The Better to Hold You (3 page)

“I’m not kidding.”

“And you really climbed up the front of the building?” Hunter reached for his watch on the bedside table and strapped it on.

“Actually, I climbed the front of the building next door and came over the balcony.”

“Good Lord.” Hunter shook his head, admiringly. “And I suppose you worked out that this was the most logical course of action?”

“I needed to get some … things.”

“That explains it, then. By the way, your pants are kind of torn.”

I bent to inspect the damage, wondering how to segue into my next question. “Um, Hunter, is there—there isn’t anyone else here, is there?”

Hunter laughed, his head nodding forward, as if he were embarrassed to meet my eyes. “What, you mean hiding in the closet? No, Abra.” He looked up. “I’m sorry about the phone. I thought it was one of those telemarketers.” Hunter patted the bed. “Come sit down.”

“I have to cancel my credit card and checks.”

“You can do that in a minute. Come over here and sit down. I can see you’re upset.”

I sat down beside him, and he wrapped me in his arms. He wasn’t even sweaty. The people in Hunter’s family didn’t seem to develop as many body odors as the people in mine. As he held me I noticed that all along the top of our low dresser, Hunter’s wallet had hemor-rhaged business cards, loose change, dollar bills, and cigarettes, breaking the neat ranks of my perfume bottles and enameled jewelry boxes.

“You okay, ‘Cadabra girl?”

I nodded into his shoulder. “Hunter.” I tried to think of a way to put this. “Is it me?”

He stiffened under my hands, then slid away. “It’s nothing to do with you, Abs. I’m just—it’s been a difficult couple of months.”

It had been three months, actually. Back in early May, I’d been lying on the plastic chaise lounge we’d wedged sideways on our balcony, reading a brochure on Block Island. No cars in summer, just like a little Nantucket close to home. My internship at the Institute began in July; I’d asked Hunter if he wanted to try to get away with me in June. Sounding distracted, he had responded that he’d just gotten an idea for a piece on some mythical Romanian beastie.

This, roughly translated, meant, I’ve already bought my ticket and you won’t be seeing me again till the last dead brown leaf of summer gets ready to take that final dive.

Hunter had spent the last few years writing articles for magazines like Outside and Backpacker. He hoped, I knew, for the kind of career-making story that meant a feature article in Vanity Fair, a book deal, movie rights, and full circle to an ongoing gig as contributing editor. All he needed was the right break—his own Everest, his personal perfect storm.

And that was why Hunter was intent on spending the summer with his Romanian-English phrase book instead of with me. It seemed that the existence of Europe’s last surviving wolves was under serious threat. Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime, like Hitler’s, had possessed a hunter’s fond regard for preserving native woodlands. The Romanians figured that wealthy American and European eco-tourists might pay to see the ancient woods where their ancestors once walked in fear of trolls, dragons, and flesh-eating creatures. This was Transylvania, after all, monster country.

And some people will pay good money to see monsters.

So, while the enterprising Romanians were cutting down old-growth forest and setting up boutique hotels, the real wolves’ ranges were growing ever smaller. And since wolves are a little less popular with family tourists than, say, a nice elk or eagle, the villagers weren’t shy about killing the rogue that went after a local calf or sheep.

If it was big enough, it got called a werewolf.

It was a good story. It was a morality tale with a good dose of irony and a hint of B-movie Transylvanian spice. And Hunter had told it well, sitting next to me on our little Manhattan terrace.

Unfortunately, it was such a good story that my Transylvania-hopping husband barely found time to call me three times in as many months. Once I’d started my internship at the Institute, I’d been able to distract myself with work—I’d been assigned to Malachy Knox’s medical group, which was the veterinary equivalent of special ops. There wasn’t much time or opportunity to ruminate about your faraway sweetheart.

But now Hunter was back, which filled me with relief and gratitude, and yet also made me want to bark: Who’ve you been sleeping with? If only there was a way to say this without saying it. Ask it without asking.

“You haven’t told me much about your trip yet.”

“Abra? You’re not going to blow this whole thing out of proportion, are you?”

I turned to look at him. He was clipping his words, getting prepared to be angry, just in case.

“I just want to know why you didn’t—why you didn’t want—” Me. I left that last pathetic “me” unspoken.

Hunter sighed deeply, pulling me back into his arms. He rested his chin on the top of my head, which hurt. “Oh, Abra, I am so sick and tired and out of my head. I wouldn’t have been any good for you. I just needed—I just wanted something quick and easy.”

“I can be quick and easy.”

Hunter’s hands rubbed my back, moved under my shirt, and then skimmed the waistband of my pants. “You sweet girl.”

I felt the sting of tears and fought it. “Hunter, I need to make my calls and get to work. I’m going to be late as it is.”

“I could make you later.” His mouth moved down, found my ear. His breath was a little stale from sleep.

“Hunter.” Was this affection, or renewed lust, or pity? With Hunter, I could never tell. His mouth moved down my neck, then he lifted my shirt and slid his hand under my practical beige brassiere.

“God, you’ve still got the breasts of a thirteen-year-old virgin.” This may not have sounded like a compliment, but believe me, it was. Hunter pulled my shirt over my head, and for a moment I was caught in my long brown hair.

“You’re never going to cut this, right?”

My hair nearly reaches my waist. “No.”

Hunter wrapped my hair around his wrist and tugged. “I’ve got you—you’re my prisoner.”

I looked at him with my head back, throat bared. His dark eyes were shining now. “Is that what you want?”

Hunter glanced down at himself. “What do you think?”

We looked at each other. “All right, then.”

There was a pause, a beat, and then Hunter let go of my hair and yanked down my pants. “Like this? Without touching you first? Quick and easy. My prisoner.”

I watched his eyes. This was real. We hadn’t made love in three months. The last time I’d been in his arms, his thoughts had been a thousand miles away, on the trip ahead, on the adventure of the unknown. “No,” I said carefully, whipping my head a little back and forth, making my hair move. “No, please, no.” In case he’d thought that first no had been real.

Hunter pinned my hands over my head. He was stronger than his wiry frame suggested. “Spread ‘em.”

“No.” How was this really done? With his hands holding my wrists, how could he get my legs apart if I didn’t help?

Hunter wedged his knee in between my thighs. “I said, spread ‘em.”

“No.”

A look, almost one of anger, crossed Hunter’s face, and for a moment I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. Then he transferred both wrists to one hand, and tried to use his other hand to guide himself inside me. After a moment, he gave up, looked at me again, and said, “Slave Girl, you’d better start listening to your Master.”

There was a touch of real anger in me. “No.”

Hunter sat back, trying to figure this out. This was a game of domination. How far to go? I was curious, too. And more than a little excited.

What he did next surprised the hell out of me. He sort of yanked me up, threw me on my stomach, and grabbed me by the back of the neck, like you would a cat. I think I was lying on the remote control; something was digging into my breast.

“Hunter—”

Our bed is a high one, and he was standing when he thrust into me. For a moment, I felt just the blunt knock of him at my entrance, and then he started to go deeper, faster, a pace set for his plea sure, not mine. There was the slap of flesh, just as I had heard it from the other room, except this time I was there beneath him. I had wanted this more than I’d let myself know.

“Hunter.” But he was beyond hearing, caught up in the chase. He slammed into me with a roughness I wasn’t used to, hitting the place high up inside that is just this side of pain. But it wasn’t pain. Not really. Because pain doesn’t climb, doesn’t build and build and … Hunter came too soon, with a deep moan that didn’t sound like him at all. And then he collapsed on top of me.

Hunter kissed the back of my neck. “You okay, Slave Girl?” He put his hand between my legs. “I was too quick for you.”

“No, I …” He moved his fingers, and I took a breath.

“There? Is that it? Come on, Abra, let me take you there.”

I started to cry then, just a little. I would never be able to lose control this way, with Hunter watching me, waiting for my response. He moved his fingers faster, mistaking my sounds for plea sure.

Cheating him, cheating myself, I cried out my dissatisfaction, and he was content.

I finally arrived at work two and a half hours late. Even though I’d called to explain, I felt conspicuously guilty as I moved through the vast white labyrinth of corridors. I kept wanting to announce to the people I passed in the halls that I’d left home as quickly as I could, borrowing thirty dollars from Hunter and leaving him to call my bank and the local police office. I hadn’t wasted a single moment.

Aside from that little aberrant time-out as a slave girl.

I found my medical ser vices group S.O.A.P.’ing a few of the noncriticals. Dr. Malachy Knox, the staff veterinarian in charge of our unit, was holding a limp rag of a cat with the distinctive uremic smell of kidney failure.

“All right,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got here. Now, what does the S in S.O.A.P. stand for?”

Sam rolled his eyes at me: Even the Institute vet techs knew the acronym for Subjective analysis, Objective data, Assessment, and Plan. But that was Malachy’s style—he drawled out his questions in his plummy British accent as if he thought we were all a bit slow. Of course, in Sam’s case, he might have had a point.

“S stands for Subjective analysis,” said Sam. “My opinion? He looks half dead.”

“I’d list that as unresponsive.” Malachy glanced over at me. “Welcome to morning rounds, Ms. Barrow.”

I flushed, realizing that he must not have received my message. “I’m so sorry I’m so late, but my pocketbook was stolen on the train.”

Lilliana, my favorite member of the team, gave me a sympathetic smile, while the humorless Ofer pushed his glasses up on his nose like an officious gnome. Malachy just looked at me assessingly, his hands still stroking the cat’s abdomen, feeling reflexively for the state of the cat’s skin, the size of its spleen, its bowel loops.

As Malachy described what he was doing, Sam kept watching the older man intently as if he were expecting some sleight of hand. Even though Sam hulked a full seven inches over Malachy, and both men wore the AMI uniform of white lab coats and khakis, even a casual observer would have known which one was in charge.

The question of late was whether he would remain so. Dr. Malachy Knox, a.k.a. “Mad Mal,” was the Institute’s resident rock star, a brilliant researcher with a reputation for thinking outside the box and using unorthodox methodologies. In vet school, I had studied his infamous experiments transplanting the brains of rhesus monkeys, and had been torn between horror and awe at the implications of his work. More recently, he had been involved in isolating the so-called lycanthropy virus, a rare disorder that caused some individuals’ cells to behave like fetal or stem cells, rendering them capable of radical shifts in form and function. Despite the name, the virus did not actually turn the host into a wolf—or, at least, that was the prevailing wisdom. Malachy himself would only say that the virus manifested itself very differently in different hosts, and that canid DNA was among the most plastic in the animal kingdom. He also liked to point out that humans and wolves had been associating with each other since the days when our own DNA hadn’t yet been fixed in its current arrangement.

I wasn’t entirely sure what Malachy had done that had resulted in his ouster from the research unit and had brought him down to the far humbler position of, as he put it, “shepherding yearlings around.” But what ever it was, it had affected his health as well as his career.

Underneath his wildly curling black hair, Malachy’s craggy face was pallid and drawn, and where his wrists were visible under his lab coat, they appeared almost skeletal. I knew for a fact that he was forty-six, but he looked a good decade older.

“Well, Ms. Barrow,” said Malachy, bringing my attention back to the here and now, “I can only assume that your current state of vague disinterest with our feline patient is the result of your brush with the city’s underbelly. Although a countertheory might involve the fact that your husband has just returned from a long trip. He was in Romania, researching the legendary Unwolves, was he not?”

What ever was wrong with Malachy Knox clearly did not affect his intelligence. He had gotten my message, I realized. He had just wanted to keep me off-balance.

“Yes,” I said, “Hunter was looking into the stories about giant wolves.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ofer, not sounding it, “but what could it possibly matter if her husband is wasting his time looking for vampires in Transylvania? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on our patient?” He pointed with one stubby-fingered hand, indicated the limp cat lying glassy-eyed on the examining table.

“Not vampires, Ofer—lycanthropes.” Malachy wrote the word out on the whiteboard behind him with a dry erase pen. “Although many people confuse the Greek vrykolakas with the Slavic vậrcolac, the former was supposed to be a sort of undead creature, not unlike a vampire, while I’ve heard the vậrcolac variously described as a wolf demon or a wizard with shapeshifting abilities. The pricolici, on the other hand, are large, wolflike creatures inhabited by human souls—Unwolves, or, more commonly, werewolves.”