Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) (9 page)

Oliver
sighed again. Better safe than sorry, he supposed, and if it would make Tyler
feel better…  He was surprised to find he was beginning to like the man. “All
right. It’s kind of a mess in there, though. Sorry.”  Not having had guests
over in ages, Oliver hadn’t been especially strict about keeping his house
clean.

“Doesn’t
matter to me,” Tyler said. “I’m going to leave the car running. If I’m not back
in five minutes, just drive away. Don’t come looking for me. Artemis will find
you.” He got out of the car and shut the door quietly behind him. Oliver
watched as he cautiously approached the house’s front door, looked around
carefully, and then put the key into the lock. Oliver had a sudden burst of
fear that the house would explode as soon as Tyler opened the door, but it
swung open the same way it had every other time someone had turned the knob.
Tyler slipped inside the house, closing the door behind him.

Oliver
shook his head softly. Had he really thought the house was going to explode?
His life wasn’t an action movie. At least not yet. But he had earned the right
to be paranoid, hadn’t he? Who could possibly blame him after an assassin had
showed up at his office? That hadn’t been a figment of his imagination, after
all.

“Hey!”
shouted a small voice from just outside the car. “Hey!  Hey!”

Oliver
looked around, startled. He hadn’t seen anyone approaching the car, and even
now he couldn’t see anyone outside. Who was doing the yelling? Could one of his
neighbors have the television on and a window open?

“Hey!
Asshole!” The voice was insistent. “Down here, asshole!”

Oliver
rolled down the car window. He still didn’t see anybody, until he looked down
and noticed a cat on the sidewalk looking up at him. It was Jeffrey, he
realized. The cat he had kind of adopted, before he had run off. Jeffrey looked
angry. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” the cat said.

Oliver
looked around, not sure how to begin this conversation, or if he should begin
it at all. “Did you just talk?” he asked hesitantly.

“Of
course I talked,” the cat said, clearly annoyed. “What the hell did you do to
me?”

“Me?”
Oliver asked.

“This is
your fault!”

On any
other day, a cat calling him to the carpet would have been enough for Oliver to
call a doctor and schedule a brain scan. But this wasn’t any other day. He
opened the door and stepped out of the car.  Jeffrey backed away, watching him
cautiously. “Don’t try any more of your sorcery!” the cat warned. 

“What?
I’m not a sorcerer,” Oliver said. He sighed and knelt down in front of the cat.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice conciliatory. “I don’t know what happened
to you. It’s been a weird day.” That was certainly an understatement, Oliver
thought. “Tyler can probably explain this.”

“Who?”

“You
probably saw him just now,” Oliver said. “He went into the house a minute ago.
He knows about this stuff.”

“I don’t
want to talk to him,” the cat said. “He smells like a dog, and his shirt is
ugly.”

“He
smells like a dog?” Oliver hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Tyler smelled like
anyone else, as far as he could tell. Not that he went around sniffing people,
of course. The cat’s sense of smell must be much more sensitive than his own.

“Anyway,
I think he is busy with your other friends now,” the cat continued, glancing up
at Oliver’s second-floor window. “So you better figure out what you did to me
and put me back the way I was.”

“I don’t
know how to…” Oliver stopped suddenly. “Wait, what other friends?”

“Your
friends inside the house,” the cat explained. “I saw them hiding in there
earlier when I came looking for you. Two of them
stink
, by the way. Not
like dogs. Way worse. You should really talk to them about it.”

There
were people hiding inside his house? Today wasn’t Oliver’s birthday, and even
if it had been, he didn’t have any friends who would be trying to throw him a
surprise party. “Oh, crap,” he said. 

“What?”

Oliver
looked back at his house. He needed to warn Tyler that he wasn’t alone in
there. He stood up and took a step toward the door, but suddenly the second-floor
window shattered and a heavyset man came tumbling through it. He fell through
the air, screaming, until he hit the ground with a sickening thud.

Oliver
ran towards him intending to help, but stopped short when he got a closer look.
The back of the man’s skull had been cracked open and Oliver could see blood
and bits of bone on the pavement. The man was no longer breathing.  This man,
whoever he had been, was far beyond help.

Oliver
could hear shouting coming from the other side of the broken window, followed
by two gunshots and a cry of pain as a piece of furniture inside his house was
smashed. Oliver saw Tyler struggling with another one of the intruders near the
window. There was something strange about the other man’s skin, Oliver thought.
Tattoos? Tyler hadn’t turned the interior lights on and it was difficult to see
in the dark. No, they weren’t tattoos. Maybe he had psoriasis or some other
skin condition. A bad case, from the looks of things.  The other man’s skin
looked as if it was covered in small, overlapping scales.

The new
man spotted Oliver as he struggled with Tyler. “He’s outside,” the man shouted
to someone else. “Go!”

Tyler
kneed the man violently in the groin and tossed him aside. “Get out of here!”
he shouted down at Oliver. Then someone seized him from behind and dragged him
out of Oliver’s sight.

Jeffrey
was at Oliver’s feet, watching the fight above them with interest. “Use your
magic,” he urged Oliver.

“I’m not
a damn sorcerer!” Oliver insisted.

“No?
Then maybe you better start running,” Jeffrey suggested.

Oliver
heard more struggling from inside the house, another gunshot, and then a
sickening crack. A long moment passed in silence, and then the front door
opened and Tyler stepped outside. His Hawaiian shirt was badly torn and wet
with blood. He had one hand pressed to his abdomen and was breathing heavily.

“Are you
all right?” Oliver asked. It occurred to him at once that this was a stupid
question. Of course the man wasn’t all right.

“Sure,”
Tyler said, wincing. “No problem.”

Oliver
heard a screech of tires from down the street. A silver Miata was racing toward
them. It pulled to a stop and Sally jumped out, silver pistols appearing in
each hand. 

“It’s
over,” Tyler told her.

“How
many?” she asked.

“Two
lizards, three humans.”

Oliver
blinked. Tyler had just fought five people? At least one of whom had had a gun?
And he’d
won
?

“They
played us,” Sally spat. “God damn it.”

Oliver
heard sirens approaching in the distance. “Thank god, the cops,” he said.

Sally
scowled at him. “You really want to explain this to the police?” she asked him,
motioning with one pistol to the dead man lying on the pavement a few feet
away.

“Lizards,”
Jeffrey said, looking up at the broken window. He sniffed the air. “That’s it.
That’s why they smelled so strange to me. They’re lizards that look like
people.”

Tyler
and Sally stared at the cat in shock. “Oh yeah,” Oliver said, realizing this
part was new for them. “Guys, this is Jeffrey. Jeffrey, meet Tyler and Sally.”
It occurred to him that he was introducing them to a cat. Maybe he’d already
seen the doctor and had that brain scan. Maybe he was in a hospital somewhere
right now, and this was all some kind of fever dream.

“My name
isn’t actually Jeffrey,” the cat pointed out. “But I’m not sure you could pronounce
it.”

“Wow,”
Tyler groaned, still wincing. “You really did make a cat talk.”

“See?”
the cat said to Oliver. “It’s your fault. He gets it.”

Oliver
looked up the street. He could see flashing red lights now. In a moment the
neighborhood would be swarming with police, maybe a SWAT team, and who knew
what else. 

“Is
Seven on that?” Tyler asked.

“Yeah.”
Sally frowned, fingering one of her pistols. “Taking his damn time about it.”

Oliver
wondered what that meant, but it became clear when the sirens abruptly stopped
and the flashing lights disappeared. Oliver saw car headlights turning away.
Nobody was coming now. The street was quiet again.

“Huh,”
said Jeffrey. “Would you look at that?”

“I can’t
believe you have a talking cat,” Sally said. “Artemis said there weren’t any.”

“There
aren’t,” Jeffrey pointed out. “Cats can’t talk. And I couldn’t do it either,
until this guy up and put the whammy on me!”

Tyler
choked out a laugh. “Did you put the whammy on him?” he asked Oliver.

“No!”
Oliver insisted.

“We can
sort this out later,” Sally said. “Right now…” she stopped as Tyler suddenly
staggered forward, dropping to one knee. “T.?”

“Hey,
he’s bleeding!” said Jeffrey.

Sally
bent down and ripped Tyler’s Hawaiian shirt open. Oliver gasped. Tyler had two
bullet holes in his abdomen and was bleeding profusely from them.

“Oh,
shit,” Oliver said.

“Yeah,
don’t worry about it,” Tyler said. “It’s not bad.  I’ll be fine.”

“Dumbass,”
Sally said softly. “Why didn’t you say you were hit? Can you stand?”

“Sure.”
Tyler strained for a moment but didn’t move. “Well, no, actually.”

“We’ve
got to get him to a hospital,” Oliver said. 

“Or a
vet,” Jeffrey said. Oliver gave him a harsh look. “I told you he smells!” the
cat complained.

Sally
had a dark expression. “There’s no time to take him anywhere,” she said
quietly. “He’s bleeding out.” She put a hand gently on the man’s cheek. “T.,
I’m sorry. You’ve got to do it.”

Tyler
shook his head. “It’s not that bad.”

“You’re
not going to have a choice in a minute,” she said solemnly. “You have a better
shot to stay in control if you do it before it takes you.”

Jeffrey
tilted his head and sniffed the air curiously. He looked at Tyler. “You smell
even worse now,” he said.

“Yeah,”
Tyler nodded. “That happens.”

“Hey,”
the cat said to Oliver. “I think we had better get out of here.”

“We
can’t leave him,” Oliver snapped.

“It’s
all right,” Sally said to Tyler. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Fine,”
the other man conceded, gritting his teeth. “Get Oliver out of here. Touch base
with Artemis when you’re out of the city.” His breaths were short and shallow
now, and increasing in speed. “Get going.  I don’t think I’ve got much longer.”

Sally
squeezed his hand and then stood up. “Let’s go,” she said to Oliver.

“Are you
serious?” Oliver asked. They couldn’t abandon the man here.

Tyler
suddenly screamed, doubling over in pain. Oliver saw him shudder, and his
muscles seemed to ripple. Was he having a seizure?

Then
there was a loud crack. Oliver gasped. One of Tyler’s bones had just snapped.
It was quickly followed by another.

“We have
to go now,” Sally said, urgency in her voice. “He can usually control himself,
but he’s in a lot of pain and I can’t be sure.”

“Go,”
Tyler urged through clenched teeth. Oliver stared at him in shock. Tyler’s eyes
had been blue when they had met this morning. Oliver was sure of that. But now
the irises were yellow, and they seemed to glow as if they were being lit by a
candle from somewhere deep inside his skull.

Oliver
took a hesitant step back.  He could hear more of Tyler’s bones cracking
horribly now, his limbs twisting around as if he were some kind of bizarre
marionette. Oliver quickly realized that the bones were not simply breaking;
they were reforming. Tyler was changing into something else.

“Yeah,
let’s go,” Oliver said.

Sally and
Oliver piled into the Miata. “Hey, wait!” Jeffrey yelled, jumping in after
them. Sally put the car in gear and hit the accelerator. The tires screeched,
and they pulled away from Oliver’s house as if the car had been shot out of a
cannon. In the passenger side mirror Oliver could see Tyler climbing to his
feet in the street behind them, but the shape of his body was bizarrely
different now. His upper body was like that of a bodybuilder, massive and
muscled. His arms were longer than they had been before, reaching nearly to his
knees. Oliver knew that they would end in sharp claws, and that he wasn’t
imagining the thick hair he thought he saw covering Tyler’s shirtless torso.
Tyler turned to watch them as the car sped away and Oliver could just barely
make out the man’s terrifying new face.

“He’s
a…” Oliver started. He knew the word he was looking for, but he wasn’t sure
he’d be able to say it. “He’s…”

“He’s a
freaking werewolf!” Jeffrey cried out from the back seat. “Who the hell are you
people?”

Sally
turned the car north onto 19
^th
Avenue. “Yes, he’s a werewolf. Well,
not really, but close enough. He doesn’t flip out when there’s a full moon or
anything.” She shrugged. “He
can
get a little testy, though.”

“He’s a
werewolf? What are you, then?” Oliver asked. “Another werewolf?”

She
glared at him. “Of course not.”

“She
smells weird, though,” Jeffrey said. His little eyes widened. “She’s a
vampire!  A dark fiend of the night!”

Sally
glared at the cat in the rear view mirror. “I didn’t teach him
that
,”
Oliver offered.

“I’m not
a vampire,” Sally told the cat. “Although that does give me an idea.”

“What
idea?” Oliver asked.

“Never
mind. We’re getting you out of the city.” She looked at the cat. “I can’t
believe I’m saying this, but do you want to stay with us or go?” she asked the
cat. 

“I’m
staying with him until he turns me back to normal,” Jeffrey said.