Running with the Pack

Sure enough, the door slammed open, rattling the whole frame of the shack. T.J. flinched, then scrambled back when Alex came at him. He tripped over the bed, ended up on his back, with the alpha werewolf lunging on top of him, pinning his shoulders, breathing on his neck.

T.J. lay as still as he could while gasping for breath. He kept his head back, throat exposed, hardly understanding what was happening—his body seemed to be reacting without him, showing the necessary submission so that Alex wouldn’t hurt him. He flushed with shame, because he thought he’d have been able to fight back.

Alex got up without a word and stalked out of the room. T.J. moved more slowly, but followed just the same.

T.J. sat in the corner, away from the others, staring out, turning over thoughts that weren’t his. He could run or he could fight. And what happened to safety? To peace? All he had to do was sit back and take it. Not argue. Not rock the boat, not stick his neck out.

He couldn’t stop staring, which in the body language of these creatures meant a challenge. He dropped his gaze to the bottle of beer he hadn’t been drinking.

Jane pulled a chair next to his and sat, then leaned on his shoulder, rubbing her head against his neck, stroking his arms. Trying to calm him, make him feel better.

“You know I’m gay, right?” he said.

Pouting, she looked at him. “We just want you to be happy. We want you to feel like you belong. You do, don’t you?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter as long as you’re safe, right? You know if anyone came through here and gave you trouble, Alex would go after them, right?”

He almost laughed. Like she knew anything about it. “That isn’t the point.”

He’d raised his voice without realizing it, glaring at her so that she leaned away, a spark of animal flashing in her eyes. Heavy boots stepping across the floor inevitably followed, along with a wave of musk and anger, as Alex came to stand beside Jane. It was the two of them, bad cop and good cop, keeping the pack in line. Like they were one big happy family.

T.J. should have gone with Gary.

He stood, putting himself at eye level with Alex—also a sign of challenge. “I’m leaving,” he said. Alex frowned. His mouth had been open to speak, but T.J. had done it first. The rest of the pack was here—they’d fallen silent and gathered around, the happy family. T.J. recognized a gang when he saw one.

Alex laughed—condescending, mocking. As if T.J. were a child. As far as their wolf sides were concerned, he supposed he was. He thought back to Alex throwing him to the floor, felt that anger again, and tamped it down tight. The alpha was trying to get a rise out of him, goad him into some stupid attack so he could smack him right back down. T.J. wouldn’t let him. All he had to do was stare.

“You’ll be on your own,” Alex said. “You won’t like that. You’ll never make it.”

T.J.’s mouth widened in a grin that showed teeth. He shouldn’t taunt Alex. He ought to just roll over on his belly like the others. But he shook his head.

“I’ve done it before,” he said. “I can do it again.”

And the wolf rose up, standing in place of the scared kid he used to be.

They could all jump him. He looked at the door and tried not to think of it, pushing all his other senses—ears, nose, even the soles of his feet—out, trying to guess when the rest of them would attack. He’d run. That was his plan.

“You don’t really want to leave,” Alex said, still with the laugh hiding in his voice.

T.J. looked around at all of them, meeting each person’s gaze. The others looked away. They’d all come here by accident, through werewolf attacks, or by design—recruited and brought to the cage. T.J., on the other hand, had come to them alone, and he could leave that way. Maybe they didn’t mind it here, but one of these days, T.J. would fight back. Maybe he’d win against Alex and become the alpha of this pack. Maybe he’d lose, and Alex would kill him. But they could all see that fight coming.

Which was maybe why they let him walk out the door without another argument. And rather than feeling afraid, T.J. felt like he’d won a battle.

He hadn’t been brave enough to live out his old life. But he’d been brave enough to stick his hand in that cage.

Before he left the area, he had one more thing to do. Just to be sure.

A different guy was working at the clinic, which was just as well. “Have you ever had an HIV test before?” the staffer said.

“Yeah. Here, in fact. About eight months ago.”

“Oh? What was the result? Is there a reason you’re back? Let me look it up.”

T.J. gave the guy his name, and he looked it up. Found the two positives, and T.J. wanted to snarl at him for the look of pity he showed.

“Sir,” he said kindly—condescendingly. “With a result like this you should have come back sooner for counseling. There’s a lot of help available—”

“The results were wrong,” T.J. said. “I want another test. Please.”

He relented and took T.J. into the exam room, went through the ritual, drew the blood, and asked T.J. to wait. The previous times, it had taken a half an hour or so. The guy came back on schedule, wearing a baffled expression.

“It’s negative,” the staffer said.

T.J. exalted, a howl growing in his chest.

The staffer shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’ve seen false positives—but two false positives in a row? That’s so unlikely.”

“I knew it,” T.J. said. “I knew it was wrong.”

He gave the guy a smile that showed teeth and walked out.

SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE

STEVE DUFFY

24-HOUR DENTIST said the sign, in Mandarin and English. Hayden tried to put out of his mind that awful old joke of his father’s, when’s your appointment, tooth-hurtee, and stepped inside. Though it was close on midnight, the streets were still bustling, tangy with exhaust fumes and the smell of the all-night noodle stalls. Inside the frosted-glass and brushed-metal reception area it was air conditioned and monastically quiet. The nurse who answered the buzzer installed him in a futuristic bucket chair, discreetly indicating the selection of reading matter spread on a nearby coffee table. Running, for the hundredth time that day, his tongue along the edges of his teeth, Hayden noticed with little or no surprise that among the magazines was the very issue of Scientific American he’d been reading on the plane, back at the start of it all.

“MIRACLE” CHINESE DENTAL TREATMENT TO UNDERGO TRIALS IN WEST, announced the headline. Trapped in mid-flight hiatus, equi-distant between London and Hong Kong, Hayden had been leafing through the magazine like the diligent sci-tech rep he tried to be, on the lookout for snappy, comprehensible articles free of algebra or chemical symbols. Medicine wasn’t his area, so what drew him to this piece? Simply that long-distance plane travel often tended to set his teeth on edge, start up aches and twinges in his back fillings. Something to do with the cabin pressure, he wasn’t quite sure. Did it matter that his crowns had been fitted at ground level, where the PSI would be different? Perhaps the whole thing was psychosomatic, a displacement of some unconscious phobia to do with long-distance air travel. There wasn’t really anyone he could ask: no one he knew seemed to suffer the same problem. Unconsciously, Hayden stroked his jaw as he read on past the headline.

According to the text, scientists from the University of Hong Kong —using a groundbreaking mixture of ancient Chinese herbal lore and cutting-edge stem cell procedures—had come up with a paradigm shift in the treatment of dental problems. Initial trials of the new medication, a simple rub-in gel, had exceeded all expectations, and already there was said to be a flourishing black market as small pirate gene-tech labs churned out their own bootleg versions of the remedy. A side-bar explained the science part. The genes which controlled first and second dentitions in the human—milk teeth through wisdom teeth—had been identified several years previously, in the wave of slipstream discoveries subsequent to the Y2K breakthrough on the human genome. The Hong Kong scientists, experts in the field of transgenics, had concentrated their efforts on the so-called genetic switches which . . . Here Hayden paused, distracted by a slowly increasing sense of no longer subliminal apprehension.

He’d been grinding his teeth, ever so slightly, as he read. He knew this was something he did, not just in his sleep but when concentrating; both his girlfriend and his dentist had told him so. Now, if he clicked his top molars against his lower, he could feel . . . what was that? He tongued around furtively inside his mouth, inserting a finger once he was sure no-one was looking in his direction. There, just at the back . . . oh, great. Of course. Naturally. Six weeks on business in the Far East, and a wisdom tooth cracked clean down the middle.

It had been the Bombay mix back in the departure lounge, he recollected glumly; no doubt about it. He distinctly remembered chomping down on the bulletlike roasted chickpea as his flight had been called, that suspicious splintering feeling he’d put to the back of his mind amidst all the check-in anxiety . . . that was the culprit, all right. Super. He didn’t even like Bombay mix that much. Maybe he could sue Heathrow for the cost of the treatment.