I didn’t know what to say. My first reaction was to protest talk of execution, but the world and its rules were different for me now.
“David is still alive,” Jules added. “Infected. But if he wants our drugs, he’s welcome to them. I doubt we’ll see the human backlash Mae and Peter dreamed up.”
“I’ve had enough of your drugs to last a lifetime,” I said.
She nodded, not meeting my gaze. “But that’s what I can offer you.” She reached into the pocket of her torn jeans and pulled out a prescription bottle. “If you want them.”
“More sedatives?” The wolf inside me bristled.
“No,” she said, balancing the bottle on the armrest of my chair. “What I gave you tonight. Clarity of the natural-born. I can’t take back what I did to you, but I can … I can make it easier.”
“Thanks,” I said quietly, not sure what else to say. I watched the others—Seeonee or Rothschild, in human form I couldn’t tell them apart—filter out from the exam rooms. They looked tired, and sad. They stayed close together, like they were waiting for something.
“I am so sorry for everything,” Jules said. She scrubbed her face with her hands, looking exhausted. “Jesus, what a day.”
“Jules?”
“Hm?”
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. I squeezed her shoulder in gratitude and stood, going into the back of the clinic. I wasn’t content to wait anymore.
Ginny came out into the sterile hallway. She smiled at me, that dimpled smile, and I couldn’t wait the length of the corridor. I ran to her and threw my arms around her, claiming her mouth with a kiss. She wrapped her good arm around my neck and tangled her fingers in my hair.
“I had a feeling you were coming for me,” she said.
“Jules has these pills,” I blurted out. “She’s going to offer them to infected werewolves, to keep control during the change and I … I was wondering if … but I won’t if you don’t want me to pretend to be—” She gently tugged my hair, bit her bottom lip in a wicked grin, and I stopped rambling. “If you’re going to be a Seeonee wolf,” she said, “you might as well do it properly.”
I smiled at that. I pushed her through the nearest door and when we were alone, she lowered her good hand to my hip and pulled me against her.
“Good to know you’re not an elitist,” I said.
I flicked off the fluorescent light and let our hands and noses and mouths take over in the ensuing darkness. My mate’s scent bewitched me and I breathed it in: cinnamon, woodsmoke, and a November breeze.
THE SINEWS OF HIS HEART
by Melissa Yuan-Innes
Rachel Feng missed the funeral, but she still got to see her dead cousin while she was stuck in the back of a Chinese taxicab.
Cho, the deceased cousin, or at least his identical twin, signaled her from a white Range Rover in the right-hand lane of Harbin’s main highway.
Rachel clutched her burgundy faux Prada handbag. Her damp fingers slipped off the cheap leather. This could not be happening.
On the other hand, a lot of weird crap had unrolled lately, from Rachel’s newfound love for steak tartar to Cho’s alleged funeral scheduled five hours from now. She’d recognize Cho’s bulbous nose anywhere. It ran in the family and dominated Rachel’s otherwise delicately-featured face. At least her nose wasn’t cocked to the left, the way Cho’s had remained after one too many fist fights.
Cho took a hard right and bumped to a stop on to the side of the road, which looked too narrow to handle a Range Rover, but a cyclist swerved around him like this was business as usual.
Rachel knocked on the Plexiglas separating her from the taxi driver. “Pull over, please,” she called in English. He didn’t turn around. All she could see was his well-trimmed, graying hairline, the weathered back of his neck, and the cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. She rummaged her brain for the correct Mandarin and finally dredged up a “Stop! Please!”
She pressed the lever to roll down her taxi window. Humid smog smacked her in the face. A woman’s voice said, in English, “Please do not touch any button” and the window began to roll back up again.
“Stop! It’s my cousin!” she yelled back in English, and through the glass, she called, “Cho! Is that you?” She jammed her arm into the remaining window gap, but when the glass kept rolling upward, she yanked her hand back and hammered on the Plexiglas taxi divider instead. “Let me out!”
The taxi crawled a few more feet on the highway. The woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry. We have not yet reached your destination.” Rachel had read somewhere that, since the 2008 Olympics, Beijing drivers used portable translators in their cabs. Too bad the translation only seemed to work one way. She craned her neck to stare out the back window.
Cho popped his door open and jumped out of the vehicle. She recognized the tilt of his head and the way he kicked the pavement, although he’d grown a little potbelly over the past fifteen years and he wore a camouflage hat and matching jumpsuit, like he was in the military.
It was him. Why the heck had she flown down for his funeral when he was alive and driving a Range Rover? Her aunt had said he’d been mauled by a tiger, which sounded so 18th century anyway. Maybe it was all an elaborate plot to get Rachel to fly from Canada to China? Or, more likely, Rachel was hallucinating after traveling for 24 hours?
She ripped open her wallet and grabbed some Chinese cash. She waved it at the driver and yelled, “Take it!”
He finally met her eyes in the mirror and rolled down the divider. “No,” he said.
Something about his expression made her hesitate for a second. The whites around his dark irises. The lift of his eyebrows. Then she figured she must be getting heat stroke in the confines of this greasy little cab. She left the money on the seat and yanked on the door handle.
“Wait!” he said in Mandarin. “It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be meeting a ghost.”
She nearly laughed. She’d heard about Chinglish, that weird combination of Chinese + English = charming nonsense. But with her rusty Mandarin, she could make up Chinglish out of her own head. She opened the door.
The driver muttered to himself, but he finally wove his way on to the highway shoulder and popped open the trunk. She seized her luggage and wheeled it toward her cousin as fast as her running shoes would take her.
It was Cho. For sure. She spotted the scar under his left eyebrow from when he fell skateboarding, showing off in front of eight-year-old Rachel and her sister before their family emigrated. He’d developed a red nose and broken veins on his cheeks. Her aunt had never mentioned booze, but no doubt it had played a role in any alleged tiger mauling.
“Cho. I thought you were … ” Dead. But the words locked in her throat. She felt all wrong in China, a Chinese girl who could hardly speak Chinese. She wished again her family could have come with her. She tried again. “It’s good to see you, cousin.” Nervousness bubbled in her stomach. A burning pain lodged behind her heart, even though she too young for heartburn. She pressed her hand to her heart. Her seemed to rebel lately.
“Come on. I’ll show you the tigers,” he said.
“Tigers?” He spoke English with a Mandarin accent, so maybe she’d misunderstood him. Or maybe “tigers” was slang for how he talked about his family, the way English people would talk about bearding the lion in his den. “I’m on my way to, ah, see your mother and everyelse here.” She showed him the printout of the funeral home information. He stared at the paper blankly. She was so punch-drunk tired, she wanted to say, You’re supposed to be dead. What happened to you? Instead, she said, “Can you take me there? Do you want to come?”