26
In that first instant, Tean was frozen. His eyes were trying to adjust again to the sudden darkness. The wolf was only an impression of fur and muzzle and ears and the smell of the rubber mask. The man was breathing softly but quickly. Panting.
At his side, like ice glowing in the ambient light, he held a knife.
The image came to Tean from earlier that day: Jem with the car keys.
He threw his phone at the wolf’s face.
It connected with a loud crack, and the wolf cried out. Tean lurched back. But the wolf only shook his head, shaking off the pain, and leaped.
The knife flashed.
Tean jumped backward. The air displaced by the knife brushed him, and it carried with it the rubber smell of the mask again.
The wolf leaped again, slashing at Tean.
When Tean sprang back again, he crashed into something—a corner that connected with his spine and sent a flash of pain through him.
He stumbled, and one foot came down on empty air.
The stairwell. He flailed, trying to catch a railing, a wall, anything.
But his momentum from the jump toppled him into the darkness, and he fell.
He hit the stairs first on his butt, rolled onto his back, and enough synapses fired for a single panicked thought to make their way to the surface: My neck. Then he came down hard on his shoulder, flopped onto his stomach, tumbled onto his butt again, and was at the bottom.
Pain from a dozen places roared up. He’d lost his glasses. He’d lost his breath. When he finally managed to suck in air, the smell of rotting meat was overpowering. And for a single moment, he wanted to lie there and be hurt, because anything else seemed like too much effort.
But the scuff of a footstep at the top of the stairs made him roll onto his side.
And then, somehow he got to his feet. He swept his hands once over the floor—bare concrete—and gave up on his glasses.
The basement was dark, with only the faintest light making its way through the small rectangular windows.
He had a sense of looming shapes around him, but his vision was so bad that he couldn’t make out any details.
One hand found cardboard—boxes. He took a step, and his ankle sparked like he’d made an electrical connection.
Tean would have fallen if he hadn’t shoulder-checked another tower of boxes.
Something clinked inside—china, his brain said; pottery; ceramics; as though any of it mattered—but the tower didn’t fall, and a moment later, he was limping forward again.
Steps clipped on the stairs.
His hand, trailing along the boxes, found a void, and he turned down the passageway.
It wasn’t a choice so much as an instinct.
Prey ran. That was how prey animals stayed alive.
The walkway was hemmed in on both sides by more boxes.
Tean’s brain ran backward, trying to estimate, trying to plan.
Was there only one path? Would the wolf—whoever it was—know immediately where Tean had gone?
It was a pointless question because Tean didn’t have any answers.
A break came in the boxes, and then Tean’s fingers brushed plastic, and something soft beneath that moved under his touch. Dresses. Or clothes, anyway. He found the hang rod, the rack, the hangers. He kept moving, and the clothing gave way to boxes again.
“Dr. Leon.” The voice belonged to a man, and it was slightly muffled. That meant he was standing beyond the boxes, not in this narrow passageway with Tean. And that meant Tean had another moment to live. “What are you doing?”
More boxes. And then the smooth finish of wood—or a wood veneer, anyway. It was a piece of furniture almost as tall as Tean, and he ran his hands over it. Maybe he could knock it down and create a barrier. Or push it on top of the wolf.
“You can’t get out.” Tean recognized the voice. It was soft, almost uninflected. “You have to go up to get out. And I’m right here.”
But he didn’t say stairs. He didn’t say steps. He said up. Even through the panic, Tean couldn’t help noticing.
Kai’s stepfather had butched him up. And that meant he couldn’t go around lisping like a fag.
“Come out, come out. I want to talk to you.”
Tean’s hand found an opening in the piece of furniture—the dresser?—and a drawer opened. He reached inside. Something heavy. Something he could use as a weapon.
Shoes.
Hopelessness twisted with rage.
“We can talk,” Kai said. “And then you can go.”
Think. Think. You have to be smarter than him. You have to think, or he’s going to kill you.
Prey ran. But where was Tean going to run? Run circles in this concrete box until Kai got bored and gutted him?
Think.
Prey didn’t always run.
Prey hid.
Prey disappeared.
Something opened in Tean’s chest—part bottomless pit, and part something else, something verging on excitement.
All the cardboard boxes.
And to Jem’s perpetual despair, Tean was wearing so much brown.
He backed down the passageway until he reached the rack of clothing.
He crouched, pushed through the hanging garments, and crashed into something on the other side—a bike, he realized as he grappled with it, trying to keep it from falling.
He managed to prop it against the wall, and then he drew himself into a ball as far back behind the clothes as he could manage.
He just needed Kai to pass him. He just needed an opening so he could get to the stairs.
“We left you alone,” Kai said. His voice was moving closer now. “We didn’t bother you or your…friend.”
Because you were afraid of us, Tean thought. He drew his knees closer to his chest. Because you were afraid of Jem.
“You could have left me alone too.” Another footstep.
And the next time he spoke, his voice was clearer, and Tean knew Kai had reached the path between the boxes.
“We’re doing a great work. We’re doing a wonderful thing.
You know Rydel. What he did to the men he met.
What he did with them. Do you know what he did to Zeb?
You wouldn’t believe it. To his own brother. ”
It was there on his—the faint slushiness of the s.
“And he took that boy, too. Do you know what he would have done to that boy? That boy never did anything wrong. Children are pure. It’s our job to protect them, understand? We’re doing that work. Protecting children from groomers, from pedophiles.”
It wasn’t necessarily a new argument, Tean knew.
Someone had always been around to make the case that homosexuals were all groomers.
That they were only able to continue their existence by perverting children and inducting them into the lifestyle.
And how many butchers had hidden behind the excuse that they were only doing it to protect children?
Maybe, for Zeb who had been abused when he was young, there was even some twisted degree of truth to it.
But Tean could hear the echo in Kai’s voice of his stepfather, of the man who’d taken it upon himself to beat the queer out of his adopted son.
“Hey!” Kai’s voice was almost next to him now. “I’m talking to you!”
Tean knew he needed to stay still, but the suddenness of Kai’s voice, the volume, the proximity—it made him lean back slightly. He reached to steady himself, and his hand came down on a snake.
For a moment, his brain went white. Somehow, he didn’t cry out.
He didn’t jerk away. And then he realized he wasn’t touching a snake.
He’d put his hand down on what must have been a spare inner tube for the bicycle: soft, flexible, the right dimensions for his brain to jump to the worst possible conclusion.
“Talk to me,” Kai said. He stopped exactly in front of where Tean was hiding.
Tean turned his face down; the human brain was programmed to recognize faces.
He had a sudden vision of himself, the brown of his clothes blending in with the boxes around him, and a giggle started to rise up.
Jem would be horrified. A moment later, Kai shouted, “Talk!”
With his face pressed to his knees, Tean couldn’t see anything. All he could do was listen to Kai’s breathing growing more ragged.
“You ought to be grateful!” Kai’s voice threatened to crack. “This needed to be done a long time ago! Think about how different your life would be if someone had helped you!”
The vision flashed into Tean’s mind of Tess’s burned face and broken fingers.
“Do you know what we are?” Kai said. “We’re wolves.
The wolves God put here to devour the wicked.
That’s why God made me like this. I had to go through the fire myself first. And I came through the flames.
He made me pure. He changed me. He gave me power over the earth to make all men pure like me.
And we will separate the sick from the whole like wolves through an unclean herd. ”
Part of him had noticed the increasing number of s sounds, and what they meant—that Kai either no longer could control himself, or no longer cared.
Because he was going to kill Tean. Because he wanted to kill him, and he would enjoy it.
And then the fear and hopelessness that had been rising in Tean snapped.
In their absence, he felt nothing but a hollow disbelief, and that clinical voice inside him had a single clear thought: in the absence of any other options, it was a mercy to put down a sick—and dangerous—animal.
And no matter how deadly an animal, if you were prepared, if you planned, if you had the right tools—
And the thought was there, fully formed in his head, like he’d always known what he was going to do.
“Quit hiding,” Kai called. “Come out here. I want to help you. You have to pass through the fire. But if you come through, you’ll be like me: more than a man.”
Kai waited, as though he thought Tean might take him up on the offer. Then rubber creaked, and the next step carried Kai past Tean and deeper into the basement.
“Do you know the problem with the world?” Kai began.
“We let people believe that faggots are natural. But God tells us what happens when people let perverts gain control of their government and schools and businesses. First, they destroy the traditional family. And then, when their wickedness can’t grow anymore, God stretches out His hand to wipe them off the face of the earth. ”
As Kai continued to rant, his voice growing uneven, the words coming too fast and loud, Tean moved.
He found the inner tube, closed a hand around it, and then slid forward.
He scooted out from under the hanging clothes, and plastic rustled.
But Kai was shouting now—something about God sending wolves to separate the clean from the unclean—and he must not have been able to hear.
Tean got to his feet. He thought once more about giving up on this plan and running for the stairs. But the rational part of him knew he wouldn’t make it. He was stiffening up from the fall, and Kai was younger and faster.
Besides, he told himself, this is going to work.
The thing about wolves, dogs—any canid, really—was that they were strong and quick and dangerous.
But no matter how dangerous, a catchpole still worked every time.
Tean stepped forward. He caught another whiff of the rubber mask, and something else, a scent on Kai that was sweet, maybe even floral.
Before he could focus on it, he swung the inner tube over Kai’s head like he was passing a hula hoop over him.
And then, as the inner tube descended, Tean twisted it at the back and yanked.
Fear and a spark of rage made him stronger than he expected.
The inner tube snapped shut around Kai’s neck, and Kai had a moment to cry out before the force of Tean’s pull hauled him into the air.
The wolf’s feet left the floor as Tean backpedaled.
The hand with the knife came up—not an attack, just a reflex, Kai’s hands groping for something that wasn’t there.
And then Kai came crashing down onto his back.
Tean kicked him in the head as hard as he could. The Keens were good boots, solid, reinforced so that you wouldn’t break a toe if you stumbled and hit a rock. Kai’s head snapped to the side, and the wolf went still.
Panting, Tean made himself let go of the inner tube. His fingers were stiff, and for a moment, they wouldn’t respond. Then they opened, and he stumbled backward.
Kai was still lying there.
No sign of the knife—lost in the dark or among the boxes, Tean guessed.
And then Kai groaned.
For a moment, the fear was like water running through Tean, trying to pour out of him wherever it could.
He collided with a stack of boxes, and they fell behind him.
Something shattered on the concrete floor.
He hit something else—another box, his brain tried to tell him—and he was blocked, he was trapped, he was—
Kai rolled onto his side. One hand flopped onto the concrete. But a moment later, he was pushing himself up.
Something was still blocking Tean.
It’s a box, Tean’s brain was screaming at him. It’s just a box!
Looking away from Kai as the wolfman got to his hands and knees was one of the hardest things Tean had ever done.
But then he saw what his brain had been trying to tell him: when he’d knocked over the stack of boxes, one had fallen into the narrow pathway at exactly the right angle to get stuck, and now it was in Tean’s way.
He ducked under it. When he glanced back, he couldn’t see Kai anymore.
It didn’t matter. He sprinted for the stairs. The slap of his Keens echoed back from concrete walls. His breathing whistled in his ears. He was halfway up the steps, the wooden treads thundering under him, when a glint caught his eyes.
His glasses.
He snatched them up and shoved them on his face as he shot up the remaining steps.
His phone was on the kitchen floor. He grabbed it and ran for the back door. He sprinted out onto the sun porch and then into the yard without bothering to close the doors behind him.
The white Ford was sitting there, still parked in the alley.
It took Tean two tries to get the door open because his hand was shaking so badly. When he threw a glance at the house, it was dark, and the lawn was just a white field broken where his steps had shattered the frost.
No wolfman.
No Kai.
The truck rumbled to life, and as Tean sped down the alley, he reached for his phone to call the police.