Kitty’s Greatest Hits (21 page)

She made her way quickly across the open space, taking the concrete sidewalk from the dorms to the school building. She moved more quickly than he’d have preferred, just short of jogging, looking nervously around her the whole time.

The werewolf wasn’t going to go for such obvious bait, Cormac decided. But he wondered. It was losing control, that much was clear. Killing livestock was the first step. Attacking people was the next. It had to know it was losing control—so why stay here? The town was rural, but this spot was full of tempting targets—a hundred kids, easy pickings. He had to conclude that the monster just didn’t care. Or the thing thought it could handle itself—and it was wrong.

Even if the werewolf was too smart to go after such an obvious target as the girl, Cormac was pretty sure the monster still had a bone to pick with him, so to speak. One way or another, the werewolf would make an appearance.

The girl was two-thirds of the way to the school building when he saw it, a shadow pouring across the lawn. It wasn’t stalking; it had already targeted her and was running, ready to strike. Wolves hunted by running, smashing into their prey, which they knocked over as they anchored their jaws and teeth in its flesh. The girl wouldn’t even see it happen. She might have enough time to scream.

No hesitation, Cormac stood, braced, aimed, and fired, all in the same motion, as reflexive as breathing.

The wolf fell and cried out.

Cormac walked toward it and fired again. The wolf flinched again. It rolled over itself in a chaos of fur, biting at its own flank, whining in pain.

The girl had stopped, frozen in fear or panic, hands to her face. Then she stepped forward, arm outstretched as if to comfort the monster.

“Get inside! Get inside right now!” Cormac yelled at her. She ran inside the dorm and slammed the door.

The silver ought to be traveling through the wolf’s veins, ought to be poisoning its heart and killing it in slow agony. The beast looked to the sound of Cormac’s voice and snarled, lips pulled away from gleaming teeth, hackles bristling. Then the wolf turned and ran.

A last burst of adrenaline, a final gasp before death. This thing wasn’t going to go down so easy after all. But it was only a matter of time.

Cormac jogged after it as it ran, trailing drops of blood, to the church.

The wolf had slowed to a stumbling trot, limping badly, to the front steps of the church, where Father Patrick was waiting for it.

Cormac watched dumbfounded as the priest guided the injured wolf inside and closed the door behind them. He ran up the steps and stopped himself against the door, rattling the handle. Locked, the son of a bitch.

On the plus side, it was an old lock on an old wooden door, a latch and not a deadbolt. He stood back, put his shoulder to it and rammed hard, and again. The wood splintered. The third time, the latch ripped out of the wood and he was inside.

A shaded electric light illuminated the altar area of the church, at the far end of a long aisle. Father Patrick and the werewolf had made it about halfway there. A trail of blood dripped unevenly along the hardwood floor from them to the door. Cormac stepped around it, hesitating at the last pew.

The wolf was gone. Father Patrick held Sister Hilda’s body on his lap. Two bloody wounds were visible on her naked back, blackened from the poison. Dark streaks of silver-poisoned blood crawled up her back and down her legs, along the veins.

Cormac’s hands flexed, ready to raise the rifle and aim at Father Patrick.

“She smelled you. Sunday, after Mass. She knew what you were. She told me. Told me to be careful.” His voice was stretched to breaking, but he held the tears back. He didn’t look at Cormac but kept his gaze on the woman. “She controlled it for forty years. She took orders to help her control it, and it worked. The routine, the structure of this life—it worked for so long. I helped her, helped take care of her. But she was losing the fight, she knew she was losing. I suppose I should thank you for doing this before she hurt anyone. She isn’t a killer. And she’s with God now. This wasn’t her fault.”

What a story. And of course it wasn’t her fault, it was never anyone’s fault, was it?

“This is just God playing tricks, is it?” Cormac said, his voice flat, his patience thin. He just wanted to get out of here.

“God sends us obstacles,” Father Patrick said. “It’s up to us to overcome them. Like she did.”

He’d killed a monster, Cormac reassured himself. He’d done the right thing, here. He knew it.

“I have to ask—are you infected, too? Has she ever bitten you?” Cormac asked. He’d shoot the man right here if he said yes, if he even hesitated, if he gave the slightest hint that the werewolf had bitten him.

The priest shook his head and murmured, “No.”

There were ways of telling for sure. Slice his skin with a regular knife and watch if it healed fast. Slice it with the silver-inlaid knife and watch if he died from it. But Father Patrick didn’t have the wolfish look in his eyes. He didn’t have the rage, the tension like he was holding something back. Cormac believed him and left him alone.

*   *   *

Cormac retreated from the school without saying anything to the girl. He’d already done a piss-poor job of covering his tracks; no need to make it worse. At dawn’s light, he checked out of the motel and showed up on Harrison’s doorstep.

He knocked on the front door and waited for Harrison to answer, which he did after a couple of minutes. His wife was looking over his shoulder, until he barked at her to leave them alone.

“Did you finally get it?” the rancher asked.

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter. But you won’t have any more problems.”

“And where’s your proof that you got it?”

“Talk to Father Patrick over at the church. He’ll tell you.”

Harrison frowned, plainly not happy with that idea. “Just a minute, then.”

He went inside, leaving Cormac standing alone on the porch. Didn’t even invite him in for morning coffee. Mrs. Harrison would have invited him in, which was maybe why Mr. Harrison had ordered her away. Folk didn’t like having Cormac around much more than they liked having the monsters. Two sides of the same coin in some ways, Cormac supposed. Though Sister Hilda never killed anyone, did she? And Cormac had. Over and over.

Harrison returned with a fat envelope to round out the job. He didn’t hand it to Cormac so much as reluctantly hold it out, making Cormac take it from him.

“You can let your herd out, now,” Cormac said, instead of thanking a man like Harrison.

“Well. I’m glad the bastard’s gone. I hope it died painful, I hope—”

“Shut up, Harrison,” Cormac said, exhausted on a couple of levels. “Just—just shut up.”

Tucking the blood money in his jacket, Cormac walked back to his Jeep, feeling the rancher’s gaze on his back the whole time.

He drove away from Lamar, away from the morning sun, as fast as he could.

W
ILD
R
IDE

Just once, he wouldn’t use a condom. What could happen? But it hadn’t been just once. It could have been any one of the half-dozen men he’d drifted between over the last two years. His wild years, he thought of them now. He’d been so stupid. They all had said, just once, trust me. T.J., young and eager, had wanted so very much to please them.

“I’m sorry,” the guy at the clinic said, handing T.J. some photocopied pages. “You have options. It’s not a death sentence like in the old days. But you’ll have to watch yourself. Your health is more important than ever now. And you have to be careful—”

“Yeah, thanks,” T.J. said, standing before the counselor had finished his spiel.

“Remember, there’s always help—”

T.J. walked out, crumpling the pages in his hand.

*   *   *

Engines purred, sputtered, grumbled, clacked like insects, and growled like bears. Motorbikes raced up the course, a barren, cratered landscape of tracks, channels, hills, and ridges. Catching air over hills, leaning into curves, biting into the earth with treaded tires, kicking up clods, the swarm of bikes gave the air a smell like chalk and gasoline. Hundreds more idled, revved, tested, waited. Thousands of people milled, riders in fitted jackets of every color, mechanics in coveralls, women bursting out of too-small tank tops, and most people in T-shirts and jeans. T.J. loved it here. Bikes made sense. Machines could be fixed, their problems could be solved, and they didn’t judge.

He supposed he ought to get in touch with his partners. Figure out which one had passed the disease on to him and who he might have passed it on to. Easier said than done. They’d been flings; he didn’t have phone numbers.

“Look it, here he comes.” Mitch, Gary Maddox’s stout, good-natured assistant, shook T.J.’s arm in excitement.

Gary’s heat was starting. T.J. looked for Gary’s colors, the red and blue jacket and dark blue helmet. He liked to think he could pick out his bike’s growl over all the others. T.J. had spent the morning fine-tuning the engine, which had never sounded better.

They’d come up to one of the hills overlooking the track to watch the race. T.J. wanted to lose himself in this world, just for another day. He wanted to put off thinking about anything else for as long as possible.

The gate slammed down, and the dozen bikes rocketed from the starting line, engines running high and smooth. Gary pulled out in front early, like he usually did. Get in front, stay in front, don’t let anyone else screw up his ride. Some guys liked messing with the rest of the field, playing mind games and causing trouble. Gary just wanted to win, and T.J. admired that.

Mitch jumped and whooped with the rest of the crowd, cheering the riders on. T.J. just watched. Another rider’s bike, toward the back, was spitting puffs of black smoke. Something wrong there. Everyone else seemed to be going steady. Gary might as well have been floating an inch above the dirt. That was exactly how it was supposed to be—making it look easy.

“Ho-
leee
!” Mitch let out a cry and the crowd let out a gasp as one of the riders went down.

T.J. could tell it was going to happen right before it did, the way the rider—in the middle of the pack to the outside—took the turn too sharply to make up time, gunned his motor a little too early, and stuck his leg out to brace, a dangerous move. His front tire caught, the bike flipped, and it might have ended there. A dozen guys dropped their bikes one way or another every day out here. But everything was set up just wrong for this guy. Momentum carried the bike into the straw bale barrier lining the track—then over and down the steep slope on the other side. Bike and rider finally parted ways, the bike spinning in one direction, trailing parts. The few observers who’d hiked up the steep vantage scattered in its path. The rider flopped and tumbled in another direction, limp and lifeless, before coming to rest faceup on a bank of dirt.

For a moment, everyone stood numb and breathless. Then the ambulance siren started up.

*   *   *

Red flags stopped the race. Mitch and T.J. stumbled down their side of the hill to get to the rider.

“You know who he is?”

“Alex Price,” Mitch said, huffing.

“New on the circuit?”

“No, local boy. Big fish, little pond kind of guy.”

The rider hadn’t moved since he stopped tumbling. Legs shouldn’t bend the way his were bent. Blood and rips marred his clothing. T.J. and Mitch reached him first, but both held back, unwilling to touch him. T.J. studied the rider’s chest, searching for the rise and fall of breath, and saw nothing. The guy had to have been pulverized. Then his hand twitched.

“Hey, buddy, don’t move!” Mitch said, stumbling forward to his knees to hold the rider back.

T.J. thought he heard bones creaking, rubbing against each other as the rider shuddered, pawing the ground to find his bearings. Next to Mitch, he tried to keep the rider still with a hand on his shoulder. Price flinched as if shrugging him away, and T.J. almost let go—the guy was strong, even now. Maybe it was adrenaline.

The ambulance and EMTs arrived, and T.J. gratefully got out of the way. By then, the rider had taken off his own helmet and mask. He had brown hair a few inches long, a lean tanned face covered with sweat. He gasped for breath and winced with pain. When he moved, it was as if he’d slept wrong and cramped his muscles, not just tumbled over fifty yards at forty miles an hour.

At his side, an EMT pushed him back, slipped a breathing mask over his face, started putting a brace on his neck. The second EMT brought over a backboard. Price pushed the mask away.

“I’m
fine,
” he muttered.

“Lie
down,
sir, we’re putting you on a board.”

Grinning, Price laid back.

T.J. felt like he was watching something amazing, miraculous. He’d
seen
the crash. He’d seen plenty of crashes, even plenty that looked awful but the riders walked away from them. He’d also seen some that left riders broken for life, and he’d thought this was one of those. But there was Price, awake, relaxed, like he’d only stubbed a toe.

Price rolled his eyes, caught T.J.’s gaze, and chuckled at his gaping stare. “What, you’ve never seen someone who’s invincible?”

The EMTs shifted him to the board, secured the straps over him, and carried him off.

“Looks like he’s gonna be okay,” Mitch said, shrugging away his bafflement. T.J. stared after Price and that mad smile in the face of destruction.

Invincible,
T.J. thought. There wasn’t any such thing.

*   *   *

At the track the following weekend, T.J. was tuning Gary’s second bike when Mitch came up the aisle and leaned on the handlebars. “He’s back. Did you hear?”

The handlebars rocked, twisting the front tire and knocking T.J.’s wrench out of his hand. T.J. sighed. “What? Who?”

“Price, Alex Price. He’s totally okay.”

“How is that even possible?” T.J. said. “You saw that crash. He should have been smashed to pieces.”