He turned his head and frowned at me. I didn’t take it personally. For a healer, his bedside manner was all but nonexistent. He was the guy who would tell you that you deserved the heart attack and why not eat some more pork and cheese while you were at it, you fat bastard. Try blocking up another artery. Not a great lover of his patients in general-of anybody in fact, outside of Catcher.
“None of your business,” he grunted. He had angular features and hadn’t bothered to shave in a day or two. A nod to the June humidity, he was wearing a T-shirt in the same faded condition as the one I was wearing that said GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, BUT GOOD AIM WILL EVERY TIME. He was also wearing a pair of equally faded jeans, and they weren’t fashionably faded. They had Goodwill written all over them. Rafferty didn’t give a damn how he looked or whether people liked what he said or how he said it. He couldn’t give a flying shit. I liked that about him. It reminded me of myself, minus my new discovery about traveling’s effect on me. Thanks to Niko, the happy-go-lucky, high-as-a-kite happiness didn’t last anyway. He didn’t think it was natural. He might be right, but I wasn’t sure I cared. To have my Auphe blood benefit me instead of curse me for once… I’d take that.
As for that Auphe in me…
When we first met Rafferty and Catcher a few years ago, I’d smelled the difference in them… werewolves… and they’d smelled the difference in me. Rafferty hadn’t known what the difference was at the time, or so I’d thought, because then I didn’t genuinely know what the Auphe were. Now I knew that Rafferty had known all along but hadn’t said anything. Either he didn’t want to be involved with an Auphe half-breed-couldn’t blame him there-or figured it was none of his business. I wasn’t foaming at the mouth or eating the pigeons and squirrels running around. That was good enough for him.
We’d met only in passing the first time in Central Park. Rafferty was tossing a Frisbee and Catcher was bounding into the air for it. Even then he’d been stuck in wolf form, with Rafferty, his cousin, doing his damnedest to get him back to a werewolf’s changeability. After an exchange of wary sniffs, Rafferty fished around in the pocket of his baggy cargo pants, then passed over a rumpled card. It had the letters RJ on it-for Rafferty Jeftichew-as well as that snake and staff sign doctors had plastered around and a phone number. “Here,” he’d grunted, handing it to Niko. “You might need a healer someday.” Then he looked over at me, his straight slash of eyebrows lowered. “In fact, I can guarantee it. And this one can’t go to a doctor or, hell, worse yet, a hospital, or it’ll probably be alien autopsy for you.”
Niko and he had talked some more. I thought they related. One with a sick cousin and one with a brother who might be considered a little worse than sick. Catcher and I went off and played more Frisbee. That had been three years ago. Rafferty had been right. We’d ended up needing a healer. He’d saved my life, but he wasn’t any closer to his goal.
Now Catcher gave me the second sign he was still sick. He lifted his upper lip to reveal an impressive show of large white teeth and growled. The look in his yellow eyes, many shades lighter than Delilah’s, was feral and suspicious. Catcher had been frozen a long time as a wolf. Maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad, but little by little he was losing the human intelligence werewolves kept when they shifted from skin to fur. One day he’d be wolf and nothing but wolf. I had no idea how that felt to him. No idea what it was like to be only wolf… like he was wolf now as he growled at me.
Rafferty rested a battered sneaker on top of Catcher’s head and rubbed. “It’s okay, Catch,” he said gruffly. “It’s just Cal. Half- Auphe. Possessed. So annoying his own brother stabbed him. No big deal.”
Confusion clouded the wolf’s eyes for a moment. Then they cleared and he snorted a spray of fine white mist-the leftover of a vanilla shake, from the smell of it. Just like that, the intelligence was back-human intelligence bright and sharp in wolf eyes. He yawned, recognition and dismissal all in one, and rolled onto his back for a furry nap. I knew what it was to lose myself. I hoped it was less painful for him… if not for Rafferty.
I leaned against the car. “You survived the night,” I said to Nik.
“Barely.” He continued eating a sandwich of sprouts, sprouts, sprouts, and some liquid slop to keep them on the bread-well, slop and a tangibly foul mood. “Robin and Ishiah had phone sex last night… until I cut the line. Then Goodfellow used his cell phone. I broke it, quite, quite thoroughly. When he finally went to bed, in less than five minutes he was asleep and having what I guessed from the moaning to be a dream of the nocturnal emissions kind. I slept in the bathtub with a knife wedging the bathroom door closed.”
“Gotta walk it off, Nik.” I grinned. “It’s a dangerous world.” I bit my tongue at his glare and didn’t go any further with it, not having much of a desire to be wearing that sprout sandwich.
“Ass,” he said without any surprise at the fact. He finished the sandwich and studied me with a look unreadable to anyone but me, commenting, “You survived as well.”
“Barely,” I echoed smugly. My stomach began to growl as Rafferty finished up a bear claw. “Get me one, Jeftichew?”
“Yeah, I hauled ass from Wyoming, driving all night drinking bad coffee, to bring you a damn doughnut.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “Doing your job and keeping the world from being wiped out by a psychotic Marcus Welby from Hell isn’t enough. What was I thinking?”
I scowled. “You might’ve saved my life, Rafferty, but that doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass, furry or not.” Now that was the normal me.
“Yeah, I smell you’re into walking on the Wolf side now.” His eyes, reddish brown, went a much paler amber. “Don’t think that means you can give me shit. Going wolf is the least I could do to you. Want to piss pure liquid fire for the rest of your life? Better yet, want to piss your pants right now?”
“Because you can do what Suyolak can do. Like when you once stopped Cal ’s heart,” Niko said quietly, not particularly concerned about my urinary tract from what I could tell.
“I can.” He finished wiping his hands. “But I don’t. Usually. I have to have one damn good reason or I wouldn’t be a healer. I’d be nothing but an executioner with a hard-on for genocide like Suyolak. Healers have that code precisely because of him. Do no harm.” His eyes paled further to Catcher yellow. “Unless you can’t avoid it. When you’re a healer and a Wolf, there are caveats.”
I, not wanting to have a urinary tract infection for the rest of my life or to piss my pants in a cheap motel parking lot, eased up. Rafferty and I were two of a kind: asses. Except that he healed and I killed. He was also having a helluva bad time with his cousin. He had shit enough in his life. He didn’t need more from me. “Speaking of Suyolak. He paid me a visit in one of my dreams. Said he could make me all Auphe. He can’t do that.” I hesitated, shifting against the metal of the car. “Right?”
He looked down at Catcher who was already kicking a back leg in his sleep. When he looked back, his eyes had reverted to their normal color. “If the Auphe were shapechangers like wolves, then, yeah, maybe. But they weren’t, so, no. He can’t make you Auphe, and I can’t make you human.” He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “Sorry.”
“Eh, I’m over it.”
His eyebrows shot skyward at my offhand dismissal. Niko wasn’t so quick to give up on the subject, although he approached it from a different angle-sneaky bastard. “So why can’t you change Catcher back if he’s a shapechanger?” he asked. “You say you can’t change Cal. I understand that, but what of Catcher? If that’s true, from what you told us, that doesn’t make sense. You should be able to cure him.”