Val opened the door the rest of the way. Behind him on the floor was a huge shaggy grey and silver dog with yellow eyes lying on a heap of rags. It looked tense and miserable. Val looked pretty tense too, and worried. Like Mom. Mongo’s tail beat harder. The huge dog was panting heavily, although it was cool in the shed, and its tail was clamped between its legs. I looked down. Mongo had his head lowered and his ears not-quite flat, his eyes wide open but soft, and his tail was going like four hundred and twelve. Friendly but submissive. I looked at the other dog again.
It looked awfully like a wolf.
“Please come in,” said Val. “Mongo too, if he wishes.”
The shed wasn’t that big. To get the door shut behind me I had to go closer to the huge dog (or wolf) than I wanted to. As soon as the door was shut I backed up against it till I couldn’t go any farther. I could still feel that keep-away sensation I’d felt outside, but inside the shed it was weirder. Much weirder. It was both go-away and please-please-please-stay. The shed had gruuaa everywhere—there was even one wrapped around the cord that the little ceiling light hung from.
Mongo got down on his belly and crept toward the other dog. One of the other dog’s forefeet gave a funny twitch and then it whined—a pathetic, heartbreaking sound. I knew that sound; I heard it at the shelter all the time. I also knew that the last thing you do is rush up to a strange animal and touch it just because you know it’s miserable.
Well, okay, I didn’t rush. I took two deliberate steps—past Val, who made no move to stop me—and knelt down by Mongo, who was by this time licking the big dog’s chin. Petting this monster seemed rude somehow . . . not that what I did was sensible. I sat down next to it and reached out for it like it was Mongo. Like we were on the sofa, and he was sitting next to me. I reached out as if I was going to drag the front half of it into my lap.
Never, ever do this.
It gave a moan, and shoved its gigantic head under my arm and . . . there was a totally doolally blur, I don’t know, all teeming and boiling and wildness . . . not wholly unlike a smaller denser version of what had wrapped around Casimir and me in the park . . .
. . . and I suddenly had my arms around Takahiro. A naked Takahiro. Val produced a blanket out of somewhere and dropped it over him, and then knelt down beside him and hung on: Takahiro was shivering like he was having some kind of fit. He still had his head under my arm, and his arms were across my lap. One of them reached around behind me and grabbed the pocket of my jeans like it was saving him from drowning. I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrapped my arms around his naked chest and back and held on too.
It was over in maybe a minute. Then he went limp, and his hand fell away from my jeans pocket. Val and I let go, but Val was tucking the blanket around him, as tenderly as if Takahiro was his baby son. A six-and-a-half-foot baby son. I realized the rags that the “dog” had been lying on used to be clothes. I thought I recognized what used to be a sweatshirt with our high school logo on it. He rolled away from me and tried to sit up. Val had begun chafing his blanket-covered back and shoulders like you might do someone you’ve just saved from drowning. “You’re all right,” said Val, pausing to retuck a bit of the blanket. “It’s over. You’re all right.”
“I’m not all right,” said Takahiro in a voice I barely recognized. “I have never been all right. I have always been this.”
I wanted to scream or throw up or run away or all three, but I couldn’t. Takahiro, as many times as I’d wanted to kill him in the last more than seven years, was my friend. And werewolves were a myth. Like mgdagas. I got up, a little unsteadily, and picked up the mug of coffee on Val’s table. “Coffee?” I said inanely, and held it out toward Takahiro.
He glanced up and away again as if he couldn’t meet my eyes. The blanket slipped down over one shoulder. He had the most beautiful creamy skin, like a golden pearl. He pulled the blanket up over his shoulder again—Val was still kneeling beside him, rubbing his back. I kept on holding out the coffee (Taks was as much of a coffee hound as Jill and me) and eventually, without looking at me, he took it.
I sat back down on the floor too, immediately in front of him, where he would have to look at me (I hoped). I was fighting wanting to scream or throw up, and if I still wanted to run away—and with the army out there cranking its zappers and wave machines, I did want to run away—I wanted to take Takahiro with me. Far away from this world where everything was going so rats’ assy. Mongo, however, was thrilled by the situation. He crammed himself between Taks and me. Taks got the soulful brown eyes. I got the being beaten to death with a tail.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I said in my calmest voice.
Takahiro didn’t say anything, and after about a minute Val said, “They were doing a sweep in this area. I was surprised; Copperhill is over ten miles away, yes? And you have not the assumption of a cobey series in Newworld, I believe. Takahiro and I were out here, but I could feel something going on—as, I believe, could Takahiro.” He stopped and looked at Taks. And waited.
Eventually Takahiro muttered, “Yes. It was the best thing that had happened since I came here, when they stopped doing regular sweeps. And this one’s fiercer than I remember.”
“The gruuaa did not like it either,” said Val.
“Then you’re seeing them again—er—you know they’re there,” I interrupted.
“Yes,” said Val. “I do not see them as well as I once did—”
How well is well? I wondered. Do you know how many legs and how many eyes, and are there teeth? For that matter, are there mouths? Is it vocal cords in a throat that Hix uses to hum with?
“—but the skill is returning—now that I am employing it. I guessed Hix had gone with Maggie this morning, which was both good and bad; good that she would protect you, bad that she thought you needed protecting. In Oldworld, when a big cobey opens, usually at least one more opens near it, and gruuaa are very sensitive to the energy shifts this causes. Sometimes they can damp these effects for their human colleagues. Sometimes they cannot.” He glanced at Takahiro again. “As I say, we were out here when this powerful sweep began. . . .”
The throb of the armydar was less awful in the shed, maybe because of all the gruuaa. “Why would a cobey sweep upset all of us?” I said. “It’s just supposed to make the cobey easier to manage, isn’t it? But it feels like it’s trying to turn me inside out.” Armydar didn’t use to make me feel like that. But the regular sweeps stopped right around the time I hit puberty. Which is supposedly when your magic gene tended to flick into active status. Back in the days when anyone had a magic gene.
“Yeah,” said Takahiro very quietly.
“It interests me very much that they do such a sweep,” said Val, “here in Newworld, including a bandwidth that apparently disturbs magical effects. In Oldworld the sweep after a new cobey is for any sign of another one in the area, but it is also for any local use of magic. The dimension shift of a cobey will distort any magic done within its range of influence.”
“Foreseers,” I said. “Um.” Not wanting to say Casimir’s name. “Aren’t there—foreseers?”
Val looked at me in surprise. “Yes. But foreseers are human, like the rest of us, and even a very good foreseer can miss a little cobey, which may nonetheless cause local disarray. It is perhaps Newworld’s lack of foreseers that explains the strength and extent of this sweep, if it is still the result of the cobey in Copperhill. Although perhaps there has been some further activity nearer at hand.”