"Not everyone survives this," Ukiah told him. "You can die."

"Or I could live forever," Animal said. "Life is a fucking crapshoot. You've got to play to win. So are we fucking doing this?"

"We're doing this." Rennie growled. He lifted his head, sniffing the wind, extending his Pack sense. While they'd talked, the other Dog Warriors had ranged out in all directions, making sure they were alone in the woods. They tensed now, hating what they must do, but resolved.

With the exception of the Kicking Deers, who had been made perfect hosts via Magic Boy's blood, most attempts to make a human into Pack led to death. Rennie had been the first to survive the process; he'd been shot in the shoulder and pinned under his dead horse on a Civil War battlefield. After countless failures, Rennie guessed, wolflike, that the weak made better prey than the healthy. He picked the sick and the wounded, and sought comfort in the knowledge that those who died had already been doomed.

Surviving, however, was not the same as thriving.

Ironically, the outlaw bikers proved to be not only willing, but also quite successful as Gets. They loved the life—the fighting and the nomadic existence—finding it a natural extension to a life they had already chosen. The bikers expected an initiation rite, and the Pack couldn't always afford to wait for one to become conveniently ill or hurt. Thus the maulings became a hated tool of necessity.

Animal shifted nervously. "Well?"

"Run," Rennie growled.

Animal's eyes went wide and he edged away from Rennie.

"Run!" Rennie roared.

And Animal bolted into a run.

" He's covered in Invisible Red," Rennie sent a hard thought Ukiah's direction. " Stay out of this." And then he was gone, loping after the running man.

Ukiah stood a moment in the empty clearing, feeling the hunt move through the woods without him. Rennie's howl went up, calling out the trail, and Ukiah felt the pull of kinship.

No, he wouldn't hunt, but he would stand witness.

Animal had said that he understood what a mauling entailed, but he couldn't really. The biker laughed as he ran, heavy footed and nearly blind, tripping and falling often as the Dogs paced him easily.

There was a mile of woods until the berm of a highway—the Dogs let Animal run half of it before the first hit. Bear had been running silently behind the biker; he surged forward and knocked Animal off his feet. As the biker scrambled in the wet dead leaves, churning up the rich black dirt to scent the night, Hellena broke his left arm with a hard, precise kick.

Animal cried out then, falling back into the autumn leaves. With carefully judged blows, they beat on the fallen biker, hurting him but not killing him.

Rennie stood over Animal, holding a syringe full of the Pack blood that would make the biker a Get or kill him, his thoughts on the red-haired boy with the mohawk who had come to the Gather nearly twenty years before. Rennie had seen the look of envy in Animal's eyes then, and known this was the probable end. "This only gets worse. If you want, you can stop it here, and we'll see that you get to a hospital."

"Fuck you," Animal whispered hoarsely. "You promised."

"So be it." Rennie pinned him and stabbed the needle home.

Silence fell except for Animal's harsh breathing and the distant roar of the surf.

"It's done." Rennie stepped away. "It's in God's hands now."

***

Animal died before sunrise.

CHAPTER NINE

Truck Plaza, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Fog had thickened the air into a cold, damp blanket. Sunrise only paled the world. Leaving Bear to deal with Animal's body, the Dog Warriors had taken Ukiah north, away from the killing grounds. They stopped for gas, and Ukiah took advantage of the truck plaza's bank of pay phones to call Max.

"Bennett." Max answered the phone with his normal snap, and then groaned slightly. "Oh, God, what time is it?"

"Six thirty," Ukiah said. "I'm sorry, Max, I've been up all night . . . and . . . and . . ."

"Ukiah? What's wrong? You sound upset."

And with those simple words, Ukiah was torn. He desperately wanted Max there—morally steadfast in the most confusing of times. Yet at the same time, he was glad Max wasn't there to be tainted by the gray. He was ashamed to admit what he'd witnessed. Ashamed to admit having done nothing to stop it. He was tempted to lie to Max, but couldn't bear the thought of staining his trust.

"Things I can't talk about over the phone," Ukiah said finally, rubbing at his suddenly burning eyes.

"Ah."

"I'm sorry for calling you so early."

"No, no, I've been worried sick about you. When you didn't call back Monday, Sam and I did a background search on the owner of the cell phone you'd used—Hikaru Takahashi."

Ukiah groaned slightly. "He's Atticus's partner."

"Yeah, Indigo dropped the bomb about your brother yesterday. She called us to say they'd found you and to call off the background search."

"Which bomb?"

"It was a multiple strike. That you had a brother. That he was DEA. That the Pack had tested him. That the Pack raided the DEA and took their shipment of Invisible Red. She sounded pretty pissed—for Indigo, that is."

Ukiah winced. When he'd called Indigo early yesterday morning—to let her know that she'd be tripping over the DEA in the guise of his brother—he'd caught her between the postmortems of the cult members. She'd been focused on the discovery that Boston-area doctors had seen enough Invisible Red-related deaths to actually recognize the symptoms. They were, however, still mystified as to the cause.

The conversation had turned bitterly cold as he explained what had happened after she left. "Yeah, she is. I let her go knowing full well what could happen to Atticus."

"She's not angry enough to . . . ?" Max paused, searching for a tactful question. Ukiah realized that Max was still looking for the cause of Ukiah's distress, and hoping that the source was as mundane as a fight with his lover.

"I don't know." Ukiah thought of Animal, dead, even now being settled into a shallow grave. What was he going to tell Indigo?

There was a sudden blare of a deep horn from Max's side of the conversation.

"What the hell was that?" Ukiah asked as Max swore.

"A barge. We took the boat downriver a ways and slept on it. Just in case. The horns, though—they about put me through the ceiling every time."

We?Ukiah said nothing. Any precaution on Max's part was well justified at this point.

"You're coming home today?" Max asked as if the answer were an automatic yes.

"No. I need to see this through."

There was a long silence from Max, another blast of the barge horn echoing up the distant Ohio River valley in the background.

"I know you feel like you have to do something," Max said, "but if you want a life with Indigo and to be a father to your son, you can't run with the Pack. You can't do both. If you keep walking the edge, you're going to fall off."

"I know. But there's too much on the line here. Too many lives at stake."

Max sighed. "What can you do that the Pack can't?"

"Well, I can ask you to help me set up a trap for the cult. Computer literate, the Pack isn't."

***