"Hey." Someone—a regular human—shone a flashlight onto the Jaguar, seeking him out. "This is a private party."
"And he's invited," a voice rumbled out of the dark. The flashlight flicked to the speaker, and hit Rennie Shaw as he drifted out of the shadows. The light reflected in his eyes with the greenish gleam of a wild dog's. There was a bullet hole in Shaw's leather jacket—a reminder of the Dog Warrior's intervention that afternoon. "This is our Boy."
The light jumped back to Atticus, finding his face. He squinted against the glare, as his eyes had been getting accustomed to the dark.
"Oh, I see," the wielder of the flashlight said, and the light snapped off.
The hairs on the back of Atticus's neck rose. Am I that much like them?
"Mouthpiece said you might be coming around, Boy." Shaw motioned that Atticus was to follow.
"You're having a party?" Atticus covered his disquiet.
"We're having a Gathering of the clans." To the bikers, Shaw called back. "Nothing happens to the car, or you'll be the ones we track down."
"Does that mean we have to stand here and guard it?" One of them whined, and was immediately cuffed by the man standing beside him.
"Okay, Rennie," the wielder of the flashlight said. "You can count on us—sir."
"Hell's Angels calling you sir." Atticus murmured as he and Shaw moved into the woods. "That's pathetic."
"They have their uses. Mostly that the cops have to wade through them to get to us."
There were knots of parties scattered through the campground; the largest concentration of people being down by the bonfire. He could feelsolitary Pack members moving through the crowds like herd dogs. It surprised him that he recognized some as they brushed against his awareness.
The humans carried flashlights, or stumbled through darkness. He and Shaw moved quietly through the trees, eyes growing accustomed to the dark, the night becoming vivid grays.
Atticus eyed the bullet hole in Shaw's jacket, the leather scorched by the muzzle flare, tainted slightly by burned blood. Shaw showed no sign, though, of being wounded. The Dog Warriors must heal as readily as himself—or perhaps faster, like the Ontongard. Still, it had to hurt. "Thanks for the save."
"We're your family. You're our Boy."
Another time, Atticus would have snapped a denial to that, but now . . . what did he know? "Am I?"
"Here. Take my hand." Shaw paused to hold out his right hand, as if to shake. "Go on. I don't bite—much."
Atticus reluctantly reached out and took Shaw's hand. The fingers closed like a steel trap on his, holding him tight.
"Do you know how to use those senses of yours?" Shaw asked. "Can you feel down deep to the pattern of life?"
During their fight on the beach, Atticus had sensed that Shaw wasn't human, but hadn't focused on how. Now, without distraction, he could study Shaw's genetic pattern. Whereas his own DNA was one smooth pattern, alien as it was, Shaw's was a mass of confusion. There was a scant human part—like a veneer—of a tall, lean, Anglo-Saxon man. Under the man, though, ran a thread of wolf and mouse, and then, like a raging river under it all, was something fully alien. Yet he could find familiar landmarks, similarities that lay in himself.
His family.
"So what are you to me? Uncle? Cousin? Brother?"
"The answer isn't that simple."
"Why not?"
"Because we don't reproduce like humans." Shaw started to walk again.
"How do you reproduce?"
"Actually, as little as possible."
After a minute of silence, it became obvious that Shaw wasn't going to elaborate. He tried another line of questions. "What happened after you put me on the train?"
"Do you really want to know? It's a grisly tale."
"Yes, I do."
"We had the advantage of numbers. Eighteen to four."
Eighteen? Then the Dog Warriors weren't there in full force. Zheng must still have her Pack backup. And four was wrong too.
"There were six." Though Atticus did leave the one drugged, possibly dead, on the docks.
"Once the police started to arrive, we didn't have the luxury to search for stragglers. We grabbed the ones we could and went to the city pound. They cremate the dogs they put down. We borrowed the facilities."
He thought of the woman, so like himself, crawling through the weeds on fire, and felt slightly sick.
"Don't pity them!" Shaw snapped. "They're the enemy of all life on this planet. They won't stop until they're put down, or they've corrupted everything into their image."
"Okay, so I don't know what the hell is going on. Why don't you tell me? What the hell are they? What are we? Werewolves? Demons? Angels?"
"You're asking for a history lesson that stretches back thousands of years and covers multiple star systems."
"So we're aliens?"
"Mostly."
Atticus jerked to a halt. "Just give me a straight answer, damn it."
"You didn't fight four men this morning," Hellena Gobeyn said, moving ghost silent through the trees to join them. "You faced one creature." She reached out and took Atticus's hand in hers. "As you have five fingers that can act as one fist"—she curled his hand into a fist—"the Ontongard act as one being."
"One body—ten bodies—a thousand—it doesn't make a difference," Shaw said. "It's one monster with one thought—to grow."
"But we're like them." Atticus freed his hand from Hellena's. "They heal like us, and the mice."
"Prime—the first of us—was a mutation of Ontongard," Hellena said. "He had a will of his own. He had hopes and dreams and desires of his own making."
"You're a lot like him," Shaw said. "An angry young male, surrounded by beings that seem like you but aren't, made a loner by the very fact that you aren't one of them. He hated the Ontongard." Shaw gave Atticus a questioning look. "Do you hate humans?"
"No," Atticus snapped.
Shaw pushed against him mentally, seeking the truth.
"Don't do that!" Atticus backed away from him, unsure how to break the mental contact.
"Don't lie to me then." Nevertheless, Shaw backed off. "I've seen into your mind. You enjoy beating the hell out of them."
"No, not all of them. I couldn't hate the entire race. For every shitheel that crawls the earth, there are a dozen good people worth protecting."
"Ah, there's the difference then. For Prime, there was only one being, and it was a monster. He tried his best to kill them all."
"He almost succeeded," Hellena said. "At least, as far as Earth is concerned. Prime sabotaged the seed ship so it would self-destruct and then joined the crew of the scout ship. When he crashed it into the Blue Mountains in Oregon, he killed all but one—Hex."
"But one was too many," Shaw said. "Oregon, late seventeen hundreds. There was nothing there that could stand against Hex. Arrows with stone heads. Hell, we can barely stand against his Gets now, and we're on an even footing."
"In his dying minutes, Prime made us, the Pack, to carry on his fight," Hellena said. "We've fought Hex and his Gets for hundreds of years."
"Made? How did he make the Pack?"
"The Ontongard reproduce virally, Boy. They might look human, but you're looking at a million of them in one body. That's how we can make the mice—shape or size isn't important—though it does affect intelligence. They inject themselves into a host—a human—and take the body over."
They walked out of the woods at last, into a clearing. It was like stepping back in time. A small cook fire was the only source of light. A deer carcass hung from a high branch; cuts of it were being grilled over the wood flame. Beings pretending to be human dressed in leather and carrying guns moved through the flickering firelight. When they looked up, their eyes gleamed in the darkness like wolves'.