10: SETH
Driving to Utica from Ithaca was like playing a redneck version of Grand Theft Auto.
Seth had taken back roads out of Ithaca since they led in the direction he could sense Jack. The two-lane “highways” could barely qualify for the name except they showed up on his GPS system as actual interstate routes. The Porsche’s powerful engine and the twisting roads through farmland and state forests tested his driving abilities.
Every light he hit was red.
Children and animals darted out onto the pavement with annoying frequency. The cats and dogs and whitetail deer he expected. The cows and bison and alpaca tipped the experience to surreal. (Since when were there bison in Central New York? And what were they doing standing in the middle of the freaking road?)
Half of the vehicles were slow-moving Subarus, it being the older redneck car of choice. The other half were a dangerous mix of impatient pickup trucks and random giant farm equipment.
The GPS claimed it was a two-hour drive. Between the bison herd and the slow moving tractors, it had taken three hours. Seth pulled the Porsche into the Utica gas station that Wonder Woman Alvarado had used. The gas gauge read empty and he felt blurry at the edges from exhaustion and hunger.
The Wolf King’s power washed over Seth as he climbed out of the low-slung sports car. Half a world away, the strength of Alexander’s presence was still stunning. Seth leaned against the Porsche’s roof, growling softly. He’d hoped that he could find Jack before the king realized Seth wasn’t safe in Mexico anymore.
A phantom brush of fur. A massive ghost nose drawing in his scent. A great shadowy foot prodding at him. Alexander didn’t seem angry. He seemed puzzled. Was it because he didn’t expect Seth to be in New York?
Seth’s phone rang. He didn’t even have to look at it to know it was Bishop. How much more trouble would he be in if he didn’t answer? He was fairly sure he knew why Alexander had sent Jack to Utica, but he wanted to verify his guess. Of course, Bishop was going to order him back to New York City.
Seth was tempted to punch the top of the Porsche but that would dent the roof. He was in enough trouble already. He answered his phone. “Yes?”
“What are you doing there?” It wasn’t Bishop. Alexander was actually growling through the tiny speaker. Somewhere in the world, pigs were flying.
“Looking for Jack,” Seth said. “You know he’s hurt. Samuels isn’t answering his phone.”
“Samuels is dead.”
It was like getting punched in the stomach. Seth bent in pain. Samuels had been a good friend; one of the few people at the Castle he trusted as much as Jack.
Alexander continued. “There’s a coven of Wickers in that area.”
“The ones that killed Anastasia?” Seth asked.
“Most likely, which is why it’s too dangerous for even you to be there alone. Go back to the Castle.”
“I need to find Jack.”
“Isaiah is on his way. He’ll deal with the Wickers when he gets there. Go home.”
Alexander hung up, confident that he would be obeyed.
“Boston is home.” Seth growled at the lost connection signal. He closed his eyes and focused on Jack.
Something had changed during his drive to Utica. Jack’s connection to the Source was no longer blocked. He must have found a pool of Earthblood. Seth focused harder, pushing through the link between them. Seth wasn’t Alexander; he couldn’t project strong enough to make Jack aware that Seth was looking for him. Seth could tell, though, that Jack had been stabbed a dozen times in the chest. His cousin lay in the magical spring; so weak he could barely move. He was so vulnerable that it scared Seth.
Jack’s emotions, however, had changed; he was no longer afraid. With the Earthblood, Jack had found safety.
“Are you okay?” a man called.
Seth opened his eyes. A news camera truck had pulled into the neighboring gas pump. The passenger with network-worthy good looks was coming toward him, a mix of concern and reporter curiosity on his face.
“I’m just tired,” Seth said truthfully enough. He’d slept on the way back from Mexico but that had been scattered across a half dozen flights. “And I can’t figure out how to put gas in this stupid car.”
The man laughed. “The engine is in the back, so the gas tank is in the front on the passenger side. You just push on the access panel to release it.” He crossed to the other side of the Porsche and pushed against the gas cap hatch, which was out of Seth’s line of sight. “But you need to have the car unlocked first.”
Seth had automatically locked the car when he got out. He used the fob to unlock the doors. The man pressed again on the side and the hatch thumped open. “Thanks.”
The man stayed on the other side of the car, watching Seth closely. “You know any of the kids that were mauled?”
Years of living at the Castle made it so Seth could keep the shock off his face. Wickers in the area. A dead werewolf. Collateral damage had to be expected. “No.” And because that seemed too short an answer, he expanded with, “I go to a private school. I was in Mexico until last night—family funeral. How many kids were killed?”
“Ten. The one survivor has disappeared.” The reporter waved across the street at an auto repair place. “So, you don’t know Joshua?”
Seth swore softly. The reporter had assumed that he knew the victims, which meant they were probably Seth’s age. Ilya was ten months older than Seth.
“Joshua is seventeen?” Seth asked. “Almost eighteen?”
“Yes, that’s him. Do you know where he might be?”
“He’s missing?” Seth felt dread start to rise.
“His parents took him home from the hospital, ran out to do some errands, and came home to find him gone.”
Hospital implied that the boy was hurt. There was a world of difference between bitten and merely clawed. A werewolf’s bite was a magical wound that opened up the person to the Source. The change would have been instantaneous. If the resulting werewolf wasn’t anchored, they became feral.
His family had lost a full generation when a newborn wolf bit a youngling. Seth’s great-grandfather had been blessed with nine healthy children. He’d taken all of them to the Tyringham lodge to celebrate his oldest son being changed into a wolf. He’d made the mistake of leaving all the children alone afterwards except for his infant son, Seth’s grandfather. The newborn wolf lost his temper with a younger sister who hadn’t been changed yet. He nipped at her, meaning only to scare her. When his teeth broke skin, he created a magical wound through which power could flow. She instantly went feral. She killed him, and mauled all their baby siblings. The ones that didn’t go feral were torn apart. The surviving monsters descended on Tyringham. A bloodbath followed.
Normally only an alpha wolf could safely change a child. The alpha used their connection to the Source to anchor the newborn within the pack. Could Thanes safely change a youngling into a newborn werewolf?
“Was Joshua bitten?” Seth asked.
The reporter dismissed the injury with a wave. “They’re worried he has some kind of brain injury. He had amnesia when he woke up. He lives near Woodford State Forest. They’re afraid he’s wandered off.”
Seth cursed. Amnesia was a side effect of being changed. If Joshua was in human form when taken to the hospital, then he wasn’t a feral. It didn’t mean he was in complete control of his wolf; that took time and training. In the meantime, he could accidently create a feral that would kill him and everyone around him.
“So you know him?” the reporter asked.
“No.” Which got him a look of disbelief. “I think I might have met his father.”
The dead puppet had gotten the Viper repaired at the garage. Had she sold Ilya to the mechanics? Was Joshua his long-lost brother?
More importantly, where was Joshua now?
If he was bitten, then he was a newborn werewolf. There was no “maybe” about it. Since Joshua was still a minor, he was a puppy and automatically the responsibility of the nearest alpha. And at the moment, that meant Seth.
* * *
Joshua’s family seemed to have nothing to hide. Their home address was listed with their phone number.
It was small house; it looked like the entire thing would fit in the Wolf King’s ballroom. A large metal Quonset hut garage in the back of the property dwarfed the house. Life, for Joshua’s family, was apparently all about cars.
A solid wall of trees edged the sprawling yard. According to the map, the woods extended a mile on private land to meet up with a large state forest. Seth could see why people thought that Joshua had simply wandered off and gotten lost.
Seth pulled cautiously into the driveway. Somewhere in the area were Wickers who’d already killed one Thane and badly hurt another. Seth turned off the motor and listened to the quiet ticking of the engine.
He’d grown up with stories of how his infant brother had been picked up helpless from his crib and carried out of the mountain lodge. His kidnappers tracked Anastasia’s blood through the snow. His father had howled himself hoarse when he realized he’d chased after the wrong car; that he’d forever lost his first-born son. The only child his father would ever have with his childhood sweetheart, the girl he’d loved nearly half his life.
It would be a miracle if Joshua were his lost brother.
The important thing, though, was he was a newborn werewolf. He wouldn’t be able to fully control his transformation into a wolf. One bite would create a feral, and then there would be an uncontrollable monster loose. It was a cascading disaster waiting to happen. It might be smarter to wait for backup now that Seth knew what was going on but if he hesitated, dozens of people could be killed.
* * *
The back door was unlocked. It surprised Seth until he remembered that the family thought Joshua might have wandered off in a fit of amnesia. They didn’t want to lock Joshua out on a cold autumn day. Seth opened the door and slipped in.
Water from an upstairs bathroom had flooded down through the kitchen’s ceiling the day before. The plaster still dripped. The range sat pulled out from its cove and unplugged. The receptacle looked half-melted; char marks followed the path of water down the wall to the floor.
Seth eyed the dripping ceiling. “Oh, yeah, someone is having trouble with their new wolf strength.”
There was more than one reason why his family normally took newborns camping for a month. Broken faucets, toilets, doors, lamps, and electronics got to be expensive. Seth had spent an entire summer shifting chicken eggs from one basket to another to learn control.
The living room reflected a modest income. Worn furniture. No paintings or artwork. Ancient TV. The items normally displayed on the fireplace mantle had been shoved aside to make way for a multitude of photos of Joshua. Afraid that he was already dead, Joshua’s family had built a shrine to him.
Seth stared at the pictures, trying to see his father in the boy. Joshua didn’t belong with this family. His parents and older sister were willowy tall, blue-eyed and blond. In other words, everything Joshua was not. He didn’t look like a Tatterskein either; he was far too short and mousey. However he ended up with this family, though, it was obvious he’d been raised with love. A toddler sat awe-struck on Santa’s lap. An eight-year-old grinned widely to show off missing baby teeth. A pre-teen had grease up to his elbows and smeared across his face as he did male bonding under the hood of a muscle car. A teenager looked embarrassed by his mother’s hug.
Seth was assuming that the boy was Ilya. If Joshua was his lost older brother, then Ilya had had a good childhood. One that was a far cry from the horrific death that Seth’s family had always imagined. Furthermore, if Joshua had been found and returned as an infant, he would have died with the rest of their family.
“Good for you,” Seth whispered to the pictures.
Seth started to turn away when he noticed that one of the photos had fallen to the floor. Joshua’s parents stood outside their business in Utica, infant in arms, snow on the ground. In the background was the Dodge Viper with a wolf head painted on front panel.
The only reason that this picture would be on the mantle would be that Joshua was the infant in the photo. It was proof that Joshua was Seth’s long lost brother, Ilya. Seth put the photo into his wallet.
Was Joshua also now a werewolf?
Seth took a deep breath through his nose. The house been closed up for the approaching winter. Trapped in and circulated by a forced air furnace, the room held a heady soup of scents. The family had had Chinese takeout the night before; General Tso’s chicken and Mongolian beef masked the fainter scents.
He growled in annoyance and closed his eyes to focus tighter on his sense of smell. Yes, there, the scent of a youngling. Fainter still was newborn werewolf; Joshua had only been in the house an hour or two before disappearing. Under the food and youngling and werewolf was something else. Seth breathed deeper.
There was something dead in the house.
A cat yowled from somewhere in the house. Another howl followed. It was a call that demanded that a stupid human come and find out what was the matter.
Seth gathered his power close to him and followed the sound upstairs.
The smell of carrion came from the bathroom. The sink’s cold-water faucet had been snapped cleanly off, creating the downstairs flood. A seal-point Himalayan sat in the battered bathtub. The cat glared at him. It wanted a human, not a werewolf, to obey its summons.
“Good kitty.” Seth’s experience with cats was limited to those he met at Dr. Huff’s office.
The cat hissed.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” The cats at Dr. Huff’s never liked the big bad wolf either.
Something fluttered under the Himalayan’s front paws.
“What did you catch?” He leaned closer, making the cat hiss again.
A snitch fluttered its paper wings, trying to escape. Its twig legs scratched against the tub’s porcelain as it clawed at the smooth surface.
“Shit!” Seth ducked back into the hallway. He didn’t want the Wickers knowing he was in the area. The magical construct worked as a spy, communicating back what it saw and heard. The coven needed to use a freshly harvested human eye to create the snitch. None of the dead teenagers at the barn had been missing their eyes. The town’s body count just went up by one.
How to catch the snitch without the Wickers knowing that the Prince of Boston was the one who caught it?
His first impulse was to use his hands. The construct couldn’t hurt him and he was trained to fight barehanded. A human, though, wouldn’t want to touch it.
He scanned the bathroom from the door. What could he use as a weapon? Yesterday’s flood must have triggered a massive cleanout, as the room was bare. The only object in the room was a toilet plunger.
The things his father never warned him about.
He leaned in, picked up the toilet plunger and braced himself for a fight.
As he moved closer to the tub, the cat hissed and fled. The freed snitch darted forward, careened off the tile wall and headed for the open door. He smacked it out of the air with the plunger and then stomped the red rubber end over it. It buzzed angrily under the suction cup.
“Gotcha!” He glanced around the bare bathroom again. “Now, how to kill you?”
A magic wound like a werewolf’s bite would work, but there was no way he was putting it in his mouth. A silver knife? He doubted that Joshua’s family had real silverware, but he should at least look.
He felt vaguely like a robber going through the kitchen drawers and kitchen cabinets. Nothing silver. Not even candlesticks.
Out the kitchen window he spotted a charcoal grill.
Fire would work.
* * *
He found a flat cookie tray and slid it under the plunger. He carried the unwieldy trap downstairs and out the back door. Joshua’s parents were orderly people; all the needed utensils for a cookout were carefully organized. All that was needed was a dishcloth to drape over the snitch so it couldn’t report who was burning it. He used tongs to hold it over the fire and spray it with lighter fluid. The flames leapt greedily up. Under the thin cloth, the snitch’s paper wings thrashed.
If the Wickers had snitches in place, then they didn’t have Joshua.
Was Joshua lost in the woods? Had he gone feral?
Once Seth was sure that the snitch was nothing but ashes, he stalked through the yard, sniffing. He found Joshua’s scent overlaid by that of multiple people. He followed it to the Quonset hut garage. Unlike the house, this was locked tight. He gave the side entrance a hard push and the dead bolt broke the frame.
Someone had run a gasoline engine in the tight confines in the last two days. Neat and orderly continued in the garage. Along the near wall was a herd of ATVs, motorcycles and dirt bikes. There was an obvious void where one of the bikes had been taken. Four pegs by the door used to hold four helmets. Only three hung there now. Seth sniffed at them. Joshua’s was missing.
The newborn hadn’t “wandered off,” he’d fled at full speed.
“Way to go, big brother.”
The snitches were in place in case Joshua contacted his family or came back home. The Wickers had lost track of his brother. Joshua would be safe from the Wickers as long as he stayed hidden.
The question was: where did Joshua go?
* * *
Upstairs had once been two bedrooms. The largest had been split into two claustrophobic bedrooms for children of opposite gender. Joshua’s room was just big enough to wedge a bunk bed into it. The lower bunk had been removed to make space for a desk. Seth’s shower at the Castle was bigger.
The room was surprisingly clean; especially for a teenage boy whose life had been turned upside down. There were no dirty clothes or books or papers on the floor. Even the small closet was neatly organized. To Seth, nothing seemed to be missing. There was even a phone sitting in a charger on the desk.
He picked up the phone. It turned on as he lifted it out of its cradle. A swipe put him at the passcode screen. Seth tried 0000 and 1234 and 4321 without any success.
“Not a simpleminded man, are you, Joshua?” Seth scanned the room for a possible clue. What would Joshua use for his passcode? Above the desk was a bookshelf. On the left side were a half-dozen textbooks. The rest of the shelf was science fiction and fantasy novels. No real clues there, at least nothing obvious.
A corkboard hung to the left of the desk. Pieces of Joshua’s life were pinned into place. A straight “A” report card. An SAT score higher than Seth’s. Applications to half a dozen colleges. Joshua ranked his applications with sticky notes. He wanted to go to Harvard or Boston College or Northeastern University but would settle for Syracuse or Rochester or Albany. Red-penned Amtrak schedules explained the latter three; he wanted to get to school and back via the train.
Seth unpinned the applications. All the little boxes were filled out with Joshua’s personal information. His birthday was listed as February twenty-ninth instead of Ilya’s date of March seventh.
Neither was his passcode.
Joshua had left his social security number blank on all the applications. Seth scanned the corkboard. A note reminded Joshua to get a copy of his birth certificate from his “mom” and apply for a social security number.
“She can’t supply what she doesn’t have.” Seth folded up the Harvard application and tucked it into his pocket. The others he repinned to the corkboard.
Joshua’s phone vibrated in Seth’s hand with an incoming text.
The screen identified the contact merely as “George.” “Your folks are on the news again, asking for information on you. Where are you? No one knows where you are. I called everyone.”
If George had actually contacted “everyone” that Joshua knew, then the newborn werewolf wasn’t hiding with friends. All things considered, that was probably a good thing.
The phone vibrated again. George asked, “Are you okay, Kickboy?”
Kickboy?
Seth noticed for the first time that there was a shelf above the closet door. It held dozens of martial arts medals, ribbons and trophies. Werewolves didn’t compete in most high school sports; their speed and strength would draw unwanted attention. A youngling didn’t have any advantages over a normal human. The number of trophies was impressive considering Joshua’s small size.
“Wow, you rock, big brother.” Seth put the phone back into the charger. The room painted a picture of a boy who was organized and compulsive over the smallest of details. Joshua had left his phone on purpose, most likely so he couldn’t be tracked via its GPS. He’d probably deleted any telling information. It was a dead end.
Down the hall, the Himalayan howled, announcing it had caught a second snitch.
Seth swore. He should have guessed that there would be a second one. The Wickers would be economical; they’d use both eyes of their victim to make the snitches.
He leaned into the bathroom to grab the toilet plunger again and followed the howling.
* * *
Joshua’s older adoptive sister fared better in the room division; she’d wedged a full-size bed on eighteen-inch risers into her bedroom. A dormer gave her space for a low dresser with piece of plywood hinged to the top so it could double as a desk. The room seemed partially stripped of belongings as if his sister had been the one who fled the house. Most likely she’d gone off to college. Otherwise it was much the same: clean, compact, focused on sleep and study, sprinkled with martial arts trophies.
The howling came from under her elevated bed. Seth got down on his hands and knees.
Up against the far wall, the Himalayan pinned a second snitch. The cat hissed at him and then dared to growl at him. Him! The Prince of Boston.
“Damn, you’re one stupidly brave cat.”
Seth leaned back to eye the bed. It touched three walls. He wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten the mattress and box-springs down the hall, through the door and into the space. It wasn’t wedged tight, it simply had nowhere to go if he tried to move it. Maybe they’d built the room around the bed.
When his father warned him he’d have rough days as the prince, his father probably wasn’t envisioning a fight with a magical construct and a large house cat under a co-ed’s bed with a toilet plunger.
He crawled under the bed and chaos erupted.
It hadn’t occurred to him that his body would block both the snitch and the cat from escaping. Or that by blocking “flee” for the cat, he’d trigger “fight” instincts. The Himalayan became a howling cyclone of claws as the snitch flitted about madly, looking for a way to escape. Seth stabbed with the plunger, trying to nail the snitch to the wall. Every time he’d thought he had it, the cat would leap in the way. He didn’t want to reduce his brother’s cat to a pancake.
He swung his leg out, trying to pin the cat. It wrapped itself around his leg and latched all four sets of claws and its needle-sharp teeth into his leg just below his groin. He roared, abandoned trying to trap the snitch with the plunger and merely grabbed it with his free hand.
“What the hell?” a woman shouted.
He’d been so focused on the snitch and the cat that he missed someone coming up the stairs.
He jerked up, taking the bed with him. A tall, willowy blonde stood in the doorway with a bamboo kendo practice sword in hand. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house? Why are you under my bed?”
He stood panting, plunger in one hand, snitch in the other, and the damn cat wrapped around his leg. Seth breathed in her scent. Yes, it was her bed that he’d just upended, the frame still lying across his shoulders like an ox-yoke.
This was going to be fun to explain.
Was he still fully human? Yes. Yay him; years of practice just paid off.
Now what did he tell her? What was a good and rational reason to break into someone’s house and molest their cat under a bed?
He had nothing. He was too tired to be that creative.
So he went with the truth.
“Catching this.” He held out the snitch as evidence.
She took a step back, raising the sword into strike position, before glancing down at his hand. “What is—Holy shit!” She jerked back. “It moved! What the hell is that?”
The snitch fluttered its paper wings and flailed with twig legs, trying to get free.
He forgot for a moment that he had the toilet plunger in his left hand. He raised it, saying, “I need to—ow! Ow!” She’d whacked him twice with the bamboo sword, both head shots. It stung but she couldn’t actually hit him hard enough to hurt him. She would need a silver weapon or a Mack truck for that. “Shit! Just wait!”
He blocked a series of blows with the toilet plunger. She was fast; he only managed to block her because he was a werewolf. He managed to get her to back up by advancing. The Himalayan kept hold of him, growling fiercely and occasionally raking at his leg with its back claws.
They went down the steps and across the living room before she realized that he was just blocking and not attacking. At that point, she grew reckless and started to swing without trying to guard herself.
“Just. Let. Me. Show. You. This!” He smacked the sword hard. The plunger broke and the sword went flying out of her hand. He thrust his hand with the snitch forward, trying to make her stop and look at it.
She caught his wrist and threw him onto the ground.
He was starting to get seriously pissed off, which was a very bad thing. He struggled not to growl or radiate his power. She was just freaked out right now. If he terrified her, there would be no talking with her. Ever. (Although he was getting to the point where he didn’t care.)
At least the cat had let go of his leg.
“What kind of bug or whatever is that?” she asked.
Oh thank God, now that she thought she had him pinned, she was actually looking at what he held in his hand.
“Is that calculus?” she asked.
What? Oh, the snitch’s wings. The Wickers would have used items they found in Joshua’s house to make it. In this case, a calculus textbook.
“I’ve been trying to show it to you,” Seth said. “It’s not a living creature. It’s like origami on crack.”
“Who the hell are you?”
He didn’t want the snitch—and thus the Wickers—to hear. “Look, can I deal with this thing first and then talk?” To keep the conversation on a “normal” level, he added, “It’s really creepy.”
She let him go and backed away. Her stance reflected the martial arts trophies in her room; she braced for a second round of fighting.
He motioned for her to follow him out to the grill.
She was conditioned not to harm a living creature. The snitch seemed living enough that she flinched as he tore off the wings. He turned them this way and that so she could see that they were pages from a math book. Even detached, the wings continued to move feebly. He tossed them onto the white-hot coals.
“That’s so weird. How is it…” She gasped as he ripped open the body to reveal the human eye. “Oh, God, tell me that isn’t…”
“It is.” He tossed everything on the fire. “Everything you think you know about the world isn’t true. There is such a thing as magic. There are monsters and witches and warlocks. They killed someone to make that thing so it could spy on your family. They want to find Joshua. They’ll take him if they find him.”
She turned without a word and walked back into the kitchen.
Seth wished he had more experience with women. His exposure was limited to a handful of hours at school and those girls were from New York City high society. None of them would have attacked him with a bamboo sword. They’d have either ignored him like a crazy guy on the subway or barricaded themselves into the bathroom and called 911 or asked him out on a date. He could hear Joshua’s sister running water in the kitchen, so it wasn’t any of the above.
After attacking people, it turned out that Central New York girls offered their victims coffee, tea, water, soda, or whiskey combined with any of the above. Seth accepted a coffee and watched her mix herself an Irish coffee.
“What’s your name?” He’d been spoiled by a week in Mexico. This coffee was horrible stale ground stuff out of a can.
“You break into my house and destroy my bedroom without knowing my name?”
“I know your last name.” He doctored the coffee with the brown sugar and heavy cream that she’d gotten out to make her Irish coffee.
“Elizabeth.” With her voice threatening to break, she added, “Joshua calls me Bethy.” Her voice went back to annoyed steel. “Who the hell are you? And don’t try to tell me that you’re a friend of my brother’s. Joshua doesn’t know anyone who drives a Porsche, or dresses in hundred-dollar jeans, or talks with a Boston accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
“My name is Seth. I’m Boston.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Actually, she hadn’t got what he meant but he was glad she didn’t understand. It made it more likely that her family were innocent dupes for Anastasia’s killers.
She pointed toward the smoking grill. “What—what—what the hell is going on? Why would anyone want to kidnap my brother? He’s a dork. I mean he’s a good kid. Too good. It’s like deep down he thinks if he’s really, really good everyone in the family will finally accept him.”
“They want to kidnap him because he’s adopted.”
She snorted into her coffee. “Really? How do they know? Most people don’t. We used to live in Whitesboro when Joshua was little, so our neighbors here in Sauquoit don’t know. We don’t tell people. We haven’t even told Joshua. He has no idea why half my family are total shits to him. Why our father’s parents are paying for everyone’s college education except his. He tries so hard to be perfect. I keep telling my mom that they’re only hurting him. He should know that it’s not him; it’s our family who are a bunch of jerks. They’re narrow-minded, racist assholes.” She laughed bitterly. “You’re not supposed to think that about your grandparents but there’s no other words for it. It doesn’t matter if was his mother was Latina, or if my parents found her broken down alongside the road too poor for a tow or that she basically sold Joshua to us. He was two weeks old! We’re the only family he’s ever known.”
“And the worst of it?” she whispered. “I was a horrible spoiled brat when I was little. I was four and so happy to be the center of my parents’ world. I didn’t want him.” She wiped at a tear. “I didn’t understand. My mother nearly died having me. She couldn’t have any more children, but she didn’t want me to be an only child. She had a younger brother who had died. She would have given anything to have him back. She wanted that for me. But I didn’t want a baby to take my place, so I was awful to Joshua, for a long, long time.”
“Your parents didn’t know Joshua’s ‘mother’ before the day they gave her a tow?”
Bethy wouldn’t be derailed. “My parents called me and told about the massacre and that Joshua was in the hospital hurt and they didn’t know how bad. I should come home, just in case he didn’t pull through. All I could think of was how many times I’d told him to drop dead.”
Seth understood completely. He had hated being the oldest. He’d been forced to be endlessly patient with his baby brothers, to take responsibility for any fight even if he hadn’t started it, and to hand over beloved toys without anger. He was going to be prince. More importantly, he was going to be a newborn werewolf while they were still vulnerable younglings. He needed to learn to never strike out in anger.
He’d thought being oldest was the worst.
The worst was actually losing his little brothers.
The pretense of coffee was abandoned. Bethy poured a straight shot of whiskey into her empty coffee cup. “The funerals start tomorrow. Someone came up with the bright idea of staggering them so the kids from Joshua’s high school could go to them all. The stupid reporters are turning it into a media circus. If I had another microphone shoved in my face, I was going to lose it. Dad told me to go home before I hurt someone.”
“Where do you think Joshua went?” Seth asked.
“I don’t know!” Bethy started to cry. “He kept freaking out at the hospital so they’d given him a bunch of strong sedatives. They said he’d probably sleep all day. Mom and Dad brought him home from the hospital and he went straight to bed.”
A newborn werewolf would burn through any sedative in minutes.
“Joshua broke the passenger door on Dad’s pickup; he snapped it off at the hinge. They had to wire it into place to get home. Dad went to the junkyard to find a replacement. Mom had to take a dish to D.J.’s parents because he—he—he’s dead, and I was supposed to stay with Joshua. He was asleep! I thought he would be fine. We didn’t have anything to eat in the house. I thought I could run into town to the store. I was only gone for an hour. I came back and the house was a disaster zone and an ambulance had been here to take our neighbor to the hospital…”
Seth stomach knotted. “Your brother attacked your neighbor?”
“No! Mr. Buckley was electrocuted by the flood.” She pointed at the blackened 220 outlet. “Joshua called 911 and did CPR until the paramedics showed up. He was here when they were here, but by the time I got home, he’d disappeared.”
The truck door. The bathroom faucet. The next-door neighbor. Joshua was clever enough to realize that, as a newborn werewolf, he was dangerous to everyone around him.
“Where would he go to hide?” Seth said.
“Hide? You think he ran away?”
“I’m not saying he’s a coward…”
“Oh, he would run if he was being chased! The track coach wanted him to go out for the hundred meters, but that would mean being naked in locker rooms with jocks. The idiots around here made Joshua’s life living hell. My parents are so clueless that it always made me want to scream! My dad thinks because he was teased as a kid that he knows what Joshua is going through. My dad was always the tallest kid in his class and completely normal. Joshua has always been dorky. The only time he isn’t doing all his weird fidgeting is when he’s fighting.”
“Weird fidgeting” was typical for their people. Younglings weren’t directly connected to the Source but they were close enough to have their behavior influenced by it. It was one of the reasons why that his family maintained a private school where younglings would be sheltered from the public eye. Normally the more wolflike the youngling, the easier time they had controlling the wolf once they were transformed. It was good that Joshua “fidgeted.”
“No, someone took him,” Bethy stated firmly. “Someone had been here. They took stuff. Stupid stuff.”
“Like his calculus book?” It sounded like Wickers had raided the house for material attuned to Joshua.
“Yes! I couldn’t convince Mom and Dad that Joshua wouldn’t take all that shit with him. Why the hell would anyone take a twenty-pound jack-o-lantern with them? Someone was here and they took him!”
Seth eyed the kitchen. Yes, there’d been a flood, but there was no sign of a struggle. Joshua knew how to fight and now had werewolf strength to back it. “I think he took a motorcycle.”
“What? Oh, he wouldn’t…! We didn’t think to look… That little…” Bethy charged out of the house.
Seth followed her to the garage. There was a digital keypad that he’d ignored earlier beside the big steel doors. She flipped up the cover and typed in the code.
“Oh, that little shit!” she cried once the door had rattled up high enough to reveal the empty space in the line of off-road vehicles. “That stupid little shit!” She turned in circles, hands in her hair, scanning the land around them. “I’m going to kill him! Where the hell would he go?”
That was what everyone wanted to know.
“Someplace he couldn’t just walk to,” Seth pointed out. “Is the bike street legal?”
“No! It’s his Kawasaki. It’s a dirt bike. Besides, he doesn’t have a driver’s license yet. But there’s trails all over the county, he could be literally anywhere.”
Anywhere covered a lot of ground. During the same time frame, Seth had traveled from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Utica. Since Joshua didn’t have a passport or a driver’s license, he was limited to dirt trails or public transportation.
Seth remembered the Amtrak schedule pinned up on the corkboard in Joshua’s room. “How much money would he have on him?”
“How the hell would I know?” She stalked back to the house. “He normally works at my family’s garage in Utica, but not this year. He found out that my folks could only afford to send him to the local community college. If he wants to go anywhere else, he needs a full scholarship. He spent most of the year studying and got a freaking amazing SAT score. At school this year, he’s been doing all the club shit that colleges like you to do to prove you’re a joiner. That’s why he was at that stupid barn in the first place. Prom committee. And oh my god, if I hear one more ‘at least he was supposed to be there’ from someone, I’m going to slap them. I don’t know why half the freaking football team was at the haunted house when it was supposed to be a prom committee event—maybe the football team was being nice for once—but don’t you dare imply that any of them deserved to live more than my brother.”
“So he had only a few hundred dollars?” Seth asked.
“You’ve never been broke?” she cried.
“I’ve never had money that was strictly mine. I’m not allowed to take a part-time job.”
She glanced at the Porsche.
“It’s my guardian’s car,” Seth said. “But, yes, I’m clueless. You said he can get anywhere on the dirt bike. Can he get to the train station?”
“Oh, that little shit!” She started for her car, a vintage black Mustang with a custom flame paint job.
Seth took that as a “yes.” “How much would he have for a train ticket?”
She paused, door open, one foot in her car. “He wanted a laptop for school. Mom and Dad said they’d match half. They bought it in August, just before classes started. He had less than a hundred dollars left over.”
Seth knew from experience that he could get from New York City to Boston for that amount. Joshua could easily reach Albany or Syracuse. How far would he run? Which direction?
Bethy slammed her car door and her Mustang rumbled to life.
“Where are you going?” Seth asked. Joshua had a full day’s head start. He wasn’t in Utica anymore.
“If he took the train, then he had to ditch his dirt bike someplace. I’m betting he put it in the storage shed at the garage. It’s the only place in Utica where it would be safe and yet my folks wouldn’t have noticed it by now.”