Stop it, Catcher. I mean it. Stop it right now,” he snapped.

I realized I’d stopped growling and was feeling… melancholy, nostalgia, inevitability, resignation. Even in our human forms we kept our wolf sense of smell. I lifted a paw and he took it in his hand and squeezed hard. “It’s not over. It’s not. I’m getting you back, all of you. Got it?”

I twitched my ears. I got it. I did. Pulling my paw back, I poked my nose at the cell phone in his jeans pocket. “Yeah, Niko.” He walked over and sat on the bed. I followed and jumped up to sit beside him. “I wouldn’t have answered this time either. You come first, but I felt”-he shook his head-“something-something bad. There’s a sickness to the east. I can’t smell it or touch it, but I can feel it inside. It’s like the worst bioengineered death germ a lab could come up with and it’s about to crawl out of its petri dish and make a run for it. And I guess I felt like a shit for ignoring all the other calls and messages. The two of them, they’re kind of like us-family. One of them not quite right in the head.” He tried for the joke, resting his hand on my head and giving it a good shake. I blew out an outraged wet snort and reared up on my hind legs, waving my front ones in the air. I tried for a combination of roar and hiss, but it came out more a choked-on-my-Alpo gurgle.

Rafferty raised his eyebrows. “That’s all you’ve got? That’s the best Auphe imitation you’ve got?”

Disgruntled, I settled back down and turned my head away dismissively. Critics, they were all the same.

“Diva,” he mocked. “And, sure, Cal ’s half Auphe, and I want to either eat him or piss on myself every time I smell the guy, but since New York City is still standing, he must be behaving himself. It’s not as if we can blame him for who or what his father was.” He turned his head… to the east, where he said he felt it, the sickness. “Anyway, they’ve run into a situation with an antihealer. Suyolak. Sickness doesn’t come close to describing him.” I looked back curiously with a never- heard-of-the-guy blink of my eyes.