“No, I’m not. As far as I can tell, this, by some means completely beyond comprehension, is not your fault.” His fingers were gripping my chin firmly, turning my face to one side, then the other. He was examining my skin color, the whites of my eyes, double-checking Rafferty’s work. When it came to me, Niko trusted no one but himself for the last word.

“Want to look at my teeth too?” I asked. “Guess my age like a horse’s?”

He decided to swat me after all. “Get your things and let’s go.” He stopped my first step with a hand on my shoulder. “You know, this may be one of the few times I was actually grateful you’re half Auphe.”

“You should be.” Rafferty dropped the bottle onto the concrete. It didn’t shatter, instead rolling from side to side with a musical tinkle. “Otherwise he would’ve never even made it to the door. He’d have been facedown in the parking lot right about where we’re standing. Dead between one breath and the next. Suyolak’s hypervirus had made it at least this far out. And if Cal had been human, all human, I’m not sure I could’ve brought him back.” Reddish brown went to yellow, then to dark amber as he stared at us through ragged auburn hair. “The Plague of the World. They weren’t shitting when they gave him that name. He’s a harvester of death, all right, but I’ll reap his ass.”

“You can be sure of that?” Niko demanded.

“No,” he answered, passing us on the way back to the car.

At least he was honest.

8

My name is Catcher…

My name is Catcher. I was pretty sure about that, as I gave a sleepy blink-as sure as I was of anything. Sun and wind and smells; some were new, some not, and all of them confusing. There was also a hazy memory of a cat. My ears lay back and I decided I didn’t care about my little way of checking if I was in my right mind, because then I sort of wished I weren’t. Full consciousness had hit me, and I woke up to a massive case of unhappy. Despite the easygoing attitude I tried to hang on to all my life, I didn’t think that was going to change anytime in the next day or so.

The day before Rafferty and I had gone to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to meet with an American Indian healer. He also happened to be about one-sixteenth trickster. One-sixteenth didn’t sound like much, but when some tricksters counted themselves as gods, it could give you serious bragging rights and sometimes the ability to go with it. I didn’t know if this guy had gotten anything extra from his trickster blood, but if he had, it hadn’t superpowered his healing ability any. He couldn’t undo what Rafferty had done and told us both, sympathetically but in no uncertain terms, that no one could. I’d been a dead man walking. Rafferty had traded my human half for more than five years of life, and only he could’ve pulled that off. No one else could do what he’d done to begin with and there was no way on Coyote’s green earth that anyone could undo it either, the other healer had said.

My cousin didn’t take it well.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t throw anything either, and with his temper, that was saying something. I would’ve been less worried if he had thrown something. But he didn’t. He just said calmly that we’d keep looking. He wasn’t giving up, and he meant it. He actually meant it.

Raff didn’t get it. He was never going to get it. He talked about Niko’s knowing some Japanese healing entity and maybe…

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

He couldn’t let me go. He couldn’t forgive himself when there was nothing to forgive. He had saved me, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t convince him of that. And now he was going to get himself killed on our one break from searching under every rock for my impossible, long-lost humanity. No Disney World. No Grand Canyon. No Hawaii, although they had strict quarantine rules there for my kind anyway. My cousin needed a vacation in the worst way. I liked him sane and the way he was going, he was going to be leaking lucidity as if his brain were a sieve. Disney World might not have cured that, but it was better than a psychotic antihealer who was turning the air itself into death. Rafferty had gone through more than enough these past years. He didn’t need this burden too. Did I care if he was the only one who could stop this Suyolak? Not really.

I had cared before. I’d cared about the world and doing the right thing, but that was when I knew Raff could take down this Rom disease without breaking stride-because he was that good, my cousin. Then I’d heard Cal ’s voice as he went from perfectly healthy to death’s door in seconds-a half Auphe taken out that quickly.

I cared about the world all right, but I cared about my cousin more. Besides, Niko and Cal just hadn’t looked hard enough for another healer. I knew about looking. One day didn’t count. Even if Rafferty was the only one who could take out Suyolak, that didn’t make it fair. I’d always thought life should be fair, whether wearing fur or skin. I knew it wasn’t-I wasn’t naïve, but it didn’t change my thinking it should be. Wolves didn’t actually see in black and white; we saw in blues and greens. Yet I saw in black and white when it came to my view of the world. Things were either fair or they weren’t, and this wasn’t.

No, I wasn’t happy about this whole thing, and my waking up with a dead cat curled on top of me didn’t improve my mood at all. I liked to think I was a good guy. I was going to help stop global warming when I was a student; that and save the rain forest. These days I avoided watering people’s prize rosebushes and put up with the humiliation of letting little old grannies pat me on the head while trying to shove dog biscuits down my throat. That was an effort, right? Considering the taste of dog biscuits, it was a big effort. But now… now this good guy bared his teeth at the cat before lifting his head to bare his teeth at everyone else around him. It was a good thing you could fit about fourteen people in an Eldorado-fourteen people or one human, a monster mix, a puck, two werewolves, and that damn dead cat. It was about equal comfortwise, but it was a tour I wished we hadn’t signed up for.

I glared at my faithful cousin who’d put me to sleep when I’d been fighting with a female feline with male pattern baldness and an advanced case of dead. I wasn’t sure if the battle had been an “episode” or just a general freak-out at the sight of a walking, grinning, tail-thrashing zombie cat. I’d seen a lot of things in my life; as a werewolf that’s a given, but that was a first. Another first was its nearly kicking my furry butt. I should be glad Rafferty had sent me to naptime. That way I could pretend it was a draw and save some of my fuzzy dignity.

The cat felt me move, yawned, and leaped up front with Niko and Goodfellow to curl up on the dashboard. Her toothy, fanged grin was smug, and I couldn’t help but bristle. I growled at her, then sat up to turn my head toward Rafferty and growled harder.

“She’s already dead,” he said in his defense. “I couldn’t put her to sleep. Suck the life force out of her and rekill her, yeah, but not put her to sleep. And Goodfellow, with his usual bad taste, seems to like her.”

I snorted and kept growling. That was no excuse and I let him know it. Niko was driving and I was between Cal and my cousin. We were on the road, the parking lot just a memory. That was odd. I gave up on the growling, and sneezed curiously. We’d left our car behind. I liked that car. I especially liked the catless atmosphere of it, and, sorry to say it about Cal, but he smelled of murder in the shadows. It wasn’t his fault. I imagined he’d suffered more than I could imagine from being what he was, suffered from prejudice, suffered from instinct, suffered by knowing he had been created to be nothing but a living weapon. I felt bad for him, I did… but he still smelled like he smelled: Auphe-unkillable monster; five times worse than a demon from Hell. Granted, most couldn’t smell him, but Wolves could. Couldn’t they at the very least hang a deodorizer off his ear out of common courtesy? Pine-fresh maybe? I could handle that. I was the accommodating kind.