Carl Wilson
When I get home, Grandma’s car is right in front of my house. I am tempted to just keep on driving, but I know I won’t be able to escape her. Plus, she’s the type of woman where it’s to just step up and take your lumps if you’ve crossed her, because she’s not going to forget, and she’s going to give you extra for having tried to run.
I pull my car into the garage, and meet her at the door. She’s way to proper to tear into me outside at this time of night, so I unlock the door.
“Before you jump all over me,” I say, “You have been spying on me for weeks. So I got out from under you for a bit. So what?”
“I specifically told you to not go looking for Ivy and Ben. You’ll put her in grave danger.”
“I can’t just sit around waiting for terrible things to happen to her,” I say. “You know that.”
“That hunter is coming up short on finding them. You are leading her right to them. If I could track you, she certainly has been.”
“Maybe everybody needs to just stop tracking me!” I want to shout that, but I can’t seem to rouse up the energy. “And while I’m on the subject of things that are pissing me off, what did you do to me? Where is the wolf?”
“It’s suppressed for a few days. It’s better that way.”
“Emily!” I say. I think it’s the first time in years that I have used her name. “I really need you to stop tampering with my life. I love you and Ivy, but I’ve lost her, and you’re pushing me away. There’s nothing that ties me to this town. Nothing. Maybe the best thing for me to do is forget about your family entirely and go back down south or something.”
“No, Carl. You are needed here. Ivy needs you.”
“Ivy threw me out of her life.”
“She did, but she still needs you. When she gets back into town, she’ll understand a lot more than she did when she left, and she’ll know what she had with you.”
“And you know this because you can see the future. So there’s something else pushing me around. You, vampires, some vague tomorrow. Does nothing in the world want me to just live my life and be who I am?”
“Ivy does. Ivy wants you to be who you are. Just don’t go back out there again, so you don’t get her killed. Wait for her to come to you.”
“I won’t go back out there,” I say.
“Why?” Emily asks. “What did you see?”
“More of Ivy than I ever thought I would, that’s for sure.” I sigh. “It’s probably a good thing you did whatever it is you did. If you hadn’t put the wolf to bed for a while, it would have come out when I saw her and Ben together.”
“I know you don’t want to hear this, Carl, but sometimes you do need to trust others. I know this has been hard on you.”
“Next time, tell me why you want me to do or not do things. This secret keeping has been killing me.”
“Carl. You don’t want that. Nobody is happy when they know what is going to happen.”
“Well maybe you need to stop carrying all of that misery alone.”
“Grab a couple of beers,” she says.
“I’ll grab you one, but I want something stronger,” I say, opening one of my kitchen cabinets, and reaching behind a dozen cans to grab the bottle of tequila laying on its side, hidden behind them.
“I’ll take some of that, too,” she says, sitting down at my kitchen table. I go for a couple of glasses, but she tells me to skip them.
I put the bottle on the table and sit. She pulls out the stopper and takes a good sip. “Boy. You need to learn to drink.”
“It’s what an underage guy can get easily,” I say, taking the bottle from her and putting a mouthful down. She does have a point, though. Cheap tequila is not pleasant.
“You want to be your own man, chart your own course. I get it. Let me tell you how walking this route for a little longer lets you do that.”
“Make it good,” I say.
“It took me some time to put all of the pieces together, but you, Ben, Nathan, and Ivy are going to put the war between the vampires and the werewolves to bed. Maybe not forever, but for a very long time.”
“How?” I ask.
“There is a reason you three men have all been drawn here to Stokers Mill, and to friendship with Ivy specifically. All three of you men have been taken in by her when our peers rejected you. You and Nathan have been here long enough that Ivy’s affection for you has gotten other people to see you differently and to warm to you. If Ben had come into town a year ago, the same would have happened to him.”
“So we’re all going to show the zombie clans and the packs that Ben and I can live together and even be in a love triangle over a girl, and they’ll all slap their foreheads, and say, ‘Wow! We can all be best of buds, we don’t have to fight!'”
“No,” Emily says. She offers me the bottle. “Take a good belt. This is about to get strange,” she says.
I pull a big mouthful off the bottle, and set it down. The alcohol burns harsh going down, enough to water my eyes and double me over. When I can sit up straight again, I say, “Ok. I’m ready.”
But it turns out I wasn’t. By the time she finishes her story, full of demons and a mother that bore twins, a zombie and a wolf, and they fought, and they made more like themselves that fought, and that was three millennia back. And then she keeps going on, to the present day. She had received a prophecy from her own great grandmother, and everything points to Ivy being the subject of it, but the prophecy was unclear. But then Ben arrived, and she was able to pick up his senses of the future from him, and there was something about Nathan knowing something about me, and that made everything super clear to her somehow.
“So, Ben has changed Ivy by being with her, and now she’s turning away from Ben to be with me, and that is going to fix everything? First, that is completely ridiculous, and second…” There’s enough hard liquor in me that I lose my train of thought briefly. “Second. Where does Nathan fit into all of this?”
“By now, you should know,” she says.
I tap the side of the tequila bottle. “I don’t know anything for sure right now.”
“Well,” she says. “By the time you sober up, I’m sure it’ll be clear. Come here.” She stands up and opens her arms wide. I have always been glad that the wolf seriously dislikes booze. It makes me a maudlin drunk instead of an angry or unpredictable one. “Good night, Carl.”
“Good night, Grandma.”
Morning comes with sunlight coming in through a curtain I did not shut the night before, and a really unpleasant hangover. I forgot to drink my fill of water before collapsing into bed, and now my mouth feels like it’s full of old socks and my head is pounding.
But clarity comes with it as well. I am able to reconstruct most of the story Grandma told me the night before, and realize Nathan’s place in the whole story. He’s a demon, that’s what I was never able to put my finger on before. Now that I know, it is glaringly obvious, but pack lore has it that major demons, the kind that can pass as pinkies, stopped concerning themselves with human affairs long ago, which means I had no reason to suspect he was anything of the sort. Kind of like having a friend who was born in the Soviet Union or Rhodesia or some other country that doesn’t even exist anymore. Unless you have a specific reason to ask, ‘Hey. Where were you born?’, you don’t, you just assume they were probably born in the same town they were living in when you met.
I think back to something else Grandma told me last night. When she mentioned that she had picked up on Ben’s sensing, fear dropped on my like a ton of bricks. Hearing Grandma say that she fully believed in Ben’s sense reminded me of his warning to me, of a Negre killing me in the process of finding out where Ivy was.
“Don’t beat yourself up too bad over that one,” she says. “You did your part to prevent that exact future from coming to pass. The lies to your friends, the amount of time you did spend very pointedly sticking to school and your job, the fact that you held off on searching for them as long as you had. It bought Ben and Ivy enough time to change their situation, and gave others enough time to disrupt the hunter. That’s the tricky and funny thing about fate. You can’t change the future, but you can change the present enough to create different futures.”
That actually made more sense last night while I was more than half blitzed on bad tequila than it does now. I feel a lot better, with her reassurance that my actions over the past few days aren’t going to get Ivy killed. I also promise myself that I need to stay away from that highway entirely, so I don’t change the present again to make futures where Ivy dies by my actions more likely again. Deep inside of me, the wolf is rumbling awake after its deep slumber of the past few days. I don’t know if it’s awake enough to help, but I throw some clothes on, pound a quart of water, and take a walk around my property.
There’s a positive reek of skunk coming from downhill. I noticed it last night, but had other things on my mind when I got home. Any other day, I wouldn’t think twice about something like that, but if you want to hide your scent, there are a few things that will do it quite well, and the acrid miasma of skunk is a good, but somewhat obvious choice.
I take a walk out to my back fence, where the stink is coming from, taking a good look around. I find no dead skunk out there, no track predator tracks and no place I can identify as a kill in the epicenter of the odor. Whatever caused it is strong enough that even with the wolf out, I’d never be able to catch any other scent underneath it. If this is evidence of the hunter watching my house, she is either not very good at what she does – very unlikely from what I know of her, or like Grandma says, she was seriously disrupted.
I go back to the house. My phone is still in my cellar, outside my cage. I know that is how Grandma has been keeping an eye on my movements. The hunter apparently is willing to embrace technology as well as her more arcane abilities. I go into the garage, jack up the right side of my car, and grab a flashlight and my creeper. It doesn’t take me long to find a GPS tracker tucked into the underbody.
I decide to leave it in place for now, because I have an idea. I retrieve my phone and open up the app that Ivy and I shared. It will show both of our travels over the past few weeks. I notice that in all that time, Ivy’s phone has been sitting in her house, where mine has been busy, but mostly in a predictable pattern. Home, school, work, my circuitous route out to meet Grandma at the truck stop right after Ivy disappeared, a couple of runs to Denver with Kate and Nathan. There are two major deviations from that pattern – the two stops I made near the cabin Ben and Ivy are hiding out in are unfortunately very conspicuous by their singularity. What would make them stand out even more to whoever put that GPS tracker on my car is the fact that the runs to Denver were both in Kate’s car. The two trips to the cabin specifically were in mine.
If the Great War were still going on, stupid things like this are exactly what would get me killed. I was so focused on my personal rivalry with Ben that I forgot to think about how he and I are both former soldiers, as is the hunter I was trying to deceive. It could have been a very, very expensive mistake.
I know that even with the hunter’s work interrupted, she may still be watching me. If not her, somebody might be watching that GPS tracker on my car. To pop it off would be too suspicious, but my travels recently are aiming straight at Ben and Ivy.
I can’t just go out and warn them myself. I call Grandma to tell her what I’ve found, but get routed straight to voicemail. I leave a brief and cryptic message to let her know somebody needs to get word out to them. I try Nathan, too. Now that I know what he is, I figure he may have some means of getting there completely undetected, but I get the default voicemail message that came with his phone, the one I’m used to, and that he refuses to change. As I get frustrated that I can’t get one of the two of them out to warn Ivy and Ben, I feel the wolf rousing itself even more. It’s going to want to act, but this new knowledge I have is something even it can’t help but heed. I feel its blood heating up as it feels wisdom restraining its actions, but it seems willing to control itself for a while.
I go to my kitchen, drink more water while cooking breakfast and making coffee for myself. I try to distract myself by doing some studying for final exams this coming week, but there’s way too much on my mind to concentrate on anything at all. Neither Grandma nor Nathan calls me back, which doesn’t help calm me at all, but I’m still able to keep my impulse to go warn Ben and Ivy myself under control. As soon as I have some food in me, I hop in the car and drive into town.
Kate is certainly at home and buried in books, and right now, I would like the comfort of her company. Nathan is known to hate his phone and simply not look at it, sometimes for a couple days at a time. So he may very well be at home, in which case I can talk to him directly and get something done.
I’m just putting my dishes in the sink to rinse them when there’s a knock on my door. I dry my hands and reach under the sink for a silvered fighting knife. I don’t think the hunter would be bold enough to just walk up and knock on my door, but if she wants to get inside my house, she does need me to invite her in. If it’s any other sort of trouble at the door, if she has some human helpers like most zombies do, well a knife is a knife is a knife.
I stand look through the peephole in my door. Whoever is knocking is carefully standing outside of its range. I shift a little bit, so I can keep the knife hidden from view, but still at the ready, and open the door a crack to peer onto the corner of the stoop that’s hidden from the peephole.
And I see Ivy standing there.