The lights of the cabin came into view as he crested the hill, headed into the clearing. Syd picked up his speed on the level ground, taking long clean strides, abandoning himself to his senses.
As he bounded up onto the porch, he heard the dead bolt slip. Then the door swung open, and he stepped inside.
"How is she?" was the first thing he asked, and the grim set of Mae"s face told him almost more than he wanted to know. She looked at the handcuffs, she looked in his eyes, and a terrible sadness crossed her features. But she did not utter a word.
Mae locked the door behind him as he followed Jane"s trail. It didn"t go up the stairs, as he might have expected, but down the hallway toward the kitchen. There was another flight of stairs there, leading to the bas.e.m.e.nt.
Gramma Mae appeared behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder.
"When this is over," she said, "you"ll have to go away. You"re not safe here anymore."
"I know." Breathing deep, averting his eyes. "What about you?"
"I"m too old to run," she replied. "And this is my home."
"Mae . . ." Voice cracking. Thinking of all he had undone.
"You didn"t know." Cutting him off. "Just take care of her."
He nodded, tears welling in his eyes. There were tears in her eyes as well. Syd turned, then, and stepped through the door.
Descending into darkness.
The bas.e.m.e.nt was musty and cluttered, with a packed earthen floor. The air was close, heavy with the aroma of dried herbs. He found Jane huddled in a dim corner, lying on a makeshift bed of pillows and quilts. She was panting heavily. She was entirely transformed. Gramma Mae had dressed the wound with a healing poultice; the bandage was nearly soaked through, and he could tell from the way she shivered just how terribly damaged she was.
Syd approached her, at once horrified and amazed. Such a beautiful creature. So unlike Vic and Nora. So literal an embodiment of the beauty at her core. He remembered the first time he looked into those soulful eyes, bore witness to the keen understanding there.
Now there was pain, as well. Incredible pain.
"I won"t let him hurt you," he said, reaching out to her. Jane made a mournful sound as he touched her head, stroking the coa.r.s.e, luxuriant fur. "I won"t let anyone hurt you." She whimpered, and a shudder ran through her powerful form.
Upstairs, the bas.e.m.e.nt door clicked shut. Syd heard the tumblers of a lock slide home, then the sound of Mae"s footsteps, moving slowly down the darkened stairs. She reached the bottom and rounded the corner, moving anxiously toward them.
"He"s here," she said.
He had found Nora"s grave; and from the moment he began to dig, the last shreds of Vic"s sanity peeled back once and for all. It was like his mind was the hole being carved now from the living earth, and his soul was the wet, rotting treasure that he sought to exhume. There was no hope in the quest. That didn"t matter at all.
Just the digging, and the digging, and the digging.
The carnage at Chameleon"s had filled him to overflowing, his nervous system humming like an overloaded transformer with the life-energy of dozens of slaughtered souls. The rush was sublime, a G.o.dlike buzz that countermanded the physical damage even as it broiled his brain, jacked his metabolism clear into the kill zone.
He was over the line now, and he might never go back. To revert to human form would be to invite incalculable suffering, more than even he could bear. Aside from the thousand little cuts and contusions, his flesh had been toasted to a blistering crisp-mostly first- and second-degree burns, all the way down to third in a couple of spots-and every little movement sent him slivers of purest agony. He only thanked whatever stars still cared for the lack of broken bones and ruptured organs.
Up above, the moon shone cold, no longer his lover at all. She hated him, clearly, as did all of Creation. He doubted, now, that she"d ever really loved him; no doubt, she"d been lying all this time. She could join the f.u.c.king club. And he could be its president.
And that was the big fat joke life had played on him, now, wasn"t it? The ridiculous notion that he had ever been loved. As he tore into the soft, packed earth, he laughed and growled and cried, simultaneously tortured and amused and destroyed. He had been l.u.s.ted after and hungered for, sacrificed and died for a thousand times over.
But had he ever been loved?
And therein lay the bitter irony: that he"d had so many chances, and somehow blown them all. In the course of all that f.u.c.king and killing, killing and f.u.c.king, he had somehow missed the boat. And now the boat had pulled out of the harbor forever.
It didn"t take long to reach the body. The grave was shallow; and once he hit that pocket of muddy soup, he knew he had arrived. Nora had changed substantially in the short time since returning to seed. Her supernature worked against her in death, accelerating the decomposition process. She was like a floater now: soft and rancid, bloated with scavengers and gas. She was barely recognizable as a woman at all, much less the woman he loved.
When he took her in his embrace, her flesh sloughed off in spongy, liquefying slabs; the fatty tissues beneath hung loose as well, muscles already going adipocerous, like candle wax made of lye and tallow. Her once-beautiful hair came out in knotted clumps, dragged down by its own sodden weight, leaving naked skull behind. Vic whined and hugged her fiercely to his charred and blackened breast, marking himself with her stench. Carrying her essence with him into battle.
But when he tried to touch what little remained of her face, it came away like wet tissue paper in his hands. Vic stared at the maggot-slick deathmask beneath it.
It could have belonged to anyone.
And there something in the howl that rose up now-something haunting and heart-rending in its expression of irreversible loss-that Syd could not help but identify with. It spoke to his love of the women here with him. It spoke to the deepest part of himself.
It meant that he and Vic had something in common, after all.
His clothes, all at once, had become too constricting, and every fiber of his flesh felt like bursting into flame. At last, the time had come. He stood and wordlessly began to disrobe. Any residual embarra.s.sment at stripping in front of Gramma Mae burned off in the urgency. There was nothing she hadn"t already seen.
Besides, she was disrobing too.
While they undressed, he stared at Jane. Her eyes, in the dim light, were luminous pools, unwavering in their focus upon him.
"You know what you have to do," Mae said. She dropped her clothing to the floor. As she stood, he saw that her weathered flesh was covered with scars: the raised welts of long-healed bites and slashes, each one marking the ghosts of battles past.
Syd nodded, peeling off the last of his clothing. He stood naked before her. Mae came to him, a small cloth pouch in her hands. She reached inside, pulled out a small stoppered vial. The vial was strangely familiar; Syd thought of Nora and shuddered.
"Remember," she said, "in the end, it"s not so much a matter of finding it as it is of letting it come to you."
She uncapped the vial, then tipped a quant.i.ty onto the crown of his head. The oil was sharply bitter, sweetly pungent, wild-smelling. It burned his skin as it soaked in.
"Just let it out," she told him, began daubing oil at his chakra points: the center of his forehead, his throat, the center of his chest, then down to his belly and on, all the way to his root chakra. Syd tensed up as she neared his crotch.
"Relax," she said, reaching between his legs. "Don"t forget to breathe. . . ."
As the front door exploded, directly above their heads . . .
. . . and Vic didn"t understand why they bothered, it made no sense at all, it barely even slowed him down. Just as the pain meant nothing to him. Just another ridiculous makeshift matchstick obstacle.
Like anything in the world could stop him now.
He moved straight past the shattered storm door, great wolf-goblin body surreal against the quaint Americana he now so pointedly destroyed, lashing out to smash all the accoutrements of domestication he pa.s.sed: rustic antiques decked with pewter and chintz, all the homey little touches that really made a cage a cage.
Laying waste to this worthless c.r.a.p collection was one thing. But as Vic moved deeper into the house and caught a whiff of the old woman, he started going really crazy. The drying flora hanging from the eaves were enough to give her away, along with the wheat braidings and corn dollies and a.s.sorted other bits of funky pagan kitsch.
But more than that, Vic could smell her power. The reek of it made his hackles rise and his flesh writhe. She was trying to help them, that b.i.t.c.h, and for that he would make her pay. Vic would split her open and floss with her withered fallopian tubes.
Just as soon as I find you . . .
Syd closed his eyes, began taking deep measured breaths. The biting aroma filled his head. He asked what was in it, and she explained. Herbs. Roots. Blood from each of the women.
All, in their own way, centering him.
Facilitating the Change.
Mae continued to anoint him, her movements quick but unhurried, all the while murmuring softly to herself. Her method was in marked contrast to Nora"s; it was controlled and deliberate, with a quiet, intensely focused sense of purpose. By comparison, he and Nora had been like a pair of preteens with a Ouija board: dilettantes and dabblers in an art they barely grasped.
Still, he couldn"t help wishing she would hurry things up a little.
Upstairs in the living room, something crashed and shattered. "Here," she said, handing him a small piece of root. "Chew this."
Syd took it, sniffed. It smelled horrible.
"Just do it," Mae urged. "We don"t have much time."
The root tasted as bad as it smelled. As he chewed, his mouth flooded with bitter saliva. He looked down at his naked body; it seemed to glitch momentarily, as if slipping in and out of focus.
"What is this?" he asked. The words came out slurred, like he was talking through a mouthful of Novocain. "Kava kava. Very mild. Just loosens you up a little."
"Is this what makes it happen?"
"No." Mae shook her head. "You make it happen. Now close your eyes. Empty your thoughts."
Syd did so: closing his eyes, letting his mind go blank and still. The destruction moved down the hall, searching. Gramma Mae scooped up a handful of earth from the floor, began rubbing it on his arms and legs and chest.
"There are lines of power that link your spirit to the earth," she told him. "Find them. Trace them to your core."
And as Syd reached inside, fire began to light up and down his spine: spreading through his arms and down his legs, coming out the soles of his feet, reaching into the soil upon which he stood. A greater power waited there, swelling just under the surface: a vast and swirling sea of energy, to which he was connected, and which connected him to all things.
Syd tapped into it, instantly felt his limbs go loose and wobbly, as if suddenly buoyed by some powerful inner current. His head filled with stars, went vertiginous, whirling. Mae appeared alongside him, helped to lower him to the floor. She was much stronger than she looked. Her gnarled hands were calloused, her fingertips smooth and pebbled as a dog"s paw.
His own hands and feet were tingling, the nerves itching as if awakening from a long and deadening sleep. Syd brought his fingers up, stared in amazement as the whorls and peaks merged and receded, like ripples on the surface of a pond.
Then disappeared before his disbelieving eyes. Taking his ident.i.ty with them.
Upstairs, Vic had found his way to the kitchen. The sounds of destruction paced him, sliding under the bas.e.m.e.nt door. From her pallet, Jane whimpered, high and faint.
"Just remember," Mae said. "Your heart is the key." Then the bas.e.m.e.nt door blew open . . .
. . . and as he came down the steps, then rounded the corner, he saw the two b.i.t.c.hes huddled at the cellar"s far end: one young and familiar, one very, very old, neither of them looking too happy to see him.
And, hoo doggies! it was tough to rightly a.s.sess just how bad that made him feel.
He would f.u.c.k them both, he decided right then. He would do it just for the h.e.l.l of it: gobble their life-spark even as he made them spread that one final time, before death took them over the last plateau.
But first, he would make them watch what happened to their boy.
Which raised the very important question: where was their boy? Had he snuck out the back? If he had any brains, then yes, he probably had, though Syd hadn"t exactly struck him as the brainy type. He guessed he"d just have to crack that skull and see for himself . . .
. . . and suddenly there was a dark form rising from the corner; but instead of stopping where it should have stopped, it just kept getting larger and larger.
Until its proportions were utterly wrong.
Until it was nearly as huge as himself . . .
. . . and it was so easy, so easy to do. Like falling off a bicycle, once you understood the secret. There was your true nature-your irreducible essence-and then there were just all the obstacles you threw in your own path. Like fear of the unknown. Like thinking too much. Like blindly doing what you"re told.
Like joining the herd in turning its back on the powerful truth of its animal heart.
But those days were gone forever.
Syd felt the fires of Change roar through him; and for the very first time, he stayed out of their way. Letting them liberate his spirit, burn down the walls of imprisoning flesh. His new body rose from those glorious flames, reinventing itself in a matter of seconds, seizing the reins of his destiny.
He looked down at the handcuffs still binding him. Flexed. The shackles fractured and burst, fell away.
Syd stepped from the shadows, and into full view.
Like Vic, he was fearsome, fangs bared in his ma.s.sive, capacious jaws; but that was where all physical similarities ended. His form, like Jane"s, was sleekly lupine, his pelt jet-black, silver-threaded; his features, like Jane"s, were more wolf than monster. It was such a different manifestation of the Change that it took even Syd by surprise. Vic, on the other hand, looked like he"d been lightly napalmed: mangy fur singed to blackness, polka-dotted with sores.
Vic squared off, at Syd"s advance; and then suddenly, he smiled. It was a nasty grin, meant to destabilize Syd, but it was also completely sincere. Syd could see, in that moment, that Vic loved this s.h.i.t. He lived for the kill. He was in it for the mayhem.
That was fine, to Syd"s way of thinking. Right now, he was living for this s.h.i.t, too. He threw the smile right back at Vic.
From there, it all happened with terrifying speed.
There was no hesitation, no snapping, no baiting. There was no one and nothing to hold them back. Vic dropped to all fours and launched himself forward. Syd matched him and met him halfway.
First blood was drawn in the very first second: Vic"s jaws, clamping down on Syd"s hunched shoulder blade. Syd smelled his own blood, and the pain was galvanizing. He went for Vic"s throat.
Then Vic bit him again.
And this time was worse: at the base of the neck, the fangs sinking in deeper before tearing loose. Syd felt ganglia shred and moist fascia wrench free. The pain and terror were blinding. He yipped and lashed out, caught Vic"s ear and removed it. Vic howled.
And then he bit him again.
And then he bit him again. And again. And again. Until Syd was streaming from a half-dozen holes, strength and confidence spurting red from the c.h.i.n.ks in his armor. He had never fought as a wolf before; he didn"t know d.i.c.k, and it showed. Vic, on the other hand, was a consummate pro . . .
. . . and then suddenly, the old wolf appeared: strategically worrying Vic"s flanks from behind, despite its age and smaller size. Vic turned on her, roaring and Syd seized the opportunity to tear a sputtering chunk his from neck.
And then Vic went wild, abandoning all caution, shaking her off and plowing face-first into Syd. Syd rolled onto his back, frantically brought up his legs to defend his exposed underbelly. His claws raked tracks across blistered tissue. Vic yowled and lurched forward, moving in for the kill.