“So after Taks and Mongo went back to join you—we hoped—the rest of us kept on toward what you’d thought was the front of the building. I’d been having this really squashing sense of doom, but it’s been so bad the last few days I’m like, so? Big ugly sense of doom with a side of fries and an extra-large coffee, you know? I was also kind of distracted by Whilp, who was so totally trying to talk to me and I had no idea what she was saying. And then Caz says like idly, When will they get here? and I heard myself answering just as idly, About an hour, and then I stopped and looked at him—What? Sorry, he said, that’s something else my mom taught me, and I know you’re picking them up better than I am. Picking what up, I said. The army, he said. They’re coming, aren’t they?
“And then something like straightened out in my head and I thought, Yeah. They’re coming. A lot of them are coming—I mean, a lot? For just Val and Arnie? Why a lot? What?
“I don’t know, Caz said, but if we’ve got an hour we can prepare a welcome for them. Do you want the hatchet or my penknife? and he pulled this folding knife out of his pocket. I took the hatchet since I’ve split way too much kindling in my life—”
In spite of the circumstances I grinned. Arnie, Jill’s mom and her four brothers all loved camping. Jill did not love camping. Occasionally she got to stay home with me.
“—and we started dropping brush across the track, and Caz untwisted the rope to make more rope and started weaving it through the brush—and muttering while he did it. I didn’t ask him what he was muttering, but it wasn’t English, and his mom taught him kind of a lot, didn’t she? Sometimes it seemed to me that the rope kind of wriggled for a while after he let go of it.
“The gruuaa network you sent with us—they were all over what we were doing. It’s a good thing Caz was so calm and focused because I kept kind of losing it—I’d start worrying about what was going on with you guys and I’d jerk myself back to what I was doing, preferably before there was any serious blood loss, and I’d discover that the jiggly woven thing that Caz and the gruuaa were making had gone way more complicated since the last time I looked. Then pieces of Caz started disappearing as the gruuaa moved around. It made me really dizzy, and Caz took the hatchet away and gave me some of his untwisted rope strands instead, and that worked because the gruuaa showed me where to wind them through.
“That’s—that’s when Whilp finally figured out how to tell me about hooking—pinning—I don’t know what to call it—some of the gruuaa around us and the dogs. I’d let the dogs off lead when we were dragging the brush around—I didn’t like the idea of them being helpless if something went wrong, you know? And Whilp needed me to help, uh . . . it wasn’t just guarding, it was invisibling, like what was happening to Caz. Like Taks in the school yard yesterday, only more so.”
“Wow,” I said admiringly. “I don’t know about invisibling.”
“But stuff did happen faster than we were ready for . . .” Jill’s eyes got huge and we stared at each other, and I knew we were both remembering wolf-Takahiro with the blood streaming down his chest.
Takahiro appeared through the trees and for a moment the world stopped as I looked at him. He didn’t look like a boy who thought he was too tall any more. He looked like a hero. A live hero. The best kind. He looked back at me and smiled. That hot distracting thrill ran through me again.
Casimir was turning more bacon. “This is not ready yet, and I gave the last to Maggie. There are apples, and potatoes in the ashes, which might be done by now.”
“You are a miracle, son,” said Arnie, eating another apple.
“I serve the mgdaga,” said Casimir calmly.
Ugh. “Where did all the food come from?” I said through another mouthful, and before anyone said anything about what Casimir had just said. Takahiro was rolling out black wrinkly-skinned potatoes with what I guessed was Casimir’s jackknife and his fingers. “Ow,” he said, and sucked his fingers. Werewolves when human still burn their fingers. He finished rolling them onto another paper plate, picked up a couple of apples too, and settled down beside me to eat.
“Caz,” said Jill smugly. “He’s the only one of us who saw any of this coming—”
“I saw none of it,” said Casimir, glancing up from his fire and looking for the first time not merely drop-dead gorgeous but also young, young like Jill and Taks and I were young, and vulnerable, and not knowing a lot—but then knowing a lot hadn’t done Val and Arnie much good. I suddenly wondered what it had really cost Mom to let us all go last night—and had to stop myself from looking over my shoulder again, to check she wasn’t standing right there watching us. She felt so close I almost reached up to stroke the air, having got kind of accustomed to stroking invisible companions recently.
I hadn’t noticed when Hix reclaimed my neck as her personal space, but I could feel her there now, and there were trailing gruuaa ends more or less visible over both my shoulders and Taks’, and a faint sweet smell in spite of the bacon. I noticed a shadow curled up on Jill’s knee. She had a hand near that knee and was wiggling a couple of fingers in a petting sort of way. I grinned again. Whilp.
“But you saw that something was,” said Jill. “The rest of us were all, oh, it’s a cobey, it’s several cobeys, who cares about deep lines, that’s what the army is for—and you got all your money out of the bank and bought a first-aid kit and two emergency blankets and some chocolate and peanuts and a water bottle with a safe-water thingy and matches and kindling starter.
“So we all had blankets last night, you know?” she said to me, and the Casimir smile came and went on her face, and I was counting: the blanket from the car, that’s one, and I was guessing Arnie and Val would have shared one, which left one for Casimir and Jill. “And this morning he was up before any of the rest of us and got the fire started, and then left it with Val while he went foraging.”
“That was only sensible,” said Casimir. “No one is searching for me.”
“And by the time he got back—the second time, with the dog food—your mom had done her security-lockdown trick and . . . here we are.”
I lied. When I thought none of the others was looking I gave Mongo half my last slice of bacon. Taks got through his first plateful in approximately one gulp, and his second almost that fast . . . his third . . . I began to lose count. “Maybe you should finish off the dog food,” I said.
“Ha ha ha,” he said.
Jill said, “She’ll be here soon.”
I think we all heard a car turning out of the general traffic noise and coming toward us, and then stopping. Nobody else moved as Val got up and went toward the sound of the hand brake going on. I had a chance to think, What in all the worlds is she driving? as I tucked my hand through Takahiro’s arm—he was eating another apple with his other hand—and then there was a bang like a storm-drain cover being dropped, which was maybe the driver’s door closing.
They came back pretty quickly, and Mom could have been a little flushed from the general circumstances, although they had their arms around each other’s waists. I got up and ran to her, and I would have managed not to cry—I think—except that she started crying, and then I had to cry too to keep her company.
She was driving the biggest double pickup van thing you have ever seen in your life: the kind of truck that really wanted to be a stretch limo except it’s on these like bulldozer wheels, and it had two seats like an ordinary four-door car and then an ordinary pickup cap over about two-thirds of the gigantic rear, like trying to put double-bed sheets on a king-sized bed. We were all going ooh and aah in a stunned kind of way—a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours but the Super-Plus Mammothmobile was still startling—and Mom said, “It belongs to one of Gwenda’s clients, of course. We didn’t know how many of you there were but I remembered what you looked like leaving last night” —and her voice got all wobbly and she gave a gigantic sniff before she went on—“and Gwenda got on the phone to some construction boss whose daughter she’d defended, and this, this thing,” she said, gesturing at it, “was delivered to our door about an hour later. It’s like driving a house but we’d asked for large.