The End of Never (14 page)
Following the nurse quietly into the dark room, Angela obediently accepted a germ mask and tied it around the back of her head. A window on the wall opposite the bed held a breathtaking, heartbreaking view of south Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. Angela could only imagine what it was like far below her, the brilliant blue of the warm water and the vibrant hues of beach umbrellas in the sand. A heavy tint on the wide window blocked the sunlight and color from her eyes.
The cold, stale air of Room 810 reminded her of the years she had spent in basement laboratories, preparing her skills for this day.
A dry cough in her throat brought a penetrating stare from the nurse, and Angela realized she had been sweating. The walk from the café, the interview with the surgeon and his lawyer, the eternal elevator rideâall these events had caused her anxiety to pour in buckets from under her skin. She shivered as the icy cool of the sterile room chilled the sweat coating her skin.
Beside the bed, a heartbeat monitor recorded the young woman's struggle to maintain her weak grasp upon life. “Rayna Elinegren,” Angela read the woman's name over the shoulder of the nurse as she grasped a medical chart in her arms.
“May I see that?” Angela asked politely. She hoped the nurse would excuse herself from the room after she handed over the chart.
At the door, Detective Johnson knocked twice lightly and entered the room. The nurse efficiently retrieved another germ mask from a cabinet under the sink by the door.
“I heard she's a Swedish bathing suit model,” the detective said quietly and took in the view of Miami Beach from the tinted window.
“Her pulse is slowing,” Angela said, noting the consistent high temperature of the woman's body. She put the medical chart down on a bedside table.
Rayna Elinegren clung defiantly to life. Her strong body, long and lean, fought for breath under an oxygen mask. She was sedated, her mind unwilling to cope with the sight of her body. Patches of gray scales scarred the Nordic beauty from chest to toe, but her perfect face, framed angelically by gossamer blonde strands, betrayed no sign of her mysterious affliction.
“What is it?” Detective Johnson whispered, as if afraid to wake the sleeping beauty.
“I'll find out,” Angela swore from under her mask. “There is a logical explanation for everything in this world.”
“So you don't believe in ghosts or goblins?” Detective Johnson chuckled. Angela shook her head no and smiled underneath her mask.
“Vampires? Werewolves? Witches on broomsticks?” the detective asked with a smirk.
“When I catch one,” Angela told him, “I'll believe it.”
An angry growl reverberated against the attic walls. The wolf man had reclaimed his feral, beastly body. He was sitting on the floor of the dim, dusty attic, bemoaning his filthy coat, full of fleas. Cyrus raised his hind legs and scratched furiously behind his spiked left ear. Matted brown fur cloaked the scars of battle on the shapeshifter's wrinkled skin. His belly rumbled and asked for food. It was a hot day and even hotter in the attic.
His thoughts turned to escape. He felt strong and he cursed the humans for their stupidity. He rose to his paws and began pacing back and forth over the rough timbers. His ears were pricked for any sign of life behind the locked attic door. Cyrus felt his strength, his bloodlust, creep into each of his muscles and bones.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a
. . . The beast licked his lips . . .
mouse
. A shiver of remembrance ran through him. A fire, a feast, humanityâall these comforts had been stripped from him. His life as a person had ended too many years ago to bother counting. The witchâJasmine, his wifeâhad cursed his soul, transforming him into a shapeshifter. He obeyed her only.
Sniffing wafts of stale air from under the attic door, Cyrus knew no human occupied the house. He whined when a flea from the musty attic blankets found the pink, warm skin of his inner left ear.
Inside his moist nostrils, a twitch jerked his nose into the air. Confused by the putrid stench of boiling rabbit, Cyrus sniffed the invisible meal brewing for him.
She ain't in dis house. But dat witch gonna help me, ain't she?
he asked the empty attic, while he sucked the smell into his heaving muzzle and licked his black lips.
Dat witch knowin me need eat sometin'.
From under the closed attic door, a wisp of gray smoke headed toward him. Sitting upright on his haunches, he whined and whimpered as the dirty, burning puff of air swirled around his face, sparks of fire twinkling in front of his eyes. His furiously wagging tail churned dust from the floor. A beam of sunlight strained through the single, grime-caked oval window on the wall behind him and illuminated the dirty tornado engulfing the beast.
With his eyes closed tight and his front paws steadying his stance, Cyrus relaxed on his back legs and let the taste of warm rabbit blood soak his inner cheeks and run satisfyingly down his tongue. Invisible fur and bone tickled his mouth and crunched in his fangs, as he threw down lumps of freshly boiled meat into his greedy belly until it refused to accept any more of the meal.
“Eat dat up, boy,” a familiar voice cackled in the wolf's ears. “Eat, Cyrus, cus ya gonna need dat food in dat belly.” Jasmine's dry laugh echoed in his ears as he savored the last bits of rabbit tumbling down his throat.
With his gut bloated and gorged, he heard her command. “Ya come on home now, Cyrus, cus me knowin dat girl gonna come after ya. There is somebody close by ya, Cyrus. Ya betta watch yaself, ya back, now ya hearin' dat? Him close to ya. He gonna help ya git dat book back to Jasmine.”
A howl broke from the beast's moist throat. Beneath his fur-draped flesh, broken and fractured bones knitted together, mending from the strength of the feast. With every breath of smoky air into his wounded, heaving chest, strength returned to his healing body.
Cyrus had a single goal: to get the girl with the book. He locked his deadly stare on the locked pine door. With a pounce forward, his body slammed against the wood, and the force caused red spit to splatter from his muzzle across the dusty floor. Shaking his dizzy head from side to side, he glanced up and looked hopefully for any damage. The door had splintered and cracked with one centered blow.
Once more he retreated inside the attic, far enough from the wounded door to gather momentum for his next attack. He cocked his head sideways in the shadows beneath the dirty oval window.
Smashing against the old pine door, Cyrus broke the wood into splintered shreds. He tumbled head-first down the steep, rickety attic stairs, his body an avalanche of fur and fang, somersaulting until hitting the landing below.
Growling and angry, he sprang to his four wobbling legs. He wanted to rip someone apart, to torture and kill. Regaining his balance, he spotted a wider set of stairs and sprang toward the scent of the black-bearded human who had locked him in the attic.
In Callahan's second-floor bedroom, there was plenty of Callahan's scent. A bare, queen-sized mattress was tucked into a cherry sleigh bed. The floor was strewn with paperback history books. Three overstuffed suitcases sat propped open on the white carpet.
Rustling his muzzle through the bags, Cyrus bit into the clothes and flung the history teacher's black pants and capes around the room. Callahan's smell was driving him into a frenzy. With the third suitcase nearly empty, Cyrus snatched a white tuxedo shirt in his mouth.
A spasm reverberated down his spine. His brown fur quickly retreated into his sagging, wrinkled, human skin. As he pawed at the shirt, his legs morphed into naked arms and legs. Sparse patches of white hair dappled his arms and legs. His nakedness as a human made him tremble in fear and disgust.
Hastily, he slid the shirt over his shoulders. His shaking, bony fingers buttoned the starched white cloth to his bruised chest. Cyrus swiftly shoved his legs into Callahan's black pants, the hem falling far past his own ankles.
He opened his eyes wider and enjoyed the sight of the sun shining through the sheer net curtains that were hung clumsily over a window. This window overlooked a porch roof, and beyond that a city street. He felt almost human. Opening the window was a struggle, its frame painted long ago to the sill. Prying the window upward, he listened.
A heartbeat, strong and determined, marched closer to Callahan's house. Cyrus stared at the graveyard across the street but heard nothing, not a peep. Even the crows kept silent as they perched on the low stone wall that separated the graveyard from the city that had sprung up around it. Nothing but resilient, eternal silence met his ears when he peered at the headstones, but still the heartbeat pressed forward and grew closer.
“Da dead comin' back to life,” he heard Jasmine whisper.
A low growl rumbled from deep inside his throat. Sighing, he removed the clothes, although he let the tuxedo shirt linger across his shoulders. Suddenly, knowing his hope was futile, he tore the shirt into shreds with his ragged yellow fingernails, his chipped teeth and bleeding gums ripping the threads of the garment.
Naked, his weak human body exposed, Cyrus knelt on the soft white carpet. Thump, thump, thump. The heartbeat echoed inside his head as he dropped to his hands and knees. Closing his eyes and sealing his lips, he held his breath as his jaw extended violently outward from his skull into the shape of a muzzle, and razor-sharp incisors punched downward into his mouth from his gums. Brown fur sprouted across his naked flesh and bulging muscles flexed in his hind legs.
Although weak and old as a man, his body was strong as a wolf. While the human half of his soul continued to age, his wolf soul only grew wilder and more fierce, forever young and virile. One day he might no longer be human at all. His dark eyes spotted the ragged tuxedo shirt crumpled into a ball on the floor by the bed. Cyrus let out a sorrowful howl; it was a last cry for his humanity. He felt grief oozing from his beastly soul.
Through the open window, the noise and smells of the looming city barraged his senses and left Cyrus tense and eager. Alexandra could have fled with the book in any direction. But a peculiar scent blew closer. His brown fur stood at attention across his muscular neck.
What he smelled was the sweat dripping from the flesh of an approaching man, sweat that smelled like salt and honey. Cyrus had smelled this man before, and the wolf gritted his teeth, wondering if it could possibly be
him
.
The wolf listened closely, the rhythm of a heartbeat not his own pounding in his ears. With each approaching step of the man, the heartbeats grew stronger and faster until they roared in the wolf's skull. Bittersweet waves of sweaty musk assaulted his nostrils.
He recognized this man, and his beastly senses had never before betrayed him. Trembling with anticipation, the wolf reared from the window. He paced on top of the clothes that were strewn on the floor of the bedroom. How could this be? His feral mind could not calculate the appearance of the approaching human.
Cyrus had to see him to know for certain, to taste his blood if necessaryâthough he dared not kill him, not yet. Every human tasted like the life he led, the food he ate, and what he drank. But every human family, every bloodline, had a distinct flavor all its own.
Calm descended on the beast as he contemplated his attack. Savoring the thought of the human's soft flesh in his wide jaws, he felt his belly grumble. The human approached rapidly, as if Callahan's house was precisely his destination.
Dat witch ain't gonna kill me now
, he thought. If he was right about the human walking down the sidewalk, then Jasmine would certainly not kill him.
Dat witch hate dem Peytons.
He sensed that the stupid little girl, the brat named Alexandra, would follow him and hunt him with her friends. But despite that possibility, Cyrus grinned, his wet, black lips sliding over his fangs.
Me gonna steal a treasure now, too.
Today was not the day to start a diet, the headmaster realized as he surveyed the campus storm destruction. The energy from precisely eight ounces of freshly ble nded vegetable juice and a granola bar had worn off hours ago. The deafening need to eat forced Dr. Sullivan to ponder an expedition to the Collinsworth cafeteria kitchen.
A chorus of buzz saws hummed in unison around campus as a tidy army of salvage crews labored to clear the fallen trees and debris spewed across the stately campus grounds by the previous night's storm.
Out on the lawn, Dr. Sullivan stood next to Callahan to examine the hole next to the cannon. Amidst the din of this noise, Dr. Sullivan was confident that Callahan had not heard his stomach roaring. Dr. Sullivan's stomach was begging for a bacon and spinach quiche, with freshly baked rolls dripping in butter on the side. As for the history teacher, he was engrossed in the gaping hole in the ground at the foot of Bloody Mary.
The mighty disabled cannon bore no trace of disturbance by the intruder who had dug a muddy mess at her feet, but Callahan surmised it was best to hide the scene from the men toiling with the trees lest someone grow suspicious. Handy at improvisation, Callahan had located a moldy blue tarp, a wad of jumbled jump ropes, and a stack of orange cones from a storage room in the gymnasium. With these items, he efficiently proceeded to cordon off the shallow grave beside the cannon.
Headmaster Sullivan briefly worried that the blue tent would draw attention from the young men in yellow hard hats and sleeveless shirts bounding around the campus. But they maintained a safe distance from Bloody Mary. Their sideways glances at the brewing commotion were enough to warn them that it was probably best to stay away. They could see the pacing headmaster and his companion, who preferred to crawl across the ground around the cannon on his belly while he held a magnifying glass to his dark eyes. If any of the clean-up crew did not find that scene disturbing enough, the holdouts were dissuaded by the history teacher's loud, yelping cries of satisfaction that emanated from within the leaning blue tent when he disappeared inside it. They could not have guessed that his satisfied cries came from rubbing his fingers probingly across the disturbed human bones lying helplessly inside the grave.