Dyre Page 5

  “Hmm, I’ve been called worse. But usually not by my own sister,” Jacob Coulter said amiably, swinging his feet down from Nathan’s desk and standing. He looked Des over for a moment, then that mischievous grin turned into a warm, slightly daffy smile. “Long time, no see, Jenny-Benny.”

  Des was agog. How many years had it been since she’d seen Jake in person? Three, at least. Jake stepped around the desk and crossed the room to take plate and tea things away from her. She almost let him, then remembered Ruby and smiled apologetically, holding them away from him. “No, I can’t stay, I’ve got—”

  “Yeah, Pop told me,” Jake said, the mirth in his light hazel eyes dimming. “I’m sorry, Des.”

  “Not as sorry as I am.” Des’s own smile slipped away. “But hey, I get a second chance to screw it all up. Nathan told you that part, right?”

  Jake’s plain, every-man face fell. “Yeah. He told me you’re sworn to the new Dyre. That George passed his Death-right to a Hume.”

  “Correct and correct, hermano!”

  “Shit. Triple shit.” Jake pinched the bridge of his nose and tipped his head back, as if trying to prevent a nosebleed. “God, how’re you gonna handle this?”

  Des shrugged irritably. “The same way I handle everything. Go in with guns a-blazin’. Kill ’em all and let ’em run with the Moon.”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “I meant how’re you gonna handle giving our new Dyre the Talk?”

  Des shrugged again. “I’ll just tell her. And if she doesn’t believe me, I’ll show her.” She flashed a bit of fang to Jake who rolled his eyes once more.

  “Subtlety is not your strong-suit, Li’l Sis,” he said, chuckling. “Has it even occurred to you that going Loup right in front of her so soon might make matters worse? Okay, I can see that it hasn’t,” he added dryly when Des blinked blankly up at him. He stooped a bit, put an arm around her shoulders and led her to the door.

  “Lemme tell you what I’d do and have done in your position…” he began sagely.

  This time, Des was the one to roll her eyes. But Jake caught her at it and tugged on her still-damp hair. She elbowed him hard, and he let it slide till they got to the staircase. Then, with truly impressive speed, barely breaking the flow of his words, he gave her a wet-willy.

  Des squawked and nearly dropped plate, pot, and cup, and Jake laughed, darting ahead of her, taking the stairs three at a time.

  “I will murder you in your sleep, Jacob Callum Coulter!” she called after him, suppressed laughter in her own voice as he disappeared around the turn that would take him to the east wing. “Bloody murder!”

  “Good thing I sleep with both eyes open, Jenny-Benny!”

  For those few moments, anyway, it was good to be home.

  *

  By the time Des got back to her room with a pork chop smothered in apple sauce hanging out of her mouth, Jake and Phil were already deep in conversation.

  “…never seen the Fever come on so fast,” Phil was saying, shaking her head. She was sitting at Ruby’s side, holding her hand the way Des had. Biting down on the chop hard enough that the bone splintered and apple sauce ran down her chin, Des ignored her Loup’s quiet, possessive growl and kicked the door gently shut behind her. The room was noticeably warmer than she’d left it.

  “…was one of the most powerful Dyres we’ve ever had in recorded history. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.” Jake’s changeable face was now worried and unhappy. He leaned forward in the room’s only chair, large hands dangling helplessly between his knobby, hairy knees. “And if she was sick or compromised before he bit her…”

  “I’d thought of that, but from what I can tell, she was healthy when George bit her,” Phil said, seeming just as helpless. With a glance at Jake, Des crossed the room and placed the teapot and cup on her night table, then folded into a full lotus at Phil’s feet with her plate. “Her breathing is so congested, though, on top of the Fever,” Phil said. “Maybe she’s asthmatic.”

  “Won’t be, after the Fever,” Des noted around her mouthful of sweet and salty goodness. She put the pork chop down and licked her fingers clean before going for the T-bone steak next to it. After a moment’s thought, she swished it in the applesauce covering the pork chop and worried a big piece off the bone, making hungry, happy little growls.

  It was only when she noticed the silence had dragged on for most of a minute that she looked up at her brother and stepmother. They were both watching her with mixtures of exasperation, sympathy, and fondness. “What?” she asked, licking the applesauce and meat-juice off her chin with one long swipe of her tongue.

  Jake smiled wryly. “Your table manners used to be much better.”

  “Get me a table, and I’ll show you some manners.” Des grinned widely, knowing bits of meat were caught in her teeth. Jake mock shuddered and leaned back in the chair, crossing one long, lean leg over the other.

  “Des, sweetie,” Phil began slowly as if trying to find the right words. “There’s a substantial chance she won’t survive the Fever. Whether or not she has asthma, the Fever itself is hitting her like a wrecking ball. Not only is it escalating quickly, it’s a higher Fever than any I’ve ever dealt with.”

  “She’ll survive,” Des said confidently, without stopping to think about the strength of her conviction. She didn’t need to think about it. If George had thought Ruby fit to be Dyre, strong enough and tough enough to lead the Packs, then she was strong enough to come through the Fever. And Des told Phil and Jake as much.

  The two of them exchanged a look then focused on Des again.

  “We know she must be tough stuff if George picked her, kiddo, but that has nothing to do with how she handles the Fever. It hits each Hume and Loup differently.” Jake held out those huge hands of his as if to forestall any protests. “The Fever isn’t just a fever, Des. It’s a Human body being changed on a cellular level, one cell at a time.” He glanced at Phil, who nodded, then went on. “As all the old cells are consumed by the new, the Human in question suffers immensely. Sometimes the stress of that can kill them. Sometimes their hearts just give out under the strain.”

  Des snorted, and nearly hocked meat up into her sinuses as a result. “It’s not that bad, right? I came through mine fine. If I can do it, she can do it, right? Right?” Des looked from Jake to Phil, then back again.

  Phil reached down to run her fingers through Des’s hair. “But that’s different, hon. You were born a Loup. Getting the Fever for the Garoul-born is a consequence of puberty. It’s about as deadly as the Chicken Pox, with proper care. It’s different for a Hume who’s been bitten. They’re generally adults, for one thing, and not as resilient as adolescents. And, like Jake said, these changes are happening on a cellular level. For the Garoul-born, their bodies are bred to handle that change as an eventuality. For Humes, their bodies are bred to fight the change every step of the way. So in a sense, the stronger the Hume, the less likely they are to survive the changes wrought by the Fever. Their bodies will fight it and fight it till they’re all used up.”

  Des dropped the T-bone, which was literally just a bone, now, clean of meat and gristle, back on the plate, appetite forgotten for the moment, and frowned. “So you’re saying that if Ruby was some scrawny, sickly weakling—”

  “—she’d be more likely to survive this.” Jake nodded solemnly. “Though the risk of death is still pretty high. If the Hume is sickly enough, the Fever’ll kill them, anyway. It’s a fine line, one that most Humes who get bitten don’t walk.”

  Closing her eyes tight, Des stretched as Phil scritched and scratched her scalp comfortingly. “What kinda odds are we looking at, Phil? Straight-deal me.”

  Phil sighed. “I’d say there’s a less than one in five chance that she’ll make it through the next twenty-four hours, let alone the next two days.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Triple fuck,” Jake agreed, leaning forward again, peering deeply into one of Des’s psychedelic throw rugs as if it had answers or
reassurances.

  For a moment, Des felt a spiraling sense of despair she wasn’t about to give in to. She shook her head and gritted her teeth. She was not about to lose another Dyre. Dislodging Phil’s fingers, Des looked up at the older woman, steeling herself against the compassion in those perceptive eyes. “She’ll survive.”

  “Honey—”

  “She’ll survive,” Des said again, putting her unfinished dinner aside. The heavy curtains at each window were drawn, but she could feel moonset in her bones and knew false dawn wasn’t far off. “Just tell me what I have to do to make that happen, and it’ll get done.”

  Chapter Four

  She just wasn’t herself these days. Or, at least, what seemed to pass as days.

  It didn’t help that every time was crazy-time in this purgatory, this non-place in which she’d been stashed. There were no stopwatches or clocks, and if there were, they’d look like something Salvador Dali had been at with a paintbrush.

  Millennia passed in mere hours, while seconds oozed by like unhurried eternities. She was a being of the senses, trapped in a place of the mind, and she was surrounded in all ways, at all times, constantly under attack.

  By what she wasn’t sure, only that they were hungry, disorganized, and legion. They threw themselves at her, threw themselves into invading her with no more plan and design than a flu virus. They slobbered and gibbered, cavorted and howled, gleeful even as she repelled them or simply let them dash themselves silly against her defenses, only to shake it off and hurl themselves at her again and again.

  By the end of the first eternity, she was pretty sure there was a pattern, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything. She had only a fuzzy-at-best sense of who she was, what she was, and where she should’ve been.

  But she knew that she should have had light and warmth and laughter.

  Fortunately for her sanity, she did not remember exactly what any of those things were. She simply knew they were missing and missed. Absent from the Non-Place, where it was always crazy o’clock.

  And so she stood alone, an impregnable tower with an eroding sense of self. She was eternally under siege with no memory of why it must be this way, only that this was the way it was.

  Always would be.

  *

  She couldn’t imagine why the things that attacked her wanted in so badly, when all she wanted was out.

  The scraps of logic she had been left with cautioned her against anything so rash as letting them in. But the larger part of her that still had hope of an end, of rest, of going back to The Good Place, where light-warmth-laughter lived, had little use for logic.

  She poked and pried, till she poked a chink, then a dent, then a small hole in the battlements of her logic and reason. She peered out and was nearly blinded by a stark silver shine, after so long in soothing velvet darkness.

  This, at last, was light. But it wasn’t warm and full of laughter and love. It was hard and cold and somehow feral. And, in a contest of wills, she’d be dashed to pieces upon it. Like tarnished moonlight, this light seemed to defy the very things that had come to define “light” for her.

  She hastened to seal the wall, seal herself off. Surely an eternity of eternities walled up alone would be better than the primal lunacy that awaited beyond—but then she hesitated . . . there was…Something..

  Ah, the Something sighed, and one of her other senses was returned. No, a sense was given to her. A sixth one, and it came bearing rough translations. The slobbering and gibbering that had been her air, her music, her only companion, became a ravenous chorus of the Untamed.

  They moved through the cold, silvery, shivering light, beings made of brittle bits of the same illumination. They were all eyes and all teeth. What they saw, they wanted to consume.

  They saw her. They always had. And now, she saw them.

  The erosion of her self had now spread to the walls that protected her. As fast as she could close the breach, another opened, and another, and another, till she was finally laid bare, shrinking and cringing from beings that had no concept of mercy and light that had no concept of warmth.

  Voiceless, she screamed, bodiless she turned, directionless, she fled, relentlessly pursued by the Untamed. As she fled, at her heels flew the Something, The Ah. It did not attack but watched her with something akin to amusement, yet closer still to respect.

  Stop. Wait.

  This was neither a question nor a command, but the mellow rumble of a curious predator. And she stopped. Waited. Though the Untamed clamored at her, tried to consume her, she stopped. Though bits of her were washing away like a sand castle at high tide and splintered away by jagged silver claws, she waited.

  Look, the Something urged, from in front of her now. It was not blocking her way, but blocking them out. It easily captured and held her formerly divided attention. And how could it not? In this place of mad, silver, bright, howling light, this thing was the maddest, the most silver, the brightest. Its howl was the din of a thousand-thousand wolves, loud beyond the point of loudness, a perfect white noise that soothed and reassured. Here was the heart of the Untamed, the Midnight Sun around which lesser satellites merely orbited.

  It was ancient and solitary, wild and beautiful.

  It didn’t want to consume her, but rather become a part of her.

  Close your eyes and listen, the Something hummed.

  She closed her eyes, and she listened.

  And was seduced.

  And was rebuilt.

  The eroded edges of her self were shored up, and the fractured bits were gathered and laced together with silver stitchery. The chorus of the Untamed became a part of her, a glue that held her together. The stitching made her both weaker and stronger than she ever had been. What had once been a whirlwind of mad satellites tugging at her with their primeval gravity was now a shield, a spear, an ally and an alloy inextricably bound to her forever.

  She opened her eyes and that light, once too-bright and annoyingly alive with the slinking movement and shifting awareness of them, was no longer too intense to be borne. In fact, the light seemed to be emanating from her, from the depths and dark crevices of her self, like phosphorescence expelled from a quasar. Her universe was a combination of stark silver light and sumptuous, restful darkness. It was an inner-verse, not a Purgatory. A way station between what she once was, and what she was on the verge of becoming. The choice she was on the verge of making.

  No, the choice she had already made.

  Let there be Light? The Something yawned from within her, quiescent and content, for the moment, its words laced with the exact amount of self-conscious irony needed for such a question.

  Irony, yeah. I remember that, she thought, with what felt like way too many bared teeth to be a grin.

  She had a lot to re-learn and remember, a lot to assimilate and actuate.

  But she wouldn’t be doing it alone. Ancient and canny, clever and mercenary, the Something that had become a part of her would be with her every step of the way, guiding her and informing her. Could easily overwhelm her, if it so chose.

  Without one of the Tame People, I would be the Untamed Heart set loose in a world that has forgotten the Dark Forest, and the time when we all lived there. I would be the spirit of the Hunter at large in a world of prey, with no mercy to leaven me.

  That time, the time of the Predator-King has passed, and the time of the Philosopher-King is at hand. Your place will be to serve the Great Balance between Human and Garoul that exists in yourself and in your people.

  And with that, the Something subsided, curious but confident as to what her response would be.

  That’s Philosopher-Queen, she reminded it after an infinity of weighing and thought. And though she had never had a lust for power, only a desire for order—for the righting of wrongs, where possible, and the fixing of what had been broken. The pushing back against chaos that separated Humans from beasts. This offer was greatly tempting. And you’re asking an awful lot of me, aren’t you? Wh
o says I’m even fit to be the diplomat to your despot? I’m just a nobody cubicle-jockey. I’ve never led anything or anyone in my life!

  That stark light wrapped itself around her. It still wasn’t warm, but it was illuminating, for suddenly, she could see how it could be done. Oh, it wouldn’t be easy. Mistakes would be made—were already being made—and not just by her, but it could be done.

  More importantly, it needed to be done, if the Garoul were to survive in the long run. Strange days were coming, stranger than the ones that had ever gone before. And despite the pretense of democracy among the Packs, the intensely feudal system in place hindered both progress and evolution.

  The last Dyre had tried but, being a product of that system himself, had been unable to change it, merely lighten its grip on the Packs.

  What was called for was a revolution. A new order.

  A diplomat, not a despot was needed to guide the North American Garoul, not to mention the spirit of the Untamed, which now resided in a nobody cubicle-jockey, into the new era.

  Choosing to live meant choosing to live for the Garoul and as the Garoul.

  But there was so much work to be done. So much struggle and strife.

  Not that that had ever scared her away from what needed to be done, before. And at least with the Garoul, as the Garoul, her life would have meaning once more. A purpose.

  And you’ll never, ever be bored, an amused voice added. It was different, somehow, from the Something, from the Untamed Heart. Her own heart supplied a name for that voice, one that shook it to its very depths.

  George.

  You’ve already decided, child, George went on. Now speak the words and awaken.

  The words? she thought, confused. Then laughed as she realized she knew exactly what words. She suddenly felt freer and more empowered than she ever had in her short, penned-in life. Sure, why not?

  Still laughing, she took a deep breath and steeled her entire self for the ride.

  “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

  For one eternal moment, the silver light of the Untamed Heart intensified within her and around her. It grew so bright there was, momentarily, just a smidgen of warmth…then the light, all of it, was gone. She was by herself in the dark.