Doug looked at Jay. He looked at the boy who was ostensibly his best friend and willed himself to have a feeling. Any feeling, but it should be fierce, and raw. Nothing came. There was nothing in him anymore that was fierce or raw except his lust. And even as he thought this, he knew it wasn’t true. Increasingly, his vampirism wasn’t a lust, it was an itch. An itch that needed a lot of scratching, sure, but…just an itch. A constant irritation; a rash; a chicken pox on his soul.
"You kids are falling in with a dangerous group of people, Doug. You have to see that. Before it’s too late. It was almost too late for my boy." His voice cracked, and he pressed a red fist against his mouth while Pamela reentered the room. "There are some bad, bad kids at that school."
That was true. There were some very bad kids at that school. Monsters. Pamela had wanted to know if any one of them might have done this to Jay, and the answer was of course.
Of course.
32
The wolf in creep’s clothing
DOUG COULD SCARCELY believe his luck. No sooner had he vowed to hunt Victor down and destroy him, than a pale wolf charged at him through the trees.
He’d left the Rouses abruptly, left the hospital before meeting Abby’s parents, and it did feel like fleeing a crime scene. He walked swiftly through the first doors he could find marked EXIT, corkscrewed down the ramps of a parking garage, and emerged into the night air.
He had no car here. He’d have to walk home. Or fly home as a bat? No, he liked this shirt.
He was picking his way through the shared woods between the hospital and the seminary when the wolf appeared, upwind, and it smelled like Victor. It slowed and made a wide circle before him and bared its teeth, but stopped short of growling. Doug wondered how best to fight a wolf. He’d have to snap Victor’s neck, he decided. Maybe sacrifice his own arm. He was walking through trees — why hadn’t he picked up a stick?
But there was no attack. Wolf Victor reared back on his hind legs and in that instant Doug realized he was turning human again. Despite himself, Doug looked away. It seemed like a private moment. There came a squeak, the sound of a million discrete hairs pulling back into the skin.
Doug was seeing altogether too much of naked Victor.
He would try to get Victor circling again, he thought, try to get close enough to a tree to snap off a branch, then drive it into Victor’s chest. There was a sternum in the middle of the chest, wasn’t there? And ribs. He’d break the ribs.
"Who were you talking to at school?" Victor snarled, his chest heaving. "Who was that?"
It wasn’t the question Doug was expecting. "Who was who? I talk to a lot of peo—"
"Today! In the parking lot, just as the sun went down."
Doug narrowed his eyes. "Are you spying on me or something?"
"I was coming off the field after practice. You were standing right there in the open with…some guy."
"It was just Stephin David. My so-called mentor? You know."
"That’s Stephin David?"
"Sure. What?"
Victor just looked away, into the ether, and Doug sidestepped gingerly to a tree with a low-hanging branch. He could just make out Victor’s mutterings, despite the wind: "That’s Stephin David…I know where he lives."
"So you were at school, at practice," said Doug. "What’d you do before practice?"
Victor looked at Doug, but his mind might have been racing through the trees. "What?"
"Let me lay out your schedule today as I see it. You had school, lunch, school, a quick errand to kill my best friend, then back to school to spy on me. Did I leave anything out?"
"I killed your best friend?"
Better to let him go on thinking he did, thought Doug. If he hears Jay survived, he’ll just try to finish the job. "You know what you did," he said, his hand closing over the branch. It was thick enough to be strong and already snapped by wind or lightning. If he could wrench it free from the trunk, it would be just over a foot long. Perfect. "Did Borisov tell you to do it? To protect everyone’s precious secret identities?"
"Where are you getting this shit? Jay’s dead? I didn’t do anything to Jay. And I haven’t been talking about him and I never told you anything about wanting to kill the vampire who made me, either. Yeah, I know you’ve been spreading that around. What the hell?"
"I didn’t say that. The signora misunderstood me. But that’s no reason to go try and kill Jay—"
"I told you, I didn’t kill Jay. But you’re gonna get me killed, you know that? I’m in a shitstorm of trouble now with the old vampires. I thought we were friends."
Doug caught his breath. He swallowed away some of the dry crust in his throat. "You…we were." In an instant Doug saw that what he’d assumed was a monster was actually a boy his age, a boy he used to play with on summer vacations. He lost his grip on the tree and his arm sank. Victor did not currently look like a killer. He looked sickly and naked.
"You’re always asking about Jay," said Doug. "And that day behind the gym when he walked up to us…it almost seemed like you were afraid."
"I was afraid. I am afraid. For Jay, for us, about everything being different," Victor mumbled. "Aren’t you afraid?"
"Why are you so pale?" asked Doug.
"Being a wolf…it makes you burn through blood kind of fast."
"Then why do it?"
"I just…feel like I’m in my right skin when I’m a wolf. I’m not real good at being people lately. I’ve been…scary, I guess. I scared my mom."
Maybe he felt exposed then. He stretched to cover his crotch, his arms stiff as a clock’s. Six-thirty, Naked Standard Time.
"Does it work," he asked, "killing the vampire that made you? Does it make you human?"
"Oh, so now you want to do it?"
"I just want to know if it works."
Doug frowned as a new possibility occurred to him. "Asa says it does. So…do you remember everything you do when you’re a wolf? Afterward?"
Victor bit at his thumbnail. "You can’t really trust that Asa," he said. "Who knows what he’s up to — you know?"
"Do you remember your time as a wolf?" Doug asked again. "Are you in control? Or do you just go on autopilot, like when you’re driving?"
"I don’t know. I gotta go."
Victor became a wolf again and disappeared into the darkness.
Doug couldn’t follow. He wasn’t that fast on foot, or as a bat, and he didn’t know how to turn into a wolf. He considered trying, thinking wolfish thoughts, confident that getting stuck halfway this time wouldn’t be as big a problem as it had been that night at the farm. Why, he might even turn into some sort of man-wolf. That didn’t sound so bad.
Then, in a moment of honesty, he imagined what sort of animal might really fall halfway between a wolf and himself, and the image that came to mind was purebred American hairless terrier.
Chewbacca had been an American hairless. Small, spotty skinned, a face like a butcher-shop window. Doug allowed himself to think of Chewbacca then, pictured the dog’s final moments: probably so happy to be meeting another vampire; confused to find he was, in a moment, small game in his own house.
Doug felt the chill suddenly. Something noxious rattled up in him, and he crumpled into a pile of leaves and sobbed. Thinking about a dog he’d never liked, he cried like he hadn’t cried in years — retching, convulsive tears. A dog. A boy and his dog. Jay and Chewbacca, like Batman and Robin, like Han Solo and…Chewbacca. Jay, his friend, nearly dead in an indifferent room in a building behind him. He cried until his tears ran red and he had to staunch the flow with his palms.