Binding: Book Two of the Moon Wolf Saga (34 page)

I picked my way along Tillman and the rabbit’s trail, the rabbit radiating fear, and Tillman happy excitement. I found the place where the rabbit had doubled back and hidden under a bush, while Tillman bounded on, still on the chase. I glared at the rabbit in her little hollow as I passed. She held perfectly still, pretending I hadn’t seen her. But now Tillman was out in the brush somewhere, off my carefully built system of tracks and roundabouts, and he might turn up anywhere—because he’d gone after a rabbit! If he wasn’t already lying in ambush, he might just blunder upon me, which might be just as bad.

I changed course to move down-slope from Tillman’s trail, and traveled parallel and downwind, so I didn’t miss the spot where he finally realized the rabbit wasn’t in front of him anymore, and cast around in a loop to pick up the scent, before he finally trotted back to where he picked up my trail again, and headed along the track I’d made. Except this was a different track, slightly older, without a trace of Finley’s scent with which I’d baited the trail near Elaine’s house. But he loped along, his tracks as wide apart in their stride as they had been before, showing he traveled at the same speed.

I followed along a bit more carefully, knowing now that Tillman’s tracking was not dependable. And I wondered if the reason he hadn’t stayed with us, after his father moved in, wasn’t that, as we’d been told, he had a job elsewhere, but because he was not reliable when he was on the hunt. That would explain, too, the Gray Fox’s care in guiding him to make the right decisions. I laughed to myself, looking forward to catching up with my oldest, dumbest stepbrother.

Tillman left the track three more times. I was starting to think he’d blown off the whole idea of tracking me and Finley down and was just having a fine old time trekking through the woods. When his trail came to an abrupt halt, I realized he’d backtracked and gone off the trail again, and I’d missed it. I’d reverted to my usual size again by this time, and moved more slowly so I wouldn’t miss my prey. When I found his trail again, I realized he’d gone up one way, and then back down the other, and I would have to do the same, and hope I didn’t meet him at the wrong moment. The web I’d laid seemed by that time just as likely to catch me as it was to catch him.

I wondered if at some point, the scouts that Gray Fox had watching the ends of the valleys were going to decide that Gray Fox had been out of touch too long, and come in looking for him. Or was their discipline so strong that they wouldn’t move from their posts until Gray Fox called for them?

But meanwhile, I had to avoid ridgelines, I had to stay in the underbrush. I had to make sure I didn’t come close enough to the end of either valley to be scented.

When I backtracked Tillman for the fourth time, and found my own recent trail instead of his, I had to admit to myself that my whole elaborate web of trails was a complete failure, because Tillman didn’t act the way he was supposed to. He could be anywhere in these hills. He could be lying in wait for me after all, or I could stumble upon him scarfing rabbits.

I stopped, listening to the night. The fog had come in so gradually I’d hardly noticed it, except as increasing dampness. Now, trees loomed out of the gray mist, and a smattering of rain made air scenting difficult. Ground scenting is much slower. I thought about high-tailing back to my car, some miles away over a few rough hills up the valley, parked behind a small country store. But then I would have given up being the predator. I would be the prey. And I’d have all this to do over again. So I cast back once again to the last place I’d scented him, stopping to listen for some large predator crashing through the brush, panting after the critters, and tried again.

He was off my track again, coursing down a well-used hiking trail. Then he left that too, and it took me several casts to find the next trace since he’d made a huge leap off the trail down onto a little open space, but here the mystery cleared up. He’d charged into a whole bunch of rabbits. I found the place where he’d landed, and the pair of rabbits in front of him had split, and he’d gone one way and then the other, and half a dozen other rabbits had lit out in different directions, and Tillman charged straight down the slope after another one, and down along a dirt road into the flatlands.

I followed, making myself small to get through the thick brush. Wherever he was, I didn’t want him to hear some large animal crashing through the brush toward him. A handful of lights shone dimly through the trees up ahead. I heard the sound of a car traveling fast in the distance, and saw the glint of headlights as it passed. The lights must be near the main road. It was getting late, and I still hadn’t found him.

The path crossed a streambed. So had Tillman, in a leap, and so did I, moving slowly. I was beginning to think that, in his wolf form, Tillman was nuts.

The path widened suddenly and opened onto a grassy verge. I stopped, tasting the air. From up ahead, beyond the shapes of old buildings lit by dim lamplight, and the smell of dust and decaying wood, came the scent of fresh blood.

The dirt road I was on carried the scent of bunches of people. Only a handful came over again, and some smelled of strange food and spices. The wind picked up and blew a clear patch in the fog, and I found myself pacing down the center of an old western ghost town, lit by intermittent old-fashioned streetlamps. The ghosts at present were the visitors who weren’t there, but probably would come again after the sun came up. But the weathered boards, the signs, the wooden sidewalks were right out of the movies. Or right in the movies. Of course, it was some kind of movie set. A figure turned the corner at the far end of the street and came toward me, licking his fingers. Tillman. At last.

I charged him, just as he caught wind of me and changed and leaped toward me with a snarl. I opened my heart to all my rage and fear, and grew. My jaws opened wide and I slathered for that first satisfying grip, the chomp that would break cartilage, rend muscle, bring up blood and screams and even life itself. And then I was upon him, and he slammed me to the ground as though I were a rabbit, and was on me at once.

They say some lessons stay with you forever. Even if you don’t remember them all the time, at certain points they will come back to you as fresh as the day they were pressed into your skull and bones. Tillman’s weight, his scent, his saliva, made me fourteen again, a spoiled child, loving and beloved, who’d never been badly hurt. Ray was first, of course. But Tillman had been next, and I’d already been beaten when he started in on me. He’d broken my will, then waited around to see if anything grew up in its place, and when it did, he’d broken that as well. All this I remembered as he rolled me over and over, worrying my ruff and biting for my throat. I was dead, as soon as he willed it. It was over and I was dead.

I arched to escape his weight, I rolled to escape his pin, I snapped at his eye, I kicked at his belly, I grabbed at his foreleg and bit down and he leaped off of me and stood panting, ready to slam me down again. This was not going to be like Finley.

All I had to do was get angry, I told myself. All I had to do was find my fury, and I would be able to withstand his blows, I could bear the pain. I could hold on to some part of myself when he broke me, crippled me, worked me over, and dragged me back home. And went on with the plan to kill my mother. I felt the fear, I felt the memory of my terror, but somehow the anger didn’t come.

I grew as small as I could and leaped away from him up a set of wooden steps, but he came bounding after me. I couldn’t seem to find the emotional traction to grow large, but I found it awfully easy to get really small. I slipped between a couple of the steps and dropped to the ground. I hit hard, but staggered to my feet again and charged off down the dusty street. He had to turn around on the stairs, but in a few bounds he was after me.

If I could get enough distance, I might still find a vantage point and be able to ambush him. If I could get far enough away from the smell of his sweat and his excitement, I might be able to find all the strength I’d acquired since I’d been away. If I could find a hiding place, I might be able to keep him from killing me.

I took the corner and dashed for a gap between the buildings on the far side of the street. Across the field the smell of freshly killed rabbit raised the hackles on my neck. Because I was next. If I could find a hiding place, Tillman might get bored eventually and go away.

Or I could get to the road. Traffic. People. It’s a lot harder these days to beat someone publicly without someone stopping you. But it was still the middle of the night, hours before many cars would be on the road again.

I tore around the next corner, along a wooden sidewalk where my nails clattered, and I heard the thump as Tillman hit it on the bound. I’d gained half a body length on him. Or maybe he was just playing.

I heard his teeth snap behind me and I pulled my tail as far under my butt as it would go. I reached out with my forelegs, but shortened my stride with my hind legs because in my back brain I thought I could feel his breath on my heels. I tore up the ground as I grabbed for it to give me purchase. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast.

I reached out farther with my forelegs. The act of running, the act of staying ahead of him, allowed my panic to subside a little, and the thought of gaining just a little more distance in my stride raised my heart. I reached out with all my power, farther than I had before. My forelegs grew. I did it again, and I gained on him. My body reached my normal size, and longer, as I tore around the side of the next building and down another foggy street.

Behind me Tillman leaped, and snapped at my tail once again, and I turned on him, teeth bared, my front end much larger than my hind end, and I was as big as Tillman, who put his forelegs down and sat on his butt to screech to a halt and not run into my teeth. I leaped for his nose. You can end a fight, even if you’re little, if you bite their nose.

Tillman batted me aside, and I turned my head, and sank my teeth into his foreleg.

He changed on a roar, grabbed me by the scruff, and shook me. He fumbled with one hand for his zipped pocket, pulled out a gun and shoved it into my mouth. “You damn bitch, you damn fucking bitch!”

Tillman’s arm—the one in which he held the gun—was bleeding. His hand shook. I changed, as gently as I knew how. I didn’t want to take the chance of getting shot as a wild animal.

“You are so over!” He clubbed me in the head with the gun, and it went off. My ears rang, and the blackness behind my eyes lit with orange and scarlet fireworks. I thought he’d shot me. The light behind my eyes went green and then faded to blackness. I came to I think only seconds later, with Tillman crouched on top of me, quite still, listening. Listening to see if anyone had heard the shot. Idiot! The light of the streetlamp glinted on his wide-open eyes.

“Okay,” he said in my ear in a hoarse whisper. “You’ve got one chance, and then I’m going to put a bullet through your hip, understand me?”

He had me by the hair. I nodded, and the fireworks went off in my head again. I thought my head would split, it hurt so much. He was on top of me. My feet were free, but had no purchase. One of my arms was under him, and the other was trapped under me. And of course he had that gun. For the moment, I was stuck.

His rancid dead rabbit breath whistled close to my ear. He whispered, “Tell me about the demon. Is it true? That you got hold of a demon?”

I made a sound in my throat, as though to deny it. He shook my head by the hair and I almost blacked out again. Yellow lights spun behind my eyes and his voice faded. When I could hear again, he was listing all the things a demon could do for him. He put his knee in my back, pulled my head back and my arm up. I let out another sound, not quite a whimper.

“Give me his name, isn’t that right? If I have the demon’s name, then I’m in control, right?” He spoke in my ear, a growl in his voice.

“Yes!” I started to cry. For me to give Tillman my demon, I would have to be broken, and he would have to believe it. So I started to cry, and tried as hard as I could to hold it back, and I didn’t answer him.

He shook my head again. “Tell me! Did you give it to Finley?”

I whined, “It wasn’t my fault!” A useful phrase in any discussion where you’re pinned.

He banged my head on the ground. I almost threw up.

“How’d you get it? What’d you do with it?”

When he shook me again, I whispered, “Three wishes. He gave me three wishes.” I mean, honestly, what could Tillman know about demons?

“Yeah?” His voice was salacious. After all, three wishes could add up to a whole lot of rabbits. “How’d you get that, huh?”

I cried some more. I whined that Tillman would make the demon kill me, which hadn’t occurred to him, because he wasn’t about to waste a wish on me. And after some more sniveling, and some more pounding, and one point where I really did throw up, I told him that you just have to clap your hands, and on each clap, you call the demon’s name. And that the demon had the power to give you a new car, or make you super beautiful, and the sex was awesome, but that if you called him again after your three wishes, he did horrible, unnamable things to you, and I was really, really scared.

And then there were some negotiations, which I pretended to believe. And some awkward contortions because he didn’t have any paper on him, and I wasn’t about to say that name again. I carefully and laboriously scratched the name Richard and I had agreed on, on the glass window of one of the buildings using a small pointed stone. The letters reflected in the light from the streetlamp and Tillman followed the syllables with one big grubby finger as he read the name over to himself several times.

I lay on the boardwalk like a bleeding, exhausted, beaten piece of meat. And that was not hard to pretend. And I waited to hear him clap his hands. And when he did, I looked up to see him form all the syllables and say them out loud, correctly and audibly. When he clapped his hands again, there was a sound like thunder going off inside a metal barrel, and there was a shape in the air around him and over him, a blackness within blackness. I saw Tillman open his mouth and his eyes in surprise. I lifted a hand in farewell, and the whole construct, with Tillman inside, folded away into itself and vanished.