Chapter Eighteen #2
“That’s not something you get used to,” Dave said, blinking.
“You probably do around here,” I commented, “which is one reason we need to get everyone to Wolf’s Head. How many more do you have to check?”
“Many,” he sighed, squinting at the thick sheaf of papers on his clipboard.
The light was dim in this section, with only a string of Christmas lights illuminating the dark puddles between working overheads.
I took his glasses off his head and handed them to him, and he looked at them in surprise and then pleasure, before settling them on his nose. “Ah, that’s better.”
“Am I wrong?” I asked, as a gaggle of graybeards came by, stuffing down tacos. “Or are there more than three hundred people down here?”
“No, you’re not wrong. That’s part of what’s complicating things. We’ve been receiving van loads from Tartarus all afternoon—”
“How many?” I asked, feeling my gut tighten around the pork.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. We were focused more on helping the injured and sick and didn’t count them all—”
Great.
“—when they showed up. I stayed behind to try to do that tonight, but people keep moving around,” he watched in amused frustration as the same gaggle of kids thundered down the hall. “Plus, I’m afraid paperwork isn’t my forte.”
“I’d think that was a big part of therapy,” I said, kicking the kids’ ball back before it could bounce into a room. “Keeping notes on everyone.”
“Oh, it is, only I’m more of a researcher these days.”
“Research?”
He shot me a startled glance, possibly because of the tone of that one word. But I couldn’t help it. The last “researcher” I’d met had almost killed me, and his research had created a monster.
“Uh, yes. Into past lives, reincarnation, that sort of thing.”
He said this with a straight face.
“Past lives?”
“Yes. Many native beliefs incorporate the idea of certain spirits of the dead returning to the human world either as beneficial, protective forces or as the opposite. Some, it is believed, are reborn into new bodies as rewards for a life well lived, while others return to defend it from malignant spirits who wish to harm it. There are many different stories, varying from tribe to tribe, and I find them fascinating—”
“Sure.”
“My current work concerns the Skudakumooch, also known as the Ghost-Witch, a figure from Wabanaki folklore, said to be created when a practitioner of black magic dies—”
“Must be a lot around Vegas.”
“—and their spirit refuses to rest. Instead, it animates a body and uses it to attack others, consuming their souls through their flesh. The only way to destroy one is to burn the body to ashes with the spirit inside it, and scatter them to the winds—”
“Fascinating,” I said, wondering how to change the subject
“Yes, it is! I’ve been working on a paper on the parallels between the Ghost-Witch and other, somewhat similar native beliefs, such as the Wendigo from Algonquin tradition, the Nalusa Chito of the Choctaw, the Baykok of the Ojibwe, and the Wechuge, a cannibalistic being from Athabaskan legends—”
“That’s a lot of people eating.” I wondered if I could just slip away and he’d continue talking. I wondered how rude it would be if I got caught.
I sighed inwardly.
Probably pretty rude.
“Yes, but the Skudakumooch is the most interesting to me, as they are said to retain their magic after death,” he said happily. “Resulting in the absolutely terrifying concept of an undead spirit feasting on the souls of its victims to increase its magical prowess!”
“Yep,” I agreed, because that would be pretty terrifying. And pretty unlikely, as it hadn’t shown up in any of the Corps’ lectures on “rare magical creatures and how to kill them.” And I guess my skepticism finally got through, because he smiled.
“I get that a lot.”
“No, I mean…” I stopped, because I’d just been in a fight with a bunch of zombies, so what did I know? Not much, I was beginning to suspect.
But Dave had already moved on to riffling through his sheaf of papers. “But back to our current concern, I started with the harmless-looking… what do I call them? Refugees?”
“Family.”
He looked up at me and blinked. “Yes. Yes, of course. I wanted to assuage Sienna’s concerns before the move, but many of the… family… here are older and partly deaf, or just not very cooperative. Not that I blame them; they’ve had reason to learn caution. But it does make things harder.”
“Where did they all come from?” I asked because there were more older ones than I’d expected. A makeshift dorm right across the hall seemed to be mostly housing eighty-year-olds. One was putting in his teeth so he could eat, making me visualize the prospect of a toothless werewolf.
It boggled the mind, frankly.
Like the idea of how they’d survived on the streets for so long.
“They haven’t,” Dave said when I asked.
“What?”
“Most of the older ones you see are new vargulfs. People of their age have a short life expectancy when suddenly finding themselves unhoused.”
“But what could someone their age do to piss off their chiefs?” I said, as the toothless guy nonetheless wolfed down a mountain of pulled pork with no discernible trouble.
Dave didn’t say anything that time.
I glanced at him, and he wasn’t looking at the old guys across from us, but at me. And with an expression I couldn’t name. “What?”
“You don’t know, do you?” he asked gently.
“Know what?”
“Some of the less well-heeled clans force out their elders if they have no families to look after them, so they don’t become a burden.”
“What?” I said, because I must have heard wrong.
But his expression said I’d gotten it right the first time. “You were originally from Lobizon, I believe?”
“Yes, but—”
“And then joined Arnou. Both of those are old, leading clans with deep pockets. Not all are so fortunate.”
“So they throw out their own people? Their families?”
“Yes.” It was stark. But then he softened it slightly. “Not everyone views clan as family, Lia. To many, they’re more like allies. And allies are only useful when they’re strong enough to help you.”
“And when they’re old, after a lifetime of supporting the clan, they’re just… thrown away?”
I didn’t believe it.
“Oh, no,” he said, and there was a sudden flash of anger in the dark eyes. “Not everyone. Just those who have outlived their caretakers or never had them to begin with, and who are too old or sick or addlepated to work, and thus become a drain on the clan’s strength.”
I felt my blood pressure test its upper boundaries again. “Does Sebastian know about this?”
“Of course. The council has been debating it for some time—”
“Debating it? While our elders are—”
He cut me off with a gesture, although I didn’t know how, considering how furious I was. But there was an air of authority around him, only not of the usual sort. Quieter, less aggressive than normal, but there nonetheless.
He didn’t back down, and he didn’t waver, not even in front of Sebastian himself. I’d heard the term “moral authority” before, but wasn’t sure I’d ever encountered it. I kind of thought I might have, now.
“It’s better than anything we’ve had before,” he said firmly. “People elected Sebastian because they wanted change, yet when it came down to it, when it required something of them, some sacrifice, some inconvenience… they were not so happy, suddenly.
“But before him, no one even acknowledged these things, and threatened those of us who dared to bring them up. There was no dialogue, no attempt even to begin a discussion on how to rectify these wrongs, and no one with the willingness to try. It was easier to rug sweep, to ignore the problems in our society, to let them fester—and rot.”
He was looking at a man that one of the nurses was tending to down the hall. The man was on crutches as he only had one usable leg, the other having been amputated at the knee. He looked about sixty to me, which made him still able to work, but I guessed the injury had put paid to that.
And to any hope he had of clan support.
“We house some of the dispossessed at our hospital,” Dave told me. “And the care home we’ve established beside it, but not many, not most. The majority we don’t even find before… well, before they no longer need care.”
“Yes, because they’ve been left to die alone!”
“But now, for the first time, the council is discussing the problem. Sebastian is making them do so. Nothing has been decided yet, as it keeps being shelved due to more pressing matters, but it’s more than we’ve had.”
“It’s not enough! And this is pressing!”
He smiled at me suddenly. “You know, you’re not at all what I envisaged.”
“You envisaged?”
“You’re rather… talked about.”
Wonderful.
We paused to let the fey come clattering, huffing, and screeching back this way to pick up their cart, and then roll away with it down the hall. Dante’s, I thought, mentally shaking my head. We needed to get out of here.
We needed to get everyone out.
“Wolves in a pack care for their elderly,” I told Dave tightly.
“They bring them food, protect them, let them eat the softer parts of a kill first, and that’s animals.
Literal wolves out in the wild. They understand that the older ones have wisdom, experience, and utility beyond a strong back or sharp teeth.
An elderly wolf can protect pups while the pack hunts, or show them water sources in a drought that no one else remembers, or—or just be there!
Just be part of the family—loved and nurtured and—”
I felt my fists curl into my palms until the nails bit into the flesh.
“But we, who are supposed to be so much smarter, we do this.”
“Some do,” he agreed.
“Yeah, well, not anymore.”
I grabbed his clipboard and headed into the dorm full of elders, who all tried to rise when I entered, even one in a wheelchair.
Until I pushed him back down and hugged him, and accepted the touches they gave me in return, so soft, so tentative, so seemingly overwhelmed that I was there, that I gave a shit.
I felt a flood of shame, horror, fury, and so many other things that I couldn’t name them all.
What if the whole clusterfuck in Tartarus hadn’t happened? What if they’d been left down there to fend for self? What if—
My hands shook slightly as I thumbed through the pages on the clipboard until I found an empty one. “Can you give me your names?” I asked, and was deluged with information before I realized that I had no way to write it down.
“Pen?” I asked Dave. He handed one over, then just stood there, not letting go. After a second, I looked back to see him staring at me, looking slightly shocked for some reason. “Dave?”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” He started looking around. “I, uh, I have a pencil around here somewhere, too…”
“The pen is fine,” I said impatiently, and he finally let it go. “Is something wrong?” I added, because he just kept staring at me.
Which finally got him to look away and shake his head. “No, not at all. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
He looked back at me, and his eyes held an expression I couldn’t read. “Just… you might be exactly who we’ve been looking for.”