Pocket Apocalypse
Page 32

I hated to make them wait even a moment, but I knew enough about fieldwork to know that if I didn’t eat now, I might not get the opportunity to eat again before dinner—if then. I’d been on a manticore hunt once that had resulted in skipping four meals in a row. Not because we wanted to; because the manticore was chasing us, and we couldn’t stop to build a fire.
(Grandma Alice always said being in the field should be treated like going to war: eat when you can, sleep when you can, never put your gun down, and never get drunker than the people around you. Grandma Alice was more than a little bit paranoid. Sadly for me, she was also more than a little bit right.)
Riley stood next to my chair, not speaking, and watched as I ate breakfast. Shelby joined us while I was still shoveling eggs into my face. She took one look at her father, sighed, and said, “Mum, slap me together a sandwich, will you? I need to go get my knives.”
“All right, honey,” said Charlotte.
“Can you grab my go bag?” I asked. “It’s the big brown one.” I didn’t like asking her to carry my things when I was sitting and enjoying breakfast with her family, but Charlotte didn’t seem inclined to make me a sandwich, and Shelby was already going upstairs.
“Shall do, lazy boy,” said Shelby, and made her retreat.
I had finished eating by the time Shelby returned, now with Flora riding on her shoulder. The little garrinna had her tail linked around Shelby’s neck, providing the leverage she needed to stay upright. Riley turned and walked toward the door without a word. Shelby got her egg-and-ham sandwich from her mother, and the two of us followed him out to the car.
The medical station was a thirty-minute drive from the house, down a series of successively smaller roads, all of which Riley drove along like he was challenging the God of Car Crashes and Automotive Fatalities to do something about it. Shelby sat in the front with him, Flora shrieking challenges at birds in nearby trees as we went rocketing by, and I bounced around in the backseat despite my seat belt, grabbing onto anything I could to try and stabilize myself. By the time we pulled up in front of the small white-walled building that was our destination, I was beginning to seriously rethink my views on carsickness.
Cooper was already outside, leaning against the wall next to the door with his hands shoved into his pockets and a vaguely disinterested look on his face. A black dog with high, pointed ears was sitting calmly beside him. Cooper’s expression didn’t change as we piled out of the car. Flora shrieked at the dog. The dog barked twice at the garrinna, a high, piercing sound that didn’t hold any real threat, but would definitely have served to alert Cooper if Flora had been sneaking up on him. The garrinna took off from Shelby’s shoulder and flew to a nearby tree, still shrieking.
“Sometimes I feel like I never left home,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” asked Shelby.
“Nothing,” I said. Louder, I continued, “Morning, Cooper. Good to see you again.”
“I go where Riley tells me to,” he said, by way of greeting.
“Cooper’s a vet tech,” said Riley, brushing past me as he went to unlock the building door. “He’s going to watch everything you do. See if we can’t figure out how to replicate the process when you’re not around.” His tone was challenging, like he expected me to protest and claim the tincture as some sort of family secret.
If he’d been hoping for a fight, I was going to disappoint him. “That sounds like an excellent plan to me,” I said, adjusting my glasses. “What are you and Shelby going to do?”
“Area patrol,” said Shelby, sounding almost obscenely pleased about the idea. “Going to poke through the local brush, make sure nothing unpleasant has decided to set up camp. You know, the usual sort of work.”
I blinked, looking at her. She was wearing what I thought of as her zoo clothes: a tan shirt and khaki shorts, with thick white socks under thicker brown leather boots. It was great attire for showing off with tigers in a controlled environment, but for the Australian brush, I’d been expecting something a little more platemail-esque. “Really?”
“Really.” She darted forward, pressing a kiss against my cheek. Riley looked over his shoulder at us and scowled. “I promise I’ll be fine. The boots’ll keep anything from taking a chomp out of me, and if I run up against something that’s aiming above the knees, clothes wouldn’t have saved me anyhow.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said dryly.
“Buck up, Alex. If I die, they’ll probably deport you. So either way, the outcome is in your favor.”
Shelby was still laughing at her own joke—and my stricken face—when her father shoved the door open and turned to stalk back to where we were standing. “How long is your little alchemy lesson going to take?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “The stuff is delicate. It could be as little as an hour. It could take as long as three hours. It all depends on whether I get it right on my first attempt.”
“Get it right,” said Riley. “Shelly, you’re with me.” He kept walking, moving onward into the dense underbrush on the other side of the narrow dirt track masquerading as a road. Shelby shrugged and hurried after him, giving me a “what can you do?” look over her shoulder. The brush rustled as it swallowed them whole, and I was alone with Cooper, his silently watchful dog, and Shelby’s garrinna, which was still giving off intermittent shrieks, just in case we’d forgotten she was there.
“I can’t imagine why they’re on the verge of extinction,” I said, turning from the garrinna to Cooper, who hadn’t moved since we arrived.
He didn’t smile. “They’re noisy because we’ve taught them to be that way,” he said. “They’re too bright colored to hide, so the ones that survived the hunters long enough to breed are the ones that got early notice when danger was coming. Hence the screams. In another few generations, it could be they’ll never stop.”
“Er.” My sense of humor has never been the most refined, but I wasn’t accustomed to being shut down quite that efficiently for something that hadn’t been that offensive. “I’m sorry. I think I’m still jet lagged. I keep sticking my foot in it.”
Cooper seemed to thaw slightly: while he didn’t smile, his stone-faced expression was a little less unyielding. Under the circumstances, I’d take it. “You’re in a bit of a hard place, all things considered. No one’s ever been willing to take a run at one of the Tanner girls before. Between Riley and Jack, it was always pretty damn clear that they were off-limits. When Shelly sent home word that she was seeing someone, Riley came close to hitting the roof. Doesn’t help that it’s her, either. Daddy’s girl isn’t supposed to fall for anybody else.”