Part 5 (1/2)

The silence struck her like a fall of bricks. The three women at her table stared at her stone faced, when they should have been shrieking and cursing at her win. She felt the grin solidify on her face and clacked the dice nervously in her hand as she stared back.

The other eight, four at one table and four in the pit, were staring at her as well. Sandy's smile faded as she looked around: there was a strange, sharp tang in the air that, more than the somber gaze of eleven other women, made her hackles rise. The scattered pencils on each table, a spill of honey-glazed peanuts from a bowl across the stained cloth of the pit, the bright green bear crumpled on the floor, a cl.u.s.ter of half-filled water bottles and a lone, lipstick-stained martini gla.s.s gave the impression of a room abandoned in haste, and the group of women that once belonged so intrinsically to this milieu, with their good-natured vulgarity and dull jobs and side businesses and recipes and husbands and boyfriends was gone, this predatory, alien coven in their place.

Sandy grasped the dice hard until the pointed edges bit painfully into her palm, then laid them carefully on the table. She tried a final placating smile, directed at Miranda's grim expression opposite her, then let it fade.

”I think we won. Did I make a mistake on the scoring?”

Miranda regarded her under lowering brows for a few seconds, then smiled, hugely, showing all her teeth. With a dull shock Sandy saw they were very white, and very pointed. More like a dog's teeth than a person's, she thought.

”No,” said Miranda. ”No, I don't think you made a mistake.”

The sharp smell-a kerosene kind of smell, Sandy thought in her back brain-got stronger suddenly and she s.h.i.+fted backwards in her chair. The path to the front door was blocked by the two tables to her left, but the arch to the kitchen was directly behind her and on the other side, the front hallway.

But that was silly. No one was going to hurt her. Not over bunco. It wasn't that important. Not like they had skin in the game. Not like her.

Then Miranda and Ca.s.s rose; Ca.s.s's chair fell with a clatter-she ignored it, poised in a semi-crouch, just like Miranda. The way they stood, knees bent not quite right, the planes of their faces not quite right-they had changed, s.h.i.+fted in some indefinable way, and as she watched Sandy saw it: the base of Ca.s.s's nose broadened between the eyes, lips lifting from teeth that were not made the way they were before.

”I told you,” growled a voice from the pit. Shel. Her partner four rounds back. They had lost, Sandy making sure it was her last loss. ”I told you she cheated. Second time she subbed.”

Dumb b.i.t.c.h, thought Sandy with useless clarity through her pooling fear. I fooled you the first game too, and you though it was sub's luck.

Miranda growled, her lips lifting, her snout-it was a snout, her face s.h.i.+fting, malleable as Play-Doh-extending out of her formerly placid face. Sandy scrambled backwards, tipping her chair over in front of Ca.s.s to give her a few more seconds, retreating into the kitchen and, abandoning purse and coat, making for the hallway. The blinds over the sink were up and a small part of her, seeing the moon rise over the neighbor's rooftop, understood.

It wasn't even a full moon, a blobby something somewhere between full and half, not even photogenic. Seemed like cheating to her.

Of course, that was only fair, considering.

The arch to the hallway was blocked by three looming forms-small plump Gwynne, her back humped up under a pink silk blouse, her fangs protruding over her lower lip, her pet.i.te fingers now claws. Lydia and Shel loomed behind her, their faces molded flat and feral like Miranda's.

Sandy whirled around, her heels slipping on the linoleum. Ca.s.s's shoulders, enormous and hairy, were bursting out of her dusky purple jacket, part of the suit she wore every Monday, or when clients were in the office. Sweet, kind-of-frumpy Ca.s.s, eating yogurt every morning and heating up her Lean Cuisine at lunch. Harriet-called-Harry, who had a meeting with her fifth-grader's teacher that afternoon and was bemoaning the fact that she only came up with fantastic retorts three hours later at dinner, drooled down her T-s.h.i.+rt, her eyes huge and yellow.

Sandy backed into a table loaded with the dirty dishes from dinner; one tipped to the floor and spun around with a clatter of silverware. More crowded into the kitchen: Tessa, Maggie, Mia-whose ears had grown up pointed, still pierced with Cookie Lee earrings. Lexie, impossibly broad and squat. Dionne, her body still human, her face a beast's.

”Keep her in here,” snarled Ca.s.s. ”I just got the carpets cleaned.”

Sandy backed into the cold expanse of a sliding gla.s.s door and fumbled at the latch; it was closed and locked tight. She slammed the gla.s.s, trying to break it, but gla.s.s is tougher than it looks and that only works in movies, and this wasn't a movie.

If this were a movie, you would have seen a reverse angle of the sliding gla.s.s door and a scarlet spray across it.

The kitchen was very clean by the time they were done. Everyone was always careful to help clean up.

”Did you win?” Ca.s.s's husband s.h.i.+fted over to make room for her. He'd taken their daughter to the movies, knowing neither of them belonged here on bunco night-not a scary movie, with blood across a window, but something with princesses, and spells, and little bit of death, suitable for a seven-year old.

”The hostess never wins,” she said, pausing to listen for her child stirring again before she laid her head on his chest, looking out the bedroom window at the blobby moon, small and insignificant, risen high above the trees.

He stroked her hair. ”Your friend from work-Sammy?”

”Sandy.”

”Did she work out?”

Ca.s.s didn't answer at first, and his fingers, twinned in her hair, stopped.

”No,” she said, finally. ”She didn't fit in.”

”Oh.”

”Some of the others think she cheats.”

”Oh.” His fingers were still.

”Cheated.”

He didn't say anything and after a while he began stroking her hair again, and she blinked at the moon, her eyes green, then yellow, then green.

BLENDED.

C.E. MURPHY.

The pack had been born savages and had, almost to a man, died that way.

Almost: almost. She had been a whelp the day the hunters came, dozens of them on their thundering black horses with the pack fleeing before them. Her mother had thrown her beneath a long-dead tree, and she'd watched dark legs flash by, dangerous broad hooves kicking up the snow.

She had seen the blood, from her hiding place. Had seen it when the hunters rode back, triumphant despite their own losses. Stripped skins still steamed in the cold, making their horses toss their heads at the scent of death. She hadn't known, then, that it was her family, her cousins and her friends, who lay strewn across saddles and stuffed into saddlebags. Not until she was much older did she come to understand what had happened. That her family had run until they could run no more, and then had turned to fight. Beasts, turning tooth and claw against the men who hunted them. Horses died; men died.

But mostly, wolves died.

Fear had held the whimpers in her throat, even when the smell of men and killing was gone. Only when the forest went black with night did she creep forward on her belly and put her nose out into the cold.

A man's big hand caught her by the scruff and hauled her into the air. She had never seen a man so close: he was huge and completely without fur except long gray crackling stuff on his head, and unlike the men on horses he wore no coverings to keep himself warm. Her tail clamped over her belly, wet with terror.

He curled his lip back, showing long teeth, though the wrinkle of his forehead was like her alpha's: hiding amus.e.m.e.nt behind more obvious exasperation. Cubs, that expression said, and was always followed by a pack-wide chuckle that was as much att.i.tude of pose as vocalization. The tip of her tail relaxed from its clench to offer a tentative wag.

”Well,” he said, and it was the first time she ever heard a wolf speak so, aloud and with words used by men. His voice was light, a thinness to it that said its howl would pierce the moon. ”One left, of a pack. But a young one, so perhaps there's some hope you might listen.” He dropped her with the carelessness of any parent weary of carrying a wriggling cub. She scrambled back to the snow's crusty surface and he crouched, brus.h.i.+ng cold from her ears and nose. ”Come, pup. We must teach you to survive.”

Then he turned, and before his hand touched the snow it was a paw, and his gray grizzling hair thick fur, and his tail made a beacon for her to follow as they ran from where their pack had died.

”No ward?” The question cut through polite murmuring, briefly silencing it. Marketa knew already not to turn; not to admit she'd heard. It wasn't that anyone imagined the sharp words hadn't reached her. It was merely that humans, inexplicable humans, pretended rudeness and gossip didn't exist, as if by so pretending they could excuse their own bad behavior. Few of them would survive a week, within a pack. They would be cuffed, stared down, and ultimately rejected, if they played at the back-biting which was a figurative, if not literal, part of human society.

The pack had been born savage, Marketa thought dryly, but humans had taught her the real meaning of the word.

”But she is too young to be a widow . . . !” The woman-an older one, with b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a size to feed a litter of puppies for all that she had only two-modulated her voice this time, but it made no difference. She might have whispered, and even through the ballroom's endless echoing chatter, Marketa would have heard her. It was not a gift, the retention of hearing and scent in her human-changed form; humans stank, and covered it with perfumes that worsened the original stench. Worse, they insisted on gathering in huge packs, where their sweat and nattering voices blurred into a nauseating background.

Still, she would have humans change, not herself. She had gone far enough already in becoming as they were, a truth she was reminded of every time another woman learned her story and spread it as a bit of t.i.tillating gossip. She was quite young, she heard it emphasized, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one. Old enough, certainly, to be married-but if not married, much too young to be on her own. But her guardian, if he'd ever existed, had died, leaving her to make her way as an eligible female amongst society's snapping wolves.

Marketa snorted loudly enough to cause comment, and thrust off societal grace to elbow her way out to the manor gardens. They were too tame, too controlled, but they were also as close to wilderness as she would find so long as she maintained the fiction of polite birth. She was aware-as a human woman would not be-that two men followed her, both trying harder to avoid one another than find her. One was older, in his forties at least, and the other hardly more than a whelp of her own tender years.

Which were far more tender than the gossiping women within could ever imagine. Wolves lived only a short span. It was an ancient beast indeed who saw fifteen summers. Marketa was three, breeding age to be sure, but there were almost no others of her kind left with whom to mate. The hunters had seen to that. The hunters, and her people's determination to live the free life of wild things, no matter what the cost. The memory of scent rose up, bitter, black. The hunt's leader had smelled that way, like hot tar sitting at the back of her throat. She would never escape its flavor.

”Miss Alvarez.” Her name sat awkwardly on a British tongue, but she'd had no sense of how human names were put together, when she'd chosen it. She'd merely liked its sound, Marketa Alvarez, and had only later realized that they were not two names that the English race expected to lie cheek and jowl. She might have been Margaret Allard and satisfied them, but by then it was too late.